Focusing SEO compaign for building great contents

The way to approach SEO depends on the business and the budget that it has for SEO activities. Larger corporations may be able to afford an in house SEO team. If that’s the case, they will certainly be able to get a lot more done and the campaign will move from phase to phase more quickly. However, many SMBs just don’t have the budget for full time SEO work and the best approach in that case is to hire a reputable white hat SEO firm to outsource the work to.

Every SEO firm has a slightly different process. What we like to do is outline what kind of work will be done every month right at the onset of the campaign. The first few months involve the research component and the on site SEO component. The first step will be getting to know the client, their industry, and their competition. Keyword research is conducted and selected keywords are implemented into meta data and on page content. Depending on the size of the website this process can take up to a few months to complete. The remainder of the first year of an SEO campaign involves researching industry sites and directories for link opportunities, getting social accounts set up and active, submitting information to all local directories, submitting press releases for newsworthy events, and content marketing (to an extent).

Content marketing is an extremely important component of an SEO campaign, and should be part of the SEO campaign from the start. We’re not saying otherwise. We’re just saying that during the first round of SEO work (whether that be a year or 6 months or 3 months) there are also other important priorities that can take time. Depending on the industry, think about how long it could take to find and submit to all of the relevant industry directories or associations out there. Working with an SEO firm as opposed to hiring someone in house means that you are paying for a certain amount of time/work each month. It fills up quickly!

During the second year (or phase) of an SEO campaign all of this “set up” work should be completed. Unless there have been major content changes to the site there isn’t any real reason to re-do your keyword research every year and you should only be changing existing content if it’s absolutely necessary. The search engines like to see (and reward) consistency. If you are continually changing the content on your site it can cause confusion as to what your site is actually about and can cause major fluctuations in your website rank.

Of course changing existing content and adding new, fresh content to the site on a regular basis are two different things. The search engines appreciate sites that continually add quality content to the site to improve the user experience. That’s why, if you don’t already have a blog on a site, year two (or phase two) of an SEO program is the right time to add one. Each blog post can target relevant keywords and long tail keywords and over time the post can gain traction in the search engines. Blog posts can also help to fuel social signals and get social media followers to click over to the site.

Year two of an SEO campaign isn’t any easier than year one, in fact an SEO campaign can continue to get more challenging. Just because the set up work is done, it doesn’t mean that you should scale back. Instead, focus your resources on creating great content.