It wasn’t all that long ago that you could get ahead of the competition just by pumping out tons and tons of content. If you wanted your website to show up in online searches, all you had to do was create enough content to give Google a good idea of what your website was all about and ta da! You were an influencer! An authority in your industry! The go-to source of information (and products/services) for all things related to your industry. All you had to do was hustle hard enough.
Now it’s a little more complicated. You can pump out content on a daily basis, but if your content doesn’t match what your target audience is looking for, you won’t get the results you need.
So let’s take a look at why you need to have all your SEO ducks in a row before you can start working on your content strategy, then we’ll talk about the best way to do so.
Table of Contents
Know Your Keywords
Keyword research is the biggest and most important part of any SEO strategy, so let’s start with all the ways you should be implementing keyword research into your content marketing strategy.
Keyword Research
First, you have to know how to conduct keyword research. Start with your favorite keyword research tool (mine is Serpstat), and enter a search term related to a product or service you provide.
The first thing you need to look at when the tool is done analyzing the keyword is the search volume. That number represents the average number of people who are using that search term on a monthly basis. Keep in mind that it changes from month to month, so scroll down a bit to see if the use of that keyword as a search term has generally trended up, down, or remained the same over the past 12 months or so.
The ideal search volume depends on your target audience and your overall content strategy. While it can be tempting to go for the largest search volume, those keywords are often very difficult to rank for. There’s something to be said for a lower search volume with a higher chance of actually getting in front of the people using that search term.
Next you want to check out the keyword difficulty score. This is a number from 1-100 that will give you an indication of your chances of organically showing up on the first page of Google for that particular keyword. Anything below a 30-35 is safest, but if your website already has a high domain authority and you’re getting lots of traffic from online searches, you can afford to aim a little higher. Even if that is the case, I still wouldn’t go over 50.
The competition score of a keyword is the PPC (pay per click) competition for that particular keyword – meaning the difficulty of getting your ad to show up in searches for that keyword if you choose to run a PPC campaign targeting that keyword. Along with this is the CPC (cost per click) of the keyword. The CPC of any given keyword is determined by what strategists are willing to pay for that particular keyword. In some cases, a keyword might not have a high difficulty score, or even a particularly high search volume, but it could have a very high CPC if it’s a search term consumers tend to use late in the buyer journey and there’s a significant amount of money involved.
The other thing you should look at are your competitors for that particular keyword. Which websites show up when that keyword is searched? Those are the websites you’re going up against, and if you recognize some heavy hitters in that list (influencers in your industry with a very high domain authority, the ones who show up in all the searches), you might be better off targeting a different search term where the competition isn’t as steep.
Long Tail vs. Short-Tail Keywords
Another very important thing you need to know about keywords is the difference between a long-tail keyword and a short-tail keyword. A short-tail keyword is only 1-2 words, and while these keywords tend to have a very high search volume, they also tend to be very difficult to rank for against everyone else targeting that keyword, so it’s not always worth your time and resources.
Long-tail keywords are usually about 3-5 words long. They tend to have a lower search volume, but they’re also usually much easier to rank for, due to the fact that not everyone is aware of the goldmine that long-tail keywords can be. The benefit of this is two-fold: 1) you’re more likely to show up in searches for that keyword; and 2) the people using that keyword as a search term are more likely to be your ideal customers.
The third benefit of long-tail keywords is that they are most often used in the later stages of the buyer journey – meaning people using that keyword know what they’re looking for and they’re ready (or almost ready) to buy. For example, someone searching for the definition of life insurance is probably not ready to buy insurance just yet. But someone comparing whole vs term life insurance is considering buying life insurance and in the final stages of comparing their options.
Search Intent
Along with the idea of short-tail keywords and long-tail keywords is the idea of search intent. In general, most short-tail keywords are going to be associated with a search intent that is more focused on finding information than buying a product or service. That’s why those keywords tend to do best in blog posts where consumers tend to be looking for information about the topic and your company.
By contrast, because long-tail keywords tend to have a higher search intent (meaning the prospect is closer to being ready to buy), they are usually better placed on landing pages and sales pages. Knowing what your target audience is looking for when they use each search term is key to putting the right piece of content in front of them at the right time.
Topics
One of the most common mistakes I see business owners and solopreneurs making is blogging about whatever comes to mind whenever inspiration strikes and they have time to sit down and write a blog post. Just because something new has struck your fancy doesn’t mean your target audience cares about it.
The topics you choose to cover on your blog (and anywhere else you’re producing content) need to be, not only topics your audience cares about, but topics for which they’re searching. This means your keyword research needs to guide your topic choices. If inspiration strikes and you happen to think of something you want to blog about, do some keyword research first to make sure it’s a valid keyword. That means it has a decent search volume, and has not already been covered to death on other websites, especially some of your highest-ranking competitors.
Sometimes you can manipulate this a little. If the first keyword/phrase you search doesn’t give you the results you want, you can try related keywords to see if you get better results. Whichever keyword research tool you decide to use should have suggestions of related keywords for you to try.
Where Do I Put My Keywords?
So, you have your list of keywords with a high search volume, low difficulty score, low competition, and maybe even a low CPC. You’ve made sure you aren’t going up against any heavy hitters with your list of keywords … now what? Where are you supposed to put all those keywords?
Obviously, you want to space them out throughout your content. Don’t put one keyword, or a few similar keywords, too close to each other (no more than 1 per paragraph) or Google will punish you for keyword stuffing, and all of the time and energy you spent conducting your keyword research will have backfired.
