How a Content Strategy Agency Can Boost Your SEO and Business

Content marketing has become a major component of a business’s overall marketing strategy, but there’s no getting away from the fact that it can be a lot of work. In this article, we’re going to look at what’s involved in crafting a content strategy to boost both your search engine optimisation and your business development efforts – and show you how the right content strategy agency can be the perfect strategic partner for your business.

Where to start with a content strategy

To craft an effective content strategy, you need to know what you’re trying to achieve from it – whether you’re going it alone or enlisting a content strategy agency to help. 

Defining your content strategy objectives

It’s important not to lose sight of the fact that a content strategy is ultimately there to help your business make money. To be effective, a content strategy therefore needs to be closely aligned with your broader business objectives. In the earliest stages of your content strategy work, you’ll sit down with your content agency to discuss and refine the objectives of your content marketing.

There are lots of different business goals content can help with, but if you’re going to put some budget behind a content strategy then it’s important firstly to identify what your objectives are, and secondly to set measurable, quantifiable goals that tie in with your wider marketing and business development aims. 

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you might want to set could include:

• Increasing your website traffic
• Boosting engagement from/with your target audience
• Turning more enquiries into sales
• Driving sales of a specific product or service
• Customer acquisition and/or retention
• Brand awareness or positioning

Can you spot any samples from above in the image below?

Once you have a clear idea of the goals you’re working towards, you’ll be able to discuss with your agency what types of content would best meet these objectives. That said, it’s still important to build some flexibility into your objectives to account for the unexpected. Whether it’s a pandemic, a breaking news story affecting your industry or a new product or service taking the market by storm. 

Identifying your target audience and persona development

Having identified your objectives, defining your target audience and understanding their motivations is a crucial next step to crafting a strategy to create content that will appeal to them. If you already have a marketing strategy, and your content strategy will effectively be an extension of that, the chances are that you already have a clear understanding of this and you may even have developed personas already. If not, there are a few things to think about (unless you’re handing over the work to a content strategy agency, of course!).

Market research is essential for understanding consumer behaviour, giving you valuable insights into the reasons why people might buy your product or service, the challenges they solve for them and the trends and dynamics governing your niche. It will also help you pinpoint the exact demographics you need to target with your content strategy, whether that’s parents with toddlers, women aged 50 to 70, or university students in a particular location.

You can conduct market research quantitatively via data analysis tools, or qualitatively through methods such as surveys or interviews. A mix of these methodologies gives you the bigger picture and adds colour to it with individual insights and anecdotes, which might enlighten you about specific preferences and pain points you can help your customers overcome.

Armed with these insights, you can then create buyer personas to visualise your target audience. This involves creating imaginary, named people with the attributes, challenges and needs you’ve identified, giving you a concrete image of your typical customers that you can keep in mind when creating content to appeal to them. 

Personas make it easier to tailor content so that it resonates with specific segments of your audience and adds value at the various stages in their buying journey. That could mean tweaking the language of an email campaign to highlight a particular product and the challenge it solves, or it might mean crafting another type of content altogether to appeal to a different group of ideal customers.

Conducting content audits: assessing your current content assets

You’ve set your goals and defined your target audience, and now the next step is to evaluate your existing content and highlight opportunities. This is something your content strategy agency can support you with, though they’ll need you to send them everything you have in the way of current content.

During the audit process, you’ll assess all your current content assets, including your website, social media, email newsletters, digital resources (such as PDFs), blog posts and offline material. Questions to consider include:

• Is it relevant, accurate, and up-to-date? 
• Are there opportunities for updating or adding to existing content? 
• Is there anything that needs removing and/or recreating from scratch?
• Could existing assets (online or offline) be repurposed to create new content?
• What’s missing? For example, could you add a blog or buyers’ guides?
• What are the user engagement metrics? Which content gets the most engagement?

Your content audit will also form a useful baseline against which you can measure your progress with subsequent audits once you get your content strategy underway.

Competitor analysis: leveraging insights for your strategy

Finally, although your content strategy should be unique to your business, it’s still worth taking a look at what your competitors are doing, It could be a source of inspiration or an idea of what to avoid! 

Analyse your competitors’ content and identify its strengths and weaknesses, noting which types of content seem to be generating the most engagement on their social channels. Are there any opportunities for you to take a different angle, or to plug gaps that your competitors aren’t currently offering with their content?

Crafting a comprehensive content marketing strategy

With the groundwork done, you’re ready to begin putting together your content marketing strategy. You may wish to enlist the services of a content strategy agency to help with this, as they will have in-depth knowledge and experience of the kinds of content that work well for different types of businesses and how to ensure they’re successful. Whether you’re working with an agency or putting a strategy together yourself, here are some things to keep in mind.

