What is SEO Content Strategy?

SEO content strategy is the method of strategically curating high-quality written content online that appeals to both search engines and is helpful to users. The main goal of SEO content strategy is to help your content rank higher in the search engine results pages, increasing your online visibility and attracting organic traffic to your website.

An effective SEO Content Strategy works together with your other digital marketing channels helping you to find and convert users at all points of the marketing funnel. By optimising your content for search engines, you can ensure that you achieve higher rankings on SERPs, driving more visitors to your site without needing to fork over any ongoing advertising costs. 

Why do you need an SEO Content Strategy Service?

A proper SEO content strategy engages your target audience with the type of content that they are searching for, builds trust and authority and helps them to move through the marketing funnel leading to increased conversions.

It’s important that you know how to stay competitive and adapt to the ever-changing algorithms or you will quickly find yourself miles behind your competitors.

With an integrated and data-driven approach to SEO strategy, you will be able to build an audience for the long term, whilst understanding exactly when and how to pivot based on changing market demands.

Improve the ROI of your content

We all know that content is a time-consuming activity, from researching the right topics to write about to planning out your content to writing it, editing, reviewing…there’s just too much to think about. Many times though, your content may not even get any views.

This is what a content strategy helps to overcome. With the right research, you can create content that search engines will love, but your audience will resonate with even more leading to better conversion rates and an improved ROI.

Create stories that resonate with your audience

There’s no use in spending time creating content that your audience won’t even like. What’s even worse is creating content for the wrong audience and spoiling your brand image.

It’s important that you first understand who the right audience is and then craft content that answers all the key points that they are looking for as well as providing additional knowledge that delivers value. To retain their attention, your content must tell a story that leaves a lasting impact that makes them want to return for more.

How does the SEO content strategy service work?

So now that you know what SEO content strategy is and why you need it, let me explain how it works and what I will do for you. Here are the 11 major steps to a killer SEO content strategy:

1) Understand your primary KPI

The first thing I will need to do is understand what the primary conversion goal you want is. There are many different goals, but most goals either fall under revenue, lead generation or general brand awareness and authority building.

This stage is crucial because we don’t want to create a strategy that ultimately doesn’t move the business forward.

2) Understand your ideal customer 

Understanding your audience is the next thing to do as it will frame the entire content creation process. The key to ranking well in search engines is satisfying the user intent.

However, to understand how to satisfy user intent, you need first to understand what type of users you are trying to target and the need that they have that your service will cater to.

3) Perform in-depth keyword research

The next thing you are going to want to do is to conduct keyword research. This is all about trying to get a better understanding of your target users’ search behaviour. I will specifically be looking at the exact keywords that they type into top search engines such as Google. 

To do this I will be using industry-standard tools such as SEMrush and Google Search Console to identify search queries that I will use to identify search queries. This will also help to better refine our understanding of our target audience.

4) Evaluating business opportunity

The next step is all about looking at the search queries that I picked out in the keyword research phase and ranking them based on the potential to drive forward your primary business KPI, whether, that be driving in new leads or increasing purchases and revenue.

This will help to prioritise the keywords that will increase business value and help to sift out keywords that may not be relevant to the business at the moment.

5) Grading based on keyword ranking potential

After we understand the business opportunity, we need to understand how easy it will be to be able to rank for those keywords. Some will be difficult and others will be easier.

This will help to further prioritise keywords when combined with the prior step of business valuation. We will then look to target keywords that are both easy to rank and will provide a good return on investment.

6) Clustering keywords based on search intent

Taking the keywords we want to target for the campaign, the next step is to group them together based on the search intent to ensure that we cover all the topics that we need to create without causing keyword cannibalisation in the future.

It’s important to take notes on the type of content that can be seen in the search results. Are there blog posts, service pages or resource guides ranking for the term. This will be the type of content that we need to be creating.

7) Planning out your content calendar

The next thing we will look to do is to take the topics we would like to create in the coming months. Deciding on the right cadence for the scope is important as we want to evenly space out the content creation schedule to help train both visitors to the site and engine crawlers to return at a regular cadence.

It is recommended that you post up between 2 or 3 blog articles a week to see sizable results, but that does not mean that posting once a week is not good. It may take a bit longer to see results but it is still way better than putting up all your articles on one day and then noting for another 2 months.

8) Creating in-depth content briefs

Once I have all the topics that I would like to cover and know what type of content that I want to create, I can get down to creating in-depth content briefs for you. This includes preparing the header structure, word count, URL structure, anchor text and link recommendations, meta title, meta description and other important elements that will help you to rank for the target keywords.

9) Writing high-quality content

Now that we have a fully structured brief to follow, it is time for the main part. Writing the actual content. The brand voice must be conveyed whilst still keeping things engaging and informative for the reader helping them to properly understand the topic and continue on to make a conversion.

This step is often the most crucial part. Often time we write from the perspective of the brand with information that we think readers should know, but instead, we need to be writing for the reader based on how far along they are in the marketing funnel.

10) Analysing the performance of articles

Once the articles have been written and are up on the site, it’s important to measure the performance of the articles to see whether or not we have been hitting the mark and are now ranking well, or whether there are small improvements that could be made to break into the top spots.

This will not only help to inform us about the quality of the article, but also about how the audience is resonating with the articles we have written. It is worth noting that articles take a while to start ranking and from experience usually up to about 8 months to fully reach maturity, so it’s best not to react quickly to performance.

11) Updating old content

Refreshing and updating old articles is often an overlooked step. Just because we have created the most comprehensive article on the market, doesn’t mean we can leave it forever to perform. We must be constantly updating and keeping the content on our website fresh and new.

Google values websites that consistently improve their content and keep them fresh and up to date. I recommend making sure that articles are no more than 1 year old and at best have been updated every 6 months. 

Content on the search engine changes consistently with competitors writing competing articles and the industry and interests changing so we want to look at how the online environment is changing and adapt it accordingly.

How does SEO content strategy benefit you?