In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, creating a solid content strategy is essential for any business looking to improve its search engine optimization (SEO). For small business owners and content strategists alike, understanding and implementing a comprehensive content strategy can be the key to standing out and building engagement.
A content strategy isn't just about creating and distributing content; it's about ensuring that every piece of content you produce is aligned with your business goals and tailored to your audience's needs. By focusing on long-term results, a well-executed content strategy can significantly boost your website's visibility, drive more traffic, and ultimately lead to increased conversions.
Keep reading to learn about the foundations of a stellar content strategy, and the key tactics that can be deployed.
The Importance of a Content Strategy
A content strategy serves as the backbone of your SEO efforts. It provides a roadmap for creating and publishing content that aligns with your business goals. But it’s important to understand this clearly before proceeding, starting with the definition.
The definition of a content strategy is best described by Kristina Halvorson, who created the term in her 2009 book, Content Strategy for the Web: “A content strategy is the ongoing practice of planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable, and effective content about a particular topic or set of topics.” A content strategy will usually define the following:
The point of the content (business objective or user need)
Who will own, create, measure, and maintain the information
How and where the content will best meet users’ needs (formats, channels, style, tone, word usage, etc.)
How the content should be structured, tagged, and organized for findability and contextual visibility
How the content will be published and fit in the overall experience
By following a structured content strategy, you can expect to achieve the following:
Improve search engine rankings: Well-optimized content can boost your visibility in search results, driving more organic traffic to your website.
Build brand awareness: Consistent, high-quality content helps establish your brand as an authority in your industry, and market. It also provides an avenue to grow your audience and users outside of your existing web pages that promote a product or service.
Generate leads and conversions: Engaging content can attract potential customers and encourage them to engage, such as making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter.
Enhance user experience: A well-structured content strategy ensures that your message remains consistent and delivers valuable information to your visitors.
Building a Content Strategy:
Before a content strategy can be rolled out, and before tactics can be carried out, it’s essential to build the foundations to help create a guiding light for all of the work that will be scheduled. Whilst also being pro-active and making sure your team has the capacity to implement the tactics that will deliver on the objectives.
Identifying Core Content Themes:
Creating clear content themes, also referred to as content pillars, will help create a consistent approach that can assist with building topical authority, and allow for a consistent launch of content that has been researched and aligns with the target audience. This is an area that should be given a significant amount of time to research and plan.
Read our recent post, that expands on the keyword research tools available to assist with this process: Essential SEO Tools for Small Businesses.
User Profiles:
Understanding your target audience is key to creating content that resonates. Work on developing detailed user profiles that outline the demographics, behaviors, and needs of your ideal customers, to ensure your content strategy aligns with their interests and needs. If you have many different types of users, then this should be reflected in the tactics, to ensure you are providing the right content for the full spectrum of interests.
Setting Goals & Objectives:
Clearly define the goals and objectives of your content strategy, whether it’s increasing website traffic, improving engagement, or driving conversions. These benchmarks will help determine if the strategies are working and provide an opportunity to pivot where necessary.
This requires access to the relevant tools to track this data. For example:
Have you got access to Search Console and GA4 to monitor organic traffic?
Do you have Content Management System (CMS) access to track new subscribers, or conversions?
Have you got access to an email marketing tool to track subscriber information and analytics?
Planning & Scheduling:
Effective content planning and scheduling is fundamental to a well-executed content strategy. Create a content calendar that outlines when, and where, each piece of content will be published. Therefore, ensuring consistency and controlling the delivery across different platforms. This will also help guarantee that your team can execute on the plan.
Strategy 1: Client, Competitor, and Search Insights
The first strategy focuses on understanding your positioning by analyzing your client, or business, competitor tactics, and search trends. Identifying keyword gaps and leveraging tools like SEMRush, and Ahrefs, to discover new opportunities. This strategy looks to not only improve your search visibility, but also reduce any gaps that exist between your domain and online competitors.
Tactics:
Identify Keyword Gaps:
If you have implemented keyword tracking, it becomes possible to monitor how your domain is ranking against selected competitors. If you spot areas where you are underperforming this provides an opportunity to find out why and make the necessary improvements.
