Content is integral to SEO, it is only through different forms of content that we are able to attract, engage, and demand actions from users. But before, we jump into the nitty gritty of strategies let's quickly get the basics out of the way.

What's SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a technique under digital marketing that helps you appear on search engines such as google, bing etc. The most common types of SEO are on-page SEO, Off page SEO, and technical SEO. Here’s our ultimate guide to understanding SEO in depth. Basically, On page and off page SEO both requires keywords and thereby content. SEO strategists makes a list of phrases that your businesses want to rank for and then run an in-depth research to find alternatives to those keywords which attracts high search volumes (enough amount of potential users are searching for those keywords), low competition (these keywords are easy to rank on search engine), and high ad spend (your competitors are spending heavy money on that keyword which means they are getting leads using that keyword)

For example, if you are a B2B mental health service provider, you would like to rank for employee wellness program, workplace mental health, reducing stress at work and the likes. SEO strategist will pull out all the possible phrases related to these three seed keywords that are being searched over the internet. These keywords can be in thousands and needs to be filtered on the above mentioned parameters to understand what would work best for a digital mental health services domain.

Steps to craft content strategy for SEO

All the searchers are searching for some kind of content whether it’s a text, image, video, or blog post. Hence strategizing an effective content plan is pivotal in SEO. The quality of your content is imperative to rank higher in relevant search results as a good content strategy for SEO is the focal point in Google’s ranking algorithm. In this section of the blog, we will talk about crafting a content strategy for SEO. 

Define Goals

Understand what is it that you want to achieve through SEO and content marketing. Is it brand leadership, leads generation, awareness or a combination of these. Set a time for achieving these goals. Always, remember that SEO is a long term commitment so minimum time period has to be six months.

Map Client Persona

To make a strong content strategy, you need to define and categorize your type of audience. There are a few ways to narrow down the procedure.

• Analyze the similarities and differences in your current or existing audiences 
• Check out the group of audience that your competitors are targeting. Look through various social media platforms, customer reviews, and blog comments of your competitors so that you can branch out or niche down from this group. 
• Analyze the benefits of your product or service and determine the type of people who need it. 
• Conduct several surveys to figure out the prospects are thinking about your product or service. 

Design Sales Scenario

Pull in the sales team and craft three different sales scenarios and pen down the phrases used by the customers for top, middle, and bottom of the sales funnel. So, if you are drawing a table, rows will be scenario 1, scenario 2, and scenario 3 while columns will have TOF, MOF, and BOF headers. Now that you have the seed keywords, you know that these are your major anchor terms that you need to focus on and your search should be in this neighborhood.

Prioritize content topics

Make content clusters, this means take a broad topic and create many sub topics under the broad topic. For example, in the filed of digital marketing, we can have clusters for seo, sem, smo, email marketing, and so forth and so on. And for each topic, we can have many many sub topics; for example, under seo, we can write topics such as on page seo, off page seo, technical seo, backlinking and these smaller topics can be in hundreds and thousands depending on your domain.

Look for Keywords of lower difficulty

Effective content strategies begin with extensive research. You should consider proper keyword research for analyzing the proper keywords relevant to your business. The three main criteria that you should evaluate while analyzing the keywords are search volume,  traffic cost, and keyword difficulty. If you aren’t an authoritative brand, you should target topics of lesser difficulty. Try to look for keywords that have search volumes greater than 200, low search difficulty and high paid difficulty. Also focus on long tail keywords

Optimize intelligently 

Once you have sorted out the high ROI keywords, you can use them to pump up your content while making it. Optimize your content intelligently to make it more visible to your searchers as well as to the search engines.  Make your content more comprehensive and relevant. Do not forget to use your target keywords in H1, H2, and meta descriptions. Don't forget to embed FAQ structured data markup in your blogs to rank in Q&A section of Google search engine and gain position 0.

Consistency in blogging 

Blogging is one of the best ways of garnering organic visitors to your website. Whether you are a B2B or B2C company, blogging can have an effective impact on your quality and quantity of traffic to your website. Crafting more quality content for your website helps in generating more inbound leads. 

Test your headlines 

Having a thought-provoking headline is extremely helpful in increasing the click-through rate of your website. A good headline is part of a powerful content strategy for SEO as it helps in increasing the virality of your content. Embed the target and relevant keywords in your headline to be easily found by search engines. 

Write longer content 

It is recommended to write longer contents as longer contents rank better in search engines. As longer contents are stuffed with the bulk of information, you can place your target keywords and relevant keywords in order to rank higher for relevant search queries. Generally articles that are above and beyond 1800 words rank much better compared to short form of content.

Content layering

Layering the middle of the funnel content by covering relevant and complementary topics and interlinking between pages is referred to as content layering. The middle of the funnel has content that is typically more linkable than the bottom of the funnel. 

Conclusion 

SEO is a subset of Digital Marketing which is a broad marketing technique. Amidst various available techniques of Digital Marketing, SEO plays a pivotal role. Having a good content strategy for seo is extremely important for a smart marketing plan. Content strategy for SEO plays a major role in the success of your website as everyone is finding for some kind of content. The quality of content helps in increasing brand authority and recognition.