Landing a spot in search results is a powerful strategy for attracting and engaging your audience. But the idea of “if you build it, they will come” doesn’t work with search engine optimization (SEO). Instead, you need an SEO content strategy that works hand-in-hand with your content marketing strategy to get your content in front of your audience and drive conversions.
Other benefits of an effective SEO content strategy include:
A good strategy sends more traffic to your website by helping your content rank higher in the search engine result pages (SERPs).
An SEO strategy inspires more relevant high-quality content for a better user experience.
Organic SEO helps you reach your target audience in a more cost-effective way.
It’s also essential to create a source of truth that outlines your SEO content strategy for anyone who touches any part of your content. A content production tool like GatherContent can help you craft and manage your content creation process, including creating templates and workflows, to ensure every piece of content works toward your overarching SEO and digital marketing goals—and not against them.
Even if you’re not familiar with the ins and outs of SEO, creating a good SEO content strategy doesn’t have to be rocket science. Here are six tips and content creation examples to help start driving traffic to your site.
6 tips to create an effective SEO content strategy
1. Get to know your audience
Don’t let anyone tell you that SEO is about playing the right keywords. Search engines, including two major players Google and Bing, have grown quickly and now use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to better understand search terms and the content their bots crawl.
For example, Google’s Natural Language AI can understand and pinpoint the entities, sentiment, syntax, and categories included in a snippet of text. But what does this have to do with your audience? It points to Google and other search engines valuing helpful, informative content over keyword-stuffed fluff.
The Google Natural Language AI helps the search engine better understand the content its bots crawl, including the sentiment, syntax, entities or people mentioned, and topical categories.
This means it’s still important to prioritize creating content that resonates with your audience—even with an organic SEO content strategy. But to create great content that resonates with your audience, you need to understand your audience, their needs, interests, pain points, and preferences.
You can get to know your audience in a variety of ways, including:
Chat with your customer service team to get a list of questions they’re regularly asked.
Invite current and prospective customers to complete surveys.
Check out your social media and website analytics, which may include info on your audience’s demographics and interests.
Read online reviews to find out what works or doesn’t work for your audience—or what they think is missing from a product or service.
Look for insights tucked away in comments on your social media posts and blog articles.
Get the scoop on your competitor’s content marketing strategies and their effectiveness across different channels. Are their audiences asking for anything you might be able to provide?
You might also glean some audience insights from your keyword research—especially if you can spot long-tail keywords.
They may seem like fun-but-unnecessary content, but quizzes can quickly and easily provide data on your audience’s needs.
For example, Sephora’s Foundation Finder quiz asks customers to answer a few questions about their skin type and the problems they’re facing. It then offers a personalized list of products based on the customer’s quiz responses.
Sephora’s Foundation Finder quiz is an engaging way for its audience to provide data about current needs, pain points, and interests.
Data from this quiz can then be used by Sephora to better understand their audience’s needs and pain points. If the majority of quiz takers deal with oily skin and related problems, then content revolving around that topic may resonate better than content than focuses on, say, aging.
It’s back to SEO basics with this step. After all, keywords are the building blocks of any SEO strategy. And keyword research helps you identify the words and phrases your audience uses to search for information, products, and services, as well as their search intent.
A word of caution though: Don’t simply stack your keyword list with high-volume competitive keywords. These “head terms,” as they’re called, are short and non-specific. For example, here are some head terms related to the topic of social media:
Social media apps
Social media icons
Social media manager
These broad terms may have higher potential traffic, but they’re also incredibly harder to rank for. If we check out the search difficulty (SD), or how competitive it is to rank for these terms, we can see that each one ranks in the 70s and 80s—this means you’re going to have a lot of competitors trying to rank for the same term.
Using Ubersuggest, we can see that head terms related to “social meda” have a high search difficulty (SD) score, which means it’s harder to rank for them in search.
But long-tail keywords are easier to rank for and can help you spot specific audience needs, interests, and pain points. Let’s look at some examples of long-tail keywords related to social media:
Social media marketing tips for businesses (SD of 15)
Is social media effective for marketing (SD of 64)
How often should businesses post on social media (SD of 66)
How can social media marketing help your business (SD of 13)
So while these long-tail keywords may have lower search volume, there’s a better chance you’ll rank on page one of the search results if you target them instead of head terms. On top of that, long-tail keywords are specifically targeted and can help you draw in potential customers who are ready to make a purchase.
