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Picture this: your content now ranks high on Google’s search results. As a result, your business finally widens its reach, leading to higher engagements and conversions.
As unattainable as this may sound, it could be easily achievable with the right SEO content strategy.
Aside from ensuring that your strategy aligns with evolving business trends and search algorithms, there are other critical considerations for SEO content strategy in 2024.
To help you remain ahead of your competitors, we’ve compiled these considerations into this post and analyzed them. Don’t just go in blindly as you draft a new SEO strategy or reassess your existing one. Explore these key points and use them as a guide for this year.
Ready? Let’s begin.
What is the Importance of SEO Content Strategy?
Before discussing the key considerations for SEO content strategy, let’s examine why it’s so important for your business.
Your SEO content strategy is the systematic approach to optimizing content. The goal is to improve its visibility and increase the chance of ranking high on SERPs.
An effective SEO strategy involves creating and aligning content with proven SEO tactics. This ensures that content is relevant and visible to the right audience.
Let’s briefly review the benefits of developing a good SEO content strategy.
- It improves your content’s search engine visibility and drives more organic traffic to your website.
- It helps you to tailor your content to the needs and preferences of your target audience.
- It helps you outrank competing sites.
- It helps you build brand credibility and trust with your audience.
7 Essential Considerations for SEO Content Strategy
In this section, we’ve carefully compiled important considerations for SEO content strategy to help you build a business plan that works. Let’s discuss them.
1. Optimize Your Content With User Intent
One of the most important considerations for SEO content strategy is user intent optimization. To increase your online visibility, you must create content useful to your target audience and address their pain points.
Know who your audience is and what they want to see. You can even identify gaps in your competitors’ content and create content that addresses them. Moreover, search engine algorithms prioritize user intent. As such, they’re more likely to place your content on the first page of SERPs if it effectively answers the user’s query.
Don’t just skim the surface. Give comprehensive answers to address your audience’s pain points. Here’s a simple guide to help you optimize your content with user intent.
Identify Keywords Based on Users’ Search Intent
Use keyword tools like Ahrefs and Semrush that automatically include search intent classification in their keyword research results. That way, you can create content around these keywords to truly meet the needs of your audience.
Depending on your service type, your users’ search intent could be navigational, transactional, or informational. However, these qualifiers are too generic to provide much value.
You must also look for search intent based on the type of content your audience is looking for. This means you must consider the content type, format, and angle. Is your target audience looking for blog posts, videos, or product pages?
Let’s look at a practical example.
If you use Semrush to get a SERP analysis for the keyword “best washing machine,” these results come up. You’ll notice that the dominant results are blog posts.
Image via Semrush
This means that your target audience is not just interested in seeing a product page of the best washing machine. They also want to read reviews and opinions from other people who have tried different washing machines to see which is best. As such, the content you should focus on creating is blog posts.
This is an important factor to consider if you want to create content that genuinely answers your target audience’s search intent in every way.
Review SERPs
Look at the format of the content already ranking on the SERPs for the keywords you want to optimize. They could be listicles, product comparisons, tutorials, product reviews, etc. Consider how the top-ranking pages formatted their content and structured their page. Use these pages as a guide to create content that will adequately meet user intent.
Optimize for Passive Intent
As you create content, consider other helpful things your audience might also find and include them in your posts.
For example, if a user searches for “Best email marketing tools,” they would also like to know email marketing tips on how to use those tools. As such, including this information in your content will be helpful to your users, meeting both active and passive search intents.
Canva has mastered optimizing content to user intent by understanding its audience’s creative needs. For instance, Canva understands that when people search for “social media graphics,” they’re not just after any image. They want designs that match platform dimensions and branding.
To address this intent, Canva offers pre-sized templates and guides tailored to various social media platforms.
2. Apply the E-E-A-T Model
The E.E.A.T model is an acronym created by Google that guides e-commerce marketers in structuring their content. However, this model benefits full-service marketing agencies and other businesses equally. E.E.A.T stands for experience, expertise, authority, and trust.
Following this model, your content should boldly reflect your experience and expertise in your niche. At the same time, it should also be delivered with authority, so much so that it makes your audience trust you as a credible source.
Building brand trust is one of the most crucial considerations for SEO content strategy. To build brand trust, avoid developing content you know little about. Instead, know your strengths and focus on those.
When your audience feels like you know what you’re talking about, they’re more likely to return to your website for more information. This leads to higher brand authority and ranking on Google and other search engines.
Here are some ways to improve your site’s E.E.A.T.
- Provide author information
- Only link to credible sources
- Build backlinks from other credible sites
- Only post facts and statistics that can be verified
- Post reviews, testimonials, and other user-generated content that can serve as social proof. You can post snippets of positive customer reviews on your home page, product page, or landing page. You can also create a web page dedicated to customer reviews.
Here’s how Slack, a team communication platform, demonstrates its E.E.A.T. The image below shows how it displays customer success stories from well-known brands to serve as social proof.
Image via Slack
The image below summarizes the E.E.A.T model and how it applies as a consideration for SEO content strategy.
Image via Portent
3. Optimize Platform-Specific Content
Another key consideration for SEO content strategy is aligning your content with the platform.
Although using the same template across all platforms may be tempting, it’s not advisable. If you want to see results, you must tailor your content to the platform’s requirements.
