7 Ways to Easily Set Up an SEO Content Strategy

Published

3 years ago

May 6, 2021

I can’t imagine an army general ever won a battle by simply “winging it.”

Military leaders study their adversary, tracking their patterns and plotting their course.

They look for weaknesses and opportunities, and they use that information to devise a strategic plan of attack to increase the likelihood of a victory.

Creating search optimized content isn’t much different.

You can’t just write about any old subject, tuck in a few keywords, post it on your site, and expect it to deliver results.

Driving profitable traffic to your site and generating high-quality inbound leads takes in-depth research, careful planning, and developing a thoughtful SEO content strategy.

Once focused on using the right keywords, content marketing is now all about writing to solve the problems of your audience.

To provide meaningful and useful information, you need to understand who your prospects are and what they need from you. This insight guides you in creating content with a purpose.

Writing with intent enables you to increase the number of website visitors you gain through organic search.

This kind of traffic can net you thousands of quality leads and close tons of sales.

The question is, how do you create your own effective SEO content strategy?

As Baroness Maria von Trapp advised in the “Sound of Music,”

“Start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.”

Focus first on the fundamental basics of creating content and keep SEO at the front of your mind as you continue to build on that foundation.

If all you hear are crickets after posting your content, it’s time to take action and begin strategizing.

Here are seven tactics to help you create winning content that maximizes SEO opportunities.

1. Identify Your Target Audience

SEO is all about creating a positive user experience and delivering the most relevant information possible.

To create content that resonates with your audience, you must first know who that audience is.

Here are some things to ask yourself to help zero in on your target market:

Who are your current customers?

Identifying key characteristics of your current customers can give you clues as to who your prospects might be.

Look at quantitative and qualitative data, from age and gender to purchase behavior and web page engagement. All of these can help paint a picture of whom you should be writing for.

Who is attracted to your competition?

Discover what kind of people are engaging with your competitors. Look at social media accounts, blog comments, and customer reviews.

Of the people who are satisfied, what is it that they like? For those who are disgruntled, are you able to meet their needs?

There’s a lot to learn from businesses like yours.

What do you have to offer?

Think about the products and services you offer, and what they bring to your prospects.

Who would benefit from those results?

How are you perceived?

Do you really know how your prospects feel about you and your products?

Survey your audience to understand what you’re doing well, what you could improve, and what kind of information people want to learn from you.

Once you’ve gathered all of this data, segment your audience and develop personas to help you craft personalized content that meets target groups’ specific needs.

Personas represent ideal customers and provide a way to further categorize your audience for maximum impact.

2. Define Your Topic Area

Now that you know who you’re trying to reach and what they want to learn from you, you can begin to brainstorm ideas for content topics.

While your goal is to create content that people want to read, your purpose and expertise should be at the heart of everything you write.

What information can you uniquely provide to the target audience that sets you apart as a voice of authority?

This is your topic area.

It will guide your research for audience interest, keyword matches, and SEO content creation.

Ultimately, this is what will help you create content that converts.

Once you’ve identified your area of expertise (or core content), you can begin to incorporate your audience data to develop a variety of content topics.

These are subjects that are within your field and are material your viewers will want to read.

3. Pinpoint Keywords that Meet Your Audience Needs + Topic Area

Did you notice that finding keywords wasn’t even among the top two steps of SEO strategy?

That’s because, to create content that resonates with people, you must first know who you’re reaching and what information will benefit them.

Only then are you ready to start researching what words and phrases might direct your readers to subjects that are meaningful to them.

Here’s how to accomplish this:

Step 1: Begin with a broad search term that relates to your core content.

For example, if I sell baby clothes, I’d start with the root keyword: “baby clothes.”

Step 2: Narrow the scope by considering these factors:

Top sellers.
Keyword variations.
Product features.
Questions people might ask Google to find your brand and your products.

Step 3: Piece it all together.

You should now be able to construct a preliminary list of ideas to begin researching. Don’t forget to include long-tail keywords that allow you to dig into your topic area a little deeper.

More specific than other keywords, they help target content with laser focus.

Regardless of what list you create, keep in mind, this is just a starting point. Still need ideas? Put yourself in the shoes of your audience and simply run some of your own searches on Google.

For example, when I search my broad term “baby clothes,” I come up with this list:

Baby clothes for boys (a top seller).
Baby clothing (a variation on the keyword).
Baby clothes embroidery (identifies a product feature).
What is the best website for baby clothes? (a commonly asked purchaser question).

Step 4: Use keyword research tools.

Now that you’ve got a rough list of words and phrases, you can run them through your favorite research tool. This will help to pinpoint the keywords that would yield the best results.

