Planning the content of your site: think about your digital content strategy

Before you do anything in this world, you need to do one thing – plan. Planning, as we all know it, is the act of formulating a course of action, or the drawing up of plans. The end game of planning is to make sure you are well prepared for whatever it is you aim to accomplish. Planning enables you to have a direction and gives you purpose.

How Does Planning Relate to Content and SEO?

Like I said above, prior to doing anything in this world, you need to plan. In the same vein, before carrying out anything related to your website, you must have done some planning. You don’t believe me? Permit me to tell you how. We are going to put how you plan your contents on hold for a moment and take a trip down memory lane back to the inception of your website.

How did you go about it? Did you just go online, purchase a domain name and create a website? Of course not! You thought of what you wanted to do with the website, what people would respond to, what would work for you, and brought it to life. That is that planning!

Now, back to planning and content. One of the main things that draw traffic to your website is your content. In fact, the only thing that increases the average time people spend on your web page is how captivating, interesting, and engaging your contents are. In fewer words, your web contents are arguably the most important part of your website. This is why it is extremely important to effectively plan your contents – to make sure they come out well structured and in a way that your readers would find interesting.

How To Write Content for a Website

When writing content for your blog or website, your main goal should be to engage your audience. If you are able to get it, Google will value you positively.

Planning your contents takes so many processes, but the most important one is the brainstorming phase where you think of what to write and how to go about the writing. There are various ways that have been found to be effective in the planning of your contents.

When creating web content the usage of trending topics is a good strategy. Research has shown that people tend to be more interested in a content that is talking about a trending topic. This is because everybody wants to talk, read, and hear about what every other person is talking about.

Also keep in mind that you should always post references and links to external sources of information. That will give your articles more credibility.

This is not to say that normal contents don’t draw in enough traffic (after all, trending topics were once ‘normal contents’), but to get an influx of readers to your web page, it is better to plan your contents around the topics that are trending at a particular point in time.

For instance, if the trending topic is about a lion that escaped from the zoo and your website is all about steel, you can structure your content in such a way that it talks about the lion on the run and how the whole scenario could have been avoided had they used original steel (like the ones you sell) for the lion’s cage.

All of this suggestions can be applied not only for your website but also to your blog content strategy.

Another way, and one we are all too familiar with, is the keyword research. Here, we are saying that you need to plan the way you use your keywords in your content and what keywords to use. By using keywords in a planned and strategic manner rather than at random, your content will have more probabilities to answer the questions of your potential audience and therefore rank.

As there are a lot of websites with almost every kind of topic, the competition is really big. One thing you can do is to focus on long tail keywords in your articles, with that strategy you can usually get better results.

Remember to do a keyword research and look for trends to help you in your strategy

There are several tools that enable you to find out the keywords and type of contents that work in your industry to enable you to plan your contents around them. These tools include:

• Buzzsumo: A tool used for analysing the type of content that performs best for any given topic.
• AHrefs content explorer: A tool used to find out the form of content that performs best in an industry based on selected keywords.
• MozBar: A tool used to find out what keywords work best in a particular industry.
• DeepL: This tool helps translate useful content in other languages, so you aren’t limited to just content from your country or locality.

Estructure your content

Apart from knowing what content to deal with on a website, it is equally important to follow a logical strategy to structure it. One of the most common estrategies to estructure the contents is the SILO structure, wich is a SEO architecture technique that optimizes the structure of a website, organizing the content in silos of keywords, in order to increase the relevance of these words in the eyes of search engines. The idea behind this is logical: Google seeks coherence in the organization of a website and one of the most efficient ways is to achieve a hierarchical structure that allows users to delve deeper into a specific topic.For example, if your website is about SEO, you may have this two main categories:

• SEO On Page
• SEO Off Page

You could have one well written article within each category and then you may have sub-topics explaining all the contents related to SEO On Page and SEO Off Page, so you may have something like this:

• SEO On Page
• Planning the content
• Structure of the content
• Interlinking
• Optimizing loading time
• Installing SSL Certificate
• .........

The ideal URL in this example would be:  www.myseowebsite.com/seo-on-page/planning-the-content/ And in the main SEO On Page article this website will have a strong content with internal links to the sub-pages of each sub-topics. This is extremely important: links placed in the articles are going from top articles to bottom.This type of organization has been proved very efficent and SEO effective.

Why Is It Important

Planning gives your contents a structure and purpose, and these are one of the things your contents have to have if they are going to stand a chance of amassing enough traffic to your website.

By planning your contents around trending topics, you are making the world recognize your website as the one-stop for insightful contents on whatever topic is trending at a particular point in time. It is however important that you don’t let the trending topic overshadow the aim of your webpage lest you run the risk of suffering the consequences that come with misplaced priorities.

Top 5 SEO Tools for planing the content of your posts:

• Bing Webmaster Tools (Free) helps you know everything about the visibility of your site in Bing. It comes with a great keyword research tool that helps you keywords that cannot be revealed by GKP.
• Answer the Public (Free) combines a question scrapper with Google Autosuggest. Pop your keyword into the answer and the tool will show you all of the questions that your audience asks.
• ClearScope (Paid) gives you a list of terms that you should use in your content once you type in your keyword. It is very simple and easy to use.
• FAQfox (Free) is a unique question scraper as it uses specific websites that you want to target. Simply put in your keywords and it will show the questions your audience searches for in those websites.

Top 5 WordPress Plugins to help you writing the topics of your blog:

• WordPress SEO by Yoast (Paid Premium) is one of the most popular WordPress plugins as it covers a lot of your SEO needs. From meta descriptions, SEO title and adding meta keywords to your pages and posts, WordPress SEO by Yoast provides you everything.
• WordPress Keyword Tool (Paid) lets you search the trending questions and keywords related to the keyword you enter, which makes it great to keep track of what your audience is searching for.
• RB Keyword Research Plugin (Free) helps you optimize your site and build your keyword list by grabbing all of the auto complete keywords from Google.
• 1SEO.com Keyword Research Tool (Free) uses the Google API to grab the best keywords for you and lets you create a list of keywords that fit best for your website.
• All in One SEO Pack (Paid Premium) plugin is just as good as Yoast. It is a perfect option to have the total set of backend SEO tools and services to get you the most effective keywords.

Did you know? Googlebots can now fish out web pages that use keywords in an unnatural way in their contents. In other words, the use of keywords is only effective when it is done in a strategic manner.

Expert’s suggestion: ‘The key ingredient to better content is separating the single from the stream” – Alina Popescu (https://www.advancedwebranking.com/blog/inspirational-content-marketing-quotes/)