It’s time to buckle down and commit to a more rigorous SEO content strategy for the web if you’ve been creating material haphazardly and hope that some of it ultimately ranks. The following four phases can help you define and improve your SEO content strategy:
Plan your objectives
Determine your website’s or company’s objectives first. Do you want to use your website to increase sales? Do you wish to simply boost traffic and repeat readers because you monetise your website with ads? What kinds of content you should concentrate on will depend on your objectives. An excellent illustration of a simple, yet stylish, product page
Your main goal should be creating appealing, educational product pages that are optimized for both search and conversions if you’re primarily seeking to increase product sales. Your secondary focus could be creating informative blog posts that explain when and how to use your products and include links to those pages when appropriate (it’s best if your blog is not entirely self-promotional, though).
If your website uses an advertising model and your objective is to draw in new readers through search, you should concentrate on creating rich content that is “sticky” (sticky content keeps visitors on your site for longer or entices them to return), such as lengthy articles or entertaining but educational videos.
Think about your audience
Know your audience; surveys and analytics tools can assist you in gaining a better understanding of the usual customer or visitor. Consider creating marketing personas, or fictional people who reflect the clients and site visitors you want to attract. Next, consider the types of content that those personas would be seeking.
For instance, you could want to publish high-level white papers that can be downloaded and saved to read later if you run a B2B website that caters to C-level executives. If your company caters to teens and tweens, you may want to concentrate on posting regular updates with more images and video and less text. Additionally, you should confirm that your website is mobile-friendly.
Make an editorial schedule
You may begin creating an editorial calendar if you are clear on who and why you are targeting them. An editorial calendar is a schedule that specifies when and what kind of fresh material will be published. This will assist you in maintaining a regular schedule (it’s crucial to provide new content frequently if you run a blog) and keep you from frantically brainstorming ideas for new content at the last minute. Here are some pointers for developing and following an editorial calendar:
- Utilize Google Calendar or Outlook Your entire marketing team should be made aware of the editorial schedule. Create reminders for authors so they are informed when a deadline is approaching.
- Think about developing recurring features A food blog might post a vegetarian recipe every Monday, for instance. Weekly link roundups are common on blogs, like this one. For each ongoing topic, make a category page so that readers can easily access all of your Meatless Monday recipes or link collections.
- Give yourself enough time to prepare When creating more complex content types, like videos and infographics. These are more difficult to optimize for search and frequently require several revisions to be perfect.
- Don’t make too many plans in advance Avoid trying to set out a timetable for the following year to avoid wasting a lot of time and effort. Calendars frequently get off track after a month or two due to changes in marketing goals, funds, or staff.
Review and analyze
Finally, monitor the analytics for your website. Examine your SEO material frequently to determine what is and isn’t working, using both content audits and SEO audits (or even a full site audit). To assist with this, a variety of tools and website graders are available. Page visits, links, comments (on blog posts and some other types of content), social shares (Facebook likes, tweets, etc.), and conversion rates are all useful indicators of success and engagement. Your investigation ought to have two objectives:
- Study your winning tactics so you can use them again Analyze patterns. Do they enjoy watching videos? Next, create more videos! In the future, modify your editorial schedule so you can devote more time and energy to the content kinds that are most popular.
- Make time to update and enhance previous SEO content Re-optimize the post if you try to optimize it for a particular keyword but it’s receiving more traffic for a different variation of that keyword. For instance, by using that keyword in the title, you might be able to considerably boost traffic.
- Keep an eye on your website: It’s critical to frequently evaluate your website to ensure that it is optimized for Google and search engines, both overall and for particular pages. Use our free website grader to get started and obtain an immediate SEO and online presence analysis.
That concludes SEO Content 101. As said before, if you have any more inquiries about developing and improving content for SEO, do let me know in the comments.