To sum up, a good SEO strategy uses head terms to identify broad topics, then narrows down the focus based on long-tail keywords that fall under each head term.
To start identifying the head terms and long-tail keywords you want to use in your SEO content strategy, try using some of these free tools:
Google Search autocomplete: Start typing your head term into Google Search and it populates related long-tail phrases as suggestions.
Google Search People also ask section: Usually appearing on page one of the search results, the People also ask section features questions related to your search term and can be a great way to spot FAQ content or even topics for whole articles.
Google Keyword Planner: The original keyword research tool, Keyword Planner gives you estimated search traffic, trends over time, and difficulty to rank.
Ubersuggest: You get three free searches per day with this keyword research tool from content marketing expert Neil Patel.
Moz Keyword Explorer: This free keyword research tool comes with a companion browser extension, MozBar, that highlights search metrics while you browse.
While stuffing may be one of the most popular Thanksgiving side dishes, keyword stuffing degrades your content quality and may even get your site penalized by Google.
TL;DR: Keyword stuffing isn’t a viable SEO content strategy. Don’t do it.
Content example:
“I tried to rank for all the highest-volume keywords that were even vaguely relevant to the people I thought would want to buy from us,” says Ryan Law, vice president of content at Animalz. “And the limitation of that was we got a ton of traffic—the old blog I did, we got up to hundreds of thousands of page views per month—and we didn’t close any deals because it was just the wrong type of people.”
Listen to this interview with Ryan Law to learn why targeting only high-volume head terms and not trying to solve the hard problems that your target audience experiences is a flawed SEO content strategy—and what to do instead.
3. Pinpoint content topics and types
After you’ve done your keyword research, it’s time to sort your findings into topics that match your audience’s interests, needs, and pain points. It’s critical that your SEO content strategy doesn’t meander off the path clearly defined with your audience’s needs and your own content goals.
This also means you shouldn’t pursue creating content just for content’s sake—make sure you can provide a helpful and engaging experience for your audience at the same time.
Your main topics will become your content pillars, which form the foundation of your content map. Content pillars will revolve around your main topics and head terms, while your long-tail keywords will become shorter pieces of content that link back to each pillar page.
Good to know: Your long-tail keywords should already give you a good idea for specific content to produce, but if you need to brainstorm additional content topics it’s time to connect with your audience again.
Next, it’s time to figure out which content types resonate most with your audience. Some content types may be dictated by the channel you use, such as Twitter’s 280-character limit. But if you have the freedom to experiment with different formats, you may want to consider these top 10 content types that content marketers said performed best in Semrush’s State of Content Marketing: 2023 Global Report:
Video
Short-form articles
Success stories
Long-form blog posts
Case studies
Webinars and online events
Gated content
Infographics
White papers
Offline events
Semrush’s 2023 State of Content Marketing Report asked content marketers which types of content performed best, with video topping the list.
Better yet, you can mix and match content types—a long-form article can become a social media post, a video, and an infographic. A case study can be rewritten as a success story, and offline events can capture and present key takeaways from any type of content.
Just remember, everything goes back to your audience, so ensure the content types you choose actually resonate with them.
Content example: Home Depot
No matter what kind of business you run, there are always opportunities to diversify the content types you produce in order to attract and engage your audience.
Case in point, Home Depot augmented its ecommerce shop of home repair and remodeling supplies and tools with a DIY projects and ideas hub. The hub contains written how-to guides as well as videos to attract and help customers with different needs and pain points.
Home Depot uses multiple content types to reach its audience, including videos and how-to guides that link back to its main business of home improvement and tools.
4. Optimize content
Optimizing your content shouldn’t happen after your first drafts are written, but at the very start of your content creation process. Content templates ensure your drafts are optimized for your audience from the get-go.
GatherContent lets you create a content template library for multiple formats, including emails, social posts, blog articles, and landing pages.
