Before you dive right into writing all the things, it's important to take some time to get your content strategy in order. This chapter will help you do just that.
Defining content strategy
With the emergence of the axiom “content is king” within the SEO world, the definition of what exactly content strategy is has been debated. We’re not going to try to throw our hat in the ring about what the end-all, be-all definition should be since lots of smart people have done so; however, we’ll define content strategy and marketing as it relates to this guide.
What is content strategy?
Content strategy is the ongoing process of developing a comprehensive plan to ideate, design, create, share, and promote content that aligns with your brand, speaks to your target audience, and is measured against specific goals.
Content strategy acts as a glue, tying together numerous elements important for SEO, from your overarching brand vision to promotional campaigns, all of which we will be addressing within the following chapters of this resource. As SEO has moved past manipulative tactics such as keyword stuffing and link buying, what’s important is creating content that’s relevant and engaging to your customers, which in turn strengthens Google’s understanding of your website and its topical authority.
Let’s dive into the steps you’ll need to take in order to create your own strategy.
If you have a dedicated content team, great! See what strategic plans they already have, and collaborate with them moving forward. If not, no problem. Many SEO teams may act as hybrid content/SEO/PR teams, and the following steps are still well within your wheelhouse.
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What's the difference between content strategy and content marketing?
While many, many people use the terms "content strategy" and "content marketing" interchangeably, they are not the same thing, because you can strategize about non-marketing content. For our purposes, though, when we talk about "content strategy," you can assume we're talking about "content marketing strategy."
Content strategy: Internal guidelines and governance
Content marketing: Editorial calendar, creation, curation, promotion, iteration
Content strategy concerns itself with the vision — the ins and outs of how and why your content will be created, managed, and eventually archived or updated. It looks at all of the content your customers ever encounter. It overlaps with content marketing, which is why you'll see a lot of things in this guide that look like content strategy, but they are not the same thing (did we say that already?).
Content marketing focuses on the tactics and execution — the actual creation, curation, and editing of content that's specifically created for the purposes of marketing. This could be anything from blog posts to the confirmation page, and is aimed at building a trusted connection between a company's products or services and the market that might end up purchasing them. It's about creating content that people not only want to consume, but that will also help them through the sales funnel.
For example, a content strategist might find that there's a lack of trust between their company and their customers, suggesting a number of ways that trust might be built. A content marketer might do the work to gain that trust by featuring an interview with the company's founder. See how these disciplines complement each other?
Vision: Know where you’re going
Your content strategy is a guiding light when questions like “should we pursue this article idea?” arise. The first element you need to take into consideration for your content strategy is your company’s vision. What do you want your company to be known for? What differentiates your company from your competitors? What topic is your company already an expert on?
Focus on what you want your business to be now and in the future, and build your content strategy on that foundation.
Setting goals
Once you set the vision for your content strategy, it’s time to set goals for your content to ensure you can measure your success.
While your vision for content is qualitative, you’ll want your goals to be quantitative. Formulate your goals so that they are meaningful, measurable, time-bound, and are objectives your content can reasonably accomplish.
A good place to start is determining how your content strategy will align with and impact your SEO strategy and goals. Consider how much you want your content to contribute to SEO goals, such as organic traffic and conversions, and create overarching goals accordingly.
From there, it’s wise to determine how content fits into your marketing funnel, so you’re able to create specific goals for different types of content. What topics should be covered at the top of the funnel tied to awareness? What subjects need to be addressed when your audience is close to conversion? Once you understand what content aligns with each part of your funnel, review your existing content to determine where you are lacking the most and start there.
After you determine what your biggest content needs are, then you can assign relevant metrics. For example, if you need to focus on awareness content, relevant metrics could be social shares and newsletter signups; whereas for content at the bottom of the funnel, you might, for example, focus on lead form completions.
You could also start by coming up with qualitative goals that align with your brand’s vision, such as wanting to be the authority on coffee (like Blue Bottle). From there, distill that objective into tactical goals. So, for example, “I think that I can further my authority on coffee by creating preparation guides for each of the most popular brewing methods.” Then, you can determine relevant metrics that would determine success and measure the outcomes of your work.
The Internet is packed with articles about how to set effective goals, which can focus on everything from getting more leads to increasing brand awareness. We advise you to create 3–4 goals for your content marketing strategy.
Defining your audience
The next step in developing your strategy is to figure out who you're talking to (and who you want to be talking to). It’ll serve you well to have a holistic view of the audience:
Demographic information (age, gender, location, etc.)
Where do they hang out on the Internet? (What other websites do they frequent?)
What channels do they use to communicate? (Is this a Twitter crowd or an Instagram one?)
Who influences them? (Whose opinions do they trust?)
If you already have persona research, great! You can apply those insights to your content strategy. If not, you can start to build personas out. Creating a set of archetypal people to represent your target customers can be a very in-depth process or a basic sketch. Mike King’s comprehensive guide to personas can be of help here, as well as Kyra Kuik and Harriet Cummings' look at audience research. You can start with basic demographic and behavioral information, but it’s important to supplement that by understanding what is going through your audience's minds.
Understanding your audience's needs
To truly get content strategy right, you must not only understand who your customer is, but also her motivations, pain points, decision criteria, etc. You can learn more about your audience by reading industry studies, asking your customer service team what the most common issues and concerns are, asking the audience about themselves and their buying journey, and more. For more information on how to research your audience and their behaviors, you can check out this post from Seer.
Knowing who you’re targeting and what goals they have that can be solved via your brand’s content are keys to a successful content strategy. By creating content that addresses your audience’s needs, you’re providing a valuable experience for them and developing a positive association with your brand. We also talk more about this in regard to content ideation in Chapter 6.
