Blogging remains one of the most effective ways to get Google — and thus potential web visitors — to pay attention to your site.
But you can’t just expect to pump out any old blog and expect it to bring results. Blogging, like all types of digital marketing, requires strategy to be effective.
This is where a well-thought-out blog content strategy can really make the difference. By putting together a blog content strategy, you’ll have a firm understanding of what you’ll publish, why you’ll publish it, and how you’ll measure its performance, among others, before you get down to the busy work of actually producing the content.
And that can help lay the foundations for having a blog that offers as much value to your business as possible.
In this post, we’ll run through everything you need to know about how to create a blog content strategy, including defining your goals and audience, researching topics and keywords, creating a content calendar, measuring performance, and scaling your strategy so that it can grow alongside your business.
1. Defining Your Blogging Goals
Can you put together a blog content strategy without first defining your goals?
Yes!
Can you put together one that’ll actually get results?
No! (Or, at least not without a lot of luck…)
Your goals — what you actually want your blog to achieve — set the tone for everything that follows. Establishing the content, tone, and frequency of your blogs can’t happen if you don’t know what you’re ultimately trying to achieve. Without these answers, what comes later down the blog content strategy process is really just a guess.
Here are some common objectives that can influence a blog content strategy:
- SEO and traffic
- Lead generation
- Thought leadership
- Brand awareness and trust
- Customer retention
Let’s look at each of those in a bit more detail:
SEO and Traffic
Blogs targeting specific buyer keywords can enhance search engine visibility, driving increased organic traffic to your site.
Lead Generation
Blogs can improve lead generation by encouraging readers to take an action, such as signing up for a webinar or requesting a demo.
Thought Leadership
Thought leadership blog posts help to establish industry credibility by providing high-level, industry/sector-specific expertise.
Brand Awareness and Trust
Blogs can drive brand awareness and trust by proactively addressing customer pain points and providing ongoing product education.
Customer Retention
Blogs can be used to enhance customer retention by offering after-sales support that boosts customer engagement and loyalty.
All of those goals serve different endpoints and require different tones of voice, content, and publishing schedules. Note that it’s possible to have multiple goals at once. In fact, most business blogs serve multiple goals, though often not equally. You’ll need to establish what your goals are, and their order of importance.
It’s also important to periodically review and update your goals, since it’s likely that they’ll evolve over time. For example, an early-stage business may prioritise SEO/traffic-focused blogs in the beginning, before shifting more towards customer education and retention once more established.
2. Understanding Your Audience
You can write hundreds of blog posts, but unless you have a clear understanding of who you’re writing for, then they’re unlikely to have an impact.
Even writing with Google in mind — such as going heavy with keywords — is a mistake. Google’s crawlers are smart enough to find content that people want to read.
Your goal is to produce quality content that speaks to your audience.
And when we say audience, we don’t just mean people interested in your brand. We mean each segment of your audience.
Blogs written with everyone in mind will dilute your blog post’s impact. If you’ve set clear goals for a blog, then it’s worth writing it with a specific segment of your audience in mind.
That’ll help ensure that each blog resonates with the precise person who will actually be reading it. There’s a big difference between the content and tone of voice of a blog post aimed at someone in the awareness stage — who will likely be new to your product/service — and the content/tone of voice of someone who’s in the decision stage of the buying process. The former is learning that a problem exists. The latter wants to know that your solution is the right one. You’d speak to each in different ways.
When putting together your blog content strategy, take the time to split your audience into segments. These are essentially different groups that may visit your blog at some point during their buying journey. They can include:
- Prospective customers
- Existing customers
- Industry peers
- Use case (personal v professional)
Each blog should speak to one audience segment at a time. That’ll allow you to put together blog content that will resonate more deeply, which will ultimately be much better at driving conversions.
3. Keyword & Topic Research
You have your goals. You have your audience.
Now’s the time to begin turning that information into valuable blog posts that drive results.
For that, keyword & topic research is your friend. It’s that process that’ll reveal the type of content that your audience is looking for, and the specific search terms they’re using to find it.
