Augmenting potential customers with a winning SEO content strategy report
In today’s overcrowded content marketing world, without the plan of a solid SEO content strategy, you would struggle to grow lead generation, ranking, brand awareness, and conversions.
Creating rich quality and strategic content can help you
- Set your business stand unique of the competition
- Drive more conversions
- Produce quality content that ranks higher in search engine results
- Skyrocket your B2B business success
- Grab your customer’s attention
Now figure out that 82% of firms are actively using this content marketing to expand their brand and ranking.
But are all of them successful?
Not at all..!
In fact, according to a report on content marketing by Semrush, only 19% state their companies became successful, with the proper content marketing efforts.
This is due to a host of challenges such as a huge level of competition and lack of proper content strategy all striving for ranking on the first page of Google.
so, now how will you build a rich network of content for your site to engage and connect with would-be customers?
After building it, how can you know the status of content strategy outcomes for your business?
The answer is through a robust reporting system for your site…!
Hence a well-thought and robust content strategy is a key plan to acquire your site noticed by all search engines. The guide delves into approaches to craft a great SEO optimization report for the best results and pinpoint the content improvement areas, to attract users to strategic content and gain their reporting benefits.
Table of Contents
What is content strategy in SEO?
The content strategy lays the groundwork to plan, create, deliver, and govern your website content. More importantly, it yields structure to your content, for attracting interested users and to have better user engagement.
This sort of content strategy necessitates in-depth research and a lot of deliberation to lay this groundwork.
Following an SEO content strategy, make sure to give a piece of valuable and helpful information, however, you do it strategically.
Now, what do you mean by the strategic way?
It means you adopt active best practices for researching, selecting the right channels and content planning, and much more before you craft the content for your site.
The role of content strategy, in amplifying your organic traffic, boosting search engine rankings, and improving user experience is immense.
Once you create content with this strategy, ensure that this content aligns with the clear business goals of your agency work.
How to write a content strategy report?
After you outline an effective content strategy plan perhaps, a powerful content strategy report paves your SEO journey to gain a content roadmap and plan SEO efforts according to the data insights from the report.
Guiding this scenario, the following section explicates the dominant steps that help you to define an impressive content strategy report for your agencies.
1. Discovering your audience
First of all, before exposing the reports, to begin with, the results depend on your research.
Discover who your customers are before molding the content for them, by creating a list of their
- Wants
- Interests
- Needs
- Pain points
Develop the customer personas, by grouping the consumers based on psychographic and demographic data.
The customer personas can assist in guiding your full content strategy in and out of your site about your brand.
As people start to comment on your blog posts, pay special attention to the questions they’re asking.
Then, utilize the comments, to enhance your SEO strategy over time.
You can offer the consumers the related answers they need to turn into a go-to resource in your industry.
Once people recognize you have the potential answers they’re looking for, they’ll commence to rely on your business for help.
2. Understand the basics
For developing a competent content strategy, you have to understand the basics.
Listed with the four types of SEO
On-page SEO – This covers the content and HTML of your website.
Optimize the blog for on-page SEO by including the relevant target keyword in the
- Opening and closing paragraphs
- An H1 Header
- Page title and URL.
- Body text
- SEO title and meta-description
- Image alt text and file name.
As SEO titles and meta-descriptions would appear on SERPs. Ensure they’re interesting for generating more clicks.
Off-Page SEO – It indulges the strategies beyond your website. For instance, you ought to develop backlinks to boost your domain authority and other metrics.
Local SEO– assist you in reaching out to nearby consumers. Start it by optimizing your site’s Google Business listing. The content inside this Google Business listing must be optimized to impact local SEO outcomes.
Technical SEO deals with the backend of your site. The content must be framed on this aspect. Check this, you’re constantly enhancing the user experience to keep the users engaged on your website.
3. Outline different ideas in topics
Begin to develop a list of various topics of content ideas you wish to cover inside your content strategy.
Think about the questions that your customers ask or the weighted topics they often want to learn more about.
