The SEO Battlefield

Chapter 6. Campaign Management

​Campaigns are a coordinated marketing effort amongst different mediums to promote a product, message, or service. A campaign that runs without a target or goal is not a campaign; it’s just marketing activity, which may be OK. My larger point is that these are separate enterprises. While SEO tends to be a more long-term play, it is entirely possible to do a campaign in the short term that will cross-pollinate through to SEO efforts.

Without campaigns, there is no start nor finish to any major marketing event. Specific goals and timeframes can help to galvanize stakeholders and coalesce teams. Just as we sometimes feel more inspired when there’s a push, it also gives us an end to look forward to where we can reset, look at the accumulated data, and evaluate metrics.

Campaign SEO Juice

When done correctly, campaigns help boost traffic, user engagement, awareness, and therefore search prominence of a site. The goals tend to vary, but typical ones are branding, launching a new product, or cultivating new business from existing customers. Campaigns can be short or long, but the thread tying it all together is always the overarching goal. A campaign without a goal is like a warrior without a battle ahead.

Some organic search efforts are viewed as a failure because of the sheer amount of time it can take to to see statistically significant results. This is especially true in established long-running SEO programs. Campaigns actually help SEO politically ...