Things to Consider Before You Start SEO Campaigns for Your Website
Do you find yourself in the doldrums if witness that your website doesn’t rank, despite your best efforts? It is well understood that running a website without its ranking means you do no business at all. Until and unless you start paid campaigns or email marketing. You may also consider organic SEO campaigns for your website. There are many things to consider before you start SEO campaigns for your website.
The big question now is how your website should rank. SEO services by an agency will help you improve your ranking and thus your traffic.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is an innovative strategy to rank websites highly. It leaves a greater impact, and thus, websites rank highly to get noticed. It is a unique process to get your websites or portals ranked on popular search engines by applying genuine strategies. Apart from garnering traffic, it also helps you build the overall reputation of your company.
Before making a strategy to start doing anything to your website, you must consider certain things as part of your site ranking plan. Without prior research, SEO won’t prove helpful to you. You might end up investing hard-earned money without getting any benefit in case you lack in planning.
You should, therefore, plan your search engine campaign by hiring SEO experts or an agency to get such tasks completed professionally. Never ever compromise with the quality while making a selection of these parties. High-quality work ensures long-lasting results thus you must focus on that only.
Before You Start an SEO Campaign for your Website
Before starting your search engine campaign for your website, you should consider these 20 important things to ensure you obtain maximum results.
1. Choose Your Domain Name Carefully
You, being an entrepreneur, should start planning the outline for your business even before you start it. The first thing you need to do is make a website, and the website needs a domain name. Domain names are one of the main ranking factors in search engines, so you should look at them to figure out what your business is all about.
While purchasing domains, you should make sure they are relevant, easy to remember, and incorporate the main keyword you want to rank for. Knowledge about Google’s EMD (Exact Match Domain) Penalty will also help you get a great domain for your website. This way you can keep your website ahead.
2. Use a Mobile-Friendly Design
Optimize your website for smaller screens as 57 percent of all online traffic now comes from different types of smartphones and tablets. When you’re planning SEO for your website, you must make it mobile-friendly. Otherwise, you will waste your money and precious time for nothing. Keeping in mind SEO campaigns, you can save time and effort in ranking. You must keep in mind the things you need to know before starting a campaign for your website.
3. Optimize Page URLs
Do you know URLs also play a great role in improving the ranking of a website? So, you should customize the URL of every page on your website. Apart from being easy to remember, the URLs should have your target keyword for the page. Keeping them short is also necessary.
4. Optimize Title Tags & Meta Descriptions
Write meta descriptions and title tags carefully, as Google looks at them to learn what the page is about. Readers read descriptions before entering a website in searches. Apart from using your keywords naturally, you get a chance to demonstrate the page in a few words to the search engines. Try to keep your title tag and meta description short.
5. Optimize Images
It is a fact that Google cannot read images; instead, it reads alt texts of the images. So, you should use your primary keywords in the alt text of images. Customize the name of each image you use by including the keyword you are targeting. Image optimization is also helpful to improve the ranking of a website. Image optimization is the first step towards starting SEO campaigns for your website.
6. Set Your Goal
Before you start an SEO strategy and plan for execution to boost the website’s ranking, you must decide your primary goals to determine what key phrases you want to be found for. You aim to gather emails, or you simply want to increase the number of visitors so that there occurs improvement in sales or service queries.
With a clear goal in mind, you will be able to approach the most suitable agency and hire experts. They will understand your needs better. Thus, you will certainly be able to plan and implement your SEO strategies as per your set goals.
7. Decide if local or global search engine ranking
Local SEO is entirely different from the broader one which covers the global SEO arena. You must have a clear-cut approach and stance prior to implementing SEO strategies. Local search improvement is much faster, and many times proves a more successful strategy than the rest.
You should keep the selected SEO agency well-informed about your customized needs if you want both local and broad search engine ranking or an improvement to be limited to any one of them. While doing such prior planning, you would be able to supervise the work through better planning. It will guarantee to accomplish the task according to your requirements and budget.
8. Check your current ranking status
Before outsourcing your SEO campaign to any SEO agency or SEO consultancy, you must cross-check whether your particular keyword phrases have ranked at this juncture prior to applying new strategies. Otherwise, you won’t be able to assess the accuracy of the improvement in the website after applying new strategies.
There is no dearth of free SEO tools today. They are easily available to help the masses in multiple ways and to ensure suitable keyword ranking solutions. One can use them prudently for appropriate results. They are also time-saving processes, thus appealing to all and sundry.
9. Be prepared to get involved
Even if you hire an SEO consultancy, you have to prepare yourself to get involved to support their efforts and have the same zeal to offer your maximum input. Being busy doesn’t mean you hardly find time for social media activities like sharing, commenting, and liking. Plan such social media activities from your busy schedule as part of the crucial strategies.
Your name could help spread the word about your company online and promote inbound link strategies to your site. They are indeed extremely helpful in the optimization efforts.
10. Set reasonable expectations
Outsourcing SEO campaigns to an SEO service agency doesn’t mean that you will get an immediate result from whatever efforts you make. SEO is a process that starts showing results after 3 to 4 months. So, you need to have patience and set reasonable expectations for a genuine outcome that proves worthy.
Your SEO campaign partner cannot guarantee 100% results, so be prepared for that scenario as well. Initially, ask such companies to work extensively with 10 to 20 keywords before the pace is increased. Once you achieve that result, you can increase the number thereafter. We hope to obtain better results in due course.
