In this blog post I will explain the importance of a successful start to an SEO campaign and how to ensure that you lay the foundations that will enable you to grow and maintain an advanced SEO strategy. Seeing as the Olympics have just been in London this Autumn I can use the athletes competing as a good analogy as you don’t just go from running one 100 metre sprint to becoming an Olympic gold medallist in a month. The same applies to SEO, when starting your campaign if you think that after a month of SEO work you will go from not ranking to top of the first page then you will be sorely mistaken. The average time for an SEO campaign to start having an effect is between 3-6 months therefore as a business if you do want to try your hand in the world of SEO then you will need to show some patience in the initial months of your campaign.
So how do you start an SEO campaign? Well the best thing to do is start off with a campaign plan. This is where you outline the tasks that you will undertake in that month and set the dates to complete each task for. It is well documented that one of the main reasons that new businesses fail within the first 5 years of trading is because they have failed to plan their strategy correctly. The same applies to a marketing campaign. This may seem quite simple but having an organised structure to your campaign is going to increase the chances of success dramatically.
Once you have the tasks planned and dates set you are ready to start your SEO campaign here I will go through some of the techniques that will ensure that you get off to the best possible start.
Firstly have a look at your website and each individual page and ask yourself the question what is this page about? And what are the aims of the page? This should help you if you didn’t know already, to decide what keywords you should target for each page. Once you have done this make your that you store them in a document where you can keep a record of which keywords you are targeting. This is important for if in the future you feel that you would fare better targeting another keyword you still have the data from the previous SEO strategy stored in case you want to look back on it in the future. The keyword strategy is the most important part of your SEO campaign. The reason for this is that these will be the keywords that you want to rank for in the search engines therefore it is important that you choose the ones that are most relevant to each page of the site. This is to ensure you have the highest chance possible of ranking for keywords that will have the highest chance of getting conversions or sales for your business.
Another important part of your starter campaign is ensuring that your website is technically sound. The Google Panda update brought out in 2011 targeted websites that had a poor structure and were generally not user friendly. Making sure that your website has no technical issues before starting your SEO campaign is very important as you want Google to accept your site as one that is credible therefore it is advisable to sign up to Google Webmaster tools and Google Analytics so you can see what keywords are driving traffic, set goal conversions for the website and sort out any technical issues with the site. If your website is technically sound and easy to navigate it will be far easier to implement a successful SEO strategy. Your campaign is then ready to target the right customers who will be able to find the information they want, which should increase the time users spend on your site and in turn increase the chances of your website converting.
Once you have chosen your keyword and are happy with the structure of your website then you can start linkbuilding for your website.
Linkbuilding is an important part of SEO for it’s a way of getting links back to your site from relevant pieces of information. People may say why can’t you just post links anywhere and eventually people will click through in essence that is true however the repercussions of that is that your website is likely to have an extremely high bounce rate which will affect its ranking in the search results.
In my next blog post I will go into more detail about how you can use linkbuilding strategies in order to increase the effectiveness of your SEO campaign.
