Improve your website's SEO by creating a content strategy that wins you more customers

1. Identify Your Target Audience

One of the best ways to generate leads with SEO content marketing is by creating valuable content that is relevant to your target audience. This content should be designed to help your audience solve a problem or meet a need.

Some people may not realize that they have a target audience. If you are not sure who your target audience is, try to think about who your product or service is for.

For example, if you are a clothing company, your target audience is people who wear clothes. If you are a pet supply company, your target audience is people who have pets. Obviously it will not be so simple as you will want to niche down your target audience - this is just a super broad example.

Your product will probably have more than one target audience that your product appeals to, in order to deliver results, you will want to focus on one persona at a time as you cannot speak to all audiences with the same message. Decide who you will be writing for and what it is that they want to know more about. It can be specifically related to your product and how they will use it in a personalized way, it can address pain points they may have, or even what they can accomplish by using your product. A great way to get engagement is to talk about how your product is differentiated from the competition.

2. Conduct Keyword Research

Conducting keyword research is an essential part of any SEO content strategy. This is a process where you identify the words and phrases that people are likely to use when searching for information related to your topic. By identifying the right keywords to target, you can focus your efforts on the phrases that are most likely to result in traffic and conversions.

There are a number of different tools and methods you can use to conduct keyword research, even free ones such as Moz's Keyword Explorer or Google Keyword Planner , these tools let you enter a keyword or phrase, and then provides you with a list of related keywords and their estimated search volumes. You want to make sure you're choosing keywords that are not only relevant to your brand and product, but also to your target audience and how they will be searching.

If you're not sure where to start, Google Trends is a free tool that analyzes the popularity of top search queries from Google Search across various languages and regions. It can help you know the seasonal trends of certain products, or your niche and you can even use it to see how your competitors are ranking by monitoring their performance. By using the Related Queries section of Google Trends, you can see what people who search for your product category are also searching for so you can write content that includes those keywords and phrases.

3. Provide Valuable Information

Providing valuable information means giving readers information that is interesting, helpful and relevant to them. You can do this by writing informative blog posts, sharing useful resources and offering helpful advice.

When you provide valuable information, you help your readers learn something new, solve a problem or feel more informed. This can help keep them coming back to your blog for more information and help you build a strong following.

Make it Personal

One of the best things about blogging is that you can make it personal. This means sharing your thoughts, feelings and experiences with your readers. When you make your blog personal, you help your readers get to know you better and build a stronger connection with you.

There are many ways to make your blog personal, such as by sharing your thoughts on current events, writing about your experiences or sharing your thoughts on various topics. When you make your blog personal, you help your readers feel like they know you and that they can trust you. This can help you build a strong relationship with your readers and encourage them to keep coming back to your blog. Just make sure everything is relevant to the audience you are targeting and to your brand or products.

4. Focus on Quality Content

One of the most important factors in SEO is the quality of your content. Google and other search engines are constantly changing their algorithms to reward websites that publish high-quality content. This is especially important for those in the ecommerce space, as it can help to establish trust and credibility with potential customers.

When it comes to creating quality content, it’s important to consider the following:

• The content should be well written and free of errors.
• The content should be relevant to the audience.
• The content should be engaging and interesting to read.
• The content should be well-researched and true.
• The content should be optimized for search engines.
• The content should be easy to share on social media.

By following these tips, you can create quality content that will help to improve your website’s visibility and credibility.

5. Provide Actionable Suggestions and Examples

It's fine to talk in theory when explaining a concept, but in order for your content to actually be useful for your audience, you will want to deliver opportunities of action for your readers. This often means developing some specific tasks or to-dos that you suggest your readers do.

If you are writing an informative blog about how to fix a part of your product that can wear down, you would want to provide step-by-step instructions that can be easily followed without additional help. Providing tips and tricks from an insider's perspective can also be a great tactic.

Using visuals such as images and video, or even an infographic, can help your readers better understand if words are not enough or the subject is complicated. Be sure to answer the most common questions that could also come up so you're predicting your reader's needs and delivering on them.

If you are talking about a concept, providing real-life examples can not only help provide understanding but also help reader's gain trust.

6. Optimize at Every Turn

You should constantly be editing and tweaking your content to make sure it is as effective as possible.

While the best approach for optimizing content for search engines will vary depending on the website and its target audience, some tips for optimizing content for search engines include using keyword-rich titles and descriptions, including keywords and phrases throughout the content, and using external sources such as link building and social media to boost visibility.

Once you’ve identified the right keywords to target for content, you will also need to optimize your website and product pages for those same phrases. There are a few basic things you can do to help optimize your site for search engines.

1. Choose a keyword-rich domain name.
2. Use keyword-rich titles and descriptions for your pages.
3. Place keywords in the body of your content.
4. Use keywords in your anchor text.
5. Use keywords in your file names and URLs.
6. Submit your site to directories and search engines.
7. Optimize your images.
8. Use social media to promote your site.
9. Monitor your website’s search engine rankings.
10. Use a search engine optimization tool.

SEO is an ongoing process that must be continually optimized in order to be effective. There are no shortcuts or easy solutions, so it’s important to be diligent in your efforts. Every change you make to your website, content, and marketing strategy should be considered in terms of its impact on your SEO.

7. Keep Information Up-to-date

It is important to keep your information up-to-date by consistently posting. If you are not regularly adding new content, your website will become stale and lose its ranking. Make sure you are adding new blog posts, articles, and product information as well as updating older blogs so their information remains accurate. Because blogs are evergreen and remain on your site, any that are no longer relevant or useful should be taken down so they are not indexed by search engines. Sometimes a topic is no longer relevant for your target audience (or never was) and should be removed all together but if the post contributes high-quality backlinks then you should try recycling it instead to prevent link losses - in this case, a rewrite will do.

Beyond search engine optimization, new content is what builds your businesses' credibility. Landing on an old blog that offers out of date information will cause your prospects to leave your site quickly, leaving you with nothin but a high bounce rate.

Lastly, images can be just as important to update as content. Be sure you're not promoting products that you no longer carry or are out of stock. If you go through a rebranding, it is also important to do a once-over on all your pages to ensure everything has been updated so no matter what page someone lands on, your brand proposition is clear and professional.

8. Track Your Success

SEO is not a one-time process. In order to see the best results, you need to track your progress and make necessary adjustments along the way. Use data to track your website’s performance and identify areas that need improvement.

Understanding which pieces of content are not only bringing in more visitors but which have a low bounce rate and exit rate, and a higher average time spent on page can help you focus on specific topics for future content for your organization.

If you sell clothing and discover through your metrics that a blog about keeping your clothes looking like new is performing well, you can brainstorm (or use keyword research) to uncover other similar topics that you can write about since you already know your consumers are interested.

To round out your analytics reporting on content, you should also be tracking your rankings when it comes to the keywords that you are targeting.

Conclusion

A content strategy that follows these guidelines will drive traffic to your site. It can take a long time to see results as you improve your site rankings and attract more of the right type of prospect, but stick with your writing and with research and experimentation, the data will point you in the right direction so be sure to stick with it.