The most common mistake when building a content strategy is completely wanting to position yourself on the keywords you're selling on and making them the absolute priority. SEO style is rarely decisive because these keywords, often generic and competitive, do not generate more conversions.
So, there must be a different way to better prioritize content production actions. A way to make you rethink your priorities when formulating a new strategy to help you grow organic traffic on your site, no matter what your site is interested in and presenting to visitors, or even if you have an online store or a website for your real company on the ground.
In our article for today, we will mention to you the most important aspects that you should focus on to ensure yourself in the lead for search engines, and to maintain an important share of organic traffic from search engines to feed your site. With this approach, your content strategy will gain in performance with search engine optimization (SEO) results.
Search Engine Optimization Strategy: The 3-Step Prioritization Method
Effective prioritization of content production requires exploration of 3 dimensions that will be developed later in this article:
- Know your business and your market
- Deciding which part of the content creation process should be prioritized
- Determine the type of content that yields the greatest return on investment
By following this method, you:
- Define a realistic and effective content strategy
- Learn what tools and features to use to make better content strategy decisions
- Get tips to analyze your business and that of your competitors
- Save time and energy
Step 1: Know Your Business And Market
First note: There are many mistakes to avoid when starting a content strategy. If you start without specific goals, you risk a poor return on investment. First of all, make sure you define your goals and communicate them to your teams.
Second note: Even with specific goals, it is essential that you know your business in-depth before embarking on a content strategy. During this first step, we will help you evaluate your business: audience, competitors, market, reputation, SEO performance, etc. Note that to get most of this information, it is necessary to create a Google Analytics and Google Search Console account for your website.
Know the level of organic traffic spending
Let's get back to the basics: What is free traffic? This is the number of visitors to your site via search engines. On your site, what is the percentage of organic traffic compared to total traffic?
If organic traffic exceeds 60/70% of the total number of visits, then you can consider that the latter is largely based on natural references. However, this does not necessarily mean that this traffic qualifies and generates conversion. For example, high bounce rate, short sessions, and low conversion rate are all signs that your site traffic is not very qualitative. So keep this in mind, you always have to go further and look through the data!
Is your organic traffic share the majority? Ask yourself what percentage of brand inquiries compare to total inquiries.
Tip:
To find this information, you can use Google Search Console. In the left menu, click "Performance", then in the horizontal filter bar, click "New". Select 'Queries contain' and type in your brand name.
If your brand's traffic is very high, which often happens to big brands or popular brands, you'll need to target more generic keywords to compensate for the brand's query share. For this, it will be necessary to develop thematic content and various resources to diversify the sources of traffic.
An example of a luxury brand of scarves. If the majority of requests are made to the brand, the latter should focus on general keywords such as: “women’s scarf”, “silk scarf”, “scarf + color”, etc.
The danger, in fact, is that other competing brands find themselves in a better position on strategic keywords. Be creative and don't give them any chance to steal your SEO market share.
On the other hand, if the percentage of brand traffic is fairly average or even low, the risk is that the brand will be considered poorly by Google. This can lead to lower traffic and positioning compared to competitors. In this case, you should not necessarily give up off-brand traffic because it is a very good positioning factor on Google, but you should also focus on brand queries, focus on local SEO and perform networking actions.
Finally, if your traffic is not dependent on organic traffic, then all the opportunities are up to you! You have a good margin of progress.
Targeting requests to achieve your business goals
Your strategy directly depends on your business goals. For example, if you want to develop brand awareness or significantly increase traffic to your website, it is likely that the most profitable strategy is to focus on general or short-tail queries, which account for the most search volume. If your goal is to convert more, you can apply the above strategy and develop content to long queries at the same time to attract qualified leads.
Finally, if you specifically want to not significantly increase the number of your customers, but rather build loyalty and make lasting gains, again, producing pages and articles about long queries will be the most effective strategy for getting better conversion rates.
Tip:
To fully understand the demands to be targeted and the efforts to be made to achieve your goals, you can look at several indicators:
- Query folders on Ahrefs, eg.
- Cost-per-click (CPC) to assess the difficulty of your positioning on a keyword.
- If you already have pages about it, you can create Adwords campaigns on them to monitor your conversion rate.
Ensure content is relevant to the purchase path
In order to determine what content you need to improve conversion and purchase funnel efficiency, it is necessary to answer the following questions:
- Who are you in the market?
- How do you position yourself in the face of your competitors?
- Are you one of the "big players" in the market, an outsider, or a beginner?
- Do you perform on “5 points” (product, price, promotion, place, and people)?
These characteristics will have an impact on your content strategy. So the more objective and realistic your answers are, the more fair your analysis and your strategy will be.
