How have you been creating your content all this while? Does it have a form, flow and structure to it? Does it have an objective, or at the very least, make logical sense? If not, then it’s time you sit down and read this article to understand why everything you are doing right now is wrong.
Just producing content randomly without any thought, and praying to the SEO gods won’t yield any result. For a more effective approach to SEO content, PR firms and marketing agencies usually commit to a much more methodical SEO content strategy that reaps infinite rewards.
Need more guidance? Here are some of the steps you should follow to define your SEO content strategy and make it better –
Know what your SEO goals are and list them down
As a brand, business or simply a website, it is important that you define your goal before embarking on an SEO content strategy. Is it leads that you are looking at or simply brand awareness? Do you want increased readership or more traffic? Once you know your goal, it will help you easily determine the kind of content your focus should be on.
Consider this – if your main goal is to drive sales for a product on your website, you may want to create content that is both informative and attractive, also optimized for search and conversions. Next, you could have some blog posts that highlight the sage or benefits of the product you are trying to sell. You could also link these pieces of contents to other relevant pages. Then if your goal is readability, you might want to create more content such as long-form articles or videos or documentaries. Basically, everything depends on your goals for the business/brand/website.
Who is your audience?
Do you know who is going to buy your product or service before you start promoting it?
Knowing your audience is a very important step towards creating or promoting your SEO content. For that you can take the help of surveys to help you gauge who your typical website visitor or client would be. You could also create some sort of a marketing persona to represent your brand. For example, if there is a B2B brand, the level and quality of content will be vastly different from that of a regular B2C brand. There will be whitepapers, PPTs, case studies, or something else more relevant altogether. If your audience is young adults, your content has to be littered with pop culture references or anything else that is trending.
Create a strict content creation calendar
The next step in the process of creating effective SEO content is to have a fixed editorial calendar that denotes what kind of content has to be posted on what day. This schedule of content will basically dictate your publishing, and help you stick to the process much better. And once you know what you are going to be posting every day, you will be much better prepared to create that content, instead of scrambling for something random at the last moment.
As for creating a content calendar, you can use Google Sheets and assign different things to different people in your team. You could set up reminders or even drop comments. You can probably schedule a certain type of content on a certain day to know the kind of content beforehand. Like you could do videos on Mondays and blog posts on Wednesdays, whatever works best for you. But remember to optimize them, no matter what.
Stay on top of your analytics and always re-assess your priorities
In order to know if your strategy is working or not, it is crucial that you always remain on top of your site analytics. Keep checking your SEO content and see what is working and what isn’t. To check whether your efforts are bearing fruit, refer to pageviews, traffic, links, likes, comments, etc, and always compare it over a period of time to effectively chart progress. If you see certain strategies are giving you great results, don’t hesitate to repeat them in a different way. If something isn’t working, first analyze the reasons before completely scrapping it. Who knows, maybe tweaking it a little could end up doing wonders for your brand.
Creating SEO content is honestly no rocket science. There are just some basic ground rules that you must follow, and you will learn how to create it in no time. The rest, as they say, will keep falling in place as and when you grow and learn the nuances of SEO content. But always remember, patience and perseverance are very crucial to success in SEO content. The most experienced marketing and PR agencies know this already and hence see the amount of success that they do. You cannot simply wish and wait overnight to see success on your strategy. Be persistent and be disciplined, and your SEO efforts will reap reward for you like no other marketing or content strategy ever will.