8 Easy Steps to Create an Effective Content SEO Strategy

If you’re keen to create content to rank higher on search engines, you must have a content marketing strategy. Content creation can’t just be spontaneous; a company must work together to create an SEO content strategy that reaches its target audience to produce excellent search engine ranking results.

Not sure what a content strategy is or the steps required to achieve impressive organic traffic from your content marketing efforts?

Continue reading our guide to find out.

What is a content marketing strategy?

A content strategy is designed to aid content production so it appeals to a target audience to improve search results performance.

For a content marketing strategy to succeed, several aspects of a business must be involved in its production. The content team will require support from the search engine optimisation (SEO) team, who will also collaborate with the paid advertising group.

The paid ads and SEO teams will decipher which keywords should be used during content creation to reach target audiences. The paid advertising team may also come up with content plans to promote valuable content on social media platforms, helping further the reach of each blog post.

From there, a web content strategy can be constructed. Content ideas can be created to centre around keyword research and a content management system can be put in place to track the progress of each piece of work.

Why is a website content strategy important?

As Google occupies 92% of all website traffic, a content strategy must be created to market blog posts on the world’s largest search engine.

People use Google for almost everything online, so it’s important to conduct a content strategy to target search intent with high-quality content.

The main reasons why a content marketing strategy is important are:

• It creates structure around your content.
• It helps to develop a unique brand voice that all pieces of content can follow.
• It ensures the content you’re producing has SEO value.
• You can track performance and compare results to your goals, allowing you to optimise poorly performing content.
  

Content strategy examples

Research – This is where all teams within a business should come together with their skills to research topics and keywords that can be used to appeal to their target audience.

Planning – Once keywords and search intent have been established, it’s time to plan the work. This involves coming up with content ideas for blog posts and more.

Briefing – The tasks now need to be handed to the relevant teams. Written content can be given to content writers, social media posts can be given to paid advertising and so on.

Writing – This is the stage where all of the content is created, using keyword research as the focal point of each piece of work.

Editing – Once finished, the content can be reviewed to ensure it falls in line with business goals and the content marketing strategy.

Publishing – When content is cleared, it can be published on the website and shared across social media platforms.

Optimisation – Check the performance of the content and work out ways to optimise it to ensure better results.

Steps to creating a successful content marketing strategy

If you’re trying to improve your reach on search engines and attract a larger audience, you can follow these eight easy steps to creating a content marketing strategy.

Identify your content and business goals

The first step to any website content strategy is to identify your content and business goals.

Content marketing can do a lot for a business; you can attract more visitors to a website via search engine results pages, but what do you want from there?

Do you want readers to contact you, sign up for a service, purchase goods, or something else?

How many impressions and visitors would you call a success?

How many conversions are you hoping for?

By outlining targets, you can create content and measure its performance with a goal in mind.

Appeal to your target audience on search engines

To bring readers in via search engines, you must identify a target audience. Understanding your audience makes the content creation stage easier as you know exactly who you’re writing for.

First, evaluate your current customer base and find out their needs and desires; you could use a survey for this.

Next, create customer personas based on your data and any demographic data you can find. With this, you can set up key personas to target, helping boost your content strategy by making it easier to reflect customers’ needs.

Ask the following questions:

• How do your target audience find their content? (i.e. on Google, YouTube or social media platforms).
• What hashtags and search terms are they likely to use?
• Which information sources do they trust?
• Which marketing channels do they use the most?
• What types of content do they engage with?
• What’s their preferred method of communication?
  

Keyword research

After deciphering exactly what your customers want and the topics they generally search, it’s time to conduct keyword research.

Researching keywords allows you to shape your content so your target audience can easily find you online. Without in-depth keyword research, the content creation stage won’t feature as much detail as it could, potentially harming your entire content strategy.

When conducting keyword research, you want to evaluate each term and phrase based on its relevance to your topic, its search volume and keyword difficulty. Finding relevant terms allows you to bring in more organic traffic from search results pages, helping to create an effective SEO content strategy.

You should also consider user search intent when reviewing keywords. Are they likely to ask questions on search engines or would they have to search a specific term to find your content? For example, could they search ‘solicitors London’ or would searching ‘property solicitors in London’ be a better way of finding you?

Keyword research for these terms would show the former term boasting around 1600 monthly searches but is a much harder term to rank for. Meanwhile, the longer – more specific – search term is a lot less competitive, giving you a better chance of ranking higher on Google search engines and attracting your exact audience.

Analyse competitors’ content

Now you’ve figured out the type of keywords and topics you want to cover, it’s time to compare that to your competitors.

This can reveal opportunities and gaps for your content marketing strategy to take advantage of, helping you overtake your competition.

Ask these questions when conducting your research:

• Where do your competitors publish their content?
• What type of content are they producing?
• How are their readers engaging with the content?
• Are they using CTAs throughout their content and, if so, how are they doing it?
• What type of topics can you cover that your competitors aren’t?
• Can you take a fresh approach to the content they have covered?
• Can you offer more detail and knowledge on the subjects they have covered?
  

Produce content ideas

Once you’ve completed all of your research, it’s time to put the plan into action and produce some content creation ideas.

How many blog posts would you like to publish per month? What about on-page content throughout your website?

You should also think about the length of the blog posts when publishing content as this can impact the amount of time it takes to produce content.

At this stage, pull together your content marketing team with your SEO team to figure out the best topics you could write about, and how you’ll approach them.

Audit existing content

While examining your competitors’ content and finding gaps to take advantage of, you could also be doing the same for your own existing content.If your website already has blog posts and on-page copy, review results and performance and try to find ways of optimising the content to improve it.

This way, you’re not only producing fresh content to rank well on Google, but you’re also boosting the content that’s already on your website.

Create content

Now, it’s ‘go’ time!

You’ve done all your planning and research, and the content is now in the hands of the creatives.

Whether it’s blog posts, on-page copy or social media posts, like videos and graphics, the content now needs to be created on a schedule to ensure you’re regularly updating your website.

Ensure the content is free of mistakes and abides by Google’s EEAT guidelines to give it the best chance of ranking highly on search engine results pages.



Review performance and optimise where necessary

Once your content has been published, you can start tracking performance.

However, be aware that you may not see brilliant results right away. SEO is a long-term game and does not necessarily produce quick fixes.

Over several weeks and months, continue to track the performance of your website and blog posts. If some blogs are not doing as well as they once were or aren’t performing well at all, look to incorporate different keywords to try and boost their rankings.

An SEO content strategy involves this aspect of constantly improving content to stay relevant and at the forefront of your target audience’s search intent.

Speak to Paramount Digital

So, are you keen on creating a website content strategy but you lack the manpower?

Well, lucky for you – Paramount Digital is here to help.

We boast a team full of digital marketers who have years of experience creating a content marketing strategy for a wide range of industries.

With our team of expert paid advertisers working alongside our knowledgeable SEO team, who supply our master content writers with the tools to succeed, we can create the content marketing strategy of your dreams – helping you achieve your business goals online.

Interested?

Simply contact us today by calling 01744 747474 or by sending an email to marketing@paramountdigital.co.uk.