Having a content plan in place will take a lot of the stress out of writing your articles for your blog allowing you to keep on top of regular posting. More importantly, content planning for SEO will allow you to map out what keywords you are going to use, how you are going to link different topics together and the frequency of when you are going to publish articles to your blog.
What is a Content Planning?
A content plan forms part of your overall SEO strategy for your website, including your social media posts. Your content plan will include a list of categories that relate to your business, topics that fall within those categories, keywords related to the topics, a schedule for posting your content and how the content interlinks. Content planning is the ongoing process of keeping your content plan up to date so that you don’t have to stare at a blank page every time you need to post a blog.
How far you develop your initial content plan will depend on how far ahead you want to plan what you will be posting. Three months is a good timeframe to work with, but if you have a good grasp of what subject areas you want to cover, you can have 12 months or more of article ideas within your content plan. Regardless of how far into the future you have planned the content, you will still want to revise it on a regular basis.
Creating Your Content Plan
Since you want your content to help your SEO, having a plan allows you to focus on your keywords, interlink your articles and have topics for your article ready to go. So, the first step in creating your content plan is to determine your keywords. Your keywords are the words or phrases that your potential audience will use in their search engine to find businesses of your type. You can have as many keywords as you like, but you don’t want to try and use them all in each article, so keep your complete list of keywords separate from your content plan.
Using Your Search Engine To Determine Keywords
You can use your search engine to work out your keywords and get topic ideas. Start with entering something you would use to find businesses of the same type as yours. Your search engine will provide suggestions as you are entering your search words/phrase. These suggestions can be used to start your list of keywords. Once you have your list of keywords, you can use those keywords in your search engine to help you develop your list of categories and topics.
Develop Your Categories and Topics
Next, create a list of categories for your content. Categories are the broad subject areas that your potential audience is interested in. Your categories can be driven by your keywords as well as the services you provide. The list of categories will then help you develop topics for your articles.
The topics for your articles provide more specific subject matter to be presented as an article. This is then broken down further into sub-topics. By having your content plan showing this level of detail, you will be able to determine how articles can link together and will also make starting to create each article easier.
Scheduling Your Posts
Once you are satisfied that you have enough topics to start your content development, you can then include a schedule of when you will post each topic.
Creating Articles and Social Media Posts
The beauty of having a content plan means that you know when each article and social media post will be due for publication, so you don’t need to create them all at once. You can organise a separate creation schedule so that you are creating them before the posting date or, if you have a block of time to create multiple articles, you can create them in batches. How you schedule the actual creation of the articles will depend on your individual business.
Using Different Social Media Platforms
Once you’ve created your content plan you can develop your posts. Use your website to post your main article and create posts for your social media platforms around that article and link them back to your article on your website. This will assist in driving traffic to your website and help improve your SEO.
Content Planning for SEO success!
If you invest the time researching your keywords and then developing your content around them, you will have a much better chance of keeping your website optimised for search engines. You’ll also have a lot more fun putting together your content since you won’t have to stress about what you are going to write about!
