The development and implementation of a content strategy is essential in maintaining a first page ranking on the search engine result page in 2022.
A well-developed content strategy can have a positive impact on your marketing campaigns and ROI. As it can help you better understand who you want to target, what business goals will be met, what content will be created and what marketing channels you can leverage to increase qualified site traffic.
This is likely to become even more important as the Google MUM (Multitask Unified Model) update begins to be rolled out over the next few months. This is due to the fact that it is expected to result in higher levels of competition on the SERP as language and regional barriers are broken down.
There are several components and benefits to implementing an effective content strategy, including:
A Content Strategy Helps You Set And Reach Goals
Ideally, all of your content/marketing efforts should bring you closer to reaching your goals. However, without a clear plan or strategy it is likely to have a low return on investment and be a waste of time.
For example, your content may not be fit for purpose, you may be creating content for an audience that doesn’t match your target market. It is also possible that you may be targeting highly competitive keywords that are unlikely to yield positive results for a small site with low site authority.
Having an effective content strategy can help you better devise marketing goals, key performance indicators and set priorities. It allows you to better allocate resources towards tracking certain performance indicators and ensure that your campaigns may yield tangible results.
Create Content That Converts
A content strategy is essential to produce content that consistently converts site traffic. This is due to the fact that it gives you the opportunity to assess what kind of content is appropriate for your target audience and what kind they wish to consume.
Whether that is by highlighting the best formatting and tone for your content or by identifying which marketing channels are suitable considering the needs of the audience and your business goals.
If your content strategy follows these rules among others, then you will have the foundations necessary when starting a new project. All you need to do is build on the foundations of the content strategy to produce high quality content with high conversion rates.
A Content Strategy Helps Reduce Costs
Content strategies can help specify how much money should be spent on different projects, and where there may be an opportunity to reduce total cost spent on all marketing campaigns.
It is always a risk that when marketers or content writers produce content without a coherent content strategy they lose sight of the big picture and allocate too much time and resources on campaigns. This results in there being limited funds for future marketing campaigns and for later in the financial year.
Identify New Opportunities
An effective content strategy can help identify new content creation opportunities. This is by coordinating the effort put into discovering new opportunities; whether that hot button industry news topics or by adapting the brand’s publication and tone to better reflect the needs of your audience and reach more of your target audience.
There are several tools out there that can help you identify worthwhile content opportunities; these include:
- SERP
- Existing Data
- Industry tools (SemRush, Ahrefs)
The search engine result page (SERP) is one of the best places to find content opportunities. It allows you to put yourself in the shoes of your target audience and consider what questions would you be asking? What are your competitors doing? And how to use rich results/the people also ask snippets to create valuable resources appropriate for your audience?
You may also be able to find new content opportunities from analysing existing data you may have been neglecting. For example, Google Search Console will show you what keywords you are currently visible for. Meaning that Google deems your content relevant towards this topic; and if you continue to produce relevant content you may be able to build topical authority and increase organic search ranking.
It is also important to consider your customer feedback as a source for new content ideas. This can include answering any questions and or implementing recommendations they may have previously suggested to make your content more engaging and serve their needs.
There are several industry tools that identify popular search terms and see how your website is already performing. For example, SemRush and Ahrefs are some of the most popular tools used in the industry to identify new content opportunities.
Google MUM update
The Google MUM core algorithm update is expected to have a significant impact on the SERP as it breaks down regional and language barriers. Continuing to abide by the EAT framework (Expertise, Authority and Trust) will be even more important once the update is completely rolled out.
As a result of this it is important to build topical authority. This is achieved by coordinating efforts to consistently create high quality comprehensive content that covers a specific topic/niche. And by developing an effective link building strategy that comprises different types of links e.g. editorial links among other natural link sources.
The importance of developing a content strategy for your business should now be clear. If you require any help in developing your content strategy or in writing blog posts, email newsletters and/or infographics.