14 Tips To Create A Highly-Converting SEO Content Strategy

Are you aware that there are 85,000+ Google searches each second? It isn’t surprising as everyone spends a considerable chunk of their waking hours on Google daily. 

We can infer from this that you have to create optimized search engine content if you want your business to see the light of the day. Moreover, ranking on the first page is a different feat in itself. 

Do you also want to optimize your content for search engines? If yes, you are at the right place. In this blog, we’ll see 14 tips to help you create an SEO content strategy that works for your business. 

So, let’s begin.

What Is An SEO Content Strategy? 

An SEO content strategy focuses on developing content that will increase your website’s chances of appearing in search results for relevant keywords. With the right keywords and content, your site can perform well in search engines and increase your brand visibility.

The basic idea behind an SEO content strategy is straightforward. You have to write valuable content that will engage your target audience while also optimizing for search engines.

Read our blog post on Copywriting vs Content Marketing.

Tips To Create An Effective SEO Content Strategy

We have a list of proven tips on how to create an effective SEO content strategy. In fact, our marketing and SEO teams have implemented these tips in our content marketing process, and it has helped us get great results from organic search. Rest assured, we have already tried and tested these!

1. Start with your goals

When establishing your SEO content strategy, you must set specific goals and objectives that you intend to achieve through this content. Establishing a content schedule for yourself based on your goals and objectives and the amount of time you can realistically commit to the project is a good idea. This way, you can ensure that you are consistently producing content relevant to your target audience and meeting your deadlines.  

While setting your goals, it’s essential to keep them realistic goals and review them regularly. You shouldn’t set a goal that seems too big; it’s easy to get distracted by the enormity of the task and lose sight of what you’ve set out to achieve. Focus on effective content marketing.

2. Identify your target audience

To begin with, you need to know who you’re writing for. The first step in creating content is to consider the audience and the purpose of the content. You might have an existing audience you want to target with your content. Or perhaps, you’re aiming to grow your audience and want to find the right people to reach.

The fact is, there are numerous ways to identify your audience. You could 

• Start with your primary audience and build from there. 
• Survey potential customers to get a sense of their interests and behaviors. 
• Look to the competition to figure out which groups of people they’re attracting and what content they’re using. 
• Ask people directly or use surveys/interviews to gather the data you need.

3. Create a list of topics

Creating content for SEO requires generating ideas. You can do this with creative brainstorming or by pulling influences from different angles. However, whatever method you choose, it is of utmost importance to generate as many ideas as possible. This will help you avoid becoming biased toward any one perspective. Instead, you will develop a 360-degree view of your topic and come up with many unique ideas that you can use to build content for your site. At this stage, you have to focus only on the topics, not keywords. 

4. Create a list of long-tail keywords based on the topics

After you create a list of topics, you have to find long-tail keywords for them. Websites and blogs that focus on SEO will usually advise you to use long-tail keywords rather than broad keywords in your content. When searching on search engines, users frequently enter keywords that are much longer than the typical few words used in a classic search. Thus, it is much more difficult for users to discover your content in the searches unless you use long-tail keywords. 

Needless to say, longer phrases potentially bring in more traffic and increase the chances of the right audience finding your content.

5. Focus on lower-difficulty topics

When picking topics for your content, try to focus on the three important criteria: search volume, competition, and traffic cost. Ideally, it would help if you looked for those with high search volume and low keyword difficulty. You can use any tool to help you with this keyword analysis, but you can also do it manually by looking at SERPs. If top brand names and sites with higher authority appear on the first page, the topic has higher competition. However, if it is the other way around, it can be a good opportunity for you to curate content and fill the gap. You must prioritize lower-difficulty keywords until you become an established and well-known brand.

6. Define your content types

One of the best practices to follow in creating SEO content is creating content in different formats. There are several types of content marketing formats. The list includes blog posts, whitepapers, infographics, videos, e-books, guides, and more. All of these formats will engage your audience well, but from the SEO point of view, blogs are of primary importance. They can tremendously impact your business. Surprisingly, businesses that focus on creating blog content have 434% more indexed pages and get 55% more visitors than websites that don’t post blogs.

Top Hack:  It is even possible to write a blog post and add a video to it to increase user engagement. It will also help you rank higher in SERPs. 

Therefore, based on your industry, you have to pick the best content formats and give the highest priority to blog posts. 

