If you’re trying to give your SEO a boost this year, you need to put together a content marketing strategy.
Content creation takes time and energy, but it is a worthy investment — you can use content to target keywords, draw in new customers, build brand awareness, and increase your authority on your subject matter. These are all things that can improve your SEO!
In this article, I’m going to take a look at how you can create a content strategy for your business.
Read on to find out more.
1. Carry Out a Content Audit
Before you start to make more content, take a look at what you already have on your site. Is there anything you can repurpose, say by turning a blog post into a video?
Did an article of yours lead to a lot of conversions? It’s important to answer questions like these before diving in and creating new content. This is where a content audit comes in.
A content audit can help you identify what needs to be improved or edited and what can be repurposed into other formats. It also allows you to decipher what has worked well for you so far, and therefore what you need to be doing more of.
By taking a look at all the content on your website, you can find the strengths and weaknesses of your existing content and use this to inform your new strategy.
SEMRush has a step-by-step guide to carrying out a content audit. They cover defining your goals, taking inventory of your content, collecting data, and making adjustments from there. It’s important to conduct audits on a regular basis in order to keep yourself on track and your content up-to-date!
2. Decide What You Want to Achieve in 2021
Before putting together a strategy, you also need to decide what you’re trying to achieve. You may have a lot of different business goals, and that’s great! But, you’ll want to have some clear focuses when deciding what kinds of content you’re going to create.
Your goals could include things like:
Increasing awareness of your brand: If you’re trying to grow your audience, enter a new market, launch a new product, or increase your market competitivity, you might want to improve your brand awareness.
Lead acquisition/loyalty: If your business is having trouble generating new leads or your customers rarely come back to you for repeat purchases, this could be a great goal for you.
Building your authority: Google only likes to promote authoritative and trustworthy websites. If you’re not yet a known expert in your field, creating content with this goal could be the right move for you.
Increasing conversions: If you’re getting a lot of website traffic, but that isn’t turning into sales, you might want to make content with the specific goal of increasing your conversions.
3. Prioritize Quality Over Quantity
Think quality over quantity when it comes to your content creation. Don’t try to do everything and stretch yourself out too thin. Focus on creating certain types of content that your customers will engage with.
Start thinking about what would be the most practical, helpful, and interesting to your particular audience. Here are some options you could choose from.
a) Ultimate guides
If you really want to show off the knowledge you have about a particular topic, ultimate guides are ideal.
For instance, take a look at The Effortless Gent’s ultimate leather jacket buying guide. The website itself focuses on helping men to put together a smart, sharp, and sensible wardrobe. And, in this ultimate guide, they answer all of the questions someone might have about purchasing a leather jacket. The piece covers the variety of styles, linings, leather types, and styling options out there.
Most importantly, this ultimate guide is incredibly relevant to the website’s audience, who will primarily be men looking to update their wardrobes. It will help the site to rank well on relevant SERPs, attract the right people, and position the company as an authority in the field of men’s style.
Consider what kinds of ultimate guides you could create for your website. Choose a topic your ideal customers will want to read about, and that is relevant to the products or services you provide. Then aim to answer all of the questions someone might have in this area.
b) Timely blog posts
While a lot of content marketing tends to be evergreen, you can also publish timely blog posts when appropriate to keep your website updated with fresh information.
IPSY does this well with their monthly previews of their Glam Bags, like this one for April 2021. The company specializes in offering monthly beauty subscriptions, and these posts give people an idea of what they can expect to receive. Of course, these posts won’t always be relevant, as they become outdated quickly, but they still serve a purpose and allow the company to publish regular content to keep their website fresh.
There are lots of ways you could come up with timely blog post ideas for your website. You could publish a post whenever you release a new product line, whenever you host an event, when you want to highlight an upcoming trend, or when something significant is happening in your industry.
c) How-to guides
How-to guides can be great for driving the right traffic to your website and establishing authority in your field.
The best ways you can come up with ideas for these is by doing some keyword research and asking your customer service time whether they tend to get a lot of the same ‘how-to’ queries.
For instance, Stilyo has a great guide to building a killer eCommerce funnel, which addresses a common pain point a lot of their customers will have. It’s very relevant to their target audience, will build trust with them, and also helps to establish the company as an expert in the eCommerce space.
Osome, an eCommerce accounting service, also creates helpful how-to guides for business owners and freelancers, which are the people they’re primarily trying to reach. For example, the company has an excellent blog which helps their target customers become better merchants.
Consider what your target audience might want to learn more about, and use your expertise to teach them. You should also focus on exploring topics that will direct your ideal customers to your site, so your content efforts might result in more sales.