7 Ways to Easily Set Up an SEO Content Strategy

The keyword suggestions I receive when I enter “baby clothes” into KeywordTool.io

The more words and phrases you have to research, the more focused your keyword targets can be.

It’ll take more time to enter those words into your research tool but believe me – it’s time well spent.

4. Optimize at Every Turn

Now that you’re armed with keywords that will boost your ROI, you can incorporate them into your writing to create powerful content that performs.

As you draft your content, take advantage of every SEO opportunity by:

Including focus keywords in your H1, H2s, and meta description. Google will pick up on these more easily and use them to rank your page.

7 Ways to Easily Set Up an SEO Content Strategy

Putting your audience first and creating content with keywords that are relevant to their needs and deliver value.
Building brand identity and customer loyalty by publishing on a regular schedule. People will look forward to your posts and seek out opportunities to learn from your brand.

When you optimize your content at every turn, you increase the chances of higher search rankings, more visibility, and increased traffic.

5. Keep Information Up-to-Date

Optimization doesn’t end once your article has been published.

Since creating useful material is such a cornerstone of SEO content strategy, it’s important to remember to constantly update your articles.

Research findings and societal trends are ever-changing, and references to them can become outdated quickly.

Articles you may have linked to in previous articles may no longer exist.

A site that posts outdated information or broken links loses a reader’s trust. Keep in good standing with your audience (and Google).

Show them that your site is fresh, current, and a reliable source for the most useful information possible.

6. Host Your Own Content

To maintain full control of how your content is published, it’s best to host your material on your own platform.

Think of posting on social media and content sites as leasing real estate from a landlord.

At any time and without warning, that landlord can change their mind and evict you from your space.

When conversions and sales are at stake, that’s a scary thought.

That’s exactly what happened to lots of guest writers (including myself) when Huffington Post pulled the plug on its guest contributor blogging program in 2018.

Without warning, any rankings those blogs had earned were suddenly gone.

Not only is that a waste of time and resources, but it’s also a loss of potential business.

The only way to guarantee the fate of your own publications is to host them on your own platform.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t consider partnering with other websites as an affiliate or serve as a guest writer for sites you trust.

But the priority for your content strategy should be posting your own articles on your own site.

7. Track Your Success

It takes a significant investment of time and resources to develop a well-planned content strategy.

And it’s totally worth it – if it’s yielding results.

To determine whether your efforts are worthwhile, you must constantly measure the success of your content strategy.

See if your plan is working by monitoring:

Organic traffic: a good web analytics tool or spreadsheet can help you determine whether you’re gaining unpaid search results.
Indexed pages: search engines are finding your content relevant and valuable.
Conversions: the more effective your strategy, the more conversions you’ll earn.
SERPs: higher rankings reveal a successful use of content.

Tracking metrics not only helps measure your success; it shows you opportunities for improvement, which can be equally (if not more) valuable.

Score a Victory with an Effective SEO Strategy

A content strategy built on the founding principles of SEO will drive traffic and profits to your business.

As you build your plan, the research you conduct will be instrumental in identifying your audience and your area of expertise.

You can use this insight to write with purpose.

In doing so, you’ll attract your audience and yield higher SERPs from Google.

And that’s what I call a win.

Image Credits

All screenshots taken by author, April 2021

Searchenginejournal.com

WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation

Published

19 hours ago

August 31, 2024

Max

WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation

A recent webinar featuring WordPress executives from Automattic and Elementor, along with developers and Joost de Valk, discussed the stagnation in WordPress growth, exploring the causes and potential solutions.

Stagnation Was The Webinar Topic

The webinar, “Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?” was a frank discussion about what can be done to increase the market share of new users that are choosing a web publishing platform.

Yet something that came up is that there are some areas that WordPress is doing exceptionally well so it’s not all doom and gloom. As will be seen later on, the fact that the WordPress core isn’t progressing in terms of specific technological adoption isn’t necessarily a sign that WordPress is falling behind, it’s actually a feature.

Yet there is a stagnation as mentioned at the 17:07 minute mark:

“…Basically you’re saying it’s not necessarily declining, but it’s not increasing and the energy is lagging. “

The response to the above statement acknowledged that while there are areas of growth like in the education and government sectors, the rest was “up for grabs.”

Joost de Valk spoke directly and unambiguously acknowledged the stagnation at the 18:09 minute mark:

“I agree with Noel. I think it’s stagnant.”

That said, Joost also saw opportunities with ecommerce, with the performance of WooCommerce. WooCommerce, by the way, outperformed WordPress as a whole with a 6.80% year over year growth rate, so there’s a good reason that Joost was optimistic of the ecommerce sector.

