How To Create a Sustainable and Realistic SEO Campaign

Intro

Competition has always been the driving force behind most businesses. To survive, your company has to outperform its nearest rivals.

This depends not only on providing the best products and services, but also on building the most recognizable and ubiquitous brand. After all, you can’t win customers and grow your business if your target audience doesn’t know who you are and how to find you.

In light of this, the advent of the World Wide Web has very much proven to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the internet provides instant access to a truly global audience. On the other hand, it affords the same opportunity to your rivals, and that means that the marketplace is more crowded, chaotic, and competitive than ever before.

There is, though, a tried and true method for increasing your company’s visibility in the increasing immensity of the internet. It’s called search engine optimization (SEO) and it may well mean the difference between rising head and shoulders above a sea of online rivals or being engulfed by them.

Let’s explore SEO best practices, and provide insight into establishing sustainable and realistic goals for your SEO campaigns.

Good SEO Takes Time

Executing an effective SEO campaign is a marathon, not a sprint. The principal goal of SEO is to leverage search engine algorithms to your advantage through strategic content creation.

As you work to create high-quality content that aligns with the standards set by Google and others, you’re going to find your content ascending search engine results pages (SERP). But getting high SERP rankings takes time.

This is because SERP rankings are, at least in part, cumulative. Search engine algorithms take into account, for instance, a site’s age, activity levels, and quality ratings. In other words, you must establish your site as a consistently reliable and authoritative source.

This means ensuring that your content is always credible, well-researched and well-sourced, polished and professional, and developed to serve the audience’s needs and interests.

As you begin to build a storehouse of good content, you can then leverage these materials to enhance the quality of new work, particularly through the use of relevant backlinks.

This will increase the amount of organic traffic on all of your pages, while at the same time establishing your site as an industry authority. All of these have an amplifying effect, driving your rankings slowly at first, but often with increasing speed over time.

The key, however, is to be patient and, above all, be consistent. Contribute to your sites regularly and maintain superlative quality standards consistently to ensure a steady progression up the SERP rankings.

(Source: Pixabay )

Set Realistic and Sustainable SEO Campaign Goals

While consistent activity and uncompromising quality standards are essential, it’s also vital to be judicious in your approach. Before you launch any SEO campaign, you must be clear on what your goals are first of all and then you can focus on your maintenance strategy.

You might be tempted, for example, to devote the majority of your time to SEO to rise as quickly in the rankings as you can.

This, though, isn’t only impractical, it’s also counterproductive. That’s because such a pace simply isn’t sustainable or realistic, especially if you are a small business owner operating on a skeleton crew.

Unless you have the staff, time, and/or money to make SEO your central focus, then it’s best to start slowly rather than going at breakneck speed and then scaling back. Search engines may read a decrease in site activity or a decline in content quality as a harbinger of trouble ahead for the target audience, which can lead to a decrease in your rankings.

Instead of shooting for the stars at first, aim a bit lower. Using the SMART goals approach to SEO is a terrific way to keep your ambitions in check while also ensuring that you’re making steady progress toward your goals.

For instance, instead of stating that you want to rank #1 in your industry, shift your focus to metrics that can help you get closer to this end state. You might, for example, aim to receive 100 hits on your new blog post within seven days of going live.

This is a specific, time-sensitive, and measurable goal that can help you determine whether you are creating the kinds of content that generate interest. That, ultimately, is what SERP rankings reflect, at least in part, anyway.

Digitalization and the Increasing Importance of SEO

Planning, executing, and maintaining an effective SEO campaign takes time, effort, and strategy. Even the best campaigns take time to yield significant results — as such, you may wonder if the investment of energy and attention is worth it.

The short answer is yes, it is worth it. In an era of increasing digitalization, the importance of SEO is only going to grow in kind.

Digitalization is often described as the great equalizer, indeed, and this is a reality that impacts consumers and businesses alike. As consumers around the world turn to the internet to research, access, and engage with businesses in every corner of the globe, SEO may well become a company’s greatest weapon.

Without a robust and well-established SEO platform, which in turn depends on the creation of a highly effective online presence, few companies can survive for the long term.

In addition to the use of SEO to boost search engine rankings, a good SEO strategy must also include an understanding of how rivals rank and why.

Tools such as a SERP checker, for example, can help you identify strengths and weaknesses in competitors’ SEO campaigns, enabling you to adjust your strategy accordingly.

Likewise, backlink checkers can be highly effective in determining the types of resources that are working well in competitors’ content. This enables you to boost your content quality while at the same time increasing traffic to your pages by leveraging the authority (and visibility) of these sources.

Supplementing Your SEO For Faster Turnaround

To be sure, SEO campaigns are a critical component of successful digital marketing, but your marketing work by no means ends with SEO. In fact, if you want faster turnarounds and better results, then you need a holistic approach to driving visitors to your pages, rather than depending on search engine rankings alone.

One of the best strategies for generating clicks, by far, is to unleash the tremendous power of social media. With more than four billion people or over half the total global population identifying themselves as regular users of social media, there is no better platform for accessing audiences.

That means that social media marketing campaigns can be an affordable and tremendously effective way to drive audiences to your online content. Social media posts can be easily tailored to the interests of the target demographic and include embedded links which will funnel audiences to the desired product or blog page.

This can be especially beneficial if you want to penetrate a niche market or position yourself against a competitor that consistently dominates in the SERP rankings.

For example, if your content is directed toward a small subspecialty of landscape designers, you might leverage the power of LinkedIn or another professional online forum to ensure that your target audience knows your name and your content.

This, in turn, can lead to more targeted searches by your social media followers and increased site traffic which can be an indicator of overall content quality and, thus, is likely to further boost your rankings.

Social media marketing campaigns have another SEO benefit as well. Because social media gives you an unprecedented capacity to directly and immediately engage with your target audience, you will enjoy the profound insight into their needs.

This means that you will be better able both to craft content that serves their interests and expectations and to identify the keywords and phrases your audience will likely use in a search. Such de facto keyword research generally results in more effective SEO.

(Source: Pixabay)

The Takeaway

Effective SEO campaigns may well be the key to your company’s long-term survival in an increasingly competitive online marketplace. That does not mean, though, that success will happen overnight. It takes time and effort to rise through the rankings. For that reason, one must be judicious and pragmatic, particularly when you’re just starting out. Focus on realistic goals and a campaign strategy that is sustainable across the long haul. Remember, as well, that while SEO is necessary, it’s not sufficient. Ensuring success is likely to require supplementation with other approaches. Social media marketing is perhaps your most effective tool for amplifying your SEO campaigns.