Last year, we caught up with Glasgow's Craig Campbell to discuss how to use SEO to drive outrageous results.

The Glasgow based marketer and SEO extraordinaire shared his 20 years’ experience in SEO marketing and advice on how to get started incorporating it into your own business strategy.

In this blog, we will break down Craig’s useful top tips which you can take away and use to smash your own SEO strategy.

The importance of SEO and the value it can bring

Ranking for organic search is an impactful, cost-effective way to drive results. Although it takes time, the benefits are powerful for organisations to gain visibility and get eyes on their brand. Consumers rely on Google to give them the best product or service as it’s the quickest and easiest way to get information fast. Using the most relatable keywords will increase your chance to rank at the top of Google meaning, your website is the most likely one they’ll click on. Keep reading to find out what Craig’s best tools to conduct keyword research are.

SEO is one of the most crucial elements in your marketing strategy as it makes your website more visible, which means more traffic and more opportunities to turn prospects into customers.

Craig Campbell is living proof of how SEO can boost your business’ visibility and popularity, yet people are still ignoring the importance of SEO in their marketing strategy. Craig runs several of his own successful online businesses which he’s scaled through implementing a strong SEO strategy. When the SEO expert showcases his successful results, business owners and marketers are queuing up asking him to create an SEO strategy for them. Unfortunately, Craig doesn’t offer his services straight off the bat, however he shares all of his tips and insights on his YouTube channel.

How to become an SEO expert? 

Craig’s top tip for starting out in your SEO journey is “don’t listen to too many people”. Consuming too much content from so many people can be very contradictory, making the start of your SEO strategy confusing so it’s important to be mindful with what sources you rely on for information.

There’s so much free content out there to help you with your SEO research, especially on YouTube, searching for things such as “YouTube SEO how to rank #1”. However, lots of this content can become outdated quite quickly so it’s vital to keep on top of your SEO research by looking for recent videos. For example, Craig uses his YouTube platform to frequently post insightful SEO guidance and features other SEO experts to give you the best advice.

To become a total SEO expert, there is also a lot of SEO training providers to guide you on how to implement SEO in your own overall business strategy. A dedicated SEO training provider can help you to focus on what will work best for your business, as they will tailor the training to suit your overall business goals. It is important to do your research on which SEO expert to reach out to, to ensure you get the right hands-on training. Don’t forget to check out their track record and look for case studies that demonstrate tangible results.

If you’re committed to putting in the hard work, willing to experiment, be open-minded and flexible, you’ll be able to become an SEO expert in no time.

Valuable link building

There are lots of different link building tactics you can use for your SEO strategy, depending on your business’s niche. A backlink helps your website gain visibility when consumers go to Google to search for the service or product they want. It is important to consider what links will benefit your business. Links from good quality websites which point to yours will help you gain positive and trustworthy content for your consumer. Links from good quality websites which point to yours will help drive traffic and build your domain authority, which is key for ranking in Google. Reach out to journalists as they give you a lot of powerful links.

A great tip Craig Campbell also gave was to say ‘yes’ to being on a webinar, podcast or featured in a blog post. Offer to knowledge share and bring value to the other party by give their following access to free content or even ask them to take part in your own webinar.

How long does it take for SEO to work?

Craig closed down the common perception that SEO takes forever to demonstrate results. Ranking can happen as quickly as a week or in a few hours, particularly where local SEO is concerned. It is important to manage expectations as you may need more tools to help with backlinks and ranking higher than more competitive cities or industries. For organic search, ranking for lower competition keywords can take up to 4 months for results to show. If your goal is to rank with more competitive keywords, expect to wait up to 9 months.

The best way to make an impact is to focus on low hanging fruits. Focus on the low competition, high volume keywords and start by optimising your existing content before focusing on new pages and blogs.

The best SEO tools for delivering your SEO strategy

The best SEO tool to kickstart your SEO strategy is SEMrush.com which allows you conduct detailed keyword research. It can do everything, from looking at your competitors to analysing your organic search position rank. There are over 40 different tools to help with research and analysis which is why SEMrush is a must have when it comes to implementing a successful SEO strategy for your business.

Another tool to help with content writing is frase.io which creates a full content brief based on what you need to do to rank for specific keywords. It helps you to add keywords to your content and has everything you need to deliver your content pieces including useful statistics to back up your points.

Page Optimiser Pro is also a very useful tool to check your existing live content to see where you can include keywords to help you rank to the top. If you’re writing competitive content and need to rephrase content pieces in different ways, Paraphrasing tool helps to reword your pieces to help make your content unique – which also helps save a lot of time and budget which every marketer will appreciate.

How many keywords should be used for on page SEO?

Tools like frase.io and Page Optimiser Pro will give you a target figure of how many times you need to include a keyword in your content. However, always remember to write for humans first and foremost! Make sure your content isn’t too repetitive and don’t just stick keywords in for the sake of it.

If you are interested in hearing from the man himself,  you can watch the full webinar here where SEO expert Craig Campbell, talks you through each step in more detail.