SEO is a powerful digital marketing tool that helps your business show up in search results and attract your target audience. But getting there requires knowledge on how to run an SEO campaign.
You might already be familiar with adding keywords to your content or building backlinks, but combining these elements effectively is where the real magic happens. 🧙
But SEO is always evolving, and what worked in the past might not work today. Keeping up with changes is crucial to staying ahead of your competitors.
From the initial site auditing to monitoring the results, let’s walk through what an SEO campaign really is and share practical steps to create one that drives long-term results for your business!
What Is an SEO Campaign?
An SEO campaign is a strategic effort to improve your website’s ranking on search engines like Google and drive organic traffic. It’s a coordinated process that involves several key tasks aimed at boosting your online visibility and attracting more visitors without relying on paid ads.
The key elements of an SEO campaign typically include:
- Keyword Research: Identifying the right keywords to target.
- Content Creation: Crafting valuable, SEO-optimized content.
- Link Building: Acquiring high-quality backlinks to boost authority.
- Technical SEO: Auditing and fixing technical issues on your website.
- Performance Tracking: Measuring and adjusting based on results.
- And more.
An SEO campaign is a short-term, focused effort with specific goals and timelines, often aimed at improving rankings for a certain set of keywords or pages.
SEO Campaign vs. SEO Strategy: What Are Their Differences?
While an SEO campaign is a focused, short-term effort to achieve specific goals, an SEO strategy is a long-term plan that aligns with overall business objectives. The strategy involves ongoing SEO efforts to maintain and improve rankings over time.
10 Effective Steps on How to Run an SEO Campaign
There are many ways to run an SEO campaign, but we’re going to focus on the 12 most effective steps. No fluff, just actionable strategies. 💪
Plus, we’ll show you how to automate most of your efforts, making the process faster and easier.
1. Outline Your Goals to Guide Your SEO Strategy
The first step in any SEO campaign is to clearly define what you want to achieve. Think about what success looks like for your website. 🏅
Start by talking with your stakeholders to understand their SEO priorities. Here are a few common goals:
- Rank higher for specific keywords
- Drive more organic traffic to key pages
- Increase leads or sales
- Improve local search visibility if you’re targeting a specific area
Once you have a goal in mind, figure out which metrics matter most to track, like keyword rankings, traffic, or conversions. This helps you measure your progress and see if your efforts are paying off.
Starting with clear goals ensures that your campaign is focused, measurable, and aligned with your overall strategy.
2. Audit the Current Website to Identify Improvement Areas
Before diving into your SEO campaign, it’s crucial to audit your website to see how it’s currently performing. This helps you spot any issues that could be holding back your rankings.
Run a site audit to identify problems, whether it’s broken links, slow page speed, or missing meta tags. For example, if you find a lot of broken links, you’ll want to fix them right away to avoid hurting your rankings.
An audit looks at key elements like:
- Technical aspects (site speed, mobile-friendliness, XML sitemaps)
- On-page SEO (meta tags, heading structure, content optimization)
- Off-page SEO (backlink quality and quantity)
You don’t need to dive into the code. There are free SEO audit tools that will help you find exactly what needs to improve.
By auditing your site, you can pinpoint what needs to be improved and set realistic expectations for the next steps in your SEO campaign. It’s all about identifying what’s working and where you need to focus your efforts to boost your rankings.
3. Analyze Competitors to Discover Their Strengths and Weaknesses
To sharpen your SEO strategy, you need to spy on what your competitors are doing right. 🕵️
This includes looking at their keywords, content, backlinks, and on-page strategies. By analyzing their approach, you can spot gaps or opportunities to improve your own SEO efforts.
Start by searching for your target keywords to see who’s ranking on the first page. Once you know who your competitors are, dive deeper into their top-performing pages. Check what keywords they rank for, what content they’re creating, and who’s linking to them.
You don’t need to do the whole research manually. Use competitor analysis tools to find what keywords your competitors are targeting, their content structure, and even their backlink profile.
For example, you might find a competitor ranking for a long-tail keyword you haven’t thought of or a content format that’s getting more engagement.
With this knowledge in hands, you can adjust your SEO campaign and take advantage of untapped opportunities.
4. Assign Roles to Your Team to Ensure Task Ownership
SEO success requires specialized SEO skills, so ensure each task has the right expert. 🧑💻
Here’s a list of common roles in an SEO campaign and their tasks:
- Off-Page SEO Specialist: Focuses on building backlinks, improving domain authority, and analyzing competitor strategies.
- On-Page SEO Specialist: Works on optimizing your website’s content, meta tags, heading structure, and internal linking.
