How to develop an SEO content strategy with Webflow?

Quality content doesn't just get readers interested, it also converts them. There are lots of ways to use the power of content marketing, and one of them is to improve your organic rankings. In other words, using an SEO content strategy can increase your visibility in Google and other search engines, thus increasing the number of visitors to your website.

But that is only an advantage. Here is a non-exhaustive list of other benefits you can get:

• Improving visibility in search results
• Increase in organic traffic
• Engaging a targeted audience
• Improving the user experience
• Credibility and reliability
• Competitive advantage
• Adaptability to algorithm changes
• Improving brand awareness
• Valuable data
• Long-term results

In the following guide, I'll show you how we use content internally at Agence No Code and how we use Webflow to implement SEO strategies for our website.

What is an SEO content strategy?

Simply put, an SEO content strategy is a planned approach to creating, optimizing, and managing the content of a website in order to improve its visibility in search engine results. This strategy aims to attract more organic traffic, target a specific audience, and ultimately strengthen the online presence and authority of the website.

Unoptimized content can have the following consequences:

• Poor ranking in search engines
• A reduction in organic traffic
• A weakening of authority and expertise
• Poor user experience
• Ineffective content marketing
• Missed conversion opportunities
• Inefficient allocation of resources
• Inconsistent messages
• Difficulty tracking performance

In essence, it can hurt your online visibility, user engagement, and overall success.

Let's take a look at the exact steps you need to take to make your SEO strategy successful.

Steps in developing an SEO content strategy

I generally break the whole process down into several steps listed below, and that's also the process that makes the most sense to me.

Determining your target audience

The first step is identifying and understanding your target audience. These are the people who will find your content useful. If you are selling a product or service, these people should also be aware of your offering in addition to your content.

In the case of Agency No Code, we identified two main audience types: entrepreneurs looking to grow their business using Webflow and individuals looking to learn more about how Webflow works, such as developers, designers, designers, SEO and content experts, and more. If you are on this page, you are probably part of the latter group. Of course, this article is written for the first group as well, as they can find valuable information for their businesses there.

If you're working with other marketing professionals, you can try creating personas to deepen their psychology. This will help you understand their needs and what type of content they would be interested in.

In fact, the first step involves the psychological aspect of your content consumers.

Search by keyword

Before I start researching keywords, I ask myself the following questions: What would someone interested in my product search for on Google? This is the first step, which I come back to regularly if I lack inspiration in my keyword research.

Then, I search for the most relevant keywords using tools like SEMrush.

There are two things to look out for when looking for keywords:

Always focus on the most relevant keyword for your content‍

It is very easy to get lost in keywords that may seem lucrative but that are not logical in your case. The best way to determine which keywords are relevant to you is to see the results.

If the results don't match your expectations, you should disregard this keyword. For example, “team building agencies” and “team building agencies” might just be a different combination of similar words, but the results are completely different. The first will show you services for building teams, while the second will also include pages related to creating teams of experts. Still, someone could easily ignore the true meaning of the first keyword and incorporate it into a keyword list, even if their business has nothing to do with team building.

Pay attention to search volume and keyword difficulty‍

Search volume indicates the number of searches performed on a given keyword in a given month. This will help you decide if the keyword is good enough to be on your list and incorporated into your content.

If the search volume is low, you should still consider relevance. Sometimes, a very specific keyword that has every chance of converting may have a very low search volume, but it's worth the effort.

Let me give you a concrete example. Imagine you're selling heart-shaped bookmarks and someone is looking for that same word combination. In fact, it seems like ten people are doing the same thing every month. Would you include this keyword? The answer is yes. Of course, you should also check the volume of heart-shaped bookmarks or simply heart-shaped bookmarks, as they have the same conversion power but might be a better choice for your main keyword.

Finally, there's the concept of keyword difficulty, which determines how hard it would be to get to the first page of Google if you wanted to rank for that word, with 1 being the easiest and 100 being the hardest. Again, it's important to understand the trade-off between search volume, keyword difficulty, and relevance for your content strategy (and business).

