Create a Winning SEO Content Marketing Strategy

1. SEO Content Strategy Training: Do you have a website but your content doesn't rank well on Google? Have you been posting new content on a regular basis, but it doesn't provide you with a boost in organic traffic. One of the major factors in ranking your website on Google is having content that Google loves to rank. There is no point in creating content for the sake of creating content, there's too much competition out there. Adding random keywords to your content is not enough to expect positive results. You need to develop an edge over your competitors. And that edge is following an SEO content strategy. My name is Tom, and I'm passionate about traffic and online marketing. In my experience, I've worked with managed advertising campaigns that focus on page traffic as well as organic traffic from Google. I spent a couple of years working in an SEO agency and I received a firsthand view of SEO inaction. What I can tell you is that there are proven templates for all SEO activities that work and help website's rank on the first page of Google. In this class, I will reveal to you how to develop a winning SEO content strategy. Inside you will learn how to find the right topics that will engage your audience and get Google's attention so that your content ranks higher. You will learn how to create content drafts in which you know how many headings you need, the WordCount of your content, where to use images. And generally, you will know everything you need to create an SEO focused article even before you start writing. If you have existing content on your website, I'll show you how to audit the content and receive easy to implement tweaks so that Google will reward your efforts with higher-ranking potential. And you will learn the tools that greatly improve the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. Chef with blunt lives will struggle, just like trying to rank pages on Google without any tools. If you don't use the right resources, your content will be outranked by competitors that use the right tools and figure out how to reach page one of Google. This class is focused on writing SEO optimized articles and preparing content plans for the right keywords in the right format. Starch, growing your online Google visibility today with an effective SEO content strategy. I'll see you in the next lesson. 2. Content Marketing 101: Hi, Tom here. As this class is focused on creating an SEO content strategy so that your pages rank higher on Google and bringing more organic traffic, you will need to set up to Webmaster Tools on your website. Firstly, you need Google Analytics. This will track all visitors to your website. And secondly, you have to set up Google Search Console. This tool shows you valuable SEO focused information about your website. If your website has technical issues that prevent a Google crawler going through your website, then even with the best content marketing strategy, you will limit your ranking potential. If you need more information about Google Analytics or Google Search Console, I recommend you view my class on growing your search rankings with SEO strategies. In that class, I covered the foundation of SEO and the tools you require to rank on Google. There's a link in the description below. In this lesson, I want to go over the basics of content marketing. Firstly, what is content? The goal of your content is high rankings on Google and organic traffic from search results. I'm concerned here about written pieces of content that Google can crawl and index. These can be blog articles, product descriptions, homepage texts, landing pages, infographics in any part of your website that needs organic traffic. What is content marketing? Content marketing is all about creating content that users find valuable and then promoting it through various channels. More specifically, content marketing can involve social media campaigns, pay traffic campaigns, search traffic, and in essence, any type of action that gets the content in front of potential customers. This class is all about SEO content marketing. I will show you the methods to create content that your users love, as well as content that catches Google's interests and then potentially rewards you with higher rankings. To succeed in ranking your content on Google, you need a strategy because you cannot write content about any subject that's suitable for you at a few keywords here and they're posted on your website and expect good results. Every piece of content that you post on your website has to be thoroughly researched. First. Of course, it has to be written well and focused on providing value to your customers. But behind the scenes, you need to pick out what keywords your content is focusing on. How are you going to format the content? What headings and how many headings are you going to use? These are the elements that you have to figure out before you even put pen to paper and start writing. I like to do the above steps in bulk and prepare a content plan first before writing anything. The process in the content strategy that I will share with you involves the following. First, you have to find the right topics that your customers are searching for. Then you have to determine the type of content that you need to create. Then prepare your content drafts or optimize your existing content for a particular keyword. Publish it, and track your results. Let me show you how I like to structure a content plan in the next lesson. 