Your search engine optimization (SEO) content strategy may have worked effectively for your company up until this point. However, it’s likely that you want to ensure your company is able to grow further. This may include bringing in new product offerings or targeting alternative audiences. As a result, your SEO strategy will also need to adapt.
This doesn’t involve starting again from scratch. Rather, in the same way that you’re building on your existing business success, you can scale your current SEO practices to grow traffic. Making strategic additions and improvements to your tactics can be instrumental in helping your company achieve its growth goals. It’s also vital for maintaining your long-term success once you get there.
Let’s explore five ways you can scale your SEO content strategy to improve organic traffic.
Improve Keyword Use
An important element of scaling your content strategy to improve organic traffic is to continually make adaptations to your keyword usage. This should begin with a commitment to regular and thorough keyword research. Utilize tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz to gain insights into high-volume and low-competition keywords related to your specific marketing niche.
Be sure to review the potential for non-branded keywords and long-tail keywords, too. After all, consumers aren’t always using concise search terms or focusing on brands. The efficacy of targeted keywords will change over time, so you need to be on top of how audiences are changing their search tactics.
You should also do deeper dives into how you’re using your keywords. Don’t just apply them contextually in blogs or web page text. Utilize them in your structural elements too. Place them in page URLs, titles, meta descriptions, header tags and alternative text for images. Remember, though, that relevance is still important here. You don’t want to stuff your materials with unnatural keywords.
Audit Existing Content
Too often, companies’ focus for their SEO strategy is creating new content and other materials to achieve their goals. However, it’s important to recognize how vital a more holistic approach can be to your success. When all elements of your site are optimized, you can find that you have a stronger impact on your campaigns. Therefore, you should audit your existing website content before each campaign to understand how strong a framework it is for building your success.
There are various aspects your audit should focus on. These include:
1. Quality
Drawing organic traffic through search engines has become more nuanced over time. One of the elements that consistently continues to make a difference is the quality of your content. Assess its readability, structure and formatting. Importantly, review how relevant it continues to be for your target audience. Consider what value it provides.
2. Link Use
Links are, of course, an important part of any SEO strategy. When you’re ready to scale your campaigns, you need to assess how your link use is serving your goals and whether they can work harder. This should include regularly reviewing the credibility of cited sources, particularly for Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) content. Update or change these wherever necessary. Look through every page to establish whether there are spaces to fit internal links that support your expertise in your field.
3. Functionality
Your SEO materials may well have great keywords and valuable content. However, if your audience is unable to access your content quickly using their preferred devices, your strategy may not be as effective as it could be. You need to assess your existing content for issues with loading or problems converting to mobile platforms.
It’s also important to prioritize accessibility in your SEO strategy to ensure those living with disabilities have equal opportunity to benefit from your content. Work with your web designers to make these types of improvements.
Create an Editorial Calendar
When you’re scaling your SEO content strategy, you can also benefit from establishing areas in which you can be more organized in your approach. For instance, building an editorial calendar provides a structured plan for creating and publishing high-quality content. On the most basic level, this allows you to see what your core content tasks are for the immediate future and adjust your working schedule to ensure you’re producing consistently high-quality and relevant materials.
However, the use of this tool goes even further toward optimizing your organic search efforts. A calendar enables you to strategize and implement keywords. For instance, you can plan to post on days your demographics are more likely to search for certain terms. Sports events, holidays, big product launches and movie releases can prompt search behavior your company may be able to leverage.
There are cost-effective and impactful ways to create an editorial calendar, too. Google Docs provides tools that make for a robust, collaborative and functional content schedule system. The spreadsheet can be easily customized to host simple weekly and monthly calendars. Your team can then work together to populate these with content ideas on timelines that best suit your SEO goals. You can then review these calendars together, even if your team is remote, to adjust the schedule as your strategic needs change.
Repurpose Content
It’s important to remember that the content you have on your website holds significant value. You should, therefore, establish how you can utilize your existing materials to improve your organic traffic. Certainly, you can make improvements to your basic content to make it more readable and relevant to your audiences. However, it’s also worth reviewing and repurposing your highest-performing content to push the value it provides to both your campaigns and your audience.
Firstly, take the time to assess what it is that makes these content pieces so successful. It may be the case that you’re offering in-demand information, particularly credible statistics, or the most practical advice. You can then re-use these elements in other content formats. Turn them into infographics for social media platforms. Make them the topic of videos or podcasts. This can be a great way to reach new audiences and improve your engagement with existing ones.
Your analysis of high-performing content may also highlight topics that your target audience seems to be particularly interested in. As a result, you can consider repurposing this content to create new series based on these niche areas of interest. Alternatively, you may be able to repackage several posts that have consistent themes into large master posts that may draw audiences that want to have access to a convenient resource.
Perform Competitor Research
Your content strategy doesn’t exist in an isolated bubble. It’s vital to recognize that the online marketplace is competitive and other businesses will be utilizing similar resources and tactics to capture the same audiences you’re targeting. Therefore, when you’re scaling your SEO content strategy, you need to take the time to perform solid competitor research. This allows you to make more agile decisions about creating and using your materials.
Firstly, maintain an ongoing awareness of who your competitors in the market are. No matter what industry you’re in, there will always be new entrants or fresh rising stars, so this requires a regular commitment. Take the time to look at their websites for the keywords and meta-tags they’re using. The insights you get here can empower you to avoid clashing terms or identify more successful uses of phrases you’re both using.
Another important area of assessment is tracking your competitors’ backlinks. Utilize a backlink profile report platform to understand what domains are linking to their website, the quality of the links and the anchor text being used. You may find this can help you to establish the quantity and quality of backlinks you need to compete effectively.
Conclusion
Scaling your SEO content strategy can help you reach new audiences and influence your company’s growth. This tends to involve taking the time to analyze various aspects, including your current keyword use, competitor actions and content performance. You can then use this data to make well-informed additions, such as a more effective content calendar or repurposing successful materials.
Remember, though, that there are few components of SEO that are stagnant. The efforts you make to scale today may not be as successful six months down the line. Your audience’s needs, search engine tools and the digital landscape itself are constantly changing.
Therefore, your marketing team needs to keep performing ongoing research. It can even be wise to experiment with new tools, such as artificial intelligence-driven data analysis. Their efforts here can help ensure you’re always proactive about your content strategy, rather than simply reacting to unexpected challenges.