President and Director of Business Development at We Do Web
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Most marketers are familiar with the phrase “content is king.” Every brand needs content to articulate its message, attract the right customers and keep its marketing engine running. Content touches everything in your marketing strategy. Whether it’s your webpage content, social media strategy or email campaigns, content is the fuel that draws users to your brand.
Here’s what makes content foundational to your SEO strategy and how to use it to drive results for your business.
Creating Foundational SEO Content
Foundational evergreen content sets the tone for your brand’s content marketing strategy. It’s the content users visit most and are most likely to encounter near the end of your content funnel. For example, a “What Is Digital Marketing?” blog article for a marketing agency would be an evergreen resource that’s likely to provide value to users for years to come. This topic is foundational to what the agency offers—digital marketing services—and can serve as a point of entry to other pieces of content.
Your main marketing pages, such as “Social Media Services,” “Family Law Services” or “Women’s Attire – Products” are pivotal to SEO and user acquisition. This content should be on-theme from a brand perspective and incorporate the keywords you hope to rank for.
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A holistic content approach supports descriptive, search-engine-optimized web content that’s then supported by both long-form blog articles and pages. This silo is oriented around the primary “theme” of your website (e.g., legal, cooking, digital marketing, travel blogging, etc.) and houses content that provides valuable information to users.
At the top, you have your high-level business category (take: “digital marketing agency”). Down the silo, you have supportive topic pages (e.g., “social media services,” “content marketing,” etc.). Finally, this is supported by long-tail topics (e.g., “how to market your business,” “what is digital marketing?”).
Evergreen content serves to generate organic traffic for your site for the long term, as this content remains highly relevant to your brand. In addition, it’s foundational to your larger content marketing strategy and becomes the landing place for most of your campaigns.
Mind-Mapping A Content Strategy
Effective content production requires organization and consistency—two skills many brands struggle to maintain at scale. The silo content structure approach makes planning and executing your content much simpler. Nail down your primary topic, and all supportive topics branch off of that.
Use keyword research tools like Semrush to identify high-volume keywords that fit your brand and what your target audience is searching for. Assign each keyword (or cluster of keywords) to a content topic, map by location (if applicable), determine the type of content (e.g., FAQ content, blog articles or service pages) and where this content will live in your content funnel.
SEO competitor research here helps identify the average word count for top-ranking content and the features your competitors are doing well. For example, a page-level analysis may reveal additional content you might cover on your next new page or article.
Social Media As A Brand Content Play
Social media marketing for brand awareness is the name of the game. Unless you are an e-commerce business, most of your real estate on social will be won by branded content.
Your existing follower base is likely brand-aware. Your content strategy should be developed to nurture this follower base, encourage engagement and drive traffic to your main offers and marketing pages.
Begin your social content strategy with audience research. Establish three actionable client personas and develop a content map to reach these targeted audiences. The success of your social content strategy comes down to personalization—providing value to users based on what you know about their interests and needs.
Whether on social or on your website, create content that resonates with each of these unique audience segments. For website content, this is informed by user behavior data and keyword research. For social, look at engagement metrics and ad analytics for customer insights.
Authorship And Brand Awareness Meet
Content marketing is a vessel for trust, authorship and thought leadership. The third-party publication opens the door to not only new industry relationships but invaluable website backlinks, site authority and referral visitors.
This is where content meets PR. Content can serve many purposes in drumming up brand visibility, forging relationships and producing expert-level authority. Many publications are itching to feature new perspectives, thought leaders and founders.
Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is one avenue for pitching content topics to publishers. If you have a unique story to tell or knowledge to share, content can generate a multitude of benefits for your brand—not only eyes on your content but improved SEO as well.
Content As The Backbone Of Your SEO Strategy
Content is the backbone of SEO and fundamental to any effective digital strategy. Marketers should focus on these things when creating content:
Quality: Google’s algorithm assesses the quality of webpage content to determine what should rank in Search. The volume of content matters far less than the quality of the information on the page.
Freshness: Search engines value “fresh” (up to date and timely) content. Replace or update old, outdated articles.
Relevance: Google aims to serve content that’s most relevant to what users are searching for. The algorithm is consistently checking and testing content to ensure it matches the user’s intent behind the search. While users’ preferences and expectations change over time, the goal should always be to produce content that meets the needs of your target audience.
How To Win With Quality Content
The quality of the content you create and where it surfaces online plays a large part in the success of your larger marketing strategy. Each piece of content offers users an opportunity to know your brand, engage with your offer and, hopefully, convert into a paying client or customer.
With this in mind, your content should be at the forefront of your marketing plan, not an afterthought. And, in short, a siloed approach ensures your content is on-topic and relevant to the audience you are aiming to reach.
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Author: Alex Valencia, Forbes Councils Member
