SEO Content: New strategies to drive demand generation
With an abundance of content being created daily, trying to rank on page one is highly competitive. And staying there can be even harder.
But its proven success is why almost two-thirds (63%) of marketers look to create SEO content marketing.
🥜SEO content in a nutshell: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a technique content marketing experts use to improve content ranking in the likes of Google and essentially get it in front of their target audience. It gets the right eyes on the right piece of content 👀 Select keywords and phrases, that we know your target audience is searching for, are peppered through content in particular places like the titles. So when the individual searches key phrases, your content should appear in the search results - preferably on page 1.
How SEO content marketing works
Above all else, the best content provides value to your ideal customers. It does this by giving your audience free expert guidance, insight, and top tips to help to solve their pain points. What’s more, high-quality content converts, has a high click-through rate, and ranks well in Google - so that it actually gets in front of your audience.
To achieve the latter, we need to use SEO in content marketing.
Introducing content clusters
Google has made huge changes to the way search results appear – essentially, they favour content that is based on topics. Instead of creating content that hits several keywords, a topic cluster model focuses content on one central topic.
Several supporting blog posts (or a cluster) are planned, written, published and distributed from this pillar. These cluster posts offer a variety of angles from the main topic and link to one main pillar - often called ‘the definitive guide to XXX’.
For example, if ‘content marketing’ was the topic, you could create blogs on:
‘How to maximise content marketing with these distribution channels’
‘Top content marketing strategies to attract your ideal customer’
‘How webinars can excel your content marketing in 2023’
Here are a few tips to help you:
Include the topic keyword in the titles, subtitles, and throughout the body copy
Aim for at least 6-7 blogs per topic in order to rank well for a specific topic
Link to the other blogs on the same topic within the other blogs
… This is particularly helpful for SMEs who want to rank for competitive keywords, but don’t have a strong domain yet.
📕Further reading: Find out more about marketing cluster planning here
The freshness factor
Moreover, both your target audience and search engines like Google like fresh content. In fact, a study by Botify found that pages with frequently-refreshed content were crawled more often and ranked for more keywords on average.
And that’s why it's important to regularly create new stuff.
PPC versus SEO: Which is better for demand generation?
The majority (81%) of all Google searches click on organic results - this is content that is Search Engine Optimised, not paid ads that often sit in the top two search results (a.k.a. Pay Per Click, or PPC) - only 19% choose to click on an ad.
Basically, you can expect to drive 5x more traffic to your website by using an SEO approach rather than paid ads. And it's much cheaper!
How to use SEO to drive demand generation
There are two things you can do:
Refresh existing content - This can be a quick and easy way to increase web traffic and leads to your ready-made, currently lesser-performing content.
Create new SEO content - This ensures new content is more likely to get in front of your target audience.
Ultimately, you want to be doing option 1 and option 2 to keep your content fresh and appealing to your target audience and to gain and keep the top spots in Google rankings.
Let’s explore these a little more 👇
Option 1: Refresh your existing content marketing
Here are a handful of ways you can update your existing content to make it SEO:
Add the keyword to your main and subtitles - ensure you use H4 for subtitles so that Google bots crawl them
Add dates to titles and change them to this year’s date if you’ve got dates on there already
Unpublish the blog and republish with a more recent date
Go back and add backlinks to new blogs you’ve written
Update your call to actions and add new sections to include the latest keywords - you can even use a video to compliment the content
Option 2: Create new SEO content marketing
When it comes to creating new content marketing, we’ve put together 5 steps to build an SEO strategy that actually drives demand generation:
🧐Step 1: Identify topics of interest
The first step is to run a workshop to pull together themes for content and keywords/phrases that your target audience is likely to search for.
🛠Step 2: Leverage tools to check keywords
Using tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush you can test out these keywords/phrases to find the keyword search volumes and difficulty ratings.
🎨Step 3: Create your content marketing and content cluster plan
While you could just start with one cluster, we recommend covering at least two clusters at a time so that there’s a variety that appeals to your target audience’s different interests (more on clusters here).
📩Step 4: Don’t forget about distribution
You also want to think carefully about distribution channels. To maximise the ROI of your content, ideally, you want to share it in as many relevant places as possible - like LinkedIn, guest blogging sites, email, social media etc.
📈Step 5: Create your SEO content
To generate demand, prospects and existing customers need nurturing with additional thought leadership. This provides expert advice from you to solve their challenges. And they'll remember you for it. So focus on adding *value* to the end customer at EVERY stage of the sales funnel (more on this here).
📏Step 6: Measure and continuously optimise
You can see how well these pieces perform by checking your SEO ranking and site visits (this takes time), seeing views on guest blogging sites and site visits on LinkedIn.
👌Step 7: Remain consistent
As we’ve touched on already, regularly posting new content and refreshing existing content helps you gain and sustain rankings on page 1 in Google.
📕Further reading: The key to SEO content: Writing for SEO and humans
Key takeaway
Keep it fresh. Regularly post. Regularly update content. Even the most popular content will diminish ranking over time if it isn’t updated because Google assumes it’s old information and wants to always provide users with fresh content.
Keep an eye on performance. If you see website traffic go down for a couple of months in a row, you know to refresh and create new content.
Ready to start generating demand? For a free marketing audit, get in touch with us today. You'll get personalised recommendations to drive demand. No fluff. Just actionable steps.