3. The Professional Content Plan: Welcome back. Creating the right content is not just about writing. The preliminary step is doing research to see what content is in-demand at this moment. And it's your website capable of ranking on the first page of Google for that content? Because if you write about a topic that is so competitive that you have no chance of ranking. You are wasting time and energy just as well if you write about a topic so specific that nobody is even searching for it. Well, it goes against the principle of getting organic traffic. I do this research and prepare a content plan before any writing. The content plan gives me a good indication of topics that are in demand and within reach for ranking on Google. It doesn't have to be complicated. So I'll show you in my simple format for content plans. I use Excel or Google Sheets. And here are the most important details. The title of the article, the focus keyword for the article. What is the Search volume on Google? The length, so the worst count of this article and an editable draft link. I'll talk more about this in the next lesson. But as you can see, very, very simple. And this content plan, it's works really, really well because when I create like say, ten different content pieces or 20, I have a whole overview of them here. I have the most important details, which is like the workout. So I know how many hours I have to invest in writing the content and the volume which gives me the welder potential for traffic. What I also like to do is because for content marketing, there are two ways to go about it. You can create new content, which is something that you will be doing. But also if your website has existing content, then you can optimize this content for rankings. So I like to separate the two. So I always have a tab for new content and then one for optimizing the content. So I use the exactly the same column headings. The only difference is that I'm going to include the URL of the page that I'm going to change and optimize. Let's move on and discuss everything you need to know about finding the right topics with keyword research. 4. How to Find the Right Topics: Now I want to discuss a very important area. How do you find the right topics to write about as you are involved in your industry and you know the popular questions that your potential customers are asking. These questions include valuable and not so valuable keywords. And it's your job to decide which keywords are worth pursuing and which awards skipping. We start with doing some keyword research and generating a list of potential topics, then you need to answer the question, is there a demand for your content? There are tools that simplify this process. But before we go into more details, I wanted to do a keyword research 101 quick summary, because not all keywords are valuable for your business, and it may come as a surprise to you, but high volume keywords typically are not good targets. So here's an example. Let's say someone is searching for diet. This is a popular search term and it has massive volumes. It's what's known as a generic keyword. These are made up of one to two words and they are core keywords for your business. This is not the way to go because they have massive volumes. So a lot of competition to rank and they are not very specific. Actually, they're the opposite of specific. So even if you get traffic, the quality will be bad and the conversions will be low. There is another type of keyword that is easier to rank and will give you better conversions. Introducing long tail keywords. These are made up of multiple keywords. The search intent is easy to identify as the phrase adds contexts to the keywords. An example would be keto diet recipes. It's much more specific than before. There are less searches in Google, but this also means less competition. The reason I'm talking about this is that when a keyword research tool, you can get ideas of keywords to target, to get her with estimated monthly volumes and a ranking difficulty score. So let's go to the tool that I use and I'll show you the information you need to know when doing keyword research and finding potential topics to write about. In my example, I'm going to start by using the generic keyword car battery. I will target the UK. So let's go and do that right now. This is a trips and I am in the keywords explorer section. This will generate a lot of different cured ideas for me. I select here Google and I type in my search term, which in this case it will be car battery. Let's specify the country for United Kingdom. Let's do a search. So a truss is a really popular keywords tool and it's actually valuable for other things as well. I mean, you can do a lot of different research, but in this tutorial, I just want to show you how you can generate different keyword ideas. Because when you do your keyword research using keyword tools, there are other tools that you can try as well, but you start off pretty generic. Car battery is a generic term, and as we can see here, the keyword difficulty is 50. So it's like a really hard, difficult. You will have to develop a lot of backlinks just to rank in the first page of Google. But if we are creating content about the toe on the topic of car battery, we need to find out which keywords are worth pursuing. So we need to find out keywords where the keyword difficulty is much, much lower. Over here we have different matching terms that we can review. We have popular questions. Now these popular questions there gives you a good idea about the search volume for it, but they also give you a good idea about the different types of topics that you can write about. So let's click on View all because also these questions here, they are, they are actual phrases that people type into Google when they do a search. But there are also a perfect example of long tail keywords. So I'll click on View All. Now I have a list of really popular long-tail keywords. I can see the keyword difficulty in the atria tools. The keyword difficulty, I mean, it depends on, on your website, it depends how well your pages built. But generally, if it's not, if the website is not too popular, I would limit the queue or difficulty to anything up to a score of 11. Anything above that is much more harder to