What makes an SEO campaign effective?
Well, to start with you can look at an ‘on point’ strategy that pays heed to the primary issues that come with a website. This is pretty basic, but it is these bare necessities that get overlooked while putting a campaign into action.
The first thing that should strike you is – Who are my competitors? One would obvious bag first place in the 100 m sprint, if they were the only one running! If you don’t know who your competitors are, you wouldn’t know what is in store for you when you get out there onto the field, thus leaving you wither with a poor strategy or no strategy at all. You need to analyse and look into what your competition is doing to have a good rank. When you have a well-researched view of competitor websites you will have a clear idea as to how to strategize to get on top of them when it comes to ranking on the first page.
Now the question arises as to how? Here is how, you consider all the aspects of SEO, make a profile based on what your competition does best and where there is scope for improvement. This activity may be a bit difficult to carry with the speed bump being the fact that Google relies on entities instead of backlinks. That being said, this is still a vital step.
Now that you have all the data you need, it’s time for some introspection. Take a look at the problems that your website has already fallen victim to. Say, for example, your competitor site and your site have almost the same content (duplicate content issues) but is still ranking above yours, this is not a place where you should ideally start when it comes to giving priority to a campaign. The only thing you would be doing is resolving internal or external content duplication issues, and this wouldn’t really help in benefiting the visibility of your site.
Take a look these six factors to up you SEO campaign game:
Content
The content of your site is one of the major areas of SEO, let’s not forget the blogs and the news sections. When you see that your competitors are producing valuable information on their websites and is shared by others, along with a good chunk of relevant text on pages that rank well, that is your que to make Content your priority area.
You will be faced with a major setback if you are not able to alter your content and come at par with what your competitor has to offer, in terms of setting up a campaign that will help you rank above them. As long as you keep producing fresh content which is up to date, your position in the search results will be taken care of.
All of the above doesn’t mean that you neglect the information you provide on your website with respect to your products and services. If you know that your overall content is up to date, then your priority area will shift to what you say about your products and services.
Backlink Risk
One must never underestimate the effects of a poor and unnatural backlink. Reports show that such backlinks have cost some huge multinational brands a fortune on their share price due their search visibility taking a fall. Google tells you whether your link profile will damage the site visibility with the assistance of its three helpers; algorithms, humans and the competition for each SERP vertical.
Hence knowing your competitors and your own site from the very beginning is key, because this enable you to get an idea as to whether the backlinks are actually holding back the site or whether they are in the same boat as the rest of the search results.
Authority Building
How well is your site recognised by Google? This should be one of the first few questions that need to be asked when you are a new company, you should have quality websites linking to your site to establish a good search presence. One can achieve this by having quality content, to start with, while participating in local or national events, working with existing communities and having citations from leading industry sources. Another task you would have to carry out is establishing whether your site is strong enough to compete with its existing presence.
Another question of concern that may arise is that, your organisation is an industry leader and yet your site doesn’t show up on the first page of relevant searches. You will be able to identify whether you need to establish quality backlinks and citations on your high priority list once you know the position of your site and that of your competition.
Page Relevance
Part of your page ranking is taken care of by the relevant keywords, however, this is not enough when the ranks are determined by mathematical calculations and rules, especially in competitive search verticals. You need to carry out a detailed review of your key pages by closely examining the content on your page, when and where the page is referencing important terms and how the page is linked internally as well as externally. You may not feel it, but relevant linking sites and strong internal navigation are still very important.
Do not forget to analyse the importance of page relevance, you can do this by comparing it with competitor sites and understanding the reasons for those sites to be considered more relevant by search engines. You can get ideas as to how to improve your own site with this review.
Technical Improvements
Resolving technical issues that may be preventing or restricting search engines from picking up important parts of a site also result in considerable large gains. This also involves issues that come with mainstream Content Management Systems. Another way in which you can really improve the existing search visibility, is by having control over pages indexed by the search engine, correcting site structure, navigation and layout.
Duplicate Content
Everyone knows it, duplicate content is a primary factor for e-commerce stores which sell branded goods, since product descriptions tend to be similar across the web. Sites specialising in unique goods or services that may have minimal duplication, this may not be an important issue. Having a unique site is good but focusing on other possible issues is also essential, so as to understand which would provide more value. So that you know where exactly to assign resources, it would be ideal to carry out a review to find out what is common amongst other sites in the same search vertical.
Now that you have these six essentials, you can up your game with setting up SEO campaigns. All you need to have is a strong database of research which will help you analyse your past performances as well as that of your competitors and you can create a successful campaign strategy which in turn will get you a greater return on investment.
