Content strategy is the piece of your marketing plan that continuously demonstrates the company as a brand and the expertise it brings to the industry. In its most basic form, it is any content you produce that results in an increase of organic search traffic. The strategy portion is the intentional content you create to achieve this purpose.
Among these components, you will want to give an answer to “What content is needed” to optimize your site and gain search engine traffic. If any of the terminology in this article is unfamiliar, check out our SEO 101: Glossary of Terms.
Content Strategy and Keyword Research
Before creating your SEO Content Strategy, it’s important to familiarize yourself with your keyword search. Keyword Research is an essential part of any SEO strategy, take it from the experts – we would know.
Keyword research is defined as the process of analyzing and finding a list of valuable keywords for the purpose of SEO copywriting. The keywords, or search terms, often become a guide for the direction of your content and marketing strategy, and have an impact that reaches far and wide when it comes to connected potential consumers with your brand.
Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing actual search terms that people enter into search engines. The insight you can get into these actual search terms can help inform content strategy, as well as your larger marketing strategy.
Creating high-quality content is critical to content marketing success. With thousands of blog posts published every day, you need a way to make your content stand out. Creating content not only helps your leads get to know your business, but it also helps your business improve your SEO ranking. As an SEO content creator, you’ll be on the fast track to boosting your website’s ranking in the search results and driving more traffic to your page.
SEO content comes in many forms including product pages, videos, infographics, blog posts, and guides. Blogs are the most common format of content for SEO content creators. It’s one of the most accessible formats for creating a large quantity of material. Blog posts are engaging and allow you to share valuable information with your audience.
With blogs, you can engage your audience by sharing valuable information with them. It’s a great way to attract links and traffic, as well as build your website’s authority.
Importance of Brand Voice
It is important to define your brand voice to be able to write successful content. A consistent brand voice and vocabulary is essential to implementing localized content and intelligent content strategies effectively. This can be the type of words you use (academic vs. casual) or your overall tone of voice (educational vs. conversational.) A simple way to identify your specific brand voice is:
Gather a representative sample of your content.
Describe your brand voice in three words
Create a brand voice chart (see below)
Ensure you understand how to put your brand voice into action
Revisit and revise the brand voice chart from time to time
Content has to be targeted and timely in order to generate qualified leads as part of your inbound sales strategy or in content marketing. Content, whatever its purpose, should always be timely, buyer-centric, improve your lead generation strategy, and positively impact sales.
Building a content strategy is more than considering what type of content you want to create. You first need to know who you’re speaking to, how you want to speak to them, and where to find them. Your buyer persona is the person that you want to reach with your content. This semi-fictional character serves as a representation of your target audience
You want to connect with your buyer’s persona and pinpoint the issues they encounter so you could provide solutions that they need. Each of your prospects follows a path to a solution — that path involves awareness, consideration, and decision stages. By creating content for each stage of the buyer’s journey, you’re ensuring that no visitors fall through the cracks and that every individual that comes to your site feels like they are receiving relevant, useful information.
Basically, the goal is to begin with identifying blog post title suggestions based on keyword research with sufficient supporting data on why you need to create this content, why you need it on your site, what are the recommended components of the content, and how it will help you grow. Most of the time, we only recommend informational content and therefore use keywords with informational intent. This is because you’ll want these topics to be written as blog posts which you can also use in link building.
SEO Content Strategy Essentials
Make sure the intent of your keyword matches the intent of your title. A good tip is to try and figure out what the people who are searching for this particular keyword want to know. Once you have that figured out, you can craft your topic/title to answer their question/give them the information they’re looking for.
It’s also important that you understand what the keyword actually is so that you’ll be able to provide the best title/angle that would revolve around that topic. If you’re not sure what it means, you can always check how other sites are talking about it so you get a better idea.
Be careful about using transactional keywords as the target keywords for informational pages. Those are mainly to inform things like product page copy and backlink anchor text. You can still use those keywords for blog posts, but you should individually investigate them and make sure that Google is actually ranking informational content for that keyword in the top 5 or so positions, and you also don’t want to inadvertently outrank your own product pages for those keywords.
