The first step before making a SEO content strategy can be overwhelming. There is a lot to consider. At least, if we want to get it right.
We start from a basic idea: the SEO content strategy seeks to offer different contents to be useful to people who are going to take a purchasing decision related to our product or service.
This is where one of the first key issues arises.
A successful SEO content strategy is not the one that brings the most traffic, but the one that converts the most.
According to data from Google59% of consumers (and rising every year) research online before purchasing a product. Depending on your sector of activity, this percentage may increase or decrease.
To be clear, few people do research online before buying eggs or potatoes (although there are some), but many more people look online before buying a computer, a mobile phone or a trip, for example.
In addition, is not always about price. Rather with the familiarity of the product or service. Turning to food, products such as konjac paste have high search volumes.
In the end, in SEO, common sense always prevails. If you don't know what something is or what benefits you have, you look it up. It's as simple as that.
Consumers are also grateful to the companies that have helped them. According to The Big Book of Facts & Statistics, 95% of shoppers consume from companies that offered them content at every stage of the journey..
Here's another key, you should not only go for the commercial or transactional keyword. The customer has to know you in order to trust you.
What is an SEO content strategy?
A SEO content strategy consists of a series of studies, analyses and actions aimed at achieving greater conversion with our online content.
We say conversion and not sale because sales are not always the goal. This, which should be defined in advance, can be a download, a phone call, a data collection or even just a qualified visit. The latter, for example, in information projects.
There is not always money as such.
Normally, the SEO content strategy is materialised in a blog. It is also possible to make a SEO on YouTube, podcasting for business or use another online medium in which to work content for SEO (or combine them all).
Having a blog not only has SEO benefits but also branding benefits. Going back to The Big Book of Facts & Statistics, 70% of consumers prefer to learn about a company through a post rather than an advertisement.
In addition, according to a report by HubSpotcompanies with a blog have, on average, 55% more visits than those who do not.
Despite the data, I also have to say that it is not always necessary to have a blog. It is possible to work on the SEO of the website and get additional traffic in other ways, e.g. with online advertising.
Every business, and every budget, requires a marketing strategy concrete. In addition, I recommend you to read the article by our business intelligence expert about the reasons why you should not set up a digital business.
Sometimes, it's not that you don't have to go for the SEOis that the business is not going to work. Don't waste your time and money if you don't have a winning product/service.
SEO content strategy: a step-by-step guide
Now that (I hope) you understand what a SEO content strategyI'm going to explain how to do it. Step by step, so that you can get it up and running.
The most important thing: you have to think things through. You don't just sit down at your computer and start typing. Not even after you have chosen a keyword that you find interesting.
We have to think, analyse and act accordingly. Also measuring and making changes. That is why we talk about strategy. This is not a trivial choice of term.
Fortunately, you don't have to win an impossible war. Today, the web offers plenty of opportunities if we know how to do it.
And how to do it? Here we go.
1. Understand your business model
It may seem the most obvious thing to do, but in my experience I can say that sometimes it is the most complicated thing to do. Whether you want to be self-sufficient or you prefer to put the strategy in the hands of experts.
How well do you know your business and what are its most important points? In which products or services are you really competitive?
I see two common problems here. The first is not being clear about the value proposal. What makes your business work. And, of course, there are also offline value propositions that do not work online. For example, proximity.
A local shop that is open 7 days a week has a clear value: its opening hours. On the Internet, this is absolutely worthless. Everything is available 24/7, so you will have to look for other extra points.
An example could be the exclusivityselling products that are difficult or impossible to find. Or even simply usability. In other words, having an ecommerce that is much easier and more convenient to use than the competition. Or to offer more complete nutritional information in accordance with certain diets or health problems. You have to give something more.
The second thing is to be clear if the value proposition perceived by the company is the one perceived by consumers. Believe me when I tell you that there is often a lot of dissonance here. Ask your audience.
The second part is more complicated: is there demand, and is it worth the investment? Check if there are acceptable search volumes for those elements that are part of your value proposition.
