Developing a content strategy isn’t a walk in the park. More than churning out content featuring trending keywords, effective content planning involves organizing tactics and understanding how to best reach out to one’s audience.
In this content strategy for website guide, we’ll go over ten steps that combine the art and science of content production. Let’s dive right in!
1. Define Your Goals
The first step to developing a content strategy for website companies is to figure out your objectives. For instance, you might be looking to:
- Improve your SEO
- Grow your leads
- Drive conversions
- Increase site traffic
Knowing your goals from the get-go will help you tailor-fit your tactics to fit your objectives. It’s best to imagine the long-term changes that you want to see on your website before working on your strategy. Plus, prioritizing your goals will help you direct your efforts on a focused campaign with specific objectives.
2. Know Your Target Audience
Next, narrowing your target audience also helps create an intentional content strategy for website. To do this, look at your niche market first. In fact, you can narrow it further by age groups, location, device use, and habits.
On the other hand, you can also group them according to their familiarity with your brand. Are they first-time visitors, casual browsers, or returning customers?
PRO TIP: As a bonus, you can create user personas to understand the needs and preferences of your customers. From your audience research, create a persona profile, which includes:
- Name and Photo: Give your persona a name and use a stock photo to humanize them.
- Background: Include demographic information, job title, and a brief bio.
- Goals: What are their primary objectives or needs?
- Challenges: List their pain points and the obstacles they’re trying to overcome.
- Preferred Platforms: Where do they spend time online?
- Content Preferences: What type of content do they engage with the most?
- Motivations: What drives them to make purchasing decisions?
3. Conduct a Content Audit
Following this, you can also start auditing your current content. The best way to go about this is to create a database of published articles. Ask yourself what kind of user need your content is fulfilling.
For instance, you can scan your database and check your best-performing articles as well as any possible gaps in your topics or keywords.
In this way, you’ll be able to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of your existing content strategy.
4. Start Doing Keyword Research
The next step is to conduct a keyword research. There are several content creation tools in the market today that can help you identify potential keywords depending on your target audience, niche, and domain authority.
Here are a few tools to explore:
- SEMrush
- Ahrefs
- Google Keyword Planner
- AnswerThePublic
- Moz Keyword Explorer
This step is a crucial one, especially if you want to improve your site traffic and SEO ranking. In fact, finding the right blend of keywords makes up a huge chunk of any content strategy for website, so choose your keywords with care.
5. Plan Your Content Topics
Meanwhile, planning your topics ahead of time is also a tried and tested way to craft the best content strategy for website example. To do this, quickly scan through other websites and identify any potential topic gaps they have.
With this, you’ll be able to pitch punchier headlines and more informative stories for your audience. In fact, you can even use the skyscraper technique and publish similar but improved versions of your competitor’s piece.
6. Update and Refresh Old Content
Meanwhile, sometimes the best content strategy for website companies is simple. That is, backtrack and update existing articles in your database. Have you written something years ago that needs a little updating?
You might want to consider adding new links or keywords, fixing broken links, and making adjustments to your old content. At the end of the day, it’s much more cost-effective to build on articles that search engines have already crawled and indexed.
7. Focus on Quality, Not Quantity
Next, avoid feeling pressured to churn out content right away. Be deliberate with the content that you want to publish. As a rule of thumb, avoid writing the same articles and make sure to always bring something new to the table for your audience.
In a sea of articles on the internet, you want to make sure you stand out with high-quality articles that tackle topics from a unique point of view.
8. Diversify Content Types
On the other hand, it’s best to sprinkle in a variety of content on your website. Content strategists should be careful not to repeat the same formula. To do this, you can create content strategy template articles. For instance, you can write listicles, how-tos, and long-form guides, just to bring some variety to the website blog.
In fact, a great content strategy example would include articles, graphics, social media posts, and other text and visual content.
9. Make your Website Mobile-Friendly
Don’t forget that subtle changes can sometimes make a huge difference. Optimizing content for mobile users is something that most marketers forget. However, it’s a crucial part of content strategy for website, especially if you want to engage your audience.
This may involve making content more concise, adjusting the user experience of landing pages and article pages, and more.
10. Leverage Analytics and Metrics
Finally, to really flex your content marketing skills, leverage your website’s metrics. Find out which articles are getting the most traffic and get to the bottom of it. Is it because you wrote a trending topic? Is it because you provided more sources and more data?
Metrics and analytics data are great markers of the success of your content strategy. Because of this, be sure to regularly check tools like Google Analytics to refine your strategy.
Developing a content strategy for website can take a lot of time, effort, and dedication.
It’s about producing the right content that speaks to your audience’s needs and keeps them coming back for more.