Specifically, you’ll need informational keywords when doing content strategy for blog posts. Content strategy in general can encompass all types of pages including product pages, landing pages, listing pages, and others. So informational and transactional keywords both have their place.
Consider the site’s authority. When choosing keywords from your keyword research, consider the authority of your site. If the site is new or has very little authority, choose keywords with the lowest difficulty instead of targeting KW with high volume search but with high difficulty, as it would be hard to compete with already established sites.
Google the keywords. This will allow you to get an idea on what other sites are talking about, and try to come up with a way to make your content better than the rest. If other sites, for example, have 5 Tips, Make ours 8-10. Or if others are just talking about “how,” make ours what, how, where, etc.
Keywords don’t need to be an exact match. You don’t want to sacrifice natural-sounding titles in order to force in an exact match keyword. Let the keywords inform the overall idea of the title, but they don’t necessarily need to be an exact match. For example, Google can make the connection between an “e-learning developer” and a “developer for your e-learning platform.”\ \ Exact match isn’t strictly necessary to have in the title. It’s nice if you can include it, but the most important factor for the title is drawing in viewers, and the creative copy can accomplish this better in many cases than just repeating the query. Do make sure that the title is clearly relevant to the query, and for ranking/featured-snippet purposes it would be good to have the exact match as a heading or subheading in the article content.
Same title as another article is sometimes OK. It should also be worth mentioning, though, that having the same title as another article from another site isn’t necessarily a bad thing either, as long you make your content better than theirs. If the first page is saturated with exact-match long-tail keywords, though, then standing out might be a better strategy than conforming exactly to the keyword.
Speak to the buyer’s journey. Usually, when working on a high-level marketing strategy, it requires that you speak to the buyer’s journey. You want to make sure to touch on how that keyword phrase ties back to the buyer’s journey of your product or service.
For example, say you’re a company that appraises homes. You could structure your content as follows:
Suggested Title: Does A Messy House Affect An Appraisal?
Target KW: does a messy house affect an appraisal
Search Volume: 200
While low search volume, this keyword touches on a topic very much on the mind of a hot lead. This is a direct query that’s linked to appraisals, which are part of the home-buying process.. And as a result, you would need to rank for that term.
Use a content explorer tool. At Galactic Fed, we like to use Ahrefs. You can also run the keyword in Ahrefs’ “Content Explorer” for more topic ideas and to check which topics generate more traffic that could also bring traffic to your site.
Overview. For each blog post title recommendation, it’s best practice that each article must be thoroughly explained, keyword-justified (using both main topic keywords and keywords for subtopics of the article), and well thought out within the context of your brand and content direction.
Cross-check against existing material. When you do content creation it’s recommended to add internal links. The internal links are a good way of cross-checking against existing material and establishing potential in-article backlinks for content syndication.
A perfect SEO content strategy seamlessly marries the science behind ranking higher in search, with the various compelling pieces of content a reader can consume. It’s using the content you produce not only to educate, entertain and inform, but to make sure people are able to find your business and brand right when they need it. The best type of SEO content addresses your buyer’s journey and solves real problems, so when they are asking a search bar the questions, you are the answer.
Become your own SEO guru by reading all the articles in our SEO 101 Series.
Voice search usage is rapidly increasing and it is expected that by the end of the year around 50% of all searches will be made via voice. It was always expected that voice search will become popular because it is easier to speak than it is to type.
As more voice technologies develop, consumers are likely to use voice search more frequently. Given how important voice search is and how important it is expected to become, it is imperative for all business owners and marketers to know the top voice search optimization strategies which they can use to get ahead of their competitors. Let’s have a look how you can optimize for voice search.
1.Optimize Your Website for Mobile:
Today optimizing your website for mobile is more important than it has ever been in the past. This is because most voice searches happen on mobile phones. Further, a mobile-friendly website can be a shot in the arm for your SEO initiatives.
