SEO Content Strategy To Dominate Any Niche

You don’t need to be a genius to dominate your industry with SEO content.

SEO is one of the most important aspects of online marketing. It can be the difference between being found by your target audience and being invisible online. That’s why we offer a content strategy to help you rank higher in search engines to get more leads and sales from your website.

Not only will our strategy help you rank higher, but it will also help you create better content that engages your audience and drives them to take action. You’ll see an increase in traffic, leads, and sales from implementing our simple SEO content strategy.

Imagine being able to call all the shots in your industry – that’s what we’re offering you here.

SEO content strategy overview

Just like any good recipe, a successful website starts with the right ingredients. In this case, those ingredients are a clear and concise website structure, an organization of ideas impacting business outcomes, and a content creation approach that everyone on your team can get behind. By ensuring that these critical components are in place from the outset, you set yourself up for SEO success.

What is SEO content strategy?

SEO content strategy is a plan for how you’ll create and optimize your website’s content to earn valuable traffic from search engines. This includes everything from the topics you write about and the keywords you target to how your pages are organized and all the other details that ensure content will bring ROI.

Why Creating an SEO Content Strategy Important for Your Overall Content Marketing Strategy?

Let’s face it, creating content can be daunting. You’ve probably found yourself in a situation where you’re staring at a blank screen, wondering what in the world you’re going to write about. Or maybe you have too many ideas and don’t know where to start. That’s where having an SEO content strategy comes in handy.

Sitting down and planning out your content can save you time and headaches later on. Plus, there are some other benefits to having an SEO content strategy:

• You’ll be able to prioritize tasks and see measurable results. This means you can allocate your time and resources more efficiently, which will help improve your bottom line.
• It helps to keep you from losing focus. With so many different things vying for your attention, it’s easy to get sidetracked. However, if you have a plan, it’ll be easier to stay on track and avoid veering off course.
• Help increase the number of leads in your pipeline. By creating helpful, informative content, you’ll be able to attract more website visitors who are looking for what you have to offer. What’s more, they’ll be more likely to convert into customers or clients.

How to create an SEO Content Strategy? Phases, Steps, and  Success Factors

A successful SEO content strategy requires a lot of hard work, and there’s no single magic formula for achieving success. However, certain success factors can help you get on the right track.

1. Phase 1: Identifying content to create that matches the website objective
2. Phase 2: Set up the standard operating process: Creating a strategy for continuous content creation
3. Phase 3: Setup Optimization tracking to make continuous improvements and improve rankings

Phase 1: Identifying Content to Create That Matches the Website Objective

One of the best ways to ensure that your website dominates its niche is by creating content that aligns with your website’s objective. For example, if you are a car dealership, you may want to create blog posts that discuss the latest cars available and how they compare to others on the market.

Step 1: Identify Key Topics That Your Website Will Talk About

If you’re trying to identify content to create that matches the objective of your website, the best place to start is with a broad search. For example, if you sell plumbing services, begin by searching for the keyword “plumbing.”

This will give you a good foundation of content to work with. From there, you can narrow down and focus on specific sub-topics relevant to your business. To do this, look at the first 20-50 pages of Google results for your keyword query.

Identify the NLP topics that are most important to the intent of those pages. Outranking Strategist feature can help you extract and group these NLP terms into clusters. Once you have a good understanding of these important terms that support your main topic and business objective move to step 2.

Step 2: Use the Topical Authority Model to Find Relevant Keywords to Target and Topics to Create

To get ahead in the SEO world, you’ll need to learn how to speak the language of topical authority.

What is a topical authority in SEO? A topical authority is the perceived authority of the website for a given topic. This authority is based on the area of expertise your website covers and to what extent. If you keep writing content about “Plumbing” and its associated areas of expertise such as supply, issues, hiring plumbers, and others that we identified in the previous step, your website will be considered an authority in the space. To learn more about topical authority, check out the webinar where I explained how to conquer topical authority and dominate any niche. 

To do this, you will have to take one area of expertise from the list you gathered in Step 1 and search for combinations of related keywords people are searching for in your favorite keyword research tool to map out the related and semantically related keywords for each subtopic (areas of expertise, we identified these in the first step). This process is time-consuming, confusing, and takes tons of effort, but it’s essential if you want to compound your website’s strength in the fastest possible way.

Once you have a list of target keywords, you can prioritize them based on CPC, volume, and difficulty data to determine which ones will impact your business most. Some keywords you select in this phase will be the ones you use to create new content that support the main pillar., and some will be for support. Outranking competitors for these keywords will be crucial for your business’ success.

Understanding how to use the topical authority model can take your SEO game to the next level.

Step 3: Prioritize Topics to Write About Based on The Business Objective and KPIs

If you’ve ever had to sit down and write a list of priorities, you know it can be tough to figure out where to start. The same is true when deciding what topics to write about for your business.

Do you focus on your product or service pages first? Or do you blog about topics that are educational and informative?

It can be helpful to think about your business objectives and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) when making this decision. Your money-making pages should always be a priority, so if you have a product or service page that’s not performing as well as you’d like, that’s an excellent place to start.

