How to Create a Content Strategy? (Step by Step)

A good content strategy is fundamental for a successful blog.

Creating content around the wrong topic can turn your efforts into dust because of high competition or lack of monthly search volume. So, how do you create a blog content strategy?

You can create a successful blog content strategy by following proven steps. These include setting clear goals, performing target market research, determining the best topic ideas, finding underserved topics, analyzing the competition, creating a guideline, and more.

This article walks you through the 10 steps to create an effective, powerful, and engaging content strategy that consistently brings organic traffic to your website.

Let’s begin!

1. Set clear goals for your blog content strategy

Each piece of content you develop should contribute towards achieving a particular goal. But it is only when you know what you want to achieve that you’ll know the best way to achieve it. So, the very first step in creating a content strategy is to set clear goals.

You should outline the goals that you want to achieve with your content. Content fulfills one or more commercial purposes. It can be brand awareness, customer conversion, etc.

Interestingly, how content is set up differs based on the goal it aims to achieve. Thus, content for boosting brand awareness will be markedly different from one aiming to increase customer conversion. There are five (5) broad goals that people generally set for their content. See how the focus differs depending on the business goal.

Goal #1: Brand awareness

You can use content to make your brand more recognizable and appreciated. Content for brand awareness focuses on selling your values as a business instead of focusing on selling your products.

Goal #2: Increase traffic

A common goal for content is to improve SERP ranking and drive more traffic. When developing content to increase traffic, you’ll need to pay more attention to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts. This includes using the right keywords, a killer meta description, header tags, link building, etc.

Goal #3: Lead generation

Another goal of content marketing is to attract prospects to your business and increase their interest. Lead generation content focuses on high-quality content that impresses your audience with new information, actionable takeaways, etc.

Goal #4: Customer conversion

Another goal you could set is to see more of your visitors become customers. Content for customer conversion usually focuses more on CTAs (Calls To Action).

Goal #5: Customer loyalty

Content that fosters customer loyalty helps drive repeat sales and increase the lifetime value of a customer. Content driving customer loyalty focuses on proactively addressing customers’ concerns.

When defining your goals, you should remember S.M.A.R.T. That is, make sure your goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

For example, while “becoming a thought leader” is a good thing, that is a poor goal because it is not “SMART.” It does not specify what you need to achieve the goal, how you’ll know you’ve achieved the goal, etc. However, an excellent goal is: to have at least ten authority links in six months.

2. Perform target market research

A target market is the specific group of people you want to reach with your content.

Effective marketing starts with knowing your audience. If you don’t know who you are talking to, you won’t know their needs and how to address them. So, an essential early step in content marketing strategy is doing market research to know your target audience.

Content for anybody is content for nobody. You don’t create content and just put it out there for anybody. Instead, you create content for a specific audience. So, you need to define these people.

Who are the people who will consume the content? What are their needs? What kind of content do they engage with? What social media platforms do they share content on? Knowing the answers to questions like these will help you create blog content that will yield better results.

The main reason audience-specific content do better is that it is more relevant and valuable. You can create more relevant content if you identify your target audience and determine what they want from your services.

An excellent way to visualize your target audience is to create a marketing persona (also known as a buyer persona). It is a fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about existing customers.

To create a marketing persona, start with your existing audience. Compile data on your current audience. You may collect the data via interviews and internet surveys. The type of information you need to collect varies depending on your business. Still, some important pieces of information to collect include:

Age
Location
Stage of life
Preferred channel of communication
Interest (the favorite aspect of your business)
Challenges (problems they face with your business)
Pain points your business addresses

After collecting the information, the next step is to condense it using common themes. That is, categorize your audience using similar traits. Condense responses to three to five profiles. These profiles are your marketing persona.

The profiles give you a better understanding of your audience, helping you tailor content to suit them.

3. Come up with the best topic ideas and keywords to target

Now you know what your target audience looks like and what they expect. The next step is to identify content that will do well and help you reach your goals. That is, determine topic ideas that resonate well with your audience.

Also, determine keywords that will help the content rank high in search engine result pages (SERP). Keywords are some of the most important elements in a successful blog content strategy.

For topic and keyword ideas, follow these steps:

Use Ahrefs to find the best keywords to target

One of the best ways to come up with the best topic ideas and keywords to target is to look at what is working for your competitors. You can start with the keyword research tool Ahrefs.