Decathlon example
The Decathlon brand gets very good results for its content dedicated to diversion. So the brand wants to focus its strategy on less mature users, and more search for information. For this purpose, I decided to develop specialized content that includes a lot of information about sports practices.
Conversely, for a site that has difficulty converting, it will be important to develop content that affects the middle or end of the conversion path.
Your position against the competition
The big question you will say! Indeed, to obtain this information, it will undoubtedly be necessary to develop a competitive map and SWOT analysis.
Also, don't forget to take a look at your SEO strengths: traffic, conversion rate, etc.
This move allows you to better choose your battles. You identify your strengths and weaknesses compared to your competitors and you know exactly where you want to go. Thus, you are putting efforts where they are really needed.
Dynamic search on your topic
What are the research intentions in your topic? Rather informational or transactional? With Google, you will be able to learn more about the search intentions of your audience.
You can also follow the evolution of positions in the SERP; Is there movement is it completely stable? What items are on your results page?
The perception of your company by consumers and your industry
Type your business name + "review" into Google and see what happens.
Also, see your incoming links. Is there a lot? Are they from "good quality" sites?
If you think your work is being viewed poorly, it may be necessary to focus on networking, encourage your customers to post reviews, and also create trustworthy content that meets E-A-T standards. You can also create Topic Groups to enhance your image as a topic expert.
Step 2: Decide Which Part Of The Content Creation Process Should Be Prioritized
You now have a better understanding of your business, your goals, and how to put it into perspective. It's time to figure out which actions to prioritize.
Define your SEO positioning
The first question you should ask yourself: Over the past six months, have your positions decreased or increased?
If the position of one of your pages increases, do you think your content can actually rank on the first page of search results? Does he have enough authority?
If so, that's good news. You can focus on building links to increase the popularity of your page while keeping an eye on the evolution of competing for content.
If not, your content may need to be updated. But beware! It all depends on the difficulty of the keyword. If it takes a lot of effort to position itself, then go no further. Try to work on requests that matter to your business and require proportionate impact.
Tip:
To determine a keyword's difficulty level, you can rely on several tools including ahrefs' free tool, Keyword Difficulty Checker. Remember to select your target country before starting your search.
The tool tells you how many backlinks you need to rank in the top 10 on that keyword.
In the event that your positions drop, it is necessary to review your content by comparing it to your best competitors. It will either need to be updated by adding content or setting an article corner.
The competition between your pages
Inter-page cannibalism happens more often than you think. It can be evaluated manually by looking at pages placed on the same keyword or automatically, using a dedicated tool.
Tip:
To evaluate the pagination process between your site's pages, you can do this with the Google command: site:monsite.com + "keyword".
You see all pages of your site placed on a particular keyword.
You can also get help from Google Search Console. In the Performance section, enter the query in the filters, then go to the Pages tab to select those that receive impressions and click on the query.
In this case, find the most performing page. Keep it and point it to the least productive page to keep your positions.
Trading "SEO Juice"
Even the best content in the world, if it is hidden in your site tree structure, will not be visible to your audience. To make it visible, it is necessary to strengthen it with ties. So intranets are the number one way to empower your content and make it visible. Effective networking consists of linking content together on the same topic.
Step 3: Select The Type Of Content That Generates The Greatest Return On Investment
This last step allows you to control your budget and precisely target the types of content to produce that will allow you to achieve your goals more effectively.
Create a content gap
What exactly is a Content Gap? This is a method that allows you to identify the keywords that your competition is positioned on and not you. This method determines the existing content that needs to be strengthened and defines new content ideas to create. Another advantage of this exercise: it allows you to estimate the probability of gaining traffic from content creation/optimization action. Thus, the more content that brings in big profits, the more you should work on it in priority.
For example, www.website.shoe.com/shoes-kids-rainbow ranks 3rd on "Rainbow Baby Shoes" with traffic associated with it for the year 2000. One of your URLs is placed on the second page of Google on this same keyword with 10 associated traffic. You can optimize this existing page and hope to get the same traffic as your competitor.
Tip:
There are several ways to assess the content gap. If you have a short time, you can use tools like Ahrefs Content Gap.
Choose the type of content to produce according to its context.
Your strategy must be adapted according to several factors:
- your budget.
- Your level of expertise in this topic.
- expected range.
- Your business goals.
Case examples:
Your subject matter expertise is limited > Invite one or more industry experts to post on your site
Your expertise is high but little recognized > Develop an ecosystem of articles on the central topics of your activity. Develop tips pages, FAQs, tutorials, videos, etc.
Your budget is limited > Focus your actions on evergreen content.
Your budget is relatively big > Bet on content that meets Google's E-A-T standards. Download our E-A-T checklist to improve the visibility of your pages.
You want to reach a big goal > focus on publishing and promoting content by displaying it in various media: videos, infographics, social media posts, in order to increase the chances of it being shared.
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