How to Build a Content Strategy That Will Increase High Intent Traffic to Your Website

 
Content Marketing • October 5, 2023
 
Content marketing is an inbound marketing method that has stood the test of time and every single algorithmic change that have been introduced by search engines over the years, and it doesn’t look like it’s gonna die anytime soon. A robust content strategy is one that gets your business’ name out there, targets the right audience, and brings potential customers right to the doorstep of your lead generation tool/form on your website. Unfortunately, content is often not used effectively enough by many companies to deliver results, owing to several reasons. When you talk to people about why they aren’t able to use content as a valuable source of leads, the answers are usually: While these are all valid points, learning to use content effectively will create an evergreen lead gen source that is inexpensive and will keep the leads coming to your website for a long time. And that’s exactly what we’re going to deliver to you in this article – we’ll be talking about how to build a content strategy that will deliver the right kind of traffic to your website and help you convert more clients from it. However, there are a few things that you need to work on to get here. And we’ll be upfront with you – this is not something you can accomplish overnight. But if you put your mind to it, it’s bound to give you great results in the span of 2-3 months and every day after that, provided you get it right. Here’s what the recipe for an airtight content strategy looks like: ➡️ A solid Domain Authority for your website ➡️ A planned approach where you target keywords with good search volume ➡️ A basic understanding of content SEO and the elements behind it ➡️ Regular analysis of what’s working and what’s not working ➡️ Repeat We’ll guide you through how you can nail all of these things in this step-by-step guide. This is how you create a content strategy that will help your company earn more leads through content.

#1 Building Domain Authority

If your website already has a great DA, then you don’t need to worry about this. Jump to step #2. If not, this is an absolutely important first step before you start working on your content strategy. Not aware of what DA is? DA is a metric that was introduced by Moz to determine how authoritative your website is. In short, the bigger the DA of your website, the more dependable search engines consider to be. It is to note that your Domain Authority is only an approximation of how search engines deem your authority, and is not the number that search engines themselves use to judge your website’s reliability. Tools like Open Site Explorer try to simulate algorithms like PageRank by using well known ranking factors to determine this number. So, the big question.

“How do I improve my website’s DA?”

Unfortunately, there’s no easy shortcut to do this. Since backlinks are a major factor that determine the DA of your website, regularly guest posting on other websites with backlinks to your website help. On page SEO, getting your technical elements right, and working on things like page speed are said to improve your domain authority. You can read more about it in this post here. Improving your website’s DA is time-consuming, but important. It also helps you reap the rewards of getting better organic search rankings in the long run.

#2 Keyword Research

So, you have your mind set to start using content as a device to deliver high intent traffic to your website. You have the /blog/ section set up, you have a WordPress instance created, and you’re about to pour words into an empty Google Docs file and start writing the content that your audience want to read. Hold up. Do you really know what’s the content that your audience wants to read? Enter keyword research. If you want the right kind of organic traffic to come to your website through your content, then you need to know what they’re searching on the internet first. You need to keep in mind that people generally type in keyword phrases in the Google search bar and click on the link that seems most suitable to their needs. And you also need to know that if several people are searching for the exact same keyword phrase that aligns with what you’re selling, then that’s where you want your content to show up, to increase your likeness of attracting more people. But how do you know what people are searching for? It’s at this juncture that you also need to know that Google and some third party tools that use Google’s API keep track of this data. That’s right, you can literally see how frequently people search for “sling bags near me” on a monthly basis (Spoiler alert: It’s 50 per month). You can use a couple of tools to gather this data for planning out your content strategy. One of them is Ubersuggest. I like Ubersuggest because it gives you ideas for things that you can write about based on your search term, unlike Google Keyword Planner that only gives you the search volume of the keyword that you enter. This is how Ubersuggest looks for “sling bags near me”. You can pick whatever works for you, but it’s imperative that you always do some keyword research before you start writing your content. Make sure that it’s closely related to the product/services that you’re selling to get the most relevant audience. If you’re not sure about where to start, then take a look at the blog of the toughest competitor in your industry. The titles that they’re writing about on their blog should give you some insight into what you can write about as well. Once you’re done with your keyword research, pick one target keyword that you want to rank for and start writing it. However, how do you write content that is keyword optimized? How do you improve your chances for ranking for that target search term?