Creating engaging and relevant content: quality over quantity

Quality is much more important than quantity when it comes to content. Mass producing poor quality content could actively harm your business, as the idea is always to add value to customers and potential customers. Flooding them with mass-produced content isn’t going to do that. 

Instead, find a good agency to work with you on creating high-quality, valuable content that people find useful, or that tells a compelling story. There are numerous different content formats you could explore to cater to different target audience groups, for example:

• Blog
• Video
• Infographic
• Podcast
• Buyer’s guide
• Whitepaper
• Tool or calculator
• App
• Social media campaign

Each content type requires a different set of skills and resources, so it’s important to be selective in which you choose to throw time and money into. Your content strategy agency will be able to support you in determining which content types are likely to be best suited to your target audience, though there may be an element of (organised!) trial and error in the beginning.

Incorporating SEO content strategy for improved visibility

There’s no point in creating fantastic content if nobody can find it, so no content strategy is complete without a strong consideration of search engine optimisation (SEO). The primary goal of SEO is to make your content easily discoverable by search engines. Optimising your content with relevant keywords means it’s more likely to appear higher up the search engine results pages (SERPs), resulting in more traffic and hopefully more goals reached!

Keyword research is a fundamental first step in the SEO process. Keywords are the terms people use to search for things in search engines like Google, and this research will help you understand the search volumes for different terms relating to your business. Ideally, you need to pick keywords that are highly relevant but not too competitive. We’ve talked more about the keyword research process in our article on B2B content strategy, including some of the tools you can use to conduct it.

In the context of your content strategy, it’s particularly worth thinking about what we call long-tail keywords. These are longer search terms that capture specific audience intent, such as “how to clean my oven”. Not only are they a great source of content ideas, but they also give you the chance to create highly tailored content that helps your website rank for these terms and turns it into a useful resource. If you sell oven cleaners, the search term in this example would be the frame for a blog post or infographic all about oven cleaning that you can then link to your product page.

With your keyword research done, you’re then armed with target keywords you can work your content strategy in a number of different ways. Think about:

On-page optimisation

Working keywords into your copy, in headings, subheadings and body copy, will help search engines understand what your content is about. Using keywords in the metadata will also help, so pay particular attention to the title tags and structured data. 

While meta descriptions aren’t a search engine ranking factor, they do affect click-through rates from search engines, so they’re worth taking time over. Using a keyword can mean that this word appears in bold in the description, catching the eye and showing your link to be relevant to the search. Using a call to action, such as “Discover our range of…”, encourages search engine users to click for more.

Backlink strategies

The number of links going from other sites to yours, and the reputation of those sites, are major search engine ranking factors. These establish the authority of your content and improve its visibility, so remember to work a backlink strategy into your content plans. 

Creating great content that people want to share will naturally and ethically attract backlinks, but you can also use techniques such as making sure you link back to your website in press releases or contacting sites that have mentioned your business to ask them to add in a link. A social media content strategy will also increase the chances of your content being picked up and linked to by other businesses and organisations. 

Mobile optimisation

A mobile-first approach is an important ranking factor for search engine algorithms, with at least 60% of searches now coming from mobile devices. This means that to boost the visibility of your content, you need to make sure that it works well on a mobile. 

Any content you create should be responsive – that is, it should adapt automatically to optimise it for the screen size it’s being viewed on – and any copy written with web writing best practices in mind. So, no walls of text; ensure it’s easily scannable by keeping language straightforward, breaking it up with headings and subheadings and using bullet points where appropriate.

Voice search

A more recent development in search engine algorithms is the advent of voice search. People often speak differently to how they type, so you can optimise your content for people searching with their voices by working in natural language keywords.

SEO metrics and analysis

Measuring the success of your content is critical, and tracking SEO metrics – such as organic traffic, click-through rates and keyword rankings – is a great way to monitor the visibility of your content. Utilising SEO analytics tools to identify high-performing content will also help you refine and optimise your content campaign so that your results get better and better. Below you can find some top tools that can help you:

• Google Analytics: A powerful and widely used tool that provides comprehensive website analytics, including traffic sources, user behaviour, and more.
• Google Search Console: Offers insights into how Googlebot views your website, provides data on search queries, and indexing, and helps identify and fix issues.
• Ahrefs: Known for its robust backlink analysis, keyword research, and competitor analysis features. It also provides site audit tools.
• SEMrush: Offers a suite of SEO tools including keyword research, site audit, competitor analysis, and more. It’s a versatile tool for digital marketers.
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider: A website crawling tool that provides valuable data on SEO elements such as broken links, page titles, and meta descriptions.

