An SEO content strategy is a plan for creating, optimizing, and publishing content to rank higher in search results. It involves everything from keyword research and content planning to building backlinks.
The ultimate aim of any SEO strategy is to increase organic traffic to your website.
This article explains what a content strategy is and how to get started to help improve search rankings.
What you will learn
- How to find relevant keywords and topics to include in your SEO content strategy
- The importance of writing for a target persona
- How to optimize for on-page SEO
- Why and how to review content to improve user experience
- How to naturally build backlinks to your content for improved search engine results page rankings (SERP)
1. Identify relevant topics for your business
When developing your SEO content strategy, choose topics relevant to your business.
For example, if your product is an email marketing automation tool, topics may include:
You should avoid irrelevant topics like how to set up a social media account or when to post on LinkedIn, for example.
Creating content on topics loosely related to your business will likely negatively affect engagement and conversion rates.
While some topics may drive more people to your site—especially if the keyword is easy to rank for and contains high search traffic—it will do nothing towards achieving your business goals.
It’s a waste of resources.
Before choosing a topic, consider its relevance to your business goals and objectives. A useful exercise I use is ranking topic ideas on a scale of 1 to 10. I usually remove anything below a 6 to 7 from my list.
To generate a list of articles that you can write about,
- Head to Surfer and connect your Google Search Console account
- Add your preferred domain
Surfer will generate a list of keywords for your subject, grouped by which topic cluster they belong to.
So, for example, if your website is about cosmetic surgery, it should cover topics related to what cosmetic surgery is, cosmetic procedures, plastic surgery trends, and so on.
Here is an example of 31 important topics for "cosmetic surgery" with 393 potential articles.
2. Prioritize low-hanging keywords
When doing keyword research, prioritize low-hanging keywords. These are the ones you can rank for without much effort.
Unlike difficult to rank for keywords, you can typically rank for these quickly. This is true even with low domain authority – the strength of a website's backlink profile.
Sorting your keywords by ranking difficulty will show you which keywords will be easier to rank for.
Using the example of “cosmetic surgery,” you can see that "derma surgery" and "face treatment to look younger" have low KDs of 10 and 11.4 respectively.
You may think that "derma surgery" only has a monthly search volume of 30.
However, don't forget you can include multiple relevant target keywords in one article. So while a low-hanging keyword may have less search volume, you can include several keywords in the article to get more traffic.
You can also do this manually, but it is long and tedious. I like to describe it as “going down the rabbit hole.”
Repeat the following keyword strategy to find new keywords and topics to write about.
First, I will assess the SERP results to find keyword opportunities. Look at websites with the top results for your chosen topics to find low-hanging keywords.
As you can see, the estimated organic traffic for this topic/keyword is 390 monthly searches in the US market.
I like looking at the top results and entering URLs and keywords into a tool like Google's Keyword Planner to find more details on organic traffic and keyword competition.
3. Publish long-form helpful articles
Unlike short-form content, such as social media posts and short blog posts, long-form content allows you to cover a topic in depth.
Google prioritizes helpful, reliable, people-first content.
“Google's automated systems are designed to use many different factors to rank great content. After identifying relevant content, our systems aim to prioritize those that seem most helpful."
– Google helpful content guidelines
Long-form content is often easier to create helpful content. This is because you can explain concepts and ideas and help readers with specific problems.
For example, if your product is a cold outreach email tool, helpful content may include topics like increasing email open rates, personalizing emails, and building email lists of prospects.
This content helps the reader solve a problem. You can also provide your product as the solution, e.g., use our cold outreach tool to build a list and automate outreach.
Long-form content can improve SEO and user engagement but maintaining the reader’s interest can prove quite a challenge.
Below are a few guidelines to help you structure long-form articles to maintain reader interest:
- Break up your content into digestible paragraphs and sections
- Use headings to separate your content
- Add a key takeaways section and a table of contents to allow readers to skim
- Use images, screenshots, and videos to break up big chunks of text
- Use simple, easy-to-understand language. 54% of Americans read below a sixth-grade level, according to a 2024 report. Use a free tool like the Hemingway editor to make your content easy to read
- Add bullets for lists and to break up your content
Take my blog post on how to write an article to see this in action.
