How to build a successful blog content strategy

10.05.2023 15:05

Author and content analyst on trade automation

The main goal of a blog is to engage and interact with the audience. A good blog can:

increase product and brand awareness,
refer new loyal customers to you,
educate and support current and potential customers,
help you become a thought leader in the industry.

To achieve these goals, an online store owner needs a solid content strategy for their blog. What steps will help to implement it?

What is a content strategy for a blog?

A content strategy for a blog is a vision and plan for blogging on the company's own resources: website, messenger channels, or social media. It is a part of the business strategy that should be in line with the company's business goals and overall content strategy. The goals should be the main driving force behind the content.

Why do you need a content strategy?

According to open-source data, more than seven million blog posts are published online every day. 90.63% of all websites do not receive monthly organic traffic. This means that creating blog content for the sake of creating it, without a clear strategy, will not bring the desired results and benefit for business growth.

A proper and consistent blogging strategy will help you get into the 9.37%.

How to create a content strategy for your blog. The main steps

1. Determine the purpose of the blog

Start by having a clear picture of your blog and your ultimate goal. What should it be like, why should it exist? The answers to these questions will form the essence of the content strategy for your blog.

For some, the goal may be quite ambitious, for example, to become the No. 1 resource in Google search results to ensure constant traffic to the site. Others want to share their knowledge and experience to attract new customers or increase sales.

Write down the purpose of your blog using the Help-To-By formula:

To help [audience with a specific problem] achieve [desired result] by [means].

At Torgsoft, the Help-To-By strategy looks like this:

By publishing detailed training video tutorials and practical instructions, useful marketing articles on our blog, we help our clients - entrepreneurs, marketers, and online store owners who do not know how to set up accounting in their store and how to run a business according to the needs of their audiences and time [audience with a specific problem] → become the best in their niche, to rank higher in search results to attract more customers and retain them [desired outcome] → using the principles of customer focus, learning marketing tools, and consistent beliefs in the effectiveness of integrated business [means].

For example, the manager of an online pet store may have a different goal:

To help pet owners choose pet accessories, to reach a certain level of sales by encouraging them to buy goods through the publication of useful content.

2. Define your audience

Research the needs and interests of your customers. This will help you understand what kind of content they want to see on your blog. Let's say you sell clothes for babies and children. Knowing who your audience is, it will be much easier for you to choose the assortment for your store and topics for your readers. Classify your customers: by age: babies, preschoolers; by gender; by parental preferences (looking for only hypoallergenic clothes, clothes in a certain style).

Create a content plan based on your customers and their needs.

3. Study your competitors

Competitor research is an invaluable source of inspiration for your blog content. Select the first pages of Google search results for the main keywords in your industry. See which keywords bring your competitors more traffic, what type of content they generate, which queries bring them to the top of the SERPs, and which ones drop off. Analyse your competitors by two types: by business and by the content they create.

Competitors by business

You can check which content and which queries on your competitor's website are most effective in organic search using analytical services such as similarweb and semruch:

Enter the competitor's domain or blog address,
Go to the seo report and see the traffic volume for the selected period, the number and time of visits to the site pages, and other indicators.

Let's analyse the website of mumami.com.ua, a clothing website for newborns.

The report shows the number of keywords for which the site is shown in search, the amount of traffic for the selected period of time, its cost, and the type (branded, non-branded).

We are interested in the most popular keywords that can be used to compose the topics of your blog posts. Keywords are distinguished by their purpose:

informational (users are looking for certain information about the product and its operation),
navigation (users are looking for a specific website or page),
commercial (people are simply interested in certain goods or services, compare prices for them, but do not make a purchase),
and transactional (the user has a clear intention to purchase a product).

Content competitors

Content competitors are websites that you compete with in organic search, but that don't necessarily compete with you from a business perspective.

That is, you can compete with them for many of the same keywords, but sell different products.

You can find content competitors through paid services such as similarweb and semrush.

