5: You Do Have a Content Strategy Don’t You?

You do have a content strategy don’t you? Because one of the tenets of the website industry is that Content is King.

Bill Gates said this in an essay in 1996 and, all these years later, it still holds true.

Websites such as the BBC, The Guardian and The Daily Mail are all content-driven beasts. Facebook draws you in to see what your friends are up to everyday because of content.

So if your website, the shop window for your products and services, doesn’t have strong content then that is something you need to take a serious look at.

Know Your Own Content

The first step in your content strategy is to know your content.

Do you know how many pages there are on your website? What sort of content do you have? What have you written about? Does it get much traffic? Which pages attract the most attention? Which content gets read the most, keeps users on your website the longest, engages with your audience and makes them share on social media or complete a form, make an enquiry or a sale?

That’s are a lot of questions but you need to answer them all in order to get a picture of the health of your website so that you can make an informed decision going forward…

Use your Google Analytics to see which pages get the most eyeballs, what the bounce rate is and follow that user flow through the website.

See which pages lead to the most goal completions.

Once you have all this knowledge, maybe marked up in an Excel spreadsheet, you can see what works and what doesn’t.

You want to do more of what is good and try to make improvements to the places where you aren’t getting as many successes.

There are many ways to plan content but knowing your own content you can divide up what you have into

1. More like this.
2. Improve upon these and…
3. Less of this sort of content.

Do Your Competitors Have a Content Strategy?

Now you may not be privy to that exact knowledge, unless you’re into corporate espionage, but you can at least go and have a look at your competitor’s website to see what they’re up to.

Do they post regular blogs? How often?

Do they publish news stories? What about?

Does your competitor have webinars and videos, whitepapers, downloadable guides, an email newsletter?

Look at their social media channels – do they have a lot of followers? Do they post a lot? Regularly? Which posts get the most likes?

If you can see that your competitor is doing so much more than you, then that will be why they are so much more successful. That knowledge alone should get you fired up!

Whatever your competition are doing that you are not is to their advantage. At the very least you should be matching this. You should be aiming to beat this!

And, again, being wise and organised, you will have expanded your list, your spreadsheet and you can see what content you have got and what the competition are up to. There is a mountain to climb but you must do it because that’s what you’re in business to do – to succeed and win.

Is There Anything You’re Missing?

You know your own content. You now know your competitor’s content. But is that everything? What if you are BOTH missing a trick?

Are there websites in your industry that you haven’t had a look at? Go see them. Explore and get more intel.

Did you see anything in your keyword research? Are there terms in Google Search Console that you are getting impressions for that you don’t have strong content for? Does Google Analytics show you which terms people are typing in your site’s search box that maybe you don’t have content on?

This is where you get clever with you marketing, by thinking and looking and doing things that you have not previously done. Even if you later dismiss some of them, having a holistic view of your business, the market and your competition will fire up synapses and make connections that will help your future strategy.

Time to Have a Content Strategy

Armed with all this new knowledge you’ve noted down, it’s time to map out your content strategy.

There will be keywords and content that you currently perform well for. You will want to preserve this performance.

In addition to preserving your best performing content you will want to support and boost it. You can do this by creating additional content using secondary and tertiary keywords, those “long tail” keywords that will help web users find what they are looking for.

So for your content strategy you should do the following:

• Choose your primary content subjects and support these with secondary subjects. This will form the basis of a parent-child relationship with your content and your website’s internal link structure.
• Define the type of content that you will deliver these subjects: articles, blog posts and cases studies may be your primary HTML content in your website. Support these content types with videos, infographics, eBooks and whitepapers as appropriate.
• Define goals such as when you will produce and deliver your new content. If you have limited resources you may wish to focus on a content strategy that has a more immediate impact.
• Back up your content creation strategy with a content delivery strategy. You have all this shiny new content but how are you going to get it in front of your audience?

That should be enough to get you thinking about and formulating a content strategy. It’s essential that you have quality content for your audience to consume.

And remember – Google automatically crawls and indexes your website but occasionally a real person will assess your site – they will use Google’s quality guidelines to see whether your website’s content comes across as Expert, Authoritative and Trustworthy. E-A-T. Remember this and create the very best quality content that you can. Your users will appreciate it and so will the search engines.

No content strategy? No problem. Our digital agency will work as your strategic marketing partner to craft and execute your content strategy.

If you would like to know more about any of these individual items then please do give us a call on 01276 534 680 or complete our contact form.