How To Develop A Content Marketing Plan

Have you ever wondered how certain websites magically appear at the top of your Google search results? It’s not magic; it’s SEO (search engine optimization).

A well-planned website SEO content strategy is critical to driving organic traffic to your website, improving your search engine rankings, and ultimately increasing your revenue. But with so much information out there, it can be overwhelming to know where to start.

This guide will explain the five steps to creating a successful SEO content strategy.

What Is An SEO Content Strategy?

An SEO content marketing plan is a plan that outlines how to create and optimize content for a website to improve its search engine rankings, drive organic traffic, and achieve business goals. It involves researching and selecting relevant keywords, creating high-quality content that meets user intent, optimizing content for search engines, promoting it through various channels, and more.

5 Steps To Set Up An Effective SEO Content Strategy

Setting up an SEO content strategy can look different for each business because of the various marketing funnel stages, budgets, and customer acquisition phases.

However, the following are the five standard steps for creating an SEO content strategy:

Step 1) Discover Your Target Audience & Buyer Persona

Your target group (TG) will likely share your content and buy from you. Therefore, all of your marketing efforts should be directed to your TG.

Your TG can be categorized into age, gender, income, and other famous demographic metrics. Once you have the metrics, you can focus on building a buyer persona by asking the following questions:

• Who are my customers?
• Who are my competitor’s customers?
• Who is interested in becoming my customer?
• Who do I want to turn into my customer?

You can get this data from the following three major ways:

• Coordinating with your sales team.
• Digging through your sales data from the past 12 months.
• Scanning your brand’s social media interactions.

Step 2) Create A Content Calendar

Quality content is the starting point of any SEO content strategy. Once you have settled on your buyer persona, you can pick a couple of platforms where your buyers spend most of their time.

A content calendar outlines your content creation schedule for the upcoming period. This comes in handy when managing multiple social media platforms and content formats.

For example, if your brand gets most of the leads from its website, then SEO blogs, eBooks, and case studies should be your content of choice.

Whereas, if Instagram and Facebook are where you get most of your customers and sales, your content calendar must prioritize photos, videos, infographics, and other visual and interactive content forms.

Step 3) Conduct Keyword Research

A keyword is an index term that allows Google to locate your content on the web. It is with proper keywords that your content is disseminated through trillions of words when it’s searched for.

Keyword research is the basis of all SEO operations and the foundation for organic traffic on the web. Here are some key concepts to consider for your keyword research:

1. Benchmark Competition: To understand how you stack up against your competitors, conduct keyword research to identify their target keywords. This can help you identify content gaps and areas to improve to gain a competitive advantage.
2. Customer Sales Life Cycle: Use keyword research tools to identify high-volume keywords relevant to your customer sales life cycle. This will help you create content that aligns with their needs at different stages of the buying process.
3. Gated Content: Keyword research can also help you identify keywords relevant to your gated content strategy. You can generate leads and gather valuable information about your potential customers by creating valuable, exclusive content behind gated forms, such as ebooks or whitepapers.
4. Actionable CTAs: Incorporate actionable calls-to-action (CTAs) in your content to drive users to your funnel pages. Keyword research can help you identify keywords commonly used in search queries. By using these keywords strategically in your CTAs, you can guide users toward taking the desired actions on your website, such as making a purchase or filling out a contact form.

Step 4) Continuously Refine Your Content

Search engines prefer fresh, relevant, and high-quality content that provides value to users. For your next SEO content strategy step, you’ll need to optimize your existing content library, social media feed, website blogs, and case study existing content with relevant keywords, backlinks, and social proof. The end goal of this process must be to refine your old content and align it with your newly conceived buyer persona and keywords.

By regularly reviewing and improving your content, you can:

• Stay up-to-date on SEO trends.
• Optimize for keywords.
• Improve user experience.
• Fix errors in your content.
• Add more value.
• Update calls-to-action (CTAs).
• Optimize meta tags, descriptions, and social tags.

Step 5) Track Your KPIs & Improvise Accordingly

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) evaluate the progress and success of business operations, marketing campaigns, and SEO content strategy.

The ideal KPIs for an SEO content strategy are:

• Organic click-through rate (CTR).
• Search engine ranking & visibility.
• Bounce rate.
• Average session duration.
• Cost-per-click (CPC).
• The overall return on investment (ROI).

After successfully tracking KPIs, you can get answers for the following:

• What’s working?
• What isn’t working?
• What can be improved?
• What should be discontinued?

KPIs bring you closer to your goals as they make room for improvement and optimization of your SEO content strategy.

SEO Content Marketing Plan Is Straightforward, But It Takes Work!

Businesses can no longer rely on ads and paid traffic to generate leads. With an effective SEO content strategy, you can maximize organic traffic and create value in your niche. Here’s how you can sum up a successful SEO content strategy in one sentence: Write a copy that converts and publish content that ranks.

If you want to create a winning SEO content strategy but feel overwhelmed or need help figuring out where to start, don’t worry! The team at RankJacker SEO is here to help. Our team has mastered these steps and successfully implemented them for hundreds of online businesses.

Contact us today if you want to take your website’s traffic and rankings to the next level. Together, we can determine the best approach for your unique needs and goals and help you succeed in SEO.