After seeing the title of this blog post, you may be thinking to yourself, what is Content-Led SEO?
Content-Led SEO involves creating a quality, content-oriented strategy to establish internal expertise on specific topics in an attempt to increase rankings on specific keywords, increase organic search traffic, and ideally, increase conversions. There are many moving parts to it, but we will try our best to break it down for you and explain how we can help you achieve your goals with a strong Content-Led SEO strategy.
So, Where Do We Begin?
Before we can even begin implementing a Content-Led SEO strategy for our clients, we need to ensure that there are no underlying technical issues such as any broken links, poor site architecture, robot.txt files, indexability, and more that could be affecting search performance. We also assess any content issues such as duplicate content, missing alt tags, broken images, short, long, and/or missing title tags and meta descriptions, and more. We have an extensive team at AMP that can dedicate their time to fixing any problems we may encounter on the site. After we have addressed these issues, we can finally begin working on our Content-Led SEO strategy!
Cleaning Up Content on Your Site
With time, any website can easily become cluttered with old content that may not be driving users to the site anymore. It’s important for us to assess the content that is currently on the site and get rid of any content that isn’t presently providing value or merge content that may be competing with one another. How do we decide which content is and isn’t providing value? There are several ways we can do this. By looking at the traffic volume, ranking keywords, inbound and outbound links, we can determine which content is low-value and which content is high-value. By getting rid of low-value content, it makes it easier for Google to find the high-value content searchers are looking for as well as helps to improve the overall quality of content on your site. That being said, this process helps to declutter your site, which in the end, results in a better experience for users and a better chance at improving your rankings in Google search results.
Conducting Keyword Research
Once we have cleaned up the content on the site, we can finally start moving on to conducting keyword research, which of course, is unique depending on the client and their goals. We work with you to establish what your goals are and what you wish the searcher’s intent to be in order to land on your site. When beginning our keyword research, we start by taking a look at what keywords are already working for your site and bringing in traffic and clicks. From there, we can conduct customer research and competitor analysis to develop a list of keywords to target for the Content-Led SEO strategy. But simply doing keyword research and using those keywords a certain amount of times in your content isn’t going to automatically drive results!
There’s More to Content Than Content
With Content-Led SEO, you want to make sure you’re showcasing expert authority on a subject, so, of course, your content should reflect that. Your content should be original and go in-depth on a subject, surface-level content won’t drive the results that you’re looking for. By taking a look at the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), we can gather an idea of how the content should be structured and provide recommendations for the content. We can provide suggestions from an SEO perspective but at the end of the day, the quality of your content combined with our recommendations, will provide the best results possible. Luckily, at AMP, we have a team of talented copywriting experts whom we can work with to create strong, engaging content that is strategically optimized for search.
Providing A Premium Content Experience
One of the ways you can amplify your content is by ensuring your site visitors are getting a premium content experience. So how can we do that? Firstly, formatting is very important! You want to make sure your content is in an easily readable format, such as using proper font size. Using subheadings is also a great way to organize and break up your content to make it more digestible for the reader. They also make it easier to provide jump links to certain sections of the content and a table of contents so the reader can have an overview of the content being presented. Earlier we discussed the importance of showcasing your expert authority on a subject, we can further demonstrate that by having bio pages for authors. Lastly, including images, graphics, and multimedia content is always helpful to make the content more engaging for the user.
The Importance of and Internal Linking Strategy
Content-Led SEO is obviously all about content, so how do you get more people to view the content on your website? With an internal linking strategy of course! Utilizing this is important as it helps to pass search equity throughout the pages and content on your site. Furthermore, it helps Google understand your site and helps users navigate the site, which are three things we definitely want. When there is a lot of content on a site, it can be difficult to figure out which content should link to which other related content. That’s where topic clusters come in. Using topic clusters helps us group out related content so we can map out an internal linking strategy between the content in each cluster. This can be a very time-consuming process especially when you have a lot of content on your site. Our team can work with you to create topic clusters based on your current content and build out an internal linking strategy for you.
Tracking Performance
What we consider to be beneficial to both us and our clients is by providing monthly reports where we analyze the performance of our optimizations. Monitoring the results is important as it helps us identify what is working well and the areas that may need improvement. In the monthly reports, we track keyword rankings, traffic, clicks, and other metrics depending on the goals of the client. Based on the results, we can provide insight and recommendations on the next steps we need to take to continue reaching our goals!
Let’s Recap!
So we have just discussed a lot of moving parts that are involved within a Content-Led SEO strategy! Let’s recap some of the main points:
- It’s important to fix any technical issues or content issues on the site before beginning a Content-Led SEO strategy
- Cleaning up content on the site helps to improve the overall quality of content on your site, provides a better experience for users, and provides a better chance at improving your rankings in Google search results
- Conducting keyword research is a very important step in the process but having good, strategic keywords isn’t the magic answer to achieving results
- With Content-Led SEO you want to make sure you’re showcasing your expert authority on a subject through your own original and unique content
- Providing a premium content experience for your users is simple, make sure to use subheadings, jump links, a table of contents, a proper font size, author bios, and the use of images, graphics, and multimedia
- An internal linking strategy helps to pass search equity along your content as well as help Google understand your site better and helps users navigate your site better
AMP Agency is here to help you with any of your SEO needs. Knowing that content is an important part of meeting your customer’s needs, our team can help you navigate your content marketing strategy. Learn more about our SEO services and contact us to start our partnership.
