Overview
- Google's AI Overviews and the leaked Search API documents have serious implications for current SEO practices.
- User intent now matters more than ever. This affirms SEO-related reasons to build a brand offline, but also means you need to refine your content to solve specific pain points for your audience.
- User experience is also an increasingly important part of content. Not only does your content need to be genuinely valuable—it also needs to be attractive, engaging, and help visitors find what they want quickly.
- Securing quality backlinks, engaging in guest blogging, and promoting your content on social media can all help build brand authority (and improve your rankings).
- Since SEO and content strategy requires a holistic and multifaceted approach, investing in expert support can be the most cost-effective way to improve your rankings.
SEO and content are foundational elements of your digital growth strategy, and Google loves to show great content from strong brands. How you affirm to Google that your brand and content passes grade is changing, and UX elements play an increasingly important role.
That might all seem complicated—but it’s more straightforward than you think. The key is to focus on providing an excellent experience for users that makes it easy for them to find what they need.
Of course, there’s a list of specific things you can do to make sure Google and other search engines know what you’re doing and reward you for it. That’s why we created this guide—read on and learn how to build an SEO and content strategy that helps you compete in the current landscape.
Why Last Year’s SEO Favorite “SEO Hack” Doesn’t Work Like it Used To
Before we get into what your current SEO and content strategy should look like, we need to cover a few major shifts that have taken place in the last year or so.
While still important, Google has somewhat lessened the impact of topical authority (via its September 2023 through March 2024 algo updates) for websites that have a small backlink profile or low volume for branded search terms. This means that for most sites, pumping out huge volumes of content is unlikely to drive the organic traffic that it used to.
Google’s shift away from its love of content is why brands like House Fresh have seen the SEO-carpet pulled out from beneath them: while they have tremendous amounts of content, they don’t have the brand recognition that drives users to Google them specifically.
This doesn’t mean that content-driven SEO doesn’t work, but that a greater emphasis needs to be placed on brand promotion and content marketing if you want it to remain competitive organically.
Google’s AI Overviews
Starting in early Q2 2024, Google has been placing AI-generated summaries ahead of traditional search results for specific questions and queries with long tail keywords. These summaries also include links to a limited number of pages that AI Overviews use to collect data for their answers.
Being linked to by these summaries can give you a significant boost in traffic when users make related queries—but because AI Overviews appear ahead of other results, they’ve had a net negative impact on organic traffic.
That means content aimed at the types of keywords that generate AI Overviews needs to be highly competitive. To learn more about this, read our related article below.
Related: Google’s AI Overviews Are Here: What It Means for Your SEO Campaign
The Leaked Google Search API Documents
In May 2024, numerous leaked Google search API documents were revealed to the public that contained revelations about how the search engine ranks content. Some of the key takeaways are as follows:
- Google is paying more attention to user signals than previously thought—which means UX should play a larger role in your SEO.
- Google also weighs navigational intent (i.e., they’re trying to show users what they think users are looking for). This means there’s now an SEO-related reason for offline brand-building.
- EEAT (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) may be less directly relevant to your rankings than you thought. That doesn’t mean they aren’t still important—but the leak suggests that their impact on rankings may be indirect. You still want your content to demonstrate EEAT, but you also need to back it up with high-quality backlinks and brand building.
If you’re following white-hat SEO fundamentals, none of the above should cause you to rethink your SEO approach from the ground up—but as you’ll see below, these principles should certainly guide your thinking as you refine and update your strategy.
What to Include in Your SEO & Content Strategy
A successful SEO and content strategy should help increase your organic traffic and boost your conversion rates—but as per the above, it should also build brand awareness and domain authority.
Below, we outline the different areas your strategy should cover and provide a checklist for improving each one.
Keyword Research
Keyword density doesn’t matter as much as it used to—as long as you’re not stuffing keywords into your content in ways that don’t feel natural. But choosing keywords of opportunity is still central to creating content that matches user intent.
Here’s what you should be doing:
- Know your audience and learn their pain points to determine what they’re most likely to search for. Use this to ideate potential content topics.
- Use tools like SEMrush and Google’s Keyword Planner to validate your potential topics and find relevant keywords.
- Target long-tail keywords for more specific and higher-converting traffic. Note that these keywords are more likely to produce AI Overviews, so you’ll want to make sure the content you create to rank for them is optimized to be included in these summaries.
