In a visibility project on Google or other search engines, creating a website is only the first step. Once your site is set up, you need to develop SEO strategies .
This is how you can make your business known to Internet users, generate organic traffic and increase your income.
This is why it is important to create an SEO campaign. In this guide, discover all the advantages of a natural referencing or SEO campaign. We also reveal the steps you need to follow to make your campaign a success.
What is an SEO campaign?
Before discovering the best practices for creating a successful SEO campaign, let’s first see the definition of this term.
An SEO (Search Engine Optimization) campaign brings together all the strategies used to optimize the positioning of a site in the search engine results pages (SERP).
Why improve the position of your site in the SERPs? Simply to attract visitors. Indeed, few Internet users go beyond the first page to search for information or buy an item.
Hence the interest for all companies with a website or an e-commerce store to aim for the top ranks of Google . The ideal would of course be to place yourself in the first position to maximize your chances of getting clicks.
Note that as part of a Google SEO campaign , the SEO consultant or SEO agency does not use a single SEO technique. To carry out this kind of campaign, it is necessary to implement a series of optimization strategies.
Moreover, the results of an organic SEO campaign do not happen overnight. It is indeed a long-term project unlike a SEA campaign (paid referencing) which guarantees almost immediate results. On the other hand, once your SEO campaign comes to an end, the effects also stop and your site will no longer show up in the SERPs.
Although the natural results of a successful SEO campaign are not instantaneous, they nevertheless have the advantage of lasting over time. This implies that it allows you to bring regular traffic to your site , increase the number of your customers and improve your notoriety on the web.
Whatever your sector of activity, whatever the size of your company, creating an SEO campaign will give you multiple advantages. Here are some examples:
Improve the ROI of your digital marketing
In digital marketing, ROI (or return on investment ) is a metric used to assess the profitability of webmarketing actions. These may include an online advertising campaign , an email campaign and an improved presence on social networks.
Not to mention the SEO campaign. Indeed, if done well, it could considerably boost your ROI in the long term. Moreover, according to a study by ProfitWorks, natural referencing would allow companies to generate up to 275% ROI . This means that 1 euro spent in a campaign allows you to collect 2.75 euros.
Build brand credibility and trust
A successful SEO campaign also helps you build credibility for your brand . Indeed, a web page that points to the first place of the SERPs is an indicator of trust in the eyes of Internet users. As such, by being well positioned in the SERPs, you will certainly have a better e-commerce conversion rate compared to your competitors who are placed beyond the first page.
Easily measure the performance of your investment
By setting up an SEO campaign, you can analyze each of your SEO techniques in real time. In particular, you can have access to specific data from your campaign. This is possible thanks in particular to powerful referencing tools, to mention only Google Analytics.
The data provided by this tool will be useful to you, in particular to better adjust your SEO strategy and make changes if necessary.
Increase your sales
An SEO campaign can also help increase sales on your e-commerce site. Indeed, if it is well done, you can bring people to your e-commerce site.
Obviously, the acquisition of traffic is not enough to improve your turnover. Your visitors need to buy your products. For this, you must not only offer quality items in your catalog, but also optimize the user experience .
Optimizing the success of your SEA campaign
Admittedly, SEO natural referencing and paid referencing (SEA) are two different optimization strategies, but they do not cannibalize each other. On the contrary, they are complementary. Indeed, an organic referencing campaign contributes to improving the “quality score” of your Ads ad. This is a score allowing Google to rank advertisements according to their relevance.
Get ahead of the competition
In the digital age, most businesses have a website. However, the first 10 search results are reserved only for SEO-optimized pages . If you want to stand out from your competitors by positioning yourself at the top of Google, then you have to create a good SEO campaign.
Reduce spending on paid ads
Besides its importance in your quest for visibility on Google, a well-designed campaign also saves you money . Indeed, if your SEO strategy is successful, you will no longer need to spend a fortune on the distribution of sponsored ads.
You are wrong if you think that an SEO campaign will have no impact on the notoriety of your establishment. Know that a good natural referencing can also improve the visibility of your business on Google Maps (discover our guide on Google Map referencing to help you position yourself at the top of the list).
Indeed, a site optimized for SEO is more likely to appear in the search results of this mapping tool from the web giant. This is part of the ranking criteria taken into account by Google in the same way as the optimization of the Google My Business listing and customer reviews.
How to create a successful SEO campaign?
A natural referencing campaign includes 5 steps:
- Target identification
- Determination of objectives
- L’audit SEO
- Optimization of site content
- Campaign performance monitoring
Let’s see all these steps in more detail.
Step 1: Define your target Internet users
In order to carry out an SEO campaign, first make sure you know your target . Who is your product or service for? This is the question you should answer first. Indeed, you will later have difficulty attracting the public to your site if you do not define your buyer persona (or typical buyer) in advance.
