Regardless of the constantly changing algorithms and guidelines, valuable content finds its way to reach its audience on any search engine. If you want to win this content game, you should make sure that all your SEO strategies are well aligned with the current best SEO practices. As technology and digital marketing progress, many better techniques have evolved that can help you stand out in the competition and rank higher on Google. As per the statistics in 2023, only 0.83% of the clicks go to websites on the second page of Google. If you want to attract organic website traffic, you should stay on the first page of Google. And that is possible by search engine optimization of your website. In this blog, we help you learn the best SEO Content Strategy practices in 2023.
What is Content Marketing Strategy?
Content Strategy is a strategic marketing approach focused on generating leads and building strong relationships with your target audience by consistently creating and sharing high-quality articles, videos, and podcasts across multiple channels. A well-crafted content strategy framework establishes expertise, promotes brand awareness, and keeps your business on the top of the minds of customers when they want to buy what you sell.
Amazing SEO Content Strategy Practices for peak Engagement in 2023
SEO is the process of optimizing a website to be ranked high on Google. The ultimate goal of search engine optimization is to generate organic traffic to your website through a search engine results page. Without any further delay, let’s look into some of the top digital content strategy practices to win your SEO game:
1. Focus on Google Feature Snippets
Google Featured Snippets are extremely important for search engine optimization. Featured snippets appear at the top of the search query results page. If Google finds your content useful, it recommends your content as a response to user search queries. Feature snippets help you gain more website traffic and click from people. Your digital content strategy should produce content relevant to people’s queries to feature under Google snippets.
2. Core Web Vitals
Google has made core web vitals, one of the critical SEO ranking factors on Google. Let’s look at what the numbers say:
- According to the research, only 12% of the mobile sites and 13% of the desktop sites are optimized to pass the core web vitals assessment right now.
- From position 1 to position 5, there is a 2% decrease in the core web vitals assessment for each position.
If you want to top Google or any other search engine, core web vitals is the area you should focus on in your SEO content strategy. Core web vitals help you maintain the quality of the user experience on your website. There are three core web vitals-namely LCP, FID, and CLS.
Large Contentful Paint (LCP)
LCP measures page loading time which is the time taken by the website to load. The unoptimized images, heavy themes, and other elements you use reduces the loading speed of your website You should optimize them or replace them with lighter elements in your website design.
First Input Display (FID)
It is the time taken by the input-receiving elements of your website to become available to the visitor. The time delay in loading the website annoys users and sabotages their user experience. Include responsive themes with lighter theme elements or hire a professional web developer to assist you.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
It is the instability of the website elements that seriously affects the user experience. Some website owners may use this to trick visitors into clicking the spam links and drive them through sales and lead generation funnels.
3. Quality Content
You should make content according to the search intent of the user. So, how can you achieve this? You have to create a content strategy coping questions list and curate content as answers. It can be accomplished by finding out the reader’s interests, trending topics, customer issues/queries, etc. Optimizing keywords, image optimization, and backlinks as per the user intent will boost your rank on the search engines. Your website should be visually appealing, informational, user-friendly, and commercial. High-quality content that is factually correct, original, and readable, and content that answers customers’ queries will make its way to reach out to the audience and generate leads.
4. Video Content
Do you know if people leave your website in less than 10 seconds, Google considers your website as a bad website? And visitors can hardly read one or two paragraphs in those minimum seconds. Instead of writing lengthy paragraphs to hook your readers, you can simply attach a video and keep the readers on your page for a longer time. Once they click on the video and start watching it, they can deeply explore your content. Video content helps your audience to quickly walk through your content and reduce your bounce rates. It’s a win-win situation for both website owners and the audience. Also, nowadays, Google’s machine learning is focusing on detecting shapes and learning how to crawl images and rank websites as per their relevancy.
If you are thinking of what kind of videos go viral to include in your content strategy, the above infographics from Statista report 2022 will let you know. Music videos top the list with the highest shares of 51.2%. If you are a business owner, you can make tutorial videos, video live streams, videos on educational content, product reviews, product highlights, etc as mentioned in the list above, and get higher reach and engagement for your brand.
5. Get Quality Backlinks
Link building makes your website credible and authoritative. Thus, it is one of the critical factors used by Google and other search engines to rank content. It acts as a testimonial from the public that lets Google judge the quality of your content. You can’t create a successful SEO content strategy that delivers real-time results without acquiring high-quality backlinks to your site from authoritative websites. Here are some of the ways to help you acquire backlinks:
- Do guest posting on the websites relevant to your niche.
- Create hyperlinks from reputable directory websites to attract additional sources of traffic.
- Create attractive infographics and provide a link for the source of the content.
- Perform competitor analysis to learn where your competitors are acquiring backlinks from, and find new backlink opportunities.
Several bloggers make a living by reviewing products or services. Partner with them to review your products and attract a part of their traffic to your website.
6. Keep Up with the Updates
Google is always looking to make things easier for readers and thus, it is making constant changes in its algorithms to deliver the best results for any search query. In recent years, artificial intelligence has grown so much that it had even entered the content industry. The content generated by AI tools and software has made it even harder for content marketers to outperform AI in search engine rankings. Google came up with its ‘Helpful Content Update’ to devalue the automated content and prioritize the content made by people.
7. Optimize your site’s UX
Each step in your SEO content strategy should direct you toward your target audience. User experience (UX) is all about the interaction between users and businesses. Delivering a positive user experience is crucial for every business to stay ahead of its competitors. While you are creating user experience design, ask yourself ‘Why?’ Why should people choose your brand, product/service over others? Find answers through the services you deliver. A clean design makes it easy to explore content through desktop and mobile devices.
You may offer outstanding content but that is valued only when the user experience is good. Lengthy texts can be a pain in the eyes when compared to clear and neatly organized short blocks of content. Incorporating images, videos, links, and infographics can elevate your user experience in several ways. An easy and memorable user experience keeps the visitors returning to your website for more. If the interface is confusing and hard to navigate, your site will lose potential prospects to competitors. Shown below are some of the most common web design mistakes affecting user experience.
8. Choose Content Distribution Channels for More Engagement & Clicks
Before you even think of attracting customers to your website, you should go where your customers are and let them know that your business exists. Once you build a strong content strategy, the next step is to distribute it on multiple channels that have the potential to get more engagement and clicks.
Start conducting audience research and discover who your target audience is and what their interests are. To make sure that your content gets maximum reach, you have to identify your own media channels, share media channels, and also paid media channels. Each channel creates opportunities for you to attract new audiences and take them down your sales and marketing funnel.
9. Regular SEO Audits are a Must
SEO Auditing is one of the fundamental principles of SEO content strategy to accomplish the ultimate purpose of websites. The SEO Audit reports that helps you detect every error related to your website (see the image below). It is impossible to avoid mistakes and errors completely. But, by re-running the audits periodically, you can free your website from silly errors that can slow down your site and impact user experience.
Wrapping Up!
The aggressively growing competition in digital marketing has led businesses to become unique and stand out from the competition. One of the best and quick ways to stay updated with digital marketing practices is to perform a thorough competitor analysis in the market. You can unlock several untold tricks, potential keywords, quality business prospects, trends in the industry, customers’ interests, etc.
Collect the data and improvise your learning and experience to create a robust SEO content strategy to outrank your competitors in the long run. Another essential part of modern SEO is user experience. Focus on offering quality user experience to your visitors and avoid tricking search engine bots into your website. One of the best ways to do this is to run frequent SEO audits on your websites. There are plenty of free SEO Audit tools you can use for this purpose. Also, you can get a content strategy template to simplify your SEO process and save time. Thanks for reading!