You need to have a responsive layout which ensures that your website offers the same seamless experience on mobile phones as it does on websites. Further, you need to ensure that your homepage is clear and your website is easily navigable. You need to make sure that your website loads very quickly (3 seconds or less) on both smart-phones as well desktops.
A site which loads quickly creates a quality user experience and helps in boosting rankings. You can try the Google Search Console to see if your site is good to go or if it needs some improvement.
2. Create Conversational Content:
Your focus should be on creating conversational content because voice searches are more conversational than searches of other kind. It shouldn't be so difficult to understand. The fact remains that people don't speak the same as they communicate online and you need to create your content around that.
Voice searches contain more specifics to what people are searching and that is why your focus should be on targeting long-tail keywords which have a better chance of reaching targeted customers.
3.Long-Tail Keyword Research:
Your focus should be on long-tail keywords because they are the best possible way to show up in Google's prime spots. It won't be so difficult to achieve this since long-tail keywords have comparatively less competition. You can use different tools to discover the long-tail keywords that your target audience uses along with their search volume, keyword difficulty and other ranking metrics. Your focus should be on using conversational, long-tail keyword phrases in your content which is better placed in answering the natural language questions of the searchers.
4.Focus On Local Searches:
Your focus should be on local searches because most people use voice search to find local businesses, products or services. It has already been mentioned that by the end of the year voice search will account for around 50% of all Google searches.
Hence your focus should be on optimizing your website and content for local searches, to get leverage over your competitors. You need to target local keywords which will help you in gaining higher search rankings.
5.Restructure Your Content:
There is a need to restructure your content because it is common knowledge that voice search queries are a lot more conversational than traditional search queries. Hence your focus should be on creating short, concise answers to voice search queries. You need to structure your content to rank better for voice search results.
You can include Frequently-Asked Questions (FAQs) on your product pages because they are inclusive of question keywords and are very short as well. You should always break your content into small fragments with the help of pointers as it helps in achieving better rankings.
6.Improve Content Readability:
Your focus should be on creating good and readable content. Your aim should be on creating content which can get a ranking of around 8 on the Flesch Kincaid Grade. When you create precise content at that level it will help you in ranking your content.
7.Leverage Google My Business Listings:
It has already been mentioned that most people using voice search are looking for local businesses, products and services. One of the most important factors for ranking for local searches is your Google My Business listing. If and when you leverage your Google My Business listing, you let Google know that your business is located at a particular place.
This works for you because any time anyone asks Google to display businesses like you in that particular area, your business stands a chance for ranking for that query. You need to include accurate NAP information in your listing. Further, you need to choose the right categories and also provide the accurate area codes. Once you improve your local SEO and have a proper Google My Business listing, you will be able to see positive results right away.
8.Focus On Answering Questions:
41% of all people use voice search in a way that they would talk to a friend. Most people using voice-search don't use keywords, they ask questions. That is why your focus should be on using conversational, long-tail keyword phrases in your content which will help you in answering natural language questions.
Your focus should be on creating conversational content around natural language keyword phrases that your target audience is most likely to ask.
The Bottom Line
Voice search is expected to impact the future of SEO and digital marketing as a whole. With every passing year, voice search continues to grow and its popularity and usage isn't expected to slow down anytime soon.
Given the changing behavior of the consumers at large, it is imperative upon marketers to be prepared for any marketing trend to be better placed to meet the expectations of consumers. If you haven’t optimized your website for voice search, then it is time that you do so. You can do so on your own or can hire digital marketing services of an offshore digital marketing agency for the same purpose.
Social media impacts your search rankings yet not in the manner you may think. The facts confirm that search engines, for example, Google doesn’t legitimately factor in the social impact on their ranking algorithm. While this doesn't give you a reason to overlook social media thoroughly. One reason why social media fundamentally impacts your search engine ranking is a result of social sharing. This brings various advantages and among them are inbound links. In the event that you know somewhat about SEO, you have most likely discovered that inbound links assume a basic job in deciding the value of a site to search engines. The more inbound links your site has, the more significant it is viewed as.
The search industry is constantly buzzing about how social media software and also facebook messenger bot can impact SEO. social media SEO alludes to how social media activities can help your site's natural traffic through search engines. It's a point that never gets old. It makes your SEO activities successful as well as worthwhile.
