SEO content for Frankfurt’s Climate Protection Website
Accompanying the relaunch of klimaschutz-frankfurt.de, svaerm created SEO content to improve the organic Google visibility of the website.
Note to our English-speaking readers: klimaschutz-frankfurt.de is the Climate Protection Website of the City of Frankfurt. It is operated by the local Energy Department.
Good to know: SEO briefly explained
SEO is a systematic process to increase the organic visibility of web pages in Google and other search engines. “Organic” refers to visibility that is not generated by paid advertisements. The latter are clearly distinguished from SEO (Search Engine Optimization) by the term “SEA” (Search Engine Advertising).
Strategic context
Our clients from the Energy Department Frankfurt already had an initial awareness of SEO. Therefore, there was already a service module “SEO” in the tender document, which was mainly focused on Technical SEO (e.g. loading time optimization of the web pages) and Onpage SEO (e.g. maintenance of page titles, headlines and meta descriptions).
However, there is much more to SEO than these two disciplines. In Germany, many marketing professionals only have a superficial knowledge of SEO, both in the private sector and in public institutions. For most marketing and PR managers, it is not reasonable to also familiarize themselves with the complex field of SEO parallel to their daily business.
Moreover, every SEO agency advertises SEO with SEO. That’s why masses of guidebook articles are written on the subject of SEO, which do not take account of the complexity of SEO as we understand it.
Because with attributes like “simple”, “fast” and “cost-efficient”, many a landing page can be embellished, which then converts its prospects better, but at the same time distorts reality. So, it can happen that SEO gets lost as a subordinate “fringe aspect” in a tender document or briefing.
This is exactly the advice we give our clients.
The main takeaway: Web pages that are to be found under a specific search term must be optimized for the user’s search intent. The search intent describes what users want to see when they enter the search term.
Instead of the website operator, it is effectively the users who decide on the content of web pages – averaged by the Google algorithm, which is supposed to interpret user behavior and provide the best possible search results.
For many institutions and companies, this circumstance means a deep strategic cut in their way of working and marketing, if they have not taken SEO seriously enough so far or have regarded it as a technical fringe topic due to a lack of know-how.
Anyone who wants to generate sustainable organic Google visibility must operate SEO at a high quality level in the long term. That ties up resources. No customer can follow all SEO recommendations a 100% – experience shows that.
The Energy Department thus decided to optimize only part of the content on klimaschutz-frankfurt.de for search engine users.
Plan content marketing
The decision as to which content should be SEO-optimized does not lie solely with the customer. In terms of their SEO potential, certain topics and editorial approaches are better or worse suited.
This is how the SEO overview succeeds at klimaschutz-frankfurt.de:
- Document content inventory
- Record keyword ideas (seed keywords)
- Analyze competitors (competitor keywords)
Content inventory
The content inventory documents the status quo, which articles, glossary entries, landing pages, etc. already exist on klimaschutz-frankfurt.de.
Since a website relaunch is always accompanied by opportunities and risks for the visibility of the existing content, it is important to complement the content inventory with meaningful KPIs from web analytics (e.g. click numbers, dwell time, conversions). This way, 301 redirects can also be set up at the time of the relaunch so that existing traffic is largely retained.
Web pages that have already been created with SEO in mind and do not yet rank on page 1 of Google’s search results can be re-optimized if necessary and led to success.
For texts that are created without taking SEO requirements into account, re-optimization is difficult or even impossible. A colleague puts it like this:
„Optimizing a non-SEO text for keywords afterwards is like getting a bad term paper back and expecting to get a top grade by changing a few words. If you’ve missed the point from the start, keywords won’t do you any good either.” – Alexander Rus (quoted freely)
The content inventory showed that the previous content was not created with SEO in mind:
- “Local hero stories”, in which citizens of Frankfurt act as role models in the area of climate protection, already have no SEO potential on a conceptual level. They are exclusively about individual persons or companies. Since there is no point in trying to mislead the Google algorithm into concluding it is about something else, the focus keyword is pre-defined to be the name of the person or company. And if the focus keyword has no search volume or the content of the “hero story” deviates too far from the search intent of the keyword, you haven’t caught any traction.