4. Setting goals and objectives
Defining concise and clear goals for your content strategy such as lead generation, product sales, and thought leadership is more essential.
While you start your new SEO content strategy, spend some weeks building a plan, first of all, covering
- Your entire website-wide content strategy
- Your market overview, and assessing competitors.
- Your brand overview and value proposition
You should be able to clearly define
- Who you are as a business
- Why someone must choose your business over
- What you’re trying to accomplish in this competitive world
- Who is your target audience
- Why should someone opt for your business over other alternatives?
So based on this information, start planning your content. Setting a content strategy must not occur in a vacuum.
Hence you have to set your goals and plan your content strategy according to this .
5. Keyword analysis and content relevance
Assess the keywords, to frame your content strategy report data.
High Search volume keywords are great, but they are also highly competitive keywords and expensive as well.
Even the highest Domain authority websites (DR greater than 90) would find incorporating these highly competitive keywords challenging to rank for those keyword terms.
Low search volume keywords and low difficulty keywords are great and provide you with certain chances for ranking quickly.
The issue is you’re limiting yourself by focusing exclusively on specific terms.
Your agency’s goal in content strategy must be finding ranking opportunities and valuable organic traffic.
Keyword difficulty or search volume alone won’t yield you an entire picture.
Do comprehensive keyword research by potential SEO tools, like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and so on to learn the keywords and frame the content strategy plan based on this.
Keyword Opposition to Benefit(KOB) thrives as a strategic approach to research and understanding the entire scope of topics in specific niches and prioritizing them based on the business potential and feasibility.
Assessing KOB compares the keyword difficulty to what audience or people are willing to spend on their content.
This may facilitate you
- Finding and picking “low-hanging fruit” keywords.
- Prioritize the topics where your clients can attain ranking quickly at every stage of the SEO funnel.
- To attain a sizable ROI.
Every keyword ought to be examined individually based on multiple factors for your content strategy such as
- Search volume
- Relevance to product, content marketing strategy, marketing strategy, and business.
- Competitiveness
- Organic traffic potential.
- Relationship with your agency goal.
The keywords you select for your content must be
- Consistent with at least a single buyer persona
- Relevant to the goal of SEO content strategy.
Approach content like any other product or service:
- Find or understand a need and address it.
- Know the emotions (fear, uncertainty, urgency, etc.) in play.
Right approach for valuable content strategy
Approach content like any other service or product
To do this quickly, you have to
- Identify or understand the needs(recent or common) of the people and address them.
- Get to know the emotions in play(like urgency, fear, uncertainty and so on) to find the content matches.
Here below is an example of a valuable piece of content that is rewarded with a top spot in the SERP although the query and title aren’t exactly aligned with each other.
By understanding the issue of the users, using this cryptocurrency, the content is framed out in the blog post of their site.
Problem aware: Empathize with your target audience by articulating the issues in a differentiated, clear way.
Solution aware: Once the issue is identified, present the audience with the detailed, valuable options and objectives for the solution to their issues.
Brand aware: get to know about the brand and its features, and create a content matching to narrate about the features.
The problem itself would give you the ideas for the content which you take you to the research phase.
Once your research has been conducted, you’ll have what you need to create content and then deploy the same in multiple ways.
The flow of the content goes like this:
Source: https://searchengineland.com/how-to-build-a-helpful-content-strategy-for-2023-391074
Nail down your Audience Problems and do keyword selection
Your specific product or service as the ideal solution for the reader’s problem.
These two major conditions should be fulfilled for all the opted keywords you finalize.
So try to give the solution by choosing specific keywords.
The keywords are explored by analyzing potential keywords deeply.
Any keyword, which does not align with your business goal or support you to achieve the site performance is useless even if your target audience uses it.
Your target must be able to address the keywords that help you accomplish your content goals.
Using SEO tools discussed above like Google Analytics, and Ahrefs, for exploring keywords, and identifying relevant and high-traffic keywords.
