How to Develop Content Strategy That’ll Guarantee SEO Growth
Previously we came to the conclusion that there’s no SEO without content, and there’s no content without SEO. But what to do if you’re used to solely SEO or content? Well, you’ll need to make some adjustments to your strategy to ensure that it’s working for your rankings improvements.
Just like when we said that content isn’t better than SEO, content marketing strategy isn’t better than SEO strategy. Each has some value that will do miracles for your site and business if you learn to unite them.
Why is a content marketing strategy a good thing?
- It places users’ needs and interests first.
- It leverages your brand’s strengths.
Why is a keyword strategy a good thing?
- It helps you reveal the exact words people use to talk about their problems
Contents
- The key challenge of SEO content strategy making
- Your steps at mapping out an SEO content strategy
- 1. Draw the outcome you want to see
- 2. Get to know your readers
- 3. Find out how your business can help
- 4. Develop your unique voice for content creation
- 5. Make a list of topics that you can write on
- 6. Determine the keywords for the topics on your list
- 7. Prepare an editorial calendar for a set period of time
- 8. Define the success metrics
- 9. Get down to work
- Does SEO content strategy seem too hard?
The key challenge of SEO content strategy making
Finding your unique voice and an original angle to stand out in the marketing choir can be tough. Still, the time you and your team spend devising it will not be wasted.
Let’s take Lippincott, a legendary consultancy agency that helps brands shape their design, strategy, and open up to innovation. Every piece of content penned by the Lippincott team focuses on the future and cultural changes, be it a case study of the companies they’ve been working with, an article on the blog, or any page of the company website.
It doesn’t matter whether they use a semantic core to create content around, every paragraph you read is looking into the future and explains how companies prepare the world for this future. Try to do the same with your brand - make sure that any page of your site tells just as much as the “About Us,” represents your beliefs and core ideas of your business.
This example is not a call to drop all your SEO efforts, and forget about keywords once and for all. What we’re suggesting is a more personal approach to content creation - write content that will make more difference to your readers than to your SEO profile. All in all, as an SEO you know that backlinks matter, and it’s your audience who decides to link back to your site, or not.
Your steps at mapping out an SEO content strategy
1. Draw the outcome you want to see
Start untangling from the end. Think about the main goals you want your business to achieve at this stage. We’ve talked several times about goal-setting, but just to remind you that goals should be as SMART as possible. SMART, in this case, stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.
Putting these goals on paper will help you understand the type of content you would want to create. Maybe, you need to educate your customers about the work you’re doing or grow your subscriber base. For each, the content will be quite different - more explanatory in the first case, and more impellent in the second.
2. Get to know your readers
To be able to produce content that will serve your readers’ needs you have to… well, know their needs. What problems are they trying to solve when coming to your site? What kind of knowledge or experience do they lack? Who are actually the people that find themselves seeking answers with you?
This is helpful! 11 Reasons to Run Social Media for Your Business
No need to take a guess or make some vague assumptions on the questions, as you have the information at your disposal most of the time. Brainstorm with your customer support team, marketing, social media specialists, and sales. It’ll give you an understanding of who you are dealing with, and what the audience is expecting from you. The perfect option if you create a solid buyer persona after all these discussions.
3. Find out how your business can help
After you’ve gathered the questions people have when coming to your site, see if you are capable of answering them. Identify every point that makes your business unique, some services that you can deliver, and no one else can.
You may think that all you do is pretty standard, but this is often far from the truth. Even the most plain-looking experience can be invaluable for other people. Not for millions of them, of course, but those tens are just the audience you would want to capture and build relations with.
4. Develop your unique voice for content creation
As we said before, clear and distinctive messaging will be among the features that differentiate your voice from many others. So pick up the angle at which you’ll be presenting the information. You can find more tips on compelling content creation in our blog post.
5. Make a list of topics that you can write on
It’s time to wrap it all up and do some more writing. You know the questions your readers have. You know the answers. And, you know how to answer. So start focusing those answers around very specific pieces of content you will create. New landing pages for your services, blog posts, or FAQs section - what will it be, and what subjects will it cover?
As your audience has to be your top priority, involve once again people from other departments to make sure you shed light on the main struggles of your readers.
6. Determine the keywords for the topics on your list
As you can see, SEO starts playing its role at this stage only. Now, that you know the pain points of the audience, find out how they are approaching Google when trying to solve them.
Use tools like LSI Graph (more straightforward) or Moz Keyword Explorer (more sophisticated) to see the most common search queries on any particular topic on your list. They will create the backbone of your future content pieces.
7. Prepare an editorial calendar for a set period of time
Put all the data you’ve got so far on paper. This way all the key points will be at your or someone else’s hand.
Your calendar will contain several types of data, e.g. Content Type, Issue Date, Keywords, Call-To-Action. These are only a few ones, and you can add as many as you want to ensure that people working on content creation will get the idea of what should be done.
8. Define the success metrics
Come back to the first step of this strategy-making journey, and have a look at the goals you’ve set to identify how you’ll measure your results. Organic visit numbers, leads or conversion rate can be your essential metrics, depending on what you’ve planned to achieve. Adsy has already given elaborate information on content marketing measuring, you can check it out here.
9. Get down to work
From there it’s utterly simple - start creating the content. Or get your content team to do it. Surely, it sounds much easier than it is, as content creation is a great deal itself. But when you have a plan, the journey seems much easier.
As you can see, this SEO content strategy is not entirely different from what marketers use creating their projects. However, such approach significantly increases your chances of getting quality organic traffic from search engines, as you’ll be creating exactly the type of content your audience is looking for. Using exactly the same words and phrases they are typing in their query.
Does SEO content strategy seem too hard?
If you struggle at any of these stages because of time or human resources shortage, Adsy is happy to assist you. We’ve recently launched content marketing services that cover much more than content creation and placement. Now you can address us with any content marketing task you need to get done, and our professional team with years of experience will help you open new horizons in your marketing. Leave you content issues and tussles to us, and observe the progress in your traffic, lead generation and enjoy overall business improvements.
Allow your business to flourish with the ingenious combination of SEO and content marketing.
