How to Craft a Winning SEO Content Strategy That Drives Results

You have a website. You have something to say. You have something to sell. But no one is listening. No one is buying. Why? Perhaps, it’s because you have not sat down to develop a proper SEO content strategy.

Many content marketers and website owners have a semblance of strategy, but it is not solid because they don’t recognize what makes SEO content different. It is not enough for you to just gather a random list of topics and start churning out content week in, week out.

For any piece of content to rank on search engines, it must match the intent and expectations of your target audience. Your content strategy must be centered around providing value and solving problems.

But how do you create such content? How do you design a strategy that drives results? That’s what this article will show you as you read on.

Step One: Identify your target audience and determine their search intent

To create SEO content that ranks well and converts well, you must provide your audience with the information, solution, or value they’re seeking. First, this means that you must know who your target audience is. What is your audience looking for? What are their needs, preferences, and pain points?

Secondly, it also means you must determine the goal behind every relevant search query: the search intent. What does your audience seek to achieve? Search intents, broadly, could be:

• Informational: learn something or answer a question.
• Navigational: find a specific website or page.
• Transactional: buy something or act.
• Commercial: compare products and services before purchase.

Step Two: Research and select relevant keywords for your topic

Keywords are important because they help you understand what your audience is looking for and how you can provide value to them. In SEO, keywords are often the carriers of search intent; hence, optimizing for the right keywords in your content is a winning strategy.

However, not all keywords are created the same. Short-tail keywords are direct, attract a wide audience, and are easy to use. However, they also come with the tough competition due to high search volumes.

On the other hand, long-tail keywords (composed of more than three words) are more conversational and targeted. However, their low search volumes may be discouraging.

A solid SEO content strategy should feature a combination of short-tail and long-tail keywords and high-difficulty and low-difficulty keywords. Use the Eye10 Keyword Planner to research keywords and improve your SEO strategy.

Step Three: Analyze your competitors and find content gaps

You can learn a lot from your competitors and industry leaders in their field. By studying their methods and strategies, you can understand why they are doing so well or discover opportunities they might be missing, which could form keyword gaps.

Using the Eye10 Industry Checker tool gives you insights into this information, including identifying your top competitors based on your target keywords and the gaps you could exploit to outrank them.

After that, fill these gaps by creating unique and valuable content that meets user needs in a way no other brand is doing. Overall, don’t overlook competitor analysis as it helps you to:

• Learn from your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses.

• Identify keywords and topics your competitors are ranking for but are not.
• Find keywords and topics that have high search traffic potential but low competition.
• Create better, different, or more comprehensive content than your competitors.

Step Four: Write engaging and informative SEO content 

Once you have the background sorted, the obvious next step is writing the SEO content. As mentioned earlier, SEO content isn’t just any content. It must be valuable to the audience and solve a particular need among the four types of search intent highlighted above.

So, how do you make your content stand out by being exceptionally engaging and informative? There are many aspects of SEO content writing, but here are some tips you should note:

• Your headlines should capture your audience’s attention and communicate your content’s value proposition.
• Introductions should hook the reader and motivate them to read further.
• In the body paragraphs, support your points with data, examples, quotes, etc.
• Provide a persuasive call to action or a suggestion for further reading.
• Use storytelling, humor, emotion, curiosity, etc., to make your content more interesting and persuasive.
• Use short sentences, paragraphs, bullet points, subheadings, and ample whitespace to make your content more reasonable.
• Images, videos, infographics, charts, etc., make your content visually appealing and encourage interaction.

Step Five: Optimize your content for on-page SEO factors 

Even if you have written exceptional content, you still want to provide search engines with information that enables them to properly crawl and index your website. Therefore, you must tweak various on-page elements to make your content more relevant and visible.

Some of these require light coding, but once you master it, on-page optimization becomes easier. And if you ever want to ensure that you have done it correctly, use the Eye10 On-Page SEO tool to analyze your webpage.

Some on-page SEO factors to note include:

• Include keywords in title tags.
• Entice your readers to click by writing concise, catchy, accurate meta descriptions with target keywords.
• Your headings should contain variations of your target keywords.
• Use descriptive file names and alt texts for your images. Also, include target keywords naturally.
• Hyperlinks on your webpage should have descriptive anchor texts.

Step Six: Track and measure the results

How do you know that your strategy is driving results if you don’t have the means of measuring your performance? Your major focus should be how your SEO results impact your business goals. Then you can identify what’s working and not working and discover new insights and opportunities.

This is the idea behind Eye10 SEO tools: to help you optimize your SEO strategy based on real-time data and feedback. For example, the Rank Checker tool helps you measure your search engine rankings, while the Pagespeed tool is for checking how fast your page loads.

Conclusion

Are you ready to craft a winning SEO content strategy? If yes, then start today. If not, then what’s stopping you? At the least, you shouldn’t let the pricing of various SEO tools on the market stop you.

Eye10 lets you access all its tools for an initial $3 trial. Then you can enter a new world of SEO and discover opportunities you may have missed. Sign up now and enhance your SEO strategy.