CONTENT STRATEGY

This article takes inspiration from the Content strategy and SEO for lead generation, SEO driven editorial calendar, and Technical SEO courses of the CXL Institute’s Growth Marketing Mini degree program.

Content is anything which gives a certain information- blogs, articles, social media content, videos, infographics, podcasts, press releases, white papers, training materials, etc.

Content is sometimes defined as the science of connecting with the audience. Data driven empathy which is gonna be all about the audience themselves and the topics and what they care about.

Content Strategy:

We can attract visitors from the three main sources of traffic- search, social and email. Some visitors will subscribe while some will follow making social more effective. To draw the attention of these visitors we share content which is important to them. Our content strategy is based on our mission statement. According to the B2B content survey by the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Crafts, 48% of companies that have documented mission statements say that they’re successful in marketing.

The key to building great SEO content is finding content gaps in your content and competitor’s content. You should be looking out for high volume, low competition or low quality content and match the keyword intent to the content type to decide on which content you should be doing.

Choose a SEO tool and stick to it. For example, Moz Explorer Tool is showing the Domain Authority score, which is a benchmark of your website against all others. Ahrefs can help you find that high volume, low competition keyword or topic.

Choosing a topic:

There are three main sources of topics:

• First one uses keyword research to figure out what people want.
• Q&A websites like Quora are also a really effective way to see what’s happening out there in your industry or with your audience.
• Finally listening is the ultimate source of topics.

Assume, I am the content strategist for an office kitchen, coffee and beer delivery service. What does my audience want? I’m gonna read the minds of millions of people by just starting to search Google which can be a great tool for a content strategist to see what one could write about tomorrow and what one can rank for next week.

Just type office kitchen and you can see all kinds of topics you could write about- Ideas, etiquette, organization, rules, template.

Now I can scrape all the phrases that Google would suggest if I typed in the next letter of my keyword 26 times.That tool is called keywordtool.io. Put the word “office kitchen” into keywordtool.io,and it suggests 202 different phrases.

Another tool is answerthepublic.io. Put an office coffee into answerthepublic.com,and it scrapes from the internet all kinds of questions that it finds, and deduplicates them and organizes them in a list.

Now go to Quora.com and see a topic like an office party. You can imagine people might be interested in this.Here’s all kinds of questions and answers and contributors, and a vetting through a voting, and so I can tell right away that these are topics that someone cares about because they’ve been answered a lot or uploaded a lot.

In 15 minutes, you can get ideas you know that will work because they’re coming from these sources that are informed by massive groups of audiences and data, but listening is going to be the best tool. Anything that I do that connects me closer to my audience is going to be a great close and hits for good content.So who’s talking to the prospects?What are the common questions they get?Who’s talking to our customers?What do they need from us? What are they wondering about?What are they worried about?What are they hoping for? What of the customers themselves? Have they had good experiences because some of them make great conversation content testimonials and customer stories?

The Power of Research

Most content gets really no results and no traction in search or social, 75% of articles get zero link from other articles, but yet a tiny percentage of the thing gets huge results, like tens of thousand.

How does this happen? If you want to create content that achieves a high level of both links and shares, then concentrate on opinion forming, authoritative content or well researched and evidenced content. In other words, strong opinions and original research are the two most powerful formats for content.

It’s difficult to create a content strategy that constantly produces strong opinions. But you actually can create a scalable repeatable process that consistently produces original research being the primary source.

Content marketing Institute publishes these things consistently- the research report, the benchmarks, the surveys, etc. Thousands of websites have linked to their research pieces over the years which does wonders for their search rankings.That is how to have an authoritative website.

Most marketers don’t produce original research. The percentage of marketers that consistently produce high quality research is in probably the single digits.

Observation is a great way to produce original research.You can answer a question no one else has answered. Aggregation is another good one.

One example shared in the CXL’s course by the trainer was the following:

If you’ve ever wondered how much money marketers make, you’re not the only one. Lots of people wanna know how much money marketers may. This was another pretty easy piece of research. All that she did was go to two big sources of data. Payscale.com and Glassdoor.com and put in seven different marketing jobs. She found the data on how much money those job titles made on average and then found the median between those. It was very interesting and then 18 months later, did it again and now she doesn’t just have how much money these marketers make but had the longitudinal data, the percentage changed.

Formats

It’s a weak content strategy to just publishone article after the other. Usually the blog is the strategy that holds everything together, but you can’t just publish text all the time.You need to publish interesting things, informative things that go beyond text into visuals- infographics, designs, videos, GIFs, diagrams and memes or the high end videos. The how-to videos, the explainers, the animations and things that can appear on YouTubeas well as embedded on your website are a great way to enhance the visuals in your content.

Always look for the opportunity to leverage something that was just text into more compelling formats such as images or video, turn your top blog post into an infographic. Definitely, repurpose that thing.Or turn the blog post into a guide.

CXL course describes the difference between social and search. Generally speaking, content that answers questions is going to work well in search. Content that triggers emotion is going to work well in social media. In other words, in search your goal is to meet expectations.In social, your goal is to be unexpected.

Linking:

Producing a lot of content should not be the ultimate goal of your content strategy, but to give the internet universe something to link to. Accurate link building is important for domain authority. The CXL course talks in depth about creating potential new content and re-format, update, curate and expand existing/old topics.

Search optimization and relevance:

Search engine optimization focuses on how to drive up the rankings of your content / website on search engines and bring targeted traffic. By the time you complete this course, you will be able to find the phrases that can win through key phrase research. You will Iearn how to achieve relevance and intent by using keywords in ways that show the actual thing and how to target topics rather than phrases and leverage semantics.

The key to building SEO content is finding content gaps (high volume, low competition or low quality) and match the keyword intent to the content type.

Another important part of SEO is to choose a tool and stick to it. For example, Moz Explorer Tool is showing the Domain Authority score. I am more inclined to use Ahrefs for SEO analysis. Each tool is great, but this one seems to have better technology and is product-driven.