How To Strategize The Content You Produce

by Christian Carere, Guest Contributor

We’ve heard it a million times but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s true and that is your content is by far the most important aspect of building a website that generates traffic and converts visitors to clients. Structuring the development of your site through a content strategy will keep your efforts focused to effectively increase traffic that leads to new clients.

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1. Define your goal
2. Keyword research
3. Create a buyer persona
4. Audit your current content
5. Choose the structure of your content
6. Promote your content

Define your goal
It’s difficult to be effective with your content if you have no defined purpose. It’s essential to clearly establish the goals in which you are aiming to accomplish so you can create the most meaningful content that serves a purpose. A brand new website will need content for explaining their products and services, supporting articles to optimize the keyword topic, branding material for information about the company and resource pages for link building.

Create a buyer persona
Creating a buyer persona is a practice that identifies who your target audience is and how you will present your content. By being specific with the attributes of your ideal client you will adjust the way you communicate in your writing to meet your client on their level. The way you speak to a senior citizen would be much different than how you would speak to an adolescent teen.

Use every detail that separates your buyer from the masses. Age, income, gender, generation, personal interests, physical attributes, etc. The more you put into creating your persona, the more effective you can be in your content. Cater to the details that make up this fictitious person that represents an entire group of clients.

Research keywords
Every piece of content you create should start with keyword research. Identify the seed keyword by using a keyword tool, or just making as many variations of the phrase to describe your product or service in the same terms your buyer persona would use in a search.

Use your keyword in a search to uncover other suggestions put forth by the search engines as well as to identify the keywords used in the pages that are performing in the top-ranked positions. Make a note of the titles in both the organic results as well as the paid ads. Based on their ranking and position they can provide clues to titles that generate higher click-through rates.

Audit your current content
Perform a content audit of what exists already that will contribute to achieving your campaign goal. If you have content that already performs it can serve as an indicator to what’s working and you may be able to add to it rather than create a wholly separate piece of content.

Perform a gap analysis by assessing what your site currently has in contrast to what is currently offered by the top-ranking pages. The Renovation Method is a common strategy used to make your content better than what currently exists. In order to outperform sites that rank, your pages have to include any relevant topics they have along with additional content that raises the standard.

Choose the structure of your content
Based on your buyer persona’s, what method of delivery would your content be best served? There are endless formats to structure how you present your information such as choosing between video, articles, how-to guides, infographics, etc. You can choose a combination of a few different methods of getting your message across depending on what’s currently working. Base your decision on what will make your buyer persona highly engaged in the content your producing.

Promote your content
Choosing the right outlets for distribution to get your content the right exposure can make or break the success of your campaign. The network you decide on should reflect the websites that your buyer persona frequents the most.

Is the content you produced a good fit for social media? If your buyer persona is over 60 years old then the answer is most likely no. However, if your buyer is a teen then Instagram, Facebook and Youtube are all viable avenues that are sure to get an audience.

Content aggregators can be an effective way to generate a stream of traffic to your site. Medium is a site that gives you access to a lot of viewers and you can promote more inbound traffic since you can link to your site by importing posts you’ve already created.

Planning your content from A-Z structures your efforts and aligns your objectives. Implementing a content strategy for your site will accelerate your growth by targeting goals through more effective content.

Author bio:

Christian Carere is the founder of Digital Ducats Inc. and specializes in search engine optimization services. Christian works primarily with small businesses on local SEO to increase leads and new clients.

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