One of the things you can do to improve your position or even land on the first page on Google’s results is to have a great blog content strategy. Your strategy should help you engage with your audience by helping you focus on creating high-quality content and measuring your failures and successes.
There are millions of blogs on the internet, or 600 million blogs to be more precise, so competition is tough when it comes it grabbing the attention of the readers. According to a report by the Content Marketing Institute, 60% of the marketers that have taken the time to create a written content strategy consider themselves effective. Without a content strategy, how will you adapt to the ever-changing search engine requirements, audience attention, and market pressures?
One of the biggest mistakes you can make when you’re running a blog is to do it without a plan as it is essential in directing your marketing efforts. Learn everything you need to know about developing a successful blog content strategy in this article.
Why Is a Blog Content Strategy Important?
Having a written plan will not only increase your chances of succeeding, but it will also save you a lot of time you would have otherwise wasted on working with the wrong influencers, writing about the wrong topics, and using the wrong promotion strategies. Even though you might have a general idea about what a few videos or blog posts you want to post in the future should look like in order to attract an audience, you need to have a plan in motion if you want them to show results.
Consistently producing high-quality content for your blog can be immeasurably valuable when building your customers’ trust and succeeding in the long run. Besides attracting new prospects to your business, a content strategy can be used to ensure customer satisfaction and sales enablement.
Define Your Goal
In order for a plan to be effective, it needs to have a goal. Your goal will help to drive your content, and it will also allow you to evaluate the success of your blogging.
A clearly defined goal needs to determine precisely what you’re hoping to achieve with your blog. It can serve many different goals and purposes, from nurturing leads to boosting brand awareness. In fact, you can use your blog’s content to:
- Tell your brand story
- Provide prospective customers with information about your product offerings and services
- Update your existing customers about product releases and company news
- Convert site visitors to qualified leads
- Drive even more traffic to your site
- Help Google rank your website higher on the SERPs
A blog can do one or all of the above-mentioned things, and it’s important to have a plan from the beginning.
Define Your Blog’s Audience
Outlining what your buyer persona and target audience should look like is an essential step when you’re new to content marketing or you’re just starting out. You will be able to create more valuable and relevant content once you know who you’re writing for. By publishing carefully curated and targeted blog posts, it must be something that your audience wants to read in order to effectively drive conversions.
If you’re a marketer with experience, you might notice that your target audience has changed over time. You need to decide if you want to expand your current target market or target an entirely new group of people. You can do this by conducting thorough market research and revising your audience parameters every year in order to efficiently grow your audience.
Analyze the Competition
Once you identify your audience, you can start by investigating what your competitors are doing and what’s working for them in order to get some inspiration. Besides getting inspired, you can also find gaps in your competitors’ blog marketing strategy that you can fill out with the content on your blog. Once you have this information, don’t just replicate what they’ve done. Instead, use what you’ve learned to create even better content.
Conduct Keyword Research
The next thing you need to do is go over the search engine optimization (SEO) part of your blog content strategy. No matter if generating organic traffic is the primary goal of your blog or not, you still need your pages to rank high on the SERPs so people can actually find and interact with your content.
You can get plenty of inspiration for your blog by creating a list of targeted keywords, especially if you ever feel like your inspiration has gone dry. Marketing tools like Ahrefs, Moz, and SEMRush will be able to direct you toward relevant search queries related to your primary keywords. You can then use these directions to broaden the range of your blog content strategy.
When doing keyword research, dedicate your resources and time to queries for which you have a real chance at reaching the top few SERP positions. An effective keyword analysis includes a balance between search phrases that are attainable as ranking targets, meaningful to your audience, and relevant to your company.
Create a Content Calendar
Now that you’ve completed all the research and acquired the necessary data, you can create a content calendar to bring it all together. A content calendar will keep you on track by creating a system that ensures your content is always published on time. This calendar will allow you to organize all content assets, make real-time updates, have visibility of who is working on what, and the due date of each piece.
To create a content calendar, you can use free tools such as Google Calendar, Notion, or Trello. However, if you’re looking for a calendar with additional features that will help you grow your blog, CoSchedule is a great option.
Start Writing Content
You know who you’re writing for, you’ve got your keywords, you’ve created a content calendar – and now it’s time to write your content. A high-quality piece of content needs to be:
- Formatted – You should use the appropriate headings, subheadings, bolding, italics, block quotes, and bulleted lists to make your content suitable for skimming and look pleasant to the eye.
- Researched – To show that you’ve done your homework, use examples, case studies, and stats to back up your statements.
- Well-written – After writing a piece of content, always check grammar and spelling.
- Rich with various media formats – Make sure that you add highly relevant and good-quality images.
Measure the Performance of Your Blog
One of the most important aspects of creating a blog content strategy is having guidelines for measuring the results of your performance. After a new blog post has been published, you need to keep an eye on its performance to make sure it’s bringing results and real value to your business. You need to figure out what your audience liked about your post as well as what they didn’t like in order to improve your efforts next time.
Regularly audit your content so you can evaluate the performance of each article as well as your overall blog content strategy. A thorough review of your content will show you what a certain blog post is lacking and how to improve it so It can resonate with your target audience better.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, even though a good blog content strategy can be challenging to implement, it isn’t rocket science. By following the steps we provided in this article, you can go from feeling overwhelmed to feeling extremely confident about your blog content.
