When it comes to running an SEO campaign, there are a large number of factors that go into whether it will be a success or not. Here are just five of the factors that we believe are the most important to running a successful SEO campaign.

Content

Content is king. It really is that simple, when it comes to helping boost your rankings, regular, fresh, high-quality content is a key factor.

The content on your page needs to resonate with your audience and will draw people into the service or product you are offering.

Content needs to be written well, contain no typos or grammatical errors and feature appropriate keyword targeting. However, if you get all these things correct, it is still not possible to know which piece of content is going to hook your audience, so it is vital every piece you produce is held to the same standard.

Analytics and Reporting

Analytics and other reporting are hugely underutilised factors that really can have a huge affect on how well your SEO works.

How can you make changes if you do not have accurate reports on how your campaign / site is currently operating?

Using Analytics can help you keep track of the visitors to your website, what pages are performing well or vice versa and can give you a good idea of what changes you might need to make to improve. We have a blog about another tool you should look into using too, called Microsoft Clarity.

Keyword reporting tools will let you know how well your keywords are doing in terms of position on search engines and whether you might need to reassess your keyword research.

Keyword Research

Provided you know your audience and industry, you can start working on keyword research. This is possibly the most vital element to ensuring your SEO works well for your site.

You need to figure out what keywords matter the most for what your website is trying to achieve. While you can do research on some optional keywords you may want to rank for, you really need to find those keywords that you must rank for.

You can utilise a number of tools for this as well as looking into what your competitors are ranking for, this might give you key insights into the keywords you want to target.

Hitting Googles Mobile First & Core Web Vitals

This is sort of two points in one, really, but both are vitally important so we are including them together.

First of all, your site needs to be optimised for mobile above all else. Since September 2020, Google has used mobile-first indexing, meaning Google predominantly uses the mobile version of your content for indexing and ranking. Essentially, if your site is not well optimised for mobile, you will fall in the rankings!

The recent update is the introduction of core web vitals. If you would like to know about these in more detail, we wrote a blog about this specific update here, but in short, Google will be utilising page speed as a significant ranking factor, moving page speed from an afterthought to an important part of optimisation.

Links

Despite Google ranking factors changing pretty regularly, one element that has always been important is that of backlinks.

What has changed is how you should be acquiring backlinks – in the past a link was a link and quality was not so important. Now, however, you need to ensure your links are coming from trusted, high-quality sources. There are a number of factors that go into checking quality, but good sources include such things as links from .edu domains & links from domains that score highly on Moz Domain Authority.

One final thing to consider is to ensure your links are not hidden – they need to appear naturally on the page, embedded in text where appropriate. 

If you want to know how we can help you with an SEO campaign, please get in touch with us today for your free review.