10 Essential Tips to Create an SEO Content Strategy to Dominate SERP

Struggling to stay ahead of your competitors and drive enough traffic to your website? Even though you have been working hard to optimise your website, the lack of a comprehensive SEO content strategy could be the largest obstacle to your desired rankings. 

Having a proper SEO strategy is key to finding an audience interested in your content and establishing credibility and trust with them, which will ultimately drive more leads and conversions. 

In this blog, we will provide you with some proven tips to create a well-rounded SEO strategy that will help your site dominate the search page. 

1. Define Your Niche and Target Audience

Every sound strategy begins with a simple step. For an effective SEO content strategy, the first step you should take is to define your niche/industry and analyse the market and competition. Next, you need to understand the needs of your target audience. This includes researching the relevant keywords, search intent, and searcher profiles. 

Try to find more information about the people searching for your product or service and its related content. You will want to know their demographics, interests, occupations, hobbies and other details to create buyers' personas. It helps you create personalised and relatable content for effective marketing. Looking at examples of useful content writing can also help you come up with strategies that will work for the people you want to reach.

2.  Analyse Your Competitors and Their Websites 

Once you have identified your target audience, it’s time to know which companies and websites are vying for their attention. Gather as much information as you can get on their keyword rankings, domain authority, backlinks, social media presence and overall SEO content strategy. 

These details will help you understand your own strengths that you can develop further and weaknesses or shortcomings you can address. You can use different tools, such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz Pro, SpyFu, etc., to carry out competitor research. 

Once you have a thorough understanding, focus on matching and outperforming them on metrics like content quality, authority and expertise. Take a long-term approach to gradually improve your standings. 

3.  Identify Relevant Topics 

After identifying your niche and competitors, you should search reaching the topics for which you can provide high-quality, authoritative content. Create a list of topics, both broad and specific, that define areas your audience is interested in. This makes it easy for you to create new content and be highly accurate with keyword research. 

Let’s say your niche is finance and investments, and you are looking for topics that will draw traffic to your website. You could list broad topics such as mutual funds, stock investments, taxation, and investment tips, which are ideal for long-form content. 

Furthermore, you can focus on specific topics like types of equity funds, how to research stocks, capital gains tax or how to create a retirement plan. Now, you can create a long list of sub-topics you can write content on. 

4.  Search for Target Keywords

When you have searched the relevant topics, you need to find which keywords will work best for your SEO content strategy. There are many tools like Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, SEMrush, Ahrefs Keyword Generator, Google Trends and others you can use to find the right keywords for your website. 

The above tools provide you with various metrics, such as search volume, keyword difficulty and CPC (cost per click), which help you pick relevant keywords. Try to find a balance based on the ranking potential of different keywords and the ease with which you can rank your topic using the keywords.  

Once you have a list, check each of the keywords on Google’s SERP to understand the trends and search intent. You should also check the business potential and ranking potential of the relevant keywords and ensure that your SEO writers incorporate them into the content. 

5.   Develop New Content Ideas

Based on your research of topics and keywords, you should create ideas for the content you want to create. Next, you should review the top-ranking articles and blogs that rank for your chosen keywords and topics for ideas and make something better or different. 

There are two main approaches to creating SEO-optimised content. You can choose to take ideas from different places and build upon the ideas out there with your own research (called the skyscraper technique). Alternatively, you can create something completely different as long as it caters to the searchers' needs, which sets you apart from your competitors. 

6. Create High-Quality with Search Intent

Regardless of the way you write content, it must be high in quality and cater to searchers’ needs. To rank at the very top, providers of content writing services are trained to write content that is people-focused, credible, trustworthy, and helpful to readers. 

Google EEAT framework helps you figure out the parameters your content must fulfil to feature in top results. E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Here’s what each parameter means:

• Experience: Author’s first-hand or life experience with the subject matter

• Expertise: Their qualifications, certifications and standing 

• Authoritativeness: Reputation established within the field

• Trustworthiness: Your site’s reliability, honesty and accuracy 

7. Utilise Different Content Formats

An often overlooked but useful SEO content strategy is to use multiple types of content to reach different audiences. For example, blog posts are ideal for driving organic traffic as they are engaging and answer queries. On the other hand, case studies and analyst reports are preferred by late-stage customers who already have in-depth knowledge about the product or service. Using unique content in all of these forms makes sure that the content is original and builds trust with both users and search engines.

You can use a variety of content formats, including videos, infographics, ebooks, newsletters and social media posts for a comprehensive content marketing campaign. Through internal linking, you can massively increase user engagement on your site and rank higher in the SERPs. 

8. Use On-Page SEO Optimisation Techniques

On-page SEO is an essential tip for improving the ranking of a website or a blog post. If the content on your website is not ranking well, you can try some of the following techniques to optimise your content: 

• Incorporate keywords throughout the content

• Avoid keyword stuffing and illogical usage

• Create a clear content structure with proper flow

• Ensure the content is helpful and trustworthy

• Use high-authority sources to back up your information 

• Increase engagement with a friendly tone

• Include semantic-related keywords

9. Audit Your Content Regularly

Even if you have executed all the above tips correctly, the content you have made may not be perfect. Therefore, regular audits and performance checks are essential. Keep checking your published content with metrics like traffic volume, bounce rate, dwell time and more to evaluate how your SEO content strategy is working.  

Using these metrics, you can determine your best and worst ranking posts, which lets you increase traffic to your website. Discover what improvements you can make to the currently published content and trim unnecessary bloat from your site. 

10. Implement a Link Building Strategy

As important content quality is for on-page SEO, link building is as important for off-page SEO. Your overall content strategy must include creating backlinks to your website from other sources on the internet to enhance your site’s authority and rankings.

If you create great-quality content on your website, others will want to link to your pages. Include original content, statistics and unique experiences to get more links. Another way to get links is to try guest blogging on high-authority sites. You can also reach out to people directly through social media to gain backlinks. 

Bottom Line

Having a proper SEO content strategy lets you create a seamless workflow for creating high-quality content. By following the above tips, you can build an audience and drive traffic and sales to your website. Make your own strategy based on your company’s requirements to set it apart from competitors and establish your authority in the market.    

If you are struggling to execute your content marketing strategy, take the help of a content writing agency. One of the biggest benefits of digital marketing services like this is that you can streamline the creation of huge volumes of high-quality content to quickly grow your business.