By Roberto Garvin
If you’re planning an SEO campaign, it may be hard to keep up with the ever changing developments because SEO doesn’t work in a vacuum.
Different moving parts all working in the proper context are required to create an effective yet holistic marketing strategy that’ll deliver results to your business.
If you want more traffic streaming in to your site over time, you have to know how to optimize your site to realize more leads and sales. Here are the main factors that drive the success of your SEO campaign.
1. Primary Industry and Audience
This is the number one factor that drives any viable SEO campaign strategy. You need to understand your industry, its top competitors and what they primarily do, plus how they execute their own SEO strategy.
Knowing the answers to these and more questions will help you form your SEO campaign strategy, as you pin down your next steps.
2. Keyword Research
Your audience normally searches for a particular keyword, but keyword research uncovers variations for the keyword that helps increase traffic back to your site.
Integrating keyword variations into your overall SEO campaign helps you target better, and offers more opportunities that would otherwise remain hidden.
3. Users’ Intent
Once you know your audience and the SEO norms for your industry type, you need to identify the best possible user intent to target, and discover what your audience searches for. Besides the ‘what’ your audiences search for, the ‘how’ is also important as it can make or break your SEO campaign strategy.
Having a firm grasp of the SEO norms for your industry gives you a better understanding of buyer personas and market shifts that will have an overall impact on your campaign.
4. Analytics & Accurate Reporting
If you cannot accurately report on your SEO campaign’s results, you can’t expect to make the necessary adjustments it needs to deliver effectively. However, not every industry needs adjustments to aspects of the SEO strategy like keywords.
If your business is in a rapidly changing industry that experiences quick market shifts, you may have to integrate regular keyword research activities into your SEO processes. This way, you get to know exactly what your audience will search for next, and you can identify the keywords and landing pages that drive your SEO campaign, and overall strategy. Doing this helps you adjust properly and find the next big opportunity in your industry as the market shifts.
5. Mobile-First
Announced about a year ago, Google’s mobile-first index is still one of the main conversations in the SEO and web space, because it is the new de facto standard for search.
With a focus on mobile-responsive sites, a new era leaning towards one standard – Android or iPhone – means you have to ensure everything works well on both platforms, or your campaign will flop. This gives all versions of your site an equal chance of being indexed by Google, while remaining competitive in the mobile-first index.
6. Technical SEO
This brings to mind terms like crawling, indexing, site speed, coding, canonicalization, and much more. Technical SEO has to function otherwise your whole website will suffer, and your SEO campaign will be a disappointment.
Most SEO implementation mistakes can get dicey at this stage, which is why SEO campaigns tend to be ineffective. As your site grows and gets more complex, one mistake can affect another part of SEO, affecting the entire process.
In terms of crawling, search engines discover your site using spiders that crawl based on your site’s architecture. If your site architecture falls short of expectations, for example if it lacks a sitemap.xml file or there are issues with internal linking, then search engine spiders will not crawl it effectively.
Other issues like 404 errors and technical implementations can also hurt your site’s indexing and crawling. Make sure your site is 100 percent crawlable and functional from the word go, instead of waiting for site audits to reveal the steps you missed during setting up of your site.
Finally, you need to get indexing right so that the entire site is considered during crawling, thereby avoiding any ranking performance issues.
Regularly performing in-depth site audits takes into account all these technical SEO factors, and uncovers issues you may not have considered, which can make or break your site’s performance and success of your campaign.
Wrap Up
SEO is about optimizing your site and content in order to rank better in search results. There are so many changes to navigate today, so it’s possible and easy to miss out on something, eventually rendering you invisible.
If you get these six factors right, you can reap the benefits of more traffic, conversions, improved lead generation, and boost in your sales and revenue.
