05 Jun 4 Essential Tips for a Successful SEO Campaign
As most search engine marketers would agree, SEO has become progressively more difficult over the last few years. This is thanks to a rapidly-changing search engine landscape driven by new and compounding Google policy changes.
In many ways SEO has moved from a “standalone” procedure to an integrated one. Everything from your website design to your customer service, from professional memberships to speaking engagements and more can all have an impact of your SEO.
What this means is that a successful SEO campaign now requires more from you, the business owner. The more “available” you can make yourself to your SEO team the more positive the outcome of your campaign is likely to be.
Here are some of the most important factors you should be considering as a business owner in order to help your marketing team to win in this ever-more competitive landscape…
A Clear Understanding of Your Business & Objectives
What do you hope to achieve from your search engine optimization campaign? Are you seeking more branded visibility? Do you want more traffic or higher rankings? How concerned are you over conversion rates, turnover and profitability? The clearer the KPI’s you agree upon the more likely it is that your SEO provider will be able to meet your demands.
In addition, it is key these days that your SEO firm fully understands your business. It is no longer enough for them to simply look over your website. The perfect brief will include information on your target demographic, the sales process and so on. The better that your SEO company understands the types of people you want to attract and their major concerns, questions and interests the better.
SEO is no longer just about building links; these days we marketers aim to build links that will produce you results. Links that will draw interested prospects. Links to the right pages of your site. In short, links that drive leads rather than just feeding the search engine spiders.
Integration into Other Marketing Opportunities
SEO should not be seen as separate to other forms of marketing. If you speak at a conference, exhibit at a trade show, publish a report, stock a new product or produce a new catalogue each of these could be of use to your SEO team. Every element could provide opportunities to build links or increase your site’s authority.
To make the very most of your SEO campaign then you should be willing to maintain an open channel of communication, and share any non-SEO business-building activities you are involved in. The more resources you can offer your search engine marketing firm the more effective your campaign will likely be.
Brainstorming & Communication
The first stage in any SEO campaign is typically a brainstorming activity. In essence your search engine optimization company will want to understand your business fully so that they can identify link-building opportunities for the future.
This is where your experience in your niche can be worth its weight in gold. You can provide examples of your top competitors and highlight opportunities you have in mind. Far from just relying on your outsourced SEO firm to just “do SEO” the better the information you can feed them the stronger the results they can produce for you.
Your SEO firm’s goal is then to take the broad outlines you provide them and find angles they can use for link building. In essence a good SEO company will be able to “translate” your messages into a workable plan to grow your organic search engine traffic.
Linkable Assets (Existing or Created)
It’s no secret that the more links your site receives the higher it will likely rank. Sadly the days of “easy links” are now largely behind us however; these days it’s not just the number of links that your site receives, but also the quality of these links. And generally speaking top-quality sites won’t link to yours just to be nice.
No. They need a reason to link.
In light of this fact, in order to get the best results from your SEO campaign you will need to possess (or create) “linkable assets”.
So what is a linkable asset? Quite simply it is an online resource that offers such exceptional value that other websites will want to link to you.
Examples might include:
- White papers or ebooks
- Exceptionally-detailed and valuable articles, interviews or tutorials
- Podcasts or videos
- Online tools
The most important factor is that your assets need to be of such high quality that other website owners are happy to link to you – simply because they can see how much their visitors will benefit from your resources.
Your SEO firm’s responsibility is to steer the creation of these assets, and then to do the “grunt work” of actually getting links to your website from the most beneficial sources.
Conclusion
In the past it has been tempting for businesses hiring an SEO firm to passively manage the campaign at arm’s length. A quick check over the monthly report to ensure traffic is trending up and you’re all good for another month.
These days, however, the most successful campaigns feature a highly involved business owner, ready and willing to share guidance and advice on their specialist business knowledge. The SEO firm’s responsibility is then to turn these resources into a workable campaign.
If you’re looking for a new search engine marketing company and are looking to grow your website traffic try applying these simple rules and see just how much you can improve your digital marketing results.
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