SEO content strategy

So, what is a content SEO strategy? This is the process of reviewing the type of content you have on your website to facilitate better positions within search. Of course, the better you rank within Google for your priority keywords, the better. As part of this, there are two key pillars of your strategy to keep in mind:

1.      Is your content aligned to how your customers are searching?

2.      Are you providing helpful content for your customers, in line with Google’s latest Helpful content update?

Keyword research in SEO

To understand how your customers are searching, you’re going to need to undertake some keyword research. Doing this will require a few different tools:

Paid for/free trials: semrush, Ahrefs

Trends: Google Trends, Glimpse

First party data: Google Search Console

Once you’ve got your set of keywords, there’s a really important step to undertake that many miss – clean up. You don’t want to waste your own (and more importantly, your client’s!) time by tracking/trying to target keywords that are irrelevant. It would be very easy to export en-masse on a broad-match search from semush, but not everything might be relevant. My mind immediately goes back to the days of working on a Healthcare client; you wouldn’t believe the inappropriate keywords that were pulling through.

On top of what you deem to be relevant, it’s also worthwhile having a conversation with your client as to what they deem a priority. Certain keywords may not be in keeping with their brand guidelines/TOV, so you may need to evaluate whether or not you can still include those.

Additionally to your core keyword research, it’s worthwhile checking on search trends for different categories. It could be that some are lower search volume, but picking up in interest, and could be prioritised as a breakout category. Meanwhile, other topics could be of high volume right now, but declining in interest over time. You’re going to want to optimise for both eventualities, but this will help with supporting your argument for going after certain topics.

Finally, it’s worthwhile taking stock of the types of keywords that are actually driving traffic to your site using Google Search Console. If you’re already receiving traffic for certain terms, you don’t want to miss out on that traffic by removing relevant content. You may have a large number of keywords in ‘Striking Distance’ (positions 6-20), which are your quicker-win optimisation topics.

SEO keyword targeting best practices

• Target one ‘primary’ keyword per landing page. This should give a broad idea of the topic that you’re talking about, and should be unique. Trying to target the same keyword across multiple landing pages will hinder your efforts. These keywords are typically higher search volume, but are also under greater competition.

• Collect relevant ‘secondary’ and long-tail keywords that are relevant to the primary keyword. These will help shape the copy that should be written for the page. Where naturally possible, use these keywords in your H2s, H3s, and FAQs. These keywords will typically be lower search volume than your primary keyword – long-tail keywords may only have 10 or 20 avg. monthly searches. They are, however, lower competition than the primary keywords with hundreds-thousands of searches each month.

• Do not keyword stuff. Ultimately, your copy should be written for the reader – not for the search engine. Use keywords as a guide, but focus on what will be most valuable for the individual seeking information.

Unfortunately, just doing keyword research doesn’t render your content strategy complete. There are wider considerations, especially when it comes to Google’s algorithm, that you will need to keep at the forefront while creating/optimising content.

Google’s helpful content update

Google is increasingly clamping down on content that is written purely for SEO/with the goal of increasing traffic. For that reason, it has rolled out multiple iterations of the ‘helpful content’ update, which seeks to bolster content that is valuable to the reader.

You will, therefore, need to keep the following at the heart of your content strategy:

• Experience: does the person writing/reviewing the content have experience in the subject matter?
• Expertise: does the person writing/reviewing the content have expertise in the subject matter?
• Authority: does the person writing/reviewing the content have a reputation in the industry to talk on the subject matter?
• Trust: can the subject matter be trusted – has it been written using relevant (and equally trustworthy) resources?

Also fondly known as E-E-A-T metrics. You can read more on these here: Google’s latest on E-E-A-T.

This is especially important for sites that operate within Your Money, Your Life (YMYL) industries, such as healthcare or finance. Where possible when writing content, use expert authors/reviewers to send positive signals to the search engine. References are also a great way to show how your content has be written based on legitimate research where applicable.

How to do an SEO content audit

Now that you’ve done your keyword research, it’s time to start translating it into something meaningful for your client/website. There are some key areas and best practices that you need to keep an eye out for:

• Does the site have multiple pages that are trying to target the same keyword? Google Search Console can be your guiding light here.
• Does the site have multiple pages with the same (or almost exactly the same) content? Use a Screaming Frog crawl to check for duplication across key elements such as H1s.
• Does the site have any pages with thin content? Look out for pages with minimal text, especially in instances where they’re going after broad keywords that need content to support ranking potential.
• Does the site have pages that are missing meta titles/descriptions, or have unoptimized/missing titles (H1s, H2s, etc)?