Nonetheless, in spite of prevalent thinking, web-based social networking doesn't legitimately add to SEO. At the end of the day, social signals don't legitimately help rank better. The links that you share on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest may enable your brand to get more introduction, yet they aren't seen by Google as a ranking signal.
Reasons to Up Your Social Media Game
Search engine optimization is tied in with increasing greater visibility and getting more individuals to naturally visit your site. Social media marketing then again is tied in with taking advantage of social networks and getting found on them by the opportune individuals. The two of them may appear to be unique yet have overlapping objectives. Fundamentally, they cooperate. This is the reason web indexes are getting increasingly social, and social networks are transforming into significant search engine tools.
The Content on social media Gets Indexed
The correct sort of social media content published on a regular basis can have a tremendous effect on your overall content marketing campaign. Also, when you discover that your social media posts can get crept via the search engine spiders and get indexed, things show signs of improvement.
Social Media Helps Build Authority
Search engines give a great deal of weight to a site's authority, making it a basic SEO factor to concentrate on. According to search engines, if your page or domain has a high value, it has high authority. Furthermore, a superior opportunity to rank above sites with not really solid authority.
Social Media helps Involving Real People
While SEO has a technical side to it, it's not just thing you ought to be centered around. The majority of the blackhat or unethical SEO practices are technical in nature, but neglect to give long term results since they take the “client” out of the equation. These strategies are not about individuals when search engines are explicitly searching for a human touch.
Tip to improve your SEO with the help of Social Media
Get More Quality Links
Backlinks have consistently been a significant factor with regards to a site's ranking in the search engines. Both, the quality and the quantity of backlinks strongly affects how well your site ranks. By concentrating your efforts on better social media marketing, you are bound to pull in the correct sort of backlink openings. At the point when your content has a higher number of online networking shares, it is gets taken note.
Increment the Number of Branded Searches
Developing your audience and building a solid brand is a gigantic piece of any online marketing campaign, social media marketing is also the same. Your social media pages and profiles assist you with making an association with your picked set of audience. With your steady social media updates and by providing quality data to them all the time, they perceive your brand. They know what your identity is and what sort of content you make. Also, beginning considering you to be a trusted source.
Tap Into Local Search
In case you're a little or medium-sized business with a physical address, you can't and ought not to disregard the intensity of local search. Google knows the significance of topography and its pertinence to giving individuals a superior client experience. With a vast dominant part of the Internet clients searching for local organizations on their mobile phones, neighborhood look will undoubtedly develop.
Understand What Your Audience Wants
While the significance of keywords in SEO continues as before, the manner in which they're being explored has advanced throughout the years. Today, finding and choosing the correct keywords includes a solid understanding of “client's expectation”. Without understanding the expectation of the searcher, the picked keywords may not give you the outcomes you're searching for. If you search for “scene photography”, Google needs to know why you did as such so as to serve the most significant outcomes.
There are numerous approaches to find out about what your audience needs, for example, email feedbacks, however, you can do likewise with social listening. By following and investigating the different sorts of discussions your audience is having via web-based networking media, you can pick up bits of knowledge into their wants and needs. This can assist you with making content that takes into account their needs, which thusly gives Google and other search engines what they're searching for.
Build a Strong Audience or Following
Making an incredible product is clearly the initial move towards accomplishing extraordinary marketing objectives. In any case, so as to genuinely consider your service or product a triumph, it is critical to get the message out about it among your intended target audience particularly the early adopters. Keep in mind, if your audience doesn't think about your offering, it's in the same class as not having it.
The marketplace of today is profoundly focused where organizations are prepared to make a genuine investment to get a lot of the pie. Which is the reason you need to place in the required additional push to effectively connect with your intended target audience? The more proactive you are in your methodology, the better outcomes you will see.
