Standing for search engine optimization, SEO involves applying strategies that drive traffic to your site and, therefore, your business. These strategies may involve producing content that is optimized to reach the top of the first SERP. Your SEO content strategy should ensure that you’re consistently producing content that enriches and supports your business. This strategy can help your site be more easily seen by your customers.
The SEO-optimized content you use must sound natural and be relevant to your market’s needs. This content can be video, images, audio, and written information for your audience. Written content should be varied, like whitepapers, case studies, articles, blogs, and short commentary.
How to Create an SEO Content Strategy: 9 Techniques
1. Know your audience and what they say about your brand.
The first step to successful SEO and content marketing is creating a user experience that is positive while offering useful content to your audience. To keep your content relevant to your audience, you must understand who they are and what they expect of your brand. You might have to do some market research to understand customer expectations fully.
If your audience is not likely to take up tools and perform a DIY project, a topic and content type focused in this direction may fall on deaf ears. However, if your audience is constantly tackling home projects, then instructional videos and detailed DIY articles will be a success. The first key to delivering useful content for your potential customers is understanding what they need so you can create content such as articles around these needs.
2. Meet your audience’s needs through your topics.
Once you know exactly who you are trying to reach, you understand what they want to learn from your brand. From here, you can start to brainstorm topics and content. Your content marketing goals should be about creating posts your audience wants to read. When topics don’t cover areas of interest, your audience won’t spend time reading them.
Make sure your purpose and expertise show with everything you create. Whether it is something like showing tutorials on trimming nails for your dog grooming business or more elaborate like a live video of you competitively grooming, make sure to show off your expertise and establish yourself as an authority in the niche.
Target the right topics for your audience and use the right keywords for each piece of content you create. Once you have decided on a topic, there are several sites you can go to for keyword research, such as SEMrush and others. These tools are useful for giving you plenty of keywords to choose from as well as important information on these keywords. These details include search volume, keyword difficulty, ranking, where the searches come from, and more. This information can help you choose which keywords to work with and help you develop focused blogs and articles.
3. Analyze your competition.
Make sure competitor research is part of your SEO marketing strategy. Take the time to visit the websites of your competition. Read through the content and web pages to see what words stand out to you. Look at blog titles and consider what they are doing to set themselves apart. It’s also important that you take note of the pages and articles that pop up in the SERPs for research purposes when you’re creating your content.
While the process sounds time-consuming and complicated, the good news is there are SEO tools you can use to automate these processes. Look at the search engine results pages for your competition and compare them to yours as well. With this, you have access to detailed information and metrics, even to long-tail keywords.
Take note of how many people are attempting to rank for the search terms you are interested in. To make content optimization easier, choose keywords and phrases that are searched frequently but don’t have a lot of sites attempting to rank for them.
4. Analyze your current content and its metrics.
You can use many metrics to track your content’s technical SEO performance for you. Some of the most important ones to track are time spent on your site, conversion rates, bounce rate, social shares, page views, ROI, total revenue, and bounce rate.
Your bounce rate will tell you how quickly someone leaves your site. When your bounce rate is low, your readers stay on your website because they find the information valuable. A high bounce rate indicates your audience is leaving your website quickly. This is also important when you are running email campaigns. Additionally, when your audience stays on your page longer, they are more likely to purchase.
Social shares are also important because they show you who enjoys your content enough to share with others. You will only know if it is being shared by tracking your metrics. Who shares your content and what is shared are important aspects you should pay attention to. Take note of the types of content and topics that get shared and put more content out like that.
Conversion rates tell you which portion of your audience becomes paying customers. Content that converts should have a solid call-to-action or CTA. Analyze the performance of each piece of content you publish so you know which CTAs work.
Page views are another important metric. This tells you how many people visit your website. The number of views your website receives correlates with how high your conversion rates are.
Finally, keep track of your total revenue. This shows you how well your business is doing. Use metrics to determine which pieces of content are working the best. Your content should bring in traffic to your site and generate revenue. Fortunately, there are formulas you can use to calculate content ROI. You can calculate for the return minus your total investment, all divided by your investment.
Regardless of what metrics you are using, make sure to check them regularly and compare your current data to past data to see how your content is doing.
5. Build authority in your industry.
Use your platform to build authority with your brand in your industry. Use your content to share your personal experience and story to connect with your audience. Connect with them through your unique journey or success and failure. Leverage your industry insight and share it with your audience to add depth to your content creation strategies.
You can also use your content to address challenges and questions while showcasing your expertise. Finally, don’t forget to collaborate and engage with your audience.
6. Create high-quality content.
What is an SEO strategy you can use to make sure your content sells? Make sure that your SEO content adheres to best practices. You should aim for blog posts that are longer pieces, such as 1,000 words or longer, broken into short paragraphs of one or two sentences.
One way of remembering what you need to do for your content is to think of the acronym REACH. This is what it stands for:
- Real: Keep your content authentic, original, and interesting.
- Experienced: Come from a place of knowledge with your topic.
- Accurate: Keep it backed by credible sources.
- Clear: Keep it clear and without jargon. Use illustrations when necessary.
- Helpful: Make sure the content solves the issue and is relevant to the reader’s needs.
There are several ways you can brainstorm great topics for your content. These topics need to be formed around questions your audience is asking or problems they need help solving.
For instance, if your core audience is stay-at-home parents, then content about saving money on meals or cleaning hacks may go over very well. If your audience is people looking for home repairs, then tips on maintenance and small DIY projects may go over very well.
7. Optimize and update your content.
Optimizing your website content means that you come in and apply keywords in a targeted fashion to grow your ranks. On-page and off-page SEO involves adding optimized title tags, meta descriptions, headings, and body text.
It is also important to remember that you will need to refresh your content and add fresh blog posts regularly to keep your audience interested. Stay current on what is going on within your industry so you can incorporate this into your blog posts and other content.
Evergreen content can be difficult to create. Maintaining your content to ensure it is up to date is an important part of your SEO strategy. Social trends and research findings change constantly, and your content needs to reflect this to stay relevant to your audience.
In addition, links can get broken and need to be replaced. If your site has broken or outdated links, it can lose your reader’s trust. Maintain your standing with Google and your audience by keeping current. This will show your audience your business is reliable and a good source of information.
You don’t want to start losing the audience you are working hard to grow by having old or outdated content on your website. The saying, “It takes years to build trust and seconds to destroy it,” applies to content as well. Make sure your website is stocked with useful, current information your core audience will find valuable.
8. Link building.
As you’re learning how to create SEO content strategy plans that work, it would be helpful to know that Google uses links as part of its ranking algorithm. You should use internal links to other site pages, as this helps Google find and index all the pages you have on your website. You should also have backlinks to other websites of authority to improve your SEO rankings. This will also lend credibility to your site and content. You do not want to buy backlinks, instead, make sure to create relationships by sending a polite email asking if they will link to your site.
Link building takes time but adds credibility to your content and, therefore, your website. You want to reach out to other local businesses you may refer your clients to for link sharing. You can also reach out to other complimentary businesses that aren’t local to share links as well. These measures will help you cultivate a well-rounded website.
9. Measure content performance.
You need to periodically go through your content, searching for posts that need to be rewritten for any number of reasons, whether it is for clarity or because of new findings. You need to use the above metrics regularly to track the performance of your content. Google can help you with a variety of metrics, but you will need to set your schedule for your content audits.
How Podium Can Help Improve Your Online Presence
Creating and maintaining a strong online presence is an important part of growing your business. Your SEO content strategy needs to be impactful if you want a strong online presence. Podium offers many tools to help you build this presence.
Podium offers chatbots to help you keep up with messages and requests for simple information. Podium also comes with AI features to help you maintain communication, scripts to help your sales team, and tips to help you get more reviews.
