How To Develop a Blog Content Strategy: A Start-to-Finish Guide

You might occasionally post blogs on your site (maybe to talk about industry news or company updates), but do you have an actual blog content strategy that’s working to bring in more traffic, leads and sales?

Did you know that companies that have an actual SEO blog content strategy for their site see 55% more visitors and 13X the ROI of companies that don’t? And the advantages of blogging for businesses don’t stop there – you can boost branding, company value and even save on paid ads with a solid SEO strategy built around your blog.

The brands that have a solid blog content strategy in place report better return on investment and an increased ability to track results and meet goals. Whether you are a complete content marketing novice or you have already been dabbling in driving online traffic with blog content, use this guide to get ahead of the game by establishing and following a clear, concise content marketing strategy.

What is a Blog Content Strategy?

First, let’s be clear that a blog content strategy is just one piece of an overall SEO content strategy for a website. A complete SEO content strategy for a website encompasses auditing your site, doing in-depth competitor and keyword research, creating content (both in web page and blog format, etc), optimizing and refreshing that content for SEO, applying backlinks and then monitoring and tracking that data every single month.

A blog content strategy focuses specifically on utilizing your blog effectively to win new keywords, boost other pages on your site through internal linking, build your branding and increase your authority with Google through consistent posting.

How Do You Develop a Blog Content Strategy?

So what actually goes into a blog content strategy in order to make it successful? This is where we get into the meat of it all.

Let’s start at the top with creating strategic SEO blog writing goals and work our way down from there.

1. Create Clear Blog Objectives

You cannot create a blog content strategy without specific, measurable goals.  What are the objectives you hope to achieve? How will you measure blog performance? Here are several common metrics you can use as a starting point when developing an blogging strategy goals:

• Build brand / product / service awareness
• Convert website visitors to valuable clients through increased authority and trust
• Bring past customers back to your company for repeat business
• Generate fresh leads for your sales team
• Improve your brand’s ranking on Google and other search engines
• Use internal linking strategies to boost main pillar pages on your site
• Create great content pages that can be candidates for high-quality link building in the future

Do Competitor Research

Set Blog Posting Goals

If you think you’ll just write SEO blog posts every month whenever you have some down time, I can promise you that down time will never come. First, you need to decide the # of blogs you want to post each month and how consistently to post them and stick to that schedule

So how many blogs should you post a month? The closest thing we have to a magic number is a study done a few years back by HubSpot that showed that businesses that blog at least 16 times a month saw 3.5 times the traffic and 4.5 times the leads of businesses that only published 0-4 times a month. That being said, we’ve found with our own clients that blogging as little as 2 times a month can still generate a significant increase and rankings and traffic over 6 months.

On the flipside, though, this is just a much longer SEO play if you only have 2 chances a month to try and rank for new keywords. In some ways, that puts a lot more pressure on all of those blogs to HAVE to perform to feel worth it. Not only that, but Google’s algorithm rewards consistency. So if you haven’t been actively blogging at all, and decide to only post 2 blogs a month, it may take 6 months for Google to even realize that you’re starting to put out new content and should be in the running as an authority in the space.

In our opinion, blogging 4 to 16 times a month (posting 1-4 blogs a week) is the right combination of consistency to wake up Google, while also allowing you to make sure you’re putting out good, quality stuff.

2. Identify Your Target Audience

You know why you want to create content, but do you know who will read your carefully crafted SEO blog posts? Creating a persona for each of your potential audiences allows you to gather data about what they want, need and search for online. You can target each piece of SEO blog content specifically for those personas. Think about the problems and challenges that person may have so that you can present a value proposition about how your business can solve those pain points.

You may already have robust data about who your target audience is and what they want. If not, you’ll need to do some research to complete this step in your blog content strategy. You can survey existing customers to find out:

• The topics in which they are most interested
• The biggest challenges and issues they face
• Their level of education
• The publications they read, both online and off
• Where they spend time online
• Their content delivery preferences
• Demographic information such as age and gender
• Their career or industry
• Income level
• How and where they spend money

SEO Content Strategy Tools Available

So outside of customer surveys, where else can you gather this data? Google Analytics is a good place to start and can give you a ton of insight into your website visitors. There are many other tools that exist to distill and deliver information about the people who encounter your online content. One recommendation is to start with a single audience persona. As you get more comfortable with content marketing, you can segment the audience to target blog content in an even more granular fashion.

3. Conduct Keyword Research

Conducting keyword research as a part of your blog content creation strategy lets you zero in on specific search terms that will help your content get noticed by your target audience. Dozens of tools exist to support keyword research, but many new content marketers and small business owners start with the free Google Keyword Planner tool, especially when they already have a website connected to Google Analytics. If you’re a little more serious about your SEO keyword research, our favorite paid tool is SEMrush.