#3 Content SEO

With so many people churning out content at an insane rate out there, it is difficult for your content pieces to gain better rankings when you’re not following any optimization techniques. While there’s nothing written in stone when it comes to Google organic ranking factors or content SEO, there are certain best practices that you can follow to improve your chances of ranking high on SERPs, and driving the right kind of traffic to your company. These are all the things that have helped our content rank and deliver the right kind of traffic to our website. Follow these guidelines, and you’re sure to see your content rank well on SERPs as well. ➡️ Have a defined target keyword/phrase for the content that you’re writing. ➡️ Use the target keyword/phrase in you post URL, title, and H1 tag. ➡️ Make sure that the target keyword/phrase appears enough times in your post. A keyword density of 1%-2% should be enough. ➡️ Add category associations and tags to your post. Then: ➡️ Make sure that you have a brief short custom meta description for better CTR. ➡️ Write content pieces that have at least 900 words ➡️ Add 2+ relevant pictures in the body of your content piece. Always have a featured image for the content that you write. ➡️ Have enough helpful outbound links to articles that will help readers find value from your content better. ➡️ Internally link between content pieces and other webpages in your own website from your content. ➡️ Add the blog index page to the footer of your homepage, so search engine spiders can index your content quickly. As we mentioned earlier, there is no such thing as a secret formula for ranking well on search engines, but these things will help you stay on the right track for writing SEO optimized content. Once you’re done writing it, publish the content that you wrote. That’s not the end of the road, though. There’s one very important step that remains, here.

#4 Measuring Results

nce your content has been published on your blog, you need to closely follow up on how it’s performing. You need to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing to rank for these terms as well, and know whether they are ranking better than you are for these terms. When you’re writing content on a daily basis and churning out, say, 20 content pieces a month, it is impossible for you to manually keep track of the performance of every keyword you’re trying to rank for. We use two tools to effectively measure what the returns we’re getting for our content.

a) Google Analytics

The go-to tool for seeing how much organic traffic you’re getting for your website on a regular basis is none other than Google Analytics. All that you need to do to track analytics for your webpages is insert a small code snippet in the header of your posts, and you’ll instantly be able to follow the traffic you’re getting for your content. Google Analytics also allows you to segment the traffic by referral source and medium, so you’ll know exactly what percentage of your traffic are coming to your website as a result of your content efforts. You can also set up goals to measure the number of leads that you are earning from this traffic as well. You can learn all about setting up and using Google Analytics for your website here. While Google Analytics is an amazing tool to keep track of the overall traffic and leads that you’re receiving on your website, it still doesn’t give you a fair idea of how your content is ranking, and how you are faring against your competitors. Which brings us to our next tool.

b) Unamo SEO

Unamo SEO helps you do just that by keeping track of how you are ranking for every single keyword that you’re trying to show up for on Google. All you need to do is type in the keywords that you want to track, and Unamo will do the rest for you. It also gives you a side by side comparison of how your content is performing against a competitor for one particular keyword. My favorite story about how Unamo has helped build a better content strategy and keep a content team’s interests aligned with their goals is from a friend who owns Local SEO Checklist. While working on trying to rank for the term ‘local SEO course’, he realized that the content piece was ranking for ‘local SEO crash course’ instead. He worked on the h1 tag, URL structure and categories after that, and shortly later, his piece started ranking for ‘local SEO course’, which has a substantially larger search volume.

#5 Repeat

Once you’re done with steps 1-4, all you need to do is follow a structure and keep doing this for some time, and you’re bound to see a bump in your organic traffic. Every time you see a content piece giving you good results, go back to it and see what you did right in that content piece. This helps you become a better content writer over time, and will help you optimize your content to rank better in the future. And that’s how you build a robust content strategy!