Leveraging AI in content creation

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has come on in leaps and bounds in the realm of content creation, though it should never be used to replace content written by humans. However, you can use it to enhance efficiency, creativity and personalisation in your content planning, creation and editing.

Use tools such as ChatGPT and Bard to generate ideas and as a starting point for your research, but you’ll still need to do the writing yourself, or at least heavily edit anything these tools come up with. Remember, too, that such tools amalgamate content from around the internet (and sometimes completely make things up), so you’ll need to fact-check carefully and cite sources for any points you make. 

We’ve written lots more about AI content creation in our article on B2B content marketing strategy, so have a read of that if you’d like to learn more.

Implementing your content marketing strategy

With the groundwork complete and the right tools deployed, you’re now ready to put your content marketing strategy into action. A content strategy agency will be able to do this for you or provide assistance and support while you do it yourself. Here are some things to think about.

Effective distribution channels: maximising outreach

You’ve gone to the trouble of creating great content, so now you want to make sure it’s seen by as many people as possible. That requires effective multichannel distribution and content syndication – posting the same content in more than one place. This might include methods such as:

• Social media – different platforms work for different types of businesses and different audiences, so form your social media distribution strategy carefully, keeping in mind the target audiences and personas you identified earlier.

• Email marketing – this has the advantage of landing directly in people’s inboxes, and of making distribution highly targeted to different segments of your audience. However, with so many emails to compete with, you’ll need to work hard to craft a compelling subject line to encourage people to open it.

• Guest posting – this involves writing content to post on external sites, such as blogs relevant to your industry niche. If you’ve created content such as an infographic, podcast or video, this would involve writing a post to promote it, with interesting insights around the subject.
• Influencer marketing – partnering with influencers in your niche is a powerful form of content marketing. Whether it’s a well-known YouTuber or someone who’s big on Instagram or TikTok, influencers can hugely amplify your content and the products or services it’s marketing.

It’s important to tailor your content to the distribution channel, repurposing it to work on a particular channel. For example, if you’ve created a video that will work well on YouTube, you could draw out some insights from it to create a blog post or email newsletter, with a link to the video embedded.

Measuring success: key metrics for evaluating your strategy

We touched on the importance of measuring the success of your content a couple of times earlier, but it bears repeating. You’ll have identified your content marketing KPIs already, so use tools such as Google Analytics or Screaming Frog to evaluate their progress at regular intervals or ask your content strategy agency to prepare a monthly report. In particular, look for metrics such as traffic volumes, conversions, where traffic is coming from – if applicable –  and time on site to gauge how well people are engaging with your content.

From here, you’re in a good position to make data-driven decisions and to conduct A/B testing to keep refining and optimising your content strategy – which is, or should be, iterative in nature. Regular content audits will also show how you’ve progressed since the audit you carried out before shaping your strategy. 

And finally, don’t forget feedback from your customers; it’s them you’re creating the content for, so listen to any opinions they offer on your content or what they would like to see from you. You could even conduct a customer survey, or a social media poll, to find out more about what customers think of your content and adapt your strategy accordingly.

Finding the right content strategy agency for your goals

Finding the right content strategy agency is crucial to making sure your content marketing efforts meet your business goals. Evaluate potential agencies by looking at testimonials and case studies that showcase the results they’ve achieved for other clients, and then organise a meeting with shortlisted agencies to get to know them. Cost may be an important factor, so request quotes for the same set of services so you can compare like for like.

When you’ve made your selection, ensure that your strategy with your chosen agency is airtight and measurable. Agree on SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals for the content you create together and agree on a publication frequency tailored to your target audience. Be upfront with your agency about your expectations regarding content tone of voice, style and visuals, which need to be kept in line with your existing branding, and be sure to discuss real-time analytics reporting so that you can benefit from immediate performance insights alongside your regular scheduled strategy reviews and reporting.

Future-proofing your content strategy

Whether it’s a search engine algorithm update or a new social media platform making it big, the digital landscape changes all the time. That means it’s important to stay abreast of the latest developments through ongoing education, webinars, industry certifications and professional networks. 

If you’re interested in working with a content strategy agency, get in touch with Common Ground today for a chat about your needs. We will be proactive in highlighting emerging platforms or developments that could affect your strategy, whilst helping you to cultivate a proactive mindset yourself. Tailoring your content strategy is a continuous process, and a strategic partnership with the right content strategy agency will help your business enjoy the many benefits of a comprehensive content solution.