Search Engine Optimization has become more complex than ever, you can not simply rank your website by doing just a few steps and it is important to work with a strong SEO strategy for staying at the top. Google introduces its core update very frequently and makes changes in Google’s ranking factor. Websites spend months to years recovering from Google’s core updates depending on the issues in the website.
Google launched its core update on 5th March 2024 to reduce 40% of unusual and low-quality content. This update affected websites globally and Google will continuously work on changing its algorithms to maintain content quality on search engines.
You might be worried about how your content will stay ahead in this competitive world and how it will survive with Google’s Core Updates but being a Content creator you should not only focus on higher rankings but also you should create content to help your users. To create more engagement and attract users it is very important to plan a solid SEO Content Strategy.
In this blog post, we will cover everything step by step to help you create an amazing SEO Content Strategy in 2024. By the end of this blog, you will be able to create a strong SEO content strategy for your business.
What is SEO Content?
SEO Content is content created and optimised with the aim of ranking higher in search engines. Creating SEO-friendly content can help people find your website more easily. This content creation can be in any format such as blog posts, product pages, articles, how-to guides, infographics and more. SEO content is optimised with specific keywords that your potential customer can search for while finding businesses related to yours.
Additionally, SEO content is created by doing some competitor's research. For example, if you want to write a blog on the topic Digital Marketing course in Ahmedabad then go to Google and search the term to understand what your competitors have written and why they are ranking at the top.
What is an SEO Content Strategy?
A great Content Strategy includes planning and execution to make content rank higher on search engines and increase visibility. The goal of SEO Content Strategy is to create content that can be helpful to both existing users and attracting new customers. SEO Content Strategy involves identifying your ideal customers, what they need from your platform, how you can solve their problem and what will be the outcomes. The motive of creating an SEO Content Strategy is simply to get higher search engine rankings and attract new customers to generate leads.
Why do you need a strong SEO content strategy?
Planning a successful SEO content strategy is as important as creating the content itself because it helps you reach a specific and targeted audience and also lets you match the search intent of the user. If you are creating SEO content for your business then it should be a mixture of good storytelling and showing facts and benefits of your products or services to generate leads through the content.
Even after understanding your audience very well, it is so important to optimise your content with SEO factors.
If you want to make your business succeed, you have to plan the entire process and it goes the same for SEO Content Strategy. Without planning you can not create high-quality content. A content strategy will help you shape the structure of your process and it will be easy for you to share the strategy with the team.
A well-planned content strategy can help you stay ahead of your competitors. With strategic planning, you can create content with relevant keywords that add value to your customers.
By creating your content with factors such as what users are searching for, you can increase engagement on your website and it can help you with an increase in conversion rates.
An SEO Content Strategy also includes analytics and tracking of your efforts, this can help you measure whether your efforts are working positively or not. A good SEO Content Strategy can separate you from the rest of the businesses.
Overview of planning a content strategy
- Identify your niche
- Understand your target audience
- Find out related or seed terms for your business
- Keyword research
- Competitors analysis
- Content planning
- Content Optimisation
- Optimise your existing content
- Track your content strategy and measure results
- On-page optimisation of content
- Off-page Optimisation of content
- Technical SEO
Process of creating an effective SEO Content Strategy
Identify your niche
Before creating an SEO content strategy, identify your niche and what is your goal of planning an SEO content strategy. For example, if you have a digital marketing agency then you will have to create content that can attract students, professionals and entrepreneurs.
Identifying a niche is crucial to understanding what steps we are going to take to make our content strategy successful. Also by identifying a niche you can avoid keywords that are irrelevant to your business.
Know your target audience
Suppose you are planning to create content for a digital marketing course page for homepreneurs and you have created content that shows the importance of digital marketing for students. Your target audience will be disappointed with your content and leave your website immediately.
Hence without identifying your target audience, you can not create compelling content. So before creating content identify your target audience. if your target audience is different based on age, gender and profession then it will be better for you to create content separately for each of them.
Identify your target audience with simple steps
- Create buyer personas to understand your audience and what they are searching for.
- Speak to your current customers and ask them to provide feedback that can help you redefine your content strategy based on their suggestions.
- Check your competitor's website and see who they are targeting. Competitor research can benefit you in improving your content strategy for the future.
Find out the head term for your business
All you need to do is first find out the terms your customers can search on search engines to find your business. For example, if you have a digital marketing institute the main term for your business would be “best digital marketing course”, or “best digital marketing institute”. Whatever niche you have, just manually search for head terms for your business.
We are not finding keywords, it’s just a step to understand what your users search to find businesses like yours. You don’t have to use any paid SEO tool you can manually check on Google and also the NLP terms suggested by Google at the end of a page. Note down every related term you see.
Once you have found your head term for your business research that term, first check who is trying to rank on the term, who is already ranking, what are the word counts they have written, and what is their content structure.
This will help you understand where you can work to plan a strategic SEO content strategy. There might be a lot of competition on your head term so now you can either use a long-tail keyword or you can find another keyword that is semantic to your head term.
To find more terms related to your business you can use tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends and Answer The Public. These tools show you data of keywords that users search and they also show search volume for keywords that can help you estimate the traffic you are going to gain on your site through the keyword.
Keyword research
Now you have head terms for your business as we have taken the example “ digital marketing institutions” Search this term and check the related terms that match with your customer’s intent.
Not down every possible term you see while researching. Use tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs to know the exact search volume and keyword difficulty of the terms.
You can take keywords with high search volume and low keyword difficulty to create content. Check your competitor’s keywords if they have keywords with high search volume and are ranking on them, note down the keywords to create content.
Competitors analysis
Analysing your competitor's content strategies can provide you with better ideas to develop your own content strategy. By analysing competitor’s content, you can understand their audience preference and effective techniques.
