8 Steps for Developing a Comprehensive SEO Content Marketing Strategy

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If you’ve been paying attention to the shift in SEO marketing trends, then you’ve probably heard the expression, “content is king.”

But what does that mean, exactly?

Most companies, and many marketers, still don’t fully understand why content marketing is so effective, and what they should be doing to keep up.

We’re going to let you in on the secret.

By the end of our guide, you’ll know exactly why an SEO content marketing strategy is a must for any business, and how to make sure your company isn’t falling behind the competition.

What Is Content Marketing Strategy?

A quality content marketing strategy is a comprehensive plan for creating, publishing, and maintaining valuable and relevant content designed to attract a particular audience.

With profitability as the end goal, a successful content marketing strategy should aim to inspire, entertain, and educate potential consumers.

Why Content Marketing Strategy Is Important

With more than 200 million people regularly using ad blockers and most websites having Adblock rates of up to 40%, it’s no secret that content marketing is not only the present but also the future of marketing.

Not only do your customers prefer content marketing over ads, but it also generates three times the leads and six times the conversion rates.

But, beyond the statistics, a great content marketing strategy is critical to the success of any business for these reasons:

To gain a better understanding of your target audience
Creating a positive customer experience
Building a trusting relationship with your customers
Generating quality leads
Improving your online visibility
Cultivating brand awareness
To gain traction on social media
Positioning your company as an authority in your space
Saving money on expensive advertising

Content marketing is here to stay and if you’re not already investing in it, you can bet that your competitors are.

A good content marketing strategy is built over time, so the sooner you get started the sooner you’ll be establishing your brand as an authority in your industry.

SEO Reseller is a white hat SEO content marketing company offering integrated services to maximize your digital potential, such as:

Premium web designs
White label SEO
Marketing bundles
Social media marketing
Local and SEO services
And much more…

Types of Content Marketing Strategies

We’ve established how important it is for every business to invest in a content marketing strategy, but what types of strategies are available and which are the best?

Here are the top 10 most effective types of content marketing to consider:

SEO content
Editorials
Videos
Social media posts
Infographics
Case studies
Ebooks
Podcasts
Whitepapers
Checklists

Many companies have a limited marketing budget, so with all these options, how do you know which one is right for your business?

In this guide, we’ll focus specifically on SEO content marketing and why we think it’s the best strategy for businesses large and small.

SEO content marketing is the marriage of two effective strategies for improving your online presence: SEO and content.

Building website content is extremely important if you want search engines (such as Google or Bing) to notice you, but without SEO (search engine optimization), it’s hardly worth the effort.

A powerful SEO content marketing strategy is:

Data-driven
Structured; and
Measurable

Search engines are constantly updating their algorithms to ensure the best possible outcome for any online query, so without SEO, your content just won’t make the cut.

Content that is specifically aimed at boosting organic search engine results will be based entirely on what people are searching for online — what internet users are actually typing into the search bar.

This is SEO content marketing.

All things considered, SEO is still a relatively new concept — one that many marketers still get wrong.

Some of the biggest companies in the world have spent millions on SEO content marketing strategies that have fallen flat, simply because they had great vision, but poor planning.

Below are some of the most common mistakes made in a content marketing strategy.

#1: Basing Content Topics on Intuition Rather Than Data

Picture a room full of top-level marketing executives, all of whom are dedicated to their company and its product.

They get together and start brainstorming and come up with the idea to start adding content to their website to attract new customers and add value to their loyal brand users.

But, they follow their passion and intuition rather than the data and their content isn’t generating the traffic they thought it would.

Where did they go wrong?

When companies guess what internet users are searching for, they’re usually guessing wrong — or mostly wrong — resulting in wasted efforts, money, and time.

Remember our first rule: Content must be data-driven.

#2: Failing to Develop a Workflow and Long-Term Content Calendar

Now imagine that same group of well-intentioned marketers and executives, and as they’re conjuring up ideas about what type of content they should add to their website, they forget about workflow.

What is a workflow and why does it matter in a content marketing strategy?

Remember how we said that an SEO content marketing strategy needs to be structured to succeed? Well, this is what we meant:

Workflow is the process of assigning specific duties to a team that is dedicated to SEO content, such as …

Writers
Editors; and
Publishers

… who follow a detailed content calendar to ensure that key due dates are adhered to.

Without structure, the work simply won’t get done.

#3: Not Implementing a Method to Track Performance

Finally, an SEO content marketing strategy needs to be measurable.

What our marketing execs failed to do this time is to implement a way to track the performance of their SEO content — and eventually, the campaign fizzled out.

Their content doesn’t seem to be driving any traffic and even if it was, they didn’t implement a way to know for sure.

What did they do wrong?

They didn’t measure the results of their campaign, and without an established and effective approach to tracking the data, what was once exciting, now seems pointless.