By conducting keyword research, you’ll understand the types of topics that your target audience is looking for, and that can help shape your content ideas. For example, let’s say that you have an organic coffee business. Through your keyword research, you learn that your audience is searching for best coffee beans for an Aeropress coffee press. That gives you both a keyword to target and the topic for the blog itself.
There are many tools that can help with keyword research. Some of the most popular include:
- Google Keyword Planner (free)
- Google Trends (free)
- Ahrefs (paid)
- Semrush (paid)
- Moz Keyword Explorer (paid).
Many paid platforms offer free trials, or sometimes allow limited free searches. You can also get surprisingly useful information just by using Google Autocomplete to see common searches.
Just be aware that more search volume does not necessarily mean it’s the best keyword. If the keyword has too much volume, it’ll be difficult to rank in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). The trick is to find keywords that have high relevance for your audience and low/medium search volume (but not too low!). That’s usually where smaller blogs find the most success.
Another good place to get inspiration for blog topics is via your competitor’s website. It’s not about copying, but about discovering the topics that your audience is interested in. Once you have the topic, you can put your own spin on it.
4. Building Topic Clusters
Topic clusters are a way to organise your blog’s content. You start with a comprehensive pillar page on a broad topic (for example: “The Complete Guide to Organic Coffee”) before creating other blog posts that thematically link to that topic (for example: “Choosing Coffee Beans,” “Brewing Methods,” “Benefits of Organic Coffee”).
This organisation aspect of your blog is easy to overlook, but it can have a powerfully influential impact on both SEO and your audience’s experience when visiting your blog. It also prevents running into the problem of having separate blogs competing with one another for the same keyword, which can hurt SERP performance.
Topic clusters are one of the key differentiators that separate ad-hoc blog posting from well-thought-out strategies. Instead of just having a random collection of blog posts on your website, you’ll have well-organised content that’s supported by your site’s architecture.
It also makes a lot more sense to develop clusters early on. While it is possible to retroactively create topic clusters, you’ll find that doing so is a lot more expensive and technically challenging than just doing it from the beginning.
So, how should you go about building topic clusters? It’s a lot more straightforward than you might think. We’ll use the coffee example below, but you can easily adapt the process for your business.
Step One: List Your Core Topics
These are the broad subjects that relate to your business. For the organic coffee business, that could be:
- Organic coffee
- Coffee beans
- Brewing coffee
- Coffee origins
- Coffee roasting
Your core topics will be your pillar topics.
Step Two: Identify Related Topics
Once you have your core topics, you can begin thinking about topic clusters. You can create clusters for each pillar page. For example:
- Organic coffee
- What is organic coffee?
- Organic coffee certification guide
- Organic coffee v traditional coffee
- Benefits of organic coffee
- Brewing coffee
- French press coffee brewing guide
- Espresso guide
- AeroPress coffee guide
- Cold brew guide
- Coffee beans
- Light vs dark roast coffee bean guide
- Single-origin v blends
- Best beans for AeroPress coffee
- Whole bean v ground coffee
This process just doesn’t add organisation to your blog content. It also drives content idea generation. As you can see above, those three pillar topics alone could produce a lot of content (three pillar topic blog posts, plus twelve cluster blog posts).
5. Creating a Content Calendar
By now, you should have an understanding of how to come up with blog content ideas that speak to your audience. The planning part of your blog content strategy is done.
A content calendar puts that plan into action.
Your calendar will tell you what gets written, when it gets written, who writes it, when it’ll be published, and other key information.
Here are some of the things you can include in your content calendar:
- Post title/topic
- Primary keyword
- Topic cluster it belongs to
- Writer
- Editor
- Publish date
It’s best to be realistic with your posting frequency. Things can quickly become complicated if you’re ambitiously aiming to publish three in-depth blog posts a week. Consistency often matters more than quantity — your blog will yield better results if you post every single week, rather than uploading a bunch before stopping.
Over time, you’ll steadily grow a collection of high-quality, well-thought-out blog posts that serve both your audience and the search engines.
