With more and more content strategists shifting gears into the world of SEO, there’s increased demand to understand how to marry these skills.
It’s easy to think SEO content strategists are nothing more than copywriters who bake keyword data into their content.
While that’s not necessarily false, there’s a lot more that goes into realizing success. To help paint a clear picture I share a few important best practices that are crucial to honing your skills as a content strategist.
To learn even more tips and practices in this space, visit my blog at TylerTafelsky.com.
Know Your Target Market And Audience
Successful content marketing is all about creating content that aligns with a given target market.
For SEO content to be effective, it is vital to know the needs, problems, and pain points of your target audience.
Then, only you can strategize and create content that offers merit.
In addition to conventional keyword research to understand search popularity, use tools like Google Trends, Answer the Public, and AlsoAsk to get a better idea of the types of questions your audience is asking around a given topic.
Being an exceptional SEO content strategist requires in-depth knowledge and empathy for your audience.
SEO is All About Organization
Everything that is involved in any SEO strategy relies on the content being organized in a way that's easy to consume.
From a wide angle point of view, SEO must be done with the organization as a means of making a site easier to spot on a search engine.
This best practice can include a few components, like:
- Information architecture is crucial, especially for larger sites with a lot of content and pages.
- Creating a sitemap or keyword mapping document is a useful tool to take stock of your content.
- Leverage internal linking and include links between related pages while using keyword-friendly anchor text.
- Boil down your content into simple terms from the introduction, and go into further details throughout the page.
- Structure your content in a very simple, easy-to-digest outline.
These are a few best practices for leveraging greater organization in your SEO content strategy toolkit.
Stoke Emotions
You don't need to be an expert in consumer behavior psychology to understand the emotional appeal that goes into content that truly engages its audience.
You just need to have a bit of empathy and understand the feelings behind a user's motives. This is often best achieved by asking yourself a few questions:
- Is the content I am producing intended to match a NEED or a WANT?
- How do (or will) a user identify with what it is I am offering?
- Is greater status achieved when the product/service I am offering is acquired?
- Does the content I share provide a personal solution to a particular problem?
- Does my offering impact an individual's personality or outlook on life, love, and happiness?
Stoking emotions requires going deep with your content, especially your copywriting. But when done successfully, your SEO-friendly copy can be the captivating message that translates into more sales.
Prioritize E-A-T
E-A-T, which stands for “Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness,” is an important signal that Google looks for when ranking content.
E-A-T is a concept that helps validate who and where the content is coming from, and whether or not the source is trusted or a true subject-matter expert on the topic.
E-A-T is especially important for content that falls in the category of Your Money or Your Life (YMYL).
That is, content that has to do with how you spend your money, like financial advice, or content that impacts decisions surrounding your health, like medical-related content.
Here’s an example: let’s say you producing content on the topic of peanut allergy. It’s one thing to publish a great article on the topic and see that it ranks on Google.
But what will really set this content apart from its competitors is how well E-A-T connects the dots from the publisher, author, and where it’s published.
The peanut allergy article written by a licensed allergist and published on a credible website will perform much better than the same article with no author attribution or published on a generic health blog.
In short, your SEO content strategy work needs to prioritize E-A-T in order to be successful, especially in competitive markets.
This post was contributed by SEO content strategist, Tyler Tafelsky, a veteran professional who’s been in the SEO industry since 2009.
