Guides  ·  4,400 · KD 29 searches a month

SEO content strategy

You have a spreadsheet of four hundred keywords sorted by volume, and every one of them is owned by a site with ten years of history. Volume is why the plan fails.

Part 1

Sort by winnable, not by volume

A term with 400 searches you can rank for beats a term with 40,000 you cannot. Look at who currently holds the first five results. If they are all sites older and larger than yours, that term is not a plan, it is a wish.

Do this: Take your keyword list and delete every row where all five top results are national brands. What remains is your actual plan.
Part 2

Write the clusters, not the singles

Five pages that answer five neighbouring questions and link to each other do far better than five pages on unrelated subjects. The linking between them is not a nice extra, it is most of the effect.

Do this: Group your remaining keywords into clusters of four or five. Publish a cluster at a time, not one page at a time.
Part 3

Match the format the results already show

If every result for a term is a comparison table, your essay will not win, whatever it says. The results page is telling you what people accepted, and arguing with it is expensive.

Do this: Open the top five results before writing. Copy the format, not the words.
Part 4

Stop and link before you write more

After ten pages, another ten pages helps less than connecting the ten you have. Orphaned good pages are the most common waste on a young site.

Do this: Every new page must link to two existing ones, and one existing page must link to it. No exceptions.

This is teaching material and our own reading of standard practice, not advice for your specific site. Check anything important with your own specialist.

Free consultation

Want us to look at your page? It costs nothing.

Run the free check, then tell us what it found. We reply with what to fix first and why. No call, no pitch.

Run the free check

If a word here is unfamiliar it is defined in the SEO glossary. Two public penalties and one problem we found on our own network are pulled apart in the case studies, and the longer pieces live in the library.