What is SEO Management?
SEO Management: How to Run Your Campaign Successfully?
What is SEO Management?
SEO management is a set of tactics you use inside and outside your website to increase your visibility in search engine results.
And this process never ends.
Search engine algorithms and user preferences are always changing. That’s why sites need constant SEO maintenance.
Who does this benefit?
SEO management is usually handled by in-house, agency or freelance SEO managers. Who is responsible for various SEO tasks, from keyword research to technical optimizations?
Let’s examine these tasks and the categories they fall under in more detail.
On-Page, Off-Page and Technical SEO Management
Let’s look at the most important SEO tasks in these three categories.
On-Page SEO Management
On-page SEO management involves taking actions on your web pages to help search algorithms better understand and rank your content.
Here are some typical on-page SEO efforts:
Contents
Review your content regularly to ensure it is accurate, relevant and useful. This will increase the chances of having a good ranking.
For example, check past articles for outdated examples, statistics, and images. Or add useful, relevant ones if they don’t already exist. Consider rewriting or expanding articles that do not add value to readers.
And keep creating new SEO content. You may be incomplete to cover additional relevant topics.
If you need to find new ideas, you can use Topic Research. Just enter a broad topic related to your business to uncover a range of related ideas.
Internal Link
Internal links are links from one page on your website to another page on your website.
It is a way to transfer authority from page to page. This can help search engines understand your content and rank it more efficiently.
When you add new content, look for opportunities to link to it from your existing pages.
When you remove or update URLs, make sure you also update the internal links that point to it.
A great way to get more value from internal links is to perform an internal link audit. You can use Semrush’s Site Audit tool for this.
Go to the tool, configure the settings, and click “Start Site Audit.”
Once the scan is complete, click on the project name to access your audit data.
You will now be in the “Overview” report.
Then click “View details” in the “Internal Link” box in the middle of the screen.
You will now see an overview of internal linking issues on your site.
Start with the “bugs” (top priority problems) and try to fix them. Then move on to “Alerts” and “Notifications”.
For example, you may need to replace broken internal links with live links. Or add internal links to orphaned pages (i.e. pages that do not currently have links from your other pages).
Site Audit also provides helpful details on why and how to fix each of the listed issues.
Keyword Research
Conduct keyword research regularly to identify new search opportunities. Because new trends, products or services may lead to new keywords to target.
For example:
The rise of artificial intelligence has led people to search for new terms. The sooner brands create content for these terms, the better their chances of ranking and increasing organic traffic.
You should also monitor your competitors to identify keywords you may be missing. This is where our Keyword Gap tool can be useful.
Enter your domain name and up to four competitors. And click “Compare”.
You will now be in a dashboard that shows you how your keywords match up with your competitors’ keywords.
Scroll down to the “All keyword details for” table and click the “Missing” button.
Now you see all the keywords your competitors are ranking for, but you don’t.
You can sort this list by metrics like monthly search volume and keyword difficulty (a measure of how difficult it is to rank in the top 10 results for a given keyword) to identify keywords worth creating content for.
Compare Your Keywords to Your Competitors
With the Keyword Gap Tool
Try It for Free →
Title Tags
Regularly review and update your title tags (HTML elements that specify the title of a web page) to ensure they are relevant and contain your target keywords.
Title tags reflect the content of your pages. Therefore, these need to change as your content changes.
Title tags in browser tabs, social
al appear in media posts and search engine results. Like for this search:
Test different title tags to see what improves click-through rates and rankings. Google may also rewrite the title tag based on context.
Look for patterns in the title tags of top-ranking pages.
Do they use a year in the titles or emphasize the number of examples? Try to apply these considerations to your title tags.
Meta Descriptions
Also update meta descriptions regularly. They appear under the blue link in search results and summarize the content of your page.
Like this:
Meta descriptions should include target keywords.
Similar to title tags, you can also test different meta descriptions. With
can potentially increase click-through rates and organic visits. However, Google may select this text for you instead of using the meta description you provide.
Schema Markup
If you make a significant change to your site or its content, update your schema markup (the code that describes the content on your site to search engines).
For example, you can add FAQs or new products. Therefore, you will want to look for relevant schema types to use.
This helps Google better understand and display the content of your pages.
Preserving schema markup ensures your content appears in search with additional details like star ratings, prices, reviews, and more.
These are called rich snippets (or rich results). And you can see one below:
Why do you want this additional information to appear?
Because research shows that rich SEO results get 58 clicks from 100 queries. Non-rich results only get 41 clicks.
Off-Page SEO Management
Off-page SEO management involves taking actions outside of your website to increase your website’s authority and search engine rankings.
