Simply creating content is not enough when it comes to your content marketing strategy. If your business is writing blog pieces without having an SEO content strategy in place, then you’re missing out not only on traffic and conversions, but potential inbound leads and sales.
As we know, SEO and content marketing go hand-in-hand with each other. A good strategy enables you to create engaging content that drives traffic and conversions, playing a crucial part in your overall SEO efforts.
Coming up with a content strategy for SEO will take time and attention, but a good one acts as a pillar of your business’ success. By having a solid strategy in place, you can build brand awareness and reach new customers to increase conversions.
We’ve put together six tips that will help you create a killer SEO content strategy.
Know Who Your Target Audience Is
When creating content for SEO, you should have a clear idea of who your target audience is. You should already have some data available about the type of visitors you get thanks to tools like Google Analytics. The important part is making sure you harness this data when putting your SEO content strategy together.
Having an idea of your customer’s interests and intent can help inform the topics you write about. Coming up with buyer personas is a great way to assist your content strategy, helping to ensure you are producing content that is relevant to your specific audience.
For example, if you run a business that sells vans both B2B and B2C, you’ll likely have different audiences that you need to tailor content to. Working this into your strategy is crucial as building rapport with any potential customer online is the key to successful content.
Decide On The Type Of Content
Before putting any content strategy into action, you need to decide on the type of content you’re going to create. It’s a good idea to create a list of relevant topics and then decide which forms of content you can use to cover them.
Whenever you are compiling topics to cover in your content strategy, you need to think about the purpose and reasoning behind them. For example, you want to make sure that any blog posts you write not only set yourself apart from competitors, but also build audience trust.
Make sure you also include a mixture of topical and evergreen content. Both have their pros and cons and finding the right balance for your industry is crucial to increasing your organic traffic.
Quality Keyword Research is Key
Keyword research is an essential part of any SEO content strategy. You want to make sure that the piece of content you’ve written focuses on these terms and targets them well. Remember – including too many keywords, or ‘stuffing’, is detrimental to SEO.
There are tools that can help make the keyword research process a lot easier for you. AHRefs and SEMRush are a couple of paid tools that you can use, but using Google’s own features like the ‘people also ask’ section and suggested searches can be equally effective.
When doing keyword research, you should think about the search volume and intent behind it. Striking the perfect balance here is important if you want to attract as much relevant traffic as possible.
‘Long tail’ keywords may have a lower search volume than shorter ones, but they have plenty of benefits. Not only are long tail keywords easier to rank for, but it also gives you the opportunity to answer specific questions and alleviate customer pain points. Both of which are crucial to building consumer trust and ultimately improving sales.
Intent is especially important when it comes to keyword research. There are four types of search intent that people use, informational, navigational, commercial and transactional. By organising the keywords you’ve found into those four search intent categories, it’ll enable you to create content that drives traffic to your site that is more likely to convert.
It’s important that you include keyword research as part of your content strategy for SEO. After all, traffic and conversions are the name of the game.
Create A Content Calendar
Having a content calendar is a great way to schedule and publish regular content in a way that is clear and transparent for all stakeholders to see. If you are creating a calendar for your content department, then there are some things that need to be included to make it work from a strategic point of view.
Including as much detail as possible in your calendar is a great way to ensure a smooth process, particularly if the person compiling the ideas isn’t necessarily the one writing them. An overview of the topic, identified keywords and any relevant internal links are a great place to start, but you may want to include other points depending on the size of your team.
Content calendars are great when it comes to making sure that you stick to a consistent schedule and publishing workflow. It means that there are no breaks in terms of writing and publishing content, ensuring you are consistently generating incremental traffic increases.
Figure Out How To Measure The Success Of Your Content Strategy
Measuring the success of your SEO content strategy is absolutely crucial to seeing if it has worked. There are a few ways that you can measure how well pieces of content perform both on your site and on search engines.
In terms of key metrics, rankings, clicks, impressions, organic traffic and conversions are a good place to start. By using these metrics to measure results, you’ll be able to gauge the success of your strategy and scale to find new opportunities.
It’s worth monitoring the results of your content so that you can identify any areas of your site that can be improved. Google Search Console and Google Analytics are two useful tools at your disposal to help figure out if your content is performing or not.
With Google Search Console, you can find out how well your piece of content is performing in the SERPs. Here, you’ll find the number of clicks and impressions as well as a breakdown of traffic-driving search terms. You can then cross-reference this with Google Analytics to see how these clicks translate into traffic and conversions.
By having the data available to you with those tools, it can make it easier for you to measure how successful your SEO content strategy is.
Produce Content That’s Valuable And Up-To-Date
At the heart of any content strategy for SEO is the production of content that’s valuable, relevant and up-to-date. You need to make sure that any piece of content you produce answers the questions that your target audience are searching for. It’s also important that the content you write is original, engaging and creative.
Before you start writing, ask yourself what the goal you’re trying to achieve is. Is your goal to try and get more inbound leads or educate your audience on the benefits of choosing one product over another? Understanding this and having it in mind as you write is at the core of effective content marketing.
It’s also worth updating any content you’ve previously written to keep it up-to-date with current industry trends and topics. By giving older content a refresh from time to time, it signals to Google that it is still relevant and helps to drive fresh traffic to a piece that may have historically performed well.
How Ricemedia can create a killer SEO content strategy for your business
Having a killer SEO content strategy is essential for any business. Not only will it assist you in creating high-quality content for SEO that ranks well on Google, but also delivers traffic, conversions, sales and leads. We hope these 6 tips will help you create a content strategy that helps you rank consistently on the first page of search engines.
If you need help creating an SEO content strategy that delivers results for your business, please get in touch with our expert team at Ricemedia today.
