If you want to increase your visibility on the web, building a content strategy is essential. Your content strategy must above all allow you to create quality content for your audience based on very specific SEO metrics: keywords, their search volume and your ability to easily position yourself on the 1st page for these words. keys. The objective of your strategy is to attract qualified traffic to your site and therefore increase your conversions.
As you will have understood, a good content strategy must be aligned with your business objectives and requires knowing your target audience well! Once you’ve got that figured out, it’s time to build your content strategy. We explain the steps to get there!
Audit your site and find opportunities
First of all, it is important to make an inventory of the positioning of your site in order to observe what the search engines have understood of your site. This inventory allows you to identify the requests on which you are already positioned.
Think about studying the competition: what content have your competitors produced? What position do they have? All this information will help you identify interesting queries for your business.
Using keyword research tools (SEMRush, Ahrefs, Google Ads Keyword Planner – free), your positioning as well as that of your competitors, you are able to create a list of keywords with their search volume in your topic. Don’t forget to check the search intent! This will prevent you from creating content that does not correspond to what you offer or what your audience is looking for.
Organize your content
You now have a list of keywords to target with your content. Great! But there is still some work to do. The organization of your site and therefore its content plays an important role in SEO. How will this content take concrete form? Are you going to create a new directory on your site? Simply enrich your already existing blog? Or rather create a subdomain? These questions are essential because they can lead to variable development costs and results.
Within your theme, you can undoubtedly identify different categories or topics. Use these categories to create a tree structure in semantic silos on your site: one category = one silo. In this way, you will show search engines your expertise in each of these categories and be able to position yourself little by little on more competitive queries. This organization will also allow you to strengthen your internal network, an important factor in SEO.
Prioritize content and create an editorial plan
Now is the time to prioritize the content you have identified because you won’t be able to do everything at once. Some subjects will be given higher priority than others, more or less easy to produce and position on search engines.
If your site is recent or does not have much authority in your topic, we recommend that you start with less competitive content (with low search volume).
You can also prioritize content production according to your conversion funnel: start with content intended to trigger a conversion.
Finally, some content is easier to create than others. A video will require more resources (human and time) than an informational article. If this is your first SEO content strategy, it’s best to start with the simple topics to create to get your hands dirty and hone your production process.
Once your prioritization is complete, all you have to do is define an editorial schedule for all this content! The production rate depends on the resources you have, so be careful not to overload your schedule or to call on external editors if necessary.
If you are new to this task, do not be too ambitious from the start. It is better to start with a slower pace to improve the production process little by little. Remember that training your resources on good SEO writing practices and your topic (if it is complex) takes time. Once the process is in place, you can pick up the pace!
Create briefs and start production
An important and time-consuming step is creating briefs for your writers. For each content you want to produce, you will need to prepare an explicit brief on what you expect. The more comprehensive your brief, the more your writers will be able to meet your expectations. Specify the essential SEO metrics: title, meta-description, Hn markup, positioning objective, complementary keywords and expressions to insert. Once your briefs are ready, it’s time to go to production!
Share your content
In SEO, it is important that the content you produce is published on your own site. But your SEO content strategy can have a more global role and can be reused for your communication in general (social networks, newsletter, etc.). Feel free to share your content with your audience. They might even get you some backlinks!
Monitor your content
Once your content has been posted on your site and shared on all your communication channels, it’s time to take stock. How do they rank on search engines? How much traffic did they generate? Did they drive conversions? Measuring the performance of your content is essential and allows you to check that your content strategy is working or to adapt it if necessary!
You now know what are the steps to follow to create and implement your SEO content strategy. Remember that the quality of the content you offer is key. Avoid compromises at this level, especially since search engines and especially Google have recently made it their hobbyhorse. The last update of the Google algorithm, Helpful Content of August and December 2022, was intended in particular to highlight on the search results pages the content deemed most relevant to users.