SEO Content Strategy: Increase Your Traffic
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a marketing strategy that focuses on improving the visibility of a webpage in search engines via organic search results. It is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or webpage in a search engine’s unpaid results—often referred to as “natural”, “organic”, or “earned” results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users; these visitors can then be converted into customers. Today we’re going to be talking about an important part of this technique – SEO content strategy.
“Content is king.” It’s a phrase used so often in the SEO industry that it has almost become cliché. But when it comes down to it, content really is one of the most important factors in search engine optimization. Without quality content, you won’t be able to rank well on Google or Bing — and if you don’t rank well on those two engines, then what good is your website?
Content marketing is a strategy that focuses on creating and promoting valuable content to attract, acquire and engage a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.
Search engines like Google want to display the best possible results for people searching for information online. Search engine optimization (SEO) was created because there were so many sites out there that weren’t optimized correctly and didn’t produce quality content. Content creation and promotion are two ways you can help improve your SEO efforts.
Search engine optimization is more than just backlinks and site speed. It’s about creating content that’s useful to your customers and getting that content in front of them with the help of resources like social media. And it is not a one-and-done process. SEO is an ongoing strategy largely requiring regularly updating and optimizing your site.
As content marketing continues to become a bigger part of marketing strategies around the world, the question of what makes good SEO content becomes more and more important. In this post, we’re going to look at a few key points that will help you develop a better SEO content strategy for your site.
Identify Your Brand
Make sure you have a clear idea of how you want your brand to be perceived before you start writing. A good branding content strategy should answer the following questions:
What type of content?
How often?
Who will be reading?
What type of content?
The first step in creating an SEO content strategy is to identify what kind of content will help attract your target audience and keep them engaged. Once you know what type of content you need, you can start thinking about how you’re going to create it and distribute it across your website, social media channels and other online properties.
When it comes to thinking about the types of content that will attract your target audience, you need to consider how each type of content can be used strategically.
For example, let’s say you want to attract readers who are interested in gardening. You might want to create a blog post about gardening tips, or an infographic about the best flowers for planting in spring. This would be a good place to start because it gives potential customers something that they can use right away.
However, if you want them to stick around for more than just one click (and you do), then you should also think about other types of content that can help keep them engaged over the long-term. Luckily, there are several types of content that are proven to work well across all audiences, including: How-to guides, case studies, testimonials, infographics and slideshares, white papers and ebooks.
How often?
The answer isn’t as simple as saying the more content you have, the better. Quality also plays an important role.
While ideal, you don’t need to publish new content every day or even every week. If you have a large team of writers and editors, you may be able to publish quality new content every day. But if you’re just starting out, or if you don’t have a dedicated team of writers and editors on hand, then publishing new content once a week will probably be enough to get started with SEO content marketing.
While it is important to publish new content consistently, it is more important to publish high-quality content that your target audience will be interested in reading. If you don’t have the time or resources to do both of these things at once, then focus on creating quality content first (and publishing it less frequently). Once you’ve established yourself as an authority in your niche, then publishing more often will become much easier.
Who will be reading?
When developing an effective SEO Content strategy it is important to determine who will be reading your content. Who is your target audience? Are you targeting a specific age group? A specific gender? Do they live in a particular region of the world? Do they have a certain level of education?
Understanding who will be reading your content will help you determine what kind of language and style to use when writing, as well as how to structure and format your content so that it appeals to your audience.
Once you know who you are writing for, you can start thinking about how to make them want to read your content. What are their fears? What are their hopes? What are their goals for the future? How can you help them achieve those goals by providing helpful advice and guidance through your writing?
The more clearly defined your target audience is, the easier it will be for you to write engaging content that will attract them and keep them coming back for more!
Topic Brainstorming and Prioritizing Easier Keywords
Once you’ve established your brand voice, the next step in every SEO content strategy is topic brainstorming, prioritizing lower difficulty keywords and ideas.
This brainstorming is the process of coming up with ideas for blog posts and articles to be published on your site. This involves identifying what types of topics are popular and relevant to your target audience.
Prioritizing keywords is the process of deciding which ones are most important to focus on in order to rank for them organically (without using paid ads). First, you need to identify which keywords you want to rank for, then determine their competitiveness (how hard it will be for you to rank for them). Then, you need to prioritize those keywords based on the amount of effort required and how much traffic they’ll drive if successful.