Understanding the intent behind keywords‍

Essentially, there are four types of intent:

1. Intent to navigate : When a person uses Google as a simple navigation tool to access the services they are looking for. If someone types “Facebook Log In,” it's a browsing query and you probably don't have an interest in ranking for that query unless you work for Facebook.
2. Information : When someone wants to learn something, they type in a request for information. It's a good idea to factor this into your content strategy and provide answers to these queries, which would allow Google to rank you in the relevant results. If you provide an answer that Google considers to be the most effective, you might even be included in the featured snippet.
3. Commercial : If someone is looking for a product or service, they will enter a commercial query. In our case, we understand that many people want to compare Webflow with similar products, so we created several comparisons, such as Webflow vs Elementor, to target these business queries. Business keywords are more likely to convert than informational keywords.
4. Transactional : These are keywords typed by someone looking to buy something. If a person types in “iPhone 13 Mini price,” they're probably looking to buy that product. These keywords are extremely useful for e-commerce.

Analyzing competitors

Identifying and analyzing your competitors should be an ongoing process at every stage of your SEO content marketing strategy. This is important for a number of reasons:

• Understanding market trends : Get information on industry trends, including popular content, targeted keywords, and effective marketing channels.
• Identify content gaps : Discover topics that your competitors don't cover, in order to provide unique content to your audience.
• Comparative performance analysis : Compare your SEO and content marketing efforts with those of your competitors to set realistic improvement goals.
• Learning from successes and failures : Adopt best practices and avoid pitfalls by observing competitor strategies.
• Improving the keyword strategy : Refine your approach to keywords by understanding which keywords are targeted by competitors.
• Improving the user experience : Get information about the user experience of your competitors in order to improve engagement and conversions on your site.
• Strategic planning : Understand the competitive landscape to better allocate resources and position yourself in the market.
• Inspiring innovation and creativity : Competitors' strategies can spark new creative approaches to your content marketing.

Create SEO content

While it seems like another step in the process, it's the most important step. If you don't create compelling content, search engines won't like you, leading to additional investments to rectify the situation.

That's why it's important to use SEO experts and content writers with a wealth of experience in their field, preferably in your industry. If you're not just creating blog posts, but also various landing pages, you will probably need professional designers to take care of the assets.

Editors should not only understand the subject but also know how their work will be represented on your website. Is it a blog or a landing page?

Finally, you need to create content that is genuinely intended to help. Search engines have become sophisticated enough to know when text is relevant and when it's just text full of keywords with no real value.

Using AI for content creation

According to Google's EEAT guidelines, the use of AI is acceptable if the content remains relevant to the reader. In my experience, using AI from time to time to fill in some gaps is acceptable, but a human should read and edit these snippets for maximum effect. The devil is in the details, and AI tools are far from reaching the circle of hell, which means the human touch is still needed to refine the content.

And that's not all. Google is aware that boring and repetitive content will be nothing better than answers to your queries generated by ChatGPT. That's why it's critical to provide feedback, observations, impressions, feedback, and more — things that humans expect from humans and robots can't do.

When you think about it, it makes sense. Let's say you want to know how to set up a content strategy for SEO. In this case, you need the first-hand experience of people who have used them, and not just blatant information about the various strategies. Don't get me wrong, it's also important for your learning, but it's the people who will ultimately tell you whether something is worth it or not.

Overall, it's important to think of your content as the knowledge and information that you pass on to other human beings and not just as food for search engine robots.

Use Webflow to download content

Webflow is perfect for managing technical SEO, but what about content? It turns out that a great CMS makes it easy to load pages and even automate a lot of things along the way.

I'm going to list some of the key SEO features of Webflow that make the whole process easier for any content strategist and SEO expert. Webflow excels in both technical SEO and content strategy:

• Easy content creation and management: Its CMS allows the addition and editing of simple content, requiring minimal technical expertise.
• SEO-friendly design: Creates responsive and visually appealing websites that improve SEO through a better user experience.
• Customizable SEO settings: Allows you to easily change meta titles, descriptions, etc. directly in the CMS.
• Dynamic content: Automates the updating of pages using dynamic content, thus streamlining the content creation process.
• Speed optimization: Webflow's own code allows pages to load faster, a crucial SEO factor.
• Mobile Responsiveness: Ensures that websites are mobile-friendly, an important aspect of SEO.
• Automatic sitemap generation: Keeps the website sitemap up to date, helping search engines understand the structure of the site.
• Structured data for rich snippets: Simplifies the addition of structured data, which improves visibility in search results.
• Content flexibility and scalability: Suitable for different types of content and fits websites of various sizes.
• Integration with SEO tools: Allows easy connection with tools such as Google Analytics for monitoring performance and improving SEO strategies.

