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Live From #BrightonSEO
Despite spending most of their workday diving among analytics and spreadsheets on their laptops, SEO experts thrive in face-to-face conversations. Attending the series of conferences organised within the Brighton SEO workshop has clearly shown how much we were missing talking about topics that we are passionate about and live for.
A perfect example of that passion is Senior Content Marketing Consultant at Evolved Search, Lucy Alice Dodds, one of the keynote speakers at Brighton SEO. Just like a breath of fresh air, Lucy brought with her into the conference a plethora of tried and tested methods for creating content strategies… that actually work!
With a clear, simple, and straightforward mindset, Lucy's perspective on SEO strategy and content creation focuses on three main objectives. According to her, any content strategy should aim to be:
- Data-driven
- Holistic
- Actionable
This intuitive approach really hits home! A content strategy does not have to be overly complicated, but balanced and thoughtful. Lucy represents a new movement within SEO optimisation that invites you to keep your eyes on the numbers and adopt a complete approach, setting yourself up for success!
Optimise What You’ve Got
When it comes to SEO, more is not always better. Creating new content and positioning yourself as an authority within a particular industry is, without doubt, an efficient strategy for SEO, but it can quickly lead you to burn out and, what is more worrying, to start creating content for the sake of content, without paying attention to the content that you already have.
Illustrating this idea, Lucy shared a personal story about the time she was working with one of the biggest game console companies in the world, Nintendo. The Nintendo team identified that they weren’t ranking for a particular keyword, so they went ahead, wrote a blog, and hoped for the better! Lucy optimised and published the requested blog post.
And, whilst this approach generated considerable volume, it didn’t uncover the quality of traffic it obtained. In other words, was this traffic even relevant? Lucy realised that, rather than focusing on coming up with new content on a particular topic, she needed to work of content already present on her client's website so it could be optimised to its maximum potential.
This lightbulb moment led Lucy to look at the bigger picture, forcing her to adopt an approach that focussed on what her clients were currently ranking for and building upon this, as opposed to a strategy that prompts continuous content creation that would produce unpredictable and unmanageable results.
So, What’s Lucy’s Approach?
Step 1: Identify Your Top Performing Pages
Making sure that you are using the right tools is essential when it comes to reviewing your SEO. A common mistake is thinking that SEO tools are both complex and expensive but, truth is, one of the best sources of SEO performance website data is the Google Search Console! And, yes, you know it, it is also free!
According to what in SEO jargon is known as the Pareto-principle, 80% of your traffic comes almost exclusively from your top performing pages. Following Lucy's advice, using Google Analytics and Google Search Console can help you identify those top performing pages and, more importantly, keywords, providing you with baseline data upon which to build your content strategy.
Step 2: Make Your Keywords Bullet-Proof
If you thought that, after identifying your top performing keywords, you could sit back and relax... Well, you would be missing out on all the magic! To stay on top of your game, optimising your pages and investing time on your SEO strategy should be part of your everyday agenda. And Google Analytics can also help you through that research.
Through Google Analytics, you should be able to identify the keywords your pages are ranking for, allowing you to make sure your strategy is balanced and that it takes into account factors such as relevance, volume, competition, or click-through rate. Working on your keyword set will allow you to create more relevant content, while keeping your aims tight!
Step 3: Get Those Pages to Convert
Optimising your SEO will help your pages rank higher, making them more available within search engine result pages. In fact, according to Source, 75% of clicks go to the top three search results! And it is important that our pages have the right tools to convert those visitors into revenue. Once you identify top performing pages, make sure you are calling visitors to action!
There is nothing more frustrating when it comes to customer experience than being genuinely interested in exploring a product or service and not being able to further your research due to poor web design. Add colourful, impactful, and well-positioned CTAs for your visitors to click on and find what they are looking for quickly and effortlessly.
Conclusion
When designing, reviewing, or completely reformulating your content strategy, avoid making the mistake of forgetting the value of the content you have already published in your page. Make use of free and incredibly useful tools like Google Analytics or Google Search Console to get accurate and reliable data to work with and base your content creation efforts.
Through those tools, you will be able to identify and focus on your top-performing pages and keywords. Introduce that data on your content strategy and ensure that you are not only optimising those pages to the maximum but also adding relevant lead capturing and call-to-actions tools that will convert the traffic on your website into revenue.
Keep an eye on our blog page for more updates from #BrightonSEO!
About Insynth
At Insynth we deliver a predictable flow of leads, customers, and specifications for building product brands through our inbound marketing approach, proven to reach a technically demanding audience.
We use the latest marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to equip building product companies to grow sustainability in this era of digital transformation.
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major in construction marketing. We have a proven formula of bringing a variety of functionalities together including CRM Implementation, Web Design, Sales Automation, SEO, and Email Marketing to achieve your ultimate aim: Growing your business and gaining new specifiers and customers.