Using data collected from a physical therapy clinic that recently launched an SEO content marketing campaign, you can see that before they implemented an SEO strategy, they had approximately 1400 organic visitors per month.

But, less than two years later, they’ve increased their organic traffic to almost 33,000 organic visitors.

Without the data, this business would simply be guessing, rather than having full knowledge, of how successful their campaign has been.

What Is a Good Content Strategy?

To sum it up, a good content marketing strategy is the process of creating and distributing content that implements SEO best practices.

A well-defined strategy will shorten the distance between your marketing goals and your results, and help your business generate leads and increase your sales.

How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy for SEO the Right Way: 8 Steps

Step #1: Audit Your Website

Analyzing the speed, performance, and health of your website is the main purpose of auditing your website.

By assessing your website you’ll identify anything that could be causing damage to the health of your site — and what you can do to optimize and improve your visibility.

Depending on your website goals, you may choose between one or all of these common types of audit:

SEO Audit — An SEO audit will analyze metadata, keywords, backlink profiles, conversion rates, traffic behavior, and video and image optimization.
Content Audit — Content can be reviewed in conjunction with an SEO audit, however, it can also be useful as a stand-alone audit to ensure that your website tone is in line with your branding goals.
Technical Audit — Even if your content and SEO are healthy, a technical issue with your site could cause serious problems. A technical audit will identify:
- Broken links and redirect chains
- Keyword cannibalization
- A weak backlink profile
- Content duplication
- And much more

For comprehensive website analysis, use SEO Reseller’s free audit tool. In less than two minutes, our audit tool will identify website performance data, such as:

On-page SEO
Off-page SEO
Technical SEO
Usability
Security; and
Social activity

Step #2: Perform a Competitor Gap Analysis

Analyzing the gaps between your own SEO strategy and that of your competitor’s starts with a competitor keyword gap analysis.

SEO analysis tools, such as SEMrush, allow you insight into the keyword rankings of your competitors, giving you the ability to identify where you can improve in these specific areas:

Missing keywords
Weak keywords; and
Low competition keywords

Missing Keywords

A quick and easy way to give a boost to your content marketing strategy is to identify any keywords that your competitors are ranking highly for, but you aren’t ranking for at all.

Using two physical therapy centers, we used SEMRush to analyze the keyword gap between them.

In the example below, you can see which keywords In Motion O.C. are missing compared to ChoosePT.

With insights like these, In Motion O.C. will be able to formulate a quality content marketing strategy outline that includes building content around these missing keywords.

Keywords With Low Competition

Using the same keyword gap analysis tool you’ll be able to identify keywords that have a low competition rating.

When developing a content marketing plan, look at identifying keywords with a keyword difficulty of 65% or below to immediately improve your SEO performance.

SEMrush allows users to sort the keyword results by difficulty or to apply a filter so that only the low KD% (keyword difficulty) keywords are displayed.

Your competitor’s SEO performance isn’t as important when searching KD%, you’re mainly looking for keywords that will leverage your existing content and ultimately improve your SEO through optimizations.

In the image below, the keyword “python needle therapy benefits” has a search volume of 70 users per month, but a KD or only 50.5%, making it a perfect keyword to target for immediate SEO optimization.

Either of these competitors would benefit from optimizing an existing piece of content to improve their ranking and increase the organic traffic to their website.

Weak Keywords

Finally, the keyword gap analysis will allow you to identify any ‘weak’ keywords that your competitor is outranking you for.

Identifying keywords where your site ranks 6-10 and your competitor site ranks in positions 1-4 will be most valuable to your SEO content marketing strategy.

Below, you can see that In Motion O.C., while ranking in the top 10 for each of these keywords, ChoosePT is ranking higher for every keyword.

By using the gap analysis tool, In Motion O.C. will be able to quickly identify any opportunity to optimize existing pages with weak keywords to improve their value and ranking in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

Step #3: Identify Your Target Audience and Brand Voice

Building a content marketing strategy should start with identifying your target audience and developing a brand voice that speaks to your potential customers.

Your website traffic is only as valuable as your audience engagement.

Keywords and keyword placement, while important, only matters if they’re reaching your target audience.

Ask yourself these questions:

Who is your target audience?
What does your target audience want?
Where is your target audience going for their information?

Identifying the specific wants and needs of your audience is crucial to developing your brand voice.

For example, a nursing home isn’t likely going to have success with content that includes a lot of modern-day slang or hashtags.

Whereas a company hoping to market to Generation Z, such as skateboard attire, won’t get the attention of their audience if they have a formal voice.

Take SkateDeluxe, for example.

Rather than a homepage of endless content, their marketing team wisely appealed to their audience by using brand logos as a table of contents.

