An Effective Content Strategy Equals Effective SEO
You’ve probably heard the expression ‘content is king’ and wondered whether you can incorporate a content strategy into your website marketing. You may know that a regularly updated blog can help to pull in new customers and keep your current customers engaged. You may also have wondered how much a blog can help with SEO. After all, maintaining a blog is time consuming, and authoring blog posts that Google’s bots consider well written is especially difficult. Is all that effort worth it? In other words…
What does Content Strategy have to do with SEO?
The answer: EVERYTHING!
We brought a finance industry client on board late last year. As you may be aware, the finance industry is extremely competitive. It’s expensive to pay for keywords in Adwords, and many people assume that’s the only way forward for a finance business. In reality, it is not. With a good content strategy, SEO can be effective even for clients with popular, highly competitive keywords.
A Content Strategy for the finance industry
Our plan was to create three ghost written articles per week for our new client and then link the articles using rich anchor text. We discussed with our content team about the SEO requirements, and they proposed a number of weekly themes, each with three related blog posts. Each of these themes is inspired by one primary keyword, and each article incorporates it and several related phrases. However, the articles are designed to be multipurpose. They are intelligently written to a professional standard and can engage customers as well as meeting the requirements for search engine optimisation.
As an example, here’s a set of topics using the generic keyword ‘finance’:
- Article one: ‘What You Need to Know Before Deciding on Finance’
- Article two: ‘Five Tips For Finding the Right Finance’
- Article three: ‘Putting Your Finance To Work’
Each of these titles contains the word ‘finance’. Each article will be written with at least one sub-heading that contains the word ‘finance’. Each article will have at least one anchor featuring the word ‘finance’ that links to an earlier blog post. Each blog post has a meaningful image, too, and it further emphasises the word ‘finance’. That allows us to optimise the image with an alt tag keyword.
Laying the groundwork for success
Content can do a fantastic job of increasing hits, but in order to live up to its potential, it has to be planned and set up correctly. For example, our client’s site was built using WordPress, which means it is using an SEO-friendly platform. As always with a new client, we started by getting the site cleaned up and adding basic SEO elements such as titles, headings, and optimised page content. This laid the groundwork that allowed our content strategy to reach its potential, without anything getting in the way. It’s important to note that this client’s improvement was purely based on building quality content. There were no backlinks added at all, only internal links.
Excellent results
Once we started posting three articles per week, the client noticed an increase in traffic. We weren’t surprised at all. We kept up the strategy and as you can see from the graph below, we’ve achieved remarkable improvements.
Plan your Content Strategy
Make sure you plan your content and schedule it in your calendar. Aim to publish at least one article per week. You can write it yourself if you have the skills and the time, but most of our clients opt for a ghostwriter. Some of our clients provide topics, references and outlines so that the writer can turn them into interesting and engaging blog posts that are highly relevant to their businesses. Others prefers to leave the topics and concepts up to the content strategists, hosting blogs that are of interest to their customers and relevant to their businesses, but not specially about their businesses. Some clients write a post weekly or fortnightly and depend on ghostwriting for the rest.
When you are targeting competitive phrases, invest in full service SEO. High quality content is worth your time and your money. Nothing is as effective for boosting your search engine rankings, and really good content will help you connect with customers, too.
