If you want to write killer content, it is important to follow tried and tested methods and strategies, but you should also try to think outside the box whenever possible. If you have no idea where to start, this guide will help you avoid common mistakes whilst putting together an SEO content plan that has an excellent chance of helping you achieve your most important digital marketing goals. Written in collaboration with our in-house specialists, it covers all the key points you need to consider when creating a new plan and considers a particularly useful strategy that has been successfully employed by many SEO experts in the past.

Points to Consider When Creating Killer Content

Make sure that every piece of content you produce is highly effective by taking all of the following points into consideration:

• ive ways to jump-start a brand new SEO content creation plan and one that is often successfully employed by webmasters who are in the process Evergreen Topics Outperform Trending Topics in the Long Run – While trending topics have an obvious attraction, they frequently underperform their evergreen counterparts over time. If you want to avoid making one of the most common SEO mistakes, we urge you to focus on evergreen topics when creating new content. There’s no reason to exclude trending topics altogether – some trends last for a considerable time and attract much attention while they last – but it is a mistake to place too much emphasis on them. Inevitably, once the trends run out of steam, you are left with a large volume of obsolete, irrelevant content. Choose evergreen topics instead, and you will be creating a library of content that never goes out of fashion.
• Content Geared Toward Specific Audience Personas Is More Effective – Whether you are creating content for blog posts, news articles or product pages, it will be more effective if it is geared toward a specific audience persona in each case. To create an audience persona, you first need to identify your customers’ challenges, goals and backgrounds. If you have different types of customers for different services or products, create a separate audience persona for each one. With your audience personas in place, you can now adjust the tone of each piece of content you write, ensuring that it resonates with the audience persona it is targeting. By always considering audience personas, you can avoid creating content that is irrelevant or unlikely to engage their interest.
• Calls to Action Should Be Clear and Direct – If visitors to your website finish reading a piece of content and have no idea what to do next, that content has failed in one of its primary purposes: to convince the reader to take action. Every piece of content you write should have a clear purpose and contain a call to action designed to help fulfil this purpose. Whether you want the reader to call and speak to a member of your sales team, register for a newsletter or take some other action, be sure to include an exhortation at the end of every piece of content that is generated as part of your new plan. If you find yourself writing content that has no clear purpose, it is time to reconsider your whole SEO content creation plan and strategy.
• Appropriate Word Counts Work Better – There is a tendency in the SEO world to target arbitrary word counts that bear little relation to the topics in question or the audience personas for which the content is being created. As a result, word counts for much of the content that is currently being created are sub-optimal. When creating a new SEO content plan, think carefully about the length of the articles. If you are not sure how long they should be, look at what your most successful competitors are doing. If you target a word count that has proven popular in the past for articles on the same similar topic, the content you create is more likely to appeal to your target demographic.
• Images, Infographics, Diagrams, Charts and Tables Make Content More Easily Digestible – Google and other search engines place great value on relevant, informative textual content. but if you want to hold the attention of visitors to your website, it is important to include a liberal sprinkling of visual elements on each page as well. If your entire website is dominated by large blocks of text with no images for light relief, readers may lose interest quickly and go elsewhere to find the information they seek. As such, a result that would run counter to your core SEO aims. You can hopefully see the importance of visual elements and will include them in any content creation plan that you formulate in the future. These elements should, of course, be relevant to the textual content within which they are placed.
• Strategically Placed Internal Links Extend Visit Durations and Help Search Engine Crawlers – There are a couple of very good reasons to include strategically placed links in the content you create for your website. Firstly, such links help search engine crawlers better understand your site: what it is all about, what it aims to provide to visitors and whether it can be considered an authoritative source on certain subjects. Secondly, relevant internal links will extend the average visit duration for your website as visitors will be able to find related content more easily, content that is of particular interest to them. In summary, liberal use of internal links is encouraged but only when the links in question are relevant. Linking to irrelevant content on other pages could do more harm than good as far as visit durations and your reputation are concerned.
• Search Intent is Crucial – Everybody already understands or thinks they understand the importance of keywords and phrases when creating new SEO content. However, what many organisations fail to consider when choosing which words and phrases to target for specific website pages is the intent of the people who use these search terms. Experts separate keywords and phrases into 3 primary categories of intent: informational, navigational and transactional. Informational search terms are those used by people who have just become aware of a need or just started searching for possible solutions to a problem. Navigational search terms are those used to identify specific products and services that have the potential to solve a problem, for comparison purposes. Transactional search terms are used when the intent is to make a purchase.
• The Customer Journey Should Inform Your Keyword Choices – Consumers and business customers take a journey whenever they make a new purchase: a journey that starts with being unaware of the existence of a need and finishes with loyalty to a particular brand and advocacy for that brand. Along the way, various important stages are passed, including when the potential customer discovers a problem, becomes aware of a solution and decides that a purchase will need to be made. To determine what type of search terms should be targeted on individual website pages, you will need to identify the relevant stage of the customer journey for each page.
• The Skyscraper (or Piggyback) Technique Is a Useful Shortcut – One of the most effectof building new websites is the skyscraper or piggyback technique. To use this technique, identify topics that have attracted much attention when written about by your competitors and target those topics with your content. Ideally, you should aim to create superior pieces of content and make sure that everybody who reads the original content is aware of your new and improved version. This technique can be extremely effective.

By carefully considering all of these points when creating your new content plan and writing individual pieces of content, you can provide a significant boost to your corporate SEO campaign.

Hub & Spoke: A Very Effective Content Strategy

There are several proven SEO content creation strategies in common use today, the most effective of which is, in the opinion of many experts at least, the hub & spoke strategy. Using the hub & spoke model from which the strategy’s name derives, topics are organised into primary hubs, with secondary topics or subtopics, coming off these hubs as individual spokes. When implemented correctly, a hub & spoke content creation strategy will help drive more relevant traffic to your website, generate more leads throughout the purchasing journey and make your overall digital marketing strategy more cohesive.

If you are starting your first SEO content plan, you could do a lot worse than the hub & spoke strategy. However, it may not be the perfect option for every SEO campaign, so you may want to consult a specialist if you have any doubts. If you would like to talk to one of our experts about SEO content creation plans and strategies, please feel free to contact the team at High Jump Digital by phone or email.