Tips For Developing Your SEO Campaign Plan

One of the most common mistakes when a company decides to invest in SEO, whether in-house or with an agency is the lack of understanding of the importance of the development of the SEO campaign plan. Often the most difficult core competitive keywords are chosen without considering the issue of profitability, as many companies hope to move up on the search engines for these broad industry keywords. SEO is not just about being seen it has to be about profitability further down the line and this should be central to the development of the SEO campaign plan.

Step 1:
If your company is selling products online the first step is to evaluate which products have a better margin and then go about keyword research. If your company is offering services then the same principle applies, only in evaluating the long-term worth of your potential clients to each service if this applies. The SEO campaign plan should market your most profitable products or services when possible.

Step 2:
Next you need to understand that you must split the keyword that apply to your chosen services or products into core competitive keywords and long-tail keywords. Core competitive keywords will be the more difficult keywords that all your competitors hope to be on page one for as well. The long-tail keywords are less competitive and often by their nature can mean that the person searching is closer to making a decision.

For example a core competitive keyword for a ladies clothes website will be dress, whereas a long-tail keyword for the same website will be one one-shoulder dress or halter neck dress. These long-tail keywords have a higher chance of moving up the rankings of the search engines faster and additionally as the lady searching is looking for a specific style of dress there should be a higher chance that she is ready to buy.

Step 3:
When it comes to deciding your keywords, both the core competitive keywords and the long-tail keywords to include in your SEO campaign plan there are some shortcuts. If you are already running a pay per click campaign you can evaluate the keywords within this campaign in terms of cost effectiveness.

Look at the cost per conversion if you have this information available and you should notice that the long-tail keywords will have a lower cost per conversion, the same principle will apply to your SEO campaign plan. It applies in a different way as you will either be investing a cost in an agency or in-house over a period of time.

Step 4:
Mix and match some different approaches to gathering keyword data. Combine what you have decided from your website and ppc campaign, if you have one and use the following free tools.

Type into google-"google search based keyword tool" and you then click on the blue link at the bottom of the page-or see top keywords across all categories. If you have a google account it will scan your website and the data from google making new suggestions also.

There is a free SEO software that is very good called Web CEO, this also has a good keyword tool giving both suggestions and average numbers of searches.

Finally the "google insights for search" type this in and this excellent tool you can drill down to various locations to see the trends of the keywords that you are considering to optimise.