Content Development for SEO

Updated on September 5th, 2025 at 12:19 pm

Content can be an important ranking factor in organic search and bring in engaged users looking to buy.

Coupled with proactive link building and correctly implemented technical SEO, content is one of the three pillars crucial to organic search success.

Defining a content led SEO strategy can be crucial for the success of your website and can be easier when you understand the steps needed to help ensure your content gets crawled and indexed by search engines.

Here’s what a content strategy is and how to organise your content to help you grow the volume of valuable traffic to your website with a detailed SEO content plan.

What is an SEO Content Strategy?

Simply, the creation and publication of content on your website which can be re-distributed across social channels to help grow your audience, your customers, your sales, your leads, your brand or your website traffic or all of these.

An SEO content strategy will differ greatly depending on; who the strategy has been created for, the skills and attributes a business or person has to take the strategy from concept through to delivery, what the aims of the business are and delivery methods of the content.

For example, an effective content strategy for a early phase start up will likely revolve around low cost, scaleable content to help deliver traffic volume to the site through organic search and allow easy re-marketing of content through social channels to assist in brand building for the site.

A developed brand, with sales history, defined audiences and repeat customers will find more value in a SEO strategy that helps deliver leads and nurture more of these website visitors into customers, effectively improving conversions through explanatory content to understand the benefits of the service.

There is no “correct” content delivery method; infographics, written content, images or video content can all formulate parts or make up the entirety of your content strategy.

What is SEO Content?

SEO content isn’t what you should be aiming to produce. You will find your SEO content becomes much more valuable if you produce it to help solve problems for your users.

This is especially true for developing brands because you won’t be able to rank for any and every keyword early on as most keywords with value will be too competitive.

Instead, you’ll need to be selective, help users complete goals and strive to offer the best user experience through your content that you can.

Offering comprehensive content pieces, solving user problems and adding to the knowledge graph which search engines already have access to.

So, steer clear of generic “SEO content” templates or pieces which offer generic lists that offer little to no real user value (listicles, spun or reformatted content or content copied and pasted from elsewhere).

Instead focus on:

• lower competition areas initially – to help reach people quickly
• question or problem led searches – so you can help users solve problems
• adding to content with your knowledge and expertise – giving a unique spin so your content differentiates itself from existing pieces

In this sense, when comparing an SEO content strategy to a content strategy, there’s very little difference (provided you’re creating content to be shared publicly and have an indexable website as a marketing channel).

How to Create an Effective SEO Content Strategy

Good SEO content strategies often include a large amount of front-loaded work such as;

• keyword research; define & group priority keywords for your site
• competitor analysis by understanding what your competitors target and rank for it is easier to determine the feasibility for a site like yours to rank and what your expected position might be. Competitor research can also help you identify keywords to target.
• content specs & outlines; create content plans for each specific subject within each topic or sector
• defined tone of voice although not always crucial for every site, a uniform approach to creating content can ensure the quality of the pieces you produce is consistent.
• strategic internal linking to ensure your content links to relevant and useful pages elsewhere on your website. Content today is very often about helping users achieve their goals, rather than simply targeting a set of keywords that you want to rank for.
• SEO & content writer collaboration to get the best results from content for both users and search engines. Whether you are defining titles for your long copy content or defining which is the most important page to link to from a guide SEOs should be on hand to collaborate with your writers.
• ongoing performance tracking and improvement To truly succeed in SEO the content you should publish needs to appeal to your core users and act as a way of getting your site in front of more users. Your content should evolve as your marketing strategy does, while returning a consistent base level of traffic to your site. We can help define a content strategy appropriate for your sector that will gain organic traffic and can be used widely on social media too.
• link building & outreach although every piece of content should be high quality because that way it will gain links naturally, content without links is like binoculars with the lens caps left on. A defined outreach strategy for your highest priority content pieces can help get your content to perform in search.

Creating content that ranks well in search engines today, is an exciting and engaging process.

The benefits of a carefully planned and executed content strategy include;

1. traffic and real term visitor growth to your website
2. better contextual experiences for users
   • both of which can increase conversions
3. variation of targeting to new verticals or topics to diversify your business coverage
4. improved Expertise Authority and Trust (specifically within Google’s ranking algorithm).
5. internal linking possibilities (more links to your important pages from a higher number of relevant pages)
6. linking potential – acquire backlinks without actively outreaching content
7. freshness boosts for pages with fresh content added

Here are the types of content you might want to priortise if you work in financial services or are a fintech business.

Here is how SEO can benefit your small business.

Why Create a Content Strategy for SEO?

An SEO led content strategy can form an essential part of any website growth plan.

Strategically produced and targeted SEO content can help not only bring in more traffic but can also help with;

• Creating content on your website most relevant to the products and services you offer to help build authority around those products and lead to better rankings, increased visibility and more sales.
• Ensure you create unique content for your website that hasn’t already been written – as websites get older, it’s more common for sites to duplicate content which can lead to issues with cannibalisation and cause problems later on. Defining what you are writing upfront can mitigate long term risk.
• SEO content planning upfront can offer clarity on the types of piece you will be producing for the site and allow you to understand how each content piece will connect together and fit into the wider content project.
• Conversion led SEO content strategies – with a holistic view of the content project, you can identify; how pieces link together, which stage of the buying process your web visitors may be at when clicking on your content and what the next steps might be to encourage them to complete the transaction.
• Site structure and internal linking – with upfront definition of your content development pipeline, you’ll get to understand how best to structure content on your site and how to link internally to allow users and search engines to move between your pieces. This can help establish relevancy between content and products and establish good internal linking practices within your marketing teams.

