CONTENT STRATEGY AND ANALYSIS
Powerful Decision Making through Data.
By employing the following techniques and analysing relevant analytics indicators, you can gain valuable insights into content gaps on a website. This knowledge can guide your content marketing – the planning and strategy to fill those gaps and provide a more comprehensive and engaging user experience.
If you are looking for content strategy and analysis with engaging visualisations and project planning to implement a winning content strategy – talk to me for a no-obligation scoping and obtain an indication of when an audit and reports can be produced for your site and digital marketing activities.
If you are looking for more SEO specific site reporting and SEO analysis alongside retained services, this is also possible, and again, I would suggest getting in touch via the many options provided to arrange an initial discussion and project scoping.
What I define as 'Content Strategy'
Too often, content strategy is mistaken for a long blog calendar and a spreadsheet of keywords. I take a different view.
My definition of true content strategy — content strategy is a marketing discipline — focused on designing clear, valuable, multi-format experiences that connect with real user needs. That includes:
Building feature-rich service pages
Creating gated or premium content
Using visual and interactive elements for clarity
Structuring a site to reflect the user’s decision journey
UX-aligned, cross-format, user-journey-led.
SEO tasks should be thought of seperately — they should be contained so they don’t overrun the project or dilute the strategic principle.
You should always design content that earns attention, converts, and builds clarity.
My freelance process and experience allows me to manage both layers — strategy and SEO — without letting one cloud or divert essential resource from the other.
SEO – the supporting role
Yes, SEO plays an important supporting role. Optimisation ensures that great content performs in search. But SEO alone is not the strategy — it’s the means of amplification.
Content strategy should be led by marketers, not just technicians. SEO is essential, but it works best I would suggest, when the two disciplines support each other and teams across each specialism work to a transparent strategy. Structure – the architectural site structure, is for example, often an element that content creators are not best skilled to decide upon. Structuring a site to reflect the user’s decision journey, built upon an architectural foundation optimised for search entities is essential. In addition each business model will rely on a different sales journey – effectively the decision tree is different – the close – as demonstrated with excellence by Optimally the most important element for your CRO.
The ultimate aim of any operation- client-side or agency should be to both unify and specialise the two areas of SEO and Content. SEO tasks are distinct and tactical—focused on structuring the content for search engines via entities and technical architecture—ensuring they support the strategic principle without diverting essential resources. The SEO Colour Wheel, as detailed below is one of the best tools/models to allow this often vast area to be accurately assessed and the ongoing work monitored.
What is the relationship between seo and content marketing?
Merging Content Marketing with SEO
The solution isn’t to rely solely on one; it’s to merge the research processes to create a complete picture.
The best content is created when the marketer brings the deep qualitative insight (The Topic, the emotional need, the business goal), and the SEO provides the precise quantitative data (The Entities, the commerciality, in terms of volume and intent alongside the structural requirements).
What is the difference between topics, pillars and entities?
A Content Pillar acts as the micro-category, grouping related Topics into a foundational architecture mapped to the user journey. Topics are the specific content assets, developed via advanced research, that answer user needs and build out the category’s depth. Crucially, these Topics must precisely map and integrate verifiable Entities—the facts and concepts that establish semantic authority. This integrated Pillar-Topic-Entity structure and fluid navigation ensures the user can enter the cluster at any relevant point and effortlessly digest or act upon information, demonstrating expertise to the user and authority to search and answer engines.
Defining The Topic and the Entity
Topics, and entities are essential in current SEO and navigational completeness, you can’t claim to be, or demonstrate that you are an expert in a subject/profession without having at least some logical structure to your content that has enough depth without understanding content clusters and having the necessary associated pillars, topics and entities.
