As a one-time editor the Panda update was a bit of a ‘Hallelujah’ moment. It was the point in time when past boardroom ‘rants’ actually came to fruition – that content is the ONLY thing of true value to an audience and that its time would come around again.
Those ‘half full’ writers, fed up with watching helplessly as ‘their’ audiences migrated online but were too afraid to go out there and learn about it just saw it as a ‘rah-rah’ speech that was designed to adopt the online universe. The reality was that I just never lost sight of the fact that the content is king cliché actually has more than a little truth to it.
It’s been the foundation for our agency and today I wanted to share with you a little bit of insight into how we have transitioned the type of content planning that we have taken from the world of consumer specialist market magazines into the online space.
Writing for the Specialist Audience
Writing for a specialist audience is what writing for the web is all about. Unless you are a digital leviathan chances are you will be concentrating on a very specific audience.
Having edited magazines that live and breath narrow and extremely deep verticals this has come in VERY useful and as Google has developed its content algorithm we have brought more and more magazine-style planning into our own content team and the sites that we manage.
Knowledge Centres
The key is to engage and entertain – to ensure you become a KNOWLEDGE CENTRE.
A specialist audience is a knowledgeable one and that means that any content you do create must be well thought out and structured. We could fill this blog post with details about how to go about creating and structuring such content but for now lets just say that networks of experts and authorities are very important and that content just focus on specifics and go deep and narrow, just like the vertical itself.
The key question we are here to answer this time is, ‘How do you go about planning such content in an online environment?’
Six-Month Content Strategies
With every new client we always sit down at the very beginning and create a six-month content strategy. For many it can seem like an over elaborate way of proving our worth but it serves as a key component in their future success.
As well as structuring the writing we will do for them, or they will do for themselves, by doing it at the very beginning it means we can also make the most of the in depth content research we will do as part of the search strategy creation.
All SEOs will be familiar with the analysis of keywords by KEI and we use this analysis to help highlight not just the main terms but also the real long tail opportunities for great advice and blog content.
Let’s start with a simple example of what we mean.
Here we have looked at a tiny sample of keywords for the golf space. As you can see there are lots of lower volume keywords here that would, perhaps, not make sense to optimize key pages around. What it does do, however, is provide the perfect subject matter for dozens of blogs-with-a-purpose.
Between these long tail audience blogs and the usual optimization work around those large volume keywords any business will undoubtedly enjoy an increase in targeted traffic. Such work will also create lots of juicy link bait from which the site will enjoy longer-term reputation benefits.
Of course, by surfacing so many great blogging ideas with measurable ‘wins’ the issue now turns from one of writing inspiration to one of organization. It is a perennial problem for all editors and the way to deal with it is to create a simple content strategy.
Magazine Planning
In a team meeting we will start by creating a chart with the next six month plotted on it.
It is then a case of creating a number of content themes to fit each of these months. What is REALLY important at this stage is to understand the cyclical nature of the market that you are writing for to ensure that you are writing with the mindset of the audience at that specific time. Its all common sense really but is so often forgotten by many websites and writers.
So, for instance, we may decide that for a golf website, for example, the summer period is all about active play (and this is where great customer insight data can be worth its weight in gold). We might therefore be much more focused on equipment and golf courses keywords and content than improvement tips, aids and associated improvement info.
It means that there is no point in writing about putting techniques in January!
With this is mind we then assign each month an overall ‘theme’ – so for our golf equipment retailer we might decide that April is the start of the golf season and so we might go for ‘Start your Season off in Style’.
Below this we then hang our structural content pillars that every journalist will be only too aware of. They are:
WHAT | WHERE | HOW | WHY
We then try and answer each one of these every week within our content strategy document.
So, let’s say we are writing two pieces per week. We may decide that week one of any month is all about golf courses. We will therefore create two pieces during that week based on this theme and ensuring that they both answer what, why, where and how – the sign of good content.
So, we decide to write our first piece about The Top 10 UK Nine Hole Courses. In it we ensure that we tell our readers what those courses are, where they can find them, how they can find and play them and, most importantly, why they are featured – what is it that makes them so good.
You can also use the Four Pillars to help with feature ideas and to create different angles:
What: What should you ‘Five Things to Work on to Get Your Game Back in Shape’
Why: ‘Why you should Putt for 30 Seconds a Day’
Where: ‘Where to find the best deals on Putters’
How: ‘Shave Two Shots off your Next Round’
These may now be titles but give us a great starting point to work from and form our article from. It is then simply a case of attributing space for both your main keywords and your long tails to these themes and pillars in the same way you piece together a meta strategy to specific pages.
There is lots more to add around article structure, continuity, how off page article work can be worked into the plan and how ‘evergreen features’ can really make your site famous and much more sticky, but for now this should give you the basics of how a decent content creation strategy can be formed.
To summarize:
- Do your keyword research and over the lower volume phrases as well as the obvious stuff.
- Create a six-month plan of behaviour for your audience and match this to monthly ‘themes’ for your website content.
- Add in your ‘Pillars’ and match them to regular feature themes.
- Match keyword opportunities to these themes and Pillars.
- Get writing – and do so consistently.
