I am sure by now, you must have heard the phrase – “Content is king” many a times. Afterall, it is the mantra for successful Search Engine Optimization.
It is understandable that content is the base for any (and every) successful digital campaign. And thus, the process of touching success is not easy as it may appear. Content creation might seem like a child’s play. However, it is not.
Creation of valuable content takes time, research and adequate understanding of a lot of factors, that vary as per the campaigns. Being a content marketer, I surely have been through all the phases. And I do understand the nitty-gritty of this process.
So let me be clear right now. To understand that content is the king is one thing. But to build a content marketing process is an entirely different task.
Further ahead in this blog, I will give all you content marketers an in depth overview of how a reliable and result driven content process can be set to support the work at your Digital Agency. Since writers come and go, even managers come and go, but if the process remains constant, then nothing goes wrong even if people keep changing frequently.
This is the right time to grab some energy drink because this session might be a bit longer than you’d expect.
Let’s start by giving birth to a sorted Keyword Strategy
Take the case of any inbound marketing process.
The first thing that truly matters is the keyword strategy, which off course, starts with adequate keyword research. I’m sure you understand the fact that for a lot of things in this world there are multiple ways of operation. Case in point, there surely are multiple ways to do keyword research. Considering the fact that there are numerous tools available in the market (both free and paid) to do the same, it might get tricky. Also the fact that every expert in the field often promote their own versions of doing keyword research, things can surely get confusing. You might think which is better out of all these. I’d say there is no better. They all are doing the same thing but in different ways. The measure of the final output is just the same.
The first thing you should do is visit the respective clients. Talk to the staff members, let’s say, sales representatives, customer service, client side marketing team and of course, the owner of the business. This way you will be able to figure out the key phrases they believe have tremendous possibility of searches at the target audience’s end. Make a note of these phrases. Based on these phrases try to figure out all possible questions that the target audience are asking.
Finally, when you are able to extract at least 20 to 25 keywords from the client, it’s your cue to start digging at your end. Go to Google Keyword Planner and enlist all the keywords into this tool. Once done, Google takes over and offers you more suitable(possible) keywords.
Now comes the evaluation phase. The process of evaluation is with respect to just one thing- you need to find the best out of the array that you’ve created and ensure that what you choose fits the customer’s search criteria and the context as per what the clients have to offer.
Once done, we move ahead with other essentials of setting up a content strategy.
Look out for Low Hanging Fruit Keywords
What on earth is low hanging fruit keyword? Eh.
If that’s what you feel then here’s something you ought to be aware of my friend.
It’s a cliched business jargon, but surely has a lot of meat. As a metaphor, it is used to describe simple tasks or work that should be done first as a priority. Case in point, in reference to businesses, it’s a jargon used mainly in the sales areas.
Even implementations such as optimization of the meta title or meta descriptions can also reflect positive effect on the rankings under particular specific keywords.
I believe Hubspot is the right place too look up to a savvy tool that will help you with this process. All in all, you aim here is to build content around these keywords that allow the clients to get easy return on investments.
If you are aware of hubspot and their Content marketing initiatives, tools and of course expert consultation, they tend to offer some extremely savvy tools that truly work and offer quality results. You might as well try your hands on the HubSpot Keyword Grader comes in handy.
This tool is handy because it helps find these low hanging keywords easily.
Here’s how the dashboard appears.
The HubSpot Keyword Grader provides accurate information based on a lot of metrics. The most useful metrics are
a) number of monthly searches and
b) ranking difficulty of each keyword
As a good practice try and stick to a monthly search count of 100 (at least) and a difficulty below the count of 35. You can always use other feasible metrics such as:
a) currently ranking positions for each of your keywords
b) the count of website visits by your keywords and of course,
c) the count of leads generated by each of those keyword.
To keep a better track of these metrics, i’d suggest you to download the data from the tool into an Excel sheet and then add colour codes to those particular low-hanging fruit keywords.
Your Excel Sheet might look somewhat like this.
Use this keywords sheet as the base for content brainstorming sessions. From here you move towards content creation process. All this while what you did was laying the foundation so as to reach till the point of generating content will add value to your business and can always be a constant process for your Marketing agency.
Rest assured, if you follow this approach to content creation, you will definitely generate valuable leads and also create some valuable content for the web. Google likes such content because, Content (or should I say, value adding content) is the king after all.
Now is the time to find the best content writer for your agency
While there is a pool of talented writers out there seeking opportunities to grow themselves while adding to the values of a company’s work standards, all you need to do set up the right panel and criterias to find them. Content writing is not as easy as the world thinks of it. And simply good writing skills and vocabulary ain’t suffice in the case of Digital Marketing.
Test the writer’s skills based on the points we have discussed so far. Do not rely on the work of freshers in this field. I might sound mean here, but hey, we are all professionals here , aren’t we? Choose the best who add value to your services. If after doing so much you still fail to bring out the desired content, then all of this effort goes in vain. Trust me, you don’t want that.
I will leave the hiring process to you, provided you understand how to set the right judgement parameters.
I will conclude this blog here. But this is not the end to this topic. Content creation process involves a lot many things here onwards. In the next blog, I will talk from a Content Writer’s perspective and give you the key metrics that a writer must follow. I will cover things such as how to develop appropriate titles and topics for blogs and other web content. I will also speak of a few tools that writers can rely on while creating content. And lastly, I will talk about Content optimization and history optimization as well.