You’re going live and still worried if Google will love you? Your content strategy is your weapon. Yes, you read that right!

I’ve outlined 3 key perspectives for you to develop a strong content strategy for your website content.

Your Business’ Perspective in Your Content Strategy

What to do? Just like design, your content needs a good plan for you to get your message out there and rank on Google’s SERPs. Here’s what you need to do:

Create A Structured Keyword Strategy for Your Content

In order to create a powerful keyword strategy, you’ll need these 6 steps:

1. Spend some time on Google Trends, a free tool offered by Google. Use it to start looking for top and trending topics in each of the countries you’re targeting. Take note of them as you’ll want to mention these topics on your website’s pages. Remember, you’ll need different keywords when targeting different countries. Each market is different. You’ll need to account for those differences with the keywords you choose.
2. Begin your research for the most ranked keywords. This can be done for a specific industry or location. You can split it by city, country, region, or your specified areas. This will depend on your market size.
3. Create your perfect sheet for each country. Include all the highly ranked keywords on Google from branded to non-branded keywords. I recommend you apply the art of organization in your files and folders to help you see where you are and what you still need.
4. Focus mostly on keywords that have high traffic and low to medium competition. Doing this will help you compete for them. Long-tailed keywords are effective when trying to rank high, but you’ll need to find the exact ones you’ll be able to cater for.
5. Dig deep. Search for keywords by country and by product and service type to be more precise in your pages and rank for each one.
6. Assign 4 to 5 keywords per page. Focus on them to get the traffic you’re looking for.

What not to do? Do not just plug in keywords on your website and expect Google to know and like you better. When you insert keywords without a plan, it means nothing and can be harmful when search engines, like Google, notice you’re just Keyword Stuffing. Keyword Stuffing is damaging. Make sure you don’t stuff keywords left and right or else you’re gonna become one of Google’s most hated websites.

Use Google Optimize And Let Your Data Be Your Content Strategy’s Guide

Once you have your Keyword Sheet and have finalized your content, ensure that you have key sentences, images, and highlights that you want to personalize.

Now, your website is more ready to go live and the whole team is happy!

But before celebrating, visit Google Optimize, a user-friendly tool that helps you change the experience of your users by country and by behavior. It allows you to change texts and visuals that your visitors will see depending on their location. You can even remove, add, or hide any of your sections. Translate the page and edit anything that comes to your mind. It’s a great way to add personalized experiences within your content strategy for your users.

You can even submit multiple meta descriptions and meta tags to Google via Google Optimize for the same website. This will allow you to diversify your outcomes when it comes to ranking. For example, if you’re visiting Hovi’s website in Ireland, you’ll get to see some different sentences and visuals than if you’re visiting it from Lebanon or the U.A.E. which helps a lot with engagement and conversions.

One more key thing to note is the potential the tool gives you for A/B and Multivariate testing. Grasp the potential to deliver the highest possible value for your visitors. You’ll be able to track how visitors are reacting to your content, allowing you to adjust and optimize to exceed their expectations.

Keep in mind that Google loves Google. If you’re working on Google Optimize, chances are very high that all the optimizations you make are going to be recognized by Google, helping you to rank high.

Build A Strong SEO Strategy Within Your Content Strategy

By now you’ll have written high quality content, used some of the most important keywords in your page URLs, and used engaging titles for each page. This is how you start positioning your website the right way and getting Google to love you.

Working on all of the above is how you build your SEO and make sure that Google understands your message the best way possible to maximize your opportunity to gain and drive traffic.

Check out these 8 SEO Tools to help build an advanced SEO Strategy.

Google’s Perspective in Your Content Strategy

You want to be found on the Web and this is how Webmasters, or recently named Google Search Console, will do the job for you!

Google Search Console is a free tool by Google that lets you monitor and maintain your site’s presence in Google’s search results and oversee everything related to your website’s performance. Your content strategy needs to make sure your content is being found. So to get started, you need an XML sitemap.

The Technicalities of Your Content Strategy: XML Sitemap Submission and Tracking

What is an XML sitemap? It’s a coded file listing all the pages of your website individually to tell search engines about the structure of your website

• When you finish your website, the most important thing is to submit your XML sitemap on Google Search Console to ensure Google can read your sitemap. This will help Google recognize the topics on each page and understand your message. 
• All you have to do is export the link from your Content Management System (CMS). At Hovi we use the Yoast plugin for the SEO processes (Metadatas and XML). Take the URL from there and submit it on Google Search Console. Remember to mark page links as “nofollow” if you have pages you don’t want Google to see.
• Once you submit your XML Sitemap you need to make sure that Fetched/Indexed pages have no errors (404s, incomplete URLs) and that Web crawlers, like Googlebot, can read your file.

Additional Tools To Use Within Search Console:

To better put your website out there and drive traffic to it, there are many features that I recommend you use, such as:

• Performance Queries: Off-set GA showing you only 5% of the keywords organically sending traffic to your website. Get reports on the queries that people are using to arrive on your website to help you identify:
  • The keywords you are ranking for, allowing you to optimize your keyword strategy.
  • How your website is positioned and adjust accordingly.
• Links: Use this feature to track your backlinks which are an important element of your off-page SEO. When we talk about backlinks, we’re talking about other websites that link directly to yours. At times, you might find some toxic websites are linking to yours. This can negatively impact your website’s domain authority.  Disavowing (discarding) links allows you to tell Google to remove toxic links to keep your domain authority healthy. So, always ensure you disavow all the bad links that are driving redirects to your website to rank higher.

Your Audience’s Perspective in Your Content Strategy

All Google relationships are over and now it’s time to think of ways to increase conversions and traction to generate high demand that will convert into revenue.

Any great content strategy accounts for its audience. If your content isn’t what your audience wants, you’re only planning for failure. So, first thing’s first:

Connect Your Website to a Marketing Automation Tool

It’s all about testing, adjusting, and optimizing. Connecting your website to a marketing automation tool will help you test and analyze your content’s performance, know what users are seeing and reading, and the perception of your brand in the user’s decision making process.

Tracking your website’s performance is key to growth. See how people react to your content to understand your market better and then generate the best content, which will push your sales up. Also, and most importantly, you will be able to create specific campaigns (emails, ads and more) using this same automation tool.

Content Strategy Secret: Lead Scoring & Funneling Processes

Monitor users by creating funnels and lead-scoring processes on your marketing automation tool. Follow the users based on their activities on the website and put them into different stages in their buying process. This will help you personalize your content for each user based on where they are in the buyer journey.

Once the lead reaches a predetermined ceiling, they can then be pushed to sales people as a sales-qualified lead since they have engaged with your content and are ready to be approached.

Nurturing Campaigns: In Light of Connecting It To The Website

Did you know that it takes an average of 7 touch points to close a lead? So your main goal here is to give your prospects what they’re asking for at the right time. Provide them with content relevant to their position within the buying process.

With nurturing campaigns, you can ensure that this is done easily as long as the content you are providing within your campaign is useful for the persona you are addressing and to their behavior on the website that you are already tracking.

Now that you have an idea on how your website’s content strategy works, you can take your website live and enjoy the results!

Interested to know more about the whole process? See how it can be used in your overall Inbound Marketing Framework by reaching out to our Hovi Experts to broaden your expertise!