This strategy makes it easy for an image-centric, instant-gratification generation to identify exactly what they’re looking for in the least amount of time.

Step #4: Define Your Content Marketing Strategy Goals

Every content marketing strategy should have well-defined goals, otherwise, the content serves no purpose. The content needs to both satisfy — and make sense — for your customers to engage.

For increased traffic and engagement, you must consider the following goals as you develop your strategy:

Brand awareness
Customer Engagement
Brand Loyalty
Customer Education; and
Talent recruitment

Whether you’re looking to increase sales or drive more organic traffic to your site, having goals not only gives you a solid benchmark to work toward, but also helps you track what you’ve achieved.

Step #5: Design a Content Calendar

A successful content marketing plan requires structure. It requires a content calendar.

At first, you may be feeling gung-ho and ready to tackle weekly content, but this simply won’t work if you don’t have the manpower.

Content creation takes time, and laying out the workflow in a step-by-step calendar will give you a realistic idea of your abilities and limitations.

At a minimum, your content calendar should include:

Your anticipated publish date
Target keywords for each piece of content
Related keywords for each piece of content; and
URL Structure

Maybe you already know that weekly content isn’t within your capacity at this time, but you’re still hoping to boost your SEO as quickly as possible.

SEO Reseller specializes in complete SEO services that will boost your rankings, including:

Website audits
Keyword research
On-page optimizations
Analytics tracking
Link building; and
Content creation

You can think of us as your own team of SEO specialists who genuinely care about the health and success of your website.

Step #6: Establish a Manageable Workflow

With so many steps involved in content creation, having a team member dedicated to creating and managing the workflow is an important step in your content marketing plan.

For one piece of content, you can expect to schedule the following tasks:

Creating the draft outline — An outline is the structure, or bones, of a piece of content and contains everything from:
- Title tags
- Meta description
- Keywords
- URL structure
- Word count
- Headers
- And more

Ultimately, this document is the first step in the research process and sets your writer up for success.

Writing the first draft — Your writer will use the outline to create the first draft of your content.
Editing the first draft — A skilled editor will read through the first draft, not just for grammatical errors, but also to check the strength of the SEO.
Writer fixes edits — The draft is then returned to the writer who fixes the edits and gives it a final read-through.
Final edit — The editor should take one final look over the draft to ensure all edits were made and that it’s ready to publish.
Publishing — Your development team is now ready to publish your content on your website.

Step #7: Create High-Value, Quality Content

The last thing you want is for the content you’ve toiled over to just get lost in the abyss of the internet.

Creating high-value, quality content that is unique and specific to your target audience will help your site rank higher in the SERPs.

But, how is quality defined in the world of content?

Simple. Write for your customers, not for algorithms.

Write for Humans, NOT Search Engines

Google’s bots are not just getting smarter — they’re getting almost human-like.

Their web crawlers are not searching for just keywords, that’s not even what’s most important anymore.

Google’s latest algorithm update not only identifies content that is written more naturally (without keyword stuffing and grammatical errors), it’s aimed at prioritizing page experience.

What does this mean?

Google will give favor to content that prioritizes:

Mobile-friendliness
Faster loading speeds
Interactivity and visual stability

In a nutshell, Google is looking for content that is pleasing and adds value to its users.

Make Your Content Easy to Read

Readability is another important factor when creating your content — especially on mobile devices.

Mobile users account for more than 55% of daily web traffic, so making your content easy to scroll through on a mobile device is critical.

To optimize your content for readability, consider these factors:

Break up your text with images and screenshots
Use headers and subheaders
Add lists and bullet points
Write in shorter, skimmable paragraphs; and
Vary the length of sentences

Step #8: Track Your Performance

At the end of the day, what’s the point in creating all kinds of content for your website if you’re not going to track your performance?

Honestly? There is no point.

Measuring the success of your content marketing strategy will give you insights into key metrics, such as:

Website traffic
Conversion rates
User engagement
SEO performance; and
Website authority

Using an SEO tool, like SEOReseller’s dashboard, will help you keep tabs on all of your content marketing campaigns in one place.

With the right services, gathering the metrics you need to ensure the success of your campaign can be done in minutes, not days.

SEOReseller Can Help You Develop an Effective Content Marketing Strategy Specifically Targeting SEO

Your content marketing strategy matters. It’s not just another campaign, it’s the future of your online success as a business.

SEOReseller is more than just another SEO tool — we are a full-service SEO content marketing platform.

Our SEO content marketing strategy services include everything you need to set your campaigns up for success, including:

Website audits
Keyword research
On and off-page optimization
Link building
Content creation
Analytics tracking
And more

If you’re ready to drive traffic and increase your revenue, then contact us today and speak to one of our SEO experts.

The post 8 Steps for Developing a Comprehensive SEO Content Marketing Strategy appeared first on SEOReseller.

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