You can see that I
- started with an interesting statistic to hook the reader
- broke up my section into headers
- demonstrated my point with an example
4. Write for your target personas
It can be useful to create target personas when writing and publishing helpful content.
This improves your messaging and ensures you’re speaking to the right audience.
I suggest spending the time to map out a few target personas.
Let’s use the email marketing automation tool example. I want to break down what my ideal product user would look like. There can be a few users—that’s absolutely fine.
You’ll just need to create different personas for each.
For example, one persona might be the head of marketing at a B2B software company. This is a good start. But you can get a lot more detailed with it to get more out of your marketing efforts.
See below for an example of a persona's challenges.
Head of marketing/VP of marketing at a B2B software company
- 11-50 employee headcount
- Has been told to try email marketing but does not know how to start
- Has an email list but it gets low open rates and conversions
- Currently only sends weekly blog and company updates to their list
- Does not know how to build the list
- Does not know what lead magnet to create
This is just a rough draft to show how detailed you can get with your target personas.
Once you understand your audience and exactly who you're making content for, you can get a lot clearer with your messaging. You can personalize your content to them so it resonates and engages your audience.
For example, if you know your target persona is skilled at marketing and understands the basics of email marketing, avoid focusing on the basics.
Instead, you can discuss their problems, such as finding the right tools or creating reports to show upper management.
For example, the marketing team at ActiveCampaign, an email software company, creates content for email marketers of different skill levels.
This blog post about email flows is for readers with email marketing experience who want to understand whether email flows are worth their time.
The several subtopics detail questions that their target reader is likely to have. They'll want to see examples and understand the benefits of email flows to their business.
If interested, readers will also want to learn best practices to implement this tactic.
The article contains common email marketing phrases and terminology since readers are already familiar with the topic, and it does not cater to those who might be entirely new to email.
To learn more about your ideal audience, browse forum sites like Reddit and Quora to discover their pain points. You can also ask your audience or your sales or custom service team for more information.
It’s never a bad idea to know more about who your audience is and their needs.
5. Build brand authority
When users search specifically for your brand name or products, they typically demonstrate higher purchase intent compared to generic searches.
These are called branded searches.
Recent Google algorithm update crackdowns have seen many blogs lose traffic overnight for various reasons.
Often, these websites did not focus on building brand authority.
Brand authority is about building your brand's strong presence, reputation, and credibility.
Building your brand authority is a little like building a fortress—you’re reinforcing your SEO strategy.
If, for whatever reason, you woke up tomorrow morning and your site was erased from search results, would people still know who you are and what you do?
If the answer is no, consider improving brand authority.
When executed properly, a strong branded search presence builds trust, controls your brand message, and creates multiple touchpoints for potential customers.
These act as trust signals to search engines like Google, reinforcing the validity of your brand and its offerings.
For example, while other websites were penalized for publishing AI content Bankrate was able to publish hundreds of AI generated articles on the back of its strong brand and authority.
Of course, they also followed Google's guidelines on helpful content by having human editors review and edit all their AI generated content.
To implement a branded search strategy effectively, start by conducting a thorough audit of your branded search terms using Google Search Console.
Identify gaps in your content coverage and create targeted pages that address specific branded queries.
For example, we don't have a specific page that serves searches for "Surfer local ranking."
Creating a page to show up for this search term could help us convert users looking for local SEO tools.
You can also enhance brand signals by repurposing content.
Repurpose thought-leadership content, how-tos, and even short posts with key points and takeaways from your blog content.
For example, I wrote a post on how to create an SEO roadmap, and Surfer repurposed this content to create a LinkedIn carousel.
You can repurpose content by creating text, carousel, and image posts. You can even send snippets—or the full blog post—to your email list.
Other ways to improve brand authority include writing helpful content and striving for topical authority—when you cover one topic extensively—building links to your content from other sites, and posting regularly on your blog, social media, and email newsletter.