Align your style with your brand’s personality
Content strategy not only needs to touch on these strategic decisions, but also tactical elements that impact all content you publish.
Style and tone in the context of content are important for your brand to be cohesive across all messaging, from display ads to major resource guides. These guidelines should stem from your brand and reflect its personality accordingly.
If your brand is light-hearted and playful, guidelines should be written to encourage playfulness and to add some fun personality into the copy. If your brand is corporate and focused on conveying complex, serious information, you’ll want to create guidelines about having a tone of authoritativeness and being clear and to-the-point. In addition to tone, you should consult your brand guidelines when creating content to ensure it aligns with the rest of your company’s communication.
Identifying content opportunities
Moving from the who and the how, we’re now going to touch on the what of content strategy.
There are many ways to go about content ideation, which we’ll go over in Chapter 6, but start by taking a macro view of where you stand vs your competitors. The goal is to take an inventory of what you already have, then compare it to the competitive landscape to determine where the biggest opportunities lie.
Content audit
Start by taking an in-depth look at the content you’ve already created through a content audit. While we’ll outline the various steps at a high level below, you may be inclined to want a more in-depth overview. This Whiteboard Friday from Rand on how to build a content to keyword map is a great resource.
Step 1: Inventory existing content
First, create an inventory of the content you have. While you can do this manually if you have a small site, you’re better off using a crawler like Screaming Frog to pull the full list of URLs from your site. Here’s a detailed guide from Seer Interactive that covers how to do that.
Step 2: Organize and tag your content
For each content piece on your website, categorize key elements that you will evaluate within this auditing process. Several necessary items to include are:
Step in the funnel: What portion of the marketing funnel is this content targeting?
Topic: What is the content about? It’s best to set up topic categories ahead of your auditing to organize yourself. You have to strike a balance between being too granular and too broad, so as to make analyzing where you’re strong and where you have gaps easier.
Format: What format is the content? Is it a short article or a long resource guide? For this step, it’s good to predetermine the format options to use when auditing.
Datedness: Is this content out of date or evergreen?
Step 3: Add in performance metrics
Once you've got all that mapped out, add success metrics for each post. These will vary based on the goals you set in your initial strategy, but the following would be a good start:
Traffic (organic and overall)
Engagement metrics (time on page, number of pages visited)
Social shares
Assisted conversions
Conversions
Rankings
Backlinks
Step 4: Analyze for patterns or gaps
Now that you have everything in front of you, begin by seeing what successes you can build on and where you are lacking. What content is performing well? Are there any topics or formats you notice that are doing better than others? What about ones that perform worse? Are you missing coverage for certain parts of a user’s journey?
There are many ways to slice and dice this data to find insights. Pivot tables are a great tool to use during this analysis. Here’s a guide on how to use them if you’re unfamiliar. Don’t be intimidated — once you get the hang of them, it’s like riding a bike!
Create a B2B SEO Strategy
Are you targeting businesses, organizations, and professionals? Well you need a B2B SEO strategy.
Now that you’ve identified what content your company has and what’s performing well, it’s time to evaluate the full competitor landscape. The process of a competitive gap analysis is to gather data on the keywords and URLs competitors are ranking for and to analyze this information to determine content gaps. Gaps may be obvious, where there is no content on a given subject, or they may be instances where the existing content isn’t great and there’s an opportunity to create something better.
There are several tools that can help with pulling the data needed to analyze for content gaps — we even have a Moz tutorial here. Here are the main steps. Note that there are several points where it is similar to the content audit above.
Step 1: Specify the competitors you’ll be looking at for this analysis.
Competitors don’t have to be direct business competitors, but any website that is ranking for the content topics that you’re targeting.
Step 2: Pull the keywords and URLs that your competitors are ranking for and combine into one spreadsheet, which also includes your URLs and keywords.
Step 3: Categorize your competitors' content by stage of the funnel and topic.
Step 4: Analyze this data to discover where coverage is lacking around subjects, as well as to understand the strengths of your competitors.
Step 5: Use these insights and opportunities to guide your content strategy. This is where the fun comes in! Detail the competitive landscape, so you can keep an eye on what your competitors are authoritative about. Prioritize content opportunities and begin ideation around what topics to cover, which format to use, etc.
Find top competitor content
Wondering what your competitors' top content is? Find out quickly and easily using this brief tutorial.
After completing all of this research and planning, it’s imperative you write it down. Having a written document ensures that anyone involved in content is aligned on your company’s vision, goals, target audience, and strategy.
Like style guidelines, a content marketing strategy should be comprehensive and also concise. You want to explain the basis of the strategy and cover likely eventualities, but you also want to help prevent a new strategist or writer from spending the entirety of their month reading it (and ensure they can actually remember the gist of it by the end).
We've created a template to get you started in writing a strategy. This document will take you through some initial research (beyond the content audit information above) and how to combine that research with your goals and content guidelines. You'll then start to make the strategy concrete by applying all that information to content types. Add in some information about governance and workflow, and you have yourself a fully fledged strategy.
Pro tip: Include an executive summary
Include an executive summary with your content marketing strategy. It will help you share your strategy with decision makers. It also gives you and your team a quick reference when questions come up.
Perhaps the most important thing about documenting your content marketing strategy is that it should be a living document. This flexibility helps when you realize that one of your goals is completely unachievable. Do you want to continue to try and support that goal or do you want to reassess and triage content's new role? Exactly.
It doesn't matter if you use a Google Doc or a typewritten manual as long as the strategy can be updated as needed and everyone who needs access can find it.
In this chapter, we’ve covered how to develop your content strategy from your setting starting vision and goals to discovering the content gaps your brand can fill through audience and competitive research. Next, we're discussing how working with the right team can mean everything when it comes to your content marketing success.
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