It can be tempting to try and rank for as many keywords as possible, but it’s better to focus on fewer high-volume keywords with low competition than a long tail of low-volume terms with high competition.
When I’m working with clients on their SEO content strategies, we look at three main factors when coming up with ideas:
Search volume —How many people are searching for your topic?
Keyword difficulty —How hard it will be for Google’s algorithm to understand what this page is about?
Relevancy —Is this page relevant to users who search for this keyword?
Content Layering and Internal Linking
The next step of strategic SEO content planning and execution includes content layering and internal links.
Content layering is the practice of creating a hierarchy of content on your website. If you have multiple pages about a specific topic, for example, you’ll want to make sure that each page has a different purpose. For example, your first page might feature general information about the topic; your second page might provide more in-depth details; and so on. This allows you to offer users the most relevant information at every stage of their research — even if they’re just starting out looking for general information on a topic.
When you link from one page on your website to another page on your website (rather than linking to a third party), it’s called internal linking. This helps search engines determine what topics your website is about — which is important because search engines use this information to rank websites as relevant or irrelevant when someone searches for something related to those topics.
The goal of content layering is to create more pages for search engines to crawl, which will increase your chances of appearing in the SERPs. It also helps you keep up with changing algorithms and provides users with more resources they can use.
Identifying Linkability
The next step of strategic SEO content planning and execution is understanding linkability and identifying opportunities.
Linkability is the measure of how easy it is for your content to be linked to from other sources, such as other websites, social media sites, email newsletters, etc. The higher the linkability of your content, the more likely it will be picked up by others.
To assess your existing content’s linkability, you can use a free tool like Ahrefs Site Explorer or SEMRush. These will show you all pages on your website that have been linked by webmasters.
Go to the “Backlinks” section of the tool you’re working with. You’ll see all of these pages listed with their corresponding rating. The more backlinks your page has, the more linkable your page is – so it will be easier for you to rank highly in Google for that particular keyword term.
If you feel like your content is linkable, but isn’t receiving the backlinks it deserves, make sure you are sharing your content on social media and newsletters to drive traffic and raise awareness around your brand. Especially if the article or your website is new.
Content Upkeep and Maintenance
It’s not enough to just write a blog post or create an infographic and then forget about it. If you want your content to attract visitors, generate leads and help drive sales, you need to do more than just publish it.
The last step of strategic SEO content planning and execution is regular upkeep and maintenance of your existing content.
Maintenance includes keeping on top of Google’s latest algorithm updates so that you can stay ahead of the curve by optimizing your content accordingly. It also means monitoring analytics to see which posts are performing best, so that you can repurpose their ideas into new blog posts.
We’re not talking about changing the words here and there or adding new images; we’re talking about reviewing the entire piece to ensure that it is still relevant, up-to-date, and useful to your target audience.
This is where a Content Audit can help you. A Content Audit is a way to assess the quality and quantity of all of your existing content. It will help you discover what’s working (and what’s not) so that you can create better SEO content in the future.
You can use this audit as an opportunity to:
Identify gaps in your content coverage. For example, if you have blog posts covering different industries but no blog posts on finance topics, then it may be time to write one!
Discover topics that might work well for guest posts or guest blog posts. If there are gaps in your content library, consider reaching out to other websites or authors to collaborate with them on posts for your site.
This kind of ongoing upkeep helps keep your website as relevant as possible for search engines, while also helping you find opportunities for new topics and ideas that might be valuable for your readers.
Developing an SEO Content Strategy is Worth It
In summary, you want to develop a strategy that will allow you to provide an ample supply of valuable, high quality content that your readers can benefit from. And that’s really what search engine optimization is all about. It’s all about the experience — give your users what they want. Keeping users on your site and coming back is the name of the game. If you can make this happen by creating content, then call yourself a success with SEO. SEO isn’t always easy, but it is an invaluable strategy and can be implemented effectively for part of nearly every marketing strategy.
So what is the takeaway from all of this? If you want your online marketing campaign to shine, you have to make sure that your content is smart, strategic, and optimized for search engines, but first, people. That means knowing your audience and tailoring your words to them. It also means understanding how search engine algorithms work—and what they’re looking for in order to boost your page rank. It may take some time to create a truly great SEO content strategy, but it’s worth it. Your website will thank you in the long run.
