A lot of brands get their SEO marketing strategy wrong.
They pursue the wrong kinds of keywords, the wrong kinds of content, and never even consider intent.
The result is spending thousands on writers, tools, and editorial staff for little or no reward.
I’ve helped scale several brands through content alone in a way that’s persisted through the AI content generation era.
Here’s exactly how you can produce rapid business growth through SEO content.
The major problems you have to avoid with SEO content
There are 3 primary mistakes I see when brands start their SEO journey.
3 mistakes that sink the entire SEO strategy before a word is even written or video snippet created.
1. Copying a bigger brand’s strategy
I see this a lot with SEO approaches.
People look to massive brands and what they’re doing so they can copy them. The big one I often see is HubSpot.
Marketers assess the HubSpot strategy and implement it with their own company, then wonder why they don’t get the same results.
Here’s the thing.
HubSpot has been around for ages.
The problem is that people look at the strategy they’re using now and try to apply it to smaller brands who don’t have…
- The domain authority
- The brand recognition
- The massive amount of resources required for their strategy
And so they don’t get the same results.
A lot of content written for SEO is templated and formulaic. The traffic goes to the biggest sites with the best reputation.
You’re competing with behemoths, and you’re never going to beat them by playing on the same terms.
You have to look at the early growth strategies of these brands.
For example, HubSpot released free tools like Website graders to bring people into their funnel.
Stop copying the tactics of a brand that’s been in operation for 10+ years and already has $100MM in revenue.
Look instead at the people one step above you to see what they’re doing.
2. Starting with keyword volumes
The majority of bad SEOs will start their content strategy by jumping into a tool like SEMRush and looking for keywords.
This is literally their stage one.
And what they’ll look for are keywords that have a high number of monthly searches.
Usually, this leads to short-tail seed keywords. If we imagine we’re searching for SEO content, then they might find things like…
- What is SEO
- SEO writing
- What does SEO stand for
They’ll sell these topics to their clients and bosses by saying they could be seen by X thousand people every month.
The problem is these keywords are so competitive ranking for them and driving traffic from Google is next to impossible for most.
You’re going up against brand like HubSpot, Forbes, and other industry behemoths.
High volume means high competition.
Add to that the “purchase intent” of people searching for these top of funnel terms and the whole thing is a waste.
There’s a better way to use these tools and find search terms that bring your people who are ready to buy. More on that soon.
3. Over-reliance on AI tools or cheap writers
AI content writing services are great for quantity, terrible for quality.
I’m not saying don’t use them, but just use them in the correct way.
AI writing is being punished by Google for being low value.
I can’t log onto Twitter without seeing someone complaining about how Google’s Helpful Content Update has destroyed their traffic.
Sites with genuinely useful and expert content are being rewarded, while rehashed content that’s just written by AI is being punished.
If you’re using AI to write content, make sure you’re using it in the right way.
It should be there to assist a human express their own genuine opinion and expertise.
It’s a tool to help speed production, not a replacement for people.
If you just let AI do the whole thing your readers and Google know, and they won’t reward you for it.
As evidenced recently when a marketer shared their process for effectively stealing content.
I have my own thoughts around this, but whatever they are isn’t important right now.
Google seemed to take issue with this approach to using AI to simply scrape content and, within a few days of the above being posted, this happened.
The best way to create content that leads to sales
So what is the better way to create SEO content that leads to actual growth.
It’s actually pretty simple so I’m amazed more people aren’t doing it.
I’ve broken the entire process down into sections below. I’ll kick it off with general thoughts and then talk about specific son how to achieve them.
The 4 types of content you need for SEO success
I’ve written a full piece about this in the past and you can see the whole article here.
The 4 categories are…
1. Buzz content
in short, this is the kind of stuff that will get you mentioned in press releases and will get people to want to share it on their social channels.
Stat-heavy pieces with a fun twist do well here.
The reason you need this in your mix is because a lot of SEO success comes down to your domain authority.
The best way to increase domain authority is to get backlinks from authoritative sites and increase user engagement.
The best way to get backlinks and drive users to your site is to do something worth talking about.
Feri Kaszoni at Search Intelligence is one of the best I’ve seen at this.
2. Attraction content
This will be the core of your content strategy.
You need to create content that brings your ideal users who are in need of a solution through to you.
A lot of brands focus only on this. It’s not too bad as this is an important element. But, it’s not the only thing you need.
I’ll explain later in more detail on this, but you need to focus this content on bottom of the funnel search terms. Basically things that bring in people ready to buy.
Here, you’ll be focusing on the article son your blog or videos on your YouTube and they’ll be written to answer key user questions.
3. Conversion content
This is your sales pages for your products and offers.
I’m not going to go into too much detail here on this as this article is about SEO.
I’ve never really seen good sales pages rank in Google.
I always recommend bringing in people with blog content and redirecting them to a good sale page. I have a guide on sale pages here for you.
4. Trust content
This is content that shows you can actually help them get results.
The kind of pieces that show you know your business and can get results repeatedly.
Think kind of like case studies.
However, I don’t recommend traditional case studies for SEO. What I would do is a slight switch and do it as an instructional article based around those bottom-of-funnel search terms. An example I had great success with is this piece.
So those are the 4 categories of content you need.
I would focus on the attraction content first along with the trust building content.
Because of what we’ll be doing with the content targeting, we should be able to drive some sales with that alone.
Then look at the buzz content to increase domain authority and overall traffic.
