How To Run A Successful SEO Campaign (Step-By-Step Process)

Have you ever run a search engine optimization campaign from start to finish?

Search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns are specific SEO strategies that are launched with the intent to achieve specific goals.

In this post, you will learn a singular process you can use to run successful SEO campaigns that optimize your site as well as individual pages.

How to run a successful SEO campaign

We recommend going through the following steps no matter what type of campaign you’d like to run:

Set a specific goal – Identify a page or aspect of your website that’s underperforming and would likely benefit from a more extensive SEO campaign strategy.
Record initial benchmarks – You can’t know exactly how much your efforts improve metrics for key performance indicators (KPIs) if you don’t make a note of those metrics before you launch your campaign.
Run a full analysis – You identified a problem in Step 1. Now, it’s time to take a detailed look at that problem and identify everything that’s wrong with it.
Determine what work needs to be done – Examine the KPIs you recorded as well as individual issues you discovered in your analysis. Determine exactly what you need to do to improve both, and decide which team member will cover which task.
Launch your campaign – Get to work. Your campaign will only be as strong as the effort you’re willing to put into it.
Record your results – Record your KPI metrics again to see how successful your campaign was.

In short, if you want to run a successful SEO campaign, you need to identify a specific goal and base your strategy around that goal.

Let’s start at the top of this list.

1. Set a specific goal

Choose something that you want to change by the time your campaign is over. These are a few examples of the types of goals you can set for an SEO campaign:

Rank for a specific keyword
Increase your ranking for a specific keyword
Increase your overall average click-through rate
Receive more organic traffic for a specific page
Acquire more backlinks

These are specific goals. It’s important that you choose a specific goal for your campaign as it’ll be much easier to develop an SEO strategy that’s capable of helping you achieve that goal.

You may want more organic traffic, but this is a vague goal that involves optimizing your entire website as a whole, not a specific page or aspect of SEO.

If you need help choosing a goal, try looking through your data in Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and your favorite keyword tracking and competitive research tools.

Look for the following information:

Your average click-through rate. You can find this metric in Google Search Console.
Pages that don’t receive enough organic traffic. You can discover this information in Google Analytics.
Pages that don’t receive as many clicks on search engine results pages (SERPs) as you’d expect. Another metric from Google Search Console.
Keywords you don’t rank for, at least not in the first 10 positions on SERPs You can discover this information with a keyword tracking tool, such as SE Ranking, Mangools or Morningscore.
Keywords your competitors rank for. The keyword tracking tools mentioned above also offer competitive research tools, including keyword gap tools that let you know which keyword rankings your competitors have but you don’t, keywords you rank for but your competitors don’t, and keywords both you and your competitor rank for.
The number of backlinks your competitors have. If they have many more backlinks than you, they’ll likely outrank you no matter what. Google has said this isn’t as strong of a metric after the HCU, but Google’s advice is contradictory. In any case, receiving a backlink from a high-quality site will increase your traffic, which Google sees as an indicator that you’re a trusted authority in your niche.

Somewhere within this research is a page, metric or keyword you need to improve. There are probably even several.

Pick one or a few. You can run more than one campaign at a time.

2. Record initial benchmarks

Note: If you aren’t yet tracking your keywords, choose a keyword tracking tool, then set it up by entering all of the keywords you want your site to rank for. Then, allow the tool to track your keywords for at least 30 days before you move on to Step 2. It’ll give you more accurate average position readings.

You need a way of knowing exactly how effective your SEO campaign is. The best way to do this is to make a note of KPIs that relate to the goal you chose, specifically before you implement a single change to your website.

If you chose to increase your ranking for a particular keyword, record these metrics as benchmarks:

Average position for that keyword during the last 30 days.
The number of clicks the page that targets that keyword has received over the last 30 days.
The amount of organic traffic that page has received over the last 30 days.

If you want to increase your average click-through rate (CTR), record these metrics:

Your current average CTR.
The number of impressions you’ve received over the last 30 days.
The number of clicks you’ve received over the last 30 days.
Your current average position. This is a metric you can track with a keyword ranking tool.

If you want to increase organic traffic for a specific page, record these metrics:

Keywords the page ranks for, and your website’s search engine rankings for each.
The amount of organic traffic the page has received over the last 30 days.
The number of impressions the page has received over the last 30 days.
The number of clicks the page has received over the last 30 days.
The number of backlinks the page has.

Write these metrics down, and record the date you took them as well as the date ranges they apply to (for example, August 1st – September 1st).

3. Run a full analysis

You should now have a few metrics you can track throughout your campaign to gauge how well it’s performing. However, these metrics don’t reveal everything that’s wrong with whatever it is you’re trying to improve.

You need to do a full analysis to determine what faults are preventing your site from ranking for a specific keyword or obtaining as many backlinks as you’d like.

Let’s cover how to do a full analysis for each goal we gave as an example.