A good template can help you format and structure your content in a way that’s most helpful to your audience. It offers guidance on voice and tone as well as style so your company’s content remains consistent across all channels. And lastly, templates ensure no one gets confused about content goals or puts in unnecessary work.
After writing your draft, you can further optimize your content during the editing stage. If SEO is your main content strategy, it helps to train your editors on effective SEO tactics as well as black hat SEO techniques that shouldn’t make it into a published post. This can include:
How to use keywords in headers and subheaders.
What an effective meta description looks like and how long it should be.
How to optimize images and image alt text for search.
How to format internal and external links within content.
Speaking of optimization, Google’s algorithms, including the August 2022 helpful content update, put the focus on creating relevant content for people, not search engines. So it’s a good idea to reinforce the importance of creating content for your audience—and using keywords that match their needs and interests—to your writers and editors.
Content example: Wirecutter
Most of us read product reviews with an air of skepticism, and for good reason. Reviews tend to be a content type that crosses the line between using keywords to show up in search and stuffing keywords into multiple paragraphs to rank for multiple terms. Not to mention many reviews seem fake and it’s hard to tell whether the reviewer actually used the products in question.
Cut to Wirecutter. Its focus on empathetic product reviews existed even before Google’s Helpful Content update, and it’s quite obvious in the site’s reviews that the author tested each product.
The “How we tested” section is especially eye-opening, as it notes the exact ways the Wirecutter staff thoroughly tested even the simplest products such as kitchen trash cans. It reinforces the goal that the content is written to solve a pain point felt by the publication’s audience—and not written just to make money.
The Wirecutter’s “How we tested” section of its reviews clearly displays how well the site understands its audience’s pain points and tries to solve them.
5. Track and analyze content performance
Your organic traffic sessions are just one metric to track and analyze to determine your SEO content strategy’s success. While traffic is the primary metric you’ll want to consider, you should also pay attention to other metrics that may indicate high or low engagement, including:
Bounce rate: How quickly do visitors leave your web pages? If your bounce rate is high, it’s likely your content doesn’t match your intended audience’s search intent.
Time on page: Time on page can help you understand whether your audience is finding your content helpful. And a low time on page result combined with a high click-through rate (CTR) can signify compelling calls to action (CTAs).
Shares: A huge aspect of social media is shares, and content that’s shared by a large portion of your audience is likely resonating with them.
Conversions: For bottom-of-the-funnel content, conversions are king. These can tell you if your content helped your audience make a decision.
Backlinks: A large number of backlinks can signify that other websites found your content valuable and may even signify that you’re viewed as a thought leader in your industry.
Indexed pages: If your content is getting indexed, it means search engines determined it’s relevant and valuable and will display it in search results.
Search results rankings: The higher up on the SERPs your content ranks, the more valuable and relevant the search engine has determined it is. (And the more likely it is to get organic traffic.)
In terms of tools you can use to check these metrics, Google Analytics and related products like Google Search Console are perhaps the most well-known. They offer in-depth insights into your traffic, where your audience is coming from, bounce rate, time on page, conversions, and more.
SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush can help you analyze backlinks and search results rankings. Additionally, if you’ve put together a list of keywords you want to target with your content (remember step two?), these SEO tools can tell you which keywords you’re currently ranking for.
Other tools, like Looker, can help you pull content performance data into visual charts for deeper analysis.
Content example: Spotify Wrapped
Spotify Wrapped, the company’s marketing campaign that highlights each user’s musical year in review, is a huge hit on social media year after year. In 2022, the Spotify Wrapped campaign saw 425 million Tweets within the first three days after it launched.
The repetitive nature of the campaign (it’s launched annually), along with its shareability and fun vibes, make it a consistent winner when it comes to social sharing.
The Spotify Wrapped social media marketing campaign consistently sees success year after year.
6. Update content regularly
Content freshness is indeed a Google Search ranking factor, but that doesn’t mean you need to churn out dozens of new case studies and blog posts week after week.
Instead, you should pair your new content initiatives with regular existing content updates—especially if your content matches the types of queries Google notes as demanding fresh information. These include:
“Breaking news” queries
Recurring event queries, such as TV shows and sporting events
Current information queries, such as cost of flights and city populations
Product queries, which may indicate someone is looking for information on the most recent model
And Google’s evaluation guidelines explicitly say, “unmaintained/abandoned ‘old’ websites or unmaintained and inaccurate/misleading content is a reason for a low Page Quality rating.”
