SEO Tips: How to Redesign Your Content Strategy

|

website marketing and development at sydney australia

Have you ever done an SEO in order to beat your competitor on SERP?

Some people might argue that it’s unhealthy to limit the market as a duel between two opposite rivals, especially in today’s fast-developing world. However, some marketing leaders like to do this kind of stuff to motivate their staff. They believe that you can build your team’s competitive spirit when they can define their “enemy”.

Aside from the pros and cons, there is a good chance that you will eventually stumble on a company that thinks this way.

How to Redesign Your Content Strategy

To do this, The Website Marketing Group team is suggesting to use the following model in order to visualize the content landscape:

By using the following methodology, you should be able to build a content strategy, which enables you to:

  • Expand your visibility into areas currently considered business threats.
  • Understand in detail the dogfight between you and your competitor, as well as how to gain the upper hand in this battle.
  • Expand your visibility through a focus on where your audience is being underserved.

The methodology puts two companies against each other across an unlimited number of keywords, using search volume and click curve data to understand each brand’s current reach. It then classifies each keyword so that they can be slotted into the model above.

Keywords & Click Curve Data

You will need as many relevant keywords as you can lay your hands on, grouped by topic. For each keyword you will need:

  • Your organic rank.
  • Your competitor’s organic rank.
  • Exact match local search volume.

You will also need click curve data in a separate table. Once you have that data in two tables you’ll first need to estimate current traffic for both you and your competitor from each keyword. Do this by multiplying the exact match search volume by the CTR figure corresponding to current rank (simple vlookup to retrieve this).

Measure Traffic Differences

Work out the percentage difference between your traffic and your competitors. If your competitor receives more traffic for a keyword, the figure should be negative.

Use if statements to ensure that where both brands receive no traffic a figure of 0 is returned, or a large positive figure (I use 1000 percent) if your brand receives a lot of traffic and your competitor receives none at all. You need to use these statements because percentage change involves division and if 0 figures you will have errors returned.

Classify Each Keyword

Classify each keyword based on our content landscape model using “nested if” statements. The criteria is described below:

Once we have applied your nested if statement across all keywords and related each keyword to a place on the content landscape we can use filters to quickly isolate the keywords we’re interested in.

Be Visual

Use pivot tables to quickly show the number of searches in each sector, and other details, such as how much traffic each brand is getting within the dogfight sector, or the size of the business success sector relative to the business threat sector.

Here, your keyword grouping comes into their own as you can visualize both the overall content landscape and the landscape for just a small subset of similar terms. Despite the lack of a proportionally sized Venn, you have been able to visualize for your client how well their content serves the consumers need, as well as indicating which topics they should be focusing their content creation on in order to take the SEO fight to their main competitor and steal their SEO market share.

Prioritize Terms

As a next step, you could prioritize the most important terms, a process which enables you to make the task of the content ideation much more disciplined and less prone to becoming one endless, unfocused brainstorm. Simply take all the opportunity and threat keywords from above and estimate how difficult it will be to improve ranking for these keywords using a tool, like keyword difficulty estimator. You can then multiply the difficulty score by the search volume for each keyword to give a weighted score for how important each keyword is.

Brainstorm

Hold a brainstorming session focused on the topics identified as a priority in the graph above.