With more than 68% of online experiences starting with a search engine, it’s no surprise that businesses stress the importance of an SEO content plan.
Content strategies are an integral component of an effective and successful SEO strategy. With its help, you can connect with your target audience, convert viewers into loyal buyers, and rank in Google.
Unfortunately, content often fails to help businesses meet their goals leading to no revenue and a waste of resources. If you want the content to work in your favor, you must approach it strategically.
It means you need to go beyond creating catchy content and develop an elaborate SEO strategy. Here, we’ve created a step-by-step guide to developing an SEO content strategy:
Step-by-Step Guide to Set Up Your SEO Content Strategy
Part of providing meaningful and beneficial information is identifying your prospects and their pain points. Here, we’ve created a comprehensive guide to creating purpose-driven content:
Determine Your Target Audience
The primary purpose of SEO is to create a positive user experience while delivering relevant and attention-grabbing information.
Start creating SEO content that resonates with your audience by pinpointing who your target market is:
Who is Your Current Audience?
Analyzing the critical characteristics of your current buyers is an excellent way of identifying your prospects.
Identify quantitative and qualitative data, including age, location, buying behavior, web page engagement, and more, to create the ideal buyer persona.
Who are Your Competitors Customers?
Go through your competitor’s social media accounts, blogs, and customer reviews to identify their audience.
Determine the likes and dislikes of your competitor’s customers. You can learn a lot from other businesses’ successes and pitfalls.
What is Your USP?
Ask yourself what makes your products/services stand out. What benefit does your product or services bring to your prospects?
Next, conduct surveys to identify how prospects perceive your brand and products.
Define Your SEO Goals
When creating purpose-driven search engine optimized content, you must define your SEO goals. Typically, businesses aim for one of the following two goals:
Goal # 1: Drive Organic Traffic
If your main aim is to drive traffic from organic search, start creating content that ranks for industry-related keywords.
Well-curated SEO content helps businesses:
- Boost Sales
- Generate Leads
- Increase Conversions
Successful SEO strategies help create the ideal marketing funnel to grab visitors’ attention from organic search.
Goal # 2: Build Website Authority
If your goal is to build website authority, you must create content to acquire backlinks. This way, you can strengthen your site authority, expertise, and trust.
Outreach activities for increasing backlinks:
- Boost brand awareness and recognition
- Encourage lead nurturing and customer engagement
- Strengthen site’s authority to ensure better search engine ranking
Identify Your Competitors
While creating an SEO content plan, you must explore the online market to identify your main competitors. There are various SEO tools you can leverage to conduct competitive intelligence.
Here’s a quick overview of how these tools can help you:
Find Your Online Competitors
Pinpoint your online competitors by comparing monthly estimated traffic and the total number of ranking keywords.
Compare SEO Strength of Your Competitors’ Site
Analyze your website’s SEO strength and compare it with your competitor to identify areas you need to improve.
Pinpoint Keywords that Match Your Audience Needs
Once you learn your SEO goals and target audience, it’s time to start researching words and phrases that are meaningful to your readers. Here’s how you can achieve this:
Conduct a Broad Search Term
Identify broad keywords that relate to your core content. For instance, if you sell feminine fragrances, start with the root keyword: ‘fragrances.’
Narrow Down the Scope
Consider the factors mentioned below to narrow down your keyword phrases:
- Keyword Variations
- Product Features
- Top Sellers
- Relevant Questions about Your Brand/Product
Combine it All
Piece your root keyword with more specific ones to create a list of ideas to research. Remember to include long-tail keywords that enable you to rank higher and dig deeper.
Use Keyword Research Tools
After creating a rough list of keywords, leverage innovative keyword research tools to identify their search volumes and rankings.
Create an Editorial Calendar
Use your keyword list to develop an effective editorial calendar. Ensure that you add your target keywords so that if someone else is creating content, they know which phrases they must include.
Here are several tips to remember when creating an editorial calendar:
- Compile the content plan and include titles, keywords, URLs, and more
- Manage content boards in a shared editorial calendar
- Leverage content creation tools to identify literacy, readability, etc.
Plan Outreach Activities
An excellent way of building site authority is by gaining mentions and backlinks. Consider pitching influencers and similar businesses to request backlinks and exposure.
Monitor Social Activity for Mentions of Your Brand/Topic
Social monitoring is an incredible way of finding relevant influencers. Luckily, you can leverage various social listening tools to stay on top of your brand or topic mentions.
Feed your target keywords to your selected social listening tool and create alerts for their mentions. This way, you’ll receive a notification whenever your desired keyword gets mentioned.
Find Domains Linking to Top-Ranking Content
Find backlinks by analyzing your competitors’ websites to gather websites interested in your topic.
Moreover, checking your competitor’s content can help you pinpoint which content attracts better backlinks.
Track Your Success
Developing a successful and effective content strategy requires significant time and resources. To determine whether your resources are well-spent, you must measure the success of your content strategy:
- Conversions- A practical and well-developed SEO strategy will help you convert more customers
- Organic Traffic- It enables you to determine whether you’re experiencing unpaid search results
- Indexed Pages- This way, you can identify if search engines find your content valuable and relevant
- SERPs- SEO rankings help you determine the successful use of your content
By using tracking metrics, you can pinpoint the success of your content strategy and find areas of improvement.
The Bottom Line
Remember that the best SEO content strategies include off-page and on-page SEO, such as backlinks, social media, developing buyer personas, and more. Start creating your content strategy so that your keyword strategy can be worthwhile.
Ensure you get your hands on the ideal SEO content strategy by connecting with our experts at Firestarter SEO. Our committed and diligent industry leaders fuel growth and drive organic traffic by curating SEO strategies that perfectly align with your business goals.
Sources
https://moz.com/blog/build-content-marketing-strategy
https://blog.alexa.com/seo-content-plan-write-get-rank-1/
https://www.link-assistant.com/news/seo-content-plan.html#anchor1
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/blog-keyword-strategy/402755/