For instance, Instagram SEO differs from LinkedIn SEO. With Instagram, you can create varied types of content, including reels, videos, and pictures. Depending on the type of content, you can also include short or long captions to complement the visuals.
On the other hand, LinkedIn works best for content with more text and less visuals. Compiling videos and pictures may not be the best approach for LinkedIn, as the platform’s audience engages more with long-form text and captions.
While you can maintain the same message across all platforms, tweak the format to match the platform and find what works best for your audience.
HubSpot Academy excels at providing platform-specific content. They teach marketing on YouTube with awesome video tutorials, and their website backs it up with downloadable resources. While it’s a one-stop shop for marketing know-how, the content format differs to suit their platform.
4. Apply Mobile-First Optimization
According to Statistica, nearly 96% of the global internet population access the internet using mobile devices.
Following this trend, optimizing your content for mobile devices is one of the most essential considerations for SEO content strategy.
Considering that a large portion of internet users use mobile devices, the best way to grab your audience’s attention is to make your content mobile-friendly.
Take a look at some easy ways to create mobile-friendly content.
- If your content includes long-form text, break it into short paragraphs to make it easy to scan.
- Optimize your images and videos to reduce loading times. If your content takes too long to load, your audience might move on to other websites.
- Make your content as interactive as possible. This will prompt your audience to stick around and engage more.
- Arrange your content in a flexible layout. This way, your audience can easily navigate it whether they use their mobile phones.
Airbnb, for instance, totally gets mobile. The brand recognized a significant increase in mobile bookings after optimizing its website for mobile search. It implemented responsive designs, improved page speed, and ensured its content was easily digestible on smaller screens.
5. Optimize Your Content for Voice Search and AI
Did you know that 50% of American adults use voice search daily? The image below shows a breakdown of voice search users daily, weekly, and monthly.
Image via UpCity
In this digital age, people seek faster ways to find information. Voice search technology and artificial intelligence (AI) make accessing information with simple commands easy.
That’s why optimizing your content for voice search is a crucial consideration for SEO content strategy. This makes it easy for your target audience to find your content, regardless of their search route.
AI also plays a massive role in seeking out content worth ranking on SERPs. So, it would be helpful to create AI-friendly content to give you the upper hand.
Moreover, you can leverage AI tools for keyword analysis and content creation. You can learn more about the best SEO tools in the expert review lists, such as Attrock local SEO tools list. It helps you choose the best one for your requirements.
Let’s look at other ways to optimize your content for voice search and AI.
- Use friendly and conversational language.
- Organize your content as well-structured data to make it easily recognizable to virtual assistants, chatbots, and other forms of AI.
- Optimize your content with the right keywords that match user intent.
- Question keywords and FAQs in your content
- Use structured data and schema markup
6. Invest in Partnerships and Collaborations
Following ambassador marketing trends is a great way to increase your SEO presence. Collaborating with other creators and influencers is one consideration for SEO content strategy in 2024.
Don’t hesitate to collaborate with authoritative content creators who share your brand’s values. Working together allows you to tap into their audience and expand your reach.
This type of collaboration also increases your credibility as a brand. Statistics show that 69% of consumers trust the recommendations of influencers, friends, or relatives over information from the brand. Search engines are also more likely to rank your content higher if you associate with other authoritative content creators. It’s a win-win strategy.
Here are some easy ways to invest in partnerships and collaborations as part of your SEO content strategy.
- Write guest posts or exchange guest posts with other authoritative collaborators in your field
- Invest in shared social media campaigns
- Use co-created content for joint webinars, podcasts, blog posts, etc
- Use affiliate marketing strategies
- Collaborate with social media influencers
Here’s how Olay, a skincare brand, announced Sha’carri Richardson as its newest brand ambassador. Sha’carri Richardson is a star track and field athlete with over 3 million Instagram followers. With this partnership, Olay aims to leverage her influence to expand its reach further.
Image via Instagram
7. Keep a Flexible SEO Content Strategy
Flexibility may be the last one on our list of crucial considerations for SEO content strategy, but it’s not the least. As business trends change, so should your SEO content strategy.
User preferences change, and so do search engine algorithms and search behaviors. A strategy that worked for you last year may no longer work this year.
Customer service providers create comparison posts such as Zendesk vs. Salesforce to provide a comparative review of their services with competitors. This strategy helps them get relevant engagement and clear indications to search engines.
The best way to stay one step ahead of your competition is to keep your ear to the ground and stay current with SEO trends.
This way, you’ll know when your SEO content strategy needs to change to remain aligned with your audience’s growing needs.
Using These Considerations for SEO Content Strategy to Scale Your Business in 2024
The key to staying ahead of the SEO game in 2024 is applying these considerations for SEO content strategy to create a successful business strategy. Take a look at a run-down of what we discussed.
- Consider user intent and create content your audience will find helpful.
- Apply Google’s E.E.A.T policy to ensure you build brand trust while focusing on your area of expertise.
- Create content specific to the platform you’re using.
- Keep your content mobile-friendly.
- Optimize your content for voice search and AI.
- Invest in creator-led SEO and collaborations.
- Maintain a flexible SEO content strategy that can adapt to changing SEO trends.
So, which of these considerations for SEO content strategy will you be applying in 2024? Always keep your content user-focused and authentic; you’ll be on top of your SEO game in no time. Good luck!
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