Search engines aside, if your focus is on your audience, you naturally want them to have the most up-to-date and accurate information available. So consider updating old content by checking facts, updating stats and data, and providing new information. Add or create new images or videos, and restructure content with additional headers, tables, and lists.
Another on-page SEO update strategy is to add internal links to new content that’s related to the topic that particular article covers. And don’t forget to add new keywords if you spot any that are relevant to the topic your content covers.
Once you’ve optimized your old content, be sure to share it across all your channels again.
Did you know? GatherContent’s content workflow can automatically resurface content to be updated on a regular basis so no blog post, case study, or landing page gets skipped.
Content example: Steven Macdonald
Steven Macdonald, head of content at INEVO AS, recently shared a post on LinkedIn detailing his success in updating four articles to increase traffic by almost 6,000 sessions. He lists the tactics he used to update the content, including:
Quotes from subject matter experts
Google’s People also ask questions
A new section called “Resources you’ll love”
“You can spend a day or two this week creating new content,” he says. “Or you can find content that’s underperforming and update it.” Take a peek at the details in his LinkedIn post.
An effective SEO content strategy is essential for any business to succeed at reaching your audience. The key part of crafting yours is to understand the needs and behaviors of your target audience, then identify the keywords you want to turn into content pillars and long-tail keywords you want to target within individual pieces of content.
One thing to remember is that SEO is a long-term game and you won’t see success right away. No matter what it looks like, your SEO content strategy requires ongoing effort, analysis, and adaptation. You’ll need to constantly adapt your content workflow, templates, and strategy as well to maintain that competitive edge and earn a spot on page one of the search results.
And while you publish new and refreshed content across multiple channels, GatherContent’s content production hub can help you ensure your articles, social media posts, videos, and landing pages are all consistently hitting your high quality standards. Give GatherContent’s free trial a go today and find out how it can help you implement your SEO content strategy without the headache of juggling multiple tools.
Landing a spot in search results is a powerful strategy for attracting and engaging your audience. But the idea of “if you build it, they will come” doesn’t work with search engine optimization (SEO). Instead, you need an SEO content strategy that works hand-in-hand with your content marketing strategy to get your content in front of your audience and drive conversions.
Other benefits of an effective SEO content strategy include:
A good strategy sends more traffic to your website by helping your content rank higher in the search engine result pages (SERPs).
An SEO strategy inspires more relevant high-quality content for a better user experience.
Organic SEO helps you reach your target audience in a more cost-effective way.
It’s also essential to create a source of truth that outlines your SEO content strategy for anyone who touches any part of your content. A content production tool like GatherContent can help you craft and manage your content creation process, including creating templates and workflows, to ensure every piece of content works toward your overarching SEO and digital marketing goals—and not against them.
Even if you’re not familiar with the ins and outs of SEO, creating a good SEO content strategy doesn’t have to be rocket science. Here are six tips and content creation examples to help start driving traffic to your site.
6 tips to create an effective SEO content strategy
1. Get to know your audience
Don’t let anyone tell you that SEO is about playing the right keywords. Search engines, including two major players Google and Bing, have grown quickly and now use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to better understand search terms and the content their bots crawl.
For example, Google’s Natural Language AI can understand and pinpoint the entities, sentiment, syntax, and categories included in a snippet of text. But what does this have to do with your audience? It points to Google and other search engines valuing helpful, informative content over keyword-stuffed fluff.
The Google Natural Language AI helps the search engine better understand the content its bots crawl, including the sentiment, syntax, entities or people mentioned, and topical categories.
This means it’s still important to prioritize creating content that resonates with your audience—even with an organic SEO content strategy. But to create great content that resonates with your audience, you need to understand your audience, their needs, interests, pain points, and preferences.
You can get to know your audience in a variety of ways, including:
Chat with your customer service team to get a list of questions they’re regularly asked.
Invite current and prospective customers to complete surveys.
Check out your social media and website analytics, which may include info on your audience’s demographics and interests.
