How to Create an SEO-Led Content Strategy

An SEO-led content strategy maximises your opportunity to rank highly on search engines and gain organic traffic. With effective use of SEO, you increase the chance of your brand being discovered, people visiting your website and making a purchase.

Creating an SEO-led strategy is one of the best ways to give your content marketing the best chance of succeeding.

Wouldn’t it be great to know your content marketing efforts were driving the quality and quantity of leads you require?

Well, these steps will help you build an SEO-led content strategy to do just that…

Understand Your Website Performance Benchmark 

When embarking on building an effective SEO strategy, the first thing to do is understand your website’s current performance.

Carry out a content and technical audit, as this will help identify the different opportunities for your business to improve, as well as establish a baseline on which you will measure success moving forward.

This will make sure you have solid foundations for your new content to sit upon.

Identify SEO-Led content pillars and conduct keyword research

SEO results account for a large portion of search results, and as such, your SEO-led strategy has to be able to identify the most effective articles to displace them.

Look at the kind of content ranking highly for the search terms you identify. Many of these websites may not be direct competitors, but if they rank above you, they are still your competitors at the point of discovery.

To get started, create a buyer persona, i.e. someone who will benefit from working with your business. Think about this individual and consider some of their most significant pain points that lead them to look for a solution like yours. Make a list of 5-10 topics or content pillars that will be relevant to this persona, and then conduct keyword research on those topics.

Look at the search volume for each topic and create variations depending on what works most effectively for your business.

Remember to look out for possible long-tail keywords – these have smaller monthly search volumes but are more specific. They can boost your performance and conversion with people who are looking for a particular niche you can provide.

Your keywords will form the basis for all your content.

Create and format content for optimum SEO

Using all your research, begin creating and optimising your content. Aside from filling your content with keywords, make sure it’s actually useful for your audience and think about the type of content that’s best for each persona. For example, will written blogs or videos resonate most?

Don’t be afraid to move beyond written content and add tools, products or services that will help your audience such downloadable templates. Creating a variety of good content can be great for creating backlinks, which strengthen your SEO performance.

Cluster your content together according to each content pillar. You can build ‘pillar’ pages that will host the content and link it all together to improve onsite SEO. Clustering content together helps Google understand what your site is about and rank it higher.

Be sure your content is optimised not for what it contains but also for how it is formatted. If you have the right tools (or can enlist the help of professionals), you’ll be able to determine how you should be laying out your content on page.

Track and Optimise

Keep an eye on your benchmark and how your new content affects it.

SEO and content creation can also take up a considerable amount time, you’ll want to regularly check that your strategy is working. This means considering how you are ranking for each keyword you want to target, as well as tracking metrics to understand your success.

The algorithm is constantly changing and new articles are always ranked differently. So remember to continually review and optimise.