If you are engaged in digital marketing at any level for your business, then you are very well aware how valuable a good ranking on Google can be for your main keywords.

Many businesses know and understand that they need to be engaged in search engine optimization (SEO), they know that it can add significant extra leads and sales to the business. But that is as far as there knowledge extends.

If this is you, then you may have asked yourself the question “I know I need to be doing SEO, but I don’t know exactly what I need.”

Businesses have slowly, over time come to realize the true value of search engine optimization. That by ranking their website well, for even just a handful of relevant keyword terms, can have a huge impact on revenue.

However, before just diving in, it is vital to understand what results you hope to achieve by investing in an SEO program.

SEO is made up of lots of different things, and depending on what type of business and website you have, will determine what exactly might go into a program, that is a good fit for your business needs.

So when considering launching an SEO campaign here are four key consideration you need to think about before you take any action.

1. Business Goals

Like most things in business your program should be goal orientated. You really need to consider what result(s) you want to achieve. By understanding this you can better understand what components you will need to build into your SEO program.

So general goals might be more traffic, or more conversions or more sales. But you need to be specific, how much more traffic, or how big an increase in conversion are you hoping for and in what time frame.

Or maybe you want to grow your brand recognition or perhaps your website was penalised so your goal is to re-cover your website and get your penalty lifted.

So depending on your answer the program components will be quite different.

2. Target More Precise Keywords & Search Phrases

Not that long ago it was possible to target a good primary keyword and generate lots of traffic for your site. As a bonus for ranking for that one keyword you would, more than likely, end up raking for half a dozen related keywords as well. Unfortunately, that day is well and truly gone.

While primary keywords tend to still have a lot of traffic the challenge is that they don’t attract highly targeted traffic and also they are expensive in both time and money to rank well for.

Targeting long-tail search queries not only attracts qualified “buyer” traffic, but these terms will typically have much less competition. Keyword research along with understanding the shopping and purchase patterns of the target consumer can help to identify search terms and phrases to go after.

3. SEO Site Audit

Your website is the hub of any SEO campaign. So when coming to grips and defining your needs a full website audit is an important part of understanding your needs.

Consider it like a yearly doctors checkup where you will learn how healthy your web site is when it comes to SEO.

Audits are usually a combination of software and manual assessment. Which determines the strengths and weaknesses if your site when it come to it’s SEO effectiveness.

Your audit report will guide you on where you should be focusing your efforts.

4. Available Resources

It is important to assess what resources you have to hand, that you can assign to an SEO campaign. After having been through points one, two and three above you should have a good idea of what components you need to have in your campaign to ensure the result you want and what type of activities you need to be engaged in.

You need to be realistic about how much time you or a team member can invest in carrying out the required tasks on a regular consistent basis.

If you know what needs to be done and you can figure out how much of that can be done by you and your team in house. Then you can determine what you will need to outsource to a reliable SEO provider.

For example, if you know that your site is lacking good content but you do not have anyone on your team that has the time to provide that service then you will probably need to use a content writer or SEO consultant to help you.

It also works the opposite way. If you know that part of your program you will need to be active on social media to generate those “social signals” Google likes and you have a team member who is social media savvy. Then all you might need is for them to go to a moderate/advance social media training session and they will be able to handle all of the social media marketing internally.

Conclusion:

Any business who is thinking of engaging in an SEO program should make sure that they have a good understanding of each of these factors going in. It will help you to build a successful program that helps you hit your business goals.