7 Easy Ways to Build an SEO Content Strategy
Janet Brandon
Technical SEO Specialist at Experian, author and owner of Green Fingers blog, and Author of 'Mastering ChatGPT: for Marketers, Content Writers and SEO Professionals'
Driving profitable traffic to your website and generating quality leads requires thorough research, careful planning and the development of a well-thought-out SEO content strategy. You can't just write about any topic, add a few keywords, publish it on your website and expect it to bring results.
In the past it was about using the right keywords, now content marketing is about you writing to solve your audience's problems. If you write with purpose, you can increase the number of visitors to your website via organic search. This type of traffic can bring you thousands of quality leads and close a lot of sales.
The question is, how do you create your own effective SEO content strategy?
Here are seven tactics to help you create successful content that maximises your SEO opportunities.
1. Identify Your Target Audience
SEO is about creating a positive user experience and providing the most relevant information possible.
To create content that resonates with your audience, you first need to know who that audience is.
Knowing the key characteristics of your current customers will help you identify who your potential customers might be.
Who's attracted to your competition? Find out what kind of people engage with your competition. Look at social media accounts, blog comments and customer reviews?
There's a lot to learn from businesses like yours.
2. Define Your Topic Area
Now that you know who you want to reach and what they want to learn from you, you can begin to brainstorm ideas for content topics.
Your goal is to create content that people want to read, and your purpose and expertise should be central to everything you write.
What information can you provide to your target audience in a unique way that makes you a competent voice?
That's your topic area.
You use it as a guide when researching the interest of the target group, the appropriate keywords and the creation of SEO content.
Ultimately, this helps you to create content that converts.
3. Pinpoint Keywords That Meet Your Audience Needs
You should now be able to come up with an initial list of ideas to start researching.?
Don't forget to include long-tail keywords that you can use to dig into your topic area a little deeper. They're more specific than other keywords and help to find the content with a laser focus.
Now that you've got a rough list of words and phrases, you can go through them with your favourite research tool. This way you can find the keywords that bring the best results.
The more words and phrases you can research, the more targeted your keyword targets can be.
It'll take more time to enter these words into your keyword research tool, but trust me - it's time well spent.
The best keyword research tools in 2022 are:
Free vs. Paid Keyword Research Tools
Free keyword research tools are ideal for new businesses, startups, or anyone who’s just becoming familiar with the world of SEO.
However, if your SEO knowledge is more advanced or your company is rapidly growing, it might be worth considering a paid tool. Why? Well, free keyword tools tend to offer an abundance of results, which takes time to sort through—and?time equals money in the world of business.
领英推荐
Furthermore,?paid keyword tools streamline their results from huge amounts of data in accordance with low-competition keywords, which are going to be more worthwhile to target.
4. Optimise Your Content
Now that you know the keywords that boost your ROI, you can incorporate them into your text to create impactful content.
Take advantage of every SEO opportunity when writing your content by:
Once you've collected all this data, you can segment your audience and develop personas that help you create personalised content that meets the specific needs of your target audience.?
Personas represent ideal customers and give you the opportunity to further categorise your audience for maximum impact.
5. Keep Information Up-To-Date
Since the creation of useful material is a cornerstone of SEO content strategy, it's important that you constantly update your articles.
Research findings and trends are constantly changing, and references to them can quickly become outdated, or articles you linked to in previous articles may no longer exist.
A website that publishes outdated information or broken links will lose the trust of its readers.?
6. Host Your Own Content
To maintain full control over how your content is published, it's best to host your material on your own platform.
This doesn't mean that you shouldn't partner with other websites or guest author for websites you trust. But the priority of your content strategy should be to publish your own articles on your own website.
7. Track Your Success
Developing a well thought-out content strategy requires a significant investment of time and resources.
But it's definitely worth it - if it leads to results.
To determine if your efforts are paying off, you need to constantly measure the success of your content strategy.
See if your plan is working by monitoring:
Tracking metrics not only helps you measure your success, but also shows you opportunities for improvement, which can be equally (if not more) valuable.
In Summary
A content strategy built on the basic principles of search engine optimisation (SEO) will help your business increase sales and profits.
When creating your plan, the research you do will be crucial in identifying your target audience and area of expertise.
You can use these insights to write targeted content.
This way you'll attract your audience and achieve higher SERPs on Google. And that's what I call a win.
Janet Brandon is a SEO specialist, working mom and cycling enthusiast. Like what you read? Please add a comment below.