How to Create an SEO Content Strategy for Your Startup from Scratch

Creating an SEO Content Strategy and conducting a Content Audit is an important process for every website owner. It refers to the process of cataloguing and analysing the web contents and their organic performance. It is an important process because it gives online marketers a clearer perspective of their content efforts. Thus, before diving into the deep water, I would like to emphasise that content auditing is an opportunity you might want to examine what’s working and what’s not working in the marketing process. 

With SEO optimisation, startups can get their websites to rank higher in search engine results. This way, they can grow and expand their customer base quickly. Other benefits of SEO include increasing organic traffic, cost-effectiveness and long-lasting results. What is more, startups can get broader coverage without so much paying for advertisements that may not even attain more comprehensive coverage than online marketing. 

Where to start with developing a Content Strategy for your Startup and Small Business

Creating a content strategy for your startup may not be the easiest thing to do. It requires a certain level of expertise and an adequate content production budget. Thus, I have created a free Good Vibes SEO Content Strategy Sheet to help you out on this journey. 

To develop a content strategy for your startup and small business, these are the steps I would recommend:

• Start with goal setting & Content Audit

Every content strategy should start with goals, and it lets you know how to measure your success and where to focus your efforts. So the first question to ask yourself is what you intend to achieve with the content strategy. For example, if you intend to build loyalty and relationship online, your primary focus should be increasing your following on social media or email. Knowing your goals will help you figure out a strategy that can get them accomplished.

Here you can find a few questions to answer to start with your SEO driven content strategy: Questions to Answer

If you already have a website and have already invested in content, you may want to start by conducting a Content Audit for your website. To do that, you should consider analysing some metrics and data. Here I have created a sample content audit sheet for you to make a copy of and use for your purposes. Feel free to play around and replace the titles, data and more: Content Audit Sample Sheet

• Audience insight and identifying your personas

Understanding your audience is key to the success of any marketing. A buyer persona starts with a well-defined audience. To have accurate audience insight, you need buyer personas. Your buyer persona can be identified through interviews, CRM and sales data. To augment the persona data you have collected, you must look at the CRM data. After you have looked at your data, evaluate the commonalities and insights and use the information to form a generalised view for each customer type. 

• Choosing your main concepts

Your decision on the main concepts depends on your target customers. Find out the key moments that influence their decision to buy and leverage that. Use concepts that influence the decisions of your target audience, create brand awareness and solve problems.

• Coming up with topic ideas

While choosing topic ideas for your content marketing, you must select topics that align with the search intent. Choose topics that provide answers to what people are searching for. Don’t be afraid to focus on long-tail keywords and niche topics that you may see with low search volume as well. It all depends on your target audience. 

• Creating content briefs

In creating a content brief, you must choose an optimal content length. The quality and relevance of content determine its ranking, and the recommended length for content varies between 600 and 1500 words—of course, depending on the content format. To format your content brief, break it down section by section in a form that can be shared and add additional information to each section when necessary. Here you can find a checklist you can use whilst creating your content briefs: Content Brief Checklist

Things to consider to improve the organic performance and visibility of your content

Reaching the top of the search engine using SEO requires a lot of work and effort. Below are some SEO tools that will help you on your SEO content strategy journey. 

• Google Search Console
• AnswerThePublic
• AlsoAsked
• Semrush, Ahrefs, RankingGapp, BiQ Rank Intelligence (most of them have free trial versions, so you can download the data and cancel your subscription;))
• People Also Search For
• Your existing data from other platforms and sections of your website. (support channels, chatbot questions, leads, webinar chats, etc.)
• Google Analytics
• Google Trends

Now that you have created your content strategy, produced, and published your content, the next step is to track the organic performance of your content and improve its performance.

Here are a few things to consider during this phase;

• Have a content calendar and practice calendar management
• Don’t limit yourself with blogs; use videos, ebooks, quizzes, infographics, podcasts, etc. Repurpose old content.
• Invite top users/customers to contribute to your content
• Pick your most important content hubs in the website and go for paid Ads to increase content visibility once you are satisfied with their quality.
• Depending on your niche, create content to attract returning customers
• Regularly check the organic and paid performance of your content
• Optimise your content according to your potential visitors’ latest trends, search data, and intent.