Investing in SEO can be expensive, especially if you have decided to run the campaign yourself. While most would opt for hiring a professional SEO agency, some try to run their online campaigns themselves – and have proven successful!

So how did they do it? How did they make a successful SEO campaign? Simple: they got the most out of their SEO with the limited time they had and the budget that restricted their investment. If you want to be like them and you are looking towards making a substantial impact on your SEO campaign, then it would be advisable to follow these ten tips.

 

1 – Find the right keywords for your campaign

It couldn’t be any easier. Keywords are the lifeblood of your campaign, but choosing the right ones can be difficult. So how do you approach it? You do in-depth keyword research by jumping on the Keyword Tool on Google Adwords to help. Your research should encompass the following:

• Look at your services or products and see what keywords you can generate from them
• Understand what your customers want and what they search for
• Look into the difficulty of each keyword and see what you can do. The higher, the harder for you, so look towards medium to low keywords
• Make a list of 20 to 50 keywords and validate them on the Keyword Tool

When you’ve narrowed down your list, apply your keywords to your campaign.

2- Optimize your website effectively

By using your keywords on the content of each of your website pages to help them rank higher when prospective customers search using those keywords. But you shouldn’t just put them in the content; you have to include them all significant spots on your webpages, including:

• The title of the page
• The URL
• The meta description
• The image alt and titles
• The headers across your pages

Doing all this will create a robust SEO structure to your website, and will help boost its rankings. However, you have to be careful not to…

3 – Overstuff your keywords into your website

Google dislikes websites that just stuff their keywords into their content. It’s a cheap form of SEO, and it doesn’t work the way it should. It’s even part of their Webmaster Guidelines: “Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.”

So it’s fundamental: keep your content clean and do not overstuff it with keywords.

4 – Quality content is essential

Let’s not beat around the bush: quality content is vital for SEO. It’s how content picks up your website and helps users find the right information. So when it comes to your content, you have to make it the best it can be. This is how you can do it:

• Make it engaging and informative, loaded with factual information
• No spelling mistakes or grammatical errors
• Refresh it once in a while, so it stays relevant to changing times
• Make it relevant to your users

But it’s not just about the content on your site; it’s about your blogs, guest blogs and social media posts too. The more effort you put into your content marketing, the better your overall content is, and therefore, the better your SEO.

5 – Build valuable links to your site

Too many think just get links from various spam websites, hoping it will help with their rankings. That’s not going to work. You need sites that have a high domain rating and can help you by pushing your rankings higher. Do your research and find valuables links where you can promote good-old fashion content. Ask the owners of related sites to carry a link to your site. The more valuable the quality of the link, say from a university website or business directory, the better your link building strategy.

6 – Get super social

Social media can help your SEO in numerous ways. It provides a valuable link back to your website, it comes up in Google searches and helps provide a platform for you to directly interact with customers, increasing your online presence and traffic.

So make sure you make profiles on all the social media platforms that are significant to your industry. We’re talking about Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn – whatever you need. From there, get active on it with high-quality content and posts. Much like content, the higher the quality of your posts, the better your social media platform will be!

7 – Make sure your website is user-friendly

Have a clean, easy-to-navigate website that enriches your customers’ experience. Make sure it’s immediately clear to visitors who you are and what you’re offering. The more readable and fluent your website, the better your user experience. That, in turn, boosts your SEO as your customers will stay on your site longer than ever. Better yet, you’ll convert those visitors into leads, which will pay off handsomely down the line!

8 – Improve your website’s speed

A slow website can kill your user experience and increase your bounce rate – which is when people get on a page and leave it. You want a low bounce rate, so that means having a super-fast website. You can do this by reducing the size of your images and removing any unnecessary plugins.

8 – Optimize it for mobile

How often do you look at your mobile phone for information? Probably all the time. So do your customers. This means your website has to be responsive to mobile phones. If your site still comes up as the full website version on the phone, that’s going to deter visitors and impact your SEO, because, guess what, Google doesn’t like websites that aren’t mobile-friendly.

10 – Be patient!

SEO takes time. It could take weeks or even months to see results. Anyone who tells you otherwise is just misleading you for a quick sale. Be patient, and keep an eye on your results. There could be a few things that could be changed here or there that can boost your rankings. Remember that SEO is continually evolving, so stay on top of the trends so you can be successful.