- Technical SEO Specialist: Handles the technical aspects of the website, such as site speed, mobile-friendliness, fixing crawl errors, and ensuring proper indexation.
- SEO Copywriter: Creates high-quality, SEO-optimized content for blogs, landing pages, product descriptions, and more.
- Web Designer: Designs visually engaging content and ensures the website’s design is user-friendly and supports SEO.
- Web Developer: Implements the technical changes needed for SEO, such as improving page load speeds, setting up structured data, or fixing broken links.
Each of these roles plays a vital part in driving the success of your SEO campaign. The key is to ensure that everyone knows what they’re responsible for and that all areas are covered.
Also, using an AI SEO Agent can significantly streamline your work. Unlike traditional SEO tools that only make recommendations, an AI SEO agent can automatically deploy changes to your website.
This means you can save countless hours and reduce human error. It helps your team focus on higher-level tasks while the AI handles the repetitive work.
Check out our 2024 in review blog to see how much time and money agencies and brands have saved by using AI SEO agents.
5. Figure Out How to Achieve Goals and Surpass Competitors to Gain an Edge
Now it’s time to figure out how to achieve your goals and outperform the competition. If your goal is to rank higher and drive more organic traffic, start by auditing your target pages.
Make sure they’re optimized for the right keywords, technically sound, and fully crawlable by Google.
If a page is already ranking but not breaking into the top spots, the issue might not be technical. It could be content quality, keyword targeting, or backlinks.
Some common roadblocks and solutions:
- No Traffic Potential: If no one is searching for your topic, you won’t get traffic. Use an SEO tool to check search volume and traffic potential before targeting a keyword.
- Weak Content: If competitors are ranking higher, analyze what they’re doing better. Are their articles more in-depth? Better formatted? More engaging? Improve yours to match or surpass them.
- Lack of Backlinks: If competitors have stronger backlink profiles, you need a link-building strategy. Earn links through guest posts, digital PR, and outreach.
6. Set Up Your Tech to Support Seamless SEO Execution
If you want the best results from your SEO campaign, you have to set up the right tools. You’ll need a solid tech stack to track performance, analyze data, and refine your strategy. At a minimum, set up:
- Google Search Console: Monitor indexing, search traffic, and technical issues.
- Google Analytics 4: Track user behavior, conversions, and traffic sources.
- Search Atlas: Get deep insights into rankings, keyword opportunities, site audit, content creation and optimization, backlink analysis, and more.
For faster results with a minimal budget, consider using an AI SEO agent. 🤖
Unlike traditional SEO tools that only provide recommendations, an AI SEO agent actively implements changes on your site, optimizing pages, fixing technical issues, building links, and even improving content in real time.
This automation can save you countless hours and significantly reduce costs while keeping your SEO strategy agile and effective.
7. Research Your Keywords to Target High-Impact Search Terms
Select the right keywords to attract an audience that’s actively looking for what you offer.
Use keyword research tools to identify valuable keywords, and a keyword magic tool can help you discover variations like long-tail keywords, which are more specific, lower-competition phrases. For example, instead of just “golf,” try “best golf clubs for beginners.”
Here are the key types of keywords to focus on:
- Short-tail: Broad, high-volume keywords like “fashion.”
- Long-tail: Specific phrases like “best running shoes for flat feet.”
- LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing): Related terms that help clarify context, e.g., “SEO strategies” for “digital marketing.”
- NLP (Natural Language Processing): Keywords aligning with conversational searches, like “easy banana bread recipe.”
- Brand: Specific brand names, such as “Sony headphones.”
- Geo-targeted: Location-based terms like “dog groomers in Dallas.”
Once you have a list of keywords, use your research tool to check their details, like keyword intent, search volume, difficulty, related terms, and questions people search related to those keywords.
This will give you deeper insights and help fine-tune your SEO strategy.
8. Create Your Content to Engage Users and Drive Traffic
The next step is creating content, which is key to driving traffic and ranking higher in search results. Using AI content creation tools can help streamline this process.
These tools generate SEO-optimized, human-like content and provide insights on keywords, subheadings, related terms, and more.
Here’s how to use AI tools for content creation:
- Include your target keyword in the title tag and meta description.
- Use primary, secondary, and related keywords throughout the content.
- Incorporate NLP terms to match how people search.
- Follow internal link suggestions to connect relevant pages and boost SEO.
- Write with a user-first perspective, and ensure your content is grammatically correct.
After publishing, check for internal links to related pages, like linking a blog post on SEO audits to your SEO audit services page, which helps both users and search engines.
9. Optimize On-Page SEO to Improve Visibility and User Experience
On-page SEO focuses on making individual pages on your site more visible and relevant to search engines and users. The main goal is to use relevant keywords naturally throughout your content to help it rank higher and attract more traffic.
