Starting an SEO campaign can feel like a tremendous task to achieve. Most business owners feel intimidated due to the vast amount of information out there on SEO. As a beginner in SEO, you may feel confused and uncertain about where to start. 

Search engine optimization is vast and complex, but it’s not an impossible task. Most business owners contact SEO consultants to assist in their website’s SEO. I’ll advise you do the same to ensure a successful SEO campaign. The most confusing part about starting an SEO campaign is knowing where to begin the optimization. Most people feel you can just start whenever, wherever you like, but that’s not true. If you want to find out where to begin your optimization, then continue reading.

Starting an SEO Campaign

An SEO campaign is a collective process of enhancing a website’s ranking on search results. Knowing where to start can be tricky sometimes, but not for us. Let’s get the campaign started shall we?

1. Set Goals and KPIs

Before you start implementing an SEO strategy you must establish your goals and key performance indicator. Identify your goals and step a plan to track them. Without a goal or KPI, your business will not be able to check if it’s making progress or not. Set up your KPIs based on what users do when they visit your website. This will help tell you if the users are enjoying your content or they are just visiting.

Here’s some sample of KPIs and goals you can set for your business:

  • Boost organic sessions by 100% YoY
  • Boost organic homepage sessions 25% PoP
  • Create at least 10 MQLs through organic

2. Analyze the current setup of your website 

Having set up your KPIs and goals, the next step is to get all the necessary and basic information about your website. This includes knowing the base of your website platform. You need to check if your website is based on an outdated or modern platform. A modern platform is fast, secure, and very easy to optimize. If your website is outdated I suggest you switch to WordPress, HubSpot, or Marketo.

3. Keyword Research and Topic Creation

After getting your website on a modern platform, it’s now time to run keyword research. Keyword research is the process of finding the relevant keywords or phrase users makes use of when searching for content on search engines. You will have to find the relevant keywords to your business niche to optimize for. After getting g the relevant keywords to optimize, you then create a suitable topic to implement these keywords.

When searching for keywords, you need to consider the following: 

  • What are users sear thing for?
  • What products are you offering?
  • What kind of message do you wish to convey to users?
  • What niche do you want to write on?
  • What niche were you writing about?
  • What keywords are your competitors ranking for?

4. Establish a quality content strategy

Quality content is an essential factor of SEO. Even if your website gets good rankings on search results, without quality content, you’ll just have a high bounce rate on your website. That’s why search engine optimization involves setting up and executing a strong quality content strategy. SEO uses the chosen keywords to form a good content strategy which results in higher traffic and keyword rankings.

5. Carry out an SEO Audit

It is very important that you understand how to carry out an SEO audit. This will help you identify areas in your site that need some SEO improvement. With an SEO audit, you can identify the strengths and weaknesses of your website, so you know the areas to focus more on when carrying out search engine optimization. Carrying out an SEO audit involves:

  • Getting page inventory
  • Checking accessibility issues
  • Evaluate the on-site optimization of your website.

6. Work on your Audit findings

After successfully carrying out the SEO audit, it’s time to work on the findings you’ve made. This is the time to implement your SEO strategies to achieve your set goals.

  • Start by analyzing the SEO audit done on the site, and find out the top priority items. 
  • Check and handle all accessibility issues on the website. Example fixing Robots.txt, sitemap files, and redirecting any 404 errors.
  • Take a look t your chosen SEO tools and see if it offers any optimization edits that can be made based on your target keywords. It will give you better ranking opportunities.
  • After optimizing and fixing any errors in your website, it’s time to look back at your old blog articles and optimize them.

7. Work on Local SEO

Local SEO is an important aspect of Search Engine Optimization, it allows local businesses to promote their goods and services to their customers in a given local. Local SEO helps build your site’s local presence. It is important to note that majority of users usually search for information and commodities within their local, so local SEO is an important factor that can help you boost traffic and sales.

It’s now time to work on backlinks. A Backlink is simply the linking of other websites to your own website. It gives your site an extra Google juice, which greatly boosts search results ranking. However, having irrelevant backlinks can do the opposite to your rankings. The more relevant and authoritative backlinks you have the higher your domain ratings will be. Hence, it’s extremely important you solely on quality backlinks rather than quantity. You could be penalized if you have a bunch of low-quality backlinks on your website.