6. Cover different intents
There are four main types of search intent you want to address when creating an SEO content strategy:
- Informational: want to learn more about a topic or product
- Navigational: the user is looking for a specific destination
- Commercial: interested in making a purchase, but more research is needed
- Transactional: ready to make a specific purchase
When writing SEO content, it’s essential to evaluate the search intent for each query. Doing so ensures your article meets the right search intent.
For example, the key phrase “best email marketing tool for small business” is a commercial phrase.
Most search results are listicle articles, e.g., “The 8 best free email marketing services.”
If you write an article on a review of one email marketing tool, you will fail to meet the search intent.
Your article would likely not perform well in the SERP rankings.
When you Google your keyphrase, look at the search intent and the format other articles follow—this is what you want to copy (e.g., the listicle example above).
You can organize the search intent of each keyword or phrase using a Google Sheet.
When doing this, I recommend assigning a search intent, article type, and stage of the buyer’s journey.
But writing a single listicle to satisfy search intent isn't the answer either.
For your SEO to really kick in, you'll have to cover the entire buying cycle of your target readers from the awareness to the decision stage.
The diagram below shows a standard buyer’s journey from awareness to decision.
When deciding which topic to write about, consider the user's current stage of the buyer’s journey. You can add this to your Google Sheet.
For example, the table below shows a mix of keywords, with the search intent and the buyer’s journey stage.
You can then prioritize content based on building a specific buyer’s journey funnel or business potential.
7. Optimize for SEO
When people hear the word “SEO,” they often think of keyword stuffing.
I like to describe SEO as a way to get people to find your content. You can write the best article in the world, but if you don’t help people find it, they won’t read it. What a shame.
Aside from including your primary keyword in your article, you can make numerous little on-page SEO tweaks to improve your article's appeal to search engines.
Think of it as the last quarter turn of the spanner.
Page URL
The Page URL is the web address of a given page. You can edit this to be more SEO-friendly by adding your primary keyword.
Other good practices include not adding numbers or dates. If you decide to update your article in the future, your URL may no longer match the title.
Heading tags
Heading tags improve readability and provide a hierarchy to your content.
Adding heading tags improves user experience and helps search engines better understand your content.
There are six heading tags, H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6 but H1-H3 tags are the most commonly used.
- H1 is the page title—this can be different from the meta title and allows you to target relevant keywords.
- H2 is the main subheading. For example, if your article is about the best email marketing practices, an H2 may include one of the best practices, such as “segmenting your list.”
- The remaining heading tags break down each sub-heading further.
- H3 could include how to segment your list, for instance. And so on.
See the image below for an example of a heading structure.
You likely won’t need to use all six heading tags. Usually, I find myself using up to H4.
It’s a good idea to include your main and similar keywords in your headings. You can also enter your keyword in a Google search to find possible heading ideas. There are three main ways to find these:
- People also ask
- People also search for
- Google autosuggest
The image below shows example search results for possible headings to include in an article using the “People also ask” feature.
You can use the Outline tab in Surfer to find header ideas and ensure complete coverage in the article's body.
Relevant keywords in the body
You want to include your primary keyword and relevant keywords in the body of your article.
Additionally, include NLP keywords—these are words and phrases associated with your primary keyword and topic. For example, if you write a topic on email marketing, Google expects to see phrases like “email segmentation", "open rates", "deliverability" and "email personalization.”
There’s a good possibility you will include these naturally. You can also use Surfer to guide your keyword optimization strategy, so you don't have to wonder which keywords are important.
Here's a snippet of keywords I'm using for this article.
You can see that while I've covered the keywords in green, I'm missing the use of keywords highlighted in orange and red.
Internal linking
Internal links are hyperlinks from one page on your website to another. These are a must in your SEO content strategy.
These links tell search engines what pages are relevant to one another. They also help search engines discover and index new pages.
Link to related blog posts within the same topic to build topical authority. For example, a topic like "facial plastic surgery" has 19 articles that fall under the subject.
Link between these pages to show search engines in-depth content coverage.
You can also use custom Google search operators to find anchor text for possible internal linking opportunities.
