SEO Content Strategy – Building Blocks for Online Visibility

Do you want to increase your website’s visibility? Then you’ll need to improve its ranking on search engines. To do that, you’ll need a sound strategy that employs best practices in search engine optimization.

A good SEO content strategy is key to increasing the visibility of a website. It requires you to organize and strategically craft your content and target keywords that people are actively searching for. Once you master it, you can stand out in a competitive marketplace, increase your traffic, and give your business a performance boost.

Whether you’re an executive, a startup, or a small business hoping to make it big, search engine optimization (SEO) can help. Read on to learn how you can leverage it and dominate search engine results pages (SERPs) like never before.

Understanding SEO Basics

Unfamiliar with SEO? Here are a few important concepts you need to know.

Definition of SEO

SEO is a process that entails modifying website content to increase your visibility in search engines. By optimizing your content, it will be easier for your target audience to find your site and visit it.

How Search Engines Work

Search engines work by crawling, an automated process that deploys web crawlers (search engine bots or spiders) that navigate hundreds of billions of pages on the web. They then scan these pages to obtain new links, follow them to find URLs, index them, and rank them.

Last year, Google released quality rater guidelines to help website owners and managers know how to rank highly on its search engine. Basically, they recommend that content strategists focus on expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness, and experience.

Importance of SEO for Businesses

We’ve already mentioned several benefits for businesses like yours—more website traffic, more leads, higher search engine ranking, and greater conversion rates. Ultimately, all these lead to improved business performance.

Evolution of SEO Strategies

SEO content strategy initially focused on keyword stuffing, HTML tags, and links for ranking. However, it has expanded to include more criteria such as quality content, mobile responsiveness, search context, voice search, and more.

At the end of the day, here’s what you need to remember: SEO is constantly changing so you need to be on the lookout for changes to Google’s algorithm.

Research and Planning Phase

We now know that an SEO content marketing strategy can have a tremendous impact on your business. Here are specific steps you can use to put it into action.

Audience Identification

As you devise your SEO content strategy, consider the following:

• Who are you writing for?
• What do they want?
• What are their pain points?

The answers will help you come up with your customer persona while paying attention to demographics, interests, lifestyle, and other important characteristics. Understand the needs and concerns of your target audience to formulate a strategy that compels them to take action at various stages of the buying cycle (awareness, consideration, and decision).

Competitor Analysis

While it’s essential to identify your competitors, visit their websites, and discover their weaknesses, you need to remember that not all websites that are vying for the same keywords are your direct competitors.

Ultimately, what you need to focus on are the other sites that are successfully targeting your intended audience.

Divide Your Niche Into Categories

Once you know who your target audience is and their needs, choose topics that satisfy their unique needs and establish yourself as a subject matter expert.

Dividing your niche means fewer customers, but it also helps you identify your competition and unique selling proposition.

11 Steps To an Effective SEO Content Strategy

After learning basic concepts and doing some market research, let’s break down the steps in formulating a strategy for SEO content.

1. Perform a Keyword Research for Each Category

Boost your SEO content strategy by conducting thorough keyword research to find popular terms your target audiences use on search engines like Google. It’s good to have a mix of:

• Short-tail keywords for broad, generalized topics
• Long tail keywords that are more specific
• LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords for conceptually related terms that help search engines understand your content

Analyze their ranking difficulty, authority, and relevancy. You want high-volume keywords that have low competition. Why? Because it’s easier to rank for them.

This is the strategy that Mediaboom used on AA Global Industries. By consistently publishing content with high volume and low-to-mid-level difficulty keywords, we increased their organic sales by an impressive 1,453%.

2. Assign Search Intent for Each Keyword

Another important aspect is search intent. Once you have a list of keywords that you want to rank for, analyze them more closely to determine why the user typed them in. Then, strive to design your content in such a way that it fulfills those needs.

Here are a few examples of search intent to get you started:

• Was the user looking for information? Informational content (like step-by-step guides) is what you need.
• Were they looking for websites like yours? Make it easy for them to find the content they need in your website.
• Were they searching for information that would nudge them further down the sales funnel? Consider content with transactional intent.

Employing search intent in your SEO and content strategy will help you attract the right visitors like qualified leads who are more likely to become paying customers.

3. Perform a Content Gap Analysis

Content gap analysis allows you to evaluate your existing content and check for SEO content strategy “gaps” that are keeping you from reaching your desired online performance.

A gap analysis is important because it identifies and helps you address oversights (like readability and usability issues) that can affect your ranking and traffic.

4. Content Planning

You know your keywords, you know how they’re being used, and you’re aware of improvements you need to make. It’s time to plan your content.

A variety of relevant, well-presented, and quality website content can grab your reader’s attention. While evergreen articles are great to have, you should also throw in trending topics and seasonal content to generate interest and visitors.

We can’t recommend having a publication calendar enough. Preparing your content and planning your publications in advance will allow you to be more strategic and make the experience less stressful for you. To create an SEO content calendar, consider using tools like monday.com.