4. Conduct thorough keyword research

Keyword research will help you find out what people are looking for in your niche.

To choose the right keywords, you need to understand your audience, what they are looking for, and what they want to see in the search results.

First, identify your base keywords. Base keywords are basically the key topics you will be writing about in your blog. The easiest way to determine them is to write down the main words that define what you do or what you sell.

You can search for and analyse possible keywords related to your products by using:

free Google Ads services - Keyword Planner, Google Trends, search tips in the Google search bar,
services for collecting and analysing statistics: Google Analytics, Google Search Console,
paid tools similarweb, SE Ranking, ahrefs, semrush,
ChatGPT, provided that you choose the right keyword

The easiest way is the Google Keyword Planner. The analysis results will show you the number of searches for your product on Google, the number of orders and the level of competition in the chosen topic.

For example, if you are creating a blog for a baby shop, the list of keywords might look something like this:

Baby clothes shop

Baby clothes shop in Kyiv,

Clothes for newborns

Diapers for babies,

Clothes for babies to buy

Clothes for babies girls...

At the same time, each keyword phrase, if you click on it in the Keyword Planner, has many synonyms that can also be used when drawing up an article plan.

5. Create a content plan

Now it's time to turn your ideas into a content plan. There are three metrics to consider:

Traffic potential, or keyword frequency - how many times a month is this query entered into Google?
Difficulty of ranking - how difficult is it to compete with other stores in organic search results for this keyword?
Keyword relevance and the dynamics of changes in the number of search queries over a certain period.
Business value - how useful is your product in terms of the topic covered by this keyword?

These characteristics will help you form a realistic picture of how promising a particular keyword is and whether it makes sense to promote it.

The best topics are those with high traffic potential, business value, and low competition.

You can also link articles to each other to create a so-called content hub - thematic categories for your blog. This grouping of topics into clusters will help each post rank higher on Google.

It is also important to take care of the variety of content to attract more readers. Generate different types of content: text articles, infographics, videos, podcasts, etc. ChatGPT can be a great solution for this in the initial stages, if you know its strengths and weaknesses. Ask specific questions to ensure that the answer is accurate.

6. Plan your posting schedule

Depending on the purpose of your blog, plan the optimal number of posts per week or month. Fill in the table with topics, set a deadline for each post, and try to stick to it.

7. Create an identity for your blog

Think about the voice, tone and style of your online blog. Create a set of editorial guidelines that will define the style of your blog. Choose a writing style that reflects your personal touch and is appropriate for your audience. For example, you can use an informative, entertaining, or authoritative style.

The most important visual aspects of a blog:

unified visual principles,
voice and tone,
writing rules.

Visual guidelines are designed to ensure that the style of images on blogs is consistent. This is important because a blog is an extension of your brand, so you shouldn't underestimate the visual component.

Make header illustrations recognisable and consistent with the brand's tone of voice.

Voice and tone determine the personality and value of your content. A blog is a separate entity that conveys your emotions and principles to readers. Be specific about jargon, formality or informality of writing, attitude to humour, etc.

Do not ignore the rules of writing. These include spelling, for example, the use of Anglicisms or Ukrainian equivalents, formatting, paragraph length, use of capital letters, heading formats, etc.

8. Produce and distribute your content

Use social media and mass mailings to distribute your content and reach new audiences.

9. Track your success

Having a content strategy for your blog is good, but you'll also need a key performance indicator (KPI) to track how well your strategy is working over time. You can do this with Google Analytics.

In the early stages, you just need to write content, distribute it, and promote it. Later on, you can move on to measuring your organic share of voice in search compared to your competitors.

Yes, creating a successful content strategy for your blog takes time and effort, but it's worth it. Blogging is a long-term endeavour. You won't see results right away, but knowing the right tools, it will pay off not only with loyal and interested customers, but also with business growth.

And we are sure that as long as people are looking for information in search engines (and not in the promoted GPT chat), blogs will live on. After all, they are at least written by people, not machines.

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