Content marketing has become the center of most marketing strategies.
Companies of all sizes are recruiting professionals to ensure that content is consistently and compellingly created and distributed.
This is because organic traffic, traffic that is not obtained through ads, has a special value for companies: it generates greater credibility and engagement.
The purpose of content marketing may have started as a way for companies to communicate with their audience, but its importance has reached a higher level.
Content marketing is now seen as the main driver of SEO and organic traffic.
Unsurprisingly, marketers are spending a lot of time developing ideas to drive visitors to their websites and encourage users to use companies’ products or services.
But without a solid content strategy, the content itself can be ineffective.
That’s why in this post, we’re going to go through content marketing in detail and a four-step framework that you can follow right away, with the following sections:
- How to improve your content plan
- Defining your content marketing goals
- Content search in progress
- Establish your authority
- cross-promotion
How to Improve Your Content Plan
Even with the best-written content, your articles may not be getting as much space as you’d like.
Your pieces aren’t ranking well for the keywords you’re prioritizing and your site isn’t getting that highly coveted position on the first page of Google.
So what’s going wrong?
Your first idea might be to create more content. But more content doesn’t necessarily equal social media engagement or better Google performance.
With that in mind, how do you use content marketing to increase your website traffic without having to spend a lot of money or create a massive stream of content?
The answer is simple: a content marketing framework will help you increase organic traffic to your website.
Now, it’s time to discover this useful four-step framework for yourself.
Step 1: Defining your Content Marketing Goals
Creating a content strategy that leads to scalable growth should be a priority. And the first step to creating a strong strategy is outlining your content goals.
Just like setting general marketing and business goals, setting goals for your content will help you commit to your strategy, stay on track, and achieve consistent growth.
Below are the main goals of content marketing:
- Higher conversions
- Boost traffic
- Increase domain authority
You may be creating content in an attempt to achieve these goals, but what steps are you taking in the process?
Are you creating the same type of content for all purposes? If your goals are different, different types of content are needed.
If you are creating content that is optimized for your link-building strategy, then you are working to increase your domain authority.
However, the same content may not help increase your conversions because the keywords you are using for link-building content will be significantly different from the keywords you choose for conversions.
Likewise, when your content is all about conversions, you are likely to miss out on opportunities to rank on your top keywords.
What can you do to achieve these various goals, then? Start by diversifying the content you are creating.
Your brand may have focused on one type of topic for a long time, creating massive amounts of well-written content that drove traffic to your site. But this ploy is no longer good enough.
There is a lot of content already available on the internet, and if you want to utilize blog posts to achieve your growth goals, you need to make changes to your content marketing strategy.
With your broad goals in mind, you need to create smaller goals and break them down into even smaller goals to achieve them.
For example, if you’re looking for more web traffic, think about creating smaller goals like:
- Main goal: Increase web traffic by 50%
- Secondary goal: Increase blog visits by 20% per month
And set actions to achieve these goals:
- Check Google Analytics
- Find the best performing parts
- Analyze keywords
- Optimize content with keywords
- Promote content on social networks
To make content creation and distribution more organized, you can create a mind map like this one, defining channels, material types, and themes for each objective while organizing the marketing chart to better direct efforts:
By breaking down your marketing goals and mapping them through chart templates, it will be much easier to achieve the main goals you set out to achieve.
Once you’ve set the goals correctly, it’s time to move on to the second stage of this content marketing framework: the content research phase.
Step 2: Content Search in Progress
There are two main types of research you need to do before creating your content: audience research and keyword research.
1. Audience Research
Anyone who uses the digital sphere for marketing knows that the audience must drive both their content itself and their content strategy.
With that in mind, you need to know who is reading your content online, what kind of topic they are interested in, and why they are interested in it, so you can decide how best to reach them.
Social media and Google Analytics can provide a lot of information about online users, but you need to look at more than just demographics and interests.
For example, your target audience might be between 23 and 45 years old, but that’s a pretty broad age range.
The content you create for a 23-year-old might not appeal to a 43-year-old. There’s a segmentation right there that you need to adapt your content to.
Also, find out your target audience’s interests may or may not be beneficial. Knowing that the public is interested in Marvel movies isn’t going to help you if the product you’re selling is plumbing equipment.
Even if you write about Marvel, the chances of that part of the audience reading your content are slim.
On the other hand, if you are a plumbing company that writes content on how to fix common plumbing problems, it significantly increases your chances of reaching your target audience.
This is how you decide what kind of content you need to create.
