To understand what I mean by SEO Content Strategy, it’s helpful to break down the phrase into parts. “SEO” refers to search engine optimisation, a marketing discipline focused on growing visibility in organic (non-paid) search engine results. Content strategy refers to the planning, development, and management of content. It helps to tell your story and create relevance and authority.
When I talk to clients about SEO, we can quickly get to optimising the existing content on their website. The next step is to create an SEO content strategy that helps to create and tell a story. This is a story about an SEO content strategy that never was but could have been, let me explain.
SEO Content Strategy
All of my clients are excellent clients. With this client, we’ve been together for about 5 years and our relationship has been build on trust through results over that time. I started out managing their Google AdWords and now, I help with their marketing automation, SEO and website maintenance.
To say that they are in a competitive market is an understatement. On average 50% of their traffic is from Organic and 21% is from Paid Search.
We were happy with these results, but we wanted, NO NEEDED more traffic. So I suggested that as we had already optimised the waazoo out of the website and that was on-going, it would be good to start writing new content on the website. We wanted to add a layer of authority by addressing the “question searches”. Question searches are the search phrases that we see appear in our Google Ads campaigns, but because they are too high up the funnel, they rarely convert so we add them to the negative list. Think “How do…”, “What is…”, “Can I…”, questions. The expensive clicks on links that don’t convert increasing our ROI.
SEO Content Strategy In Practice.
So to explain my SEO Content Strategy idea, I wrote an article. 520 words, fully optimised published on the site and pushed into the Google index. A few days passed an of course nothing happened, that was expected by both parties. The client ummed and ahhed about diving into a content strategy, not so much over the price, I’m very affordable 😉 but it was more around the need for instant gratification. Suffice to say that they understand the importance of content, and we are still talking about it, but we needed leads today! Not a drama I said, I doubled my efforts in their Google Ads and we are kicking goals like the West Coast Eagles in the 2018 Grand Final.
That was March 15, 2018. Fast forward to August 31. I had a nosey at the landing page that I created:
In the five months since we published that article, it’s been viewed 68 times. BIG WOOPAS. But check this out. Average Time on Page is 1m59s. That’s higher than the website average which is around 1m25s. AND of the 68 page views, 31 of those are “entrances. This means that for 31 visitors, this was the first page that they found on the website, no doubt from search. The exit rate of 50% means that this was the last page that visitors saw on the website.
Had we have implemented the content strategy in March and published 4 articles per month, for the last 5 months, you’re potentially looking at 1,400 page views to the website.
By comparison, using Google Ads, in August alone we tracked 1,595 clicks to the website at a cost of over $7,000.
In conclusion…
Yes, there are a lot of ‘ifs’ and ‘ands’ and ‘buts’, but if the client had directed 20% of their paid search budget into an SEO content strategy then the benefits 6 months later would have been quite noticeable. And that is ongoing organic traffic too, I mean, if they turn off their Google Ad’s tomorrow, their leads will dry up. But if they turn off their SEO tomorrow they will still benefit from the hard work that they had already put in. Until the next big Google Update or their competitors up their efforts.
What I’m trying to say is, seriously consider an SEO content strategy. It might feel painful for the first couple of months, but in the long term the benefits will be supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