There are two major ways to determine and refine the keywords for your content strategy
Utilize a keyword research tool: Exploring keywords manually isn’t a smart choice. The use of tools with a specific subscription is quite handy and offers detailed information for multiple search engines.
Google keyword planner, a free research tool benefits you to identify the search terms for Google only.
Related Article: How to write Keyword Analysis Report?
6. Competitive content assessment
Examining the content of competitors makes you pick out the gaps in content and the respective opportunities.
Strategies to create content that stands out in the competitive landscape help you to outperform your site in highly qualified outcomes.
To understand the competitor companies’ content strategy, you must have a look at
- What competitors are ranking for the content?
- What are the competitors performing well?
- Which are the topics that bring more traffic to your competitors’ sites?
- How long does the competitor take for ranking for a specific topic?
This can allow you to craft more efficient content planning decisions for your site.
Knowing what content works for your competitors, minimizes the need for you to spend your cost on trial and error.
For a full picture of the competitive landscape, go ahead with the SEO tool doing competitor analysis.
For a better understanding of how much you should invest in your content strategy, do a comparison of your website metrics like
- Organic Keywords
- Linking Root Domains(LRD)
- Domain Rating
- Monthly Organic Traffic
- Organic Traffic Value
Topic clusters are the way to go
Rather than creating content in silos on the individual keywords, just create topic clusters, also referred to as the Hub and Spoke model for content marketing.
Topic clusters are the pieces of content centered around a particular broad topic or theme known as the pillar page.
You can establish topical authority by encapsulating every query related to that broad theme or topic.
- To utilize this topic cluster, here’s the thing you should do
- Create a solid pillar page, cornerstone content, or hub content.
- Determine the sub-topics by keyword research.
- Create helpful content focussing on the sub-topics,
- Build contextually relevant internal links for augmenting your topic clusters.
7. Content inventory and audit
Generally, a content audit is defined as the process of assessing your content to determine opportunities for your site’s improvement.
The step is highly significant to understand what you have to do and what elements you have to focus on to enhance your website’s SEO performance.
Related Article: How to write SEO Performance Report
This benefits you to pick out web pages that aren’t performing well and find ways to fix them.
You may have excellent content, have constant traffic and it may rank for many keywords, however, all of that can be at risk, because of the blog’s health or the present content’s health.
The health audit of the website is highly essential because this
- Depicts the errors on your website, which you failed to notice.
- Helps in the optimization of content and thus achieves the site’s performance optimization.
- Determines the broken links and their web pages.
By performing this audit, you would get a huge range of information and one of the most significant steps relies upon understanding what the priorities are:
- Pick out the major errors and resolve them.
- Optimization of website speed.
- Prevent sudden losses of impressive and important rankings.
- A blog having bad health would not rank even for a better strategy.
8. Analyzing existing content
Assess the existing content for relevance, quality, and performance. Determine and enhance the underperforming web pages and the other outdated content.
If SEO is your major content strategy, it will support training your editors on efficient SEO tactics, and black hat SEO approaches, which shouldn’t make for a different published post.
This includes
- How to effectively use the keywords in your content headers and then subheaders.
- How to format the internal links inside content and external links.
- What an effective meta description may look like and how long it must be.
- How do you do the image optimization and image alt text for the search?
Search engines aside, if you have focus on your target audience, you basically want them to attain the most accurate and up-to-date information.
Hence always keep updating your old content by updating the statistics, data, checking facts, and offering new information to the user.
No matter what the goal of strategy is for your business, your SEO results and insights must be at the center of every data in your content strategy report.
Related Article: How to write Content Analysis Report?
9. Technical aspects of content strategy
Performing an in-depth analysis of technical aspects and thus doing the technical SEO audit seems crucial to determining and fixing the issues influencing the search engine rankings of the website and the user experience.
Implement the fixes and monitor the progress of your Site, to frame your content strategy effectively.
In content strategy, you have to spend time developing a piece of well-written content, attracting your ideal audience, keeping visitors on site for a longer time, and matching relevant user intention.