You can create flowcharts for each segment of your audience to define what topics to cover for each of them.
What issues do they need to fix? How much do they know, or want to know, about your product? Direct these readers to your content because they are already looking for you; they just don’t know how to find you.
Depending on the depth of the subject, you can take more elaborate actions, such as creating an ebook, a slideshow, or video tutorials, for example.
You may have the general demographics of your audience at hand, but within that group, find the people who will engage with what you create. This leads to the next part of the research phase: keyword research.
2. Keyword Research
Finding appropriate keywords is a key part of the content writing process – in fact, content marketing is pretty much keyword driven.
Keywords are what help people find your content, so if you’re not researching how to use them, your content is essentially getting lost in the vast sea of online content, with no one clicking, looking, or reading your well-written work.
There are two main types of keywords essential to a brand: transactional intent keywords and informational keywords.
Purchase intent keywords are keywords you use to drive traffic to conversion-focused web pages. Typically, page intent keywords are used on landing pages.
The keywords you use for these pages are usually based on the product or service you are selling, such as “plumbing equipment”. These types of keywords are often quite competitive.
Everyone who is selling a similar product is looking for specific keywords, which makes it difficult for your business to rank in search engines.
Depending on the product, it can also be difficult to include these keywords naturally in the content without appearing overly sales-focused.
Pages that are informational and not sales-focused, meanwhile, tend to use informational keywords.
So instead of ‘plumbing equipment’ these pages will use a keyword like ‘how to unclog a drain.
These are the pages people go to when they want to learn something, not buy something. That’s why the keywords you use here are unlikely to be as competitive as your high-intent keywords.
3. Organizing Your Keywords
You can start by using Google Search Console to determine which keywords are related to your business people are searching to find the content you need to cover.
You can also use Google’s keyword planner or tools like SEMrushand Ahrefs to find out the search volumes for the keywords you’re targeting and which related keywords you can tap into.
Once you have an idea of your words, list the broad keyword categories, list the associated keywords into subcategories, and break them down to one more level.
From there, you can determine your long-tail keywords. The mind map below is an example of how keywords relate to each other.
With your keywords organized, you’ll be able to create content that targets the relevant keywords people will actually be looking for, and even group related topics together to plan the structure of an ebook to generate more leads.
Keyword research can take some time, but it saves you from having to create content that won’t be found. The right keywords can increase your traffic significantly, which makes it a worthwhile effort.
Step 3: Establish your Authority
With so many big companies dominating online traffic, you need to do something different to get noticed.
After determining your audience and finding your keywords, you are now well positioned to prove to Google that you are an authority figure in your field.
But how can you establish yourself as an authority figure and prove to Google that you deserve to rank well?
One of the main ways to establish authority is to optimize your keyword usage. If you followed this structure, you will have already broken down your keywords into several smaller topics – go ahead and use a variety of these keywords in your articles.
Since they are all related, internet users will eventually be directed to your main keyword – your sales-focused keyword.
Another way to establish authority is by linking to your content.
To do this, you will have to find like-minded sites that will place links to your site in their own content. The more of these links – known as backlinks – you earn, the more confident Google will be that you are a trusted resource.
Your content marketing strategy should help and enable you to become an authority figure in your field.
But it all comes down to keywords – with the right keywords, you can get on the first page of Google to reach your target audience much more easily.
Step 4: Cross-promotion
In the previous three steps of the framework, we discussed ways to optimize your content for Google and your audience.
In the fourth and final part of the to-do list of this content marketing framework, you need to find ways to reach your audience, as simply creating content is not enough. You need to start promoting.
You can promote your content on social media, through posts or guest posts, for example. But there are other ways to maximize your sales funnel.
We’ve mentioned backlinks before as a way to gain authority on Google. But backlinks are also great for promoting your content.
You can use a tool like Ahrefs to find content that can link back to you. Some tips to keep in mind when looking for partnerships of this type:
- Keep your touch personal so it doesn’t look like a robot has sent you an email.
- Don’t be afraid to experiment! One type of email may work for one person and not another, so try different combinations.
- Ask for feedback. Often potential partners will not understand the idea behind the proposal, so do a good follow-up and give them a chance to ask questions.
Link building is generally a great addition to your content marketing strategy, even if it can take time to execute. But don’t let that discourage you.
Along with your organic promotion efforts, link building will help significantly improve your web traffic over time, so it’s definitely worth the time and effort!
Alright, I hope you found this article helpful, if yes then don’t forget to share it with your friends who want to grow their website traffic.