Creating an SEO Content Strategy That Works
When developing content to rank on search engines, does this mean the content you create should not be focused on users’ and customers’ questions?
When developing your content strategy, always consider the customer and create only content that promotes the brand and can result in a sale.
Content Strategy Overview
- Find topics with relevant search traffic potential
- Assess their value to your business goals
- Determine your ability to rank
- Create high-quality content that focuses on search intent
Throughout this walkthrough, we’ll use Invisalign (invisible braces) as an example and show how you can develop an effective content strategy to rank the treatment and all its variations. Let’s dive right in. More on content strategies that work.
1. Choosing keywords with the right search traffic potential
Your goal is to rank highly on Google, but don’t just create copy based on the one keyword or keyphrase. Think long-term and build entire sections around your main keyword to show Google your expertise on the topic.
Here’s how we do it:
- Navigate to Ahref’s Keyword Explorer (several other tools exist, but this is our favourite).
- Enter the keyword (in this case, Invisalign) and assess the keywords with traffic potential.
PRO Tip: Don’t discount pages with traffic potential as low as 150; these will have a lower keyword difficulty, will be easier to achieve, and will help you overall rank for the bigger keywords. Do discount search terms with no conversion value, for example, “how to clean Invisalign” – as in this case, the user already likely has Invisalign, and there’s no opportunity to sell.
2. Assigning Revenue and conversion values
From the above list, we can begin to see that Invisalign + location has significant value, as do keywords focused on cost, process, and alternatives.
From the huge list of keywords and phrases ahrefs generates, you can determine which ones will give your business the best chance at conversion.
To do this, you need to assess if the keywords address:
- Your customer’s problems and points.
- How is your product essential for solving that problem?
- Can you mention your company a little or often? For example, tips will focus less on what you can do specifically and more on what the user can do for themselves.
Here’s an example of keywords we would avoid initially due to their limited marketing potential:
PRO Tip: Each piece of content you generate needs to connect back to the brand, but that does not mean that pieces like “Invisalign Tips” won’t be valuable to create. Whilst they won’t have high-converting value, they can be served in blog format later down the line to support the overall keyword. This connects to point four and is essential for maintaining your content and ensuring it flies.
3. Bear in mind ranking potential and difficulties
Due to various reasons – one of them being competition, some keywords are harder to rank for than others. But that doesn’t mean you should avoid them – we always say, you’ll never have a chance of ranking if you don’t have a page. You just need to take into consideration the difficulty.
This is where SEO gets tricky and complicated. It’s not enough just to create content; you also need to have other websites link to your content (known as backlinks), which are extremely hard to get and costly, especially if you try the dreaded guest post approach. With backlinks, it’s not just about quantity but quality, too.
Plus, they’ll help you increase your authority, too. While Google said they do not evaluate a site’s authority, we’ve seen how sites with bigger authority perform much better than those without one, especially for more difficult keywords.
4. Creating a high-revenue SEO content strategy
We’ve chosen an initial five from the thousands of keywords to focus on based on fast ranking ability and commercial value.
The content plan:
- Invisalign (your parent page, where all other pages and keywords link from).
- Invisalign Go (a faster Invisalign treatment our client offers).
- Invisalign Cost (breaking down the different costs of Invisalign and how we make it affordable).
- Invisalign Before and After (a gallery and description of before and after cases showing our expertise).
- Invisalign Process (highlighting to potential customers the benefits and how easy it is).
Look at what we’ve done over 12 months for one client who offers Invisalign. We’ve built entire Invisalign sections from keyword research that sell their services and encourage users to engage.
PRO Tip: As each page you create on the website attributed to a certain keyword aims to support the business, you need to connect it back subtly to show your expertise. For example, have you noticed us do it in this post? Who creates content strategies daily and uses this keyword to support our services and show off our skills?
Remember
- Your pages or posts might not rank on your first try; see why from Yoast.
- You’ll rarely rank number one with only one page on the topic.
- Just because you’re on the first page, don’t assume you’ll stay there—other people will also try to compete for the keyword daily.
- Search intent might change.
- Other companies will outrank you.
- You’ll have to add to and rewrite your content often.
- You cannot publish your content and forget about it.