- The same applies to PR interviews with representatives from politics and society.
- Guidebooks and collections of tips have SEO potential in principle, but to do so, they must be aligned with successful competitors and meet users’ search intent. It is theoretically possible to reinvent the wheel and rank with a groundbreaking editorial full of unread approaches, but this is the exception rather than the rule. Most of the time, it’s better to evolve what already works – and make the respective content more relevant, complete, compelling, up-to-date, and accessible. The journalistically written articles on klimaschutz-frankfurt.de that we found were not specifically designed for online media and do not meet these requirements.
The focus of SEO content creation for klimaschutz-frankfurt.de is thus on new articles (instead of re-optimizing existing articles).
Keyword list
Keyword lists help to validate and prioritize SEO topics. Validation implies that there are unsuitable keywords – for example, because the positioning of the Energy Department is too far off from the actual search intent or the KPIs are not good enough. Important KPIs are in particular monthly search volume (Vol) and Keyword Difficulty (KD) as an index (from 0 = easy to 100 = very difficult). Priorities are set in order to use the client’s budget as effectively as possible.
The keyword list for klimaschutz-frankfurt.de is based on keyword ideas from the agency and the Energy Department, which were refined using keyword tools (this is referred to as a “seed keyword approach”). In addition, competitive research has also yielded new keyword ideas (“competitor keyword approach”).
Examples of SEO editorial topics from our analysis:
| Focus-Keyword | Vol / KD | Search intent |
| upcycling | 97500 / 38 | What is upcycling? Why upcycling? Examples of upcycling Upcycling instructions |
| earth hour 2021 | 1800 / 34 | What does Earth Hour mean? Why Earth Hour? When is Earth Hour? Who participates? |
SEO Editorial Planning Desired?
If your organization or company also wants editorial planning aimed at generating organic Google visibility in your niche, please contact us with an initial written information.
Content creation
Our search intent hierarchy analysis “calculates” a suitable text structure from an SEO point of view. The ideal order in which users should be informed about certain topics is indirectly decided by the users themselves through their search and reading behavior. We at svaerm also like to call it the “swarm behavior” of the users – and recreate that ideal order.
We can also systematically determine the length of the text and any “mandatory modules”, such as specific upcycling instructions for a blog post that should be findable via the keyword “upcycling”.
Our clients can be found in our SEO article in an “advertising block”. This is a section in which our customer is introduced, with his own position, or appears with his products and services in the article.
For the Energy Department Frankfurt, for example, we have added a chapter “Upcycling in Frankfurt” to the upcycling article, in which local initiatives and collaboration partners are presented. In the Earth Hour 2021 gallery, there is a list of Earth Hour participants from Frankfurt, who are in turn encouraged to share the link to the Earth Hour gallery in their social media channels and newsletters. This creates good PR for our client.
This key information, a mixture of SEO requirements and customer topics, is collected in a content briefing. Our network of expert editors can thus create SEO content for (almost) any industry.
Our SEO articles on klimaschutz-frankfurt.de [in German]
Here is a selection of our SEO webpages [in German] on klimaschutz-frankfurt.de:
Note: Our cooperation with the Energy Department Frankfurt is limited in time due to public procurement procedures. Furthermore, accompanying SEO activities such as link building, semantic SEO and local SEO were not booked. In addition, these webpages de facto represent a compromise between SEO and customer wishes. We no longer have any influence on the further development of the rankings of these pages.
Good to know: How search intent hierarchy analysis works
The formula for success consists of:
- Analysis of the search engine result page of the respective keyword
- Analysis of competitors’ web pages that rank for the target keyword
Read more in our info article on search intent hierarchy analysis.
Contact for business
Are you also planning an SEO or content marketing project? We will be happy to provide you with an individual quotation.
Please contact us by e-mail or via the contact form. After receiving initial written information, we will be happy to advise you by phone.
