How to Put SEO Strategy at the Heart of Campaign Ideations

With digital PR being one of three SEO pillars, it’s vital that every campaign, reactive or piece of core work you create and outreach should follow your wider SEO strategy. With this in mind, our PR team at NORTH place the SEO strategy at the heart of our campaign ideations, to ensure we’re thinking about the organic search benefit our brands’ can achieve right from the start. 

Ideations should encourage creative thinking and produce campaigns that are unignorable and newsworthy, because that’s how you’re going to cut through the noise in journalists’ inboxes. But, the difference between traditional PR and digital PR, is that, through earning relevant and authoritative coverage and links, you’re improving a website’s organic performance, as well as brand awareness. Ideations should be driven by your brand’s overall and organic goals, so that everyone is aligned all the way through the campaign process.

But, how exactly do we incorporate the SEO strategy into the ideation process? Well, we ensure that we have produced the SEO strategy ahead of the ideation, and then make sure this is embedded into the ideation brief. Find out exactly how, below.

1) Produce an SEO Strategy

An SEO strategy is a thorough plan that includes a well-selected set of tactics to meet your business objectives. Often, your tactics can follow the three SEO pillars of tech, content and digital PR, but these can change and switch priority depending on what you’re trying to achieve organically. Your strategy helps to improve online performance, increase brand awareness and boost organic traffic to ramp up your SEO efforts and climb up the SERP.

2) Creating the Ideation Brief

At NORTH we’ve created an ideation brief that covers all bases. Your team should have all of the information they could possibly need to understand the brand and create relevant and newsworthy campaigns. 

It’s important to link to the SEO strategy you have and to encourage the ideation team to read this thoroughly. Then, they should take a look at the priority pages you’re looking to build links to, and the target keywords. 

Your ideation brief should also cover:

• Your brand in a nutshell 
• Link to your website
• What does your brand sell/ what is your service?
• Target audience
• What is your brand’s unique selling point?
• Dream publications you want to feature in
• Any issues to be aware of [time restraints, do’s and don’ts etc]
• The budget
• What does success look like?

In our briefs, we like to give prompts to help generate ideas. These can be specific types of campaigns, such as surveys, or asking for campaigns around target keywords. Our prompts include:

• 1 x survey campaign: a campaign focused around survey data
• 1 x visual campaign: this could be an interactive tool, infographic, photography, visual mock up
• 1 x keyword focused campaign: a campaign idea inspired by or based around a priority keyword
• 1 x blog topic focused campaign: a campaign inspired by the best ranking blogs on the website
• 1 x we could get fired for this campaign: a ridiculously bold idea that would be amazing but a struggle to get signed off
• Plus any extra ideas the team might think of

3) Deciding the Most Relevant Campaign Ideas

Once your team has pulled together amazing campaign ideas, it’s time to decide which ideas are best for your brand and will help you get closer to meeting your objective. 

When deciding which campaign ideas to put forward, think about the following:

• Is the campaign relevant?
• Does it help with your overall SEO strategy?
• Can you do it within your budget?
• What resources will you need?
• Is the idea data-heavy? Do you need visual assets making? Can you do this in the time period and budget?
• Does the campaign have a time-constraint? E.g. a holiday such as Christmas
• Are management likely to sign off on the idea? Or at least open to hearing about it?

Once you’ve decided your ideas meet these criteria, send them across to the relevant people for sign off!

Remember, digital PR is a pillar of SEO, meaning it should always be guided by your SEO objectives. Ultimately, placing your SEO strategy at the heart of will mean you create well informed, relevant and impactful campaigns that will help your overall organic performance and brand awareness. 

If you need someone to create an SEO, or digital PR-focused, strategy for your business, or you’re struggling to generate unignorable or impactful campaigns, then get in touch with us today. We have the experience needed to take your business to the next level and maximise your online performance.