Hi @RhiannonCleary. Glad you asked, this is one of the INBOUND 2016 announcements I’m really excited about.
The new Content Strategy tool is evolving based on the changing nature of search engines, and how content needs to adapt. Keywords are still very important, and still matter, but how your content is structured and the engagement of that content has become far more important in the eyes of Google.
There are a few fundamental shifts occuring that are driving this change:
- As searchers, our queries are changing. Instead of just searching for “sports cars”, our queries are more complex now. One example could be, “what are the best sports cars under $50,000?”
As a result of queries getting more complex, Google introduced RankBrain to help understand the context of your long-tail query and boil it down into a meaningful answer. - Because Google, and other search engines, have begun to understand and interpret induvidual terms and the context their used optimizing for just one keyword may mean you miss out on the overall topic. There are a ton of different but related searches going on to your keyword that you don’t want to miss by just optimizing content for a single-term.
- Individual words within your post is now only one of over 200 signals that Google uses to rate results. Some other crucial elements are page architecture, inbound links, social sharing, and more. The new Content Strategy tools helps ensure your content structure is setup for success.
If you have content already created, you’re ahead of the game. Content Strategy is simply a shift from the existing way of creating content and shouldn’t require replacing existing content, or rewriting content.
Fundamentally the new Content Strategy structure starts with a topic to focus on. Generally a topic should be a highly searched term that is only a few words long. You may not be ranking for the topic overall right now (which is OK). An example of a topic could be Inbound Marketing. Your core topic should be a page that is the definitive resource on the topic. Surrounding that topic should be sub-topics that are individual blog posts, social messages, videos, etc which answer questions around it and all link back to the core topic page. This structure helps diversify your terms into a broader collection which will help search engines interpret as authority on the given area.
If you want more information on the topics over keywords framework, check out this blog post by well-known SEO Matthew Barby. Also if you’re interested in Content Strategy you can find out more here.
Hope that is helpful!