Creating an SEO Content Strategy

Are you struggling to get noticed in the digital world? Creating a solid SEO content strategy is usually the first step to turning things around.

SEO (search engine optimization) boosts your website’s ranking with Google, making it easier for potential customers to find you online. It can even improve your organic CTR (click-through rate) by as much as 39.8%. This means that people will not only find your website easier, they’ll be more ready to convert which means more leads and, ultimately, sales.

However, the tactics for an effective SEO content marketing strategy evolve over time, so you have to make sure you know what’s working now. Whether you’re designing a new content strategy for SEO or updating your previous digital marketing approach, we’ll walk you through everything your content marketing plan needs in the modern online marketing landscape.

Key Elements of an SEO Content Strategy

First, let’s define what we mean when we talk about an SEO content strategy.

What is an SEO content strategy? It’s the combination of researching, creating, optimizing and publishing strategic content on your website with the intent to rank for higher on SERPS (search engine results pages) with those pages. SEO content strategy starts with auditing your current website, seeing what is or isn’t working, and then creating a plan to bring in more online traffic, leads and sales. The key elements of any good SEO content strategy include:

• SEO Site Audit
• Competitive Analysis
• In-depth Keyword Research
• SEO Content Creation
• On-Page Optimization / Technical SEO
• High-Quality Link Building
• Monthly Reporting/Tracking

In this blog, we’ll cover each of these elements and how you can turn them into an actionable SEO content strategy for your website.

1. Invest in an SEO Site Audit

The first thing you should do when creating an SEO content strategy is analyze the current performance of your website. How many pages are on your site? How many of those pages are ranking for keywords? How many of those keywords are actually bringing in traffic? Without understanding how your site is currently performing on the search results, it’s hard to create a substantial plan getting you to the next level. Here is how you would perform a website audit:

Measure Overall Site Performance

Whenever we do a site content audit for clients before creating a strategy, we first look at the overall performance of the site. Namely, how many keywords does it rank for overall? How much traffic is the site bringing in on a month-to-month basis? Here’s a quick list of what we try to glean from the website as a whole:

• Age of site: Is it brand new? Did you just migrate it to a new domain? Has it been around for years? The age of your site, and it’s history of ranking, can tell you a lot about how it might perform going forward. For instance, if the site is brand new and it’s not ranking, then it could potentially be due to not having been on Google’s radar for long enough, not having enough content on the site, etc. If your site has been around for years and has historically never ranked (but has content on the site), there may be some bigger issues (typically technical, or having to do with how your site is built) that may be the real issue instead of just not having created enough content or done enough SEO.
• Site Structure: What is the hierarchy of the site? Does it highlight it’s main products/services/locations on the website? Is there any sort of structure on the site showing the most important pages on the site with additional subpages to support them? Does it give Google enough context as to what this company does and where it does business?
• Domain Authority Score: Depending on the SEO research tool you use, this will be displayed differently, but ultimately it’s giving you a score of 1-100 (1 being the worst, 100 being the best) of how dominant/authoritative your site is in the eyes of Google. A low domain authority score could be the reason why Google doesn’t take your site seriously, and would need to be remedied through your SEO content strategy.
• # of pages: Does the site not have very much content to begin with? Typically, sites with only a few pages rank for fewer keywords.
• Total monthly keywords: The number of keywords on your site can be drilled down even further into keywords in the top 3, top 10, (those ranking high enough to actually get traffic) etc., but for this exercise, just knowing the total number of keywords on your site can give you an idea of your current organic profile. Does Google trust your site enough to rank it consistently for keywords or not? What types of keywords are you generally winning? Are you only winning branded keywords that have to do with your company name, or are you winning the types of terms people would actually type in to find a company like yours?
• Total monthly traffic: This metric is related to monthly keywords, but also becomes the basis for all SEO content strategy efforts and tracking going forward.
• Total backlinks: Does the site have very many backlinks coming back to it from other sites? If you have a lot of pretty good content on your site but few backlinks, that might be the missing piece to boost your site in the rankings.

Identify Performing Pages VS Opportunity Pages

The next thing we like to separate in our SEO content audit is the performing pages from what we call “opportunity pages”. We traditionally define performing pages on your site as ones that have keywords ranking in the top 10 and are bringing in traffic. These are pretty easy to identify, because they’ll come up at the top of all of your reporting from either keyword research tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs, or Google Analytics. But, you may not realize that these pages are also your best candidates for link building! We’ll cover this more in-depth below, but knowing which pages these are as well as what keywords are currently ranking on these pages is an important step in creating an effective SEO content strategy.

Opportunity pages, on the other hand, are the best kept secret on your site. We define opportunity pages as the pages on your site ranking for multiple keywords (typically 5 to 10 or more) but none high enough that they’re actually bringing in traffic. Most small businesses don’t even consider these pages when creating an SEO strategy because they’re not super easy to identify. If pages aren’t bringing in traffic or ranking for your top keywords that you’re tracking, you’ll likely pass over them. But this is a huge mistake! Opportunity pages are ones where Google has awarded them ranking, but they just need a little work to really perform. This might come in the form of on-page SEO through an SEO content refresh, or they might also be candidates for strategic link building.

2. Conduct Competitor Website Analysis

What’s that saying? You don’t have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun the friend next to you? Similarly, SEO is a non-stop race, so it’s not really about “winning” anything in particular but more about continually beating out your competition. In order to develop a successful SEO content strategy, you need to know how fast your competitors are running online.

