Content marketing plays a big role in reaching the target audience and building a distinct digital brand image.
The basic objective of using content marketing is to drive conversions — you want your readers to become your followers, subscribers, or customers.
But if your content isn’t first SEO-friendly, there’s little chance that potential customers will find it.
In this piece, we are going to cover everything that you need to create well-researched, engrossing yet informational content that is infused with keywords, planning, and proper flow. So let’s get started.
Five Steps to Writing Consistent SEO-Friendly Content
Step 1: Brainstorm Your Topics
Step 2: Organize Your Topics in a Content Calendar
Step 3: Infuse Your Piece with Keywords
Step 4: Audit the Final Content
Step 5: Make Content Workflow a Cycle
What Is SEO-Friendly Content?
The website is your online asset meant to drive traffic towards your brand and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the heart of this asset. The very tool that drives the traffic to your website. Your website and optimized content together manifest a high-impact digital profile that thereafter functions to convert potential buyers into loyal clients.
Another thing to consider is SER (Search Engine Rankings). The purpose of optimization is to rank high in a search engine’s top results so more people are likely to click on your website. Ideally, you should rank high and create maximum impact on the customer.
Thus, content written specifically to attract online traction, and to make your website rank higher on search engines such as Google (mostly Google), is Search Engine Optimised content.
Five Steps to Writing Consistent SEO-Friendly Content
In this chapter, we’ll take you through five steps to creating consistent content that is well in line with SEO techniques.
Step 1: Brainstorm Your Topics
Producing impeccable online content increases the chances of garnering more attention to new clients and audiences, exposing your brand to a bigger market and a higher chance of getting your published content better backlinks.
However, it is not always easy to come up with killer taglines, the perfect set of keywords, or even the ideal topic to begin with.
Now and then, we might run out of good ideas to write about and hit the much-dreaded inspiration block. This becomes quite the turmoil with tight deadlines and schedules.
Let’s illustrate this with an example:
Imagine you want to create content for a wedding company. Naturally, it wants to rank high on the search engine but also wants fresh, out-of-the-box content. To deliver that, you need to come up with brilliant and hard-hitting topics that resonate with your audience. So how do you do that?
You sit with your team, come up with relevant topics, and you start writing!
Well, not that simple.
Brainstorming doesn’t only mean identifying the right topics. It has layers associated with it:
- You identify the niche
- Understand the target audience
- Do a little research to see what the competitors are writing
- Pay attention to their keywords
- Come up with your own set of keywords
- Identify SEO friendly URLs
- Define a well-thought meta description that is eye catchy and optimized.
Step 2: Organize Your Topics in a Content Calendar
Now that you have your research with you from your brainstorming session, it is time to file them in your content calendar.
What is a content calendar, you might ask?
Typically, when thinking about a content calendar people’s brains go directly to social media content. While content calendars are relied on by social media marketers to plan social posts, SEOs also need to use content calendars to help plan and prioritize their content roadmaps.
A content calendar is a way of arranging your topics and your marketing strategy in a way that the right data gets pushed at the right time for the audience to view and interact with it in the best manner possible. Simply put, the content should be relevant to the most current topics.
Once you create the calendar, make sure to email a copy or share a link to everyone involved in the content production process.
Let’s get into another example:
We’ll talk about Instagram here.
Apart from being one of the most engrossing platforms of all time, Instagram is a great place to grow your brand and expand your reach. Instagram algorithms are wired to make your post stand out if you have pushed it out at the right time slot and you are creating consistent content.
These time slots are identified based on the number of views a post gets. Say, you are into the apparel industry and you have come up with a whole new line. You want to garner attention so what is the right time slot for you? Mid-week, 4 pm is the best time for you because that’s when people are exhausted with their work and they turn to their phones for a break.
Now, if you have a calendar, wherein you have organized the whole data in terms of time, the post, the caption, and most importantly, the right hashtags, then all you need to do is push it out.
Understand the idea behind ‘sensationalizing a content piece’. There is no point in creating a pop-up sale in March. But, December is the right month to let those discounts do the trick. It’s the holiday season and your audience would love to get quality stuff at a cheaper rate.
Step 3: Infuse Your Piece with Keywords
Keywords are the main ingredient in cooking a masterpiece and the most underrated too. Choosing the right keyword for your piece is important to help you dominate the digital space and the search results.
But first, let’s understand what a keyword is through a very basic example:
Let’s say you are planning an itinerary to Italy. This is the first time you are visiting the country and would want to experience its culture completely. You head to Google and you type in “Things to do in Italy” or “ Experiencing Italy culture”. You will get more than 30,000 results instantly with articles and guides on the same lines.
The words you type in to search for a particular query, like in the examples above, are keywords. They are an essential part of your SEO strategy, which requires thorough research and analysis.
There are several tools available that aid you in searching for the right keywords for your business like SE Ranking Keyword Suggestion tool, AnswerThePublic, or Google Keyword Planner. But before you select the tool and take the plunge, there are a few points that need your attention:
- Finalize your target audience
- Finalize the intent behind the keywords you want to use
- Finalize the platform you want to capture
- Do a thorough market search and understand the landscape
- Take a page out of your competitors’ notebook and see the keywords they’ve been using
Step 4: Audit the Final Content
Auditing your content is one thing you just cannot ignore when you want to do brilliantly on the search engine. There is absolutely no room for error because customers these days are extra cautious of their investment. They are constantly looking for reliability, which can only happen when they know that they can depend on you.
The second step involves you going back and seeing how your published content is performing. Check for metrics associated with overall website traffic, click-through rates, conversion rates, and lead generation. Take all that data and put it to use while creating new pieces, learn from your mistakes, see what you’re doing right and incorporate that in your fresh content.
That is the only way forward.
Step 5: Make Content Workflow a Cycle
Creating good content consistently is the only breakthrough you need to develop an exceptional digital marketing strategy. You need to constantly push the limits and generate good quality content to gain maximum traction on the website which is where content workflow comes in handy.
Content workflow is a plan which helps you decide the steps you need to create that pitch-perfect piece that elevates your SEO plans and puts you on the digital map for success. It helps you activate that concise, well thought of, thoroughly revised, and optimized content strategy that will aid you in cutting through the clutter and carving your name in the online world.
As and when you are good to go with a finished article, involve your team in creating a new one. Establish responsibility and accountability in your team. Everyone needs to have clear KRAs that spell out their roles in a clean, cohesive, and coherent manner to avoid unnecessary confusion and clutter. This will go a long way in maintaining productivity and good workflow in the team.
Once your team has defined the topics and they are all set and arranged in the content calendar, move on to the next brainstorming session.
Conclusion
Strategize your content pipeline and maintain a proper cycle of producing and publishing consistently good content. The stages mentioned above, are all equally important in helping you produce an effective marketing strategy. And to implement those strategies, either you should start learning more about SEO and content marketing or hire a freelancer, or if you have a good budget, you can also set up a remote SEO team to grow your business.
Focus on the user intent, be as original and authentic as you can, and work diligently towards improving the quality of your content. The algorithms are constantly changing, customer preferences are constantly shifting, and you need to up your SEO game with time to stay on the right path and mitigate your risk of getting redundant.
Andrej Fedek is the creator and the one-person owner of two blogs: InterCool Studio and CareersMomentum. As an experienced marketer, he is driven by turning leads into customers with White Hat SEO techniques. Besides being a boss, he is a real team player with a great sense of equality.
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