At practiceedge we manage hundreds of digital marketing campaigns for a range of businesses and industries, all with extraordinary results. We can create a custom and tailored SEO package to suit the needs of your business and offer out-of-the-box solutions to extend your online reach to your ideal customer.
Search engines like Google are constantly updating and refining ranking algorithms to improve user experience and search patterns. Google implements major changes to how it handles local, mobile and voice search, but this is where an ongoing SEO campaign can ensure your website is updated alongside these changes.
SEO acts like a funnel, fetching a flow of leads to your blog posts or website, making it one of your best lead generation tools. To make the most of the opportunity, you need to improve existing content and create new high-quality content, as well as specifically structured website service pages so that you become more discoverable in search engines. In turn, higher organic rankings will increase the total number of users that can see the value of what you offer and want to engage with your business.
But we are often asked by our clients, “what is included in my SEO campaign?” or “what do you do as part of my campaign management?”.
When planning and executing an SEO campaign it is important to look at all the crucial points and proven tactics you need to plan a successful SEO campaign and get great results.
1. Defining Goals, Strategy & Target Audience
The obvious goal of an SEO campaign is to rank number 1 and generate website leads. However, before you can rank number 1, we need to look at which products and services you would like to target, which region you would like to attract leads in, who your target audience is, and which type of interaction you would like the users to take on your website.
Once you define your target audience and the products or services you would like to market, then we can look at what makes your business stand out from your competitors, what your unique selling proposition (USP) is, and why a customer would choose you.
Next, we look at which strategy would best suit your campaign; for example if you are a local plumber then the local suburbs would be the best starting point, or if you are a medical specialist then perhaps a region-based campaign would be better.
This first step in any SEO campaign is one of the most important stages. Without proper planning and research in the first stage, it may affect the results that your campaign yields later.
2. Keyword Research
After you have defined the services and products you wish to target, we then need to look at the best keywords to drive traffic to your website for those products and services. Keyword research is an essential component of our SEO campaigns and is heavily data-driven.
We look at terms people search for in Google, review your competitors’ keywords and look at your historical Google Analytics and Google Search Console data to review previous trends and identify the most effective geotargeted and general keywords.
3. On-page SEO Implementation
Now that we have conducted your keyword research, we need to implement on-page SEO metadata. Meta tags or metadata are snippets of code that tell search engines important information about your web page, such as how they should display it in search results.
They also tell web browsers how to display it to visitors. Every web page has meta tags including a meta title and description, but they’re only visible in the HTML code. As they are only visible in the HTML code, they aren’t visible to your website users once they land on your website.
4. Technical Audit
When starting your SEO campaign, you need to get off on the right step by making sure your site is setup correctly. When auditing your website, we check a bunch of different factors, but primarily focusing the following technical SEO elements:
- XML sitemap: Search engines use a website’s XML sitemap to find, prioritise and organise your URLs. It is an important SEO element for your website, with its primary purpose to inform search engines about pages on your website that need to be crawled but isn’t a ranking factor.
- Page speed: Load time is a crucial part of user experience and, therefore, SEO. No search engine wants to recommend a slow site. There’s a lot of reasons your site could be slow. Images & Videos are often the main cause of slow load page loading speeds & often if your site load speed is more than 7 seconds the probability of a bounce increases by 106% (Stats Source: Google Research 2017) A “bounce” is when a user lands on your website and then exits from the same page. A higher bounce rate can, in turn, affect your SEO & keyword ranking positions. It can signal to Google that the correlation between the keyword users originally searched, and your website as a result, didn’t best suit their needs.
- Schema code implementation: Schema is a set of data that sits in the source code of your website that gives search engines data that they’re looking for, without relying on them pulling the correct information from the page. This can include an array of different pieces of data, but things like business location, trading hours, contact numbers, are important to feed to search engines instead of relying on them to match the right data up for you.
5. Google Analytics Set Up
To monitor all website traffic sources, we set up and install Google Analytics on your website. Google Analytics allows us to identify trends and drops in traffic and review/adjust your campaign accordingly. It also allows us to see in-depth detail about your website visitors, their journey through your website and where they potentially exit before converting. This detail will provide insight to help shape the success of your business’ online marketing strategy. You will also receive a monthly customised report giving you insight into your website traffic.
6. Google Search Console Set Up
Google Search Console tools and reports help you measure your site’s Search traffic and performance, fix issues, and make your site shine in Google Search results. As part of your ongoing SEO campaign, we set this up to ensure Google is well aware of where to find your XML sitemap, and use this on an ongoing basis to identify keyword trends and performance over time. On Google Search Console, we also identify broken links within your website or from other websites linking to yours, ensuring all of your pages are in Google’s index, and any other important information Google alerts to us.
7. Internal Linking Strategy
We also review the internal linking across your website as this can improve both user experience and your organic keyword rankings. Internal linking connects your content and indicates to Google the structure of your website. Internal links can also establish a hierarchy on your website, allowing Google to see the most important pages that provide more link value. This is helpful for when Google crawls your website, as it disseminates the link equity to flow through the entire website and increase the ranking potential for each page.
8. Backlink Strategy
We complete an ongoing backlinking strategy to your website to further build the trust and authority of your website. We create a web of local citations and directories, feature your website on our private blog niche network and acquire links from niche-specific authority sources.
We use a combination of techniques, including a focus on what your high-performing competitors are doing, in order to garner the high-quality, relevant backlinks for your website. This increases your authority in Google’s eyes, and is a critical part of positioning your business at the top of search results.
We use our custom-built proprietary software to analyse competitors who are ranking above your website in the SERP results. We compare their targeted keywords, site structure, backlink profile, internal linking strategy, Google Business Profile and website content. Through this process we can objectively look at the core metrics that move the needle for your rankings, and allows us to quickly pinpoint weaknesses and get to work on these.
10. Website Content Structure
For the best SEO keyword ranking results we need to ensure your content throughout the SEO-critical pages matches the targeted keywords. We use all the work completed in the strategy and research stages in reviewing your on-page content to ensure not only that it will rank well, but that it adds value to your users, and leads users to enquire with your business.
11. Google My Business Profile Management
We create a new Google Business Profile for your business if you haven’t previously had one. We also ensure your business remains as a verified listing in Google Maps. We optimise this profile as part of your campaign to ensure it is set up with your services, and that all aspects of the profiles are completed in a way that helps visibility for your primary search keywords.
We regularly maintain this as a part of your campaign to ensure details are kept up to date so that potential customers can easily contact you when you are showing up in those search results.
12. Ongoing Campaign Review
During a periodic review of your SEO campaign, we look at items within each of the items listed above as well as your SEO keyword rankings & website traffic sources. We also continue to make on-page and off-page optimisation changes to ensure your keyword ranking positions improve over time. These reviews focus on your real-world results and help to influence future strategy.
13. Client and Campaign Enhancement Suggestions
We also look at the wider online profile of your business, ensure all social media are connected to your website and can provide in depth analysis of the overall user experience on your website. When we spot something that a competitor is doing well, and is worth exploring for your business, we’ll let you know about it.
Related Link: How To Know If Social Media Is Right For Your Business
