It can be upsetting. A lot of people keep doing a lot of work on building their website search engine ranking but aren’t getting anywhere. Why is this? More often than not, this is because they’re not creating the right content.
You see, it is not enough to simply have great content or a huge volume of content, you also need to have the right content. Your content needs to be optimized and strategic to rank well on Google.
In this article, we’ll discuss four steps you can take to boost your search rankings with the right kind of content.
What Is Strategic Content?
Strategic content is content that is specifically designed to rank well in search engines and fully resonate with your readers.
It’s content that is tailored towards improving your search ranking, increasing traffic to your website, engaging that traffic and driving more sales.
Why Is Strategic Content Important For Your Business?
While you may think your content is great, search engines may not necessarily agree. This is because of the elements that Google looks at when ranking content. Gone are the days when you could place a few keywords in strategic places and call it good. In addition to keywords, Google also cares about the relevance and quality of your content.
If you identify topics around keywords you want to rank for, and then create the strategic content in your blogs, videos, or social media posts, Google will be able to understand what your site is about.
Strategic content is also evergreen and gives you freedom and flexibility to try out other marketing methods (like sponsored content and distributed content) to generate more revenue without compromising on leads from content.
How To Develop Strategic Content
There are 4 general parts of strategic content planning and execution and these are:
- Make your list and put topics that are less difficult to rank at the top.
- Create content that appeals to people at each stage of the buying journey and link related content together.
- Create content that other people will love to link to and look for opportunities and platforms to build links.
- Keep your existing content regularly updated and evergreen.
Let’s take a deeper look at each of these elements.
Focus On Easy Ranking Topics First
It’s easy to be distracted by sexy, new, and exciting topics but when you’re starting out with your content, it’s important you focus on simple, easy-to-rank topics. These are topics that have a lot of search volume, a high conversion rate, and are easy to rank for. Using keyword research, pick out one or two of these topics that you know you can rank easily for.
What’s more? These are usually topics that are always going to be relevant and continuously help you bring in new customers.
Use A Keyword Research Tool
To find out which topics are easy to rank, you can use a keyword research tool like SEMRush, SpyFu, or Ahrefs. All three of these tools have free versions and free trials that will help you find the most relevant and competitive keywords for your chosen topic.
You can also use the Google AdWords Keyword Planner to find more relevant keywords, but you’ll have to create an account to use the tool.
By doing the above, you should have a list of easy-to-rank topics. If you don’t find too many, don’t worry, you can still come up with a couple of different topics through brainstorming on which you can create content or an epic blog post (topic bank), after which you can start adding new topics to your list.
Analyze Search Results Pages
After you have found a few topics that you think you can rank for, analyze the search results pages of your competitors to see how they are doing it. What kind of keywords are they using? Where are they using their keywords? Are they using H2 tags to highlight keywords? What kind of content are they writing? What’s the quality of their content?
When you have a clear idea of how your competitors are doing it, you can pick out a few things that they are doing well, and then make use of them in your own content.
Create Content For All 5 Stages Of Awareness
Most of your leads are going to start their journey at a particular stage of awareness, so it is important that you create content for all five stages of awareness. The way you do this is to create different types of content using different topics.
As people become aware of their “problem”, they begin asking questions that contain keywords like (for example) “how to do keyword research,” or “what is SEO”. Creating content that answers similar questions that relate to your particular topic will help you to build links and boost your search ranking.
With the right content, you can fill in any holes in the customer journey, engage people to move them to the next stage, and better convert those who are already engaged.
Also, by creating different types of content, you will engage your customers better, and provide additional value for them.
Link Building And Strategic Content
Another aspect of strategic content is to build links for your content. This isn’t about using the ‘quick-win’ low-quality links, but about creating high-quality content that other people want to link to.
This means you want to create content that’s not only useful but also helpful enough that another website wants to link to it. For example, if you’re a dog trainer who’s writing a guide on how to train a dog, you may want to create a free training guide (that’s useful enough) and then share the link on platforms (like forums) so others can build backlinks to it. You can also use this kind of content to build up a network of related blogs and groups, to build more relevant links to your website.
Regularly Update And Maintain Existing Content
The final, but equally important aspect of strategic content is to make sure you regularly update and maintain your existing content. This is because the people coming to your website, Google, and the other search engines all want relevant, fresh content.
In particular, make sure you regularly update your homepage and landing page, as well as any blog posts that you consider your ‘go-to’ content.
Conclusion
Creating strategic content doesn’t have to be a time-consuming task, but it does require a little bit of planning upfront. Once you have a system in place and you build up content over time, it’ll get easier and easier to rank in search engines, generate leads, and build links.
Take the time to give this strategy a go and see how much it impacts the results of your website visibility.
About Christy Kiltz
Christy Kiltz is the owner of Design! by Kiltz Internet Solutions and has been taking care of business owners online since 2001. Her high-touch digital agency is located in Southern Oregon and provides comprehensive online marketing services and technology solutions that free up business owners to focus on what they love to do instead.
According to Christy, “Service-based business clients come to us spinning their wheels trying to make money online. We form a partnership to turn their websites into lead-generating machines. Our White Glove Growth program is designed to help you get more leads and grow your business.”
In addition to building websites and offering technical support, Christy’s primary focus is education and empowerment. By toning down the “geek” and offering practical tools easily understood by non-technical folks, Christy opens the black box of technology with classes, webinars, and web tips developed to demystify digital marketing. With ease and a bit of humor, she reminds us that while technology continues to move forward at warp speed, many foundational marketing principles remain.
Christy Kiltz joins us as a regular contributor to share her digital marketing expertise with our business community. Enjoy her articles and commentaries!
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