The tool helps you identify the keywords helping your top competitors rank. When you enter your domain into the tool, it’ll show your top competitors. You can then research these sites to know what works best for them.

When the tool reveals your top competitor, choose one to research. Then use the “site explorer” function to analyze the chosen domain’s top-performing pages.

Clicking the “top pages” tab, you’ll find the domain’s best-performing blog content in terms of organic traffic. Notably, the page shows you the keywords helping the pages rank.

Now you know the keywords that are helping your competitors’ blog content rank. This gives you an idea of the keywords to target in your content.

Use AnswerThePublic to find content ideas from relevant keywords

Next, determine the topics that’ll work best for you. The best topics usually incorporate the keywords that people are searching for.

So, in coming up with topic ideas, you should start with the keywords you’ve identified. One tool that can help you use keywords to come up with topics is Answer The Public. The tool listens into autocomplete data from search engines to quickly create the phrases and questions users are asking around keywords.

That is, if you enter a relevant keyword into AnswerThePublic, the tool will give you different variations of questions that people are asking online using that keyword. You can then create a topic answering one of those questions.

For example, consider that you got the keyword “user manual” from your research using Ahrefs. AnswerThePublic will give you real user search queries like:

Difference between user manual and user guide
User manual requirements
How to create user manual document

These are “content ideas” that you can use to position your content before people.

Find the content ideas that have a similar search intent

Now, you have a host of content ideas. But which one should you use for your topic? The best content is one that shows up on search engine result pages for different search queries. To find that “best topic,” look at the content ideas from AnswerThe Public to identify those that have a similar search intent.

Search intent is simply what people hope to find when they enter a search query. Search the generated “content ideas” in Google.

When you query different content ideas, does a particular topic show in the SERP? The content ideas that produce the same result have the same search intent. You can then use them in your content. That way, your content will show up in SERPs for different search queries.

4. Brainstorm ideas to find underserved topics

The point above will help you find topic ideas from what is working for your top competitors. But sometimes, you can hit gold from topics that have yet to receive adequate service.

In this phase, you need to create a list of topics that you can write about from different verticals within your niche.

This helps you test which vertical produces the best results (more traffic and/ or more sales).

A great content strategy should have a healthy mix of informative and transactional articles.

Let’s quickly review what this means.

What are informative articles?

As the name suggests, informational articles are content that answers a particular query or educates the reader in some way.

The main goal of informative articles is to educate your reader about a specific topic relevant to your niche. This, in turn, transforms your site into an authority within your industry.

Examples of these types of articles are:

How-tos
Guides
Response articles
And anything that primarily informs the reader.

What are transactional articles?

Transactional articles are pieces of content dedicated to selling a product or a service. They have much more persuasive copy than informational articles, and competition for this type of content is usually higher because they bring the most sales.

Transactional articles include:

‘Where to buy X’
Comparison articles
‘Top 10 X for Y’
And review articles.

How to find content ideas effectively, efficiently, and fast

Go to answersocrates.com and type in your desired Topic (Make it broad)
Select the country you want to rank in and your preferred language
Click ‘search,’ and a list of questions relevant to your topic should populate.

At this stage, you should create a Google sheet and copy and paste all the ideas that seem good topics to write about.

In the next section, we will dive deeper into how to find out whether or not that topic is too competitive.

5. Analyze the competition

Competition analysis is the process of determining the strength of the top five websites/articles ranking for the topic you chose to write about.

Look at the top five results for the topic you want to write about and see whether or not you have a chance to rank in the first positions, taking into account your site’s authority, your competitor’s authority, and the quality of the top-ranking results.

NOTE: You don’t necessarily have to rank #1 to get a lot of traffic from a search query. Some heavily searched topics can bring 1000’s page views, even ranking on the lower 1st page positions (#5 to #10); keep that in mind.

Here’s what you need to do to find competitors you’ll be able to outrank and claim their current ranking for the searched query.

How to analyze your competition step by step

Copy one of the topics you found in the first part of the content strategy process and do a Google search.

These are the things that you have to look out for from the results that you get:

That is a good sign if there are no exact matches or maybe only one or two for the query you are searching for.