You can start by using an on-page SEO tool that automates the process.
These tools help optimize essential elements like meta tags, titles, descriptions, and headers, making sure they clearly communicate the page’s content to both users and search engines.
Here are some key on-page SEO tactics:
- Optimize meta tags and headings with target keywords.
- Use descriptive, clean URLs that indicate the page’s content.
- Ensure your site is responsive and loads quickly on both desktop and mobile.
- Use internal linking with descriptive anchor text to link relevant pages together and share SEO value across your site.
An AI SEO agent can also automate most of your on-page SEO tasks. It can suggest keyword placements, optimize headings, check for broken links, and even adjust image alt texts, saving you time and effort while ensuring the content is fully optimized.
10. Use Off-Page SEO Tactics to Build Authority and Increase Backlinks
The next step is to use off-page SEO tools, which mainly focus on building your website’s authority through external signals, like backlinks.
Backlinks are important because they tell search engines that other websites trust your content. This can significantly improve your site’s ranking.
One way to acquire backlinks is through link building. This involves reaching out to websites and influencers in your niche and asking them to link to your content, or by offering guest posts in exchange for backlinks.
Another important concept to understand is Domain Power. This authority metric is a more reliable metric than Domain Authority (DA), Domain Rating (DR), or Trust Flow (TF). It measures the relevance and trustworthiness of a domain based on organic traffic and keywords ranking, making it much harder to manipulate.
Another essential aspect of off-page SEO is press release distribution. A well-crafted press release can help spread the word about your business, driving traffic and acquiring backlinks from news outlets, blogs, and other media sites.
Using PR outreach tools can help you find journalists or bloggers who are interested in your topic and pitch your content to them. Building relationships with industry influencers can also lead to valuable backlinks from authoritative sites.
An AI SEO agent can help automate these off-page SEO tasks. It can identify relevant websites for outreach, generate personalized email templates, and manage the process of asking for backlinks.
Additionally, it can help with backlink exchanges (Wildfire), ensuring you’re gaining quality backlinks without taking up too much time.
11. Improve Your Technical SEO to Enhance Website Performance and Indexing
As your site starts gaining traction and climbing in rankings, it’s time to look at your technical SEO. This is where technical SEO tools come in handy to identify areas that need tweaking.
To kick things off, use a site audit tool to pinpoint issues affecting your site’s performance, issues that, when resolved, can significantly boost your rankings and visibility.
For instance, compressing images or asking your developer to minify the site’s code can make a big difference in load times.
Improving technical SEO often means working closely with your development team. They can address some of the bigger issues, like:
- Missing XML sitemaps
- Pages being blocked by robots.txt or meta tags
- A lack of breadcrumbs or internal links
- Wasting crawl budget on unnecessary pages
- Issues with Core Web Vitals
- Missing or incorrect canonical tags
- Structured data errors
- Broken links
- Poor site structure
Focusing on these issues helps ensure that search engines can easily crawl and index your site.
Another powerful tool in your arsenal is schema markup, which helps search engines understand your content better and can lead to richer search results. Schema markup can also be added automatically with the help of an AI SEO agent.
12. Measure Your Performance to Track Progress and Refine Strategies
Once your SEO campaign is up and running, it’s time to track how it’s doing. It’s a good idea to set up a performance dashboard early on so you can catch any issues and fix them before they snowball.
Keep an eye on important metrics like:
- Keyword rankings
- Organic traffic
- Conversion rates
- Backlinks acquired
Check your progress based on the KPIs you set at the start. Use a reporting tool that integrates with Google Analytics (GA4), Google Search Console (GSC), and Google Business Profile (GBP), the platform’s own keyword rank trackers, and other features.
As you review the reports, look for both wins (like better rankings and traffic) and areas to improve (like high bounce rates). Automated reporting tools make it easy to keep tabs on everything, so you can tweak your strategy and keep moving forward.
How to Run an SEO Campaign Efficiently with Automation
Running an SEO campaign takes a lot of work, requiring a holistic approach to cover all aspects like on-page optimization, technical SEO, content, backlinks, and more.
While you can go further with advanced strategies, the steps we’ve outlined will set you on the right path to improved rankings. ⬆️
SEO often requires a dedicated team, but with OTTO, the first AI SEO agent, you can automate most of your efforts: On-page optimization, technical SEO, content, backlinks, press releases, and more.
Unlike other AI tools, OTTO not only recommends but also implements changes directly on your website.
Why manage a big SEO team when OTTO can streamline the process? Try it now with a free trial, no commitment, cancel anytime!
