Content strategy: THE method to get better SEO results

The most common mistake when building a content strategy is insisting on ranking for the keywords you sell on and making that the absolute priority. This SEO approach is rarely conclusive, because those keywords — often generic and competitive — don’t generate more conversions.

During the 3rd edition of SEO Square, Corentin Mirande, SEO and Content expert at Semji, and Cécilien Dambon, head of SEO at Mailbird, shared a different method for prioritizing content production work.

With this approach, your content strategy will gain in performance and deliver better SEO results.

Watch the conference replay here.

🍋In a hurry? Here’s the method summarized in an infographic.

Web content strategy: a 3-step prioritization method

Effectively prioritizing content production comes down to exploring 3 dimensions, each developed further in this article:

• Knowing your business and your market
• Identifying the part of the content creation process to prioritize
• Identifying the type of content that generates the highest ROI

By following this method, you will:

• Define a realistic, high-performing content strategy
• Know which tools and features to use to make better decisions about your content strategy
• Get advice on analyzing your business and your competitors’
• Save time and energy

Note that there are also tools like Semji that let you identify, in just a few seconds, the content on your site with the highest potential for SEO gains. Request a demo right now with one of our Customer Success Managers.

Step 1: know your business and your market

First observation: There are many mistakes to avoid when starting a content strategy. If you get started without specific goals, you risk a poor return on investment. So before anything else, take care to define your goals and communicate them clearly to your teams.

Second observation: Even with specific goals, it’s essential to know your business in depth before diving into a content strategy. During this first step, we’ll help you take stock of your company: audience, competitors, market, reputation, SEO performance, and so on. Note that to obtain most of this information, you’ll need a Google Analytics and Google Search Console account for your website.

Know your level of dependence on organic traffic

Let’s go back to basics: what is organic traffic? It’s the number of visitors who arrive on your site via search engines. On your site, what share of total traffic is organic?

💡Tip

You can find this information very easily by looking at your website’s traffic data in Google Analytics.

If organic traffic exceeds 60 / 70% of your total traffic, you can consider that your traffic depends for the most part on organic search. That said, it doesn’t necessarily mean this traffic is qualified and generates conversions. For example, a high bounce rate, short sessions and a low conversion rate are all signs that the traffic on your site isn’t very high-quality. So keep this in mind: you should always go further and dig into the data!

Is organic traffic the majority on your site? Then ask yourself what share of total queries are branded queries.

💡Tip

To find this information, you can use Google Search Console. In the left menu, click “Performance” then, in the horizontal filter bar, click “New”. Select “Queries containing” and type your brand name.

If your branded traffic is very high, which is often the case for large or popular brands, you’ll need to target more generic keywords to offset the share of branded queries. To do that, you’ll need to develop thematic content and varied resources that diversify your traffic sources.

Take a luxury scarf brand as an example. If the majority of queries are on the brand, it will need to emphasize generic keywords such as “women’s scarf”, “silk scarf”, “scarf + color”, and so on.

The risk, indeed, is that competing brands end up ranking better on strategic keywords. Be responsive and don’t give them any opportunity to steal SEO market share from you.

On the other hand, if the percentage of branded traffic is rather average or even low, the risk is that the brand is poorly regarded by Google. That can lead to a drop in traffic and rankings compared with competitors. In this case, you don’t necessarily have to abandon non-branded traffic, because it’s a very good ranking factor on Google, but you should also emphasize branded queries, invest in local SEO and carry out netlinking actions.

And finally, if your traffic isn’t dependent on organic search, then every opportunity is open to you! A great margin for progress is right ahead of you. 😉

The queries to target to reach your business goals

Your strategy depends directly on your business goals.

For example, if you want to build brand awareness or significantly increase traffic to your website, the most rewarding strategy will no doubt be to focus on generic or short-tail queries, which represent the most search volume.

If your goal is more about converting, you can apply the strategy above and, in parallel, develop content on long-tail queries in order to attract qualified leads.

Finally, if you don’t particularly want to increase your number of customers but rather to retain them and secure lasting gains, here again, producing pages and articles on long-tail queries will be the most effective strategy for better conversion rates.