If all of the results on the first page respond precisely to what you searched for in their title, that is not a good sign, and it indicates that the competition may be substantial.

We are not yet ready to determine that. But generally, it is best when you find ‘underserved topics.’ This means no results answer the exact question or topic you searched for, or there are only one or two exact matches.

II. Are there any forums or user-generated content like Quora or Reddit on the first page?

If you see any user-generated content ranking in the top five, then BINGO.

This is an underserved topic! You can most likely outrank that website.

If there are no forms or user-generated content, there is still a chance that you can outrank the sites in the top positions. Let’s see what we have to look for.

III. Are any of the top five results short articles? (900 words or less)

Now it’s time to visit the first five pages and see what they are doing.

NOTE: There is an excellent Chrome extension called ‘word count’ you should download and install. After you do, you can select the text, right-click, and count each article’s words. This process is much faster.

Most of the time, you’ll be able to outrank a site that has less than 900 words around the topic if you write more content (assuming that the content you write has no fluff but actual information in it)

But for the sake of this guide, if the article is 700 hundred words, write 1400. If the article is a thousand words, write 2400. Make it more in-depth, and you will win the ranking.

IV. Are any of the top five results low-quality content or not to the point of your search?

Check whether one or more of the articles in the top five position of the search results have low-quality content. Do the articles have lots of fluff, no factual information but regurgitated info that is poorly organised? If yes, there’s a big chance you can outrank them.

How do you do this?

You can outrank them by writing high-quality content that responds to the search intent. This brings us to the second part of the section.

V. Does the article respond to the search intent?

Look closer. Is the article giving readers the information they are looking for when searching for whatever query they enter into the search box?

When the top-ranking articles do not accurately match the user’s search intent, it means Google has nothing better to show the user than whatever is delivered to you.

This means that you have a chance to rank in the first position for this query. You only have to respond directly to what the user is searching for in a comprehensive, well-written, well-organized article.

6. Write explanatory guidelines

An explanatory guideline is like an outline for your content. This step is often overlooked but can help you produce better-quality content.

Writing explanatory guidelines simply means outlining the topics/ subtopics you will treat in the article before writing. An explanatory guideline helps your writing in the following ways:

It helps you organize your ideas. You can list out the headings and subheadings of your content in a thoughtful flow. You can visualize the points your content will discuss, and how each point connects to the other.
It helps you identify weaknesses in your argument. Your guideline breaks down your article into its main points. Thus, you’ll see when you do not have support for a particular point. Also, if you have a point that does not relate to others, you can easily see this from the guideline.
It helps you avoid the writer’s block. The blank page can be intimidating, especially when you are writing a lengthy article. Explanatory guidelines help break the article into more manageable pieces. Each subheading is easier to tackle, and before you know it, you’ve completed the blog content.

Now that you know why writing an explanatory guideline is important, how do you write one?

It starts with deciding the points you would like to discuss in the content. You may check your competitor’s content for inspiration. Check different blog posts to see what subheadings they use in developing the topic.

Write out many of these subheadings. Decide on the ones you’ll use. Then rearrange the chosen few in a logical order so that one connects to the other.

7. Create the article’s guidelines thinking about responding to a “topic” and not a “keyword”

When creating your guideline, it is essential that you think of responding to a topic and not a keyword. Gone are the days when you could stuff keywords into an article and rank for it.

Google has grown much more intelligent. Now, you can rank for keywords you do not even mention in your article.

This happens because Google has become better at determining the user’s true search intent. That is, Google is better at determining what the user wants to find at any given time.

That doesn’t mean that keywords are irrelevant. It means that you don’t have to think about keywords anymore but about topics.

The best response to search intent for a particular search query will rank for many associated keywords thanks to LSI (Latent semantic indexing)

LSI is the method Google and other search engines use to compare and study relationships between critical terms allowing them to understand what the user is searching for, even when he is not accurately looking for it.

Amazing!

This allows you, the content creator, to rank for many relevant keywords for the topic you write about by just focusing on creating high-quality content that covers thoroughly and in-depth a specific topic.

In short, think about topics and let Google match you with hundreds of different relevant keywords.

We’ve touched briefly on this at the beginning of the article.

The battleship method means mixing up the verticals in your content strategy. Later on, when your articles find a stable position in search engines, you can analyze your data and determine which types of topics produce the best results to double what works.