Use the right content type
Another issue I see is people not using the right kind of content type.
There are loads of different content types to choose from.
But you have to chose the right one for best results.
Don’t overcomplicate this. I usually ask 2 questions to identify a potential best fit.
- What does your ideal audience prefer?
- Can you produce that content type consistently?
For example, I write for a marketing audience.
My audience will resonate and buy from written pieces like this, and I can churn these out with relative ease.
So it’s pretty easy for me to do that.
I might decide to focus on TikTok because I find it easy. however, I’d soon realise that my ideal audience isn’t on TikTok and so I’m not getting any qualified leads.
You need to find the overlap between what your audience will engage with and what you can produce.
Focus on bottom-of-funnel topics about solutions users need
Here’s where the biggest difference is made.
A lot of brands and marketers will go for those high-volume keywords. the ones I warned you off earlier.
They’ll also make another mistake of going for top-of-funnel terms like…
- What is X
- What does X mean?
The purchase intent with these terms is very low.
The top-of-funnel terms will attract people who will never buy, and people who are months away from even considering buying.
Most of us don’t have the runway to wait that long.
You need to be focusing on people that are further along in the stages of awareness.
Your content should be focused on problem aware onwards.
You will either…
- Explain the problem and how you can help them overcome it (attraction content)
- Explain the solution and feature your offer as a faster way to get there (attraction content)
- Explain the offer in detail and get the sale (conversion content)
And you want to focus these kinds of content on “long tail” keywords.
Here’s a quick primer on that.
If we go back to the very meta example of SEO.
The Seed keywords that have the most competition will be things like “What is SEO”.
Short searches that are very general and have low purchase intent.
Long tail keywords usually have 4+ words within the search itself. And, the best ones are focused on bottom-of-funnel content.
For example, “how to create a marketing strategy for SEO”
This search has far lower competition so it’s easier to rank for. It’s also a person looking to solve an actual problem meaning the purchase intent is higher.
And so if you create that piece of content it will attract people who need a solution and your offer. The thing is, finding these kind of keywords and content topics isn’t easy with the common SEO tools.
How do you find them?
Start with the customer
You find those terms and issues by talking to the customer.
Simple, but not easy.
Ideally you want to follow a simple process for audience research.
1. Identify your best users
Look into your analytics to find the power users of your offer.
You want to talk to these people as you want to attract more people like them.
2. Bolster research with internal stakeholder interviews
You also want to identify a couple of people from departments that deal with users on a day-to-day basis. This includes…
- Sales teams
- Customer support
3. Talk to them directly
Talk to these people directly. The more 1-2-1 time you get with them the more valuable it will be.
4. Discover the below
When you’re chatting to them you want to, at a minimum, look to understand…
- The before (pain they experienced, how it affected them etc)
- The moment of highest tension (what happened that made them look for a solution)
- The search for a solution (what did they find, what resonated with them, why did they choose your offer over competitors)
- The results (how has it helped them, what’s the most valuable result)
With this you have a great understanding of the user and their problems.
You know what problems they wanted solved, the reasons why, and what was valuable to them.
The great thing about this is because you’re targeting bottom-of-funnel terms you should attract people who are closer to the point of buying.
Which means a shorter payback period and more profitability for you.
And thanks to focusing on actual user needs rather than the same recommendations from SEO tools as everyone else, you should attract more traffic as the competition is lesser.
Create once, distribute forever
The final thing is to distribute your work as frequently as possible.
Don’t just publish it worked for word on other sites though.
You need a good distribution strategy.
In short, this is finding where your ideal users hang out and leaving a comment on those communities that’s a teaser for the readers.
It needs to be a teaser because otherwise they won’t go to where you jome your content, which means you can’t generate leads and nurture the relationship.
For example, let’s take this very article as an example.
I might do this with it…
Syndication
I would find websites that allow syndicated content within my industry and republish there.
I usually use Medium and HackerNoon.
Make sure there are canonical links pointing back to your site as the original source.
Community snippets
I’ll find relevant questions on places like…
- Quora
- Private communities
I’ll make sure the community is filled with my ideal users. Then I’ll find a relevant question and rework a small section of the article to answer the question.
A good section in here might be the instructions on how to do audience research.
I’ll rework that, paste as a response, and leave a link back to the full piece.
The key here is giving value in the original answer or post and also linking back to the main asset.
This way you don’t break the rules of the community but still generate traffic.
Social content
I’ll cut the piece into little snippets of key learnings and schedule several social posts for the most relevant social media platform.
I’ll keep doing this to drive awareness and engagement.
Newsletter
I’ll also send it out in a newsletter to my audience and ask them to share with their connections.
Partnerships
if I have something of real value, I’ll look for people with overlapping audiences and see what I can do to get them to send it to their audience.
And just like that you’ve turned one high-value piece of content into something that can bring in users from several channels.
Summing up an SEO marketing strategy that actually causes business growth
It’s actually a lot simpler than it seems to drive quick gains with SEO content.
All you have to do is look for where you can have the most impact. That means focusing on attracting people who are ready to buy with content that has less competition.
And the best way to figure that out is to…
- Talk to users to identify their biggest problems
- Create content that helps them solve the problems and positions your product as the best solution
- Focus on BoFu and long tail searches
- Distribute like mad
- Bolster with other forms of content to help raise brand profile, authority, and trust
- Rinse and repeat
Simple, right?
Of course, if you want help with this then feel free to get in touch for an audit.