rank. I have the keyword difficulty here. I see the search volume here. And if I also want to have a look at the top search results, I can just click here on SERP, which stands for search engine results page. Then I can see the top ten results for this keyword, how to disconnect the car battery. And over here I have analysis about these websites. I can see how many backlinks they have, how many referring domains they have, an estimated amount of traffic that they get from this keyword. But in this lesson, we're focusing on generating keywords ideas. Here we have the keyword difficulty. Let's limit it to, let's say 12. Looking at this, even the first one, how to fit a car battery. That's a nice topic to write about. Keyword difficulty is eight, which generally means that you will have to build probably about eight to 15 backlinks to rank for this volume, 450. So that's pretty decent volume. Again, we're not looking for terms that have a massive amount of volume, like in the thousands. Unless the keyword difficulty is low, then, then it's great. Looking over some more results here, we see the search volume is getting lower. But this could be an idea how to fit a car battery. This could even be the keyword and the title as well. Here's another good one. How long can a car battery sit? Unused? Keyword difficulty seven, That's fine. Volume is, is okay. But these are questions in this keyword tool. There are other ways that you can do keyword research. On the left-hand side, you can look for related terms. You get a whole list of different terms. Now this is limited to the UK. Here volume €1.4 million car parts, but again, 1.4 million volume, lot of volume keyword difficulty isn't the biggest, I would say medium. However, not very specific. The generic. You want to target keywords that are specific so that you know the intent, you know exactly when somebody types this into the search, you don't know what they are searching for. The more specific you get, the better quality traffic you'll get from Google, and the more conversions you'll get. Again, let's just limit this to say 12. We have some terms here that would be easy to rank for. This one has a lot of volume keyword difficulty, easy. 12 volt battery. This could actually be worth to ranking for this term. For some people they will be looking for a car battery. For other people would using this term, they may be looking for a different type of battery, but the volume is there. So I would definitely create some content around this keyword. But basically the task here is to browse through all of the keywords, make sure that they have decent volume. Keyword difficulty is not too hard. Make a list of this, and then you can include these in your content plan. Like this one, Argos battery charger, lot of volume, not my difficulty. You're probably not going to include this in your article because people are looking for an Argos battery charger. So it would be better if they were looking to buy a new battery charges or second-hand battery charger. But Argos battery charger, they already fed to go into Argos to buy it. Okay, so moving on, you can also click here to get some new search suggestions for the term car battery. So let's limit the keyword difficulty to 12. Overlooking these results. Let me see. Well car battery weights, that might be a term that you could use. 200 people are searching for it. Car batteries, solar charger. This should be easy to run for 200 volume. That's always something. But basically what I'm trying to show you here is that this tool, it generates a lot of different keyword ideas, but you also get a glimpse of whether it's worth pursuing it. If you want to see something that has a low key or difficulty and decent amount of volume. Now in your industry, you know your customers. You know the question is do they are asking, you know, what they are searching in Google? You can use a keyword tool to see exactly is it worth pursuing? Because before this, when I just typed in car battery into the results. Although if I was selling car batteries, this would be a nice term to rank for. It's pretty unrealistic to rank for it with a new website. That's why I'm looking for long-tail keywords to make the process of ranking for it much, much easier. Just to summarize, if you're creating a list of potential keywords, and then based on these keywords, you can create a suitable title. Then when you go to your content plan, you know the title, you know the focus keyword, the volume is visible in your keyword tool. And then in the next lesson, I'll show you how to create a editable draft link and how to determine the word count for your new content. Thank you for watching. I hope this has been valuable. 5. How to Generate SEO Focused Content: Hi Tom, here. In the previous lesson, you learned all about brainstorming keywords and topics and checking if they are valuable to write about. In this lesson, I want to share with you the easiest way to create a draft for your new content. When creating content, there are a number of aspects that you need to optimize to achieve higher Google rankings. These include but are not limited to, how many headings to use. How many images will you use? The number of paragraphs? How many times will you use your main keyword? What are the secondary keywords that you will focus on? And how many times will you use the secondary keywords. Now the amount of keywords and how many times you use them is very important. Because if you don't use the right keywords, the right number of times, well, how will Google know to rank your content for that particular keyword? But also you have to be careful because if you use the keyword too many times, while Google will pick up this as suspicious behavior. And it will realize that you're just stuffing your content with keywords. And for this, you can get penalized. Fortunately, there is an easy way that you can generate