What’s involved in an SEO campaign?
With 85% of people using Google to help find product ideas and information before making a purchasing decision, Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is essential. Optimising your website for search engines will improve its search engine ranking and get more visitors to your site. Once on the site, SEO will improve the user experience too, ultimately, leading to more sales and helping your business grow.
An SEO campaign should be a part of your long-term digital strategy addressing continuous improvements but when people talk about “doing SEO” what kind of activities are they actually talking about?
Here, I’ll outline some of the activities that are involved in a typical SEO campaign and explain some specific actions you could take to improve your sites performance. Typical areas that would be covered under an SEO campaign are:
- Technical Fixes
- Copywriting
- Usability
- Link Building
- Analytics & Reporting
Technical Fixes
Website Structure
This includes a review of the website structure and is a vital aspect of your SEO strategy. A clear structure will help the user navigate your site and find what they’re looking for more easily so improve the user experience.
To improve your site structure you can start by removing old, outdated content, reevaluating your categories, and improving your internal links – so make sure you have multiple links pointing to the most important pages on your site.
Site Speed
40% of people will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load so site speed is another important factor to keep in mind when optimising your site. Some factors that could slow down your site are a slow web host, excessive plugin use, a slow server, and unoptimised images.
Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions are another important feature. They are also shown by search engines in the search results so can act as a mini advert for your business. A lot of sites I’ve worked on still have outdated and unappealing meta descriptions. This is a wasted opportunity for you to promote your business and attract more visitors!
Copywriting
SEO normally involves creating new copy, or text, across websites that include keywords in a natural, user-friendly way. While the copy on your website needs to cater to both search engines and users, you should write primarily with the user in mind. Google rewards ‘good’ content much more than ‘SEO friendly’ content.
SEO also involves working on top landing pages and optimising them so the conversion rate of the page is as good as it can be. Conversions could include email signups, whitepaper downloads, or actually making a sale.
Usability
Aspects of usability have been covered in the sections above but it’s definitely worth repeating. You can improve your sites usability by concentrating on writing clear copy, mapping out a strong site structure, reducing page loading speeds and 404 error pages. Making improvements in this area will help your website in the ranking process and improve your conversion rate. So it’s a win-win.
Link Building
Link building is the process of building links from other websites to your own. Generally, the more high-quality websites that link to you, the more likely you are to rank well in search engines. Again, this can increase the number of visitors to your site, and lead to increased sales or conversions.
This is one of the hardest aspects of SEO but if you want more search engine traffic, you will need some kind of link building strategy in place that is focused on quality and relevance.
Analytics & Reporting
As with all marketing activities, it is important to continuously measure and test your performance. You can use analytic tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to review your current site, identify any issues, highlight what your site is doing well, and monitor how your sites performance changes over time as you continue with your SEO activities.
If you need a bit of help with your SEO campaign, I can help. Contact me today to discuss your businesses SEO needs and opportunities.