An effective SEO content strategy can generate work for your marketing teams for years to come and combined with expert organic search consultancy, could see your website, customer base and sales totals increase rapidly.

Here is why content is important for SEO, traffic growth and client acquisition.

What to Consider When Creating a Content Strategy

Your goals are important, you need to be proactive in how you approach “success” from your content strategy.

Just throwing content out there, hoping it will “go big” isn’t a well defined content strategy.

Researching and planning your content strategy so specific parts of the strategy join up to help both you and users complete goals is the single most effective way of creating content for organic search growth.

For this reason, here are the most important considerations for you to think about when developing your content strategy.

Help Users Achieve Goals

There is no secret to great SEO content. Creating a content strategy for SEO can help you focus your business on the core problems that you are trying to solve for your users.

Creating a content strategy based on helping your users complete their goals quickly and effectively is one of the best ways to grow you presence in search results.

This is what truly great content offers. Content pieces that focus on fully meeting the needs of the user are much more likely to acquire links, visitors and rank well in search engines than content without any strategic intent.

Add Your Take

Ensure you add your own takes and opinions to content you produce.

Try to include things like;

• new data points to help prove your opinions or theories
• commentary or opinions of experts (yours is fine, if that is you)

These types of feature will help add to the existing canon of information elsewhere and data, if used well, can help prove your opinions and theories.

Diversify Content Delivery

Don’t just stick to text or blog written content, more and more, Google especially is favouring alternative methods of content in search engine results pages.

For example; X (twitter) and tweets commonly surface for short form snippet content and news.

YouTube can rank well because many prefer videos to consume information.

Reddit is currently the go to destination for UGC content, real opinions, discussions and debates.

Your content strategy should ensure that your content can be shared, or at least promoted, across these platforms in some guise.

Increased traction across social will help with organic performance right now, so a cohesive approach which streamlines the ability to easily share content everywhere is critical.

In the early phases of your content strategy development, consider how you’ll market content, tie your organic content with products, social media campaigns and re-distribute it to maximise results quickly.

Is there an easy way to create a content strategy?

There’s not really an “easy” way to do this, although, depending on the detail level, some ways are simpler and easier than others.

For example; keywords alone are not a content strategy, it is understanding how these keywords can help inform you how to leverage your content to convert users that is the valuable part.

“Evergreen” SEO content strategies were and still are a very effective, simplified strategy for creating SEO led content strategies. However, “evergreen” is a term to be used lightly because updates will be required to maintain content and keep it relevant.

How we can help

I can help you. We are experts in planning and implementing content strategies and can help your business.

We can help define a relevant, holistic, valuable and long term viable SEO content plan for your business.

Our content led SEO service will take into account; your business goals, your team and their expertise level and your budget to help you achieve your business goals through a highly detailed specific content plan.

Our SEO content strategy services & what you will get

Our content strategy services can help you develop your content strategy that will bring you valuable traffic. We can offer;

1. Research and identify keywords your site should target
2. A detailed opportunity analysis so you can see the biggest revenue opportunities alongside how difficult it will be to rank for that set of queries.
3. Define page-level spec sheets for content writers to follow so you can be confident your whole team is on board with SEO prioritisation.
4. Work with your writers to create a tone of voice and be on hand to answer any SEO content best practice queries they may have.
5. Assess performance and changes to the rankings of your existing content so that you have clarity over how your important content performs, how we can grow traffic and which other subjects can be covered to help diversify your offering.
6. Create a link building and outreach strategy specific to your brand which can get your content seen by readers and ranking in search engines.

A typical content strategy developed by Search Natural will be delivered in excel or Google sheets and provide key data around the content pieces that we would advise you to write first, these might be based on;

• keyword volumes
• overall potential $/£ value
• buying phase of the content
• content which best aligns with your current business goals

SEO content development FAQs

Why is unique content so important in SEO?

Unique content is critical for SEO because it sets you apart from competitors, helps underline your expertise as a business and helps build trust with your users.

If you’re creating content which;

• is heavily duplicated or already exists in abundance on your website
• relies heavily on AI for insights and expertise
• that simply isn’t performing in organic search (lacking visitors or returning no leads or sales)

Speak to us, we can help you define an effective, efficient and high value SEO content strategy to transform your digital presence and your business.

What is an SEO content strategy?

An SEO content strategy will vary from business to business and website to website. For some businesses, a specific and distinct SEO content strategy isn’t necessary, however, we’d always recommend that SEO best practice is woven into any digital content that you produce for your website.

For other organisations, where a healthy digital presence is critical to the success and profits of your business, a well defined and thoroughly thought through SEO strategy is essential for keeping the business moving and growing.

You will always want to show up where your potential customers are searching and a detailed SEO strategy can certainly help you achieve that.

By positioning your content to help solve problems your customers are having, you’ll benefit from;

• consistent new leads
• ongoing and repeated custom
• brand recognition and growth
• better business profitability

Published on: 16/07/2019