To build your ideal customer profile, you must assign several criteria. Here are some examples:
- An age or an age group
- A gender
- A profession
- A field of study
- A level of study
- An address
- marital status
- A monthly income
- Centers of interest
- Consumption habits
What is the point of creating a persona as part of your campaign? Well, it allows you to tailor your content to suit your audience . For example, if you are targeting a young audience, forget long text content. Instead, favor image-rich content if you want to capture their attention and encourage them to come back to your site.
Step 2: Set SEO campaign goals
Once your target has been identified, it’s time to define your objectives . This allows you to have benchmarks and better analyze the progress of your SEO campaign.
Occupy the first position on Google following the requests of its target Internet users. Who doesn’t dream of it? Obviously, all companies on the web aim to place their web pages at the top of the SERPs .
However, for better effectiveness of your campaign, you should not set a goal that is too vague (for example: Generate more traffic ). Opt instead for SMART objectives, that is to say Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely defined.
Here is an example of a SMART objective as part of a natural referencing campaign: position yourself in the top 5 of Google on the keyword “best disposable razor for women” in 10 months.
In this example, our goal perfectly respects the SMART method . Indeed, it is a target that is both specific and realistic. Also, since it is possible to analyze keywords with an SEO tool like Ahrefs, this objective is therefore measurable. It is also realistic and temporally defined since we have set a reasonable deadline.
Step 3: Do an SEO audit (SEO audit)
At this point, you clearly know who your target internet users are and what your campaign goals are. Now for the next step: the SEO audit .
This consists in analyzing your site in order to identify the faulty elements at the origin of a bad positioning in the search engines. A SEO audit also helps identify the strengths of a site’s SEO strategy . It is therefore a complete diagnosis with the aim of finding opportunities for optimizing the referencing of a site.
- The targeted keywords : level of competitiveness, search volume and relevance
- Competition analysis : identification of your main competitors, analysis of their on-page optimization strategy and their netlinking strategy (use of backlinks or incoming links that direct Internet users from one website to another)
- Internal linking ( SEO technique which consists of integrating links into a web page to send those who click on them to another page on the same site)
- Indexing of web pages
- Content quality
- Site loading time
- Title and meta description tags
- Hn tags ( h1, h2, h3, etc.)
- Site security
- Visibility of the site abroad (multilingual strategy)
- The compatibility of the site on mobile devices (smartphone and tablet)
- The user experience
To do an SEO audit, it is essential to use tools such as Google Analytics , SEMRush or Ahrefs.
Step 4: SEO Optimization of Site Content
Once the SEO audit is complete, you must put in place techniques to optimize your content that is already published. If you haven’t added content to your site yet, great. This is an opportunity to start creating content while respecting good SEO practices:
- Use keyword generator tools to find relevant keywords (Google Keyword Planner, Ranxplorer, SEO Hero, etc.)
- Favor long tail keywords (3 or 4 words): these are generally low search volume keywords, which allows you to position yourself more easily. In addition, this kind of keywords can generate qualified traffic
- Opt for shorter URLs without forgetting to integrate your target keywords
- Spread the main keyword in various places in your content: in the page URL, in the meta title, in the meta description, in the h1 title, in the introduction, in the subtitles and in the rest of text
- Enrich the semantic field of your content
- Create quality content with high added value to seduce Internet users and search engine algorithms
- Write long articles (over 2000 words to get good SEO)
- Create content rich in images and illustrations
- Write a short and precise description of the image in the ALT tag (don’t forget to include your main keyword)
- Insert quality backlinks in your article to boost the authority of your site and thus improve your positioning in search engine results
Step 5: Analyze the performance of your SEO campaign
Your natural referencing campaign is now launched. However, it should not stop at this point. For a successful campaign, be sure to follow its evolution and analyze its performance .
Here are the most important KPIs (key performance indicators) in an SEO campaign:
- The ranking of your keywords : to follow the impact of your strategy on the traffic of your website (to do this, you will need to use the traffic analysis tool Google Analytics)
- The performance of your return links or backlinks (see the definition), on the Majestic SEO tool: the data to be studied are in particular the Trust Flow and the Citation Flow to evaluate respectively the quality and the quantity of your backlinks
- The performance of your organic search
- The performance of the content that brought the least traffic to your site
- The conversion rate
- The behavior and session duration of visitors to your site
- mobile traffic
- Bounce rate ( the percentage of visitors who visited your site without opening another page)
A successful SEO campaign allows companies to get ahead of their competitors and optimize their visibility on Google ( position on the first page of search engines). It also has the advantage of offering a good ROI.
However, setting up a web referencing campaign is an obstacle course. Not to mention the monitoring of its evolution, which requires an investment of time. This is why this kind of mission is generally entrusted to a web agency or a natural referencing consultant.
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