Developing a content strategy without search engine optimization (SEO) in mind is like trying to sell lemonade without the stand.
How will anyone know you’ve got delicious, refreshing lemonade for sale? Each car that drives by or person that walks down the road will have no idea.
You can write pages and pages of content, but it won’t be beneficial to you if it’s not visible to the people who matter.
Search engine optimization and your content strategy go hand in hand.
Let Galactic Fed be your SEO and content strategy guide! From topic clusters to optimizing internal links, pair your SEO and content strategy to stay light-years ahead of the competition.
We’ve pulled together our five building blocks for ensuring your content strategy and SEO work perfectly together to help you reach more customers online and grow your business.
Keep your content updated and relevant
This step is critical.
Why?
Because outdated content can actually hurt your search engine ranking.
The first step in developing a successful content strategy is undertaking a content audit. It’s essential to understand how much content you have, where it lives, what it’s about, and how it’s performing. Every single text, image, and video should be reviewed.
It’s not always about more content but the right content.
By doing a content audit, you’ll be able to identify underperforming content and figure out why. Is a blog missing a meta description? Or is an image missing alternative text? Google looks at your website’s user experience and its content to rank your site on search results, meaning it’s all the more critical that every piece of your content is up to date and adds value to your user.
Address customer pain points
Addressing customer pain points is key. Because most online experiences start with a Google search, it’s essential to frame your content around people’s search queries. Essentially, people are searching for answers or solutions to their questions and problems. Your content needs to be the answer.
Customer pain points can be:
- Financial
- Time-related
- Process-related, or
- Support-related.
By looking at the solution you present to people through these four categories, you can begin to frame your business and its products or services to solve their problem and identify what’s needed to make them a happy customer.
Spend some time on social media to explore common issues people discuss concerning your product or service. LinkedIn and Facebook are great, free resources for researching what and how people are talking about a problem they have.
Also, take a peek at how your competitors address customer pain points. Your offer should present your unique solution to their problem. Our Fed Fix series is dedicated to helping you solve the most challenging problems facing your business, including figuring out if your business needs a lead generation campaign.
Set your content creators up for success
Ensure your whole team is on the same page and is working towards the same goal by creating an editorial calendar.
As a minimum, your editorial calendar should include target keywords pulled from your keyword research, what topic cluster each new piece of content will belong to, and a meta description ready to publish alongside the content when it’s scheduled to go live.
Optimize internal and external links
A powerful way to increase organic traffic is by strengthening your internal and external links. Easier said than done? It doesn’t have to be.
Start small by ensuring complementary content on your site links between each other. For a more advanced approach, develop a buyer journey, and create a pathway of links with relevant content that guides the user towards conversion. Creating a linked internal content path allows you to share page authority between content pieces while meeting your users’ needs.
To gain external links, your content needs high linkability. How do you make your content linkable? There are several ways to promote link building:
- Publish new research or findings
- Expand on or explore a topic in more depth
- Improve your page load speed
- Cite reputable sources
- Boost readability (with headings and subheadings, a table of contents, bold text, lists, and high-quality images or infographics.
Focus on topic clusters
Source: HubSpot
You’ve hopefully already done robust keyword research. If not, check out our definitive guide to keyword research to help you get started.
To supercharge your keyword strategy, try building a topic map for your business.
Because of Google’s ranking methodologies and changes in the way people search for information online, it’s vital to optimize your content around topic clusters instead of focusing only on matching exact keywords.
Your keyword strategy plays a big part in determining which topics to go after. Still, search engines consider the entire content eco-system when delivering results to internet surfers, not just focusing on single-page optimization.
Content Strategy & SEO: the perfect match
The moral of the story: you can’t have one without the other.
Perform a content audit to understand what, where, and why you have to content you do and how it’s helping improve your SEO and reach your business goals.
Create the right content that addresses your customer’s pain points and make sure it’s back up by metadata so Google will favor it and rank it on search engine results. An editorial calendar will ensure everyone that creates content for your site understands how SEO factors into each new piece of content.
By clustering your content by topic, you can ensure Google’s algorithm notices your web pages and gives you the best search ranking possible.
Finally, by focussing on link building and fine-tuning your internal links, you can drive people to your site off search engines and convert people into happy, repeat customers.
** If you want help with developing your content strategy alongside SEO, contact us today. Galactic Fed has a ton of experience crafting dynamic content strategies that boost SEO and help businesses rapidly grow.**