5. Create SEO Brief Templates for Your Articles

Whether you’re creating a strategy yourself or outsourcing it to an agency, come up with an SEO content brief that includes instructions for important page elements like meta descriptions, headings, title tags, URLs, and strategically placed keywords. While you’re at it, keep your keyword density from 0.5% to 3%. Otherwise, Google may recognize it as keyword stuffing.

6. Content Production

Scalable content production involves assigning goals for each piece and sending briefs to your writers. Allot enough time for revisions, fact-checking, and quality checks while following your publication schedule.

If you’re having trouble coming up with strategic goals and briefs for each piece, Mediaboom can help. Our SEO content strategy for Aspen Luxury Concierge resulted in a 118.42% increase in new organic users, a 50% improvement in average open rates, and a 54% increase in conversions.

7. Content Creation and Collaboration

Clear communication within your content creation team is essential for accountability and quality. To ensure that everybody is on the same page, do regular check-ins via platforms like Zoom, Slack, Skype, or Microsoft Teams.

You can also use project management tools like Trello to boost visibility and teamwork.

8. Optimize the Article or Landing Page Before Publishing It

Since 2017, mobile devices have consistently generated around 50% of website traffic. That’s why mobile optimization is a crucial step for delivering a good user experience. Aim to keep your website’s loading time within 3 seconds or you’ll lose the interest of up to 53% of your mobile visitors.

Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to ensure your landing pages perform well. For good effect, we also recommend posting at the best time for improved visibility.

9. Create a Link-building Strategy

Almost 40% of businesses spend $1,000 to $5,000 a month on link building because it helps with ranking.

There are three types of links you need to incorporate:

• Internal links lead users from one page on your website to another.
• External links direct website users to high-authority resources (don’t overdo it though as you may end up passing your link equity to another site).
• Backlinks lead users from other websites or blog posts to yours. Since Google considers your link profile when ranking pages, employing effective backlinking in your SEO content strategy can increase your traffic.

When including links, ensure you have anchor texts that make sense or they won’t be as effective.

10. Switch To a New Cluster after “Explaining” it Completely

Talking about the same thing again and again can be boring. So, if you’ve adequately explored a cluster of topics, move on to other content topics. If there are any updates, you can modify your content to keep it relevant.

11. Optimize the User Experience of Your SEO Content

As you work to create an SEO and content strategy that converts, pay attention to page speed since Google uses it as a ranking factor.

While you’re at it, brush up on website navigation and focus on usability (making popular content easy to find).

You should also review it for readability to make reading, understanding, and processing your content easier for your audience.

This was one of the strategies that Mediaboom employed during its engagement with Qazi Cosmetic Clinic. The result? A 3,496.68% increase in organic traffic!

Essential SEO Tools and Performance Tracking

Did you know that there are a plethora of tools for tracking your performance and improving your technical SEO?

Our favorites include:

Keyword Research Tools

These tools give you access to hundreds of relevant keywords that are based on multiple search engines and websites. Some even provide information like competitiveness so you can decide which terms to focus on.

Google’s Keyword Planner and Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest are great choices for researching keywords that you can use in your SEO content strategy.

Other options you can look into are Ahrefs and SEMrush. Ahrefs is handy for link building and monitoring SEO metrics like search volume. Meanwhile, SEMrush leverages a vast database of backlinks among other valuable features.

Analytics Tools

Google Analytics performs historical data analysis and gives in-depth information about how users interact with your campaigns. By having a better grasp of your website performance, you can improve the user experience, leading to more traction, traffic, and leads.

Some common key performance indicators you’ll want to keep an eye on are:

• Bounce rate or the number of visitors who leave your website without interacting with it
• Session duration or how much time people spend on your site
• Organic traffic measures how many visitors you receive from unpaid SERPs
• Total clicks tell you how many people clicked on your website

Evaluate your benchmarks and performance regularly to ensure your campaigns are delivering results.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console measures how your site is performing in online searches, checks if your web pages are properly indexed, and tracks various KPIs. It is a priceless part of any comprehensive SEO content strategy. You can then improve your site based on the data you get.

On-Page SEO Tools

On-page SEO influences the way search engines interpret your content. You can optimize on-page elements with plugins and software like Yoast SEO and Screaming Frog.

Off-Page SEO Tools

Off-page SEO refers to techniques outside your website like content marketing and social media strategies. These tactics improve the trustworthiness and authority of your business as well as your website’s ratings.

Look to SEO tools like Moz and BuzzSumo. Moz helps you track metrics that boost your site’s authority while BuzzSumo monitors your backlinks.

Bonus: Additional Tracking Tools

Here are other tools that can help you improve your SEO content strategy:

• HubSpot Website Grader generates actionable insights that improve your website’s performance
• Internet Marketing Ninjas identifies broken links, compares your SEO with your competitors’, optimizes web pages, and more
• Bing Webmaster analyzes your website, performs keyword research, etc.

You can also check out Seolyzer, Check My Links, SEOquake, and Sitechecker.

Conclusion

Learning how to create an effective SEO content strategy and seeing its results take time. But the learning curve is well worth it. If you want to hit the ground running and ensure that your strategy produces results, let Mediaboom lend a hand.

Send us an email at [email protected] or leave us a message to get started.