SEO has been present in the digital marketing scene for some time now, and it’s been wielded by several businesses to truly establish and strengthen their online presence. However, despite its growing significance and benefits, some businesses still tend to struggle with keeping up with SEO’s fast-paced and evolving methods. Some seek the involvement of a team of experts, like an SEO service provider in the Philippines, as an aid to keep up with sudden changes and be equipped and up-to-date with the proper tools, while withstanding the tough competition.

One of SEO’s toughest yet crucial hurdles that need to be overcome by most businesses is developing the right content strategy and executing it accordingly. While having quality content truly is king (and superior), if it doesn’t reach the right constituents and subjects, its reign is basically pointless. Writing great content is important, but having the right strategy in order to reach the audience looking for it is equally important. Most businesses try to solve this through creating strategies that are centered towards using keyword research alone to immediately get noticed by the audience; however, it’s also crucial to note that their search needs aren’t all met through a single search. Many key factors need to be carefully considered in order for strategies to work. How can these factors be incorporated seamlessly into creating an effective SEO-driven content strategy?

Define Your Scope of Topics

Introduce your brand’s purpose and field of expertise through general topics that are unique and related to your brand, and offer these to your audience. This will give you concepts and ideas of what the audience could be looking for, and then, through content, create different ways to position your brand as the answer. This area of topics would serve as your guide in audience research, as well as keyword research — the most searched sets of words, the top results, and those that are closely tied to your brand — and eventually could also be useful in creating content that provokes higher chances of conversion.

Figure Out Your Target Audience

One of the first important steps in creating an SEO content strategy is figuring out who your target audience is in search. Discovering who you would target in your search would inevitably give you ideas about what type of content the audience would be searching for. You can then create content based on those ideas. General ideas in defining your target audience would include conducting surveys, taking a look at your existing customers–the demographics, their background, age, interests, hobbies, and occupation–as well as taking a look at your possible competitors’ target audience. Having this relevant information would help you in creating marketing personas, have an understanding of the range of the people you would be targeting, and create content that would appeal and resonate with them accordingly.

Identify Keywords from Your Set of Topics and Target Audience

Now that you have defined your purpose and expertise, set a proper scope of general topics, and have a better understanding of the audience that you’re targeting, you may use a combination of these in doing keyword research. This means researching for keywords that are directed to topics that are relevant to what your audience wants. You could start by choosing to have key terms that are broad yet are still related to your brand, and narrowing down these terms through incorporating more specific factors such as your brand’s exact service or product, your best-selling services, the features of your products, and questions most likely searched by your existing customers (if any). Combine these broad terms with specific factors (and incorporate some variety) to generate a list of keywords to appear higher in search results, and attract organic traffic.

Utilize Different Formats for Content Creation

To guarantee higher rankings in search and generate relevant traffic, it’s important to acknowledge different formats you can use to create content and maximize their use. The use of these different formats does not only ensure higher audience engagement but also expands its reach and influence to cover every base possible. These content formats include blogs, videos, infographics, and even podcasts. However, a study revealed that blogs are the type of content that prove to be the most impactful and efficient for SEO and businesses in driving traffic. Brands that produce blogs increase website visitors to 55%, which in turn means that more links could be incorporated, which leaves a positive result in your SEO.

Create a Calendar for Frequent Content-Posting

Focusing on optimizing content for SEO would be a successful strategy, but not without frequent posting. Publishing as many optimized content as possible is also important in order for the strategy to be effective. To help you get on top of things, creating a calendar where everything is scheduled would help you be more organized on when to create content, edit, and publish it on the right dates. It’s advisable to plan only at least three to four weeks ahead, since the budget, the rankings, and the audience’s search behavior are subject to changes.

Reflect and Make Adjustments on Your Overall Content Performance

Monitoring the performance of your optimized content for search engines is also crucial in ensuring an effective strategy. Since SEO and algorithms basically change like the weather, some methods applied may not be consistently efficient if not properly monitored. Take a look at important metrics such as traffic, rate of web page visitors, number of pages visited, bounce rate, and dwell time. Study the changes from these metrics and make adjustments accordingly to retain effectiveness.