For example: if you are in the baby niche, you will not only write articles about parenting, you will write about parenting, baby toys, baby foods, baby habits, etc. Do you get the point?

Then, you will see what brought the most traffic and sales to your website and focus only on those verticals when planning the next batch of articles.

9. Create a content calendar

Consistency is key to keeping your audience engaged and interested in your brand. That is, you need to publish content consistently. A content calendar helps you plan how to feed your audience with quality content consistently.

A content calendar is also known as an editorial calendar. It lists upcoming dates and the content you plan to publish on those dates. The editorial calendar should also show the overall theme of your content. For example, in the lead-up to the holiday sales period, content should focus on promoting products. After the holiday sales period, content should focus on how to get the best out of products.

Your editorial calendar should not cover just a few weeks. It should cover content publishing for at least three (3) months. This allows enough time for content creators to do the needed research and create quality blog posts.

Know that your content calendar can include more than blog post ideas. It can also include social media posts, email newsletters, and other content. Your content calendar can also include content promotion, as this activity is part of your blog marketing strategy.

There are different options for creating your content calendar. You may use a sheet of paper, a spreadsheet, or task management software. The most important thing is having a schedule for your blog posts.

10. Review the results after 8-12 months to plan for the next batch of content

The last step of a comprehensive content strategy is analyzing the results to double down on what works best.

You must install Google analytics and search console (from day one!) to do this step.

How to do the analysis and pick your winners?

Blog posts take between 8 to 12 months to find a stable position on Google (this may vary depending on your niche and other factors, but it’s an average estimate to analyze the data)

After analyzing your traffic for the past year, you need to look for winners.

A winner is a blog post that brings 800+ page views per month or a blog post that generated sales or leads in the past.

Once these topics are set aside, you need to restart the content strategy creation process focusing (only) on the winning verticals.

As you repeat this feedback loop, your content strategy will get smarter and smarter because your data points will become more accurate.

Your site will grow its authority within the verticals that you focus on, and as a result, your traffic will grow more efficiently and faster every time you produce a new piece of content.

Bonus: Do not rely on SEO tools

SEO tools supposedly help you build content that performs well in search engine result pages. They do this by providing the skeletons you need to build your content.

When you enter a keyword into an SEO tool, it checks top-performing pages and returns data about those pages. Such data include:

Primary and secondary keywords used across the content
The headings and subheadings used across the content
How long competitive content should be

The idea is that you can use these data from the SEO tools to create blog content that does well in search results.

Know that the SEO tools only do things you can do yourself. For example, you can conduct keyword research to determine keywords that will help you rank.

However, using SEO tools come with some drawback. First, since the tools are broadly available, anyone can implement their suggestions to produce content that looks the same.

Secondly, using the suggestions from these tools without any refining can make your content machine-like and less human. For example, SEO tools may make you think in terms of keywords. Many of these tools not only suggest keywords but also how many times they should appear in the content. This can shift your focus from “topics” to meeting keyword suggestions.

Know that keywords alone do not give a true reflection of what people are searching for. Pairing SEO tools with content marketing know-how and other tools help you get the full picture of people’s search for a more successful content marketing strategy.

In conclusion: what to keep in mind when creating a blog content strategy

Ranking a blog on Google and generating income from it is not a random process that involves luck. On the contrary, it is a proven method that is replicable again and again once you know how to do it.

This article covered the blueprint to create content strategies that rank on search engines no matter your niche.

To create a successful blog content strategy, you need to:

Set clear goals
Perform target market research
Come up with the best topic ideas and keywords to target
Brainstorm ideas to find underserved topics
Analyze the competition
Write explanatory guidelines
Create the article’s guidelines thinking about responding to a “topic” and not a “keyword”
Use ‘the Battleship method’ to pick a variety of topics related to your niche
Create a content calendar
Review the results after 8-12 months to plan for the next batch of content
Bonus: Do not rely on SEO tools

If you apply the steps described, you will grow your traffic and be on your way to generating free, targeted, and organic traffic to your website.

Need help with your content strategy? Redakthor Content marketing is the ultimate hub for content marketing. Contact us today for high-quality and insightful content that increases your reach.

How to Create a Content Strategy? (Step by Step)