Introduction
In many ways, content makes the world of digital marketing go round. We’ve all heard how important it is to Google’s algorithm to have those fresh blogs and articles on your website. Content also helps you to broaden the conversations you have on your social channels and gives you a broader pallet of things to work with when promoting with email marketing.
However, having a strategy in place to execute this regularly and successfully can be difficult to define, especially when you’re caught up in all the other aspects of making sure your site runs well. As content is the medium that allows you to communicate with your target audience, we advise our clients to have some form of strategy in place to ensure their brand message is getting out there effectively.
Today, we want to give you some tried and tested pointers that we use here at Equator to create a well-defined blog content strategy.
What can you do to improve the blog content for your site?
Define Your Goals
The first step you should take when developing your content strategy is to define your goals. Think about what you want this new blog content on your site to specifically achieve. For many of you, it will likely be related to expanding the keyword pool of your site or improving the position of existing, relevant keyword terms. Content is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal, so having a clear idea of how you want it to work for you is vital.
Undertake Keyword Research
It’s one of those regular tasks that will already inform different SEO strategies across your site. Still, keyword research is an incredibly important exercise when building and defining a content strategy. There are some tools that can help you with this, like Keyword Planner and Keyword Tool.io.
Answer The Public remains a popular resource for developing simple keywords into topics that you can create into a blog post of interest to the people using your target keywords. This will play a big part in forming the angle of your content, which we’ll come to shortly. None of the tools we have mentioned above are particularly new in the world of SEO. Still, they remain incredibly important in helping you develop a strategy that is based on keywords that present search interest opportunities.
Find the Content’s Angle
Once you have identified the keywords and topics you want to target, it’s time to create an angle to see where your content can add value to the search experience. You need to find a way to speak to your audience about your chosen topic in a way that is unique to your brand. Take some time to Google the keywords you want your content to target and find out what currently exists in the search space. Take stock of how other sites are writing about your content topic and any particular areas of interest they might have missed.
You might find that a particular opinion or area of interest is underrepresented, or it might be a simpler case where no one writing about your chosen topic in the recent past. The question you should continually ask yourself is, “why would someone read what’s on my site over anywhere else?” This will help you create and define ideas that will be of interest to your target audience and will give you the best possible chance of ranking well in organic search for the keyword’s you’re looking to target.
Create a Calendar
By repeating the steps above across different topics and keyword groups, you can create a calendar-based plan of articles you can post on your site’s blog across the year. This is the stage where your content strategy will really start to take shape. You can time topics for particular search trends you’re likely to see throughout the year to capitalise on search uplifts and be in the right place at the right time. This will also give you a continual workstream that you can use to keep your content fresh and up to date – something that Google looks for and rewards with better organic visibility for your site!
Write, Write, and Re-Write!
Going back to the individual blogs, while the initial draft of your blog might seem like the lion’s share of the work, the most important thing you can do to create something special and of value to your users is to re-write and edit. Going back over your work will reveal areas where you might not have expressed yourself clearly, or where more detail might be required for the uninformed reader. While spell checkers can pick up simple spelling mistakes, you might be surprised at the range of grammatical errors these built-in tools can miss. Here at Equator, we utilise tools like Grammarly to convey our message as clearly as possible. If you have the resource, try giving your post to someone else to read to make sure it’s understandable and easy to follow. This will ensure that what is eventually posted on your site is of the highest possible quality.
Publish and Promote
Once you’re happy with your piece of content, now it’s time to share it with the world! Once posted on your site, you can also use social channels to expand your reach and connect with the people who already follow your business across social media channels. LinkedIn lends itself well for industry-specific posts, but you might find good engagement through all the other traditional mediums like Facebook and Instagram. Using appropriate hashtags will help make your content more discoverable and maximise the chances of people clicking onto your site.
Reviewing Content Performance
Once you’ve let your precious piece of content fly the nest, it’s time to find out if it’s soared your site to new heights or if you have room to improve. For the vast majority of us, there is always little areas where we can make adjustments and take learnings from what we have done before. Have a look at the analytics data for the page to get a sense of how long people are reading your article or if people are bouncing off after a short time. You can also look at the comments your post generates on social media. Perhaps those posts that had a high amount of engagement would be worth further attention in the future.
It’s important that at this stage of the process and it should tie back to the goals you defined at the top of today’s post. Your content should always set out to fulfil the goals you set out in the first instance for your strategy to be successful and should serve as an anchor for the approach you take in developing your ideas and posting articles on your website.
Our Approach
Here at Equator, we’re always keen to find out what makes your customers click. The content strategies we create in collaboration with our clients take in everything from audience behaviour, brand messaging, industry trends, and unique insight to get people clicking.
If you want to find out more...