How To Start Developing Your Content Strategy
Well written content is one of the most important tools in helping reach your organization’s marketing goals - It is the reason people visit your website to begin with. Whether Lapero is helping you with a complete website redesign or to make improvements to what you already have, it’s so important to have a solid content strategy in place.
Getting Started
As mentioned above, the information on your website is the sole reason that users are visiting your site. It is important when setting out to write your copy that you are creating content that aligns with the search intent of your target audience. Ask yourself questions from your audience’s point of view, and try to answer those questions while developing the bulk of what you want to say on your website. What types of things are they interested in? What problems do they have? What kind of language would your target audience use to describe the things that they do or the tools that they use? Answering questions like this will help you keep your user engaged in what you are trying to tell them, and they will also help you start to generate a list of potential keywords that can be used as part of your SEO strategy.
Next, it is crucial to make sure that you have unique content on every page of your website. Having duplicate content hurts your SEO performance, but it doesn’t necessarily get you a penalty from Google (as long as you didn’t copy the content directly from someone else’s website). The problem with duplicate content is that when there are several versions of the same text available online, it is hard for search engines to determine which version to index. This lowers performance for all versions of the content, since they are competing against each other.
Once you have decided what you are going to write about, it is time to make sure that your content is readable for users. A formatting strategy is important when deciding how you will be displaying your content on the page to your users. When formatting your pages, you want to be as inviting and accessible as possible. Large chunks of text scare readers away, so try not to overwhelm your users with text that spans the entire page. Using formatting options like Headers, Subheadings, bulleted lists, and the occasional bold keyword makes your content more accessible and allows the reader to scan or skim your content quickly to find what is most relevant to their needs. There are a lot of good resources online for seeing how “readable” your page content is. If you are an existing Lapero Wordpress client, our team has most likely already installed the Yoast plugin on your site. This tool scans your text and provides you with helpful feedback on how to improve it. Sites built on other platforms can use similar services provided by www.read-able.com or SEM Rush’s SEO Writing Assistant.
Using plenty of charts, images, screenshots and quotes from industry experts can also help break up the large chunks of copy. You can take this idea a step further by creating video content that can be embedded into your page - After all, YouTube is the second most popular search engine so creating pieces based on your content can help to improve your search rankings!
Your Ongoing Strategy
Once you have created your website content, the most common mistake is for people to hit publish and forget about it. A good content strategy can only be maintained by keeping your information fresh and up to date. There are millions of blogs on the internet, and Google chooses to rank the ones that are frequently updated first. Updated content is more frequently indexed by search engines. This is not to say that frequently updating your content will make you necessarily rank higher, but the more frequently you update your website with news articles, blog posts, and web pages, the more frequently a search engine will stop by to visit your website. When search engines start to look at your site more often, you have the opportunity to rank higher based on the content you write.
Keep in mind, though, that producing more content is not the key to success, but the quality of the content is. So, while it is a good idea to keep things updated you must also keep high standards for the content being published.
From an SEO perspective, relevant content is more authentic and believable to readers. One study found that audiences who perceived the content they used as relevant are
Nearly 3 times as likely to convert than users who felt the content was only somewhat relevant
More than 8 times as likely to convert than users who felt the content was not relevant
Google wants your website to be an authority on your subject matter. The more informative and valuable the content that you publish is to your specific industry, the greater authority potential your website has. Being an 'authoritative website' in Google’s eyes means that crawlers have determined that you are a trusted source that offers reliable information to your users. Your website's credibility goes hand in hand with higher search rankings, which then leads to an increased number of website visitors.
What About Keywords?
An informed content strategy incorporates keywords in a way so that they are seamlessly incorporated throughout your text, allowing the content to flow naturally for the reader. To avoid keyword stuffing, our team recommends using a 3-5% keyword density. Keyword stuffing is when the target keyword appears more than 10% of the text proportionally, which is something that will cause Google to penalize your site’s search ranking. A good way to avoid keyword stuffing is to increase the word count of your content. If you write 800 words instead of 500, you can add more keywords in the extra 300 words without forcing a keyword every 25 words or so.
Using long-tail keywords is a great addition to your SEO and content strategies. Long-tail keywords get less actual organic search traffic, but usually have a higher conversion rate because of how specific they are. Longer search queries that contain more than 3 words are a great opportunity to capture traffic as these phrases tend to be more precise in user intent and can give more relevant results than generic keywords. Content that is written specifically to answer long-tail search queries results in higher conversions and organic search traffic than a standard single, highly competitive keyword that is most likely also being used by competitors in your industry. Remember the keyword list that we talked about creating earlier in this blog when asking yourself questions about your audience? Here is the time to put it to use!
Let’s Talk More About Your Website
Do you have any questions about how to best develop a content strategy for your website? Reach out to us for more information on how to take what you’ve read here and best optimize the information that you are presenting to your users!