How to Set Up an SEO Content Strategy

Content SEO strategy is the backbone of SEO promotion. Its goal is to attract the target audience through publishing information, gaining their trust and motivating them to take the action you need.

Effective SEO promotion is hard to imagine without a well-thought-out content strategy. It doesn’t matter what product or service you are engaged in, you need a strong information base to promote them. By creating texts, videos, or graphic materials that help solve a particular problem of the target audience, you can create a special trust in the brand. They will come to you, again and again, sharing useful information with friends.

Content marketing can contribute to your business in the following ways:

• to create an image of an expert and a real specialist in your field, to whom your visitors can always turn for useful recommendations;
• to increase the degree of trust in the brand through effective assistance in solving any problem;
• to increase the authority of the site for search engines and improve its position due to
• the natural growth of the link mass;
• traffic growth;
• improvement of behavioral factors;
• an increase in the number of optimized queries;
• increase brand awareness;

to form the effect of “word of mouth”, attracting more and more users with the help of its own target audience, which works much more reliably than advertising;

sales growth due to increased traffic, dissemination of information by the users themselves and an increase in the degree of trust of the target audience.

With the knowledge of what tasks content marketing solves, get ready for serious and time-consuming work. The most attention should be given to the quality of the published material. It should be valuable to a specific target audience, answer its questions, address their fears, help in solving problems and deliver reliable information.

Do you know the 5 Content Types That Gain the Most Engagement & Links? Read the new article and learn some new tips and tricks. 

Let’s start with a content marketing strategy. SEO content strategy is an action plan to create and publish content that is useful to potential customers that will motivate them to take the desired action. Below we will consider the main steps and tools for implementing a content strategy that will help you publish texts and what is the most important, turn them into a competitive advantage of the project.

Content should not be created by itself and only for show. It is important to clearly understand why your project needs the information that you plan to publish. Otherwise, there may be a lot of texts and videos, but you will not get any useful effect from them. Depending on the established goal for a certain period, the nature of the content placement strategy and its content will have their own characteristics.

Examples of the dependence of a content marketing strategy on its task

The goal is to increase and diversify traffic.

>Solution: posting useful SEO-optimized content on your own resource, publishing articles on third-party sites, collaborating with popular bloggers, an active advertising campaign in various sources that your target audience visits.

The goal is to create a status of an expert.

Solution: publication of case studies with the results of your work, research and experiments, interviews, instructions, guides, and reviews, where you or your company act as a specialist. As in the previous example, when creating a content marketing strategy, it is important to involve external sources: third-party blogs, thematic online and offline resources, social networks, etc.

The goal is to build a reputation.

Solution: posting reviews both on your website and on third-party ones, publishing cases, answers to frequently asked questions, videos with the personal participation of the head of the company or employees. It is especially important to pay attention to dealing with negative reviews.

The goal is to increase sales.

Solution: detailed demonstration of the benefits of products or services (service) provided by the company. The main tool of the strategy is its own information resources: website, communities in social networks, email newsletters. The most effective types of content are video reviews, case studies, information about promotions, news, and special offers.

A content marketing strategy can solve several problems at once, but you must determine which ones will be the highest priority in a certain period of time. For example, you just launched the site, and there are no visitors on it yet, that is, there is no one to inform about promotions and discounts. In this case, it is better to focus on attracting traffic.

2. Drawing Up a Portrait of the Target Audience

Why do you need a customer’s portrait?

Looking for new clients. The consumer profile is compared with new users and the database is sorted into potential customers and interested parties who may purchase your product after a while or forget about your company. Thus, you immediately see the person who needs your product right now, and the one who is considering purchasing it in the future.

Personalized offers. Having a detailed portrait of a client, you can create more appropriate commercial offers, advertisements, content on your website, and email newsletters based on their interests and pains. That is, it will be easier for you to create a unique offer, find a trigger and prepare an offer.

Selection of promotion channels. A portrait of the target audience helps to understand which channels users come from and what devices they use. The image reflects the psychology of the client’s behavior. This can be used to strengthen existing promotion channels or to launch new ones.

Prioritization. A customer avatar helps the sales team understand who they are talking to – a potential buyer or an interested user. And also decide how to conduct a dialogue and what product to offer.

Concentration on a strategy. After obtaining a customer portrait, you can focus on the company’s strategy and choose the direction of business development. The client’s portrait allows you to understand which product needs to be accentuated because most of the target audience chooses it.

