SEO Web Strategy: How to Create Content That Resonates and Ranks

Your SEO web strategy should include a variety of tactics and efforts. All of these come together to lift your site in search. One of the most important of these tactics for mental wellness organizations is creating educational blog content. 

When done right, this allows you to reach people who don’t know you yet—but would love what you have to offer. Think about it: they have a question, let’s say, “how to meditate,” and you give them an answer. You add value to their life, which gives them a great first impression of your brand. When they need what they have to offer, they go to you.

In this ideal world, your content was SEO-optimized well, so it’s ranking. But it was also created with your very specific audience in mind, so it resonates as well.

In this case, it makes sense that 56 percent of marketers say blogging is an effective marketing tool and 10 percent say it generates their biggest ROI. What’s more, searches for wellness and mental health have been on the rise since the pandemic with 1 billion health-related questions every day. 

If your website isn’t ranking for the terms that your potential customers and clients are searching for, you risk losing them to your competitors who are showing up instead. 

The thing is, SEO content creation is a long-term strategy, which makes it hard to prioritize over paid advertising or social media marketing. On the other side of that time and effort, however, is a long-term and sustainable source of traffic that grows in value year after year. 

Each day you wait to prioritize SEO is another day that you lose potential customers and clients in search. Now’s the time to solidify content as part of your SEO web strategy. Here are five steps to get started with that.

Data is the most important aspect of any SEO web strategy because organic growth can be hard to see. You need benchmark data to start with and access to fresh data to know if it’s working as you go. 

It’s important to remember, however, that, even if you are doing it right—you may not see traffic to your new content for a year or more. Plus, your success is dependent upon a variety of other factors like how new your site is, how much traffic you’re already getting, your current backlink profile, and site speed. 

Regardless of all that, there are a few metrics that can help you determine if your SEO web strategy is working. You should see progress with the data points below within 3 to 6 months if your site is a few years old and already has traffic coming in. It could take closer to a year or longer if your website is new with little to no traffic coming in.

Creating content that resonates and ranks, however, comes down to more than just knowing your audience. It’s making sure that your content is infused with your unique voice. For example, when creating content with my client, Lindywell, the team and I often come back to this question: how do we know this is from Lindywell and not some other wellness brand? How does our voice come through in this? What unique lens are we putting on this topic? 

We achieve this unique POV in all Lindywell content by adding more personal stories to the content itself. We also regularly reference back to the pillars of their brand like grace over guilt mindset. In addition, those brand pillars are also the backbone of all content creation at the start of ideation and keyword research. 

Ultimately, they know their audience very well and that helps us create content they love. You can check out the content we create together at Lindywell.com/Blog.

Google’s algorithm changes, but one thing that never changes is the importance of quality. If anything, with each new update they release, the focus on quality gets more and more heightened. They want their users to have the best possible experience and that means prioritizing pages and websites that provide that experience. 

Unfortunately, quality goes out the window when you’re trying to do this work on a budget or cut corners. While free tools like ChatGPT or inexpensive freelancers can be a part of the content process, they won’t get your content to the level it needs to be to compete in search or within a crowded market. 

That’s where an organic content marketing agency or an experienced SEO contractor, who specializes in organic content marketing for the mental wellness industry, becomes important. This type of person or agency knows your audience and the industry but also understands the inner workings of organic marketing and SEO. This is what will help you reach the quality you need to be successful. 

Simply updating one or two pages or publishing one blog post every three months won’t do anything for you. Sure, it’s good to have, but it’s not going to move the needle. To rank for the thousands of search terms your potential clients and customers are searching for, you need to be creating new content consistently. 

This is why I always recommend starting with four blog posts per month. This will help you get moving in the right direction quickly. While you don’t need to maintain this cadence indefinitely, you do need to continually add new content to your site. It’s also helpful to update old content so you can build your authority over time. 

The good news is that this content isn’t just for SEO. You can leverage an Integrated Content Strategy (what I teach my clients) to make sure this content seamlessly supports social media, email, podcasting, and more. It can feed your entire organic marketing funnel with fresh content each month if you do it right.

I require a 6-month contract when working with clients because SEO and organic marketing take time to work. Not only do you need to be consistent, but you need to plan on committing to SEO indefinitely. 

Bottom line, this is not a one-and-done or a 6-month and then-done kind of process. If you want to see real results—and keep them coming—it needs to become another part of your marketing strategy that’s just as important as social or paid ads. 

Here’s the thing: the longer you wait on this aspect of your SEO web strategy, the longer it will be before you see traffic (and leads, clients, and customers) from search. Don’t ignore content—get started ASAP so you can start building this sustainable source of traffic and leads for your mental wellness business.