An SEO content strategy to rank your content at #1 with zero links

You might be wondering that is it really possible to rank in #1 with zero links? Can you rank your website at the top of Google only by optimizing your content?

Well, there’s no definite answer to this question. However, as you know that ‘content is the backbone of SEO,’ an effective content marketing strategy is all you need to rank your website higher in search engines. Though there are many factors like Backlinks, page speed, site structure that contribute to the SEO growth of any website, the power of content still remains on top. With high-quality, search-oriented content, you cannot just improve your search rankings but also get a large number of visitors to your website.

So, in this article, I am going to share a complete step by step SEO content strategy that you can follow to push your website higher in Google:

Identify your target audience and their problems.

Before creating any piece of content, the first thing you should do is identify who your target audience is, what they want, their pain points, and what all solutions you can offer to them uniquely.

To do this, you can analyze your current clients or customers, their behavior with your products and services, what they like, and how they are engaging with your website.

However, if you are just starting out, you should focus on conducting market research to understand your target audience better. Instead of focusing on your products, focus on the myriad benefits they can offer to various people. Based on your research, get an insight into your target audience’s emotions, nature, tone of voice that you can use effectively to convince them to buy your products or services.

Do in-depth keywords research to find profitable keywords.

Keyword research is one of the most critical steps that largely determine the success of your content. First, you need to understand how your current keywords are performing and ranking to do efficient keyword research. You can evaluate your recent performance through Google Search Console and see if you can upgrade your content or find new keywords to yield better results.

Zutrix is an amazing rank tracking tool that shows the real-time ranking of your website and related keywords. You can also find new keywords with the help of this tool and sort them based on their relevancy and importance.

The best SEO agencies suggest an excellent way to create compelling content: Write content about the questions that people often ask in your niche with eye-catching titles, meta descriptions, and stunning images.

Target low competition keywords with high search volume

Now comes the most challenging part, i.e., to find keywords with low competition and high search volume that you can easily rank. Using any keyword researcher, you can dig deep into your niche and find some topics that no one targets but people search for it. A keyword with fewer Backlinks, 3-4 words long, and has irrelevant search results is considered a low competition keyword. In addition to this, any keyword on which sites like Quora, Reddit, or Medium is ranking, multiple results for the same search query, and the low word count is also a low competition keyword, and you can easily outrank these sites.

Understand the search intent of your targeted keywords

Analyzing the search intent of the keywords you are targeting is crucial and plays a vital role in the ranking of your content. If your content is not aligned with the user’s search intent, then there is no use of it. To understand the intent of a keyword, let’s consider two terms – informational and transactional.

For instance, there’s a keyword- home theatre system; here, the user wants to browse through the various home theatre systems and buy one as per his choice. For this particular keyword, ecommerce sites will tend to rank better that display products in multiple categories.

However, there’s another keyword- best home theatre system; here, the user has not taken his decision yet and is keen to look for the best recommendations that enable him to make a wise and informed choice. In this case, buying guides and product reviews will rank better.

So the point here is to understand the search intent behind each keyword a user is searching for and providing the most relevant content.

Write compelling content that sells

The basic idea behind writing any content is to provide the most helpful and satisfactory answer for a particular search query. An excellent way to create compelling content is to write content about the questions that people often ask in your niche with eye-catching titles, meta descriptions, and stunning images.

Over the period of time, it has been observed that long-form content having more than 1000-2000 words tends to rank better as it is more detailed and query-oriented. However, as long as you give complete desired information for any topic, the word count doesn’t matter. So, focus on writing content that can educate, entertains, and inspire the audience.

Optimize your landing pages with focus keywords

Landing pages are essential to a website as it is the welcoming page of any website and gives users a chance to browse through the other pages of your website. So, to optimize your landing page, it is recommended to use a single primary keyword. You can also use different combinations of a keyword but make sure the search intent remains the same. If the search results for these keywords are the same, then you can ensure that they have similar search intent.

While optimizing your landing page, keep in mind that you use keywords naturally and not do excessive stuffing, leading to bad impressions and negative results.

Track how your content is performing

Monitoring your content performance is equally relevant when finalizing a content strategy to rank your articles. You can either do so with a Google search console or employ a third-party rank tracking tool to keep a note of your keyword rankings and content position in SERP. Other than this, remember that not all your website traffic comes from organic search, so installing Google Analytics to monitor the traffic sources is also crucial.

Based on your performance and the results generated, you can mold your content strategy accordingly; write better content, find more search-oriented keywords and think of the other innovative ways to rank your articles higher in Google.