What Is an SEO Campaign?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) sounds like it’s something you do once to optimize a webpage for search engines. But it’s much, much more than that. SEO is an ongoing challenge, but if you want to reduce it to an actionable concept, you can do so with an SEO campaign.

An SEO campaign is a focused, structured initiative executed over a defined period to improve a website’s authority, relevance, and technical health. A campaign is designed to help you earn higher rankings than competitors in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), whether it’s for specific important keywords or for your entire site. A successful SEO campaign can ultimately drive more qualified organic traffic to your pages, which will result in more leads and sales.

The Pillars of an SEO Campaign

A successful campaign isn’t about choosing one type of optimization; it’s about strategically hitting all three pillars of SEO to build a strong foundation for your site.

Technical SEO

Putting keywords in the right places and picking the right URL won’t magically make your pages rank higher. There’s a vitally important technical aspect of SEO that is all about your website’s infrastructure.

Google’s set of Core Web Vitals is especially important for any website trying to improve its SEO. These metrics measure user experience, focusing on site speed, loading stability, and interactivity. Improving these metrics often involves optimizing code, server response times, and image sizes to make your site faster and more usable for visitors. A site should be mobile-friendly and adaptable to all devices, especially since about 64% of all web traffic today is mobile.

Your site should also be crawlable and indexable so search engines like Google can effectively find and catalog the important pages on your site. You can do this by optimizing files like robots.txt and building an XML sitemap.

On-Page SEO

With a strong technical foundation, you can focus on the bread and butter of SEO, and what most people think of when they consider an SEO campaign. On-page SEO focuses on the content and structure within the visible pages of your site. This is where you perform things like strategically including target keywords in high-value areas like the page’s title tag, meta description, headings, and the body text.

Search engines like Google put a heavy emphasis on the user experience (UX), so it’s crucially important to make content easy to read and navigate by using lists, short paragraphs, compelling images, and clear calls to action.

Finally, pages should be aligned with search intent. If a user is searching for “best hiking boots,” a page targeting hikers should offer products and reviews, not a history of hiking gear.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO focuses on signals coming from outside your website that help build trust and authority in the eyes of search engines. These are important steps that require some outside management beyond the content you create.

A few key ways to maximize off-page SEO efforts include:

• Backlinks: These are links from other reputable websites back to yours. Search engines treat high-quality backlinks as votes of confidence. A core part of any campaign is executing a link-building strategy to earn these high-value votes.
• Domain authority: These third-party metrics estimate how well a website is likely to rank based on its link profile. Improving these is often a long-term goal of off-page efforts.
• Brand mentions: Ensuring your brand is discussed and cited accurately across the web, even if the mention isn’t a direct hyperlink.

An essential part of any SEO campaign is ensuring that your website and business are accurately and thoroughly represented in the internet community.

The Core Phases of an SEO Campaign

An effective SEO campaign follows a logical, five-step cyclical process, but must be supported by continuous iteration and practice.

Phase 1: Discovery and Audit

You can’t fix a problem if you don’t know what it is. In this phase, you have to define clear SMART goals that address diagnosed problems. For example, “Improve SERP ranking for keywords X, Y, Z to number 1 by the end of Q4.”

With that goal in mind, you can use SEO tools like Semrush or Moz to identify technical roadblocks like slow pages, broken links, server errors, and indexing issues. At the same time, look at your competitors’ sites and websites currently ranking in the top positions for your keywords you think you should own, and determine what they’re doing right (content length, structure, backlinks, meta elements).

Phase 2: Keyword Research and Content Mapping

Keywords are the bridge between what users search for and the solutions you offer. Keyword research is often extremely competitive, and you’ll need to leverage SEO tools to understand where your best opportunities lie. Finding keywords is about striking a balance between high search volume and manageable competition. IT might be better to rank #1 for a lower-volume keyword than #50 for a major one.

More importantly, you have to thoroughly vet the intent of each keyword. What is someone trying to do when they search “flying monkeys?” Do they want to learn about the origins of the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz? Are they looking for flying monkey costumes? Sometimes, there might be more than one intent, so it’s important to create content that targets all intents.

As you build out a list of target keywords, you must map where they’ll live within your site architecture. Will it be a new blog post, an update to a product page, or a new category landing page? This prevents the issue of keyword cannibalization, where multiple pages compete for the same term.

Phase 3: Content Creation and Optimization

Now it’s time to execute. Create authoritative, unique content for each of your target keywords that’s better than the competitors. Update old, decaying content with new statistics, more current information, and stronger on-page SEO elements. Add strategic internal links to keep visitors circulating through your website, and strong backlinks with descriptive anchor text to help strengthen your domain authority.

Phase 4: Link Building and Promotion

One of the best ways to help content rank higher is through link building and promotion. After you’ve published your pages, contact relevant, high-authority industry sites and offer your content as a resource for them to link to for their visitors. Search relevant pages for broken links and offer yours as a replacement. Sites won’t always say yes, but they can’t say no until you ask.

Phase 5: Monitoring and Iteration

SEO campaigns may have an end date for your goals or key performance indicators (KPIs), but the work is never really done. Tracking KPIs daily, weekly, and monthly using tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics will help you see how your page rankings over time.

Each focused campaign will give you useful data and insights for the next campaign. SEO is a continuous loop of diagnosis, execution, and review, using analysis to determine which content to improve, technical fixes to make, or links to pursue.