Pillars Of An Effective Content Strategy

Pillars Of An Effective Content Strategy

While creating and publishing content on your website is better than producing no content at all, simply writing blog posts randomly and when it is convenient to do so, is not a strategy that is going to bring many positive SEO results.

Professional SEO companies advise that for your content to have all the positive impacts on your SEO, and the subsequent improvement in your search engine rankings, it needs to be done in a way, that very few other website owners would ever think of implementing.

That way is structured, has end goals, works for your audience, and not just the search engines, and it can be monitored to see if any changes to it have to be made. It consists of 4 components or pillars as we like to call them because they form the cornerstones for your content to be effective and bring results. Here are those 4 pillars…

Determine What Goals Your Content Should Achieve

Many people assume that content’s one and only purpose is to please Google in order to boost rankings, but they are wrong. Yes, that is part of its job, but it can achieve much more than just that.

Ask yourself, is its role to inform your visitors? Is it designed to entertain them? Does it try to promote a product or service? Or, is it purely an article to boost our SEO? Whether it is these 4 examples or any other of the multitude of reasons to publish content, establish what its goal is first, and then create it.

Know Your Audience

So, now that you have the goal of your content, you now need to consider the audience you are creating it for. This can cover a vast number of variables with regards to demographics, and it will also vary with regard to what the audience is expecting from your website.

Demographics obviously means knowing the age range, gender, family status, and income levels, and whilst you can’t write for each specific group, you should have as much data as you about the visitors who come to your website. As for their intention, does your research tell you if are they are mostly buyers or information seekers, do they like to interact, and do they prefer text versus visual content?

Schedule Your Content Sensibly

A proper content strategy for a website always has a calendar which the website owner should follow. First, it allows much of the content to be created in advance and then scheduled for automatic publication on the due date. This is less stressful than ‘just in time’ publishing.

Content calendars also allow you to publish content at the appropriate time of the year so that you can take advantage of events and holidays like Christmas or Black Friday, which has spread from being an American shopping phenomenon to a worldwide one.

Analyse Your Content’s Effectiveness

It is not enough to simply implement your content strategy and then sit back. As with any plan, you need to assess how effective it is and make decisions based on that analysis. If something is working well, continue and expand upon it. If something is not working, either amend and improve it, or stop it, and try another way.

To assess your content, you will obviously want to look at sales data such as conversions or SEO data using a tool like Google Analytics. Other ways to determine how well your content is working is the amount of engagement it, so count the comments or the number of shares it has on social media.