Marketing strategies continue to evolve today, and staying up to date can be challenging. So too, can shift in search engine optimization (SEO) best practices.
Yet these shifts can prove beneficial and time-saving to your overall marketing efforts if you let them.
A prime example of this is the shift away from focusing solely on keyword research, once the golden rule of a solid SEO strategy.
As a result, today’s SEO tactics involve several components, pillars, and beneficial acts to ensure higher success.
While keywords are still part of that plan, you’ll need to take a few more steps and concentrate on creating and implementing a better SEO approach.
In the digital era, businesses must generate leads in a competitive online landscape. As many as 74% of businesses report that incorporating content marketing increases their leads, making it an essential driver for business growth.
However, when people start talking about content development, they quickly dovetail into SEO. This makes sense when you consider that more than half of traffic comes from organic search, meaning that visibility on the search engines makes all the difference in discoverability.
If you are new to creating an SEO content strategy, we will walk you through what you need to know to lay the foundation for a successful future.
Let’s explore the question, “How do you use an SEO strategy to create content?” so you can build your strategy effectively.
What is SEO Content?
SEO content is strategically crafted online content that is not only high-quality but also attractive to search engines. The goal of SEO content is to help you rank higher up on those search engine results pages and, in turn, attract organic traffic to your website.
To be successful, however, your SEO content must involve more than the right keywords or keyword strategy. The writing, presentation, and structure will be key as well.
The focus is on producing high-quality content that is valuable to the reader and also entices them to learn more. Search engines will recognize this value, acknowledging your website as an authority and boosting you in search rankings.
Use this type of content wherever you are online, including in blog posts, landing, and product pages, and even in your interactive content.
Why is SEO content important for your business?
Your website is at the heart of your business online, and the content here and elsewhere that reaches your targeted audience is crucial to your success.
With well-written and structured SEO content, search engines will take notice when scanning your website. As a result, your site will potentially rank higher up in search results pages.
Creating the best SEO content you can, then, is important to your business. Without it, your potential customers may never find you or not learn about your business quickly enough and, as a result, make a purchase from someone else.
How to Create SEO Content
Creating the best SEO content starts with knowing who it is you wish to reach. From there, you can pull out all the stops and provide the type of content needed to attract attention and reach your intended audience with the help of higher rankings.
While the subject of content differs among businesses, there are specific characteristics or inclusions to help you write better SEO content.
Find a target keyword to center content around
Keyword research is a part of your SEO content strategy already, helping you to identify what keywords your target audience is searching on most often.
For each piece of content, to make it SEO-friendly, select one of those keywords to focus on and craft a topic around it. Make that topic something you already know your target audience already wants to learn more about.
Be original
Always begin your content planning with an original idea. You want to offer readers something new, fresh, and original, something from a new angle or new approach that current online content doesn’t provide. This step can be challenging, so you may want to consider working with a content services platform to come up with potential ideas and content.
Place your chosen keyword prominently
For the best optimization, ensure your selected keyword is prominently placed in your piece of content. That is, place it as high up in the content as possible without making it sound unnatural. Doing so will increase the chances that Google will consider your page to be about that keyword specifically and rank you accordingly.
Provide long-form, comprehensive content
Go above and beyond what others will do and provide long-form content for searchers. Consider all the information surrounding your keyword and topic that will be helpful to the reader, and cover as much of it as you can, creating a comprehensive resource.
Give your reader no reason to go elsewhere for the information they need. By providing more, you establish yourself as an authoritative resource and cause readers to stay on your site longer. Search engines will notice how much time readers are spending on your content, which is a ranking factor.
In addition, long-form content will give the search engines more clues as to what your webpage or blog post is truly about. With this, confidence increases that your page is a resource for that particular keyword.
Make your content attractive to readers
While high-quality content is essential for SEO, if it isn’t attractive to your readers, they won’t stick around to read it all. You want readers to stay on your website as long as possible, so creating content that is easily scannable, broken up with headings and subheadings, and more can make all the difference.
You also want to incorporate copywriting methods to entice them to convert.
To keep readers around, here are a few writing tips to help.
- Alternate sentence length and structure
- Stay away from complex words or sentences
- Insert images in key spaces
- Choose the best words and phrases for your particular readers
- Run spelling and grammar checks
If your content is easy to consume by your visitors, causing them to stick around longer, search engines will also recognize this as a signal that you are contending for a higher rank in SERPs. Search engines value interaction data to assess the relevancy of your page.
Incorporate different types of multimedia
To increase the user experience with your content, incorporate different types of multimedia, such as images, videos, infographics, diagrams, charts, or something interactive (e.g., quizzes, calculators).
Make sure each type of multimedia is as high a quality as the content itself. Not only will this break up text and make your content more readable, but you will also meet the needs of a variety of visitors to your site.
What are the Components of an SEO Strategy?
Your SEO strategy requires a comprehensive approach, and that approach needs to incorporate three essential components — rankings, high-quality content, and measurement.
1. Rankings
It’s no secret that Google ranking factors are an essential focus of your overall strategy.
While Google algorithms may change up to 600 times a year, in the end, they are always meant to benefit customers by meeting their expectations more often than not.
Keeping this in mind can help you create content that provides value and gives your visitor a good reader experience, two key factors in ranking higher.
In addition, according to Google, you can increase your rankings by knowing more about how the search engine goes about crawling and indexing content and how your formatting matters.
Google uses bots to crawl your website and index the web pages. You can increase your chances of ranking higher by doing the following:
- Update site maps and submit them in the Google Search Console.
- Create more high-quality content and blog posts to be indexed.
- Strategically place keywords.
- Incorporate high-quality links, both external and internal.
- Use the tools at your disposal, particularly when it comes to formatting your content. Focus on creating: optimal titles and snippets, descriptive meta tags, heading tags for efficiently organizing content on pages, and short, simple URLs that describe the post clearly.
Other factors that affect rankings include ensuring your website is mobile-friendly, easy to navigate, and loads quickly.
2. High-Quality Content
Your content is what sets your website and your brand apart from the competition. Creating unique, high-quality content, then, is a must.
Throughout your content marketing strategy, consider the value and purpose of each piece of content.
Make each one useful to the reader and also authoritative to build trust.
This step is particularly important for search engines since they attempt to provide the strongest and clearest answers to user questions.
Also, make sure all content is unique. Spinning content or being unoriginal will make you less popular with the reader and the search engines.
You can also take steps to re-purpose older content, boosting its quality with images or videos.
3. Measurements
With search engine algorithm changes occurring often, it’s imperative to stay on top of these along with changing SEO best practices.
By doing so, you can better track and measure your own SEO strategy.
Set KPIs and track them to see where you are succeeding and where you need to make changes.
Analyze important measures such as rankings, traffic, bounce rate, dwell time, click-through rates, and social engagement.
Key Factors Influencing Keyword Ranking
Your effective SEO content marketing strategy will revolve around a few key elements that will build your brand. Here’s what you need to know about the cornerstones of content success.
Keyword Research and Optimization
Begin with keyword research. Keyword research is the foundation of successful SEO marketing strategies because it tells you precisely what people search for online. This gives you insight into their priorities and interests. Several tools, including Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Google Keyword Planner, can help you identify terms people use in their queries.
You will quickly discover both long-tail and short-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords generally provide significantly more detail and thus become more specific. These keywords are often used for content further down the sales funnel, while short-tail keywords are often broader and thus help higher in the sales funnel.
As you find keywords that fit your audience, you will want to place them strategically throughout your content. This includes working them naturally into your titles, headers, meta descriptions, and the content itself.
Google uses keywords to understand better how your content aligns with user needs. Therefore, you want to use keywords throughout the piece to match your material with your target audience.
Content Creation and Quality
Once you have your keywords, you will also know about the topics you want to cover. As you develop your content, quality matters far more than quantity.
The material you create should be interesting and informative. As Doug Kessler, a B2B tech founder, says, “Traditional marketing talks at people. Content marketing talks to them.”
Your content should revolve around building a relationship. Google looks for content that meets its criteria for E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness).
As you build your content, remember to incorporate various content types. Consider creating:
- Blog posts
- Infographics
- Videos
- Podcasts
Offering such a variety of different types of content allows you to cater to different audience preferences.
On-Page SEO
To help search engines recognize your site’s topics, you also want to think carefully about on-page SEO.
- Use title tags and meta descriptions that entice people and use keywords to improve click-through rates.
- Employ internal linking throughout the site to encourage engagement and movement and distribute page authority.
- Create meaningful URLs that include keywords that people can easily read.
Content Distribution and Promotion
Once you produce your content, invest in content distribution and promotion strategies to help people find your material. Share links across your social media platforms. Email newsletters also get the content in front of your target audience, particularly when you segment your audience based on interests.
Finally, look for opportunities to build backlinks. Backlinks are links outside sources make to your content, improving your rankings and domain authority. Creating valuable content that others cite helps. If others reference you or your content, you can also ask for a link. Publishing guest posts on industry domains can also allow you to link to your site.
Performance Tracking and Analysis
Finally, include strategies for tracking and analyzing your performance. Tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Ahrefs allow you to monitor your content performance and see the impact of your SEO strategy.
Look at key metrics that will help you understand lead interactions. Some great KPIs to use right away include:
- Organic traffic
- Bounce rate
- Average session duration
- Conversion rates
As you incorporate this data, shift and mold your SEO marketing strategy to capitalize on your opportunities. Note what works well and resonates with users and what doesn’t so you can build a more mature strategy.
Best Practices for SEO Content Strategy: How to Create SEO Content Strategy
To build your SEO content marketing strategy, keep these best practices in mind.
User Intent and Content Relevance
Know what people want to accomplish when they search for or land on your page. Align your content with these intentions to boost relevance and customer satisfaction.
Create content that remains up-to-date with industry trends and the latest audience needs. Monitor your progress so you can make the necessary shifts.
Technical SEO Considerations
Remember that how your site operates matters in SEO and content strategy. Site speed and mobile optimization impact how your site ranks and how many people interact with your page. Slow-loading pages will lead to high bounce rates, and a non-mobile site will create a negative customer experience for those on phones.
Structured data should also be used. Use Schema markup to enhance search engines’ understanding of your content and its intention.
What are the Four Pillars of SEO?
To benefit your SEO content strategy, it also helps to break down the four pillars of SEO.
1. Technical SEO
Search engines focus on technical set-up or backend architecture of your website. One example, in particular, is site code.
As the site owner, pay close attention to the following:
- Crawlability.
- Indexability.
- Mobile optimization.
- Quick page loading speeds.
- Content structure or hierarchy.
These hidden elements can positively or negatively affect your rankings.
2. Content
Your content, as you already know, is an important aspect of your website and SEO strategy.
Whatever types of content you have, from landing pages to blog posts, you want to include SEO tactics while also providing the best, most relevant answers to a searcher’s question.
All content created for each stage of the buyer’s journey needs optimization.
3. On-Page SEO
On-page SEO relates to your website content and HTML and the ways to optimize them to boost rankings.
In addition to keeping your website content well-structured and optimized for keywords, you can also increase on-page optimization by:
- Using simple, descriptive URLs.
- Conducting keyword research to target your audience.
- Including meta descriptions.
- Incorporating keywords into headings/page titles.
- Inserting strong CTAs.
- Including local keywords, if applicable.
4. Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO focuses on building authority by way of link building.
Links to your website from highly reputable websites increase your authority with readers and builds trust with search engine algorithms.
Incorporating a backlinking strategy into your planning can increase your optimization efforts.
To accomplish this, be sure your content is of high quality, has the ability to attract the attention of reputable websites, and can lead to relationship building between your brand and others.
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What are the 5 Most Important Parts of SEO?
While your strategy will take time to develop, it helps to understand what the five most important parts of SEO are, so you can ensure higher success in reaching potential customers, boosting conversions, and increasing sales.
1. Audience
Identifying target audiences and getting to know them is an essential part of any SEO strategy. Creating buyer personas can then guide you through the creation of your strategy and content.
2. Industry
Your industry plays a key role in how you go about designing and implementing an SEO strategy.
A beneficial tool is a competitive analysis, telling you who the top competitors are in your industry, where they do most of their business, and how they go about strategizing for SEO.
3. User Intent
User intent behind keyword searches is another essential part of your SEO planning. It provides you with information on what the user is actually searching for instead of what you think they are looking for.
4. Crawling
Search engine spiders or bots discover your site through a process called crawling, utilizing your website architecture, sitemap, internal linking, and more.
5. Indexing
Once discovered, a webpage is indexed by Google, listing each page’s location (URL) and content. Today, Google utilizes mobile-first indexing, so mobile optimization of your website is crucial.
9 Steps to Create a Top SEO Content Strategy
To create an SEO Content Strategy that has a higher chance of success, here are the top 9 tips to follow.
1. Discover your Target Audience
The first step of any SEO content strategy development is discovering who your target audience is and understanding their wants, needs, pain points, and interests.
Create buyer personas to guide your strategy in the beginning and continually refine those personas as you learn more about your audience.
2. Conduct Keyword Research and Develop a Topic List
Conduct thorough keyword research and find those keywords that address the needs of your target audience.
Develop a content strategy around the keywords, creating a list of topics to include in your content offerings.
3. Incorporate Various Content Formats
Look at the type of content that is trending and receiving higher conversion rates today, such as video, and incorporate it into your SEO content strategy.
Also, analyze where your target audiences spend their time and the type of content they most interact with. This data will give you clues about what to add to your strategy.
Content types to focus on include:
- Blog posts.
- Videos.
- Podcasts.
- Infographics.
- eBooks.
- Interactive content, such as calculators, polls, quizzes, and more.
4. Fully Optimize Content
Include optimization everywhere, including in your content headings and meta descriptions.
Create a checklist or other reminders to ensure your team includes these optimizations at every opportunity.
5. Schedule Posts Often
Publish your blog and social media posts often and on a regular schedule. Be consistent. To help with this, create a content calendar for your team.
6. Develop a Link Building Strategy
Determine how you will include links in your content and on your website.
Include both strong internal and external links, and establish a way to encourage backlinking from highly reputable websites and influencers.
7. Continually Update User Experience and Content
As your strategy progresses, take time to ensure your content stays updated, and the user experience continues to satisfy.
8. Track and Measure Results
To know what is working and what needs attention, track and measure the performance of content and your SEO efforts. Create KPIs to track and help you accomplish your brand’s goals.
9. Monitor Changes in SEO Best Practices and Search Engine Algorithms
Once you have created an SEO content strategy, continue to monitor changes in search engine algorithms and SEO news and best practices.
Make adjustments to meet these new demands along the way.
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Wrap Up
Promoting your brand with a unique SEO content strategy means focusing on creating the highest-quality, optimized website and content.
As a result, you can rank higher up on search engine result pages and let more potential customers find you, leading to a higher conversion rate.
Building a solid, well-rounded SEO content strategy is the cornerstone of a strong web presence. Your strategy should employ various central points, from keyword research and on-page SEO to remembering technical considerations and content promotion.
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