content droughts that specify exactly what your content needs to rank amongst the best pages. This is surfer SEO. It's an invaluable tool for generating content drafts, content audits. And I'll walk you through this process right now. And after this lesson, you will be astonished as how easily you can create SEO optimized content drafts. Before moving on, I would just like to mention that server SEO, it's a product that is growing. And as of recently, you can do a lot of the keyword research that I did in hatreds. You can do it on this platform. The reason I use hatred is I have a preference for it. I find it much easier to do any type of backlink research keyword analysis. And I know that HFS, it's like the one that all of the SEO agencies used for that type of research. However, there are many other tools and surfer is actually quite inconvenient bundle for combining content and keyword research before you actually generate the content drafts. Just to clarify, after reviewing the keywords from the last session, I decided to create my content that raft based on the keyword, car battery keeps dying. This was will be the focus keyword volume for that keyword was 400. The keyword difficulty was low, it was under ten. And the title, which I talked about will be like five reasons why your car battery keeps dying. Now this can be changed to seven reasons. Nine reasons. It all depends what the word count will be. And let's go to surfer and generate a draft. And then you'll see the word count as well as I'll show you a editable draft link. Here I am logged into surfer SEO and I mean the content editor section. I type in my keyword here. The keyword was car battery keeps dying. I select the United Kingdom, and then I click on create content editor. So our draft is ready. Now let's edit it. Here we have our content draft. The content comes here. And when we write our content, we get our content score. But before you do any writing, you need to customize your draft. Here you have the results from Google. So the top results from Google. You can see the page. You can see the content score because surfer goes into the page and create a content score based on the content here you can see the page authority and the word count. And your job here is to review the results and make sure that only relevant pages are selected. Here. Why does my car battery keep dying? It's a blog post. It's relevant to my content that I wanted to write about car battery keeps dying. So I will select it. For this example. Pretty much all of these ones are relevant. They are blogposts. Sometimes what happens is you're writing a blog post and some of the results here, maybe I linked to a contact page, or it could be a product description page. Now that's not a direct competitor and the content on that page is irrelevant to your page. So That's when you would de-selected. Because what surfer does for the content draft, it compares the content of all of the top search results. Generate I draft based on similar keywords, similar topics, similar headlines, similar word linked. And then becomes the content structure for your content that you will need to write up. Okay, So let's move down. And here we have the content structure. So surfer generated will generate a content draft for us. We would need to write at least 1447 words. Of course, if you go over, it's even better. We feel. So how many headings we need, how many paragraphs and how many images to use within our content. Next, we have the terms to use. Now this is very useful because surfer goes through your competitors and analyzes the main keywords and then provides you with them here. What you need to do is you need to just review the keywords and make sure that the keywords are relevant to your article. These keywords provide you with an outline for your content, but also provide you with certain topics for your article. So it's very, very useful. But if you see some keywords which are completely not relevant to your article, than just deselect them. Similarly, here are some additional keywords. If you find that they are relevant to your content or to your niche, then make sure you select them. Now topics and questions I like this section because it gives you more information about potential while more ideas about potential content. So if you need to write, like before we saw about 1500 words and you don't know what to write about, you can just review the different topics here. Learn how to fix the car drain could be irrelevant. You could select it. Why do car batteries die? You could select it. You can go through all of these and just select the ones that are suitable for you and relevant to you. Then moving down, if you need to add any notes, you can add them here. Once this is set up, let's click here. Now we have our content draft. In the left column. It's just a standard document editor. The real benefit is here in the right column. As you write your content, you will see your content score improve. The content structure, gets updated. And what I really like is that all of the keywords, once you type them here, they will get highlighted. That battery. And as you can see, as it's included in the content, you can see it turns to green. So the recommendation is to use this term two to four times. Scrolling down you have all of the different keywords that were reviewed in the process earlier. Then you just write your content and they get highlighted. Now another useful feature is you go to here, outline, click on titles, and then you can see the titles. So this is the H1 tag that was used by your competitors. It gives you a lot of ideas. Then you see the topics and questions here. Then click on headings. You will see actual headings used by other competitors. The headings here, they are. The H2 tags, could be h3 tags as well. And I'll give you a good idea what to write about. What you can do is you can even use the