SEO Content Development: Six Ideas to Improve Your Strategy

Originally published December 7, 2021 , updated on August 24, 2024

Content creation is all the rage these days. Businesses across all sectors and industries are doing SEO content development. Or at least attempting to. 

But content for the sake of content seldomly drives growth or boosts website traffic. Not unless you are making an effort to create strong pieces that really appeal to your audience. If you keep developing pieces that serve no real purpose, you are wasting both time and money. 

So, what type of content should you be creating? What content will lead to better website visits, more engagement, good leads, and new customers? We have some ideas. 

Below are six types of content that will work as a growth hacker and boost your traffic and engagement. 

Create Reference Content

By reference content, we mean ebooks, white papers, and research papers. These are the types of pieces that deep dive into a subject, a problem, or a solution. 

For example, let’s take a business in the tourism industry. This business could create a research paper about the effects of the pandemic on travel and tourism to island destinations —  destinations that have previously been hugely popular with travellers. This research paper could explore how these island communities have adapted over the last two years and what the future of these islands is if tourism does not bounce back. 

This is the type of paper that does several positive things for your brand. For one, if you make it a downloadable paper, it could help with an email database. To access the paper, people would need to input their details into a form. It also positions the tourism company as a thought leader in the industry and others will link to your research paper to support the same or similar ideas. Which, of course, leads to more website traffic and better search rankings. 

Other examples of reference content to consider include ebooks and whitepapers. If you are unsure of how to create these, you can use SEO content writing services. 

Develop Newsjacking Pieces 

Not sure what newsjacking is? According to a story on Sprout Social, “Newsjacking is the process of adding your thoughts and opinions into breaking news stories. It’s piggybacking on trending news topics to get yourself noticed”. 

It’s a highly recommended form of content and a good way to insert yourself into whatever the current narrative and headlines may be. But you have to get on it early. You need to be able to identify a newsjacking opportunity before it starts trending too much. Otherwise, you risk being drowned out in all the content. 

This is not the type of piece you can plan for next week. If you see a topic starting to trend and you want to write something to newsjack it, you have to get on it immediately. The turnaround needs to be within an hour or two. Any later and you will miss the window of opportunity. 

Newsjacking is great for SEO as search engines prioritise stories and headlines that relate to trending stories. It leads to better engagement and more website traffic because your content is fresh and relevant. 

Use Videos 

We’ve said this before and we will say it again – videos are the way to go. Videos have proven to be the most engaging type of content for a while now. It’s been noted that websites with video get more views, that video content gets more engagement, and that video is better at holding the attention of an audience. 

If video is not yet part of your content plan, it definitely should be. These days, you don’t even need top-of-the-range cameras to create a good video. Smartphones have come a long way and many content creators use their phones for video creation. There are numerous free video editing software programmes that are easy to use. You can try DaVinci Resolve, OpenShot, and iMovie if you have a Mac or iPhone. 

Design Infographics 

Just like videos, an infographic is an easy-to-consume piece of media. It can get a lot of information across in a clever and fun way. These do really well as images within a text-heavy piece, but also on social media. 

Infographics can often lead to more engagement on social media and you can use them to encourage your audience to visit your website for more details. 

Write List-Type Pieces

List pieces — or listicles as it is sometimes called — help break up long pieces of text. Instead of readers reading one long written piece, they can see the main points of the story in, well, point form.

This very piece that you are reading now is a list of six types of content that will help your website grow. If we had written this as one large block of words, it wouldn’t have been easy to absorb. 

Separating everything into subheadings or listing makes things easier to read and is less taxing on the brain. It’s also an interesting way to present information. Good, relevant lists are often linked in other websites too. And this works towards website traffic and new website views. 

Create How-to Guides

One of the most searched phrases on the internet is “how to…”. And it’s definitely something you should consider answering in your content. 

It has to be relevant to your field, of course. You wouldn’t create a guide on how to change a flat tyre if you are a tour operator. But you could create a guide on how to travel the world on a budget, or how to make the most of a solo holiday. 

A how-to guide could also be something very straightforward for your company. If you are an online project management tool company, your how-to guide could simply be “How to best use our program for your business”. This type of guide is popular for new users or potential customers. 

SEO content development isn’t always easy, but with the right strategy and the right type of content, the hard work can lead to great rewards in the end. 

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