But in addition to including relevant keywords throughout your content, you also need to make sure you place your keywords in a few strategic places to make sure you get the most bang for your buck.
Meta Tags
Meta tags are a type of code embedded in your website and throughout the content that allow Google to “read” it, which in turn gives Google a better chance of accurately indexing your website and matching it with relevant searches.
Keywords can (and should) be placed throughout your content, but one of the first things you need to focus on is the meta tags associated with each piece of content. If you’re using WordPress as your content management system, it makes it really easy to do this by providing a section for tags under the “document” section of each piece of content (blog post, landing page, etc.) on your website. You don’t want to flood this section with as many keywords as you can think of, especially if it’s showing up on your published blog posts for all your readers to see. You don’t want to overload them (or Google) with a ton of keywords with varied relevance to your content. You want to foucs on the keywords that are most relevant to that particular piece of content.
The Headline
Not only is your headline the first thing any reader will see before deciding whether they want to click through to your website, it’s also one of the first (and most important) things Google will look at when figuring out what the content is about and in which searches that particular piece of content should rank. So when you’re doing your keyword research to determine what topics you should cover on your blog, don’t forget to include the relevant keywords you find in your headline, as well as your slug for that particular blog post.
The slug is the last section of the URL for that blog post. Most content management systems, such as WordPress, automatically put your headline as the slug of the blog post, so if you want to tweak it, you’ll have to do that manually.
You should also include subheadlines throughout your blog post, especially if it’s a longer post (500 words or longer) to help break up the content and make it easy to navigate. Each subheadline also gets entered as a meta tag, meaning they get priority (after your main headline) when Google is scanning your content trying to figure out how to classify it. That means subheadlines are also an important part of your SEO strategy and should include, if not your main targeted keyword for that particular piece of content, at least a related keyword for which you’re trying to rank.
Images
Google has not yet figured out how to read images and video, although it’s getting closer every day. To help it out, you can give each of your images an alt tag, which is a kind of meta tag that gets attached to the image. The alt tag doesn’t affect your website’s searchability, unless you want the alt tag to show up in Google image searches.
What the alt tag does do is read a description of the image for people who are visually impaired. So, rather than trying to get keywords into your alt tag, focus instead on providing a short, but accurate description of the image.
A/B Testing
Just because you think you’ve followed all the rules doesn’t mean you can just give up. Remember that the rules of SEO and content marketing are constantly changing, so you can never take anything for granted. Everything should be tested as much as possible, but especially your headline and your call to action. If your headline isn’t getting as many clicks as you need it to get, try a different one and see if that’s more successful. If your headline is getting clicks, but you aren’t converting your website visitors into customers, then your call to action needs work.
If your headline isn’t getting the results you need, don’t assume the keyword is the problem because it’s more likely that the placement of the keyword is the problem. One prominent content strategist found on at least one of their blog posts, that placing the target keyword at the beginning of the headline got more clicks than when they put it at the end of the headline. So do some A/B testing to figure out which placement works best.
Your email management system is a great tool for this since it allows you to separate your list into different segments so you can see which headline gets the most clicks. You can also run two different PPC campaigns, each with a different headline, to see which one gets the best results.
Content Length
Like it or not, the length of your content is also a factor in where your content ranks in search results for relevant keywords. It’s a stupid rule of SEO because it tends to encourage content marketers and strategists to fill their content with fluff in order to achieve a certain word count, which doesn’t help their audience, and may or may not serve their search engine rankings, at least in the long run.
Instead, content marketers and strategists should be focused on providing valuable content that gives readers answers to the questions that bother them. Sometimes that will meet a certain word count, especially if it’s an in-depth post that covers a particular topic from beginning to end, but a marketer should never be more concerned about their word count than the value their content provides.
I also recommend covering everything there is to cover on your chosen topic in your blog post because Google will look at that more closely than the word count. If people can get an answer to their question somewhere else, they’ll go somewhere else. If they can find all the answers to their questions on your blog, not only will Google reward you for that, but so will the real, live humans reading your content.
Remember that Google’s goal is always to pair users with the answers they’re looking for, so as long as you find a way to create valuable content that serves your target audience, Google will eventually figure it out and improve your ranking for relevant searches. Just keep in mind that it takes Google a while to index your website, and the algorithm is a constant work in progress, so it might not happen overnight, but with a consistent content strategy, implemented over time, you will see results.
New Content
Google (and readers) value newer content over older content. With our world changing faster than ever, newer content is more likely to be considered relevant, while older content is more likely to be outdated and contain tips and information that are no longer relevant.
One of the reasons to maintain a regular blogging schedule is, not only does it give you a chance to include a wider variety of relevant keywords, and to update your keywords when necessary, but it also gives Google more content to index, and therefore a better chance of classifying your website alongside relevant search terms.
That said, I always preach quality and consistency over quantity. There is certainly a valid argument to be made in favor of quantity, but if you’re just pushing out poor-quality content for the sake of meeting a deadline, you’re not doing your audience (or your search rankings) any favors. So, if you’re writing your own blog posts, pick a schedule you can stick to, even when you’re busy. If you’re hiring a professional to write your blog posts for you, pick a schedule and a frequency that doesn’t blow your budget. I always advise business owners and marketers to publish one blog post a week if they can. If you can only do 1-2 posts per month, that’s fine, as long as the content is high quality.
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