Definition: SEO content strategy
What is an SEO content strategy?
An SEO content strategy is a plan for creating and publishing high-quality content that is optimized for search engines to drive more visitors to your website.
It works hand-in-hand with your content marketing strategy to help get your content in front of the right audiences — and ultimately drive conversions.
What are the benefits of an effective SEO content strategy?
A good SEO content strategy can:
- Send more traffic to your website — by helping your content rank higher in the search engine result pages (SERPs).
- Inspire the creation of more relevant, search-focused content — meaning better user and content experiences.
- Ensure that your organic SEO works harder for you — helping you reach target audiences more cost-effectively.
How to create an SEO content strategy
1. Get to know your audience
It’s still important for organizations to create original content that resonates with audiences, meaning that — even with the emergence of generative AI tools — organizations still need to work hard to understand their audience's needs, interests, pain points, and preferences.
2. Use keyword research
Keywords are the building blocks of any SEO strategy, and keyword research helps you to identify the words and phrases your audience uses in their searches when they're looking for information, products, and services.
Don’t simply stack your keyword list with 'high-volume' competitive keywords though; these broad terms may have higher potential traffic, but they’re also incredibly harder to rank for.
Instead, try to focus on "long-tail" keywords which are specific phrases that are less competitive and more likely to match a user's search intent.
3. Pinpoint the right content topics and types
After you’ve done your keyword research, sort your findings into topics that match your audience’s interests, needs, and pain points. Your main topics will become your 'content pillars'.
Next, spend some time ascertaining which content types are going to resonate most with your audience. Can you mix and match content types — for example, could an article be reworked into a social media post or a video?
4. Optimize your content
Google’s algorithms, including its August 2022 helpful content update, put more focus on creating relevant content for people — not search engines.
It's just one more reason to try and make any optimizations you want to your content from the very start of the content creation process. Plus, tactics like using the right content templates can ensure that your drafts are optimized from the beginning.
5. Decide how you'll track and analyze how your content performs
While 'traffic' is a primary metric to analyze, you should also pay attention to other metrics that may indicate high or low engagement, including things like bounce rate, time on page, conversions, and page rankings.
6. Update content regularly
The 'freshness' of your content is a Google Search ranking factor, but that doesn’t mean you need to keep creating brand-new content.
Instead, consider pairing new content initiatives with any relevant regular existing content you can revise and update; especially if this content matches the types of queries Google notes as demanding fresh information — such as breaking news queries, product queries, and pricing queries.
In fact, Google’s evaluation guidelines explicitly state that “unmaintained/abandoned ‘old’ websites or unmaintained and inaccurate/misleading content is a reason for a low Page Quality rating.”
