This article talks about the efforts and strategies you can apply to improve your monthly traffic with just seven easy-to-follow steps.
Step 1: Is Auditing Existing Keyword Strategy
Begin with an audit of the client’s existing keywords. For example, the customer had already compiled a list of 300 keywords that they intended to target across numerous categories.
Let’s say, these are the most prominent ones:
- Project management
- Process management
- Workflow management
Furthermore, the following are also included:
- Content marketing
- SEO
- Computer science
As a result, the initial step was to eliminate all irrelevant terms. Everything that wasn’t related to process management had to be removed. Moreover, we generally advise our clients to focus on no more than 1-2 niches when it comes to SEO.
Ranking for SEO themes might certainly deliver some relevant traffic to our client’s website, but the chances of ranking for these target keywords are extremely slim. When ranking your website, Google takes into account the niche.
Another problem discovered was that some keywords were consuming each other. For example, the client had three to four versions of the keyword “process management,” each with its own article.
- Business process management
- Process management
- BPM
Lastly, it is recommended to separate all of the target keywords into three priority groups:
- Free points – These keywords have moderate to traffic jams, minimal rivalry, and a high cost-per-click (CPC). They are the most important content elements, so they must be written as soon as possible.
- Rewarding difficulties – These keywords are more difficult to rank for, but they can yield incredible results. They have medium to high traffic and a high CPC, but they’re a lot more competitive (and difficult to rank for if you’re new to SEO). As a result, they were only a secondary concern.
- Nice-to-haves. These are worthwhile keywords to pursue, but they aren’t as significant as the other two.
Step 2: Is Content Audit
If the client already had a writing team providing content when you arrived. They had about 100 blog entries online, and the writers were producing new content every week. So, the next step was to go over all of the current content and evaluate if we were on the right track.
The biggest flaws that you will probably notice are below.
- The contents didn’t match the keyword search aim. The article, for example, discussed the advantages of process management, and the word used was “business process management” (and not about business process management in general).
- Opinion articles made up some of the content (instead of educational). Opinion posts, for the most part, do not rank well on Google. Let’s imagine you’re looking to rank for the term “resume.” A resume builder or a guide on how to make a resume would rank higher. An opinion post about how The Resume is Dead would not make the cut (use this instead).
As a result, the next stage was to figure out what you would do with all of this data (and get the most out of them). Look over all of the previously released blog posts and categorized them as follows:
- Great – these articles are pretty accurate; they simply need a few tweaks.
- Salvable – Despite the fact that the post is unlikely to rank for the keyword, it can be repurposed into something more valuable (and parts of the existing content piece can be reused).
- Unsalvageable – The content piece falls well short of expectations and cannot be used.
We saved all of the “excellent” content pieces and redesigned anything “salvageable” later.
Step 3: New Content Marketing Direction
In this case, the main issue was that they weren’t SEO experts: they knew how to write good content, but good content isn’t always SEO material.
As a result, you can devise two techniques to help them move in the right direction:
- Creating content outlines is a task that requires a lot of time and effort. We offered each writer an outline that included all of the important information they needed to include in the piece.
- Creating writer guidelines that outlined all of the essential parameters for producing high-quality SEO content.
The key distinction between SEO content and generic content is that the former is prepared with the user’s search intent in mind while the latter is not.
Moreover, keep in mind what the Googler is looking for while searching for a particular keyword. Then, you produce material with that aim in mind. The client’s writing team was repeating the same point at the time.
We started making outlines for each term to fix this. In order for this post to rank, the blueprint detailed exactly what topics the writer needed to include.
In general, it is recommended that you start the content marketing campaigns with a set of writer guidelines. This guarantees that the SEO writers you select are well-versed in your requirements.
Step 4: Ongoing Interlinking
An internal link is a link that connects two pages on the same domain. Consider backlinks, but this time, they’re from your website to your website.
Example:
- Choose an article to link to. Consider the phrase “business process improvement.”
- With the following query, Google its term on your domain.
- Link the article you’re now interlinking to all of these pages. In our situation, we’d open each of these, press Control + F, type “process improvement,” and click the link to the article on process improvement.
- Repeat the process for all relevant phrases. For example, the terms “business process improvement” and “improve process” are interchangeable.
After we finished the initial interlinking run, we set up a method for interlinking additional content (i.e., ALL existing articles were properly linked to each other).
Step 5: Improving Blog Visuals And Readability
The readability of the content is important. Moreover, long lines of writing paired with a slew of plainly stock images don’t make for an enjoyable read.
Two steps to address this:
- Stock photographs were prohibited, and writers were encouraged to utilize relevant graphs, charts, tables, and other visual aids. We used Draw.io (for charts and graphs) and Canva for this (for anything more graphic).
- Custom CSS boxes were created. To make the generic text more visual, CSS was used to generate graphic boxes.
Step 6: Keep Track And Improve Headlines
The headline of an article is considered as a ranking factor in determining whether or not the content will rank.
For example, let’s pretend your content is ranked #4 and has a CTR of 20%.
Google compares your average click-through rate to that of your competitors in the same position. For example, your #4 post has a CTR of 20%, while your competitors have a CTR of 12%. This indicates that your material is more relevant and, as a result, should appear higher in search results (as long as other SEO metrics say the same).
As a result, you have to check Google Search Console to track article CTRs and make adjustments as needed.
Step 7: Continuous Monitoring And Improvement
Keep track of the progress and make tweaks and adjustments as needed.
To guarantee that your content strategy is working and producing justifiable search volume you need to keep track of the rankings.
You can use the following checklist to determine why a certain content link was not ranking:
Is the information as thorough as it might be?
- Is there anything else you’d like us to mention?
If not, restructure and improve the article. To put it another way, make it more visually appealing or complete, and include more information.
- Is the material relevant to the keyword on which it should rank?
If this isn’t the case, edit the article to include the term.
- Is the website’s content linked?
If not, run the article through an interlinking test.
- Is the headline of the story “clickable”?
If that doesn’t work, try experimenting with different headlines.
Conclusion
In this case study, you just need to follow industry’s best practices as you guide. Apply some personal and critical thinking on how your customer does their search in Google. There is no such secret sauce to all of these but you don’t need rocket science to understand SEO.
Furthermore, the above-mentioned SEO practices were still recommended in 2021!
But what does this imply for you personally?
It implies you may use these exact same strategies on your blog in 2021 and receive fantastic results.
Depending on your business, product, and experience, implementing them on your own can be tough. That’s why we’ve made it our mission to help one-of-a-kind businesses succeed in SEO. Whether you want us to assist your staff in improving their SEO knowledge or manage your SEO and content entirely, we can help.