Even though to frame an effective content strategy, check on the technical aspects of your site, to reflect the outcomes in the strategy report.
When you first commence your SEO projects, you ought to audit the present setup for any errors in technical aspects. Once you have a complete understanding of the existing website, it’s better to prioritize your content strategy after this.
Before formatting the content, get to know what are the aspects of the technical SEO side you have to look at.
- Conduct a website crawl.
- Analyze Page Speed
- Assess Website Structure.
- Review URL structure.
- Checking Duplicate Content
- Inspect XML sitemaps and Robots.txt.
- Analyzing content quality
- Check Mobile Friendliness
- Assess Page Speed.
- Gather tools and Resources.
- Ensuring Security Issues.
- Monitor Indexation.
- Assess Hosting and Server Performance.
- Analyze Technical Onpage SEO.
- Assess Canonicalization and Redirects.
Keep assessing the return on investment, which you take from the efforts of content marketing. Track the landing pages, user visits, page views, and organic traffic levels for measuring the efficiency of your content on your website.
10. Content marketing and ROI
The best metrics to utilize while you measure your content marketing for organic or SEO are also the better metrics marketers employ to report on the content performance you publish
Increase in organic conversions
- Better ranking on average
- Page 1 Keyword growth.
- Page 1 search volume increases
- Rise in clicks and organic traffic.
Remember, goals or KPIs for every content type might differ depending on the intent, media format, and target audience.
11. Track & measure content strategy outcomes
In the process of executing content marketing, you have to first understand how your content is performing, what changes have been made, and how these changes are effectual so that you can adjust your content strategy accordingly.
If the efforts of your work are working, you could ramp it up.
Other side, if it’s not working, you’ll have to pivot and tweak your content approach.
That’s why, you try to understand your content performance.
The best way to measure the results is by determining the Key Performance Indicators(KPIs). Set out specific KPIs and decide the ways to track those performance metrics periodically.
At the endpoint, your content efforts will end with your content strategy report, by exploring if your content strategy has worked out or not.
Assessing metrics
The success of your efforts is measured through tracking of the metrics.
This indulges assessing metrics such as click-through rates, social media engagement, bounce rate, dwell time, and organic traffic.
The organic sessions are merely the single metric for tracking and assessing to identify the success of your content strategy.
While this traffic is the main metric, you’ll wish to consider, you have to pay attention to the other metrics, which might indicate low engagement or high engagement such as
Time on page: Time on page, helps you understand if your audience is identifying your content more helpful. The high click-through rate(CTR) outcomes and low time on the page could signify compelling calls to action (CTAs).
Bounce rate: how quickly do the visitors leave your pages? If your bounce rate is higher, it’s likely your content doesn’t satisfy or fulfill the search intent of your target audience.
Backlinks: Your content is valuable, and it is signified by the large count of websites through backlinks. It also signifies that your website is viewed as the thought leader in your respective industry.
Conversions: For bottom-of-funnel content, these conversions are the king. It supports you in conveying whether your content assists your audience in making a decision for your agency.
Shares: A great aspect of social media is the shares of your works, and the related content, which is shared by a large volume of audience is likely to resonate with the audience.
Search engine rankings: The higher up on the SERPs, your site content ranks, the more relevant and valuable the search engine has identified it is. ( more likely this content is to acquire organic traffic).
Indexed pages: if your site content is being indexed, it reveals that the search engines identify it as valuable and relevant thus getting displayed in the search results of search engines.
In terms of different tools you can utilize for checking the metrics, Google Search Console and Google Analytics are perhaps the most well-known.
It provides in-depth into your organic traffic where your audience is arriving from, conversions, time on page, bounce rate, and more.
12. Measure and iterate
Tracking the performance of your webpage and regular updates on Google Analytics helps you understand if your content strategy aligns with the search intent of the user, search algorithms and generates more traffic constantly.
The frequency with which you’re updating your content strategy would have a dependency on the specific business needs.
