Content is the most important aspect of search engine discovery and rank. You can get all of the organic traffic in the world, but it won’t get you anywhere if it does not convert into customers. The key to turning your organic traffic into customers is understanding who the converting visitors are.
Understanding your target audience
Start by taking a look at your analytics and focusing on which types of content drove your existing customers to convert. Segment your audience by value and focus on that. Consider what your conversions are, such as subscribing to your newsletter, making a purchase or downloading something. Then ask yourself if they are actually doing this?
Rethinking your strategy
It comes down to quality over quantity. If you have tons of organic traffic with no conversions, the traffic isn’t doing much for you. It’s easy to push out low-quality content day after day, but what is that really accomplishing if you aren’t seeing conversions? Before you create a piece of content, ask yourself, does my client need this? If the answer is no, then don’t waste your time on it.
Create a content framework
Once you’ve analyzed your data and figured out what types of content work best for you, you can move on to creating a content strategy framework.
Topics
Define the main content topics you will focus on based on your data about your audience and what you know about your customers. This data can be found from multiple sources including site traffic and analytics, your CRM, social media engagements and ad campaign data.
Classify your categories
Once you have your topics defined, you can classify them into categories. This will help maintain consistency across initiatives and give your content strategies structure.
Define requirements
Each initiative should have requirements, such as unique information, a new point of view, provides a benefit, and includes credible sourcing and supporting data.
Process
Remember that a strong content strategy is not about SEO or search engines, but about the customers.
Create evergreen content
Evergreen content is key to your long term goals. Producing high-quality main topic focused pieces that can be promoted, leveraged and shared is where your time and resources should be focused. The goal of evergreen content is to provide a resource to drive customers and brand loyalty while solidifying topic authority.
Create and maintain an editorial calendar
An editorial calendar is the foundation of your operational content strategy. It will keep your resources focused on the goals set for your content.