1.1 How do you know if there is demand?
When I talk about checking for search volumesI mean in a broad sense. I mean, you may have a massage centre and your best service is a type of massage inspired by traditional healing methods of the Jarawa tribe.
Well, "jarawa massage" is probably not intended as a search term. But think of it in a broad sense: oriental massages, oriental therapies, traditional healing methods, etc... are words that have good volumes and where your type of massage can fit in.
In some cases, especially for certain foodstuffs, they also There may be no volumes today but there may be tomorrow. For example, in the example I mentioned in the introduction of the konjac paste.
This type of pasta, which comes from a tuber and has no calories, has become fashionable since 2020 thanks to the fact that several influencers have started using it (don't discard the influencer marketing if you have the liquidity for this kind of thing).
If we look at the interest graph, we can see how the pandemic triggered interest and how it continues to crescendo. According to data from SEMrushin Spain alone, with 9.9K monthly searches.
If we Google, konjac we see that the first result is from 2018, two years before interest skyrocketed. At that time, positioning without competition was easier and maintaining a position is also easier than stealing it from a strong competitor.
So if we have time, let's not rule out that interest may rise. Here it is necessary to also apply common sense. A new working methodology arriving from the United States is likely to end up expanding its searches, the name of a type of screw that is not searched for now will probably not be searched for in 2, 3 or 5 years.
2. Do a full SEO audit or create your own website
The next step is equally fundamental (actually, all the steps are fundamental, let's face it). It is to make a SEO audit of the current situation.
In case you are not online yet, it would be the right time to thinking and designing the websitealways in line with the SEO guidelines.
In the audit we will check the current situation. Here I am going to give you a piece of advice. Don't trust free audits. If someone tells you that they will send you an audit of your website in 15 minutes, they are not doing it right.
It is simply adding your company name into a tool and pulling what comes out of it, without any checking or depth. That may be a first step in checking for the most important errors, but is not a real SEO audit.
However, it is one of the most widespread methods of acquiring customers. Be careful. It is also a truism, but the results have to be interpreted and, at the moment, the tools do not interpret anything.
In the SEO audit you have to check the current situation (ours and the competition's): linkbuilding, domain authority, evolution, best articles, CTRs, SEO optimisation, indexation, titles, meta descriptions, pages that bring more leads and sales (if you have it enabled), conversion rates, bounce rates, contents that can be improved, etc...
In addition, a good SEO audit includes actions and deadlines for solving the problems.
Once our page is SEOfriendlyWe can then move on to setting the objectives.
3. Decide on the objectives we want to achieve
The objectives are necessary for two main reasons. First, because they are intrinsic to having a strategy. A strategy for what? That question is answered by the objectives.
Secondly, to be able to check whether what we are doing is working.
Of course, objectives should be specific and measurable. An objective that says: "sell more" or "have more visits" is not valid. Why? Because it cannot be measured effectively.
The best way is to use smart targets or SMART objectives, stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.
For example, if you want to sell more, the goal would be: "achieve a 20% increase in sales through the organic channel in one year". If you want to have more visitors: "achieve 50% more organic visits in six months".
We can be as specific as we want. It is also interesting to set objectives that take into account our target audience. If we have created our buyer personaIn addition, an objective may also be to improve outreach to people who meet that target.
Many of the objectives will also be determined from the SEO audit previous. For example, if we have found that most of our visitors come from Mexico (something quite common as it is the country with the highest number of Spanish speakers in the world) but our business only sells in Spain, we can set ourselves the goal of improving the percentage of visitors based in Spain.
Alternatively, we could opt for the International SEO and that we try to expanding the business to another market of which we already have some of the traffic. But business decisions are independent of the SEO content strategySo let us get on with it.
4. Do keyword research
I wrote this article about keyword research focusing on the more practical part: tools, keyword selection, etc... and here I will talk about the more strategic part.
First of all, which keywords should I discard? Of course, the ones that are not focused on the business model. That is why we have devoted time and care to point 1.