What does the audience portrait consist of?

In the portrait of the target customer, the characteristics that influence the purchase decision are clearly presented

• socio-demographic profile: gender, age, education, income level, marital status;
• geolocation;
• long-term and instant interests;
• actual needs (“pains”);
• fears and objections (“barriers”);
• values and insights.

3. Competitor Analysis

Concentrate on the leaders of the business niche. It is from them that you can and should learn. You probably know who is the best in your market field. Competitors in SEO can be found using search engines, choosing the most successful sites that rank high in the search results for key queries. Research what types of content your competitors are using, where you can find information about them and their product, how and what they are talking about with their target audience. Be sure to keep this useful data in mind when crafting your own content marketing strategy.

4. Definition of content distribution channels

An effective content marketing strategy must necessarily include those distribution channels that best meet the goal.

Types of content distribution channels:

Internal or own:

• website;
• communities on social networks;
• email newsletters;
• YouTube channel;

External or third-party:

• guest posts on partner sites and thematic blogs;
• MEDIA;
• cooperation with bloggers;
• offline sources (printed publications: periodicals or special literature, advertising brochures, work at exhibitions, etc.);

Attracted: 

• the distribution of useful content by the target audience, in particular, reposts in social networks.

We recommend that you work with content in parallel, using different types of distribution channels. At a certain stage in the development of the project, focus on the option that is more suitable for the implementation of specific goals. 

6. Developing a Content Plan

After collecting and analyzing the necessary information, you can start creating your own content marketing plan. This step involves drawing up a clear list of actions, types of content and main topics, sites for its placement. The plan should cover a specific time period, include a description of goals, tools, and time frames for their achievement.

What are we going to publish or where to get ideas for content marketing?

So, what to write about? Sooner or later, ideas run out and it becomes incomprehensible: what next, where to get ideas? Now we will reveal to you all the secrets of idea generation!

Competitor analysis 

You can learn a lot from your competitors. 

Links.This is where Ahrefs comes in handy. You will be able to see which pages on a competitor’s site are viewed by users the most, and how customers go to them. This can give you an idea and force you to analyze what types of content and topics your target audience likes, and why people go to competitors, and not to you;

Keywords that generate more traffic. Semrush will help you in analyzing the keys. With it, you will see the competitors’ keywords and will be able to analyze them. 

What top brands write about. Google Alerts’ Fresh Web Explorer tool will help you find brand mentions on the web. Thanks to this, you will be able to understand what content your target audience is paying attention to. You can also find out how people feel about your company.

But in general – you need to see how everyone is doing, and not to do so. This is a clear mistake that almost everyone does. Let’s stop doing this! We do not sit at the school desk on the test paper to copy from each other. Moreover, there is a way out of this situation: before writing, look for a similar topic on the main profile portals of competitors. If there is such a topic, it is not worth writing about it. If not, great, you need to use it.

Brainstorm

It is important to involve people who are not yet familiar with the project to participate in the brainstorming session. They have a fresh perspective on things and have no preconceived notions.

Brainstorming rules:

• Try to maintain a creative atmosphere.
• Do not prohibit anything.
• Find a spark.
• Write down ideas, they can be captured in google spreadsheets.

7. Increasing Distribution Channels

When creating a content development strategy, think about how you will attract the target audience to it. For example, by posting an article on your website, you can use: reposts in social networks; email newsletters and push notifications; publications in messengers; links on the YouTube channel; SEO promotion; advertising with opinion leaders and partners; contextual and targeted advertising. 

8. Evaluating Effectiveness

Be sure to analyze how effective the developed content marketing strategy was. This is necessary in order to understand in which direction to move on, what more work needs to be done, and what does not bring results and what could be a mistake. 

Track: 

• the position of the site for the collected requests;
• traffic dynamics;
• changes in user behavioral factors; 
• conversion rate;
• the open rate of letters and the percentage of clicks from them; 
• coverage, views, likes, reposts, comments in social networks; 
• duration of video views.

The development of content SEO strategy is only the beginning of a long development and choosing the right direction to achieve the set goals. Your developments will gradually change over time, and you should be calm about constant adjustments and changes since the development process is always dynamic and immediate.

If your chosen strategy turns out to be wrong, do not be afraid to experiment, choose difficult paths, and always go forward! Those who put in the maximum amount of effort always get great results!