same headings or you can tweak the headings to your own liking and make it unique to your own content. As I said, when you're writing the content, you will see the content score increase. You will see the keywords being filled in. And once the content score reaches the green area, while you have an SEO optimized article, at that point, you can publish it. Now in my content plan, if you recall, I included I shareable link. That's because you can create the content draft here and then you can share it with your writer. And the shareable link is really, really good because you don't have to be logged into surfer in order to write the content. So you just click here, share, copy the link. And then here's the link. The word count from memory. It was about 1500 words. That concludes this lesson, these drafts, and they show you all the keywords, headings, paragraphs, and there's so much more information. I mean, so many ideas about the content that you can include in your article. So I find this really, really valuable and it's just the easiest way of creating contents. In the next lesson, I wanted to discuss existing content optimization also using surfer SEO. I'll see you then. 6. Boost Rankings with a Content Audit: Welcome back. In this lesson, I'm going to show you how you can perform an audit on your existing content. If your website is new and you are using the content drafts to create new content, then this section still applies to you. The content audit reveals different parts that you can optimize that are not included in the initial content drafts. This is a sample page that I will use to create and content audit. As you can see, how long do car batteries last. That's the title of this blog post. And we have some paragraphs, headings, some texts, bullet points, an image here. So this is the content and we'll see what surfer generates and how we can improve on this content. Let's copy this URL. And now let's go to surfer. Here I am in surfer SEO and this time I'm in the audit section, I will paste my URL here. I need to give my optimization I certain keyword. For the sake of this example, let's use the same keyword that we used before. Let's set the results for the United Kingdom. And let's create the audit. Now that our audit has been completed, let's edit it. The audit is formatted a little bit differently than the content drafts. However, you can start by selecting the relevant competitors. Once again, you can go through this list of Google search results, find the articles that are relevant to the ones that you are competing against. And once you have done that, just click on, let's go. This will update the content audit so that it is relevant against your competitors. We start with the content score. So it has analyzed the content of your blog. Then here we can see how your content compares to the top results of Google. And as you can see, with a rating of 32, there's a whole lot of room for improvement to make our content stand out and rank better on Google. Next, missing common backlinks. This is not always available, it depends on which region you are in. However, if you click here, you can see all of the common buckling. So these are, these are the common backlinks that are shared amongst websites that are ranking in the top ten positions of Google. Now this is very valuable and is very useful because you need to build backlinks to promote your content. This gives you a view of where to get your backlinks from. Basically, instead of doing a whole lot of keyword research, where to get backlinks which is valuable. Of course, you can just see what your competitors are doing. Go to these websites, create your own backlinks. And well, it's like a go-to place for buckling generation. So it's very, very useful here. This is a relatively new feature. It's not available in every country, but everywhere I've used it, It's available and I find it's really, really useful. Next, internal links. So we have a recommendation here, basically to add more internal links, like on this webpage. What this means with internal links is the more internal links are pointing to this page. It's like assigned to Google that this page is more important because other pages are pointing to it. So if you add some more internal links, it can help. Next, we have the terms to use section. Here you can see the popular keywords that are used in the top performing pages. And you can see how many times the keywords are used. Here. You can see how many times you are using the keywords. So as you can see, there are lots of keywords that you are not using. Most of your focuses just on the keyword car battery. What you would have to do is you have to go to your content, add more content, or the relevant keywords to your content. This will definitely give you a boost to your Google rankings. Next we have the word count, so our content is 707 words. Recommended. Word length is anywhere from 839.522 thousand words. The suggestion is add more content, which is very easy in this particular case because we have all of the different content, all of the different keywords here that we can use to add more content. Similarly, we can see we need to add more headings. H2 through to H6 tags, more headings to our content, add more paragraphs. And this one, this one is not as important. It just means how many words are highlighted in bold? Exact keyword. So this means like our content is being optimized for car battery keeps dying. Here we can see how many times we're using debt particular keyword and in which locations the recommendation is to add the cure to the title and add mark of the keywords to the body. And it compares it to the other pages. Next we have partial keywords, so you get some information here about then. Then we have the page structure. This is very similar to actually the content drafts in that you can see H1 tags, H2 tags, paragraphs. And please pay attention