A Step-By-Step Guide

An SEO campaign is a structured set of tasks that should lead to better rankings on search engines. If you actively do SEO, you likely engage in SEO campaigns, whether you call it that or not.

But what should the process from campaign idea to evaluation look like? There are often many steps and people involved, so proper planning is needed to achieve effectiveness and the desired outcome.

These are the steps we’ll go through:

Discover and prioritize your SEO opportunities

Set up an SEO objective

Outline the process to achieve the objective

(Re)write the content

Acquire and build backlinks

Monitor the results

Evaluate the campaign

1. Discover and prioritize your SEO opportunities

The first rule of planning SEO campaigns is simple. Don’t start if you lack information and data to back up your decisions. You can come up with countless SEO campaign ideas. But without research, you can’t tell which opportunities are worth pursuing and prioritizing.

The research we’re going to dive into will help us estimate the effort needed to run any SEO campaign and its potential impact. This concept can be illustrated by the Impact Effort Matrix:

Now, because an SEO campaign is defined as a set of tasks, we’ll assume that all the ideas will fall into the two quadrants on the right side.

We need two essential sets of SEO data that will help us come up with the SEO campaign ideas and add them into the matrix. Welcome to keyword and backlink research. If you’ve already done this, feel free to skip to the second step.

2. Keyword research

Keyword research is the process of understanding the language your target customers use when searching for your products, services, and content. It then involves analyzing, comparing, and prioritizing the best keyword opportunities for your website.

Now, I’m not going to dive into the process of keyword research, as we have a whole guide about that. But do note planning and running a campaign is more advanced than just picking a few keywords and writing content about them.

Here are a few use cases that are worth pursuing as an SEO campaign based on keyword data:

Targeting highly competitive keywords

Selecting topics that can attract many backlinks (link bait content)

Developing boilerplate content that can be scaled up into hundreds of similar pages targeting different keywords (example from Wise SEO case study)

Most of these require an outreach campaign on top of the content creation to maximize the potential. That’s where the other set of data comes into play.

3. Backlink research

Backlink research is the process of understanding what makes websites link to one another in your niche and gathering link opportunities for your own pages. Basically, it’s about getting all the necessary information to grow a strong backlink profile for your website that should lead to better rankings.

A lot of backlink research stems from a sort of SEO competitive analysis. It can be in the form of analyzing intersecting links where you check which websites link to your competitors but not to you. This Link Intersect report can be accessed in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer:

Then we can analyze the type of content that gets the most links (link bait) in your niche in the Best by links report in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer:

Or do the most straightforward analysis, which is going through the Backlinks and Referring domains reports—all in Site Explorer:

Getting all this research and processes right allows you to launch outreach campaigns that should get high-quality backlinks to your most important pieces of content. Technically, any outreach campaign can be considered an SEO campaign on its own. (Ideally, it’s best to launch it right after the “content creation” step.)