According to 2020 data from Tim Soulo of Ahrefs, 90% of content on the web receives no traffic from Google. Therefore, optimizing content for SEO is essential to increasing your site’s organic traffic and ensuring that your content is written in a way that reaches the most people possible.
In this article, our experts explain how to implement an effective SEO-optimized content strategy.
How do you identify your objectives and key performance indicators?
The first step in defining a content marketing strategy is obviously to know your brand as a whole: what is its identity? What are its values and market positioning? Each brand has its history that needs to be known to develop a relevant content strategy. In addition to its history, it is also necessary to understand its products and services to define the target and the editorial line to follow.
Then comes a second step: defining the objectives, to refine the strategy accordingly. What do you want to achieve with your brand:
– Prospect new targets?
– Convert prospects?
– Increase customer loyalty?
– Improve its ranking in search results?
– Develop its notoriety?
– Increase your authority on the web?
Based on these questions, you can guide the editorial strategy to meet the brand’s objectives. It is also necessary to set specific goals and key performance indicators that will help you drive the content strategy from start to finish. To do this, start by defining your SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely) objectives. These are essential to set the milestones for an efficient content strategy. Let’s move on to key performance indicators. These data should be fixed from the start to set up forecasts and then evaluate your performance. These indicators can be:
- The positioning of your content in the search results
- Traffic on your website
- Reactions generated by the content on social networks
- Conversion rate
- Contact requests
- Etc.
How to choose your keywords based on your personas?
The most crucial step to creating effective content is to choose your keywords. To do this, you must first know your target audience. Ask yourself what words people type on Google when they are looking for you or your industry in general, or what are the common questions they ask about you.
In fact, the more you understand your personas, the more detailed your insights will be. Your list of seed keywords will only be more complete and accurate.
Having information about your personas’ industry, the size of their company, and the tools they need to do their job can be a starting point for collecting relevant keywords.
For example, if you find out that your target persona works in the hotel industry, with a team of 25 people, and typically uses tools for hotel reservations and accounting, you’ll know that “hotel management software” is a keyword that may be of interest. It is important to know that keywords are useless without a user intent analysis. User intent defines what a user is looking for when making a query on the search engine. Google uses four types of “micro-moments” for queries to classify user intent:
- Know – The user is looking for information.
- Go – The user wants to navigate to a site.
- Do – The user seeks more detailed instructions for performing a specific task.
- Buy – The user is ready to make a purchase.
From there, you can expand your original keyword list and refine it with related short-tail and long-tail keywords. Some of the tools our experts at Eminence recommend to help you identify relevant keywords include Ahrefs, Moz, and Semrush. From there, you can expand your original keyword list and refine it with related short-tail and long-tail keywords.
→ CRO and SEO, the winning combination!
How to set up an editorial plan for SEO content?
Having a variety of quality, SEO-optimized content is good, but it’s not enough, as a good SEO content strategy should be planned for the long term. When you’re ready to create your SEO content schedule, gather all the relevant elements:
- Your list of keywords and ideas
- User intent
- The user’s engagement cycle
- Your website
Start by mapping the important keywords according to the maturity level of the user in the SEO engagement cycle: is the user in the informational search phase (i.e. Does he seek information about your products, pricing, etc.)? Is he in the commercial phase where he is comparing and evaluating his options before making a purchase? Or is he doing navigational searches (i.e. entering a brand name, domain name, or a specific URL)?
Once your keyword + maturity level + user intent are compared with your existing content, you will be able to optimize your content strategy and meet your SEO needs.
Finally, once the content is created, there are still a few steps to put in place to make sure it reaches the right target audience. The first one is to publish it in the right place. It is also essential to publish regularly to ensure that the content produced has an efficient SEO impact.
Accurately following up and optimizing your SEO can make a big difference in the performance of your content. You should treat it in parallel and give it real importance. It should never be dissociated from all the phases you put in place to develop your visibility on the web.
Do not hesitate to contact our experts to make an audit of your content and help you to set up an effective strategy.
Contact us: https://eminence.ch/en/contact-us/