to this part here, images. So the recommendation is to add six to 20 images to your blog posts. While 20 images, that's a little bit too much. But we could definitely adds, make sure that we have at least a minimum of six images. The good thing about him at adding images to your content is that each image gives you an opportunity to add alt tags. And in the alt tags, you can include keywords. It's a good way to add more keywords to your content. Then we have the title and Meta description linked. Your page will be visible on Google. The title and Meta description, That's what we'll be visible in the Google listing. It's basically a way to advertise your listing on the search engine results page. Make sure that you don't want to go overboard because if it's too long, then Google will truncate the title and the description, but make sure you use all the characters that you have. This gives you a recommendation how much longer your title should be as far as your description. Then you have the time to first byte load time. While this has everything to do with your website loading, if your website is a little bit too slow while you need to go investigate with your hosting provider what you can do to boost your load times. Maybe, for example, if you're using WordPress, you can add a plugin to boost the load times of your page. Once you go through all of these tips and let's say you tweak your content. Well, you need to find out how your content ranks. Then you go to refresh this content audit will analyze all of your new content and it will update all of these requirements. Once everything is green, then your content is fully optimized. And again, just like before, we can copy the link pasted into our spreadsheet. And that is a shareable link. So somebody may be a technical guy or maybe your content writer. They can view this report and they don't have to be logged into surfer. And that's how you do a content audit. It's pretty similar to a content draft. But as I mentioned before, I especially like the common buckling section because it's an excellent way to start building backlinks. Just compare your work to competitors, go to their sources and build those back links. Now let's say you just published your article and it's been about four or five months, it may still be worth running a content audit on that article because it will give you an idea of how you can update its content. And also it will give you an idea about what backlinks you can create. Thank you for watching. I hope this has been very valuable to you. 7. Tracking your Content Marketing Performance: You have written articles and publish them to your website. Now what? Well now it's the time to track the performance. Google Analytics and Google Search Console are good general SEO tools that you should be using. Through them, you will get an overview of the increasing traffic from your new content. But as your content is always focused on primary and secondary keywords, you need a way to see if you are ranking for those keywords. There are tools known as rank trackers that do this job very well. There are many tools for this. I recommend you use one of these. The first one is a waitress. You've already seen me use this tool for keyword research. And I really liked the stool because you can use it for anything keyword research, backlink research, site audit. And one of the tools is a rank tracker. In the basic package, I believe you have 500 words that you can keep track of. So this is a really, really good option for anything to do with SEO. Now if you want an alternative, more economical alternative, then try this one. This is Senator, and it's also an All-in-one SEO tool. Through this, you can, while you can keep track of which keywords you are ranking for, but you can also do keyword analysis, backlink analysis. I have used this tool in the past and it takes a while to learn, but the keyword tracking tool, it's very useful. So I recommend this as an option. This is a sample reported a generated through senator. And at first you have summary of Google Analytics and Google Search Console statistics. But then scrolling down, you have the organic keyword performance. So this is the rank tracker. So you will see the keyword and what URL the traffic is going to. And then you see your current drinking position, the previous ranking position. And you see whether your rankings are improving or decreasing. I really, really valuable tool highly recommend that you consider this one. That's it for dragging. You need to get proper feedback so that you know whether your content strategy is working. So I highly recommend you invest in appropriate rank Drucker. Now, in the next lesson I want to summarize what we have covered and I want to share with you a bonus training on checking your website's FeO technicals. 8. Next Steps: Well done for making it to the end of this training. Now it's time for you to work on your content marketing strategy and start writing Google Optimized Content. Follow the proven strategy of finding keywords that interest customers and don't have much competition. Generate a content plan for at least one month ahead, prepared the draft, write the content, review page performance via keywords tracking tool. There is a resource section to this training. You can access it by going to search operative.com forward slash content bonus. I've also included a bonus lesson on checking your website from a technical SEO perspective. In it, you'll learn how to run a crawler through your website and discovered technical SEO issues that needs to be fixed. If you're interested in learning, they're foundational skills for SEO, then I recommend you take my beginner SEO class, grow your search rankings with SEO strategies. There is a link in the description below this video. Thank you for staying to the end. It's been a pleasure teaching you. Good luck in your content strategy.