Here are some typical off-page SEO activities:
Creating Links
Link building is all about increasing the number of links pointing to your website from other domains. These are called backlinks. And these are one of Google’s most important ranking factors.
Therefore, you should constantly review your backlinks to understand how well your link building efforts are going.
Is a particular piece of content getting a lot of backlinks? Double down on this content format.
It’s also important to monitor your competitors’ link building efforts. To see if they get backlinks with innovative tactics.
You can use the Backlink Gap to find backlinks that your competitors have but you don’t.
Add your domain and up to four competing domains.
Then, click “Find leads.”
Once you see the dashboard, click the “Charts” drop-down menu to see a visual representation of how your Authority Score (a measurement on a scale of 0 to 100 that indicates the overall quality of a website) and number of referring domains compares against history. 12 months.
Then, click “Best” in the “Possibilities:” section (and make sure your domain is selected). To list all domains that point to your competitors, not you.
Check the boxes next to the domains you want to reach as part of the link building campaign. And click the “+ Start access” button to send them to the Link Builder.
Now you can initiate and manage your link building efforts.
content marketing
Content marketing is the creation and distribution of different types of useful content. The goal is to attract or maintain your target audience’s interest in your brand.
It’s a good idea to publish different types of content regularly. And share it across multiple distribution channels to reach multiple audiences.
Here are a few distribution channels you can explore:
search engines
Podcasts
Bulletins
Paid ads
Social media
Here’s a social post promoting one of our articles:
Your off-site content marketing efforts can benefit your SEO efforts.
Here is an example:
Writing a guest article on another site can help new audiences learn about your brand. You can also get backlinks to your site.
This establishes authority with both readers and search algorithms.
Comments
Respond to online reviews regularly. Both positive and negative. Building trust with customers and improving your brand reputation.
From where?
Because a positive brand reputation can lead to more people searching for your brand and visiting your site.
Tip: Use our Listing Management tool to update listings and respond to Google reviews in one place.
Technical SEO Management
Technical SEO management involves optimizing your site to make it easier for search engines to navigate and improve user experience.
You can find what technical SEO management generally requires here.
your:
Site Speed
Site speed is a confirmed ranking factor. This means faster loading times can positively impact your search rankings.
Therefore, regularly check your site’s speed using free tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
Here’s an example of what the results might look like:
There are things you can do to increase your site’s loading speed:
Compressing images and videos
Enable browser caching
Removing unnecessary plugins
Promptly addressing major issues that are slowing down your site can lead to better performance.
Tip: Check out our comprehensive PageSpeed Insights guide for more detailed information.
Important Web Data
Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics related to load time, visual stability, and responsiveness.
Google confirmed that these metrics impact search results.
This means it’s important to keep track of your Vital Web Vitals. And see what you can do to improve them.
You can use Google Search Console (GSC) to access your Core Web Vitals data.
Open GSC and click “Important Web Vitals” under the “Experience” tab in your main GSC dashboard.
You will then be able to choose between accessing mobile or desktop data.
Click “O”
PEN REPORT” in the “Mobile” module to access the control panel with various graphs and tables showing important information.
In the “Why URLs aren’t considered good” section, click on a specific row to see which of your URLs have the issue in question.
You can then make adjustments to correct them.
Robots.txt
A robots.txt file tells Google crawlers which pages they should and should not crawl.
Some pages (such as staging sites or landing pages) are not intended to be viewed by the general public. Maybe you also want to exclude certain PDFs and videos from the search results.
When you update your robots.txt file, it lets Google know which URLs you want it to crawl.
Keeping your robots.txt file updated is an important part of technical SEO management.
Sitemaps
A sitemap is a file (usually in XML format) that lists all the URLs you want indexed. To help Google find your pages quickly and effectively.
You’ll want to make sure you submit a valid sitemap to Google Search Console.
Depending on how you set up your website and the plugins you use, updating the sitemap with newly published pages may occur automatically. You can find more information about this in our XML sitemaps guide.
If you need to submit and update manually, you can easily do so using Google Search Console.
Go to the “Sitemaps” report under the “Indexing” section in the left menu.
Then add your sitemap URL in the “Add new sitemap” field. And click the “SEND” button.
After submitting your sitemap you will receive the following message:
How to Successfully Manage an SEO Campaign
An SEO campaign involves a series of tasks designed to achieve a specific goal within a specific time period.
Let’s look at how to manage SEO campaigns.
1. Conduct a Site Inspection
It’s a good idea to start with an SEO audit. Understanding how well your site is performing in terms of keyword ranking, speed and more.
