How your customers find you can vary significantly. It may be based on their interests, needs or pain points.
Some people may already know exactly what they need and search for that on Google. Others may be just starting the research process. Others may already know what they need and compare to identify the best source to purchase from.
In this stage of your SEO research and planning, you’ll want to identify:
- Target personas
- Buying stages
- Potential keywords
Your goal will be to map your target personas, buying stages and keywords for each persona and buying stage.
Evaluate your existing content
With your comprehensive keyword research, the next step is to look at the existing content of your site and see if it’s optimized properly.
- Does your website have pages that are not getting any traffic from Google, pages that are near-duplicates or multiple pages targeting the same keyword?
- Do you have content pieces to match the keyword list you created in the previous stage?
Before creating a content calendar or editorial strategy, it’s ideal to audit your existing content. By reviewing your existing pages, you can decide which pages need to be removed, consolidated or optimized.
Some of the elements you can look for include:
- Page traffic
- Primary keyword
- Number of keywords ranking
- Word count
- Internal linking
To perform a content audit, you’ll need to export all of your pages from your CMS or use an SEO audit tool, such as Screaming Frog or Semrush Site Audit, to get a list of your site’s existing pages.
Assess your site’s content
once you have collected all of the data, go through the URLs and label the pages:
- Keep: The page is optimized and performing well and can be left alone.
- Optimize: The page could be ranking better with improved on-page SEO.
- Rewrite/revamp: This is for pages where the content needs to be revamped or rewritten.
- Remove: These pages are not performing well and should be removed. When doing so, it’s important to remove the page from your sitemap, Google Search Console, and any inbound links.
- Consolidate: If there are multiple pages targeting the same keyword, consider moving all of the content into the URL that is performing best and using 301 redirects for the other pages.
Revamp existing content
Primary keyword optimization
The primary keyword should appear in the:
- Meta (page) title: For existing articles, you can edit an existing article’s meta-title. Where possible, start the title tag with your primary keyword.
- Meta description: Up to 230-character descriptions of the article. Make sure that you use the primary keyword as close to the beginning of the meta description as possible.
- The first heading of your article is the title. This should be an H1 heading. The title/heading should include the primary keyword.
- First paragraph. The primary keyword should appear in the first paragraph, ideally within the first 100 words.
- Anchor text: Include the primary keyword in at least one outbound, internal link.