Secondly, very general keywords. Going back to jarawa massages, maybe trying to rank for massages doesn't make much sense. Besides, if our business is local, even if we use long tail keywords, the smartest thing to do is to geolocate them.
Don't use oriental massages, use oriental massages in Chamberí or Cuenca. Here is another example of a problem with geolocation. Cuenca, in Ecuador has six times the population of Cuenca (Spain) and 40 more searches on average per month for the geolocated keyword massages. You will have to avoid visits from Ecuador because they are not your target audience.
Likewise, as with the objectives, we have to be realistic. Massages in Cuenca has a 11% of difficulty according to SEMrushThis gives us plenty of room for manoeuvre. If a keyword is difficult, it is better to look for another one, at least at the beginning, because it will be very difficult to position it if you don't have many resources.
Finally, another problem is over-positioning. Don't try to rank for more words than you have to. Focus on keywords chosen that correspond to the keywords you have stages of the sales funnel and fight for them.
Often, if a company has a very wide range of products or services, it tries to cover as much as possible, and its SEO work ends up being diluted. That's why in point 1 we already selected the differential value. Now is the time to check which are the strong products or services that also have a volume that makes them competitive.
4.1 Types of keywords
Keywords can be divided into informational, commercial and transactional. and the ideal is to include all three in our SEO content strategy.
The informational keywords are those that offer information on a topic. Following the example of jarawa massages, these could be keywords of this type: "how to solve a backache", "fashionable oriental therapies", "types of massage", etc...
These are keywords in which the intention to search is focused on being informed. You are not looking to buy anything or learn more about a product, you simply want to broaden your knowledge.
These keywords correspond to the first part of the SALES FUNNEL and are often discarded (a serious mistake) because they do not see their future potential.
The commercial keywords are those that are given when there is already a purchase decision. For example, "how much does a massage cost" or "best massage centres in Cuenca".
Finally, there are the transactional keywordswhich are keywords that already include the transaction itself. In this case, "book a massage in Cuenca", or "buy oriental massage" could be two clear examples.
In order for a SEO content strategy to work, you have to earn the user confidence. This is achieved by being there for him from the very beginning. Let's take a closer look at the stages of purchase.
4.2 Stages of purchase
The purchasing stagesthe SALES FUNNELthe customer experience map or the customer journey are, with some nuances (such as point of view) irrelevant to this practice, the same.
We start with a person who is not aware that they have a problem or need. I always insist that we look at it in a broad sense. Let me give you my real example. Two days ago I bought a pair of trainers. I really had no need to buy them and no problem with the current ones.
I simply came across a tweet with a photo talking about how nice the trainers were that were sold in the online shop of the cooperative of manteros in Barcelona. I thought they looked nice and also, at some point months ago, I had read about the initiative in a news item.
This would be the first step. Learning that the product/problem exists. It could be because of SEObut in my case it was through the media. The problem I discovered was: the manteros are people who have risked their lives to get to Europe and are looking for a formula that allows them to make a legal living by setting up their cooperative and their online shop.
Personally, I am a very non-consumerist person. However, the information I received was aimed specifically at my profile. A person who is concerned about social issues and who does not mind spending more money than necessary if he understands that it is for a just cause.
The issue turned into: the manteros are looking for a way to make a living and I am doing absolutely nothing to help them. Still, I read the news and forgot about it until I saw a tweet in which they showed the shoes. Beautiful, by the way.
Because the sales funnel process is quite slow and often takes months or even years.
Here informational keywords must be targeted. That are targeted specifically at your buyer persona.
From here I looked for information about the shoes. We moved on to the transactional keyword. The price was far higher than I would consider buying any garment. However, in the information I found there was additional added value that made the extra expense worthwhile..
To cover my need to help the manteros, on the one hand the aesthetics, which is always important, and on the other hand, that they were shoes designed in Spain, manufactured in Spain and Portugal complying with all the regulations, vegan, genderless and made in small workshops.
At a stroke of a pen, by buying the shoes, I could contribute to solving several problems that concern me. I was consuming a local product, respectful of the environment and working conditions, designed here and which favoured the situation of an oppressed group.
