Creating and executing an effective SEO campaign is a marathon, not a sprint. It requires time, resources and expertise to do it properly and see results. This is true whether you manage it in-house or outsource to a digital marketing agency.

But this doesn’t mean you can’t start improving your SEO campaigns right now. There are plenty of tweaks you can make to boost the performance of your campaign. Here are some quick tips to help you get up and running:

Set your goals
Before you do anything else, define what it is you want to achieve. Do you want to simply increase leads and sales, or something more specific like improving your site’s rankings for a specific keyword? Set your goals, and make sure they’re achievable, measurable and specific – and set a timeframe too.

Know your KPIs
To see how you’re doing on achieving your campaign objectives, you need KPIs. These are Key Performance Indicators, and are essentially the important stats and metrics you need to keep an eye on. Yours could include:

Organic search traffic
Keyword rankings
Domain authority
Bounce rate.
Do an SEO audit

How is your website currently doing? Get in touch with a specialist SEO agency in the UK for a site audit, or use a tool like Site Auditor from SearchAtlas to look at things like loading speeds, technical performance and crawling statistics.

Check out the competition
Find out what keywords your competitors are targeting, and what SEO techniques they’re using to boost their SERP ranking. There are lots of tools available to speed up this vital research, including the Market Explorer tool in Semrush.

Do LOTS of keyword research
Ask any SEO experts in the UK or worldwide and they’ll tell you that targeted keywords are the backbone of any effective SEO campaign. Tools like Keyword Explore at Moz or the Semrush Keyword Magic Tool are a major help. You can use them to build a list of keywords and phrases related to your business that have a high search volume.

Use your keywords effectively
When optimising your content with your targeted keywords, keep these tips in mind:

Avoid keyword stuffing – use your keywords sparingly and naturally
Target keywords that you have a realistic chance of ranking for, avoiding highly competitive ones
Cluster your keywords into semantic groups, so you can find long and short-tail variations.
Optimise your website using your keywords

You need to get keywords into everything – title tags, meta descriptions, alt text for images and all other HTML tags.

Get linking right
Your web pages should include two types of links. The first is relevant links to other key pages on your website, while the second is high quality outbound links. These should be to relevant, credible and authoritative sites that offer the user additional value.

Get some backlinks
There are a few ways you can build backlinks, which are links from high-quality sites back to your site in order to boost your SERP rankings. You can try guest blogging, partnership outreach and PR, although avoid buying links or entering into questionable link exchanges.

When producing content, remember to E.A.T
This stands for expertise, authority and trustworthiness, and it’s what Google uses to assess the quality of website content. Use E.A.T as your own guiding principles when producing content as part of your SEO campaign.

Need help with SEO? Work with our experts here at Nextgen Marketing, a leading SEO marketing agency in the UK.