But your product and service pages will never rank for tones of keywords. You will need to consistently publish supporting pages that rank for many keywords and bring a systematic flow of users, link authority, and rankings. 

Once you have the list of keywords you want to add to your strategy, prioritize them based on your business objective, efforts, value, and ultimate goal. 

By taking things one step at a time, you can make sure you’re always moving in the right direction.

Phase 2: Setup Stand Operating Process: Creating A Process for Continuous Content Creation

Whether you’re a solopreneur or have a team of 500, if you’re in the business of content creation, it’s essential to have a process in place to ensure frictionless execution of new content.

Here are a few tips for setting up your process:

Step 1: Identify the Team for Content Creation and Optimization Projects and Create A Standard Operating Process

Creating great content isn’t just a matter of putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard, as the case may be). It takes a village, or at the very least, a team. That team should have a standard operating procedure for content creation and optimization projects.

The first step is to identify who will be on that team. Will you have an SEO manager who creates strategy? A content writer? Someone to edit and someone to publish? If you’re working with an agency, what role do they play?

Once you’ve assembled your content and SEO team, it’s time to create a process. Someone creates an SEO outline, another person writes, someone edits, and someone publishes. Or something like that. The important thing is that everyone knows their role and the order of operations. That way, your content can flow from idea to execution smoother than a hot knife through butter.

The key to the successful execution of SEO content strategy is team alignment. Check out this article for details about content creation workflow. Investing in project management software like Jira or Asana would totally make sense. Many are free if you are just getting started.

SEO Workflow Process For [Predictable] Content Success With Outranking

Step 2: Focus on Creating Detailed Content Briefs Using Data

Creating detailed content briefs is essential for SEO managers and content strategists. It helps keep everyone on the same page and avoids wasting time and rewrites. A good brief will be clear and concise, leaving no room for misinterpretation.

When creating a content brief, data is your best friend. Ensure all relevant information such as target keywords, audience demographics, and desired tone and voice. Using data to create your briefs, you can be confident that you’re crafting the most effective content possible.

So next time you’re assigned a writing project, take a moment to create a detailed brief. With some forethought, you can easily create content briefs that will assure quality content and the best research behind it.

Outranking’s content brief generator can help you ace this process.

Quick video on how to create content briefs using Outranking

Step 3: Ace Your On-Page SEO, This Is Totally in Your Control and One of The Biggest Ranking Factors

On-page SEO is like the foundation of a house – it’s essential and something you have complete control over. Unfortunately, too many people try to shortcut the process, and as a result, their ranking suffers.

If you want to ace your on-page SEO, follow best practices from the start. That way, the resulting draft will already be following best practices.

Sure, you can optimize after, but that can require some hefty rewrites. So, it’s better to just do it right from the get-go.

When it comes to on-page optimization, many factors are to consider. But don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Check out our detailed guide about on-page search engine optimization for all the essential factors.

Trust us; it’s worth your while. After all, on-page SEO is still one of the most important ranking factors – and it’s totally in your control. There’s no excuse not to give it your best shot.

Step 4: Good Content Is Okay, But Great Content Focuses on Users, So Follow E-A-T

Good content is acceptable. But if you want to knock your audience’s socks off, you must focus on creating great content.

There’s no question that content is essential. After all, without content, there would be nothing for users to read, watch, or listen to. But as any good marketer knows, it’s not just about quantity – it’s also about quality.

That’s why Google has been advocating for E-A-T – Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness – for years– three qualities that should be at the heart of every piece of content you create.

That’s why great content focuses on users first. After all, what’s the point of writing valuable content if no one is going to see it?

Keep writing, focus on users, and most importantly, position yourself as an authority on your subject matter, and build trust with your audience by being consistent and transparent. If you can do all that, you’ll be well on creating great content that users will love.

Step 5: Conduct Regular Scrum Calls to Keep the Process Running and Keep Teams Aligned

Keep your team on their toes by regularly conducting scrum calls!

Without teamwork, there is no way to achieve an accelerated workflow. By getting the team aligned and having regular content or SEO scrum calls, everyone can stay updated on the progress and plan future tasks.

This level of communication helps keep everyone focused on the collective objective. In other words, it’s essential to herder the cats and keep them moving towards the common goal. If not, the workflow will unravel, and things will become undone.

So, do yourself a favor and ensure you’re regularly rounding up the troops for a good old-fashioned scrum call. Who knows, you might even have some fun in the process.

Phase 3: Setup Optimization Tracking to Make Continuous Improvements and Improve Rankings

If you’re not tracking your website’s performance, you’re missing out on valuable data that could help you improve your rankings and get more visitors. Setting up optimization tracking is a vital part of any website’s success.

Step 1: Setup Tracking with GC and Analytics

There’s no point in putting all your effort into something if you’re not going to track the results. That’s why, if you want to make sure your SEO efforts are paying off, it’s essential to set up tracking.

The essential step in improving your website’s ranking is to set up tracking with Google Analytics (GA) and your Google Search Console. This way, you can easily see what’s working and what’s not.