Keyword Intent

If you’re completely new to the idea of keywords, start with the concept of keyword intent – specifically commercial vs. informative intent keywords. Keyword phrases that have commercial intent are ones where the person typing them into Google intends to purchase at the end of their search journey. Some examples of commercial intent keywords may be ones that contain terms like “buy,” “purchase” and “affordable” as a part of the keyword phrase.

Informational intent keywords are phrases that a searcher is typing into Google to try and find helpful information – but isn’t necessarily looking to purchase anything. The users typing these keywords are typically looking to find “how-to” type content, or get helpful information from a trusted, authoritative source. 

Most of the time, informational-intent keywords are the right keywords to target on your blog. People that find helpful, valuable, informational content through your blog are more likely to trust you as an authority in the space and ultimately use you down the line when they have need for your services.

Here’s a great video tutorial on how to do effective SEO keyword research as it relates to a blog content strategy:

Short-Tail vs Long-Tail

Aside from keyword intent, you also want to go after relevant keywords that have enough monthly searches to invest writing a blog on it, but aren’t so competitive that you’ll never rank. One key indicator of how to find the right keywords for your company’s blog content strategy that fall into this sweet spot is to look at the length of the keyword.

Short-tail keywords, which consist of just one or two words, usually have tons of monthly searches on Google, but are typically much more competitive and lack enough context to really give you user intent. For example, if you own a bakery in Boca Raton, you probably don’t want to try to rank on Google for “cakes,” “cupcakes” or “pastries.” These searches are too broad. What if they are looking for pastries in New York instead of Boca Raton? Even if you ranked for pastries, you can’t help that person because they aren’t relevant to your business.

A more relevant keyword phrase would be “bakeries in Boca Raton” or “custom birthday cakes in Boca Raton.” See how these keyword phrases are longer than the short-tail ones?  The long-tail keywords (usually consisting of 4-7 words) may have a smaller monthly search volume but they are much less competitive and also more specific to their intent. Targeting plenty of these long-tail keywords in your content will help drive relevant traffic to your site and improve both your visibility and your conversion rate.

4. Get To Know Your Competitors

Via the process of getting to know your competitors, known as a gap analysis, you’ll look for a unique content niche to fill within your industry. Choose your main competitors and review six months of web content and blog posts. Make note of the topics they cover, the tone they use, and the tools and resources they offer website visitors. Creating a spreadsheet with this information allows you to visualize the gaps in coverage where your blog content plan can truly make an impact. Remember, it’s important to know what your competitors are doing when it comes to creating a digital content strategy, but you should also pay close attention to what they aren’t doing.

One recommendation is that you find your brand’s “one thing” to stress in your content using this simple method:

• Make a list of the messages your company plans to or already uses in its content.
• Review competitor websites to see where similar messages appear.
• Eliminate messages that other brands have exhausted to uncover the “one thing” you should try to express as your company’s unique selling proposition.

Returning to the example above, maybe your bakery is one of five different bakeries in your town. Every shop offers fresh-baked pastries, a pleasant environment and free wireless internet. However, your bakery is the only one that offers custom birthday cakes. That could be your brand’s “one thing.”

While you’re getting to know your competitors, you should also become familiar with their best-ranking keywords with Google Analytics or a competitor research tool such as SEmrush or Ahrefs. This helps you spot areas in your content strategy where you may be able to outrank your competitors and neglected keywords that could potentially give your brand a big SEO boost.

5. Brainstorm SEO Blog Topic Ideas

You have your keywords and you know what your competitors are publishing online, but you aren’t sure where to get a steady flow of ideas for your weekly, monthly and quarterly blog posting quotas. Try drawing inspiration for your blog content strategy from sources such as:

• Industry newsletters and blogs
• Content aggregators such as Feedly, where you can follow topics of interest
• Online forums such as Quora, Reddit and industry-specific message boards
• Reader and customer surveys
• Social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and other popular platforms
• Google Trends

You should also jot down ideas in a notebook or in an app on your phone that you can page through whenever you’re in need of some fresh ideas to add to your blog content marketing strategy.

Let Your Keywords Guide Your Blog Content

Ultimately, building a blog topic based around a keyword as the main theme is the best way to give yourself a chance to rank on EVERY single blog post you create. The more words you add before or after that long-tail keyword phrase in order to make a title, the higher the chance your content might veer off-topic and cover somethin other than the main keyword phrase in your content.

One great way to make sure you stay on topic is to just google the keywords you intend to create blog content about (in incognito mode) and see what results Google serves to you. You might peruse any of the top 5-10 articles currently ranking on the first page of Google to see the kinds of things they wrote about to get the top rankings. If you can also talk about similar things to what they talked about (and improve upon it), you’ll be giving yourself a great chance to beat them in the future.

6. Review Existing Blog Content

In addition to creating brand new blog content as a part of your content marketing strategy, an extremely important step is to take an inventory of existing content. Unless your brand is new, you should use a keyword research tool to see which blogs currently exist on your site that are (or have ever) ranked for keywords.

After the content inventory is complete, you can hone on in on these blogs that have been trusted enough by Google to rank for keywords but just aren’t ranking high enough to get traffic. Relevant but outdated SEO content can be refreshed, revised and re-optimized, which both improves your reader’s experience with your content and improves your SEO rankings.

Refresh Instead of Rewrite

During the content audit, look for content you can re-optimize around already existing keywords. If you didn’t have a very refined blog strategy in previous years, then it’s likely that any of your existing content that isn’t ranking could use some tweaking to make better. For instance, just using keywords on your website correctly can make a massive difference in how well it ranks for those keywords.

Look and see what these blog posts are already ranking for and reoptimize those posts around that new keyword subset. You may need to remove some old content that no longer matters and add some additional content to make it more relevant to the search term you’re trying to win, but this is much easier to do than creating a brand new blog from scratch that doesn’t rank for anything yet.

While developing your blog content strategy, consider these SEO content refreshes of blogs as additional assets that can go towards your content marketing goals.

7. Create a Blog Content Calendar

As the writers at industry blog Search Engine Land note, the step of creating an editorial calendar is where all the research, data and planning begins to coalesce into a bona fide blog content strategy. This calendar will serve as your touchpoint as you plan, create, deliver and measure blog content throughout the year. While your editorial calendar serves as one of the key documents in your SEO content strategy, it isn’t necessarily set in stone. Allow the flexibility to adjust it throughout the year to take advantage of additional keyword opportunities on web pages, social media, ebooks and more.

When you create your blog content calendar, build out the entire year with slots for quarterly, monthly and weekly updates, publications and posts. You can assign content writing to staff members, and/or work with professional SEO blog writing services. Many companies that succeed in blog marketing use a combination of these strategies.

For example, you may want to twice a week short-form blog posts, monthly long-form posts and one extended piece of content (e-book or white paper) each quarter. For each publication, list the keywords you plan to include, the source of the content, the deadline and whether you need ancillary items like photos, illustrations or infographics.

Fill in the Content Creation Gaps

The blog content audit you completed in the previous step is the ideal starting point for your editorial calendar. After adding those items, fill in the gaps with new content ideas that include your keywords and support the content marketing objectives you established all the way back in step one. If you aren’t sure where to start placing content, try assigning a theme to each month or quarter. 

Make sure to leave room for brand events and seasonal events throughout the year so you can use your digital blog content strategy to highlight those initiatives. For example, your custom cake bakery may want to plan content that showcases the “custom graduation cakes” keyword as June approaches.

When it comes to SEO blog content, don’t limit yourself to just written paragraphs. You can mix up your blog posts with a host of other formats, including infographics, quizzes, interviews with industry experts, reader question and answer sessions, FAQ pages, how-to guides, original research, case studies, video stories, podcasts, checklists, guides and newsletters. 

8. Create The Blog Content

How will you source and create your blog content? Do you have an internal marketing department with the skills and bandwidth for this project? Do you have the time in your schedule to manage a freelance writer or the budget to hire a full-time staff writer?  Or, do you partner with an SEO company that can do it all for you?

The answers to these questions will inform the next steps in your website content strategy, whether you decide to buy blogs from an SEO agency or keep it in-house.

If you aren’t sure how much time you should realistically dedicate to content creation, consider that blog writing experts average four to seven hours on each blog post. Do you have an extra five to seven hours in your week? If not, you may want to consider outsourcing the SEO content creation process. Consistent content delivered on a regular schedule will help build reader trust in your brand.

Outsourced Content Writers or In-House?

Many brands struggle with the question of whether to use in-house or outsourced content when they introduce a new blog content program. To help answer this question, we performed a cost breakdown for our blog readers and found the following facts that may help you decide:

• B2B companies spend 29% of their marketing budget on content writing, while B2C companies spend about 26%.
• The more blogs published by a brand, the higher its average ROI for content marketing.
• Businesses spend an average of nearly $75,000 per year to hire an in-house content writer with a full-time salary and benefits.

9. Plan for Content Publication

If this is the first time you’re publishing blog content for your brand online, you’ll need to develop a system for vetting, preparing and posting your content. With countless content management systems available, research your options to choose the best one for your digital content strategy. For example, you can choose a comprehensive CMS where you can publish and maintain your content as well as analyze its performance. If you aren’t sure where to start, you may want to outsource this step to a full-service SEO marketing agency.

You should also consider who should control the content writing and marketing process within your organization, unless you run a one-person show, of course. If you work for a larger company, usually an in-house marketing professional will manage the content creation process, whether you have in-house writers or plan to hire an SEO company.

