Table of Contents
Setting clear, achievable content marketing goals is essential to drive an effective content strategy.
By the end of this article, you’ll have a clear idea of how to create a content SEO strategy.
Why Align Content with Business Goals?
Aligning content with business goals ensures it serves strategic purposes. For instance, if the goal is to increase sales of a specific product, content should focus on highlighting its benefits and features.
Identifying Target Audience and Segments
Identifying target audiences and audience segments helps understand their needs, interests, and behaviors, allowing you to create content that resonates with and meets their specific needs.
Mapping Content to Customer Journey Stages
Assigning content to stages of the customer journey ensures you’re providing the right type of content at the right time. For example, content at the awareness stage may be more educational and problem-solving, while decision-stage content may be more persuasive and conversion-focused.
Choosing Distribution Channels
Decide where and how to distribute your content. This includes selecting the right channels to reach your audience, such as your website, social media, email, guest blogs, and paid ads.
Defining Brand Voice and Tone
Setting guidelines for brand voice and tone helps build a strong brand identity, fostering trust and loyalty from customers.
Clarifying Roles and Responsibilities
Clarify team roles to ensure everyone understands their part in the content strategy and knows what’s expected of them.
Top-of-Funnel Content
Top-of-funnel content, known as TOFU, focuses on attracting and educating users in the early stages of the buying process.
Social Media Posts
Social media posts effectively increase brand visibility and attract new followers. This type of content includes informative posts, helpful tips, interesting facts, or simply engaging, entertaining content that captures audience attention.
Optimized Blog Posts
Blog posts drive organic traffic from search engines. They often address questions, problems, or common topics of interest to your target audience in the early research stages.
Authored Articles
Authored articles are expert-written pieces on a specific topic and feature the author’s name, enhancing credibility.
Informative Videos
Videos are an excellent way to convey information visually and engagingly. They can include tutorials, demos, interviews, or other types of content to educate your audience on relevant topics at the start of their journey.
Email Marketing
Ideal for raising awareness of a product or service.
Mid-Funnel Content
Effective mid-funnel (MOFU) content educates and nurtures leads who are interested in your product or service but are not yet ready to buy.
Detailed Blog Posts or Articles
At this stage, leads seek more detailed and specific information about topics related to your product or service. Detailed blog posts can address specific questions, offer practical advice, or analyze relevant use cases.
Webinars
Webinars provide educational, relevant content to your audience. They can be live presentations, Q&A sessions, or product demos, designed to dive into specific topics and offer valuable insights to potential customers at this funnel stage.
White Papers
White papers are detailed documents that explore a topic in-depth, offering technical information and analysis. They’re useful for educating potential customers about industry challenges and solutions, establishing your brand as an authority.
Podcasts
Podcasts are convenient and accessible content that users can consume on the go. They may feature expert interviews, discussions on relevant topics, or in-depth analysis of specific issues.
Product Pages
Detailed product pages are essential at this stage, providing specific information on the products or services you offer. These pages should include descriptions, key features, benefits, and customer testimonials to help leads evaluate and compare options.
Case Studies
Case studies are real stories of customers who have succeeded using your products or services, providing social proof and helping leads visualize the potential benefits of working with you.
Bottom-of-Funnel Content
Bottom-of-the-funnel content in SEO (also known as BOFU) targets users ready to make a purchasing decision or convert, having passed through the initial buying stages.
Objective
To convince users that your product or service is the best choice.
BOFU SEO
Keywords should be specific and focused on conversion terms like the product name, comparison search terms (e.g., “best [product] vs. [competitor]”), and purchase intent terms (“buy,” “price,” “best option for…”).
Conversion-Optimized Landing Pages
Use specific product or service keywords and meta descriptions that summarize the main benefit of the offer.
Trust Elements
Include customer reviews, ratings, and other social proof to build trust.
Comparisons and Case Studies
Product comparisons help users at the decision stage. Create content that facilitates direct purchases or encourages conversion with links to shopping carts, free trials, or contact forms.
Include Frequently Asked Questions
Cover queries on purchases, post-sales service, return policies, and guarantees.
FAQ SEO
Structure FAQ questions with FAQ schema data for better visibility in Google, optimizing each answer with purchase-intent keywords.
