Four Ways To Create An Effective Content Strategy For Your Business

One of today's most effective marketing and communication strategies focuses on creating compelling content to reach customers and prospects alike. It doesn't matter what type of business you own or run - you need strong content that resonates with your target audience. 

In an incredibly competitive marketplace, it's vital to create and nurture real connections with your audience to help them understand your brand, mission and values in order to keep your business top of mind over the competition.

Ultimately, a highly effective SEO content strategy will help you generate leads, inform and educate prospects and customers, and build on those relationships via meaningful blog and social media posts, white papers and more.

Here are four tips to help get you started with developing an effective content strategy. 

1. Know That Keywords Matter When Used Judiciously 

Keywords were once the king of content, which led to many keyword-stuffed blog posts and articles five-plus years ago. However, Google has fine-tuned its algorithm over the past half-decade to pick up instances of keyword-stuffing and penalize websites that engage in the now largely verboten content practice. For instance, Google uses a keyword stuffing checker that lowers a website's ranking for articles that contain an excessive number of keywords per word count and other factors. That doesn't mean you can't wisely and sparingly use keywords to your advantage; instead, start by focusing on the ideal keyword density for each blog post.

2. Create Timely Content With Regular Updates 

Gone are the days when you could write a few blog posts, load them onto your website, then forget about them for six months to a year. Your competition is not using that approach, nor should you. In particular, you want your content to serve as a living, breathing part of your overall communication and business strategy. Come up with content on time-sensitive events, including:

• Major holidays like Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving and the 4th of July, where people are looking for fun and creative ways to spend time with loved ones, as well as find new and unique gifts. By providing this content, you can offer readers helpful ideas to prepare for these events. 

• Take time to add seasonal changes and what that means for your business, such as a shift from winter to spring merchandise. You might focus on blog content that discusses the change from winter to spring and how customers can adjust using certain strategies and tools, including your products or services.

3. Design Your Content Philosophy/Approach Around SEO & Your Organic Digital Presence 

By designing your content approach around SEO and your website's organic digital presence, you'll soon experience customers finding you and reaching out to learn more about your products or services. This approach comes down to understanding that driving content performance is not about continually adding more and more content but rather, creating and adding the right mix that speaks to your customers. This can be achieved by using reliable data to determine your business' recent performance and areas primed for improvement and growth opportunities. Moreover, partnering with the right digital content partner can help you develop a robust content marketing strategy that brings attention to your website and business organically.

4. Start Building A Living Content Library Dedicated To Your Customers & Prospects 

Just like brick-and-mortar sales strategies or traditional direct mail marketing, you want to ensure your customers and prospects always feel like you're speaking directly to them and their needs. You might think of keyword stuffing as the modern equivalent to stuffing someone's mailbox or email inbox with endless junk mail or spam — and that on its own is good enough reason to avoid that practice. It's essential to consider your customers' time-focused needs and the effort to drive organic traffic to your website.