It is recommended that the agencies update their site content strategy on an annual basis or if the business circumstances change.
13. Reporting on SEO and content marketing
Crafting comprehensive reports that encompass insights on organic research, backlink analysis, and keyword rankings. For bulk keyword rank tracking, you can use software designed for agency rank tracking.
The use of non-technical language and utilizing clear visualization may help to present the data efficiently.
Some templates for your content strategy and presentation give you a better and more innovative idea of what you must track to get the best from your report efforts.
Your report must include
- Content Goals
- Sales funnel
- Highlights for the month.
- Opportunity generation
- Keywords
- Traffic generation
- Next forward steps.
The results-oriented efforts walk through creating your content strategy report, commencing with setting your business goals. You’ll enter every goal and the KPIs.
You can follow the template of the report page by page and input your own information. It’s basically setting up to perform or employ relevant calculations for your goal.
The template for your reports would allow you to create an effective report, showing your business growth from one month to another month.
This way, you can select the areas to enhance while viewing what efforts will work, what is currently working, and what requires more effort.
Many agencies utilize manual reporting tools as well like Google Data Studio, and AgencyAnalytics which are more time-saving and cost-effective.
14. Actionable insights and recommendations
Translating analytics outcomes into better actionable steps to improve the content is of utmost need at every stage of your site performance.
We have posed specific recommendations for aligning your content with the overall SEO goals.
You also might discover the original content type isn’t a better fit for attracting the searchers.
For instance, the keyword research and your market reveal that the guide post published last month must be performing better than it is. Your search results, though, imply it isn’t delivering as per the expectation.
To broaden the appeal, repackage the different kinds of content assets, to a series of blog articles.
Use industry trend reports and onsite analytics to inform or get to know which types of content resonate and give the best performance to answer the different needs of the user or audience.
Use those SEO insights in informing new content strategy if it is working and its status, and ensure every existing piece of content is performing to its fullest potential.
15. Effective client communication
Strategies to present the content strategy reports to the clients can be pursued by visual aids and accessible language.
Aside from reporting your content outcomes on KPIs, the agencies must give the reports with data-backed insights that can boost the business growth of your clients.
This may consist of campaign recommendations or useful ideas extending to the different marketing channels.
Therefore, discuss actionable data and perform the strategy.
Visualize data in an intuitive way: The client reports which are heavy on numbers and data could be difficult for the client to understand and digest.
Hence visualizing the data of content strategy reports using graphs and charts helps the clients in navigating the campaign outcomes and thus making informed decisions.
Client feedback and content evaluation
After you share your reports with all the team members or share them in a portal, Customer feedback stands as a gold mine, helping you to enhance your brand position, products, or services. It’s really a valuable source for your content ideas.
Dig into the customer reviews and feedback, send out surveys, and pose queries to your customers about their real requirements, preferences, and what they need from your content.
Then, utilize this information for crafting powerful content ideas and the perfect tunnel that is going to work for your client.
Specifically, you could be able to gain more insights into the requirements of your users in the content than you think, by really taking out the content feedback and content you have available, and how you can yield the most out of it.
Post reports for every work for your team. If you have data or content arriving from different projects that use different platforms, think of a better way to consolidate this data for your team, setting a group of links is more effective than expecting people to track with their bookmarks.
Bottom line
Remember to adapt the strategy based on the objectives. Regularly update the content strategy and review it to align with the evolving SEO changes and trends in your business landscape.
High-quality content could be a game changer when it comes to your website’s SEO. it helps illustrate to the searchers that you’re a trustworthy thought leader and fulfilling the intention of their search
By following the above strategic steps and by having a doable, solid plan in place, you’ll have a thorough, robust content strategy report worth bragging about.
With this, your content strategy report thrives as an essential entity to assess future content flow and find the right content conversion path for your business.
Tackle your own content strategy out of reach from your competitors, and learn more about how an expert SEO content strategy could boost your organic traffic, contribute to the overall digital marketing efforts, and increase conversions for your client.
Additional resources:
