Developing a Cornerstone Content Strategy

Did you know that “cornerstone content” strategies will boost your SEO performance in exciting ways? Cornerstone content is a series of articles on your blog that are typically long and information-packed. These blog posts cover a variety of topics relevant to your industry. And, they also reflect your business’ mission and highlight your expertise. It’s essential to have a cornerstone content strategy to set your site up for success. Over time, it’s vital to get your articles to rank high in search engines, and a plan can help you get there. We’ll review this and reveal some tips on how to make that happen.

Cornerstone content should be the center of your website’s on site SEO strategy. We’ll let you in on a secret: That’s where all the action happens. The more articles you write, the more you can identify yourself as an expert in your field. Your audience will flock to your website because they want to learn more about the latest and most significant trends.

For example, if your focus is on marketing your health products, you should work on writing a series of health-focused articles. The idea is to keep people coming back to your blog to get advice and learn how they can improve their lives.

How a Cornerstone Content Strategy Affects Rankings

Sure it’s great to build a strong readership and have a bunch of blog articles on your website. But, as you push out more content, wouldn’t it be nice to improve your website rankings? You deserve to get rewarded for your hard work!

That’s where an SEO strategy comes into play. As you develop a variety of articles focused on your niche, you should always have SEO in the back of your mind.

It gets challenging to rank for search terms, but with the right cornerstone strategy in place, you can work on ranking for competitive terms. If you don’t take the time to focus on this, you’re not taking advantage of the many benefits of creating an effective content writing strategy.

Luckily if you focus on developing the correct internal link structure, your posts will “talk” to Google and let them know which ones are important. If your articles are offering tasty and appealing dessert, Google will take a bite! Google wants to showcase the best articles, and you can make that happen!

We have had a lot of success with clients by turning to an SEO tool, we prefer SEMrush, to see which keywords have some good momentum and are close to reaching the first page of Google. Capitalize on that progress with a new article, or series of articles, discussing that topic. By adding in several internal links (where appropriate) and properly optimizing the content we are able to create great content that doesn’t just rank well, but that readers find relevant and useful.
— Briana Barkett, Webdirexion Content Strategist

Here are a few tips on how to improve your SEO (and we can help you develop a strategy as well!) These tips are if you’ve already written articles and want to improve them. But, if you’re starting from scratch, you have an advantage. You can incorporate keywords and work on your SEO right from the get-go!

Check these quick tips out:

1. Think about which keywords you want to go with and want to rank for
2. Rework posts so that they include important keywords throughout the article
3. Rewrite and/or expand cornerstone articles and optimize them for SEO
4. Interlink your articles by adding links to different articles in posts that are performing well (more on this next)

Improving Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are a short paragraph of text that describes the content. This description, otherwise known as a snippet, will show up under your page’s URL when people search for various topics using a search engine. When your website pops up after searching on Google, for example, the snippet will tell them more about the subject based on their search.

So how does a meta description affect your content strategy and SEO? Ultimately it influences the person who comes across the snippet. Based on what your description says, the searcher may or may not click through and land on your website.

Providing well-written meta descriptions can help improve your chances of people clicking through to pages on your website.

There are always ways to improve your meta descriptions and improve your rankings.

For example, if you have articles with high-impressions and a low Click-Through Rate (CTR), there are a few things you can do to improve them. Internally link to articles that have a low bounce rate. That means successful blog posts should include a link to newer articles. And, you should also add links to blog posts that don’t have a strong CTR. That way, when someone clicks on a link after finding your article on Google, they’ll have the option to read more content. If that happens, excellent work! It’s great getting rewarded due to your clever linkage strategy.

Here’s a quick recap: Work on improving your meta descriptions to improve your SEO. Add a link or two in your top-performing posts to other blog articles. Implementing both of these strategies is a great way to generate more clicks. And, you’ll also send site visitors to articles who need more attention.

Categories and Tags

You might be wondering what categories and tags have to do with SEO. Well, it just so happens that if you want to have high-rankings, then using categories and tags on your website is essential. Categories and tags combined with SEO-friendly content can do wonders for your site.

A few ways to improve your content is by coming up with legitimate categories and tags. To accomplish this, first, you should do some keyword research. Figure out what the most relevant keyword phrases would work best for your website.

As you come up with excellent categories and tags, be sure to ask yourself if they’re relevant to your blog posts. If your answer is yes, then they will improve the readability and accessibility of your blog articles. And, that means your posts are more likely to rank higher.

It’s best to come up with a structure before writing a lot of blog articles. If you’ve already written several articles, you can still improve your categories and tags, though. Knowing which topics you’re going to write about and what those categories and tags will look like can help point you in the right direction. Come up with a structured plan. That way, you won’t have to deal with changing any categories, sub-categories, and tags down the road.

In Conclusion

So there you have it. Are you ready to improve your SEO by enhancing your blog posts, tags, categories, and meta descriptions? It may seem like you have a lot on your plate, but we can come up with a cornerstone content strategy that’ll set you up for success. Continue to come back to our blog for future advice on this topic, and if you have any questions, please contact us.

We’re happy to point you in the right direction. Coming up with creative solutions is our goal, so you can improve your SEO on the world wide web!