Modern SEO is a unique puzzle for every business. Methods of search promotion that gave high results 2 years ago will become today only an additional expense item.
Nowadays, regardless of the company’s size or its target audience, content marketing is an essential tool for marketers. Made qualitatively it can become the core on which other marketing channels are held.
20% of the time people spend online is spent studying content. 68% of users actively study a content about brands that interest them.
And a content plan is the best help for you in this situation. I was convinced in this on my own experience. And in this post, I want to share my practice of using the right content plan for your success.
What is the right content plan
A content plan is a list of possible topics for the blog for a certain period of time. It can be from a couple of weeks to a half year or more.
To get some profit from a content plan you should develop it correctly. And it’s hard to do it if you don’t know what the right content plan must be.
It’s possible to draw up such a plan in almost any form. It can be a special daily program with the appropriate notes, Excel spreadsheet, where corrections can be made to add or change the publication scheme, or even an ordinary notebook.
The main thing is to develop appropriate topics.
The implementation of any content strategy should be based on the usefulness of published materials.
Also, posts on your site should be dedicated to your business area and your goods or services.
These articles should be regular and related to each other but different if we speak about the manner of given information.
Pros of content plan
You should not worry daily about new ideas for publications using a content plan.
The quality of materials will reach a completely different level because they’ll be thought out in advance.
If the team is working on the resource rather than one person, the content planning will allow you to coordinate the work of employees easily and always observe the terms of publications.
Developing a right content plan also gives you the following opportunities:
- planning publication of materials without any confusion;
- planning of the right internal linking — sending from one material to another within the same resource;
- structuring of a content variety to create a single concept;
- storage, as well as the selection of ideas for articles and other publications for the future.
Content plan for SEO
Site optimization for search engines is almost the main task of every one of us. And even content marketing is specialized under it.
A content plan can help you in the following fields of SEO:
Increase site’s ranking by keywords
To create the right content plan it’s necessary to collect a keywords list and allocate popular and low-frequency queries. It’ll help develop its structure correctly.
Popular queries can become sections — material grouped by topic will increase the time users are on the site and the depth of viewing.
Low- and mid-frequency queries can be the basis for the formation of a content plan. Your posts will be highly ranked in SERP with the correct creation of texts and work with headlines and meta-tags. So you should include keywords exact in titles of your future posts in the content plan.
You can choose these keywords at Google AdWords to save your time and energy.
Enter the main keyword of your site in its search box and select appropriate queries for you.
Backlinks profile
Creating a content plan you think over every topic of your future post. Due to this, they may be more interesting and involving for your audience. As a result, you’ll get more sharing as if you develop posts on the spot.
Also, you can plan offering your articles for other appropriate blogs to share and get extra backlinks.
I don’t speak now about your social networks, as it should be a matter of fact for your company.
You’ll not forget about sharings and proposals for other blogs if you’ll write down it in the content plan.
Backlinks profile is very important for your rankings, and content plan help increasing it.
You can check this your profile by special SEO tools, for example, Ahrefs to understand where you should move on. Enter your domain in its search box and go to Backlink Profile.
Brand awareness
Maybe, it’s not fully about SEO but it’s a very important aspect of your brand promotion. And content plan can exactly help you increase it.
Plan your posts for every day in the most active time the most amount of your audience can see them. If your brand will glimpse often in their feed, people will unconsciously choose your brand among all the others. Without a content plan, you can forget to publish different posts regularly.
To find out which kind of posts and at what time your audience like you can use special SEO tool — Buzzsumo. You’ll see which posts were shared the most and will be able to make some conclusions according to this information. Enter your site domain in its search box and learn the report given there.
How to develop an effective content plan
To compose a content plan properly you need to make a lot of efforts. In this part of my post, I’ll give you some tips that’ll help you manage it.
Posts’ types
An important point before starting developing a content plan is to determine the types of posts or articles that’ll appear on your site.
If it’s a personal blog, then they aren’t very important. And if a blog is made for business purposes, you’ll need to think over the variants for the categories, or types of articles that will appear regularly on the site within your content plan.
The most efficient posts’ types are:
- manuals (step by step guides);
- cases;
- ways to solve existing problems;
- audits;
- step by step video tutorials;
- hypothetical articles;
- overviews of the market, goods or services;
- news (within your company and general);
- qualitative comparisons of technology or goods, services or their cost;
- popular life-hacks;
- analytics.
It’s important to determine the size, topic, and style of presentation. It can be business, humorous, popular science, journalistic, and so on.
Search for posts’/articles’ topics
Your own ideas generator doesn’t always work. There is a question at once: where and how to find topics for articles on a site?
Here everything is quite simple, variants for their searching are as follows:
- Personal experience and collective decisions are welcome. When working in a team, it’s worth getting together and discussing the content plan for the site, rather than trying to develop it alone.
- Communities, as well as thematic forums, can help enrich ideas and find a variety of necessary and popular topics.
- Sites and pages of competitors can be an excellent example for your promotion and generation of ideas. The main thing is not just to copy the topics proposed there, but to develop them, update in the context of your resource, and highlight it from another angle. You can make the content more detailed, consider the problem from a different position, finally uncover the topic.
- Different services of questions and answers, Quora, for example, will become good help when drawing up a plan. You can find out what really excites your audience, and don’t act blindly.
- Specific SEO tools for keywords research. A very good one is Serpstat. Enter the main topic of your site and go to Keyword Research > Content Marketing > Search Questions. There you’ll get the list of the most popular questions on your topic people ask Google.
List of topics and distribution
After an active search, the main task is to collect everything together. To do this, you can use Google Drive. Write down everything for rubrics and sections when collecting topics.
You can distribute topics:
– by weeks;
– by months;
– by quarters.
It all depends on how often the publications on your blog will appear. Topics themselves are better to divide by type of posts among the week.
If there is a distribution of topics and their list, then it’s much easier to keep a site’s content than think each time about what to write and where to find a topic.
Thus, you prepare in advance and facilitate the process in the future.
Control of implementation
It’s a very important stage. Since in addition to the fact that you are building a detailed plan, the most important thing is to act and do what you have planned. Otherwise, everything described above makes no sense.
In order a content plan to be implemented, you need to motivate your employees or yourself in some way.
In general, these are the main steps that can and should be taken into account when creating a content plan for your site. They’ll greatly facilitate for you its maintenance in the future.
As a summary
Content plan creation is an opportunity to organize your work on the materials of website, blog or public.
It’s also a great SEO “tool” or way to boost traffic on your site. You just need to develop it in the right way. It’s not a very easy work but you’ll get the benefit after its’ realization. Follow my advices given above and you’ll definitely feel improvements.