Suddenly I had not one need solved with the purchase, but several.. And only one drawback: the price. Putting it on a scale, price ceased to be important.
Of course, it worked because of my personal characteristics and concerns. That is why it is so important to define the customer archetypes to perfection.
There will be many other people who are not sensitive to the problems of the manteros, to vegan clothing or to the production of sustainable and local fashion. However, these keywords work with the target audience of these trainers.
And I have to insist on the aesthetic aspect, because if the shoes had looked ugly to me, no matter how much I would have liked to collaborate, I would not have bought them. So your product or service has to work beyond the social or environmental benefits it brings, if not the SEO cannot do magic.
To summarise, this route that I have described and to which we must take the content strategy goes like this:
1. Ignorance of the problem or need
2. Recognise the problem
3. Inform themselves about the problem and its solutions
4. They discover your product or service for that problem
5. You are more attractive than your competitors' options
6. They buy your solution
I repeat, because it is extremely important when it comes to converting, that you have to speak in the language that matters to your customer.. If I see the shoes I bought in a standard shoe store or in an Instagram advert, I wouldn't have bought them.
I wouldn't have bought them because of the price and because I don't buy clothes or shoes unless I need to. And working in the digital marketing world I am even more immune to advertising strategies. However, this product sold me so well on its benefits that I now have more shoes than I need.
Select the keywords that will seduce your buyer persona.
5. Perform scheduling and strategic content planning
Once we have the keywords we are going to work with, we have to put them in the calendar.
As I have shown you before, the first stages of the sales funnel are about giving visibility to the problems that your product or service serves. So focus on that first.
I won't tell you to discard the transactional keywords o commercialsbut these will work best for you when you have enough informational keywords positioned. So if you are going to work on 10 keywords, I recommend that 8 of them are informational.
First gain customer confidenceTell them what they are interested in. Then you can focus on selling to them.
Remember also to ensure that the contents are evergreen. In other words, they should work all year round, with no expiry date.
Another important aspect of planning is to add promotion actions. You have to move the content, publish it in networks, update it periodically, look for links with your linkbuilding strategy, etc....
The work does not end when you publish, but there is another phase of work that begins. However, I am not going to focus on that and will move on to another very important point.
6. Measure your results
You have the content online and you are promoting it, what else? Because the SEO content strategy is not over until it is measured..
You will have to measure constantly and not only to check the achievement of objectives. It is also important not to despair. SEO is slow work, if you want speed and immediate results use SEM.
Create reports and alerts and set goals in Google Analytics to check that everything is working correctly and analyse the data you are getting. Also the organic data from Google Search Console.
When testing (e.g. changing meta descriptions if you don't have a good CTR) also measure each result. Take into account the dwell timedemographic and interest data to ensure that it matches your buyer personaconversion data per page, etc...
You may need to adapt your strategy. If, for example, you discover that there is a population segment that works better for you and you were not targeting it, adapt. SEO is slow work, but it also requires speed.
Finally, always be clear about your ROI. That is, how much your SEO strategy has cost you and what return on investment you have. This will be the meter that will show you (in the long term) whether or not it has really been a success.
Advantages of having an SEO content strategy
Finally, I don't want to end this long article (sorry) without talking about the advantages more clearly. Beyond the obvious (getting visits and leads), what are the advantages of creating a SEO content strategy?
I dropped it earlier, there is a clear improving user confidence in the brand. Improve your visibility and authority and make you a reference in your field (with informational keywords).
Another advantage that is sometimes forgotten is that it facilitates a better targeting for social selling and Google Ads campaigns. By having an already qualified audience, you can use this audience to make remarketing and improve your sales.
One last advantage that I do not want to leave unmentioned has to do with education. Yes, educating customers. With your content you can explain how to best use your product or service, when it is best, solve common doubts, etc...
All this will lead to a increased customer satisfaction and, ultimately, greater chances of retention and recommendation. In other words, re-selling to them and winning new customers. A win win in the fullest sense of the word.