| Strategic topic | Definition/goal for content | Why it is a topic (user goal) |
|---|---|---|
| Corporate relocation law | Comprehensive guidance on legal requirements for housing employees moving into a new country/area, covering tax and compliance. | Broad subject area addressing a complex corporate or mobility department need. |
| HMO rental investment planning | Everything an investor needs to know about purchasing, licensing, and managing a House in Multiple Occupation (HMO). | Focuses on a specific, multi-stage investment model and its complete lifecycle. |
| New residential rental legislation | An up-to-date guide and analysis of major UK government bills affecting private landlords and tenants. | A dynamic, ongoing, high-level subject that encompasses many specific legal elements. |
| Entity (within the topic) | Definition/role in SEO | Why it is an entity (technical substance) |
|---|---|---|
| Assured Shorthold Tenancy (AST) | The specific, defined legal contract type used for most private residential tenancies in the UK. | A single, non-negotiable legal thing with defined properties in the Knowledge Graph. |
| Housing Act 2004 | The foundational piece of UK legislation that primarily governs HMO licensing requirements. | A specific, dated, and universally identifiable legal document. |
| Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) | A mandatory, verifiable document providing energy efficiency ratings for a property. | A specific, formal document or object with a clear, defined structure. |
| Property Ombudsman (TPO) | The specific UK government-approved redress scheme organization that handles complaints. | A unique, named organisation or person (a singular body). |
| Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards (MEES) | The specific, mandated legal benchmark a rental property must meet. | A single, specific concept or standard. |
Identifying search queries in context of intent
Interactive Content Audits are effective in allowing you to allocate the correct budgets to content creation, identify cannibalisation and duplicate content.
Additionally, by over-laying the search query data you can improve your SEO with better alignment to the helpful content updates and E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trustworthy) requirements for your site. This includes intent, entities and more generally, topical representation – site-wide and granular url detail.
Visualisations
+ Reporting
Analysis
Keyword Analysis: Conduct a thorough analysis of the website’s target keywords and compare them with the existing content. Look for keywords that are highly relevant to the business or industry but have little or no content coverage. Identifying keywords with high search volume and low competition can reveal potential content gaps to capitalise on within your sector. Identifying related keywords of high search volume but that rank poorly or not at all could indicate that there is a case to spend some time on your content strategy and Analysis of your site.
Content Audit: Perform a comprehensive content audit to evaluate the existing content on the website. Look for topics or areas that are not adequately covered or are missing altogether. Analyse whether the content addresses the needs and interests of the target audience. Identify gaps in terms of content depth, format, or topic coverage.
The SEO Colour Wheel – a useful visualisation and project management tool for your gap analysis content strategy.
Gap analysis content strategy is best suited to the SEO Colour Wheel visualisations – neatly identifying key areas to focus your content strategy, namely, when utilising this framework – micro-topics and Thin-Content, the latter also giving rise to concern for structural elements of the site.
This second chart now has many of the correctly categorised products removed from the diagram allowing us to see more clearly which URLs and content groups require more attention. It is at this point that your site content strategies can be formed, this chart allowing an informed and accomplished strategy to be implemented in accordance to the priorities dictated by your competition and company objectives.
UI and UX Behaviours
User Engagement Metrics: Analyse user engagement metrics such as engagement rate, average engagement time per session, and exit rate. Poor performance metrics on these key events indicate that visitors are not finding the information they need or that the content fails to capture their interest. Such indicators can highlight areas where content gaps exist and suggest that there may be cause to spend time on your content gap analysis and content strategy.
Cookies are another element that have added a level of confusion even to those in the professional world of digital marketing and to get consultancy on what the actual facts are in relation to the data in the GA4 account, how it deals with consent and how it produces reports on those that have stated a preference not to accept any cookies can be explained and, if required implemented very easily for you.
Tracking tools
You may also require someone to look at your events set-up and tracking and tagging and I work in GTM to provide these services – I can provide an hourly rate if you simply require a specific task completed, or I can quote for analysing your existing events, site data layers and code and cross-reference with those UA tags that you believe should still be active or advise you on any new code implementations required. Google Analytics Freelancer
These tags can extend to areas such as Bing Ads, social pixels and tracking code and beyond and as such you will have a completely re-vamped container with a report on any changes, recommendations, and new implementations – this can be a type of tracking audit if preferred.
More Information on GA4 properties
Take a look back through some of these useful articles providing information on the GA4 properties as they evolved during 2022 to present day.
