How To Launch A Successful SEO Campaign [Step By Step] 2021

Launching an SEO campaign for your business website might seem daunting. I’m not going to lie, planning and implementing an SEO campaign is quite challenging and it needs to be addressed in a way that allows your business to get countless benefits without wasting any resources in the process.

In this post, we are going to see how to plan and implement an SEO campaign for your website. Also, you are going to learn about the following topics:

• People you need to hire for a successful SEO campaign.
• Project management process (how to put a team together and how to manage it effectively).
• How to plan and implement an SEO campaign step by step.
• How to measure SEO success.
• How much you can expect to pay for SEO.
• The results you might expect from your SEO campaign.
• Why SEO is important for your business.

Let’s dive in!

What is an SEO Campaign?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it is the process of optimizing your website to rank higher in search engine results pages. This process includes things like improving page content, making sure that navigation structure on the site makes sense, building high-quality links from other websites (backlinks), etc.

An SEO campaign is the process of planning and implementing these optimizations in order to be successful.

Who Participates in an SEO Campaign?

An SEO campaign might be a complex project where there are many different fronts to attack. These fronts usually involve areas like content creation, link building, social media, technical SEO, web design, and other areas.

Therefore, in order for an SEO campaign to be successful, there are a number of professionals that need to be involved.

–Growth Strategist

A growth strategist is a person who comes up with a project plan to be executed by other staff. They are also responsible for analyzing data and metrics, as well as developing new ideas on how best to achieve a company’s goals.

-SEO Project Manager

The SEO project manager is responsible for the day-to-day management of a project and assigning tasks to team members. SEO project managers are a vital part of the SEO campaign because they will be the ones responsible for completing milestones and achieving goals.

-Design team

The design team is a group of people who are responsible for designing and implementing the website. They will be in charge of keeping your SEO campaign organized by creating wireframes, mockups, site maps, content calendars, etc.

-Copywriters

Copywriting is an important part of SEO because it will be what draws in potential customers and encourages them to stay on the site. The main responsibility for copywriters is creating quality content that resonates with their target audience.

-Content Writers

Content writers will be responsible for writing content that is going to resonate with your target audience by providing valuable pieces of text. This can take many forms, including articles, blog posts, or customer testimonials.

-Outreach Specialists

Outreach specialists are responsible for helping to spread your content across the web, so it can reach a wider audience and rank better on search engine results pages. Also, they will be responsible for getting backlinks to your landing pages and blog posts.

SEO Project Management

Once you have your team of experts set up, it will be time to deal with management. How do you manage a team of several people that are likely based in different time zones?

I like to use Agile methodology and several tools that help me ensure the project management is on spot. Some of these tools are:

• Slack
• Jira
• Confluence
• Airtable
• Excel
• Zoom
• Google Docs

This pack of tools should be enough to get you started.

Start Successful SEO Campaign (Step by Step)

I’ve broken down the process I follow when I work with medium-sized to big companies into 7 practical steps that you can use as a template for your own SEO campaigns.

Let’s take a look:

1. Product Assessment for SEO Purposes

The initial step in any project is to identify the product or service that you want to get more visibility for on Google. What are your prospects searching for, and which keywords should they be looking at?

It’s practically impossible to market a product you are not familiar with. A great SEO strategist will show interest in the product and the value it provides before looking into any other aspect of the project.

In order to assess your product correctly, an SEO specialist might ask for a demo of the product or even a sample of any physical product you want to sell. This with the purpose of understanding the user’s journey and how they might interact with your product.

2. Market Research

Once the growth strategist is familiar with your product, it will be time to do market research. This step is fundamental to making sure that the SEO campaign is successful.

The market research phase not only helps you understand how people are searching on Google but also how they search elsewhere like Bing or Youtube as well. All these points should be taken into account when conducting an accurate growth strategy for a website’s SEO campaign.

3. Competitors’ Research

An in-depth research process will include: researching keywords, understanding your competitors and their strategies (actions they are taking to rank for the same keywords), identifying what you can do better than them, checking if there is any new legislation around those topics of interest or anything else which might affect your marketing strategy.

Knowing your competition is crucial because it can give you a leg up on improving your strategy.

4. SEO Site Audit

The next step is running a site audit. At this point, you should have a clear idea of what needs to be done and where the website can improve.

To do an audit, we need to use Google Search Console (formerly known as Webmaster Tools). This tool is very helpful for checking any errors on your site which might prevent it from ranking well in search engines.

Also, you can do a site audit to see which keywords are ranking for your website and how well it is doing with them.

SEO audits will also help you improve the way your site is coded and structured to improve SEO.

This step should be done on a monthly basis if you want to make sure that your website is running smoothly, but it can also be scheduled for every quarter or even year as long as the updates are made regularly.

5. SEO Strategy Creation

Once the SEO specialist is familiar with the product, the market, and how healthy your website currently is, it’ll be time to plan a dedicated SEO strategy.

In this step, you will need to create a list of keywords that your website should be targeting and write the content for them.

The type of content will vary depending on what industry your company belongs to. For example, if your business deals with fitness products then it would make sense to share recipes or workout tips in order to rank high in search engines.

If your business is a start-up that deals with financial advice, then you’ll need to create blog posts about the latest investments and their potential benefits or problems. It’s important for SEO specialists to understand what kind of content will be appealing to people who might want your services so they can come up with a strategy that actually works.

6. SEO Strategy Implementation

The SEO strategy implementation stage will definitely vary depending on the industry and also your business goals. That said, most SEO strategies include the following elements:

–Keyword Research

Keyword research is one of the most important stages of developing an effective SEO campaign. The right keywords can make the difference between ranking on page one or not showing up at all in search engine rankings.

