SEO + Content Strategy

Strategy is at the heart of our St. Louis SEO and content services. As a digital marketing agency, it fuels our efforts and feeds into every part of what we do. We’d love to give a basic definition of what a comprehensive online marketing strategy is, but trying to summarize it as just one thing is next to impossible since there’s no one-fit-all solution. Our favorite comparison is to that of a doctor assisting a patient.

When someone comes to us with an underperforming or “sick” website, we’ll run a series of tests, also known as an SEO audit, and then formulate a custom care plan to help your site recover. Also similar to a real ailment, you can’t rush the healing process. It’ll take some time before your site is performing at an optimal level, but we won’t quit until we get it there.

Get a free St. Louis SEO and content strategy consultation by clicking below. You can also get a consultation if you aren’t from the St. Louis area.

Our St. Louis SEO & Content Strategy Services

Now despite what we said about there being practically a million ways to approach SEO and content strategy, we’re going to do our best to lay out a few crucial components that feed into all of our strategies in one way or another. If you’re familiar with SEO, you’ve probably heard these terms used before but maybe just don’t understand the specifics of what goes into each one. We’ll give you a basic definition and dive into some details around the role each one plays in our strategies.

SEO Strategy

SEO services and content strategy are slightly different but very closely related, kind of like siblings. They’re both considered separate beings but heavily rely on each other to succeed. We’ll first start with SEO and some of the important factors we look at when formulating a strategy.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is an extremely important part of your overall SEO strategy because this is how search engines determine what your page is actually about and what search terms your website is relevant for. If your on-page SEO is not in place, you won’t even begin to rank for your target keywords.

Things We Do

• Correct structure of your URLs
• Proper page titles and meta descriptions per Google’s guidelines
• Ensure correct 301 redirects are in place
• Develop and implement an effective internal linking structure
• Content development and optimization
• Keyword-rich content containing location-specific words
• Ensure you have all original content, fixing all duplicate content
• Develop an XML sitemap, connect Google search console, SEO Tools, and tracking tools

Local SEO

Local businesses thrive off of having the correct business information in as many places as possible. This means making sure your business citations, if they include a link or not are all correctly optimized. We will optimize your NAP listing and make sure they are correct across the Internet. Outdated or duplicate listings can hurt your business if not taken care of.

We’ll spend time each month managing each listing and making sure they’re optimized for your business location. This is also important if your local business has an eCommerce website. This is very important for your small business and major corporations. A number of listings for your niche can range from sixty to over two hundred, which really help your business get seen, including:

• Yelp.com
• Google My Business
• Bing Local
• Facebook.com
• Dex Knows
• Yahoo Local
• Citysearch
• Superpages
• Manta
• Yellowpages.com

Technical SEO

To bring it down to its simplest form, technical SEO is what SEO experts do to make sure that websites follow search engine rules which include a series of back-end fixes and implementations that Google loves. This often includes improving site speed, inserting schema, fixing all errors, making sure your site structure is set up right, creating a readable robots.txt, submitting an XML sitemap, plus many other things. In turn, this all helps make sure that your website is properly indexed and ranked by search engines.

The key to understanding technical SEO is that it doesn’t directly work with the content you put on your website’s pages but rather its infrastructure. To fully understand this concept, think of a city. Part of a city’s infrastructure is its roads and each road takes you a little bit deeper into different sections of that city through connecting streets.

That is essentially what technical SEO does. It guides search engines and viewers to different parts of your website through connecting URLs.

The goal is to eventually get your site to a place where:

• It has no major penalties.
• Website speed is good.
• It’s free of 404 errors.
• There are no duplicate page titles or meta descriptions.
• Your robot.txt file is in place and accurate.
• Canonical URLs are set up correctly.
• There are no bad redirects (redirect circles).

Link Development

Another very important part of SEO is backlinks, otherwise known as inbound links. We make sure that you receive these links from trusted and authoritative sites. Having 5 links from strong authoritative sites is better than having 50 links from sites with low authority. We encourage natural link building by providing high-quality content on your website.

To get ahead of your competitors we will also do a competitor analysis to find valuable links that Google gives more trust to, and then begin to acquire those links.

Content Strategy

Once we’ve had a chance to address some of the more pressing technical issues and have constructed a solid foundation for your site, we’ll then sprinkle in some more content strategy. We use the word “more” because at this point we’ve already started to implement content optimizations and on-page implementations which help set the stage for more intensive content tasks further down the line.

As mentioned above, SEO and content strategy go hand-in-hand so the lines of where SEO strategy stops and content strategy starts can be a bit blurry.

Here’s a rough timeline for our SEO/Content process:

• Month 1: Technical fixes that help improve site health (404 errors, broken links, redirect loops, etc.).
• Month 2-3: More technical fixes and optimization of existing content (landing pages, blog posts, forms, etc.).
• Month 4: Content strategy presentation.
• Month 5+: Ongoing technical fixes + new content creation and optimizations.

Now of course every timeline varies depending on factors such as the size of a client’s site, the type of industry they’re in, the number of technical issues that need to be fixed, etc. The most important takeaway is that we need to lay down a solid foundation and make sure all existing pages are ranking before we throw any new content into the mix.

Content Marketing Deck

Once we’ve hit that threshold, we’ll present you with a content strategy deck. In this deck, you can expect a list of content goals, a competitive analysis, an audience analysis, keyword research, tone/messaging recommendations, new content opportunities, and more. Once we’ve presented this information to you, we’ll wait for your approval before we set our priorities and get to work.

New Content Creation

The main reason to put out new content on a regular basis is to give search engine spiders a reason to keep coming back. If your website becomes stagnant, search engines may not consider your content relevant anymore and your rankings could suffer. We’ll never know exactly how search engine algorithms work, but we do know that the more pages you have indexed, the more of an expert you appear to be.

When creating new content, whether it’s a landing page or a blog post, there are a few important steps that must be taken:

1. Keyword Research – Need to identify which keyword you’d like your content piece to rank for, along with a handful of LSI keywords.
2. Industry Research – In order to be labeled as the expert, you need to sound like you know what you’re talking about.
3. Competitive Research – See what the competition is doing, and what’s working and not working? What can you do to stand out?
4. Content Writing – Write the actual content making sure that it’s easy to understand and properly caters to your audience.
5. Content Optimization – Make sure that you’ve included both external and internal links, keywords, proper heading hierarchy, call to action, etc. This will help your overall lead generation.
6. Link Building – The process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. This is an important factor to Google and great content can make natural link building easier.
7. Reporting – Check in on your content to see how well it’s performing. If your content didn’t hit its intended goal, make some tweaks

We’re Here To Help With Your St. Louis SEO!

Hopefully, at this point, you’re not reaching information overload, but if you are, we’d be more than happy to answer any questions you may have and help clear things up about our St. Louis SEO and Content Strategy services.

SEO and content strategy may seem super intensive but as long as you’re patient and consistent, you’ll see vast improvements over time. We can say that because we’ve seen it happen with our own eyes! As an SEO Agency, we want you to call us at (314) 849-6969 with questions about our St. Louis SEO company or fill out our project tree form below. Don’t forget to ask about our website design services.