Read online reviews to find out what works or doesn’t work for your audience—or what they think is missing from a product or service.
Look for insights tucked away in comments on your social media posts and blog articles.
Get the scoop on your competitor’s content marketing strategies and their effectiveness across different channels. Are their audiences asking for anything you might be able to provide?
You might also glean some audience insights from your keyword research—especially if you can spot long-tail keywords.
They may seem like fun-but-unnecessary content, but quizzes can quickly and easily provide data on your audience’s needs.
For example, Sephora’s Foundation Finder quiz asks customers to answer a few questions about their skin type and the problems they’re facing. It then offers a personalized list of products based on the customer’s quiz responses.
Sephora’s Foundation Finder quiz is an engaging way for its audience to provide data about current needs, pain points, and interests.
Data from this quiz can then be used by Sephora to better understand their audience’s needs and pain points. If the majority of quiz takers deal with oily skin and related problems, then content revolving around that topic may resonate better than content than focuses on, say, aging.
It’s back to SEO basics with this step. After all, keywords are the building blocks of any SEO strategy. And keyword research helps you identify the words and phrases your audience uses to search for information, products, and services, as well as their search intent.
A word of caution though: Don’t simply stack your keyword list with high-volume competitive keywords. These “head terms,” as they’re called, are short and non-specific. For example, here are some head terms related to the topic of social media:
Social media apps
Social media icons
Social media manager
These broad terms may have higher potential traffic, but they’re also incredibly harder to rank for. If we check out the search difficulty (SD), or how competitive it is to rank for these terms, we can see that each one ranks in the 70s and 80s—this means you’re going to have a lot of competitors trying to rank for the same term.
Using Ubersuggest, we can see that head terms related to “social meda” have a high search difficulty (SD) score, which means it’s harder to rank for them in search.
But long-tail keywords are easier to rank for and can help you spot specific audience needs, interests, and pain points. Let’s look at some examples of long-tail keywords related to social media:
Social media marketing tips for businesses (SD of 15)
Is social media effective for marketing (SD of 64)
How often should businesses post on social media (SD of 66)
How can social media marketing help your business (SD of 13)
So while these long-tail keywords may have lower search volume, there’s a better chance you’ll rank on page one of the search results if you target them instead of head terms. On top of that, long-tail keywords are specifically targeted and can help you draw in potential customers who are ready to make a purchase.
To sum up, a good SEO strategy uses head terms to identify broad topics, then narrows down the focus based on long-tail keywords that fall under each head term.
To start identifying the head terms and long-tail keywords you want to use in your SEO content strategy, try using some of these free tools:
Google Search autocomplete: Start typing your head term into Google Search and it populates related long-tail phrases as suggestions.
Google Search People also ask section: Usually appearing on page one of the search results, the People also ask section features questions related to your search term and can be a great way to spot FAQ content or even topics for whole articles.
Google Keyword Planner: The original keyword research tool, Keyword Planner gives you estimated search traffic, trends over time, and difficulty to rank.
Ubersuggest: You get three free searches per day with this keyword research tool from content marketing expert Neil Patel.
Moz Keyword Explorer: This free keyword research tool comes with a companion browser extension, MozBar, that highlights search metrics while you browse.
While stuffing may be one of the most popular Thanksgiving side dishes, keyword stuffing degrades your content quality and may even get your site penalized by Google.
TL;DR: Keyword stuffing isn’t a viable SEO content strategy. Don’t do it.
Content example:
“I tried to rank for all the highest-volume keywords that were even vaguely relevant to the people I thought would want to buy from us,” says Ryan Law, vice president of content at Animalz. “And the limitation of that was we got a ton of traffic—the old blog I did, we got up to hundreds of thousands of page views per month—and we didn’t close any deals because it was just the wrong type of people.”
Listen to this interview with Ryan Law to learn why targeting only high-volume head terms and not trying to solve the hard problems that your target audience experiences is a flawed SEO content strategy—and what to do instead.
3. Pinpoint content topics and types
After you’ve done your keyword research, it’s time to sort your findings into topics that match your audience’s interests, needs, and pain points. It’s critical that your SEO content strategy doesn’t meander off the path clearly defined with your audience’s needs and your own content goals.