See the image below for an example of how I'm searching for pages on Surfer's blog that have the terms "keyword research" in them.
I can then link from these pages to a new keyword research article I'm writing.
Meta title and description
The meta title tag is the article title that shows in the SERP. The meta description is the text below the title, which describes what your article is about and why the reader should click.
Images and alt text
Instead of uploading an image with the regular title, you can rename this to be more relevant to your article.
Also, add alternative text to images. This description of the image is used for accessibility purposes when an image does not load.
For example, the alt text for this image would be "Youtube thumbnail for a real estate video in NYC"
It also tells search engines what the image is and may help it appear in image results. Keep these titles and text relevant, and don’t cram them with keywords.
Search intent
I have already explained this in this article, but I want to mention it again because of how important it is.
If you fail to meet search intent, there’s a very good chance the other on-page search engine optimization efforts will go to waste.
When choosing a keyword, always check the search intent before writing.
User experience
It’s important to avoid over-optimization when doing on-page SEO. For example, if adding a keyword to a sentence makes it difficult to read or overly technical, don’t add it.
Focus on user experience first, SEO second.
Additionally, you don’t need to achieve a perfect score of 100 when using Surfer's Content Editor. I like to aim for a minimum score of 70.
I find this is a good balance between search optimization and an easy-to-read article. If you can score higher while maintaining readability, hats off to you.
When many people think of SEO, they think of thin or spam content. But when it’s done correctly, it’s quite the opposite. You should be giving the reader exactly what they are looking for—you’re answering search queries.
SEO is quite simply just a way to get them on the page.
And when done correctly, the reader can find all the answers and information they need without visiting another page. This should be your goal for most content pieces.
8. Monitor results and adapt
Once you’ve got the cogs turning on your SEO content strategy, it’s time to see how well it’s doing.
Monitor results and adapt as needed to improve your content for readers and search engines.
You can use various free tools to measure and track results. I like to use a handful of key performance indicators (KPIs) and user behavior metrics to track performance.
A must-have tool if your content tool belt is Google Search Console (GSC).
There are numerous ways you can use GSC, but I’ll start by explaining how to evaluate a single page.
- Click Search results in the Performance tab
- Select Average position
- Click Pages
- Navigate to the page you want to examine
This will show data such as total clicks, impressions, average CTR, and position in search results. If you scroll, you will see what keywords you currently rank for a given page.
Use this data to ensure you’re ranking for the right keywords and analyze your SERP rankings.
If you prefer, you can connect your Google Search Console to Surfer's Content Audit tool for a more user-friendly and analytical approach. This will show you all of your content, including historical positions in search, organic traffic, and CTR results.
The Recommendations tab is a good place to find pages that can rank better with a little bit of work.
Next up is Google Analytics.
While GSC gives data on how many people clicked your page and what keywords you’re ranking for, Google Analytics tells you more about page and user experience, like how long a user spent on a given page.
I recommend measuring various key performance indicators (KPIs) using Google Analytics:
- Key events—The number of times users triggered a key purchase, download or custom action. .
- Engaged sessions—Sessions lasting 10 seconds or more, or featuring one or more key events, or having two or more page or screen views.
- Average engagement time per user—The average duration for which your website appeared prominently in a user's browser or app device.
Use this data to make informed decisions regarding your SEO strategy.
I suggest reviewing your content every 3 months. Use this to gather data and refine your content strategy based on data-driven insights.
For example, if data shows you’re ranking in the top 10 SERP results but your CTR is low, this tells you that you should likely update your meta description or title to convince more people to click your article.
Alternatively, if you have low engaged sessions, consider tweaking your content and make sure you’re accurately delivering on the keyword's search intent.
9. Demonstrate your products
You’ve likely heard the popular marketing strategy, “show, don’t tell.”
You have the perfect opportunity to show and demonstrate your products in your blog content.
For example, in this blog post on how to create an SEO roadmap, I discuss on-page optimization strategies to improve SEO with minimal effort.
Instead of only telling the audience what to do, I walk readers through a screenshot of Surfer's Audit tool to demonstrate how it can help the reader solve their problem.