You can then evaluate how successful your past strategies have been. Get a foundation for future SEO campaigns.
To run a technical SEO audit, open Site Audit.
Follow the configuration instructions. And click “Start Site Audit”.
You will then be directed to the “Overview” report.
Click the “Issues” tab to access a list of priority tasks you can focus on fixing.
Note: Site Audit can be paired with Google Search Console to perform an in-depth SEO audit of your site.
2. Learn About Your Competitors
Take the time to learn about your SEO competitors. This way, you know who you’re facing in the search results to understand how much effort your own SEO campaign might require.
Are you up against corporate sites with more authority in your niche? Or do you keep small personal blogs?
Answering these questions will allow you to understand how good your content and backlinks need to be. And how much time and money your SEO campaign might need.
You can use Domain Overview to get competitive insights.
Enter a competitor’s domain name and click “Search.”
You will now arrive at the main dashboard, which lists data points such as Authority Score, total number of backlinks, estimated organic search traffic, and more.
The tool also allows you to compare your domain name with four competitors.
It also allows.
Click the “Compare domains” tab.
Then add your domain name and any other competitors you want to review and click “Compare.”
You will now see how your site compares to your competitors on various metrics.
For example, you can easily see which domain has the largest traffic share.
Look for data insights that can reveal your strengths or weaknesses.
For example, your site’s Authority Score may be higher. This means you may be more likely to rank higher than your competitors in search results for relevant keywords (all else being equal).
Get Information About Competitors
With the Domain Overview Tool
Try It for Free →
3. Set Clear Goals
Now it’s time to set goals for your SEO campaign.
SEO goals often revolve around increasing organic traffic, improving organic conversions, or building backlinks.
However, campaign objectives should support your main business and marketing goals.
For example, your company may have aggressive revenue targets. Your SEO campaign may be geared towards creating conversion-focused content that will later contribute to revenue.
You also want your goals to be clear and have a timeline and specific deliverables. So you can track the progress.
Here are a few examples of clear and vague goals.
Vague goals Clear goals
Increase the organic traffic of the site Increase the organic traffic of our blog by 25% in six months by producing 30 new articles
Generate a large number of backlinks for important pages Generate 25 high-quality backlinks for a content hub page through outreach efforts in four months
4. Create and Execute an Action Plan
Now break your goals down into actionable steps. And each step can belong to a specific person or a team.
Let’s say the goal is to increase organic traffic by at least 25% within six months by producing 30 new articles.
Here are some actionable steps for:
achieve this goal:
Specify all primary keywords you will target
Create a content summary for each keyword or keyword phrase
Fill the content calendar with summaries and set publication dates
Hire three new writers
Define writing, editing and rendering workflows
Assign articles to authors
Review and publish five articles each month
Analyze performance and report blog performance every month
Evaluate the SEO campaign as a whole after six months
This is just a high-level action plan. Each of these elements also has sub-items with details such as assignee, due date, and more.
And some action plans can be more complex. For example, a single plan might include writing content and growing backlinks simultaneously.
5. Monitoring and Reporting Performance
SEO campaigns can last for months. That’s why you need a way to track and report SEO results to make sure you stay on track.
This means tracking SEO metrics that make sense for your goal.
If you’re trying to increase organic traffic, you may want to monitor organic traffic and keyword rankings.
Location Tracking is useful for this type of SEO tracking.
Go to the tool, enter your domain, and click “Set up tracking.”
Then configure targeting, add all the keywords you want to track, and click “Start Tracking.”
You will now have access to location tracking reports.
Let’s take a look at the “Horizontal” report you will see first:
From here you can access various tabs depending on what metrics you want to track.
For example, you can go to the “Overview” tab to track your gains and losses in keyword ranking positions.
You can also visit the “Pages” tab. Tracking the SEO performance of all pages ranking for at least one of the keywords you track.
Apart from Semrush, you can also use Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console to monitor organic traffic.
Monitoring, on the other hand, is an ongoing process that you can perform weekly or monthly.
6. Evaluate the Campaign
When the campaign end date is reached, it is time to evaluate your campaign. Determining how successful you are and reflecting on lessons learned.
Here are some questions you can ask to evaluate your campaign:
What parts of the campaign went as expected and why?
Where did we have problems and how did we solve them?
If we did not achieve our goals in the time frame we chose, what is the reason?
Are there any successful, repeatable tactics we discovered during the campaign?
You can also adapt these questions according to the nature of your SEO campaign.
Use what you learn to inform your future SEO campaigns. To help you achieve your goals.
Improve Your SEO Management Today
Planning, creating and managing SEO campaigns is never-ending time.
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