Look For Competitive SEO Opportunities

Using tools like SEMrush, you can also quickly analyze your top competitors to see your biggest keyword opportunities (or keywords that are related to all of you that your competitors aren’t currently ranking for). These keywords represent potential quick wins and opportunities for deeper content creation.

Using this and any competitor audit information you find can help you to reverse engineer what your competitor’s strategies are to rank for the keywords that they’ve gotten so far. For instance, maybe they are better utilizing their main nav within their site structure to highlight their individual services (targeting specific keyword phrases on each page), or maybe they’ve created a specific location page for each of their geographical markets to capitalize on searches with local intent. This is where you can take the best parts of your competitor strategies and add / improve upon them for your own SEO content strategy.

Analyze 3-5 Competitors

How many competitors should you analyze? There is no hard and fast rule as to how many competitors you should look into when creating your SEO content strategy, but a good rule of thumb is to at least pick 3.  Also, if you’re in an industry that’s a little immature when it comes to SEO and online marketing, try to find some related companies that are winning keywords you would like to win, so you have some good sites to emulate when it comes to creating your own SEO content strategy.

Similarly to how you ran an SEO site audit on your own website, you’d also want to conduct competitor analysis by doing an abbreviated version of the site content audit we talked about above for your competitors. Creating a graph showing your site in relation to your competitors as far as domain authority, keywords ranking, total monthly traffic and total backlinks can be a nice snapshot to help you develop a plan of action to close any gaps (or capitalize on any opportunities) you find.

3. Perform In-Depth Keyword Research and Analysis

Almost all good SEO content strategies start with finding the right keywords and topics for your site. From your SEO site audit and competitive analysis, you should have an idea of what keywords you’re currently ranking for as well as keywords your competitors are ranking for that you would like to rank for as well. This is a great starting point to start digging into additional keyword research for your site.

Create a List of Top Keywords

When starting your keyword research for your website’s SEO content strategy, it’s always good practice to create a list of the most impactful keywords you would like to win on your site. These keywords would be the words and phrases that most accurately describe your products and services – essentially, the keywords your customers would type in to find a company exactly like yours. We like to create a list of around 25 keyword “pillars” that represent the most important categories of keywords you want to win on your site. When creating this list of top SEO keywords for your content strategy, you’ll want to consider a few important things:

• Search Volume: This is the number of monthly searches this keyword gets every month. This provides some market research insight into how many people search for these terms and the potential traffic you could capture by ranking for it.
• Keyword Difficulty: This is shown on keyword research tools on a scale from 1-100 (1 being the easiest to win, 100 being the hardest). It gauges keywords by how many other websites are already targeting and ranking for these types of keywords.
• Relevancy: How relevant are these keywords to your actual sales funnel? Will these keywords drive leads, sales from customers or are they too broad?
• Intent: Does the searcher have informational, commercial or transactional intent when searching this phrase? For instance, a “How to” type keyword is informational – people are looking for how to do it. Whereas someone searching for “plumbing companies near me” is likely looking to make a purchase or transaction at the end of their search journey.

Consider Short-Tail vs Long-Tail Keywords

One extremely important point to keep in mind when doing keyword research for your SEO content strategy is, believe it or not, the length of the keyword phrase your targeting. A short-tail keyword is typically a keyword phrase with only 1-3 words included in the phrase. This type of keyword usually has much higher search volume and higher keyword difficulty (more competitive), but also lacks any context as to what the searcher is actually looking for. For instance, if you sell mountain bikes online, a short-tail keyword like “bikes” with a bajillion searches a month might seem like a great keyword to put on your list. Outside of it being uber-competitive, though, how relevant is it to your actual customer base? What does someone searching this term actually want to know about bikes? How much they cost? How much they weigh? Different types? This short-tail keyword is likely too broad to be helpful for an effective SEO content strategy. You need an identifier that makes this keyword more specific – see next point.

Long-tail keywords, on the other hand, are keyword phrases that typically have 4-7 words in them. These longer keyword phrases usually have a smaller search volume (hence why so many small businesses overlook them) and a lower keyword difficulty, but provide you with a lot more context as to what the searcher was hoping to accomplish when typing it into Google. This more specific phrase allows you to more accurately create content that answers user’s questions (which Google loves), is less difficult to win, and brings you in more qualified traffic. Getting 20 people a month to your website looking to actually buy your product or service is worth more than 200 visits from people that aren’t actually looking to buy what you’re offering.

Use SEO Tools for Deeper Research & Strategy

If you’re serious about creating a successful SEO content strategy, start using SEO keyword research software to find topics, information on your competition, and long-tail keywords more quickly. We’re fans of Semrush here at BKA Content. With it, you can audit your site, research appropriate topics and keywords, and get insights into site traffic. SEMrush, in our opinion, has the most accurate keyword data for site content and allows you to track keyword momentum on your site.

If you’re not ready to invest in an advanced keyword research tool from the likes of SEMrush or Ahrefs, you can start with free tools like Google Keyword Planner. Another option is to invest in a proven SEO company (like us!) that has a track record of using SEO content strategies to rank on Google. Whichever way you decide to go, just start finding ways to automate your process sooner rather than later because your competitors who are ranking are, and you’ll need that to keep up.