This also means you shouldn’t pursue creating content just for content’s sake—make sure you can provide a helpful and engaging experience for your audience at the same time.
Your main topics will become your content pillars, which form the foundation of your content map. Content pillars will revolve around your main topics and head terms, while your long-tail keywords will become shorter pieces of content that link back to each pillar page.
Good to know: Your long-tail keywords should already give you a good idea for specific content to produce, but if you need to brainstorm additional content topics it’s time to connect with your audience again.
Next, it’s time to figure out which content types resonate most with your audience. Some content types may be dictated by the channel you use, such as Twitter’s 280-character limit. But if you have the freedom to experiment with different formats, you may want to consider these top 10 content types that content marketers said performed best in Semrush’s State of Content Marketing: 2023 Global Report:
Video
Short-form articles
Success stories
Long-form blog posts
Case studies
Webinars and online events
Gated content
Infographics
White papers
Offline events
Semrush’s 2023 State of Content Marketing Report asked content marketers which types of content performed best, with video topping the list.
Better yet, you can mix and match content types—a long-form article can become a social media post, a video, and an infographic. A case study can be rewritten as a success story, and offline events can capture and present key takeaways from any type of content.
Just remember, everything goes back to your audience, so ensure the content types you choose actually resonate with them.
Content example: Home Depot
No matter what kind of business you run, there are always opportunities to diversify the content types you produce in order to attract and engage your audience.
Case in point, Home Depot augmented its ecommerce shop of home repair and remodeling supplies and tools with a DIY projects and ideas hub. The hub contains written how-to guides as well as videos to attract and help customers with different needs and pain points.
Home Depot uses multiple content types to reach its audience, including videos and how-to guides that link back to its main business of home improvement and tools.
4. Optimize content
Optimizing your content shouldn’t happen after your first drafts are written, but at the very start of your content creation process. Content templates ensure your drafts are optimized for your audience from the get-go.
GatherContent lets you create a content template library for multiple formats, including emails, social posts, blog articles, and landing pages.
A good template can help you format and structure your content in a way that’s most helpful to your audience. It offers guidance on voice and tone as well as style so your company’s content remains consistent across all channels. And lastly, templates ensure no one gets confused about content goals or puts in unnecessary work.
After writing your draft, you can further optimize your content during the editing stage. If SEO is your main content strategy, it helps to train your editors on effective SEO tactics as well as black hat SEO techniques that shouldn’t make it into a published post. This can include:
How to use keywords in headers and subheaders.
What an effective meta description looks like and how long it should be.
How to optimize images and image alt text for search.
How to format internal and external links within content.
Speaking of optimization, Google’s algorithms, including the August 2022 helpful content update, put the focus on creating relevant content for people, not search engines. So it’s a good idea to reinforce the importance of creating content for your audience—and using keywords that match their needs and interests—to your writers and editors.
Content example: Wirecutter
Most of us read product reviews with an air of skepticism, and for good reason. Reviews tend to be a content type that crosses the line between using keywords to show up in search and stuffing keywords into multiple paragraphs to rank for multiple terms. Not to mention many reviews seem fake and it’s hard to tell whether the reviewer actually used the products in question.
Cut to Wirecutter. Its focus on empathetic product reviews existed even before Google’s Helpful Content update, and it’s quite obvious in the site’s reviews that the author tested each product.
The “How we tested” section is especially eye-opening, as it notes the exact ways the Wirecutter staff thoroughly tested even the simplest products such as kitchen trash cans. It reinforces the goal that the content is written to solve a pain point felt by the publication’s audience—and not written just to make money.
The Wirecutter’s “How we tested” section of its reviews clearly displays how well the site understands its audience’s pain points and tries to solve them.
5. Track and analyze content performance
Your organic traffic sessions are just one metric to track and analyze to determine your SEO content strategy’s success. While traffic is the primary metric you’ll want to consider, you should also pay attention to other metrics that may indicate high or low engagement, including:
Bounce rate: How quickly do visitors leave your web pages? If your bounce rate is high, it’s likely your content doesn’t match your intended audience’s search intent.
Time on page: Time on page can help you understand whether your audience is finding your content helpful. And a low time on page result combined with a high click-through rate (CTR) can signify compelling calls to action (CTAs).