7. Build pillar pages for each topic

If you want to rank your website in search engines, try to create pillar pages. Pick a pillar topic and create a page or post that gives an overview of the topic. In a pillar page, you can describe the main broad topic and give readers a brief introduction to subtopics that you will discuss in other blog posts. Your pillar pages must align with your business needs and the products or services you are providing. That way, it is easier for potential customers to find you when they search for you on Google or other search engines. Also, keeping search intent in mind is important. Creating pillar pages works well for SEO; by implementing this, you can see tremendous results. 

8. Create an editorial calendar

It takes time to build up a good foundation for SEO content that is both relevant and useful. Once you establish this, your next step is to evaluate how you can improve the content even further so that it can rank for more keywords.

This is where an editorial calendar comes in handy. It is a tool that helps you organize your strategy. You can use the calendar to track the content you’ve already created as well as what is left out. It is possible to plan when you will create, edit and post content that helps in keeping the entire team in a loop. It’s easy to add new content to your schedule once you have everything written out ahead of time and to ensure you are posting enough content pieces. 

With a content calendar, you can make better decisions about what content to create because you have deadlines in mind. Try your best to plan 3-4 weeks in advance. 

Here are a few content calendar templates for you. 

9. Work on link-building 

So far, we have seen on-page SEO copywriting tips. Now it’s time for one from the off-page category. And that is link building. It involves attracting inbound links, also known as backlinks, to your website from other sites. 

Usually, you have to get a higher authority website to link to your contact in order to see good results. You have to invest time in finding out different ways of attracting inbound links. You can start with a link exchange with other websites or write guest posts to get backlinks to your website. Authority link building will give you results beyond your expectation and is worth the time and energy you invest in it. 

10. Compress media files before uploading them to your site

Optimizing your blog post or website for search engines involves making it mobile-friendly. Images, infographics, and videos that you add to your content are good for engaging readers’ attention, but at the same time, when they are too large, it can be difficult for the browser to display them. Mobile browsers can have a tough time in particular because the bandwidth for mobile devices is usually smaller.

Therefore, to increase your website’s page loading speed, you must ensure that the images and files are smaller. The only way out is to compress them. So, before you upload the images on WordPress, it is advisable to compress them using tools (there are many free tools to help you out) as your mobile SEO strategy. Ideally, try to keep the file size in KB range.  

11. Host your own content

You need to host your content on your platform. This is because several websites have removed guest contributions from their websites in the past, severely impacting rankings. Guest writers literally lost them overnight. The best way out is to focus on prioritizing posting your articles on your website. However, this does not mean you should not partner with other websites or write a guest post. You can still do it but prioritize hosting your blog post so that nobody can take them away from you.

12. Regularly update and maintain existing content

Google’s algorithm rewards websites that constantly evolve and adapt to changing trends and new information. That’s why keeping your content fresh and up to date is a critical part of your SEO strategy. It would help if you were looking to update the content at least once every month. That gives you the best chance of keeping relevant and fresh.

While updating content, you can keep the original version of the post and add some additional content to it. Sometimes, you might want to remove some content that isn’t relevant anymore and replace it with new information. For example, you’re publishing a guide to becoming a web designer and notice that a lot of the information is outdated. Rather than removing the entire article, you can rewrite it and make it more relevant to the target audience. 

13. Track your success

To understand whether your B2B SEO content strategy is working or not, you must analyze content performance. Here are a few metrics to monitor:

• Organic traffic to your website.
• The number of links generated.
• Domain rating.
• Conversions. 

However, you have to first find out what your business is focusing on, and based on that, you have to measure the content marketing KPIs & metrics. This way, you will understand where to focus more on and what changes to make. Measuring your success is the most important part of any strategy. You must know how well it works before you can build future plans.

Look at these content marketing examples.

14. Stay up-to-date on SEO news and best practices

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a constantly changing field. New research gets published, new algorithms are released, and more blogs crop up than you can track. It can be hard to keep up with all this change, but you have to invest time and energy to know what approach is the “best” way to optimize a site for search engines. This calls for hard work and hours of learning, but that’s the only way to achieve results.  

Check out this post to learn all about content marketing.

Build An Effective SEO Content Strategy 

To sum things up, creating an SEO content marketing strategy is not as difficult as you’d think. Simply put, you want to do everything you can to ensure that you create content that will be useful and accessible to your target audience. To make this happen, you need to consider many different factors, like the type of content you want to produce, the keywords, and the links you need to create to make the most of your efforts. With these SEO & content marketing tips, you’ll be able to create a solid foundation for a content strategy for SEO, provide a great user experience and start getting the results you want sooner than you know it.

Here’s a look at the content marketing guide.

FAQs