One of the most common mistakes among business owners, although it happens not too often, is not being able to have a step-by-step plan when crafting their content strategy for SEO. We’ve seen this kind of mistake all too many times, and what’s more saddening is that they expect some good results out of it.
There’s a common misconception that content strategy and SEO are two different things altogether, that’s why some businesses choose to focus solely on strengthening their SEO without giving a second thought on how to strengthen their content strategy instead for higher ranking. Imagine running while shooting arrows at your target… while blindfolded.
That’s why we’ve crafted this 5-step, comprehensive guide on how to create a content strategy for SEO services by Contevo. If you’re a business who’s just starting out getting familiar with different digital marketing tactics and you’re considering strengthening your SEO game, this article is 100% made for you.
Determine who your audience is and how they think.
The most important step when creating a content strategy for SEO is to identify your audience and their separate nature as individuals and consumers. Most agencies won’t be emphasising this, but why is it necessary to identify the different behavioural components of your target audience as individuals and consumers? Some people tend to differ their own personality from their consumer decisions, that’s why it’s important to be able to penetrate through the consumer’s mind.
Here are some handy tips to properly narrow down your audience targeting:
- If you have existing customers, try to observe their current online activities and list down some of their behaviours that you haven’t discovered yet.
- Conduct short surveys in order to figure what your audience thinks about you overall. From there, improve what needs to be improved in your business.
- Try to create different audience personas. It’s a way for you to understand how to make different types of content that address different kinds of audiences.
Come up with several ideas for your content.
Content wouldn’t be called king for nothing. The first real step of creating content strategy for SEO after you’ve decided who you’re gonna talk to is listing down several ideas and topics that are timely and relevant to your brand or industry and this starts by doing a thorough keyword research which you can do for free by using keyword research tools like Google Trends, Google Search Console, and WordTracker.
When conducting keyword research, always remember to look at the following factors:
- Search Volume – Is the keyword being searched by large volumes of people? It doesn’t necessarily mean that the higher the search volume of a keyword is, the better the results.
- Difficulty of the keyword – Is the keyword too long or too vague? Find out by putting in your desired keyword into the search bar, and analyze the results. If the first page results contain popular business names or highly-authoritative websites, it usually means it’s more difficult. Butf you see low-authority websites, it means lower difficulty and better chances to create effective content.
- Bidding Price – If you’re doing paid search, it’s best to evaluate which keywords have good search volume and traffic value and at the same time, is within your ad spend.
Layer your content with authority links.
Basically, content layering involves creating relevant content that generates links, ranks high, and is directly relevant to your product or service. Content layering strategy is an important part of your middle funnel content strategy because it helps push higher conversion for bottom funnel landing pages. Another bold move being done by some even up to this day is they link people directly towards their bottom funnel landing page which might seem to direct for some consumers who still wants to know more about your brand, therefore leading them to stray away from reaching the bottom funnel.
Make sure your content is linkable.
Again, this all amounts to the relevance of your content. Your ability to earn links and have good search ranking increases when you keep in mind the intent of a user who gets to see your content.
Creating better content does not necessarily mean spending several time trying to come up with something that beats your competitor. You only need to change some aspects such as:
- Refining and organising your content’s readability and structure
- Improving your website’s loading time
- Citing credible sources and statistics
- Presenting content in a different format (e.g. video)
Learn to update your content whenever necessary.
Observe how your most go-to blogs and articles have something that says “updated on July 2019” even if the article was published in 2018? It also pays to update your published content from time to time since new types of audience might come across your website when they look up for something on Google and updating your content helps give the idea that you’re after what’s latest and people usually want something that’s been updated regularly.