At first glance, creating a content strategy plan can seem like a daunting task. There are several different factors that go into play throughout the process of building your plan. In this article, we are going to discuss not only how to create a content strategy plan, but why it’s important.
1st of all… What is Content Strategy?
In order to understand the importance of content strategy, you’ll first want to understand what it is. To put it simply, content strategy is the act of researching your topic and audience, and organizing a plan to use specific content to drive traffic to your website.
Why is it so important?
A Content strategy plan is important in order to increase web traffic. Without any web traffic, gaining visitors, leads, and ultimately sales will be virtually impossible on website. Content strategy will also allow you to better understand who your market is, what their interests are, and how you can help them with their needs.
3 Key Steps to Creating a Content Strategy Plan
- Keyword research
- Research topics on social media
- Organizing and building a plan
1. Keyword research (on Google)
Before creating your content strategy plan, you’ll first want to figure out a focus. The best way to do this is through research. Using a process we call “fill in the blank research”, you can discover a specific focal point that relates to the topic at hand. Start by entering a keyword into the Google search bar.
In this case, let’s say our keyword is “candy”. When you search “candy” in google, it yields 1,080,000,000 results. That is a bit of an over-saturation to say this least.
But, if you insert the word “candy” into the search bar and hit space on your keyboard, a wide range of related searches should appear in the drop down space that all contain the word candy. You can use this to help refine your keywords and also learn about your audience.
While viewing the options Google presents to you, you decide that the term “candy melts” may be a good fit for your content strategy plan. Keep in mind, the results Google shows you may be different, depending on your location and search history. A good way to see where “candy melts” ranks in a google search is to use the online web tool Ubersuggest.
Ubersuggest allows you up to three free keyword searches a day to help you boost your web traffic. After putting “candy melts” into Ubersuggest, you will notice the keyword overview. The search volume for “candy melts” is 33,100, which is generally high. The SEO difficulty score is 58, which is also fairly high.
Since this particular keyword proves to be on the difficult side, we need to try and find another keyword that closely relates to the keyword that we want to use. Scrolling down the page, you will find a box containing keyword ideas. In it, you will find a list of related keywords all containing the words “candy melts”.
The third column from the right displays the search volume each keyword receives in a month. On the far right, the search difficulty is shown. Less difficult keywords in terms of SEO are shown in green, while the more difficult ones are shown in different shades of beige.
Using this tool, you will see that the keyword “how to melt candy melts” returns 1,900 monthly search results and scores a 6 on the SEO difficulty level.
Let’s say the goal with your blog post is to rank on Google. If that is the case, it would appear that “how to melt candy melts” would be a good choice for your keyword, since the SEO difficulty has a low score.
However, only 1,900 people are searching for “how to melt candy melts” in a monthly time frame, so the amount of clicks you will yield will not be as high as some others may prove to be.
You can continue this research between google and ubersuggest until you’re able to pull together a list of 10-20 possible keywords to use for your content.
2. Research topics on social media
Another key piece of the puzzle when learning how to create a content strategy plan is to research trending topics on different social media platforms. What you’re looking for is insight on which platforms are the best option for you to post your content on. Start by looking at the amount of posts containing your keyword on each site.
This can be done by entering the keyword into the search bar on the social media site at hand. Feel free to explore hashtags pertaining to your keyword as well to better gauge the frequency of posts containing your keyword. The higher the amount of posts, the better the odds are of your content getting noticed.
3. Building and Organizing a plan
After establishing the keywords you want to use throughout your blog post, the next step is devising a plan and getting organized. You’ll want to make a plan on how often you will post your content and where.
Are there more people searching Facebook for the type of content you create on a Tuesday? You may want to take note of that when devising your posting schedule.
You’ll want to be consistent with your posts in order to make yourself more visible. Having a schedule and plan will help keep things on track and make your job easier in the long run.
You can use a simple Google spreadsheet to make your content strategy plan. Include items like Target Publishing Date, Keyword, Title, and Share, so you can keep track of what content you need to create when, and where you’re sharing it.
Hopefully, this gives you a better understanding of how to create a content strategy plan. However, if you are in need of some assistance we can help! Visit us at Oyster, where we help people just like you increase their web-traffic volume and improve conversion rates. It’s more than SEO, it’s about engaging your ideal visitor online, on your terms.
Writing for ecommerce and need a data-driven strategy? Check out Midnight 20, the data-science company behind Oyster.