Analyse their top-performing content, understand their strategy and identify their keywords to refine your strategy according to market trends. Identify the gaps and opportunities in their content and think about what you can implement in your content strategy to receive better outcomes. Even their mistakes can provide you with lessons.
Plan your content
Now you have the keyword that you have found by following the above-mentioned steps but creating content on any topic is not that easy, it takes time and effort to write content that solves the user’s query and helps in rankings.
While planning your content you can follow a few simple steps to rank your content such as:
- Search your keyword and check the top-ranking content, make sure you write one scale-up from their content.
- Use tools such as market-muse and neuron writers to check what key phrases should be used in the content.
- Use focus keywords on your content as much as you can.
- Write high quality content that can talk about user’s ping points and provide them with a solution.
Optimise your content
Optimising your content with some relevant keywords will help you in better search engine rankings, as mentioned above you can use content optimisation tools to audit your content. Read the whole content once you have written it and check manually if your content has the power to solve your user’s query.
Optimise your existing content
Optimising your existing content can improve the quality of your content and updating is important for everything.
Find out some popular topics that your audience likes and update your existing content according to that.
If some of your content is not working well and it’s not useful to your audience anymore then remove that content from your site.
By reviewing your content, you can make better decisions about what to create next and how to improve what you have.
Also, optimise your content for local SEO to improve your presence in your local area.
Track your content strategy
Tracking and analysing is a part of SEO content strategy and it is so essential to measure if your SEO content marketing strategy is working the way you expected or not. This will not only help you understand your previous strategy but also help in planning strategies for the future.
Use tools such as Google Search Console and Google Analytics to measure your data and this measurement is known as KPIs(key performance indicators).
If you want to increase your brand awareness you can track organic traffic on your website. If you want to generate more leads then you can track the number of new visitors on your site and how many of them took action like signing up or filling out a form.
On-page optimisation of your content
Optimise your content as much as you can because it will improve your content performance and help in search engine ranking. Well there is no perfect formula for writing SEO content but on-page optimization of content is a key ranking factor, by the following steps you can create content for both search engines and your users.
A few tips to optimise your On-Page SEO
- Use your main keyword in the title, meta description, H1 and H2 as well.
- Use bold and clear headlines so readers can easily find the information they are looking for. Create relevant content using keywords that are related to your niche.
- Write content to solve your user’s queries not just for keyword ranking and make sure your content covers all the topics related to the keyword with true information, this builds authority among users.
- Don’t add unnecessary or irrelevant information.
- Use a compelling meta description and title with your focus keyword to rank better in search results.
- Write your content in an interesting or storytelling format.
- Use Alt Text and compressed images.
- Use Internal linking's as they encourage users to spend more time on your website.
Off-page optimisation
Along with the on-page optimisation, off-page optimisation also plays a key role in ranking content. Creating high-quality links can create the authority of your website and it also tells the search engines about your credibility.
Link with trusted websites and check your competitor's websites to understand their link-building strategy. You can also link with websites they are already linking to because backlinks work as a vote of authority from other websites and increase your website’s authority score.
A few strategies to acquire high quality backlinks
- Outreach websites relevant to your niche for guest posting.
- Write informative and engaging content that can add value to other platforms and their audience.
- Approach for broken link building in relevant business sites.
- Create how-to guides and tutorials as a resource that other websites want to link.
- Share your content on social media platforms for more engagement and reach a wider audience.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO covers crawling, indexing, speed of website and user-friendliness, all of these factors play an important role in the content’s ranking. By optimising technical SEO elements such as structured data, schema markup, page speed, canonical tags and mobile friendliness you can make it easier for search engines to rank your content. Technical SEO improves user experience which can indirectly impact time spent by users on the site.
Improve your technical SEO with these tips
- Create a descriptive and user-friendly URL for your content.
- Use schema markups to provide additional data to search engines about your content.
- Use canonical tags to show a preferred version of the webpage if you have another page with similar content.
Conclusion
Having a strong SEO content strategy is very important when we want to rank our website in search engines. Nowadays it is not enough to create a website and hope that it will rank one day. You need a plan and that’s where SEO content strategy comes into play.
While creating content strategy it is important to understand audience needs, conduct keyword research, and optimise content for search engines. Also, monitor your performance metrics from time to time to adjust your previous strategies accordingly and ensure long-term success.
By following the above-mentioned steps in the blog you can create a solid SEO content strategy and make sure that your website ranks higher in search engines attracting a lot of new users. Make a plan, execute that and share your content strategy to help other businesses.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s)
Q. 1 How can I start developing a content strategy for my business?
To develop a content strategy first identify your target audience and their needs from your business. Conduct keyword research to find keywords that are relevant to your business, analyse competitors, create a content calendar, plan your content and optimize it for SEO.
Q. 2 What are the tools I can use for my content strategy development in 2024?
To create a solid content strategy in 2024 you can use tools SEMrush, HubSpot, Market Muse, Neuron Writer, Answer The Public, and Survey Monkey, etc.
Q. 3 Is competitor analysis important in content strategy development?
Yes, competitor analysis is a super important part of overall SEO and content planning. Because it opens areas for you to improve your strategy and also provides ideas that can be used to optimise your content.
Q. 4 What are the three types of SEO
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
- Technical SEO
Q. 5 Can I use the same keywords for both Google ads and SEO?
Yes, similar keywords can be used for both SEO and Google ads, it shows the importance of keywords to your site and also data from Google ads can help you refine your SEO strategy.
Q. 6 How can an SEO service provider help my business in SEO success?
An SEO service can enhance your SEO efforts by providing strategic advice that can lead to the success of your business.
