What is a Content Strategy and Why do you Need One?

Implementing a content strategy for your business is a great way to essentially collate all the information you need in order to begin creating impactful, useful and thought-provoking content that your audience, and Google, will love.

Long gone are the days of stuffing keywords into websites; digital marketing is much more complex these days, but you don’t need to be an expert on everything in order to produce top-quality content. After all, it’s the content on the pages that’s going to drive users to your site and encourage them to convert.

You don’t have to worry about being a top-class wordsmith either, as long as you know your product and the associated keywords (and can string a few paragraphs together), you can create hard-hitting, effective content. Okay we can’t lie; it does help to be able to write compelling copy, but if you’re really struggling, you can get a copywriter to do it for you.

Why Do You Need a Content Strategy?

As we said earlier, having a content strategy provides a wonderful means to create great content. And it’s simple really – the insight you gain from content strategy tasks offers up all sorts of things, like:

New content ideas
Finds gaps in your current content
Explores precisely what your competitors are up to from a content perspective and more importantly, what’s working for them
Unveils questions your audience are asking
Looks at any existing issues with your site for some quick wins
Helps to identify what sort of content would be ideal for your blog.

The reason why we recommend you look at a content strategy to discover all these findings is so that you can rest assured you’re creating content that actually has a purpose and answers users’ queries. After all, that’s what Google is all about.

Plus, you don’t want to end up wasting your time creating content that you believe is useful, with no actual research to back it up. We hate to break it to you, but the chances are your customers aren’t always interested in what you think they are, and that’s where content strategy findings are invaluable.

What Do We Mean by Content Strategy?

So we’ve already talked a bit about what sort of information you can get out of various content strategy tasks, but what is a content strategy and how do you put one together?

This is where we need to get our thinking caps on, as it will depend on what you’re trying to achieve. We use content strategies to help our clients understand all the bullet points we listed earlier, so when we look at creating content, we know precisely what we’re doing and why.

You’ll need to think about priorities first. What are you trying to achieve? Do you need to build out your website, so it’s got more useful pages to present your product or support your customers? Do you need to develop your blog? Do you want to see what content is performing well for your competitors and then try and knock them off the top spot? Do you want to ensure your site’s existing content is where it needs to be? Start by popping your goals in priority order, then you can build out your strategy based on these.

Here are some examples of the sorts of strategy tasks we would recommend for the questions we’ve highlighted above:

Developing Your Blog

Look at high search volume commonly asked questions around your industry or products to see what information your target market is searching for. A free tool like Answer the Public is a great place to start, or SEMrush if you have some marketing budget to throw behind your work.

Once you’ve got a good picture of what’s being talked about/asked online, start creating blog posts which clearly answer these questions. If you get it right, you may even end up qualifying for a featured snippet.

Exploring High-Performing Competitor Content

There are some useful SEO tools (such as SEMrush and Ahrefs) you can use to get this kind of information – allowing you to directly compare between your business and a number of competitors to see who is beating you for certain keywords. You can also take a sneaky look at the specific content that’s ranking well so you can see how to compete better for that keyword. If you don’t want to invest in SEO tools, you can adopt a manual process and google specific keywords and longtail phrases to see who comes up on top.

This can also be a good tactic in order to build out new pages, as if you’re missing some of the key industry pages which are coming up top in the search results, you can create new ones targeting the same terms in order to complete more effectively.

Checking Over Your Existing Content

This is a good place to start as it helps you get all your ducks in a row before you go ahead and start getting creative. This is known as a content audit. Done through gaining a crawl of your site using tools such as Screaming Frog, you can then look to make sure all your pages are working okay, that you have good meta descriptions and title tags for each page and lots of other things too. It can also act as a useful checklist of all the things you need to make sure any new pieces of content are set up properly and have everything they need.

All these tasks will give you some super useful insights on how to move forward with your content marketing in an effective way. It will also mean you and your team are not wasting any time developing ideas that no one will ever search for.

Learn The Ins And Outs of Content Marketing

If you’re not sure how to go about some of these tasks and would benefit from in-depth, step-by-step instructions on content audits, competitor analyses and lots of other useful content-related bits and bobs, our online course is the way to go. There’s lots to learn and we’re here to support you all the way – no question is a silly question!

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