6. Measuring Content Performance
It’s important to track the performance of your content. Even pieces that once worked well can need an update from time to time. Making an effort to periodically check in on how your content is faring helps you to make adjustments that can maximise the performance of your posts, as well as guide your future content strategy.
You measure different pieces of content differently, related to their original purpose. For example, if you created a post with the intent of generating leads, then you could measure page conversions or landing page traffic. If you created a piece to boost SEO performance, then measuring traffic via search engines would be effective.
Note that you’ll measure different metrics at different times.
- First Few Weeks: Indexing status, initial keyword rankings.
- Months 1 – 2: Organic traffic, click-through rate (CTR), engagement time, backlinks.
- Months 3 – 12: Conversion, keyword ranking performance, content freshness.
Many of the tools that you’ll have used for keyword research will also help you to measure blog performance, including:
- Google Analytics 4
- Google Search Console
- Ahrefs
- Semrush
These tools offer a wealth of data, but remember that not all the information they provide will be useful. When analysing blog metrics, it’s best to focus on the ones that relate to the goals you originally set for your blog, and ignore the rest.
If you find that a blog post isn’t performing as well as you expected it to, then that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily worthless. It could just mean that there are a few key issues that need a little bit of work. Updating the content with fresh information or targeting a new keyword can sometimes be all it needs to start producing.
7. Scaling Your Strategy
As your business grows, so too will your blogging demands. All too often, businesses fall into the trap of thinking that scale = publishing more frequently, but that’s only part of the puzzle. The main challenge is to scale the output while maintaining the same level of quality that you had at the beginning.
That usually happens because the strategy that guided the blog content in the first place goes out the window and is replaced by volume. That can undo a lot of the good work that has already happened.
Wanting to stick to your original strategy and actually doing it are two different things, but there are some useful strategies that can help you to scale without experiencing any dip in quality.
Repurpose Your Content
By the time it comes to scale, you’ll likely already have a reasonably large body of great posts. Repurposing the content by turning it into other content forms allows you to quickly create new content, as well as extend the life of your best pieces.
Here are just some of the content forms that work well with repurposing:
- Email newsletters
- Downloadable guide
- Short videos
- Infographics
- Slide decks
Note that some of those forms — videos, infographics, slide decks, and downloadable guides — can be published directly onto the blog page of your website.
Grow Your Content Team
The content team that successfully managed your content calendar during the early stages of your business can quickly struggle when things scale up.
As your blogging demands grow, it’s worthwhile looking to add new members to your team. Freelancers and contractors can be highly useful when you’re still figuring out your needs. The main thing is to bring these players on board before your current content teams are drowning. That’ll ensure that your content strategy can stay on track without overstretching your team.
Document the Process
As we said above, scaling often involves bringing in new writers and editors. Yet, while that can help to increase output, it does run the risk that quality may dip. Even great writers and editors can cause harm if they’re not given clear instructions on what you’re looking for.
Documenting the process provides a written guide on what good looks like. Through style guides, editing checklists, or even just examples of your best-performing pieces, you can remove much of the trial and error that accompanies new members of your content team.
Regular Check-ins
As things grow, there’s a real risk of drifting away from the core principles that guided your blog in the first place.
Periodic check-ins allow you to make sure that your content is still aligned with your original vision. While it could be that things have developed significantly — such as adding new formats, greater blog output — any changes to strategy should be deliberate. A good question to ask is how each piece of new content stacks up against your original goals and vision. That’ll help to ensure that you’re still on the right track until you make a conscious decision to change direction.
Summing Up
Blogs work best when they’re built with a vision. By putting together a well-thought-out blog content strategy, you can quickly give your blog the best possible chance of getting results. Here’s a quick recap of the main steps:
- Defining Your Blogging Goals
- Understand Your Audience
- Invest In Keyword & Topic Research
- Build Your Topic Clusters
- Creating a Realistic Content Calendar
- Measure Your Content’s Performance
- Scale Your Strategy As Your Business Grows
Do all of the above consistently, even at a small level, and your blog will be on the right path.
