This is How to Power-Up Your SEO Content Marketing Strategy [Quick Guide]

Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

In 2021, content is still king. And, SEO is still like a queen that complements your content marketing efforts—she will ensure that your content is seen by more people.

See, the problem with only producing content is that it doesn’t matter how valuable and engaging it is. If your content isn’t backed up by a solid SEO strategy, it won’t be placed at the top of SERPs. 

However, when content marketing and SEO develop a partnership, they drive organic traffic to your web pages. In this article, let’s take a quick look at how to do exactly that by creating a powerful SEO content marketing strategy. 

Here’s what’s in store: 

• What’s SEO Got to do With Content Marketing?
• Create Your SEO Content Marketing Strategy
  • 1. Define Your Audience
  • 2. Pick Your Topic(s)
  • 3. Conduct Keyword Research
  • 4. Optimize Your Content
• Wrapping Up

What’s SEO Got to Do With Content Marketing?  

Before we dive into the specifics, SEO is the process of improving your website (and content) so that it acquires organic traffic. The better your SEO practices are, the more likely it is that your website will rank higher for specific search terms on the SERPs. SEO is one of the most popular marketing tactics: even low-growth SaaS companies acquire 31.4% of new customers through organic traffic. 

When it comes to content marketing, SEO boosts your results by ensuring you pick the right high ROI keywords that your customers are searching for. But it does more than that – it also helps you choose the right topics and it helps you create as much value for the end-user as possible by answering their most pressing questions. 

And because Google wants high-value content, this is obviously a major ranking factor.

Now, Create Your SEO Content Marketing Strategy

Let’s now take a look at how to create your powerful SEO content marketing strategy in four, easy-to-follow steps. Here, we’ll touch on audience, topics, keyword research, and content optimization. 

1. Define Your Audience 

It’s impossible to create SEO-friendly, useful content when you don’t know who your target audience is (and what they want). 

You could go ahead and write the best piece of content the planet has ever seen — Pulitzer Prize winning, even. But, content is useless to your business if it’s aimed at the wrong person. 

How do you define your audience? 

There are a few ways you can do this. The easiest way is to take a look at your existing customers and create a buyer persona based on them. If it helps, create a few buyer personas. For example, Adidas sells to pro athletes just as much as they sell to the casual gym goer. 

Next, you can use tools like SpyFu to “spy” on your competitors so that you learn who they are targeting. You can also simply find out who your competitors are before checking their social media sites and customer reviews in order to learn more about their target audience.

You can also create surveys that you send out via email. These should be created with an objective in mind to learn more about your audience, which means your questions need to be relevant. 

Don’t forget to take another look at your products or services to define who would buy them.

2. Pick Your Topic(s) 

When businesses implement an SEO content marketing strategy for the first time, some jump straight to keywords. But, before you have your keywords, you need to know your audience first, then your topics. 

Your topic area is what will define how you research your keywords. Thus, it ultimately lays the framework for your content creation. This then allows you to create high-quality content that attracts readers – and converts them. Bingo.

To define your topic area, you need to take a look at your brand and ask yourself what your purpose is. What are you here for? What are you offering people? 

Answering this question will help you to define your expertise. And when you know what your expertise is – be it digital marketing, social media, coffee, travel and so on – you’ll have a better idea of what kind of unique content topics there are to create. 

3. Conduct Keyword Research 

We can’t talk about SEO and content without mentioning keywords, as they are the core of any powerful SEO content marketing strategy. 

What does a keyword do? 

A keyword does a few things. Mainly, it is the word used by your target audience as they perform a search online. But it does more than that. A keyword reveals the intent behind a user’s search.

And it’s the intent that defines your content. See, there are four types of keyword intent:

1. Commercial intent
2. Informational intent
3. Transactional intent 
4. Navigational intent 

If a customer is using the word “buy” in their search, it suggests commercial intent. This means your content must be centered on selling your products or services. If, instead, you focus on relaying information, you will miss out on conversions. 

Keyword intent, then, needs to form the backbone of your keyword research. 

Speaking of keyword research, it doesn’t have to be as tricky and time-consuming as some people may believe. First, you need to begin with a exact search term that’s related to your area of expertise (see above). For instance, if you run a digital marketing agency, you might start out with the keyword “digital marketing.” 

Naturally, such an exact term is very hard to rank for. Why? Because too many competitors will be fighting over it, which will make it difficult for your content to get seen (no matter how good it is). This is why you then need to broaden your search term while bearing in mind intent (see above) and factors including the specific services you sell, its features, specific questions your customers might have about your brand, as well as variations of those keywords. 

Once you’ve done all that, you should be in a position to write down a list of possible keywords. Here are some: 

• Digital marketing for beginners 
• Affordable digital marketing agencies
• Best digital marketing strategies in 2020
• Digital marketing tools 

These all look okay but we don’t know how much potential they’ve got unless we run them through an SEO tool (I prefer Ahrefs and, no, I am not an affiliate). Our aim here is to find the keywords that have the best ranking opportunities. 

Once you’ve found the standout keywords, it’s time to move onto the next step… 

4. Optimize Your Content 

The thing is that keywords can’t just be randomly added to your content. They need to be thoughtfully added if they’re to improve your ranking.

For example, if you want to boost your ranking and get your content seen by more people, the general argument is that you should add your main keyword to your first paragraph. You should then sprinkle it around your content 3-4 more times, including at least once in a H2. 

You should also add your target keyword to your metadata, including your meta description and title tags. This is just basic, rudimentary optimization that works. 

However, keywords are just part of the puzzle. In order to fully optimize your content for better ranking success, you need to make sure that your content is:

• Relevant 
• Full of value 
• Comprehensive 

Relevancy relates to your target keyword. How relevant is your content to your main keyword? If it’s barely relevant, the reader will immediately realize what’s going on and exit your website. This will cause your bounce rate to rise, which is bad for SEO. 

Value is key, too. The more value you’re able to offer your site visitors, the higher you will rank. Why? Because Google is on the lookout for high value content that improves the user experience. And if your content is full of value, readers will stick around on your page for longer. Google will realize this, and will rank you higher because you’re clearly doing a good job. 

Your articles must also be comprehensive. In other words, they need to cover all the bases of the particular topic related to your keyword. To help you cover all the bases, and to help you cover more bases than your competitors, it’s a good idea to use a tool like BuzzSumo. This tool shows you the most popular content in your niche. You can then check the content related to your target keyword and look for any weaknesses and ways you can improve on it.

Finally, don’t forget your alt text/markers/attributes – these are the characters that load on a screen if your photos fail to display properly. Alt text is also used to help visually-impaired site visitors “read” your pictures, which is why it’s a requirement for many institutions. As a bonus, proper image attribution helps search engines understand image content, thus ideally boosts search presence. 

Wrapping Up

The key to bear in mind when creating a powerful SEO content marketing strategy is that, while you shouldn’t forsake the SEO elements of your content, you must still prioritize high value content that is readable, engaging, and that answers the end user’s query as comprehensively as possible.

Kkeyword research and related tactics exist to enhance and improve your content. Get SEO and content creation just right, and you’re onto your next win.

Learn How SEO Copywriting Services Can 13X Google Search Traffic [Case Study].