Shares: A huge aspect of social media is shares, and content that’s shared by a large portion of your audience is likely resonating with them.
Conversions: For bottom-of-the-funnel content, conversions are king. These can tell you if your content helped your audience make a decision.
Backlinks: A large number of backlinks can signify that other websites found your content valuable and may even signify that you’re viewed as a thought leader in your industry.
Indexed pages: If your content is getting indexed, it means search engines determined it’s relevant and valuable and will display it in search results.
Search results rankings: The higher up on the SERPs your content ranks, the more valuable and relevant the search engine has determined it is. (And the more likely it is to get organic traffic.)
In terms of tools you can use to check these metrics, Google Analytics and related products like Google Search Console are perhaps the most well-known. They offer in-depth insights into your traffic, where your audience is coming from, bounce rate, time on page, conversions, and more.
SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush can help you analyze backlinks and search results rankings. Additionally, if you’ve put together a list of keywords you want to target with your content (remember step two?), these SEO tools can tell you which keywords you’re currently ranking for.
Other tools, like Looker, can help you pull content performance data into visual charts for deeper analysis.
Content example: Spotify Wrapped
Spotify Wrapped, the company’s marketing campaign that highlights each user’s musical year in review, is a huge hit on social media year after year. In 2022, the Spotify Wrapped campaign saw 425 million Tweets within the first three days after it launched.
The repetitive nature of the campaign (it’s launched annually), along with its shareability and fun vibes, make it a consistent winner when it comes to social sharing.
The Spotify Wrapped social media marketing campaign consistently sees success year after year.
6. Update content regularly
Content freshness is indeed a Google Search ranking factor, but that doesn’t mean you need to churn out dozens of new case studies and blog posts week after week.
Instead, you should pair your new content initiatives with regular existing content updates—especially if your content matches the types of queries Google notes as demanding fresh information. These include:
“Breaking news” queries
Recurring event queries, such as TV shows and sporting events
Current information queries, such as cost of flights and city populations
Product queries, which may indicate someone is looking for information on the most recent model
And Google’s evaluation guidelines explicitly say, “unmaintained/abandoned ‘old’ websites or unmaintained and inaccurate/misleading content is a reason for a low Page Quality rating.”
Search engines aside, if your focus is on your audience, you naturally want them to have the most up-to-date and accurate information available. So consider updating old content by checking facts, updating stats and data, and providing new information. Add or create new images or videos, and restructure content with additional headers, tables, and lists.
Another on-page SEO update strategy is to add internal links to new content that’s related to the topic that particular article covers. And don’t forget to add new keywords if you spot any that are relevant to the topic your content covers.
Once you’ve optimized your old content, be sure to share it across all your channels again.
Did you know? GatherContent’s content workflow can automatically resurface content to be updated on a regular basis so no blog post, case study, or landing page gets skipped.
Content example: Steven Macdonald
Steven Macdonald, head of content at INEVO AS, recently shared a post on LinkedIn detailing his success in updating four articles to increase traffic by almost 6,000 sessions. He lists the tactics he used to update the content, including:
Quotes from subject matter experts
Google’s People also ask questions
A new section called “Resources you’ll love”
“You can spend a day or two this week creating new content,” he says. “Or you can find content that’s underperforming and update it.” Take a peek at the details in his LinkedIn post.
An effective SEO content strategy is essential for any business to succeed at reaching your audience. The key part of crafting yours is to understand the needs and behaviors of your target audience, then identify the keywords you want to turn into content pillars and long-tail keywords you want to target within individual pieces of content.
One thing to remember is that SEO is a long-term game and you won’t see success right away. No matter what it looks like, your SEO content strategy requires ongoing effort, analysis, and adaptation. You’ll need to constantly adapt your content workflow, templates, and strategy as well to maintain that competitive edge and earn a spot on page one of the search results.
And while you publish new and refreshed content across multiple channels, GatherContent’s content production hub can help you ensure your articles, social media posts, videos, and landing pages are all consistently hitting your high quality standards. Give GatherContent’s free trial a go today and find out how it can help you implement your SEO content strategy without the headache of juggling multiple tools.
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