💡Tip

To understand which queries to target and the effort needed to reach your goals, you can look at several indicators:

• Query volumes on Ahrefs, for example.
• The CPC (cost per click), to assess how hard it will be to rank on the keyword.
• If you already have pages on the topic, you can run Adwords campaigns on them to observe the conversion rate.

Make sure your content matches the purchase funnel

To determine the content you need in order to improve conversion and the effectiveness of your purchase funnel, it’s essential to answer the following questions:

• Who are you in the market?
• How do you position yourself relative to your competitors?
• Are you one of the market’s “big players”, a challenger, or a newcomer?
• Are you performing well on your “5Ps” (product, price, promotion, place and people)?

These characteristics will have an impact on your content strategy. So the more objective and factual your answers, the more accurate your analysis and the more relevant your strategy.

The Decathlon example

The Decathlon brand, a user of the Semji platform, gets very good results on its content aimed at conversion. The brand therefore wants to steer its strategy toward less mature users, who are looking more for information. To do this, it decided to develop expert content packed with information on sports practice.

Conversely, for a site that struggles to convert, it will be important to develop content that addresses the middle or the end of the conversion funnel.

Your positioning against the competition

A big question, you’ll say! Indeed, to obtain this information, drawing up a competitive map and a SWOT analysis will no doubt be necessary.

Also remember to look at where your SEO strengths lie: number of visits, conversion rate, and so on.

This step lets you choose your battles better. You identify your strengths and weaknesses relative to your competitors and you know exactly where you want to go. That way, you put the effort where it’s really needed.

💡Tip

Semji is a solution that lets you, among other things:

• automatically identify high-potential content on your website. The solution ranks pages by opportunity level (the best gain-to-effort ratio) so you can immediately see which pages to optimize and how much effort is required.
• analyze the structure of competitor content as well as the topics it covers.

You can discover Semji right now and quickly understand how to identify your high-potential content.

The search dynamics around your topic

What are the search intents on your topic? More informational or transactional? By using Google, you’ll be able to learn more about your audience’s search intents.

You can also track how positions evolve in the SERP: is there movement? Is it rather stable? What elements appear on your results page?

💡Tip

The Semji solution lets you see at a glance the search intents and the topics most covered in the content that ranks at the top of the SERP. That way, you know exactly what your page needs to talk about in order to rank.

To learn how to analyze a search intent, you can read our article dedicated to the subject, or download our template to easily determine your audience’s expectations.

How your consumers and your industry perceive your company

Type your company name + “reviews” in Google and look at what comes up.

Also look at your incoming links. Are there many? Do they come from “good-quality” sites?

If you think your company is poorly perceived, it may be worth emphasizing netlinking, encouraging your customers to post reviews, and also creating trustworthy content that meets the E-A-T criteria. You can also create “topic clusters” to strengthen your image as an expert on the subject.

💡Tip

For this, you can also rely on Semji, which lets you see the other queries your audience searches on the subject.

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Use the up/down arrows to increase or decrease the volume.

Step 2: Identify the part of the content creation process to prioritize

You now have a better understanding of your company, your targets and how it positions itself within its ecosystem. It’s time to see which actions to prioritize.

Your SEO positioning

First question to ask: over the last 6 months, have your positions dropped or risen?

If the position of one of your pages has risen, do you think your content can really rank on the first page of search results? Does it have enough authority?

• If yes, that’s good news. You can focus on link building to strengthen your page’s popularity, while keeping an eye on how competitor content evolves.
• If no, your content may need to be updated. But be careful! It all depends on the keyword’s difficulty. If it takes too much effort to rank, don’t go any further. Try to work on queries that are both valuable for your business and require a proportionate effort.

💡Tip

To determine a keyword’s difficulty level, you can rely on several tools, including Ahrefs’ free Keyword Difficulty Checker. Remember to select the target country before running the search.

The tool tells you how many backlinks you need to rank in the Top 10 on that keyword.

If your positions have declined, you need to review your content by comparing it with that of your TOP competitors. You’ll need to either update it by adding content, or sharpen the article’s angle.

💡Tip

Thanks to a Content Score, you immediately know how well your pages are optimized. To improve it, the platform provides many SEO recommendations (optimal word count, search intents, topics and questions users frequently ask on the subject, internal links and number of external links, and more) based on an analysis of competitor content.

Together, these two features let you produce content that performs better than your competitors’.

