When it comes to building content over time to increase your search engine rankings, one analogy immediately comes to mind: stacking the bricks.

The first time I heard this term was Amy Hoy using it to describe building products, and in similar fashion I'm using it to describe the process of building a house of organic rankings.

Just like Amy describes success as being built brick-by-brick, so is SEO — you just need to make sure you're using the right bricks.

Building Your SEO Bricks

Building a base of content designed around contextually relevant and interconnected topics is just like building a house. You need to:

Let's talk more about these one at a time.

1. Defining Your Requirements

When it comes to SEO, requirements are defined by keyword research and prioritization.

Once you have your list of target keywords and associated targeting timelines — immediate, short-term (3 to 6 months), and long-term (12+ months) — then it's time to go to work analyzing your competitors.

What you're looking for here is to adjust and validate your priorities based on your target keywords' individual rank potential.

The goal of your requirements is to crack rankings and gain traction (traffic) as quickly as possible for qualified queries.

It's OK to start with less than ideal keywords, as long as they're at least tangentially relevant — and you're able to acquire the traffic quickly and easily.

As you begin building up traffic and relevancy, it gets easier to begin targeting better, more difficult keywords.

Requirements Sample

Content requirements can take on a lot of forms, but generally the criteria I want to see when reviewing requirements include:

2. Designing a Blueprint

Building your blueprint depends heavily on your target keywords and your decided priorities.

Once you've honed in on the rank potential for your terms, and adjusted your SEO timelines accordingly, you can start to design a keyword strategy that includes mapping content to your keywords.

One of the first steps in creating your blueprint is to analyze your requirements list and identify content themes or categories (think of these like buckets). Ideally you want to come up with somewhere around 10, up to a max of 15 or so.

The purpose is to keep these high-level. But if your broad topic is already a niche inside a niche — like let's say you're a construction company that focuses on excavating — then you would want to expound on topics within the sub-niche of excavating, like underground excavating for rail tunnels, excavating procedures for city streets, or excavating around fragile structures.

Making sense?

3. Developing The Structure

Now you can begin to flesh out the requirements for your content.

With the requirements for your content in hand, you can begin to stack the bricks. It starts with building out the cornerstone content that will be needed to establish the relevance you're after.

My topic priorities when building this kind of content map typically include:

That's your roadmap for content development — posts that act as the scaffolding to connect topics across your site. The next step is to build the rooms (individual posts within the topic areas), and then connect the rooms with hallways: better known as links.

Backing Into Your Content Map

Maybe you have an existing site, or you're doing work on a client site, where you already have a content catalog to work from and most of the important pages exist — but they're not that great yet.

Here's where a content audit can work wonders from an SEO perspective.

My favorite process for this, and the one we use at FTF, is to do a content gap analysis.

Essentially you're taking inventory of all your existing pages, tagging them into keyword buckets and themes, and then finding the gaps where content needs to be created or repurposed.

TIP: While auditing your content — make a note that even if content doesn't exist yet, once it's created make sure you go back to existing pages and add in those internal links.

Refreshing and Adding Content

One of the easiest ways to blow out your existing SEO is by leveraging content to find opportunities to poach rankings.

My favorite way to do this is to find pages on your site that are already ranking — albeit not on page one — that are pretty thin in terms of both content and link authority.

Once you know which pages need some love it's not hard to create a priority list by cross-referencing your keyword targets.

So start by analyzing existing content for keywords that are already in place — that should be supported with dedicated content (think of these as adding reinforcements to your house).

My favorite way to do this is to drop a URL into SEMRush, download the keyword rankings report, and then filter the rankings column for greater than 10.

One extra tip is to use a constrained filter by setting it to greater than 10 but less than 20 — so you can first look at your page 2 poaching opportunities.

Then the next step is to quickly beef up the link authority of these pages — and the easiest way to do this is to add links that are both trusted and guaranteed: from your own website — internal links.

In order to maximize the link juice of the pages you're building new internal links to, find pages on your site that have the highest link authority, using a 3rd party link metric like Ahrefs or Moz page authority.

Identifying New Content Opportunities

In some instances while working on your content map you'll realize that there are naturally occurring keywords within your content that would be great keyword-rich internal links — but you have nowhere for them to link to.

This is where you identify new content to add to your content map. For example, if a strong term appears naturally in your content but you don't have a dedicated page covering it, that's a clear signal to create one.

Search for the term in Google — if the top result is clearly the ideal destination but it doesn't exist on your site, you've found your next content priority.

An Important Consideration

Gone are the days of "stone throwing SEO" — there was once a time where it was considered a best practice to create a page for every keyword you wanted to rank for.

That's not how it works anymore.

Instead of just throwing stones (small, lightweight objects that won't have any impact unless they're being chucked at really weak, thin glass), modern SEO requires you to build sturdy websites made with bricks.

You need to be smarter and more intentional with your content development.

Google's ability to comprehend and predict LSI — connecting all the conceptual dots and topics — is only going to get better. A great reinforcement of this is how sometimes the best thing you can do for your site's content is to kill it.

Does stacking the bricks make sense in terms of designing your SEO content map?