As you embark on the journey of an SEO campaign, you’ll hear a lot about content creation. Content is what fuels growth in digital marketing, and you need quality material to aid your ads, your rankings, and your increases in conversions.
You can’t just write up whatever comes to mind, though. Content should be thought out, well-made, and organized in a particular way. The process of working all of that out and executing it is called “content strategy.”
We’re going to discuss just what content strategy is, as well as some of the methods you can use to get it right. Hopefully, the ideas below can save you some time and improve the quality of your content as it gets sent out into the world.
Let’s get started.
Why Is Content Strategy Needed?
It might seem like a stretch to say that you have to curate a plan for how you’ll post information on the internet. When you think about it, though, content is the core of most people’s relationship to most businesses. If you’re curious about something, you look it up on the website.
Many people are introduced to brands through content on their social media feeds or found in Google searches. Apart from actually visiting a store, most of the interaction that brands have with their customers takes place through the text of various pages on their sites.
So, content is important. Additionally, the kinds of content you end up producing are important. Content that’s random and isn’t optimized will not do well.
Sure, you could strike gold and go viral with a random piece of content, but there are millions (maybe even billions) of posts and pages that have sunken to the bottom unnoticed.
A strategy needs to be in place to produce quality content en masse. That plan also has to pinpoint how you’ll deliver that content, how often, and what your goals are for its reception. That structure is what will drive your SEO campaign, and, consequently, your digital marketing success.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is the foundation of optimized content.
There are numerous tools online that help you find the keywords that your customers are searching for. You can pinpoint search phrases based on area, demographics, age, and more. That means you can look up exactly what your target audience is searching for online and make content in response to it.
Your strategy should include the stats of your ideal keyword phrase. That means looking into how popular it is, how much competition there is for rankings, and who is searching for it. When you narrow down those factors, you can consistently produce content that falls into the same range of search rankings.
Try to look for keywords that are popular and have little competition. Naturally, you’re not going to find a lot of those terms, so it’s important to fall in the middle somewhere. Just avoid the most popular terms with competition from industry titans.
Content Ideas
Your marketing team should be researching keywords on a regular basis. There are different ideas as to how often you should post content, but know that there’s no harm in posting a lot of great content. When you get stretched too thin and you’re just posting information that doesn’t serve a purpose, you’re doing too much.
Valuable content that addresses user needs will always help your site. Fluff content that is only there for the purpose of optimization could actually hurt your rankings. Google’s algorithm is great at determining which sites are useful and which are not.
If Google gets a whiff that you’re pandering for search results, you could get penalized. The best method is to see what your content production team is capable of doing and keeping them at a steady pace. Asking too much of the people writing your content could cause the quality to go down enough to harm your site.
Content should be made in response to the keyword phrases that you’re trying to rank for. Unless there’s some important information you want to release about your business, you should always make content that’s based on user searches. If you find a lot of success, there’s room to start branching out with more creative ideas.
Let’s say that you found “antique glass coffee cups” to be the perfect keyword for your business. Maybe you sell that product, or maybe your brand is closely connected to antiques. You could then produce content that’s optimized for that exact phrase, and discusses different qualities of that product.
There aren’t any rules on what the exact topic has to be, only that it has to include that keyword phrase.
Posting Schedule and Analysis
The final pieces of your content strategy plan should discuss how often and where your content will be posted. Some research into various social media platforms should give you an idea of how often successful sites are posting. Additionally, look into the time of day that posts have the most success.
Narrow down those factors and stick to them as you move forward with production. It’s also important to designate a person or team to analyze how your posts are doing. You’ll see that some posts draw a lot of people, but those users might not be making conversions.
You could also notice that one post thrives and another, very similar post does not. All of these things are able to be monitored through the analytics platforms of the site you’re posting on. It can be tough to manage all of that data, though.
That’s why it can be really helpful to hire a content strategy agency. These people can help you refine and maximize your content’s potential for success.
Need Some More Insight?
If you need a little more content strategy information, you’re in the right place. It’s important to explore all areas of SEO to get as much out of it as possible. We’re here to help you take the next step.
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