Has your content been missing the mark lately? Or maybe you’ve successfully increased your search engine position ranking, but your hard work isn’t resulting in quite as many click-throughs and conversions as you’d like. Whatever your reasoning for wanting to develop a more successful SEO content strategy, adopting the right process can help you to achieve a range of goals.
Thanks to years of invaluable SEO and content experience, we can help. Regardless of whether you want to attract more attention to your website, encourage more service enquiries or boost your conversion rates, developing a strong content strategy can be an important component of any business’ success.
Below, we explore what’s involved in the creation of a content strategy, the difference between a standard content strategy and an SEO content marketing strategy, and which strategy you should use to help smash those company targets!
What do content strategies do?
Content strategies are, in their most basic form, a plan. These strategies allow you to map out how and when you want to use a variety of different content types, including written, audio and visual content. Ultimately, the aim of a content strategy is to help you achieve your business goals – no matter what they might be.
For example, you may want to drive brand awareness or receive more enquiries about your company’s services. This is where a content strategy comes into play to help readers to find and read your content, while also encouraging them to engage with your company in a way that boost sales or enquires.
Why do I need a content strategy?
Without a content strategy, it’s likely that you won’t attract the right attention from your target audience. This can not only affect your online visibility and the number of people that find and read your content (known as organic traffic), but can also have a negative effect on your conversion rates and enquiries, too. Without a content strategy, it can also be difficult to keep track of published content, leading to the creation of duplicate or irrelevant content.
What makes a good content strategy?
The best content strategies are made up of five important components; they must be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. This allows them to be tracked and to have their efficacy accurately evaluated at certain intervals. Below, we explore these key components in more detail to help you develop the most effective content strategy for your business.
What are the key components of a good content strategy?
Specific
Doing your research and defining your brand’s particular goals is an essential part of creating a specific content strategy. Try asking yourself: what goals are your trying to accomplish with your content? What does your target audience look like and how can you tailor your content towards this demographic?
You should also consider how this content strategy can aid your marketing or wider business objectives as well as helping you to assess performance using key performance indicators (KPIs). All of this information is not only useful, but crucial when it comes to planning and implementing your content strategy.
Measurable
In order to identify how successful your content strategy has been, it needs to measurable. This is where setting specific goals (as outlined above) can help. This could, for example, refer to a certain number of conversions, enquiries or calls you want to receive from a piece of content. Ensure you use accurate dates and precise figures to help track the performance of your content strategy.
For example, when developing a content strategy, you may want to see a 20% increase in the number of customers sending your business an enquiry or giving your team a call. You may even assign different goals to each piece of content, helping to create a well-rounded and comprehensive approach to your overall content strategy.
Achievable
Always ensure it’s possible to achieve any goals you set for your content strategy. Setting unrealistic and unattainable goals for your content strategy is never a good idea and only increases your chances of falling short of these mammoth expectations. The target should be always be challenging, but still attainable as this helps to boost motivation and encourage hard work.
Relevant
There’s no substitute for high-quality content. Ensuring this content is therefore relevant and useful is of the utmost importance if you want to connect with your target audience. Targeting popular topics and high volume keywords that hold little relevance for your business is likely to result in more organic traffic, but fewer conversions, a higher bounce rate and may even have a negative affect on your brand perception.
Time-bound
Every goal, no matter what it might be, needs a target date – a date that you’d like to achieve this goal by. Setting a deadline for a goal helps to promote motivation and encourages a sense of urgency to complete the work required to achieve the goal. With regards to a content strategy, this might be the number of content pieces you want to write and publish each week, month or quarterly period.
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