The most undervalued part of your content strategy is.....

If you search for content marketing and look at the top 5 images, and the top 5 search results, it is hardly mentioned.

In the images I could find, it was represented in user research at the start, but not further downstream. 

If you look at most content strategies, the focus is on process, governance, content production, or on the types of content you should produce.

It is the one thing that is guaranteed to bring clients, readers and attention. If it is done right, it can also increase the value of your brand in the eyes of customers. 

I am talking about SEO. 

SEO is something that needs to be at the core of your content strategy, from conception to creation to marketing to client engagement. It should be a major part of the overall strategy, including which topics you want to own and how you are going to analyse the search traffic that you generate.

As a content producer, are you also on page one for your major services and markets?

My guess is that you don't because few do.

Most of the major professional firms might say "We don't need SEO, our brand does the talking", but the truth is brands need to be an "Equal thought not afterthought". 

A key question I might ask is; do you have a marketing (or firm) wide group set up to guide how you can be found (email, web, social) by your clients?

You might have groups that work with key clients or accounts, or with making sure your content is proof read, but does anyone look at where you rank in search engines?

The Top 3 spots in Google make up 62% of all traffic

How much is the top spot on Google actually worth?  According to data from the Chitika network, it’s worth double the traffic of the #2 spot.

In order to find out exactly how much traffic number 1 spot was worth, Chikita looked at a sample of traffic coming into their advertising network. The top spot generated 34.35% of all traffic in the sample, almost as much as the numbers 2 through 5 slots combined.

The First Rule of SEO

The prime directive of SEO is “Create what will interest your clients and their influencers“. Links, pages, content and imagery can all be manipulated in the process of chasing after customers, but the more you compromise on this prime rule, the lower the impact of your SEO activities. 

The key word here is "interest". How can you measure the value of interest? By the number of social shares, and the number of people that register/reach out to you once they have read the content.

The other value of "interest" is; Are your clients already searching for these answers (SEO)?

The second key word is "influencers. The content has to be something interested media would want to write about. If you didn't write a press release about the content, or call a media briefing, would the media and bloggersphere still write about the content?

The importance of Keyword Analysis

The first part of the content strategy must be to picking the right keywords. This is because you need to be consistently using the right keywords through your content so that readers are not confused, and search engines know what the content is about.

The other thing about keyword analysis is that it will help remove the use of acronyms or internal phrases that can be littered throughout a document. 

 The best start is to look at the marketing attention cycle which is; Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. You need to look to focus on the two word and three word combinations of keywords that your clients are actually using. 

Long Tail Keywords

Long tail keywords are  combinations of words that a searcher uses that are hard to predict. Typically they would include combinations of words that would not appear together in a sentence. Most of the long tail keyword phrases on a website are 5 words or longer. Even Google recognises they are hard to predict, because 20% of all keywords used on Google are used for the first time. 1/5th of all users of Google are searching for that object for the first time, ever.

People type in strange and long combinations of keywords when they know what they are looking for. These are people that are doing research for something they know they need. This makes them very valuable, because you know the people using them are ready to buy. These long tail words should be used to advise on the direction of your content strategy. 

Thinking Page Structure

For most pages aiming for a particular keyword ranking, using H1 for headings, meta title and description tags are all a good start. However, a diverse range of HTML parts (bold, images, videos) is an indication of an interesting page, which is another key factor for SEO. If organisations have an opinion on something, they need to be diverse in their explanation of it.

My question for firms is; "Why don't you release the raw data more frequently"? This would provide readers with a complex explanation and encourage more people to link to your content.

Internal Linking

Most search engines understand that websites will have a menu, and a blog, that will be structured in a way for users to navigate through a website. The frequency of links to a page is used to indicate how important that page is on a website, (a menu appears on every page, the same pages are linked to, those pages must be the key services pages). Search engines will give less value to a page that only has one link to it from a blog post.

If you create content, do you leave it buried deep in your website (or only linked to from the front page). How do you connect similar topics?