A general sense that WordPress was entering a stall however was not in dispute, as shown in remarks at the 31:45 minute mark:

“… the WordPress product market share is not decreasing, but it is stagnating…”

Facing Reality Is Productive

Humans have two ways to deal with a problem:

Acknowledge the problem and seek solutions
Pretend it’s not there and proceed as if everything is okay

WordPress is a publishing platform that’s loved around the world and has literally created countless jobs, careers, powered online commerce as well as helped establish new industries in developing applications that extend WordPress.

Many people have a stake in WordPress’ continued survival so any talk about WordPress entering a stall and descent phase like an airplane that reached the maximum altitude is frightening and some people would prefer to shout it down to make it go away.

Acknowledging facts and not brushing them aside is what this webinar achieved as a step toward identifying solutions. Everyone in the discussion has a stake in the continued growth of WordPress and their goal was to put it out there for the community to also get involved.

The live webinar featured:

Miriam Schwab, Elementor’s Head of WP Relations
Rich Tabor, Automattic Product Manager
Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO
Co-hosts Matt Cromwell and Amber Hinds, both members of the WordPress developer community moderated the discussion.

WordPress Market Share Stagnation

The webinar acknowledged that WordPress market share, the percentage of websites online that use WordPress, was stagnating. Stagnation is a state at which something is neither moving forward nor backwards, it is simply stuck at an in between point. And that’s what was openly acknowledged and the main point of the discussion was understanding the reasons why and what could be done about it.

Statistics gathered by the HTTPArchive and published on Joost de Valk’s blog show that WordPress experienced a year over year growth of 1.85%, having spent the year growing and contracting its market share. For example, over the latest month over month period the market share dropped by -0.28%.

Crowing about the WordPress 1.85% growth rate as evidence that everything is fine is to ignore that a large percentage of new businesses and websites coming online are increasingly going to other platforms, with year over year growth rates of other platforms outpacing the rate of growth of WordPress.

Out of the top 10 Content Management Systems, only six experienced year over year (YoY) growth.

CMS YoY Growth

Webflow: 25.00%
Shopify: 15.61%
Wix: 10.71%
Squarespace: 9.04%
Duda: 8.89%
WordPress: 1.85%

Why Stagnation Is A Problem

An important point made in the webinar is that stagnation can have a negative trickle-down effect on the business ecosystem by reducing growth opportunities and customer acquisition. If fewer of the new businesses coming online are opting in for WordPress are clients that will never come looking for a theme, plugin, development or SEO service.

It was noted at the 4:18 minute mark by Joost de Valk:

“…when you’re investing and when you’re building a product in the WordPress space, the market share or whether WordPress is growing or not has a deep impact on how easy it is to well to get people to, to buy the software that you want to sell them.”

Perception Of Innovation

One of the potential reasons for the struggle to achieve significant growth is the perception of a lack of innovation, pointed out at the 16:51 minute mark that there’s still no integration with popular technologies like Next JS, an open-source web development platform that is optimized for fast rollout of scalable and search-friendly websites.

It was observed at the 16:51 minute mark:

“…and still today we have no integration with next JS or anything like that…”

Someone else agreed but also expressed at the 41:52 minute mark, that the lack of innovation in the WordPress core can also be seen as a deliberate effort to make WordPress extensible so that if users find a gap a developer can step in and make a plugin to make WordPress be whatever users and developers want it to be.

“It’s not trying to be everything for everyone because it’s extensible. So if WordPress has a… let’s say a weakness for a particular segment or could be doing better in some way. Then you can come along and develop a plug in for it and that is one of the beautiful things about WordPress.”

Is Improved Marketing A Solution

One of the things that was identified as an area of improvement is marketing. They didn’t say it would solve all problems. It was simply noted that competitors are actively advertising and promoting but WordPress is by comparison not really proactively there. I think to extend that idea, which wasn’t expressed in the webinar, is to consider that if WordPress isn’t out there putting out a positive marketing message then the only thing consumers might be exposed to is the daily news of another vulnerability.

Someone commented in the 16:21 minute mark:

“I’m missing the excitement of WordPress and I’m not feeling that in the market. …I think a lot of that is around the product marketing and how we repackage WordPress for certain verticals because this one-size-fits-all means that in every single vertical we’re being displaced by campaigns that have paid or, you know, have received a a certain amount of funding and can go after us, right?”

This idea of marketing being a shortcoming of WordPress was raised earlier in the webinar at the 18:27 minute mark where it was acknowledged that growth was in some respects driven by the WordPress ecosystem with associated products like Elementor driving the growth in adoption of WordPress by new businesses.

They said:

“…the only logical conclusion is that the fact that marketing of WordPress itself is has actually always been a pain point, is now starting to actually hurt us.”

Future Of WordPress

This webinar is important because it features the voices of people who are actively involved at every level of WordPress, from development, marketing, accessibility, WordPress security, to plugin development. These are insiders with a deep interest in the continued evolution of WordPress as a viable platform for getting online.

