Content strategy
You can write well, publish often, and still not get found. A content strategy makes sure you're writing what people are searching for before you start.
You can write well, publish often, and still not get found. A content strategy makes sure you're writing what people are searching for before you start.
An SEO content strategy is the thinking and research that happens before any writing begins. Without a clear strategy, a website tends to grow the way most websites grow. Someone writes a page when it feels like a good idea, without checking whether anyone's searching for it or whether another page on the site already covers the same ground. The pages go live, some do well and some don't, and nobody's quite sure why. A content strategy answers the why.
A content strategy looks at your site from several angles at once. What are your customers typing into Google, and does your website have pages that answer those searches? What do your competitors' sites cover that yours doesn't? Are your pages connected well enough for Google to see your site as knowledgeable on a subject? And what about AI tools like ChatGPT, which now pull answers from websites using a different set of rules entirely? A good content strategy considers all of these before a word gets written.
How do you decide what to publish on your website? If the answer is gut feeling, you're not alone. Keyword research replaces instinct with data. We find out what your customers are typing into Google, how many of them are doing it each month, and how realistic it is to compete for each term.
How many pages does your website have? And how many of them are bringing in visitors? There's almost always a gap between those two numbers. A content audit goes through every page on your site and works out what's performing, what's competing with itself, what's outdated, and what's missing entirely. From there, we know what to keep, what to rewrite, and what to remove.
Search engines are more likely to rank your site when they can see that you know your subject well. In SEO, this is called topical authority. You build topical authority by covering your subject thoroughly across multiple pages and linking them to each other. Topical mapping is how we plan what pages your site needs, what each one should cover, and how they should connect.
Once you understand what a content strategy covers, your own website starts to look different. We start with the questions that shape everything that follows, from on-page SEO through to the copywriting itself.
Say helloAn SEO content strategist is someone who plans what a website should publish, based on what people are searching for. They research keywords, audit existing pages, analyse competitors, and map out how content should connect across a site. The aim is to make sure every page on a website has a reason to exist and a chance of being found.
If your website has pages that aren't bringing in visitors, or if you've been publishing without checking what people search for first, a content strategy will help. It's also useful if your pages have built up over time without anyone reviewing how they work together. A content strategy finds what's missing, what's redundant, and what needs improving.
Content strategy is the research and planning that decides what to publish and why. Content marketing is the publishing itself. A strategy looks at search data, competitors, and your existing pages to build a plan. Content marketing creates and distributes the content that the plan calls for.
A content strategy helps with SEO by making sure every page targets a search term people are using, covers its topic thoroughly, and connects to other relevant pages on the site. Without one, pages tend to overlap, miss important topics, or target searches nobody is making. Search engines reward websites that cover a subject well across multiple connected pages.
A content strategy typically includes keyword research, a content audit of your existing pages, competitor analysis, topical mapping (how pages should link together), and a prioritised plan for what to write, rewrite, or remove. It may also cover how your content should be structured for AI search tools like ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews.