There was a time when blogging was pipping hot. Finishing the 20th century and starting the 21st, hundreds of people started writing to vent their thoughts and feelings on the Internet, and many of them can now write blog posts for a living. So, of course, it has become a crucial part of the marketing industry, and nowadays, more than 52% of marketers consider it the most vital part of their strategy.
So, it’s only natural if you want to start creating the content marketing strategy for a blog and get a taste of the benefits blogging can drive for your business.
We mainly think about blogging as a tool to increase your results in organic search ranking or, in other words, how high does it rank your webpage in Google and other search engines’s results? And why it can help you improve your SEO metric. It can also help you drive more traffic to your website, nurture the relationship with your existing and potential clients, increase your brand awareness, and become a trustworthy reference in your niche.
So, if you’re ready to start building a content marketing strategy for your blog, you’ve come to the right place. Here, we’ll see how to create a successful blog content strategy from scratch.
The best content marketing strategy for blogging begins with finding your blog’s purpose. This purpose will serve as a guiding light, answering the question: why will your blog exist? It will also define the difference your blog can make in your readers’ and customers’ lives. These answers will shape your content and ensure your strategy is focused and driving results.
Now, finding purpose and setting goals can be challenging. Hence, if you’re struggling to determine the purpose of your blog, you can help yourself by following the “help-to-by” framework:
“My blog will help [your target audience] to [desired outcome] by [the means required].”
For instance, if you’re creating a blog for your remodel company, the purpose could be to help new and existing homeowners upgrade their homes by educating them on choosing professional and trustworthy remodeling companies (a.k.a. your business).
Setting this at the beginning of your content marketing strategy for a blog will help you ensure your content is on track and the results you get align with your marketing goals. So, if you want to educate your audience on choosing trustworthy remodeling services, your content won’t be titled “How to remodel your home all by yourself in 10 steps” because you want them to pick your services for their remodels.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t provide them with valuable tips and information on remodeling homes. Content value is highly recommended in marketing, as it helps build trust and leadership within your customers. So, occasionally, you can post about the five best floor materials to upgrade your flooring in your blog content planning. Other examples of valuable content could be how-to guides, industry insights, or customer testimonials.
Researching what your competitors are doing in blogging is an invaluable source of inspiration. It can show you the keywords that drive traffic in your niche. It can also help you find underexplored topics and keywords to boost your blog. So, when building a content marketing strategy for your blog, set aside a moment to investigate your business and content competitors.
You can research your competition with any SEO tool, such as Ahrefs or Ubbersuggest. Once you have identified your competitors, you can enter their blog’s domain in these tools, and it’ll generate a report with their best-raking pages and the top keywords they used. These keywords will simply be words and phrases that your customers use to search on the internet, and they can provide you with initial topics to use when planning your blog content calendar.
Likewise, you can use these keywords found to identify your content competitors, which means those websites you’re competing against in organic search results for your chosen keywords, whether or not they’re in your same niche. These websites rank for the keywords you want, and understanding their content strategy can help you refine your own.
This report will show the websites with the highest estimated traffic for these keywords, and you can see what kind of content and topics are working for them.
With this pivotal point of topic and keyword ideas, you can now go to the next step in this guide to create a content marketing strategy for a blog.
Knowing what your competitors are writing about and the topics driving their traffic is undoubtedly helpful. However, that doesn’t mean you can strengthen your content marketing SEO strategy to increase your blog’s traffic. By diversifying your keyword list, you can improve your chances of appearing first on your customer’s Google searches.
You can start by defining your seed keywords, simply the main topics you plan to write about. To do this, you can define the main words describing your business’s products or services. So, continuing with our remodeling company example, some of your seed keywords could be:
Once you’ve defined your seed keywords, you can use the SEO tool of your preference to find variations in prepositions, suggestions, and questions that include your main keywords. For instance, many paid tools, such as Answer the Public, Ubersuggest, Keyword Surfer, Ahrefs, and more, include keyword explorers as freemium features that you can use for your blog content planning.
Still, they’ll naturally limit your search. So, if you want to access all the potential these tools offer you without getting overwhelmed with five different subscriptions, a digital marketing agency with seasoned content writers can handle your keyword research and content writing.
Now that you have your blog’s goal, keywords, and topics to write about, you can start building a content marketing strategy to distribute your content throughout the month. To start publishing with the right foot, take the time to determine:
Make sure to choose writing topics with a high traffic volume that are highly related to your business and have a low difficulty ranking since there will be less competition and higher chances of ranking on Google’s first results.
Let’s say you choose the seed keyword “home remodeling” and put it on any keyword research tool. For this example, we used Ubbersuggest, but you’re free to use any other one. These are some of the options we have:
ALT Name: ubbersuggest-search-results-for-keyword-home-remodeling
ALT Text: Close-up of Ubbersuggest result’s dashboard for the keyword “home remodeling” in the USA.
In Ubbesuggest, the ranking difficulty is named SD (SEO Difficulty). As you can see, the difficulty of ranking the keyword “home remodeling” is relatively low, while the keyword suggestions may be a bit harder to rank with. So consider keyword ranking difficulty when planning your blog’s content marketing SEO strategy.
In this case, we could use home remodeling as the main keyword and select “home remodeling companies” and “home remodeling exterior” as support keywords for content titled “How to get the best home remodeling on a budget,” targeting the other two in the text.
Ensure your blog content planning has enough space for you or your content writing team to write a well-researched and edited blog post. Writing quality blogs takes time, and depending on the length, it may take you a full working day (trust us, we know about content writing). Hence, if you plan to write your blog, ensure you have enough time to create content and run your business without overwhelming yourself.
Like your brand, your blog needs a defined identity to distinguish it from the ocean of online blogs. Think of it as the first impression people will have of your blog when they click on your article. Is it quirky? Is it thoughtful? Is it a bookworm or a binge-watcher?
Setting up editorial guidelines will ensure that all of the content writers, whether you or your marketing team, follow your blog’s style, and it gives a consolidated impression to your readers. So, when you’re planning your content marketing strategy for a blog, ensure you have three crucial elements for the guidelines:
As with any business strategy, you’ll also need to define and track KPIs for your blog’s content marketing SEO strategy to ensure you achieve your marketing goals. These KPIs will depend on your blog and overall marketing goal.
When you’re just starting, the most common goal with a blog is to drive traffic to your website, which you can analyze with Google Analytics and your website and content platform insights.
Once you’ve mastered your content marketing strategy, you can elevate your content KPIs to more robust ones, such as the share of voice, which measures your brand’s visibility in organic search, or email sign-ups if you included a newsletter strategy on your blog.
Regardless of your numbers, it’s always best to identify the best and worst-performing posts to see what is working and what you can adjust to create the best content marketing strategy for your blog.
If you’re ready to boost your business’s content marketing strategy, Xperience Marketing Solution is your best choice. Our seasoned and diverse team will build and nurture your blog with quality content to amaze your clients and readers, create captivating visual content for your blog, website, and social media, and ensure your messages are clear, well-written, and convincing.