Ask us for a demo to discover all of Semji’s features.

Competition between your own pages

“Cannibalization” between pages happens far more often than people think. You can assess it manually by looking at the pages ranking on the same keyword, or automatically with a dedicated tool.

💡Tip

To assess cannibalization between your site’s pages, you can use the Google command: site.com + “keyword”.

That way, you see every page on your site that ranks on a given keyword.

You can also use Google Search Console. In the Performance section, enter the query in the filters, then go to the “Pages” tab to identify which pages receive impressions and clicks on that query.

In that case, find the page that performs best. Keep it and point the least productive page toward it, so you preserve your positions.

The flow of “SEO juice”

Even the best content in the world won’t be visible to your audience if it’s buried in your site’s structure. To make it visible, you have to strengthen it with links.

Internal linking is therefore the first way to strengthen your content and make it visible. Effective linking means connecting content on the same topic to each other.

At an advanced level, this is also known as a semantic cocoon. Feel free to download our white paper dedicated to the subject.

💡Tip

Semji automatically identifies the pages on your site covering the same topic and suggests them so you can create internal links.

Step 3: Identify the type of content that generates the highest ROI

This final step lets you keep control of your budget and precisely target the types of content to produce that will get you to your goals most effectively.

Establish a Content Gap

What is a Content Gap exactly? It’s a method that lets you identify the keywords your competitors rank on and you don’t. It helps you spot existing content you should strengthen, and surface new content ideas to create. Another benefit of the exercise: it lets you estimate the potential traffic gain of a content creation / optimization action. So the greater a piece of content’s gain potential, the higher you should prioritize working on it.

e.g.: www.site-chaussure.com/chaussures-enfants-arc-en-ciel ranks 3rd on “rainbow kids shoes” with associated traffic of 2,000. One of your URLs ranks on the 2nd page of Google on that same keyword with associated traffic of 10. You could optimize this existing page and hope to get the same traffic as your competitor. Potential traffic gain: 2,000 – 10: 1,990.

💡Tip

There are several methods for assessing the Content Gap. If you’re short on time, you can use tools such as Ahrefs Content Gap.

Choose the type of content to produce based on your context

Your strategy must be adapted to several factors:

• Your budget.
• Your level of expertise on the subject.
• The intended reach.
• Your business goals.

Example cases:

Your expertise on the subject is limited	Invite one or more industry experts to publish on your site
Your expertise is high but not widely recognized	Develop an ecosystem of articles around topics central to your business. Develop advice pages, FAQs, tutorials, videos, etc.
Your budget is limited	Focus your efforts on evergreen content.
Your budget is relatively large	Bet on content that meets Google’s E-A-T criteria. Download our E-E-A-T checklist to improve your pages’ visibility.
You want to reach a wide audience	Emphasize distribution and promotion by adapting the content into several formats — videos, infographics, social posts — to increase its chances of being shared.

💡Tip

Semji can also help you list high-ROI topics! By leveraging the GPT-3 artificial intelligence technology, the platform identifies your audience’s expectations in terms of content and information. It can then generate automatic briefs, based on competitor content and users’ search intents.

And most importantly: always keep your business and SEO goals in mind, so that your production work stays aligned with them. If you need to evolve your strategy, do it and be agile! The key is to monitor your performance properly, and to do it continuously.

💡Tip

Having trouble measuring how effective your content is? Semji brings together in one place all the KPIs that matter, so that you, as a decision-maker, can quickly assess your production’s performance. Depending on your industry and your challenges, you can customize your report with the most significant KPIs (traffic, custom conversion goals tracked in Google Analytics, revenue, impressions, and more).

The 8 things to remember from this method

• Set precise, realistic goals before starting your content strategy.
• Know your company and take stock of its performance before acting.
• Always keep an eye on your competitors and the content they produce.
• Base your choices on concrete data.
• Improve what already exists before creating new content.
• Meet your audience’s expectations and search intents.
• Equip yourself with tools suited to your needs.
• Adapt your actions to your situation, your market, your goals and your audience. Every company is unique!

Need a visual recap of everything we’ve just shared?

👉 The summary in one infographic.

And to quickly identify your quick-win actions (little effort, big SEO gains), request a demo with one of our CSMs.