A large part of my work as a digital marketing consultant involves coming up with a content marketing strategy for my clients. Since SEO is one of my fortes, I enjoy using my skills to deliver content that best serves both my clients and their customer’s needs.
While keyword research still remains a powerful tool when it comes to driving content strategy, I realized that it had some limitations. For one thing, keywords might not really help you capture all your audience’s needs so your content might fail to address some of their key concerns. Additionally, overreliance on keyword research alone might lead you to create bland content that doesn’t resonate with your customers, meaning you’ll have fewer conversions.
Lately, I’ve been moving from a “keyword-first” approach to content strategy and incorporating a more audience-centric one.
How To Build An Audience SEO Focused Content Strategy
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Start by setting your goals.
What do you hope to accomplish with your content? Do you want to drive more subscribers to your newsletter, boost your sales or maybe even increase leads by a certain percentage? Documenting your goals will not only help determine your content but also your calls-to-action.
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Pinpoint your primary audience and their needs.
Who is your target audience, what are their key needs and most importantly, how can you address these needs? Talking to the organization’s customer service, sales or social media teams can help you build a clearer picture of your intended audience so you can better tailor your content.
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Determine your brand’s unique content angle.
If you want a higher conversion rate, ensure that your content resonates with your target audience. To do this, first, figure out your brand’s unique expertise i.e. what makes it stand out from competitors. Next, see how you can put a unique spin on your content to merge both your audience’s needs and your brand’s expertise.
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Draft a list of potential content topics.
Once you’re clear on the direction you want to take your content, brainstorm with others in the organization to come up with a list of potential content topics that your audience will care about.
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Carry out keyword research.
After listing down good content topics, you can move on to conducting keyword research. There are plenty of excellent tools to help you work out the best keywords to optimize in your content.
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Create an editorial calendar.
Having an editorial calendar on hand helps you organize and plan your marketing content. This way you’ll have a detailed map of your content campaign i.e. how often to publish content, when to review it etc.
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Decide how you’ll measure success.
Being clear on what methods you’ll use to measure your success will help you realize if you’ve hit your goals or not. If not, you’ll have to determine how to tweak it to achieve the intended results.
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Create your content.
Finally, after going through the steps above, you can create and publish your content.
Contact me today and let’s work together to build a content strategy that suits your unique business goals and needs.