High Search Volume, Low Competition Keywords:
Use SEMRush Keyword Magic Tool to identify low competition and high search volume terms that can be targeted. This approach can be used with any keyword ranking tool to assess keywords that provide access to users with little competition. It's vital that you only select terms that are relevant to your business.
Competitor Analysis:
Investigate top performing competitors to find out what content is performing well for specific search terms. Reverse engineering what made their content perform well is a great method to understand the improvements that you can make both on-page and off-page.
Gather Customer Questions + Google PAA Results:
Asking clients to provide details on recurring customer questions, and diving into Google 'People also Ask' (PAA) results (tools exist that make it easy to scrape this content, e.g. SEOMinion) to find out what questions your target audience are looking to be answered.
Identify Existing Opportunities:
Identify if there is an opportunity to re-purpose a successful newsletter, social media post, or video that has got a great reaction into a blog post. Or content that can be added to improve existing category or product/service pages.
Complete Keyword Research & Gather Search Volumes:
Using Google Keyword Planner & SEMrush Keyword Planner combine the avg. monthly search volumes to determine a potential traffic number for each theme/topic. This is a great way to identify where you should focus your time.
Use Google Trends to Evaluate Trends and Seasonal Interest:
Google Trends can help shine light on trends that are increasing and decreasing over time, thus helping predict if search volumes will increase or decrease over time for specific themes/topics. It's also possible to compare similar phrases help identify if there’s any correlation between specific terms and the date - lots of keywords will have a seasonal spike.
Strategy 2: Content Creation and Optimization
Once you have your insights, it's time to create and optimize content that aligns with your findings. This strategy involves producing various types of content and ensuring it is well-optimized for both search engines and users.
Tactics:
Establish Content Guidelines:
Obtain, or create, guidance relating to tone of voice, branding, and user personas.
Determine Content Location (category pages, product pages, blog posts):
Different tactics and keyword targeting will be implemented, depending on the type of landing page.
Determine Frequency of Updates:
The frequency of posting and updates will be determined by the type of content (e.g. on-page content & blog posts)
Build Content Strategy and Blog Calendar:
The content strategy, and blog, calendar will feature the schedule for the content that will be published alongside the relevant details. Such as the 'target search terms', 'the items that are being progressed', and the 'content themes'.
Create Content Briefs:
A content brief will contain the purpose and purpose of each content change, or blog post. The wireframes and keyword guidance will be included. These can be used as part of a process that required feedback.
Identify Stage of The Marketing Funnel & Intent
Strategy 3: Content Updates and Refresh
The final strategy is about continuously monitoring the performance of your content and making necessary adjustments. SEO is not a set-it-and-forget-it process; it requires ongoing adjustments and refinement to stay competitive.
Tactics:
Improve Top performing Content: Gather insights into the top performing content pieces to determine why it has proved popular.
For example, use Search Console to isolate your performing content; 1. Visit Search Console, 2. Filter the last 28 days, 3. Export the data, 4. View 'Queries' in positions 2-20 OR View 'Pages' in positions 2-20, 5. Refresh and optimize content to improve targeting for those terms.
Identify Underperforming Content:
Analyze your content and data to identify pieces that are not performing as expected based on keyword targeting or user engagement.
Consider if there is room for improvement through improved keyword targeting or adding additional content that will improve the user experience (UX).
Always consider the concept of removing content that has become outdated or simply is not receiving any traffic. This should be a task that is carried out each year, to help make sure there’s no content that exists which may provide incorrect information or is simply is no longer valid.
Content Refresh and Updates:
Regularly update existing content, alongside new content, to keep it fresh, accurate, and relevant. This applies to every page across your site, e.g. product pages, contact pages, blog posts, promotions, etc...
Opportunity to change focus of the content, expand with additional content, refresh, or re-evaluate target keywords and search volumes.
Incorporate new information, improve readability, and optimize for SEO. This is where the first strategy can be used to help inform the changes, based on existing ranking data.
Consider adding new sections, visuals, or examples to enhance user engagement.
Conclusion
Creating a content strategy is a powerful way to improve your SEO and drive long-term success for your business. By focusing on the right strategies and implementing the associated tactics, you can ensure that your content not only ranks well in search engines but also resonates with your target audience. Remember, SEO is an ongoing process, and regularly revisiting and refining your content strategy is key to maintaining and growing your online presence.
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