When it comes to creating an effective search engine optimization (SEO) content strategy, the first thing to know is that you’re up against a lot of competition. Most businesses running any form of digital marketing are now at least familiar with the basics of SEO, so how do you stand out when competing for higher rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs)?
Firstly, it’s important to understand that SEO content should always be designed to appeal to your target audience, but it also needs to meet the ever-changing criteria that search engines use in their rankings.
Content can take many forms, from blog posts and articles to videos or product pages. The key is to incorporate elements like carefully selected keywords, engaging headlines, and links to balance both user interest and search algorithm preferences.
Not sure where to start? I’m here to give you the basics of how to create an SEO content strategy to create high-quality content that both users and search engines love.
Why Do You Need an SEO Content Strategy?
At its core, an SEO content strategy is designed to give you a structured approach to creating and optimizing content on your website. Your primary goal with any article should always be to deliver useful, actionable content to the user, but this must be done in a way that allows a search engine to crawl, index, and rank it. Do this right, and it will help you build visibility in organic SERPs and drive traffic to your site.
Without a strategy in place, it’s easy for content to quickly become disjointed and ineffective. Not only does this lead to missed opportunities for traffic and user engagement, but it’s a waste of your time and marketing budget. A well-planned SEO content strategy makes it easier for potential customers to find you, providing them with value and addressing their specific needs or concerns.
By knowing how to create an SEO content strategy and working in alignment with it, your site content will be more organized, which helps search engines to understand the structure better, while also showing your expertise on the subject matter you’re talking about. Authority is an important ranking factor, so proving that you know your topic inside and out — and better than your competitors — is vital. Over time, you’ll build trust and credibility with your audience, becoming a go-to resource on your specific subject matter.
There are, of course, other factors to consider when it comes to SEO, like building a reputable backlink profile and ensuring that your site’s architecture is technically up to standards. This work goes hand-in-hand with your on-page SEO content strategy, which should be a significant focus of your time when investing in this marketing approach. It’s an opportunity to dive deeper into your industry, find knowledge gaps, and leverage this information into purposeful content for both audiences and search engines.
9 Steps to Effectively Building an SEO Content Strategy
1.Define Your Goals
Any new marketing efforts should begin with a discussion around goals and expected outcomes. This not only helps you to determine the direction of your campaign or strategy, but also gives you tangible benchmarks to measure success against.
Goals should be a combination of key performance indicators (KPIs), which are the measurable values you want to track (e.g., a specific number of visits to the site per month), along with any overarching desired outcomes that may not have a fixed numerical value (e.g., increased brand affinity).
2. Focus on Users First
It’s tempting to focus all of your efforts on what’s going to rank best in SERPs and attempt to “game the system,” but ultimately, this strategy rarely works. Particularly with the introduction of AI-created content, standing out with unique insights in a content-heavy world is becoming increasingly more challenging.
Focusing your content on users first, search engines second, is the best approach to take when figuring out how to create an SEO content strategy. Aim to address real user questions or concerns and think through their potential thought process to get to the heart of the search intent.
Ultimately, your goal should be to help users find what they’re looking for as quickly and easily as possible. Because by helping them, you help yourself — search engines want to reward the sites that help people learn or do something, especially if you’re able to provide expert-led insight in a way that AI-generated content can’t do.
3. Review Existing Site Content
Auditing the content you currently have on your site should always be one of the first steps in an SEO content strategy, rather than creating brand new content right away. Search engines will often reward older content that’s still relevant, particularly if you’re already ranking well on some of these pages.
It’s much harder to rank for new keywords and topics than for a topic you’re already appearing for, so don’t waste those past efforts if the topics are still relevant to your audience. Instead, refreshing this old content could have greater benefits than trying to create something from scratch.
You will likely find old blog content that you want to delete, but always check if it’s ranking first and if so, what for. From there, you need to decide if it’s worth refreshing the content or removing and redirecting it. You could also combine several posts on similar topics into a single, guide-style post as part of a refresh to make this content more relevant and up-to-date.
4. Determine Your Topic Clusters
SEO is no longer about trying to get content to rank for hundreds of single keywords. Instead, marketers are now turning their attention to creating content in topic clusters. This is a group of pages that all relate to a specific topic, typically covering the topic in a high level of detail across several posts or pages.
Topic clusters are usually built around a pillar page, which typically targets high-volume keywords on a specific topic. From there, cluster pages that are focused on more specific, long-tail and lower volume keywords still related to that topic are built out. Links are added throughout these pages to the other posts or pages on that topic.
Clusters are one of the best ways to show authority on a subject. For instance, a real estate business could create a cluster around “first-time homebuyers,” with a pillar post that discusses what first-time home buyers need to know. From there, cluster pages could be built on topics such as “getting your first mortgage,” “how to complete a home walkthrough as a first-time buyer,” and “a document checklist for buying your first home.”
5. Examine Existing Search Results
Once you have a few topics in mind for what you want to create content about, it’s always a good idea to look at what’s already ranking. Search for some of the keywords you’re hoping to use and research the type of content that’s coming up first.
Look at who is ranking for these phrases, too — if it’s large publishers like national newspapers or well-known organizations in that industry, it’s unlikely that your content will be able to outrank them (although not impossible!) For example, wedding vendors may struggle to get their content to appear above sites like The Knot or Brides.com.
