SEO Campaign Management: How to Prepare

SEO campaign management is how you implement your SEO strategy for your website. It's a way of breaking down and organizing all the steps you'll need to take to complete a specific phase or your entire SEO strategy. This makes it easier to manage and to catch mistakes.

After all, SEO campaign management isn't just the process of optimizing your site for search. It's how you organize that process to make it clear, effective, and measurable. Building a strong framework to manage your SEO will help you maintain and expand the organic growth of your site.

Your SEO strategy should be specific to your site and business goals. If you're not sure where to focus, you may want to get an audit of your site.

How to organize your SEO campaign management

Before you begin your campaign, set a clear budget and make sure you understand your SEO timeline. Search engine optimization requires careful planning to get results. During this phase, it's important to come up with ideas that are within the reach of your budget and the time you have to reach your goals. In the next phase, you’ll determine the goal of your first campaign.

Your first SEO Campaign

Your first campaign is a helpful time to experiment and to test any theories you have before they impact your entire website. Start with one small project or section of your site, for example, one category of your blog. This can give you a testing ground to measure the effectiveness of your SEO strategy.

As you test your ideas you will also be creating the templates or checklists that you will use as you optimize your full site.

These will cover the step-by-step details you will follow for your SEO optimizing process. Some examples of the tools you’ll want to create include:

Technical SEO optimization checklist

SEO is full of details. Having a checklist you can refer to on a regular basis can help you keep up with changes as they happen. This will help you maintain your site health.

Some apps, like Screaming Frog, make it easy to see these changes. Depending on how you built your site, a manual list of common issues to check can also be helpful.

SEO checklist for content creation

At some point, you may have someone else writing content for your site. This makes it important to offer guidelines on how you want your SEO writing to look.

This document may include keywords or how to approach headers, or it may be a general overview of best practices for search in your niche.

On-page SEO optimization checklist

There are a lot of ways you can make a big impact with search engine optimization. The checklist I use for SEO optimization for my blog has almost 30 points to check off!

I use a checklist because, even though I have a great memory, I always forget at least one detail. These details seem small, but I have data from experiments I’ve completed for my site. That data shows that these little changes make a big difference.

Email templates

Link building and guest posting require a lot of emails. Whether your primary goal is to add links where your brand is already mentioned or to build the reputation of your site, email templates will make a big difference when you begin your outreach.

Contact list for guest posts and partnerships

As you execute your first campaign and continue your research, you will start getting ideas of who you want to work with. These contacts will be vital as you promote your optimized content.

Creating a list of guest post targets and people or businesses that you want to partner with is a great way to organize and measure your outreach.

Site SEO analytics spreadsheet

This is a spreadsheet where you will measure your results before, during and after you launch your SEO campaign. The data points you measure should tie directly to the goals outlined in your SEO strategy. It's a good idea to update this sheet weekly to see how your efforts are impacting your results.

Executing your SEO strategy

Once you have clear and tested results for your first SEO campaign you're ready to optimize the rest of your site.

As you continue to make updates, it's important to optimize one thing at a time. Optimizing everything at once will make it difficult for you to understand what aspects of your optimization are helping or hurting the growth of your site.

You may have had success in your initial campaign. That's great! But not every part of your site will get results in the same way. So, it's important to manage changes carefully.

SEO is a long-term strategy that requires long-term tools and measurement for success. Personalized templates are the best way to set your SEO campaign management on the right track.