11. Do Proper Keyword Research
It would help if you did proper keyword research before adding content to your website to determine the potential words your audience is using when searching for your products or services. It would help to ask yourself certain things before you get started with your keywords, like:
a. About your page—what is it about? Is it about a product or service you are selling, like air coolers or burst pipe repair? Or a practical how-to guide on how to proceed with interior decoration. Having a clear-cut concept about the main topic and information to be included will make it easier for you to determine the type of keywords needed to target on that page.
b. The primary intent of the page: You need to have a clear concept regarding the main goals of this page. Is it supposed to sell a product or a service, or is it meant to provide more information to educate the visitors? You’ll be able to focus on maximum relevant keywords rather than generic ones by figuring out the primary intent for a page.
12. High-Quality Content
Crafting high-quality and people-centric content is the cornerstone of your interface with customers, and it helps sites achieve the top rankings. Reference is made by content to anything you publish on your site that makes the customers happy, and it educates and attracts them. Here are some of the basic categories for the same:
- Content for Web pages;
- Content for Blog posts;
- Preparing eBooks, white papers, and reports;
- Planning Brochures & Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs);
- Sales pages;
- Videos;
- Pictures, infographics and more.
You May Also Like: Top 10 Free Duplicate Content Checker Tools
13. Technical Setup—To Measure the Effectiveness
To measure the effectiveness of your SEO campaigns, extensive efforts are required. You should also see how your website is performing. How many visitors are getting attracted to your side a month? Which are the most popular pages? How much time is being spent by them on your site? These are just a few things that can be unfolded by using an analytics tool to see that you set up your analytics software effectively now. Therefore, collecting data right away can be started by you.
14. Earning Links—An Important Factor
Links, an important ranking factor, continue to be a great indicator of which content is essential and relevant. However, it aims to get quality and authority sites to link to your website, not get hundreds of links quickly.
15. Important Things to Check Post-launch
You must check the following things post-launch for smooth operations:
- Test Usability;
- Test site speed;
- Check your mobile website;
- Your SEO checklist.
Test Usability: It is vital for SEO usability, and so does it help you keep your visitors happy. A site that is easy to navigate through is a great user experience, with information that’s easy to find and remains helpful.
Test Site Speed: It is an increasingly important factor, so don’t forget to test your site speed and improve the loading time, if necessary.
Check your mobile website: It is imperative to have a website that works on all devices—desktops, tablets, and smartphones. Mobile devices are now driving 56% of traffic to top sites.
By following these steps, you will set a healthy base for your website to ascertain it receives more traffic. But remember not to be impatient as it takes time for search engines to index your site and start ranking it after that.
16. Consider Your Social Media Presence
Social media presence is one of the things to consider before you start SEO campaigns for your website, as social media signals are a crucial factor in determining a website’s relevance and authority. To ensure that your social media presence is optimized for SEO, it’s vital to regularly update your social media profiles, use relevant keywords in your content, and link back to your website. Engaging with your audience on social media can help increase brand visibility and authority. Likewise, sharing your website’s content on social media can help drive traffic to your site.
Being available on all popular social media channels is one of the most important things you need to know before starting a campaign for your website.
17. Build High-Quality Backlinks
Search engines always use backlinks to determine the authority and relevance of a website. Therefore, focus on building backlinks from authoritative websites in your niche to enhance your website’s authority and relevance. High-quality backlinks should be relevant to your website’s content, come from reputable websites with high domain authority, and use relevant anchor text. Avoiding low-quality backlinks from spammy websites is essential, as these can harm your website’s search engine ranking.
Building high-quality backlinks is one of the things to know before starting your SEO campaign for a company.
18. Create a Sitemap
Creating a sitemap is one of the things to consider before making your SEO strategy, as it provides a clear roadmap for search engines to crawl and index your website’s content more efficiently. A sitemap includes all the pages on your website and ensures that search engines can easily access and index all of your website’s content. Submitting your sitemap to Google can help speed up the indexing process and ensure your website’s pages are accurately indexed in search results. If you have a blog, creating a sitemap will help Google understand which articles are most relevant for ranking and which should be included on the main page of Google’s search results.
19. Use Header Tags
Using header tags appropriately allows you to break down your content into smaller, more manageable sections, making it easier for your audience to scan and navigate your content. It enhances the user experience, increasing engagement and reducing bounce rates, crucial to improving your website’s search engine ranking.
Moreover, search engines use header tags to understand the hierarchy and layout of your content, which can improve your website’s search engine visibility. For example, H1 tags are typically used for the main title of the page or post, while H2 and H3 tags are used to break up sub-sections and subheadings. Properly using these tags signals to search engines that the content on your page is well-organized and structured, providing a better user experience for visitors.
20. Avoid black-hat SEO Techniques
Black Hat SEO techniques are unethical and prohibited techniques that aim to manipulate search engine rankings through deceptive and manipulative means. Some notable examples of black-hat SEO techniques include keyword stuffing, cloaking, and link schemes. These techniques can harm your website’s search engine ranking and lead to penalties, including being removed entirely from search results.
To avoid such penalties, creating high-quality, relevant content for your audience and using ethical SEO techniques are crucial. Creating valuable and engaging content can attract organic traffic and build your website’s authority and reputation over time. Avoiding black-hat SEO techniques can help you maintain a positive online presence and improve your website’s search engine ranking in the long term.
The Last: Start SEO Campaigns for Your Website
Search engine optimization (SEO) is surely a process to obtain a rewarding outcome. It requires lots of research and strategies to obtain results. Furthermore, equally important is the proper implementation of strategies planned. Before hiring an SEO service provider, you should consider the above-mentioned points. You would be able to obtain the best results through meticulous planning.
Organic search ranking is fruitful in the long run. Follow the above-mentioned five steps before you even speak to an SEO firm. You will undoubtedly be the happiest person in the long run for taking such a prudent decision.
You can share your ideas here about Things to Consider Before You Start SEO Campaigns for Your Website. SEO Content India would love to hear your points and give you valuable suggestions on the topic.