Make sure to create a list of keywords that you want to track beforehand. This way, you can avoid duplicating effort and focus on keywords that have the potential to improve your ranking.

Outranking connects with your Google search console and its AI can learn from the patterns of your existing ranking data to suggest other keywords that you can easily rank for or improve content for better rankings.

See the Actions feature of Outranking for analysis of opportunities in your existing content.

Step 2: Tracking Important Content and Find Opportunities to Improve On-Page SEO

If you want to improve your website’s ranking in search engines, tracking the right keywords and then making improvements accordingly is essential. This can be a time-consuming process, but with the right SEO content software like Outranking, it’ll take a fraction of the time.

By tracking your priority keywords, you can identify opportunities for improvement and then take action to improve your website’s ranking. With a little effort, you can significantly impact your website’s visibility and traffic.

Step 3: Create A Solid internal linking Architecture Based on Topical Nodes

Try and picture your website as a city. For people to get around, there need to be roads or links connecting different parts of the city.

Now, if you want Google and other search engines to be able to find all the different parts of your city quickly, you need to make sure that your links are well-organized. That’s where a solid backlinking architecture comes in. Like an actual city, your website should be organized into different nodes or topics, with links connecting them.

This will help Google understand the different topics on your site and which pages are most important. In addition, by linking to pages with relevant anchor text, you can tell Google which keywords you want to rank for.

Use silo interlinking for internal linking between your content. This will ensure page rank is transferred from ranking pages to those needing a boost.

If you want to get the most out of your website, create a solid backlinking architecture.

Step 4: Create Optimization Briefs to Improve On-Page SEO

Now that you’ve gathered all your data, it’s time to start thinking about how you can improve your on-page SEO. To do this, you’ll want to create optimization briefs for each page you want to improve.

An optimization brief is essentially a list of suggestions for improving a particular page, and it’s a great way to keep your web and content teams in sync. When creating an optimization brief, focus on tasks that your web team can do relatively quickly.

This might include things like adding missing alt text or updating outdated information. Once you’ve created your optimization briefs, you can easily use Outranking’s Actions feature to send them to your team members.

You can soon see a real improvement in your on-page SEO with a little effort.

A good optimization brief is segregated into the web team and content team. This ensures you pass on the right tasks to your team members.

Outranking can automate the process of curating these suggestions and the generation of AI content optimization briefs and reports.

Phase 4: Track Progress and The Resulting Revenue Attribution from Your Efforts in Executing the Strategy

Any business or organization looking to be successful should have a strategy in place. But once you’ve got your strategy, how do you know it’s working?

Step 1: Setup Revenue Attribution Model for New SEO Content Efforts

It’s raining. It’s pouring, and the old man is snoring…he went to bed and bumped his head and couldn’t get up in the morning. That’s what it feels like when you try to attribute revenue to your new SEO content efforts. One could say I did X amount of revenue coming from all organic traffic. 

This is flawed. Why?

1. Revenue comes in from many channels. If you are getting organic, chances are you are also getting direct conversions. So first you need to segment your revenue by channels.
2. Most users now use javascript blockers that make it difficult for even Google analytics to track what is the source of that visit.

One of the most common methods of attribution of revenue that sort of works is described below. Right business SEO platforms like Outranking can track this on an ongoing basis and suggest improvements in course of action for more attributed revenue. 

Method:

Find all the keywords, their volume, and clicks. You will need to use a combination of tools if you are using other tools. 

Step 1: Find all the keywords and how many clicks they get from your search console data. 

Eg.

Step 2: Attribute CPC value to each of these keywords and multiply with a click

There are a few different methods described in one of the articles on Search Engine Journal, but to sum it up the challenge is always going to be accuracy vs effort.

Step 2: Setting Up the Right KPIsStep

Most managers are going to want to attribute SEO efforts to the revenue. Only then does it make sense to invest in SEO and content. While that’s the final goal and SEO content OKR should consist of this as the vital outcome, there are a few things you can set up for ongoing monitoring of key performance indicators. 

Some of the common KPIs are:

1. Organic traffic
2. Bounce rate on certain pages
3. Amount of technical fixes
4. Number of backlinks
5. Amount of content created
6. Number of PAA and featured snippets
7. Form fills or leads
8. Conversions

All of this should tie into your net increase in attributed revenue, whether you are tracking quarterly or yearly.

Step 3: Be Consistent and Execute Your Strategy

An old saying goes, “If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it.” There’s a lot of truth to that. People who consistently execute their strategy are usually the ones who get things done. They’re the ones who make things happen.

SEO success is all about doing things consistently and making sure you turn every knob and run every yard every day to build authority in your niche. Strategy, prioritization, speed, consistency, and alignment are the key to the successful execution of SEO Content projects.

Conclusion

SEO content strategy is all about putting a few key elements together and creating a process that will bring increased revenue and business outcome. Since data is the key driver behind a successful SEO strategy, having the right tools to understand the data and guide you in the right direction, have you prioritize, and always stay on top of your KPIs is going to increase the chances of successful execution. Outrankin’s SEO platform can help content strategists build SEO content strategy from the ground up and improve attributed revenue to your SEO efforts.