Based on the data that you’ve collected, you should evaluate which landing pages should be ranking for what keywords. Are they already ranking for them? Are there any obvious gaps for particular categories of keywords? Your content audit should aim to surface areas of opportunity to optimise the content that’s already live on your site, as well as areas of expansion for new content to be created. You could consider splitting your audit up depending on the structure of the site; this could be by category, or by page type.

How you prioritise actions from your content audit will greatly depend on available resources to take action. For example, you may have identified a need for new blog content to be written on the site, but the copywriter is strapped for time. Instead, you could recommend prioritising quicker wins/low hanging fruit in the form of quick fixes across content that’s already live on the site.

How can technical SEO push your content strategy to new heights?

You could write all the amazing content in the world, but if you don’t have an accompanying technical strategy in place, your content is going to struggle. Why? Because if Google can’t properly understand your content, it isn’t likely going to rank it.

Technical SEO deserves a series of blogs in it’s own right, but some specific areas to keep in mind when it comes to content SEO:

• Is your content being indexed as expected by Google? Check presence in XML Sitemaps, request indexing in Google Search Console where needed, ensure there are no noindex tags/exclusions within the robots.txt
• Are canonicals being used effectively? Does your new piece of content have a self-referencing canonical/do all necessary pages across the site have canonicals applied?
• Is structured data being used on the pages? Help Google to further understand your content by using relevant schema types to bring it to life. Especially to support with your E-E-A-T metrics.
• Is the page being linked to effectively? Avoid creating orphan pages by creating an internal linking hierarchy across the site, and link customers on to other relevant pieces of content on your site within text/components.
• Are titles being used and marked up appropriately? Ensure that no valuable text is being housed within an image, as the search engine won’t be able to understand it.

Reporting on success of content optimisations

When you’re ready to report back on the success of your content optimisations, it’s important to focus in on how your target keywords performed post-optimisation. You could look at clicks and impressions to those keywords, as well as understanding how average position has improved. Keep an eye out for SERP features such as Featured Snippets to further bolster your impact reporting.

Ideally, you would track keyword performance over time. Each month, keep track and report back on how your average positions are fluctuating so that you can react to any sudden changes that may occur. If there's an algorithm update, you'll be able to report straight back on any priority keywords that have been impacted.

Note: reporting on average position at the URL level will be skewed by all keywords that page ranks for, as opposed to the specific keywords that you optimised towards.

Testing the efficacy of your content

Here at Hookflash, we’re lucky enough to have an Experimentation (CRO) team under our Digital Optimisation umbrella. This gives us the opportunity to review whether or not SEO optimisations are going to have a direct impact on customer conversions, by testing variations before go-live.

For example, your client may be going back and forth on what to call a certain offering. There may be more search volume behind one naming convention, but customers may convert more with a different, less-searched for variation. By testing this first, all parties can be happy in the knowledge that ultimately, the final recommendation will benefit the customer, as well as the search engine.

Leveraging Digital PR techniques

When you’re creating fantastic content, another way to get it out there is through the use of Digital PR. Digital PR seeks to further bring awareness to your brand and it’s key offerings, by supporting with gaining coverage from (relevant) authoritative websites/channels. When done right, this is a fantastic way of creating an off-site internal linking structure for search engines to follow and further understand your content. Keep in mind that for this to do it’s best job for SEO, you’re going to want ‘follow’ links as priority (as opposed to ‘do not follow’).

How can an improved content strategy benefit paid media channels?

It’s one thing running paid ads across search, but it’s another thing ensuring that when a customer lands on a site, they’re presented with content that meets the search that the ad ran against. Improving on-site content, by using customer search interest and trends, has been known to have a positive knock-on on metrics such as Quality Score. 

Final thoughts on content SEO...

It’s worth keeping in mind, especially for new content being created, it can take time for search engines to understand and rank your content. By following content best practice, backed up with technical SEO, this will likely come to fruition much quicker. Keep an eye on how your optimisations are performing, as sometimes it can be a test and learn to understand which content is working best for your site.