Not only should you look at which sites are ranking, but what type of content they provide. In this wedding example, if search results for “best wedding venue in New York City” show roundup posts from these high-authority sites, rather than individual venues, this suggests that search engines are prioritizing aggregate information because they think that’s what users are looking for. They’re still at the top of the funnel and looking for general information, rather than details about one specific location.
If SERPs aren’t showing you what you’re hoping to see, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to give up on a topic, though. It might mean going back to the drawing board on keyword research to find more niche phrases that still answer user questions, but aren’t as competitive. For instance, instead of “best wedding venue in NYC,” a venue could get more specific with a keyword like “historic wedding venue NYC” or “modern industrial wedding venue NYC.” These alternative approaches are all part of knowing how to create an SEO content strategy.
Remember, too, that Google isn’t the only site you should be checking. A solid SEO content strategy is often a multi-channel one, and depending on the type of content you’re producing, you should also be optimizing for TikTok, YouTube, and others.
6. Create New Content
Once you’ve done plenty of research on competitors and the SERP landscape, you’re ready to actually start creating new content. Use keyword research tools like Google’s Keyword Tool, SEMRush, or Ahrefs to get started. You want to find a good balance of high-volume and low-competition keywords that you can build into your topic clusters.
When you post the new page on your site, include your keyword in the page title, the meta description, the page or post URL, and H1 tag if possible. It should also be included within the content itself a handful of times. Use synonyms and plurals to make sure everything still reads naturally.
Finally, add visually interesting pieces to your content like images or embedded videos. Don’t forget to include the keyword in alt tags on your images for accessibility purposes, and include internal links to other pieces of content on your site that’s relevant to the new content.
7. Make a Plan for Consistent Content Creation
Every piece of content you create should have a defined purpose, but it doesn’t always have to relate to a specific topic cluster. If you notice that customers are asking about a certain topic frequently, but it doesn’t necessarily fit into a cluster or need its own cluster built, you can still create content on it.
Keep track of everything you’ve created and updated, along with your plans for content creation moving forward. SEO is a long-term strategy, so don’t expect to see results overnight. Staying consistent in your posting schedule, even if that means one blog post a month, is the best way to see sustainable organic growth.
8. Keep Thinking About Every Part of the Funnel
As discussed on this blog’s guide to top of funnel marketing, you need to incorporate different types of content at different stages of the funnel. It’s important to ensure the content you’re posting at each stage is appropriate to the user journey, with more informational content at the top of the funnel, and more transactional content as you approach the bottom.
9. Create a Backlinking and Online PR Strategy
Having a treasure trove of excellent content on your site is great, but you need people to see it. While you’re waiting for search engines to crawl and index your content, you should also be thinking about other distribution channels you can use.
Aside from posting on your social media platforms, you should also think about how you can build backlinks to this content from other sites. This might mean reaching out to local businesses asking if they’d like to share your content, or even creating content on their site with a link back to yours.
Another approach is working with journalists to become an expert source that they can reach out to when they’re working on new articles. This can be an excellent strategy for getting your site linked from highly reputable media publications.
How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your SEO Content Strategy
When you’re investing significant time and resources into SEO, you want to know that your efforts are paying off. Tracking and measuring your content’s performance is an essential part of knowing how to create an SEO content strategy, since this shows you what’s working well and where you may need to make changes in future content creation.
Rankings
As you create more content, you should begin to see your site appearing in search results for an increasing number of related keywords. Tracking these results in tools like SEMRush, RankWatch, SERPWatcher, and Google Search Console will give you a good idea of what your site is ranking for and the content being ranked.
Organic Traffic Visits and Engagement
Review the number of people visiting the site each month that come from organic search — not just Google, but other search engines, too. You should also look at metrics related to these searchers like time on page, bounce rate, and pages per session. All of this data can be found in a tool like Google Analytics, which is free to use.
Conversions
If you have forms or purchase options on your site, you can track whether your new content is helping to increase completions of these. Google Analytics gives you the option to set up conversion goals to make it easier to see the customer journey from where they landed on the site to taking a conversion action.
Social Shares and Referrals
Tracking how often your content is shared on social media can also give you important insights into your content’s overall performance. Social media analytics tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, and Sprout Social can all provide this information, along with native platform analytics on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
Key Takeaways
Understanding how to create an SEO content strategy is essential for driving organic traffic to your site, improving your search visibility, and building a sustainable online presence. By focusing on your audience’s needs and aligning your content with search engine best practices, you can create valuable, high-quality content that stands out.
Your SEO content strategy isn’t a once-and-done effort. Instead, this should be a fundamental foundation of your digital marketing strategy and an ongoing process that adapts and evolves with your audience and the changing digital landscape.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is an SEO content strategist?
An SEO content strategist is a professional marketer with expertise in both SEO and content development. They typically have some technical SEO knowledge, along with creative content marketing experience.
Is SEO part of content strategy?
Yes, SEO is an essential part of a content strategy. A well-planned content strategy integrates information that’s helpful and aligned with an audience’s needs, while also ensuring the content follows SEO best practices to make it discoverable by search engines.
How do you write SEO content?
To write SEO content, start with researching topics and keywords that align with audience search intent. From there, you can create written or visual content that incorporates those keywords naturally. Adding links helps to provide more context for readers, while also improving site structure.