Not only will you find the right keywords, but you also have to make sure to use them in the right type of content. Here is when the competitors’ research comes to play because you will be able to identify the type of content that search engines consider relevant for searchers’ intent.

-Meta robots optimization

This refers to the use of the meta tag in your pages to control how search engine spiders should or shouldn’t index content. This is a very important step because it will help you structure your content correctly for search engines and ensure that they index your most relevant pages.

-Image optimization

This is about using the right images to make your content more appealing and readable. You also need to understand that not all search engines are able to read text within an image, so you should always include a textual description with your images in order for them to be indexed by Google’s spiders.

Also, you have to make sure all your images are compressed and correctly optimized so they won’t affect UX and page load speed.

-Structured Data Optimization

This is about implementing structured data markup for your content, which will help search engines understand what type of information they are dealing with.

Doing this correctly will help you get featured snippets and knowledge graphs on Google SERPs. As you may know, featured snippets help a lot with your CTR as more people will feel attracted to click on your website.

-Landing pages creation/optimization

This is the most important part of any SEO campaign. All your content has to be written for people coming from Google, so you need to optimize it as much as possible in order not to confuse them or make sure they don’t bounce off before reading anything.

Your landing pages will be the main source of conversions. Therefore, you need to start by creating content for them using high-quality copy.

–Blog creation and optimization

This is a great way to get more traffic and rank your website higher. All you need for this is to create highly engaging content that will help people discover your product or service. 

To that end, the growth strategist will do KR and prepare the best titles for your blog posts. Of course, these blog posts need to align perfectly with your business goals and be written specifically for your target audience. Otherwise, it would just be a waste of resources.

-Outreach and Backlinks

This strategy is about creating high-quality content that will attract links from other websites. You can use link-building strategies for this purpose, such as guest blogging and outreach campaigns.

For example, you could create a list of the best blogs in your industry or write an article with insights on how to manage social media accounts better (and do it fast).

In both cases, make sure that the title has keywords relevant to your brand so people find it quickly when they search online. This way, you’re guaranteed great results.

7. SEO Metrics: Data Collection and Analysis

Data is essential for your SEO campaign to be successful. You need to collect and analyze data in order to adjust your SEO efforts while the campaign is still active.

These are the most common metrics SEO experts collect and analyze on a weekly or monthly basis:

• Avg. monthly traffic
• Conversion rate
• Keywords tracking
• Organic Backlink acquisition
• Site Authority
• Page speed
• Funnel ruptures
• Bounce rate
• Mobile friendliness
• CTR
• New vs. returning visitors
• Crawling and indexing errors
• Competitors’ performance

An SEO specialist will look into these metrics and take action accordingly. In fact, most SEO campaigns don’t produce the best results on the first try. This is why is crucial that the growth strategist uses all of the previous analytics in order to optimize the SEO campaign.

The most successful SEO campaigns are constantly adjusted almost on a weekly basis in order to produce the best results possible.

How Much Does an SEO Campaign Cost?

The cost of an SEO campaign can vary greatly depending on many factors. For instance:

• Industry
• Site authority
• Business goals
• Duration of the SEO campaign

As you can see, an SEO campaign’s total expenses are always different depending on the previous factors.

That being said, I can tell you my experience with small, medium-sized, and big companies I worked with.

I have created successful SEO campaigns for small companies with a total budget of 8k to 10k USD. Naturally, the goals were not too ambitious and the industry wasn’t quite competitive, not to mention the team was quite small (2 or 3 people).

Now, I have also worked in successful SEO campaigns for medium-sized companies that allocate 100k to 300k USD for their SEO campaign.

If we go to the major league, I have been part of SEO campaigns for fortune 500 companies that can easily allocate up to 5 million dollars or more for a single SEO campaign. Of course, we are talking about complex projects with large teams and localized marketplaces across multiple countries. These campaigns usually happen in super-competitive industries with a massive ROI.

How Long Does SEO Take to Work?

The answer to this question is not straightforward. The time it takes for SEO techniques to work depends on the competitiveness of your industry and a lot more factors, as well things that I mentioned in my previous paragraphs such as the company’s size or budget allocated, market share, etc.

However, you can expect results from an SEO campaign in between 6 months (which is quite fast) and 36 months. In fact, some campaigns keep working after years but they are mainly maintenance strategies rather than explosive growth ones like we would see with search engine optimization campaigns nowadays.

How to Measure SEO Success?

Now that you know how to plan and implement an SEO campaign, it’s time for me to reveal how can we measure if our SEO strategy is successful.

There are many ways in which you might be able to measure your success through different metrics but there are two main ones I want to mention here briefly: traffic volume and conversion rates.

Traffic Volume – You should see a steady increase in both referrals from organic search engines such as Google or Bing and visitors coming directly from these channels. Simply put, more people will find out about your company because they searched for it through a search engine, and this is great.

Conversion Rate – Conversion rates will also increase if you do your SEO right because people are more likely to complete the desired action on your website when they found what they were looking for in the first place. Let’s say that someone wants to buy some of your products: there should be enough information about them available so he or she can make an informed decision without much difficulty (like pricing info). This way we know how many sales have been made as a result of our efforts with Google.

How Important is SEO for your business?

Well, it’s important because you have to stay on top of the game if you want your business to survive.

Although many people think SEM will produce the desired results in a shorter period of time, this will only work as long as the SEM campaign remains active.

On the other hand, SEO might take more time and resources at the beginning, but it is definitely the right long-term strategy.

Now, don’t get me wrong, an SEM campaign is great for startups seeking to build a brand and it must be implemented from the beginning. However, SEO must also be done on your website from day 1, so it can take bring in the majority of your profits in the long run.

Truth be told, SEM is a short-term strategy whereas SEO is a medium and long-term strategy that will consolidate your company as an authoritative brand in the online world.