4. Buying guides
If you want happy and repeat customers, you’ll want to help your audience to make the best buying decisions to suit their needs. Buying guides can help with this.
These should outline the pros and cons of similar products and outline all of the things people should keep in mind when making a purchase.
For inspiration, take a look at The Spruce Pets’ post about the best dog food brands. They highlight seven of the top brands' dog owners might be considering buying from, and provide all of the information someone will need to make a decision. They cover all of the most important considerations, including the price, food types available, and more.
This type of content is great for improving your SEO rankings, too, and can help you to catch people at the decision stage of the buying journey.
Target the Most Relevant Keywords With Each Piece of Content
Target keywords are words or phrases that people are typing into their search engines, and that you want your website to show up for. If you’re able to optimize your content with the right keywords, you’ll be able to direct the best possible people to your website.
You can use a keyword research tool to figure out what keywords you should be targeting. Answer the Public, for instance, will show you a series of questions based on the search term you plug in. For example, if you type in “SEO strategy,” questions like “why is SEO important?” and “what is a good SEO strategy?” will show up. So, these would be good questions to answer with your content.
Alternatively, you can use something like Google Keyword Planner. Plugging in the same term gives you keywords like “SEO backlinks” and “small business SEO,” in addition to the number of monthly searches and level of competition you’ll face. You might want to choose less-competitive, more specific keywords to ensure you can rank highly in the SERPs and attract the most relevant visitors.
It’s vital that you weave your chosen keywords into your content naturally. Only use them where appropriate, and don’t keyword stuff, or you could actually be penalized by search engines like Google.
Come up With Content Ideas That Will Earn Your Site Links
Link building is a great way to boost your SEO. This is the process of getting other people to share and link back to your content; when this happens, Google takes it as a vote of confidence in your authority on a subject and gives you a boost on the SERPs.
So, you’ll want to create content that can help you to build high-quality backlinks on high-authority sites. Here are the most shareable and link-worthy types of content to focus on:
Infographics: Infographics are colorful, engaging, and make information easy to digest. This makes them especially shareable (and linkable). Creating them can be incredibly easy, too. Venngage has a guide to creating infographics in five easy steps that will walk you through the process.
Free tools or templates: If you create genuinely helpful tools and templates that are free of charge, other sites will want to share them with their own readerships, which can build backlinks. Just make sure these are very relevant to your target audience, so they also attract your ideal customers to your site.
Interactive content: The content space is quite saturated, which means it can be difficult to ensure your site stands out. But, one type of content that people will always love is interactive content like calculators, quizzes, or virtual try-on features. Because they’re so fun to use, other sites will be tempted to share and link back to your interactive content, too. For inspiration, check out Warby Parker’s glasses frames quiz, which helps you to pick the best pair of glasses for your face shape, size, and more.
Videos: Video content is becoming increasingly popular content so, if you have the means to create it, you should. A lot of businesses don’t have the budget or resources, though. However, it's still possible to create great informative or entertaining videos. Armed with just a phone camera and free video editing software you can get a lot of shares (and links).
Plan Most of Your Content in Advance
Planning your content in advance can help you get the most out of your content strategy.
Try to have a regular schedule for posting and make a note of international or national events that are relevant to your business so you can publish timely content around them. This might not stay fresh or searchable for long, but it shows that you know what’s going on in your industry, thus building up your authority.
Evergreen content can be used to fill in the gaps in your calendar — it should cover topics that will likely never change (besides the occasional edit or update) and that are searchable no matter the time of year.
Put Together a Content Promotion Strategy
It’s not enough to just create your content — you also need to be promoting it so people can see it! Some of the best channels for this are social media and email newsletters.
With social media, it’s important to note that different platforms have different audiences. Some might not be right for your business, and you might have to adapt your approach to certain platforms.
If you’re unsure of where you should be focusing your social media efforts, use a social media analytics tool to assess which platforms you’re getting the most engagement from, and which types of posts are the most successful. This way, you can ensure you aren’t wasting any time or energy that would be best spent elsewhere.
Wrap Up
To get the most out of your content marketing efforts, you’ll want to come up with a strategy that aligns with your goals. This will help you to reach your ideal audience, retain your customers, and make more sales.
Start by carrying out a content audit and setting your goals. From there, it’s a matter of finding the best possible content for your audience. Now, get to work, and it won’t be long before you’re reaping the rewards!
Author Bio:
Alex Ratynski is a Content Strategist at Loganix, an SEO fulfillment partner that works with agencies and marketers. The company focuses on helping businesses to improve their online visibility, so they can grow and reach their goals. If you enjoyed this article, visit the Loganix blog for more expert advice.