Goal: Ranking for a specific keyword

Your analysis should include:

SERP analysis to see what kinds of results return for this keyword on Google
Keyword research to find related keywords to target.* Search for relevant keywords, which are target keywords that directly relate to content that’s already on your site.
Competitive research to see how your competitors are targeting this keyword
On-page SEO research. Use SEO tools like Frase, Surfer SEO or NeuronWriter to reveal recommendations for word count, related keywords to include, number of images to include and more

*If you’re trying to rank for a highly competitive keyword, make sure your keyword research involves identifying topic clusters, which are around 30 low-competition keywords you can target with smaller blog posts that relate to the high-competition keyword you’re trying to target.

Goal: Increasing your ranking/organic traffic for a specific keyword/page

Your analysis should include:

SERP analysis for the target keyword to review search intent, SERP features and how your competitors are targeting the keyword.
A look at the page’s keyword density. Tools like Frase, Surfer Seo and NeuronWriter count how many times you use your target keyword and related keywords in a blog post. Some WordPress SEO plugins include a keyword density metric for your target keyword, including plugins like SEOPress, All in One SEO, Rank Math and Yoast. There are also free keyword density checkers online.
Looking for your target keyword in headings as well as in the page’s SEO title, meta description and permalink.
Checking if you’re overusing your target keyword. You should only use your target keyword once in H1 and H2 heading tags to avoid over optimizing your page for a particular keyword. All other instances should be keyword synonyms, such as using “basketball match” instead of “basketball game.” A keyword research tool will reveal possible synonyms for your keyword. Synonyms can also fix keyword density issues.
Checking if you answer your reader’s search query toward the beginning of the article.
Reviewing the readability of your article, including its readability score, your use of headings, too many words between headings, whether or not you use bullet points for easier content consumption, and whether or not you use images to break up text. These tactics improve mobile SEO.
Making sure your images are original. This boosts your credibility in Google’s and your reader’s eyes.
Checking for internal and external links. Both should link to web pages that relate to your target keyword.
Checking page performance with PageSpeed Insights and page speed testing tools.
Making sure the page belongs to a topic cluster on your website. Unless you have a lot of authority in your niche, Google doesn’t want to rank sites that don’t stay focused on a specific topic.

Goal: Increasing your average click-through rate

Your analysis should include:

Arranging your pages in Google Search Console to review which pages are receiving the most number of clicks and which are receiving the lowest.
Spotting patterns in your SEO titles.
Comparing your SEO titles with your competitors’.
Comparing your domain authority/rank to your competitors’. This metric is different for each tool that offers it, so it’s best to only compare metrics within the same tool.
Testing the performance of your site.
Reviewing Google Search Console to see if you have technical SEO issues, such as pages that aren’t indexed or pages that can’t be crawled.
Comparing your backlink profile with your competitors’.

Goal: Acquiring more backlinks

Your analysis should include:

Reviewing your backlink profile.
Reviewing your competitors’ backlink profiles.
Comparing your content with content your competitors have received backlinks for to see if they’re doing something you’re not.
Comparing your domain authority to your competitors’.

Note: In Google’s May 2024 algo leak we learned that they are looking for links from pages that receive traffic.

4. Determine what work needs to be done

Your analysis likely revealed several issues with your content as well as your website in general.

For instance, poor scores in PageSpeed Insights indicate performance issues that need to be fixed.

This step involves researching each issue you identified and coming up with possible solutions for them.

Do you need to switch hosts to improve your website’s performance? Will a website optimization tool do the trick?

Do you need to launch link building campaigns in an effort to increase your authority? Will increasing your off-page SEO efforts improve your appearance in search engines?

Maybe your competitors’ digital marketing efforts completely shadow your own, and you simply need to up your game across the board.

Or maybe you need to completely rethink your keyword strategy and start targeting topic clusters for a while.

Make a list of every solution you need to implement in order to achieve your goal. If you have multiple team members, divide each task among each.

5. Launch your SEO campaign

Now that you know what’s wrong with your website and content and have identified solutions you can implement, you can get to work on your SEO campaign.

The SEO world moves fast, so it’s best if you complete the work as quickly as you possibly can.

Make a note of everything you’re doing to optimize an individual page so you can optimize new pages in the same way.

6. Record your results

Once you complete your final task, give search engines at least 30 days to analyze your changes as well as to crawl and index new and updated pages.

Once those 30 days are up, record the same metrics you recorded in Step 2.

You’ll be able to see just how well or poorly your SEO campaign optimized your website.

Some results may be subtle, but even if your metrics only improved by a little, it’s a good indicator that you’re on the right track and simply need to implement more SEO campaigns that target additional goals.

Final thoughts

Now, you know exactly what you have to do next. It’s a process and you’ve got to treat it as such.

Things got weird in search when the HCU was dropped. But the algorithm didn’t do what it was supposed to and it definitely wasn’t about helpful content (Google confirmed as much at their Creator Summit towards the end of 2024).

So, that means business as usual but with one specific change – keep content on your site as focused as possible.

Google is treating smaller sites by different rules than huge sites like Forbes. They’ve always done this in a way, but now it seems to be happening more so than ever.

Larger sites can publish content on a broad range of topics but smaller sites need to stay more focused on their niche.

This isn’t the first time Google has thrown a spanner in the works and it won’t be the last. So, keep pushing and keep moving forwards.

Just don’t forget to diversify and try to become less reliant on Google.

Related reading:

X Facebook LinkedIn Flipboard Reddit