In addition, your firm’s chief marketing officer, CEO or another executive may want to have final approval over content before publication. You need a blog writer who can take constructive criticism and deliver content that meets your publication parameters.

Design a Blogging Development Workflow

Design a workflow for this blog content strategy process before you start rolling out new content. The optinmonster blog recommends this simple list of steps for each piece of content:

• Develop a comprehensive brief or outline, including images, links and formatting details.
• Obtain approval from the C-suite.
• Deliver the outline along with background information and resources to the writer.
• Edit the finished copy and make changes as needed.
• Obtain final approval from the C-suite.
• Upload and publish your post, including meta data such as blog categories and tags that make it easier for readers and search engines to find your content.
• Share your new content on the appropriate channels.

10. Get the Word Out on Social Media

Once you’ve created your blog content and published it, it’s time to get the word out! Social media platforms are one of the easiest ways to get this blog content out to your existing customer base without just waiting for it to be seen organically. Some pieces, like long-form industry analyses or original research, may be most appropriate for LinkedIn. More immediately digestible items such as infographics work well on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

For best results, choose approximately five of the most important platforms for your potential readers and publish your blogs loyally on those channels.

The Digital Marketing Institute recommends choosing well-known channels with expansive membership numbers if you want to build awareness of your brand, ideally paired with paid advertisements for the most impressive reach. Literally everyone and their grandmother has a Facebook page, which explains why the site has one of the best reputations for return on your blog content marketing dollars.

Looking for leads? The industry blog says that LinkedIn articles beat most other channels for social media shares, especially if you actively join group discussions with your followers and industry forums. Twitter and Facebook also fare well for fresh lead generation.

11. Measure Content Strategy Performance

How will you know your blog content writing strategy is actually working? You’ll need thorough analytics for each and every post. Here at BKA Content we track our SEO blogging campaigns separately from any other SEO services we run for our clients. Every month we take a look at these blogs to assess the following:

• How many keywords rank overall per post
• How many keywords rank in the top 11-20, 4-10 and 1-3 spots on Google per post
• What position on Google does the primary keyword phrase for the post rank on Google
• Which blogs are getting traffic on Google Analytics
• How many keywords does our SEO blogging campaign have VS the rest of the site
• How many traffic does our SEO blogging campaign have VS the rest of the site

Some other simple benchmarks that signify an effective SEO blog content strategy might include:

• Are more readers sharing and liking our content than before we implemented this strategy?
• Are we gaining more website traffic overall?
• Do fewer users “bounce” (visit the site and immediately click away)?
• Are visitors spending more time on the site than before strategy implementation?
• Are blog posts and other content items driving a positive return on investment?

For tips on how to set up and track your SEO blog writing campaigns, it might be worth consulting with an SEO expert or investing in SEO tools to see how to create a custom monthly report

12. Adapt and Adjust SEO Blog Content Strategy as Necessary

When the indicators in the previous step are positive after the first few months of your blog content strategy, stay the course. If you aren’t seeing results in these areas, consider tweaking your strategy. Make small changes to target new keyword phrase (based on keyword clusters that are starting to perform on the site), adjust your word counts and tighten your content writing briefs to include more FAQs and related keyword variations.

Here is one idea of an iterative cycle for various channels and blog content initiatives:

• Test: Start a new blog content strategy with clear objectives in mind.
• Analyze: See how the numbers measure up to your goals.
• Prioritize: Find out what’s working or not working to hone your strategy
• Optimize: Make changes to your blog content or strategy based on your analysis.
• Repeat: Start the cycle again, whether you continue to work on the current campaign or begin anew with another blog content initiative.

Content marketers who followed this SEO blog strategy increased their content marketing revenue sixfold, boosted the number of qualified leads by more than 500%, saw a 200% boost in open rates among email subscribers and experienced 253% more engagement with followers online.

13. Maintain and Scale Your Blog Content Strategy

Although an effective blog writing strategy involves careful planning and continuous tracking for true success, it’s difficult to overstate the benefits of blogging for business. At BKA Content, we’ve found that blogging brands get 97% more links than companies that are less savvy when it comes to content.

If you find certain blogs taking off, double down on those keyword clusters to try and replicate your success. The most successful blog strategies gather data over the first 3-6 months and then adjust and reinvest on where things are working. It takes time to build a balanced google organic profile when it comes to keywords. Blogging for SEO is one of the best strategies to round out that organic profile and put you in the running to beat out your competitors.

Developing an SEO Blog Content Strategy is Vital to Online Success

If you’re looking to create a strategy for your blog but don’t know where to start, BKA Content can provide the resources you need to get your blog content strategy off the ground once and for all. Contact us today to learn more about the customizable, targeted organic SEO services we provide for small businesses.