Content has been king for several years, but just because you’ve written something doesn’t mean it will bring qualified traffic to your website. In fact, it does not even guarantee that your content will appear in search results: 90% of web content receives no traffic from Google, according to 2020 statistics from Ahrefs.
The key to effective content is planning. For sure, some people are typing out bangers from their stream of consciousness, but those writers are definitely few and far between. The rest of us rely on thoughtful execution and planning. So how can you plan SEO content that actually ranks?
Here are some tips to help you get high in search engine results.
1. Perform Keyword Research
First, create or refine your personas. When we talk about advanced SEO, it is often a step that one cannot skip. And you have to urge SEOs of all skill levels not to skip this step. The deeper you understand your personality and the broader your insights, the more accurate and comprehensive your list of seed keywords will be. All of your keywords in the research process come from these personas.
Some basic persona questions you may need to answer include how big their department within their company is, what their industry is, and what tools they need to do their jobs. So, if you find that your target personality in the real estate industry is a team of 2 people and a company of 24 and they typically use tools for land keeping and accounting, you’ll know that “software real estate Management” is a seed keyword.
From there, create your list of seed keywords and expand it into related short tail keywords and down to long-tail keywords. Along with some fantastic tools (Ahrefs, Moz, Semrush), you can also go for other keyword research tools that other SEOs may not be aware of. Using different tools also means that you get information that other SEOs researching that place don’t have. For example, you can include Keyword Keg, Bing’s keyword research tool, and seed keyword, which lets you ask your target audience how they did search for a particular topic.
After that, clean up the list based on what you know about each persona and decide what’s relevant and what might not be worth your time. Then, Filter, categorize and group your keywords together so you can create content efficiently.
Next, you can classify queries by intent: information, transactions, and navigation.
Information queries include modifiers such as ‘who, what, where, when, why,’ transactional queries include price, cost, and promotion questions. Finally, navigation queries are specific to the brand or product you are researching.
2. Build a Content Calendar
Create the content calendar tool that works best for you and the one you will actually use – whether it’s Asana, Trello, Monday, or just plain Google Sheets. From there, add the following to your content calendar tool of choice:
- The basics: such as target keywords, URL recommendations, headers, and more.
- Internal Linking Opportunities: Product, Offer, or Signup Pages.
- Effort Level: Average Keyword Difficulty of the target keyword multiplied by the competitor’s Content Quality Score.
- Expected Traffic: Multiply the search volume by the CTR of your expected position.
- Competitive Advantage: Something that will set your content apart (original data, vital perspectives, etc.).
You can also group targeted keywords by theme (as opposed to personality) and summarize how much search volume you’re targeting for each theme. In the end, you get to write your next level of content based on these goals and data points.
3. Identify Measurable Metrics for Your Content Goals
Step 1. Find out what would make your boss [or] your client over the moon on the Y-axis. It’s probably not traffic, but something else like leads, appointments, purchases – that should be your end goal. Traffic goals will lead you to those end goals.
Demand Goals ÷ (Expected) Historical conversion rates = traffic goals.
At this point, you may be like, although that’s great, but I don’t know what my expected conversion rates are.
Here’s how you can figure it out: “Take your actual demand for the past 12-24 months and then compare them to your actual traffic over the same period. Summarize your choice of demand metric by dividing it by your organic traffic, and there you go.
If you don’t have this data, you’ll probably have to get creative and calculate a relative conversion rate. For example, if you’re building a new product or service, you can use the same CVR as other properties you’re working on (such as a blog or online community, etc.).
Step 2. Next, calculate the demand growth you want to drive over the next 12 months and share them with your historical or expected CVR. It gives you the traffic goals.
Once you have achieved these goals, you should also figure out where you would get if you did nothing. Unless you currently have content, your traffic will increase no matter what you do. So by figuring out where you’d get if you didn’t and the gap between that and what you need to develop, you can figure out how much additional traffic and adjustments you need.
Step 3. After that, determine how much monthly search volume you need to target to compensate for the difference between your estimates and how your content will grow if you did nothing.
Create a CTR curve analysis and estimate the things based on the 1-3, 4-6, 7-9, and 10th SERP rankings on the first page of search results. Finally, you can multiply your weighted CVR by the traffic you need to generate to find estimates for your MSV [monthly search volume].
4. What Would You Want the Reader to Do Next
If you want to rank your SEO content on the first page in SERPs, what would you hope to achieve when a user clicks through and lands on the content?
Here are some options for possible next steps:
- Buy your product
- Add to your email list
- Download a piece of content.
- Share the product page
- Just read it and go – no commitment expected. And then…retarget them with ads.
The buyer’s journey can be long, with many subtle commitments leading them to your sales funnel. Each piece of content should address a stage in that life cycle so that the visitor can take a small step forward in your marketing funnel.
That is, don’t expect someone seeking educational content to stumble upon your content and purchase your product immediately. They are not ready.
But, you can help by educating them with your own content and providing a downloadable guide about whatever they are learning about.
Zytal’s ultimate marketing strategies make it easy to grow your business using SEO. Sign up for a free consultation about an Advanced plan to discover the best keywords to target for your content strategy.