Optimizing existing content

Implementing an SEO content strategy should be a continuous effort if you want to achieve optimal results. This means that in addition to having a continuous content program, you also need to track and optimize your existing content when needed.

The most common dilemma is: when should content be optimized? Should we do it when we notice a decrease in the number of visitors?

In most cases, it's best to do this when it's appropriate, which is when existing information in your content needs to be updated and additional information needs to be added.

In other words, your content should always present fresh information to your readers.

Ongoing content needs to be updated from time to time. Come to think of it, no content really lasts forever, because the world around us is changing rapidly.

Even if there's not enough new information for your content to be updated and optimized, you should always check what the latest practices are for high-ranking content and apply them to yours if possible and smart. Google is updated regularly, and from time to time, the preferred structure and length of content changes, so keep an eye out.

Common SEO content mistakes

Unfortunately, content strategies for SEO also come with a lot of pitfalls that you should be aware of. Here are the most common ones:

• Do not perform a technical SEO audit and do not implement corrections
• Be an imitator
• Thinking that only AI writes good content
• Hire underqualified or inexperienced writers
• Skip keyword research
• Neglecting the content structure
• Neglecting meta tags and descriptions
• Do not update content
• Overuse of keywords (keyword stuffing)
• Not optimizing content for mobile devices
• Ignore analytics and comments
• Inconsistent publication
• Not aligning content with user intent
• Neglecting internal and external links
• Focus only on search engines, not on real people

SEO content best practices

Keyword research and content writing are not enough. Here are some of the most important practices to consider:

• Content structure : Use a clear and logical content structure with titles (H1, H2, H3, etc.) to break up text. Organize your content in a way that is easy for readers to follow.
• Keyword optimization : Place primary and secondary keywords in the title, headers, and throughout the content in a natural way. Avoid keyword stuffing, which can have a negative impact on user experience and SEO.
• Meta tags : Write compelling, keyword-rich title tags and meta descriptions for each page or post. Title tags should be no longer than 60 characters and meta descriptions should be no longer than 160 characters.
• URL structure : Create clean, descriptive URLs that include keywords. Use hyphens to separate words in the URL.
• Responsiveness for mobiles : Ensure that your content is mobile-friendly to meet the needs of users across devices.
• Optimizing images : Optimize images by compressing them to speed up loading times. Use descriptive alt tags that include keywords for SEO and accessibility.
• Internal and external links : Incorporate internal links to relevant pages on your website to improve navigation and user engagement. Add external links to authoritative sources that support your content. It will also help you determine which pages will get the most link juice.‍
• Readability : Make your content easy to read by using short paragraphs, bullet points, and plain language. Aim for a Flesch-Kincaid readability score that matches the reading level of your target audience.
• Content length : Longer and more comprehensive content is often well placed in search results. Aim for at least 1,500 words for detailed articles.
• Originality of the content : Create unique and original content to avoid problems with duplicate content penalties. Cite your sources and attribute them correctly when referring to the work of others.
• User experience (UX) : Optimize your website for a positive user experience with fast load times, easy navigation, and clear calls to action.
• Social sharing : Include social sharing buttons to encourage readers to share your content on social media platforms.
• Follow-up and analysis : Use tools like Google Analytics to track the performance of your content, such as traffic, engagement, and conversion rates. Adjust your content strategy based on the data and information gathered.
• Content promotion : Promote your content through a variety of channels, including social media, email marketing, SMS notification, and content syndication, to reach a wider audience.

These SEO practices can help you create content that not only ranks well in search engines, but also provides a positive experience for your readers and helps you reach your content marketing goals.

An SEO content strategy that supports your goals.

Set up a good SEO content strategy, start implementing it, and you should start to see results within a few months. If there are no results, it is because you are doing something wrong or you need to rethink your content strategy.

If your business needs SEO and Webflow content experts, don't hesitate to take contact with Agence No Code and start getting liked by Google and other search engines.