Build Partnerships
In our very own social media strategy, while regardless we use strategy one (deliberately sharing our content via web-based networking media), I've been moving more or our time toward utilizing social to build strategic relationships prompting potential associations. The way that it's gotten substantially more hard to contact an audience naturally nowadays implies we should focus on the one thing social media shows development over practically some other marketing channels: cultivating connections. there are three levels of relationship-building you should focus on with your social media:
Brand fans. This works with both of the past strategies since it will expand the introduction of your content and assemble progressively positive brand specifies via social media. The active social media clients who love your brand are unpaid supporters who duplicate your adequacy for free.
Organic influencers. Organic influencers are social media accounts that have an impact significant to your brand earned in view of real aptitude, authority, and dependability.
Strategic partners. Strategic partners are representing non-focused organizations or persuasive individuals in your industry with whom you can co-make significant content and experiences that influence both of your social audiences.
Author Bio –
Sunny Chawla is a Marketing Manager at AIS Technolabs. Web-design & Development Company, helping global businesses to grow using equity based crowdfunding sites. He would love to share thoughts on Android & i-Phone App Development Services, Digital marketing etc.
Search
Engine Optimization plays a huge role in how customers find your online store
through search engines. Simply put, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the
process of optimizing aspects of your site so that search engines understand
what you're offering (through tags & description) and place you high on the
search results page. SEO is the online equivalent of the billboard or
advertisement banners that we pass by on the streets. The big difference is
that while the billboard can only be seen by those who pass by that particular
street, SEO can potentially expose you to millions of people when done right.
Combining Woocommerce, the most popular shopping cart plugin and SEO is the most essential thing to the success of your Woocommerce store in bringing you new customers and growing your store. Woocommerce provides you easy-to-use controls to build and manage your online store but on its own, it won't help you get high up on search engines. In this article, I'll share tips to help you optimize your Woocommerce store and get it ready for higher ranking on search engines.
Product
Titles
The most important part of woo-commerce SEO from a search engine point of view is the product page title. When search engines show your product in the search results page, the first thing shown is the title. Write short, descriptive titles that describe the product in as little words a possible. Avoid general terms that are too broad or that could have multiple meanings. Ensure that your title has important keywords such as brand, model, or make to quickly distinguish it from a bunch of other items like it.
Product
Description
Many
online store owners use a very little amount of text to describe their products
because they assume people will just get it. When it comes to product
description, the more the better. Just be sure to break the text into shorter 2
– 3 sentence paragraphs and use bullet points wherever necessary. As far as
product information goes, you need to answer questions like:
What material is the item
made of,
What size and color does
the item come in,
Who is best suited for this
item
Think of
the questions a visitor may have and add it as part of the product description.
Categories
and Navigation
The other
factor that impacts your Woocommerce SEO is the structure of your site's
navigation. Aim for simple, intuitive navigation that is easy for visitors to
understand. When setting up categories try to keep the levels shallow so that
users don't get lost trying to track down an item.
Category
names, just like product titles, should be descriptive. Woocommerce allows you
to enter a description of the category so go ahead and add helpful text there
as well. Product categories help search engines understand the grouping of your
store so it's important to have them laid out nicely.
Conclusion
Woocommerce
SEO, when done right, is like having a 24-hour salesperson on the streets
inviting customers to your site. Take some time and optimize your online store
today and start enjoying the benefits of more sales and business growth.
The glitz, the glam, the glorious design elements that make your website look like a million bucks. When contemplating a website redesign, it’s easy to focus only on those features that are appealing to the eye.
Unfortunately, redesigning a website isn’t simply an exercise in aesthetics. Sure, the purely visual elements of your newly designed website will likely get the most attention, but remember: a great website redesign also requires that you consider (and improve) what’s under the hood.
A flashy exterior doesn’t help much if the actual machine fails to function. If people can’t find your website via search, or if they can’t intuitively navigate through your site’s pages and easily understand what information those pages contain, it doesn’t really matter how beautiful it looks.
When it comes to your website redesign, form and function need to be a package deal. So while you should absolutely incorporate that new color scheme and add that big beautiful hero image to your homepage, don’t forget about what’s happening behind the scenes.
Why You Need to Think of SEO From the Start
To ensure your new site will truly resonate with your target audience — and to save yourself from some major headaches down the road — you need SEO to be ingrained in your redesign strategy from the very beginning.
“The most common SEO mistake that I see marketers make when redesigning their websites is not involving the SEO team early in the process,” says Jeff Ferguson, CEO of Fang Digital Marketing. “All too often, when we’re brought in for SEO work on a redesign, it’s often late in the process, such as when the site is being coded or even totally complete … The advice that usually needs to be passed on at this point will most likely cost the company much more in design, coding, and more.”
Laura Hogan, marketing director at OverGo Studio, takes a similar view. “If you don’t have SEO in mind from the initial strategy session, you’re going to lose what you took so much time and effort to build. Everything from the structure of your website to the meta description of your website pages is important and should be taken into consideration.”
Website Redesign & SEO: Your Major Action Items
So, how exactly do you make sure SEO is incorporated into your redesign strategy from the very beginning? Here are a few items to add to the to-do list:
Do an Audit of Your Existing Site
Before you bust out the wrecking ball and start demolishing your soon-to-be-forgotten site, make sure you take the time to examine and audit your site to determine what’s working and what isn’t. Here are some key metrics you may want to consider:
Number of visits/visitors/unique visitors (monthly average)
Top performing keywords (in terms of rank, traffic, and lead generation)
Number of inbound linking domains
Total number of total pages indexed
Total number of pages that receive traffic
Armed with this knowledge of how your existing site is performing, you'll be able to make informed decisions about which of your pages should stay, which ones should go, and which ones should get revamped or reorganized during your redesign.
Identify (and Include) Commonly Used Keywords
It’s a new era for SEO, an era where you can no longer keyword-stuff your way to search ranking success. Nowadays, if Google finds out that you are blatantly overusing (or hiding) keywords on your site, your credibility (and rankings) could take a serious hit.
However, this doesn’t mean that keywords are totally irrelevant. In fact, if you’re doing what Google wants you to do (creating high-quality content), keywords will work there way naturally into your website’s pages. To quote from Google directly:
“In creating a helpful, information-rich site, write pages that clearly and accurately describe your topic. Think about the words users would type to find your pages and include those words on your site.”
Consider Your URL Structure
If your site is littered with lengthy, indecipherable URLs that don’t align well with the actual content of your site pages, restructuring your URLs should definitely be a priority during your next website redesign.
Wondering where SEO comes into play here? Just like the searchers themselves, search engines prefer URLs that make it easy to understand what your page content is all about.
A general rule to follow when creating your new URLs: use dashes (-) between words instead of underscores (_). Google treats dashes as separators, which means it can return results when you search for a single word that appears in a URL and when you search for a group of words that appears in a URL. This means that Google sees the individual words in the URL inbound-marketing-tips.com, which means the website could show up in searches for terms like “inbound tips,” “inbound marketing tips,” “marketing tips,” etc.
In contrast, Google treats underscore as connectors, which means it will only return results when you search for a group of connected words that appears in a URL. So Google reads the URL inbound_marketing_tips.com as inboundmarketingtips.com, which changes how often the site appears in search results.
The bottom line: Using dashes creates more opportunities for your pages to be discovered.
Opt for a Responsive Solution
As Google’s preferred configuration for mobile-optimized websites, responsive design is your best option for delivering a great search and browsing experience to mobile users.
With responsive design, all of your website’s URLs are the same across all devices, and they all serve up the same HTML code. This isn’t the case with other mobile configurations, like setting up a separate, mobile-only site (which requires a different set of URLs) or implementing dynamic serving (which uses the same URLs but serves up different HTML).
With responsive design, the only thing that changes across devices is the styling (which is controlled by CSS). This configuration makes it easier for Google to crawl your pages and retrieve your content.
Have any website redesign and SEO tips you'd like to share? Sound off in the comments section below!
Erik was a Sr. Content Strategist and launched HubSpot’s first-ever Medium publication, ReadThink (now ThinkGrowth.org). Erik is now taking a break from the tech/marketing world to tackle some passion projects.