High-Quality Content
Google’s helpful content policies reward content that provides value to users. That means you can’t just mass-publish blogs anymore if you want your content to rank. You now need to make sure it’s delivering what users want quickly and efficiently. Here are some things to keep in mind:
- Speak to your audience. Answer their questions fully and provide real solutions to their pain points. This is easier if you’ve done your keyword research properly in the last section.
- Go for engagement. Grabbing a visitor’s attention lowers your bounce rate and increases your chance to convert them. Add high-quality images, videos, infographics, and other elements to your blogs.
- Don’t forget EEAT. Your content should be well-researched, include uniquely valuable information, and be connected to credible sources (either via the author or backlinks). Like we said above, this is still important, even if its effects aren’t as direct as people used to think.
- UX is part of content now. Make sure your content is created for maximum consumability. We’ll talk more about this in the UX section of this guide.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO involves optimizing individual pages to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic. Here are some key aspects:
- Titles and descriptions. Titles are now the more important of these two to focus on—you want them to be under 60 characters, include your main keywords, and compel the reader to click through.
The character count for descriptions matters less, but you should still keep it under 160 so that it doesn’t get cut off and impact your CTR.
- Header Tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.). Header tags structure your content—making it easier for users to read and more crawlable for search engines.
- Keyword placement. Naturally incorporate keywords into your content, including the introduction, body, and conclusion.
- Interlinks. Link to other relevant content on your site to keep users engaged and improve crawlability.
User Experience (UX)
As we said above, UX is now a vital part of creating content that delivers value to visitors. You also need to stop thinking about UX as a collection of technical criteria and start thinking about it in a more holistic way. Essentially, UX is the sum of everything a user interacts with when they view your site and content.
We’ve written an entire article on UX for SEO. Check it out below:
Related: Why UX Matters More for SEO Than You Think
Some quick steps you can take to improve the UX your content offers include:
- Make your content lean and mean. Grab attention off the top with engaging hero sections and intros, provide accurate information, include high-quality backlinks, avoid spammy links and keyword stuffing, and offer an experience that users can’t get from other search results. We covered most of this in the content section above.
- Make your content navigable. Create a sitemap and wireframes that help people find what they’re looking for and make your content easier for search engines to crawl.
- Optimize for mobile first. Ensure your site is responsive and offers a seamless experience on all devices. After all, more than 60% of traffic today is from mobile.
- Increase your page load speed. Fast-loading pages reduce bounce rates and improve user satisfaction.
Off-Page SEO & Link Building
Off-page SEO involves activities outside your website that impact your rankings. While conventionally understood by SEOs as the most important ranking signal after content/user intent alignment, the recent API leaks largely affirms the value that backlinks and brand sentiment provides.
Make sure you are:
- Securing backlinks from reputable and relevant sites.
- Earning positive brand mentions on websites relevant to your audience
- Writing guest posts for high-authority blogs in your industry.
- Promoting your content on social media platforms to drive traffic and build brand awareness.
- Promoting your brand through a mix of digital and offline channels (AKA, getting more people to “Google” you)
Measuring & Analyzing Performance
As before, part of your SEO and content strategy should be to regularly measure and analyze performance so that you can make data-driven decisions about future efforts. Key metrics to track include:
- Organic Traffic: Monitor the volume of traffic coming from search engines.
- Bounce Rate: Track the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page.
- Conversion Rate: Measure the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action (e.g., filling out a form, making a purchase).
Keyword Rankings: Keep an eye on how your target keywords are performing in search results. You can also use Semrush’s position tracking to find out how many times your site is appearing in AI Overviews.
Finding Support for Your SEO & Content Strategy
In some ways, you could argue that Google and other search engines are doing everything they can to make search simpler for users. Most of the new developments we’ve discussed above are aimed at connecting people with the information they want in faster and more intuitive ways.
But as a business owner, you need to be aware of the specific changes search engines make to facilitate this experience—and you have to adjust your content strategy accordingly if you want to reap the SEO benefits. It’s a lot to stay on top of, even if you have someone doing it in-house.
Investing in professional support can help you update your content strategy more efficiently. Our team at Apex Growth knows the specific ranking factors that help brands grow, and we can create a plan that keeps your content ranking as the search landscape shifts.
Reach out to our team and learn more about how we’ll work with you to elevate your digital presence.