The fact that they’re talking about the stagnation of WordPress should be of concern to everybody and that they are talking about solutions shows that the WordPress community is not in denial but is directly confronting situations, which is how a thriving ecosystem should be responding.

Watch the webinar:

Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?

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SEO

Google’s New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO

Published

2 days ago

August 31, 2024

Max

Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO

Google announced that images in the AVIF file format will now be eligible to be shown in Google Search and Google Images, including all platforms that surface Google Search data. AVIF will dramatically lower image sizes and improve Core Web Vitals scores, particularly Largest Contentful Paint.

How AVIF Can Improve SEO

Getting pages crawled and indexed are the first step of effective SEO. Anything that lowers file size and speeds up web page rendering will help search crawlers get to the content faster and improve the amount of pages crawled.

Google’s crawl budget documentation recommends increasing the speeds of page loading and rendering as a way to avoid receiving “Hostload exceeded” warnings.

It also says that faster loading times enables Googlebot to crawl more pages:

Improve your site’s crawl efficiency

Increase your page loading speed
Google’s crawling is limited by bandwidth, time, and availability of Googlebot instances. If your server responds to requests quicker, we might be able to crawl more pages on your site.

What Is AVIF?

AVIF (AVI Image File Format) is a next generation open source image file format that combines the best of JPEG, PNG, and GIF image file formats but in a more compressed format for smaller image files (by 50% for JPEG format).

AVIF supports transparency like PNG and photographic images like JPEG does but does but with a higher level of dynamic range, deeper blacks, and better compression (meaning smaller file sizes). AVIF even supports animation like GIF does.

AVIF Versus WebP

AVIF is generally a better file format than WebP in terms of smaller files size (compression) and image quality. WebP is better for lossless images, where maintaining high quality regardless of file size is more important. But for everyday web usage, AVIF is the better choice.

Is AVIF Supported?

AVIF is currently supported by Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari browsers. Not all content management systems support AVIF. However, both WordPress and Joomla support AVIF. In terms of CDN, Cloudflare also already supports AVIF.

I couldn’t at this time ascertain whether Bing supports AVIF files and will update this article once I find out.

Current website usage of AVIF stands at 0.2% but now that it’s available to surfaced in Google Search, expect that percentage to grow. AVIF images will probably become a standard image format because of its high compression will help sites perform far better than they currently do with JPEG and PNG formats.

Research conducted in July 2024 by Joost de Valk (founder of Yoast, ) discovered that social media platforms don’t all support AVIF files. He found that LinkedIn, Mastodon, Slack, and Twitter/X do not currently support AVIF but that Facebook, Pinterest, Threads and WhatsApp do support it.

AVIF Images Are Automatically Indexable By Google

According to Google’s announcement there is nothing special that needs to be done to make AVIF image files indexable.

“Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the web. We’re happy to announce that AVIF is now a supported file type in Google Search, for Google Images as well as any place that uses images in Google Search. You don’t need to do anything special to have your AVIF files indexed by Google.”

Read Google’s announcement:

Supporting AVIF in Google Search

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SEO

CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO

Published

2 days ago

August 30, 2024

Max

CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO

Eli Schwartz, Author of Product-Led SEO, started a discussion on LinkedIn about there being too many CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) who believe that AI written content is an SEO strategy. He predicted that there will be reckoning on the way after their strategies end in failure.

This is what Eli had to say:

“Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO.

This mistake is going to lead to an explosion in demand for SEO strategists to help them fix their traffic when they find out they might have been wrong.”

Everyone in the discussion, which received 54 comments, strongly agreed with Eli, except for one guy.

What Is Google’s Policy On AI Generated Content?

Google’s policy hasn’t changed although they did update their guidance and spam policies on March 5, 2024 at the same time as the rollout of the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update. Many publishers who used AI to create content subsequently reported losing rankings.

Yet it’s not said that using AI is enough to merit poor rankings, it’s content that is created for ranking purposes.

Google wrote these guidelines specifically for autogenerated content, including AI generated content (Wayback machine copy dated March 6, 2024)

“Our long-standing spam policy has been that use of automation, including generative AI, is spam if the primary purpose is manipulating ranking in Search results. The updated policy is in the same spirit of our previous policy and based on the same principle. It’s been expanded to account for more sophisticated scaled content creation methods where it isn’t always clear whether low quality content was created purely through automation.

Our new policy is meant to help people focus more clearly on the idea that producing content at scale is abusive if done for the purpose of manipulating search rankings and that this applies whether automation or humans are involved.”

Many in Eli’s discussion were in agreement that reliance on AI by some organizations may come to haunt them, except for that one guy in the discussion

Read the discussion on LinkedIn:

Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO

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