By including this as an example, this shows and positions your product as the solution to their problem in a non-invasive way—there’s no salesman chasing you down the street.
As another example, ActiveCampaign has a blog post on how to set up an online course.
In the post, they position their automation software as a way to set up workflows to engage subscribers at the right time, helping readers attract and retain students effortlessly.
They also mention the importance of building an email list, showing real examples in ActiveCampaign.
You can also add case studies and quotes to highlight product benefits and applications to real-world scenarios.
This helps build trust and shows the reader that you can help them—because you’ve helped someone in their exact situation who experienced the same pain points.
10. Build links to your pages
Backlinks signal to search engines that your content is trustworthy and authoritative.
The more high-quality backlinks you have, the higher your overall domain authority. You can rank content more easily, even when targeting more competitive keywords.
Additionally, building backlinks to a page or specific article can help it rank higher in the SERP rankings.
But how do you build links?
There are a few ways you can build links to your site and content naturally. I emphasize the word "naturally" here. I don’t recommend investing in what’s known as black-hat SEO. It’s not worth risking your site’s ranking potential.
You can partner with industry influencers and authoritative sites to contribute expert quotes or unique insights.
For example, as an expert in search engine optimization, I might contribute to high-ranking blog posts by providing tips on conducting keyword research, building backlinks, or finding unique keywords.
This is usually in exchange for a backlink to your site.
But how do you find these opportunities?
You can use sites like Qwoted or Help a B2B Writer to respond to requests from journalists and publications. You may also find it useful to join various free—or paid—Slack communities to find further expert contribution opportunities.
Below, I’ve included two additional methods to build backlinks.
Guest blogging
Writing blog posts for other websites and publications may sound counterintuitive. However, it’s a great way to build backlinks to your site.
Often, these blog posts are not paid but you can build links to your content. Usually, you can include a link to your author page on your website and sometimes blog posts in the main post.
You can find guest blogging opportunities in numerous ways. My two preferred methods are:
- Joining relevant communities and asking if people are interested in a guest post
- Using a custom Google search to find websites looking for guest bloggers
Communities include Slack and Facebook groups. But don’t spam—keep it professional and leave a casual note asking if anyone wants some free content written for their site.
If using the Google search method, you can use a custom search like:
“Finance + write for us”
You can play around with the search modifier “write for us” and the topic “finance” to discover new opportunities.
You can also go the route of building personal relationships and asking to post on their site.
But this is more of a long-term strategy. Plus, it’s better to build relationships with no expectations. And if the opportunity arises to publish content on their site in exchange for a link, that’s a bonus!
Broken link building
This link building method involves finding broken links on a website and asking the author to link to your article or resource instead.
For example, let’s say a website has a blog post on how to save your first $1000 and links to an article on how to budget. The link they originally added is broken—when clicked, it shows a 404 error.
The website owner or author likely does not know the link is broken.
If you find these links, you can email the author telling them the link is broken. You also provide them with your blog post on the same topic to link to instead.
This link building method works because website owners do not want broken links on their sites. Plus, by finding these links, you’re helping them. And better yet, you’re providing a solution to their broken link problem—adding your new link.
Most popular keyword tools have a broken link tool.
You enter a site URL, and it shows all broken links. You then have two options: you find a suitable article that the author can link to or you create a new piece of content and ask the author to link to that.
Sometimes, you can find multiple websites that link to an article that has been moved. In this case, you can offer your own page instead to all these websites.
Key takeaways
- An SEO content strategy is a plan for creating and optimizing content to rank higher in SERP
- Choose topics and keywords with business potential to improve engagement
- Prioritize low-hanging keywords when performing keyword research
- Focus on creating long-form helpful content
- Create target personas to personalize your content strategy for your audience
- Repurpose blog content on social media to build brand authority
- Optimize blog content for SEO before posting to increase organic traffic potential
- Monitor your SEO content strategy using tools like Google Search Console and Analytics and adapt as needed to improve results
- Demonstrate your products in your content if possible to showcase your product as a solution to their problem
- Build links to your blogs and pages using strategies like guest blogging and contributing quotes to improve SEO
