Content Strategy: Key Step for SEO and Site Development

Have you ever heard your agency use the phrase “content strategy”? If you answered no, you should probably be asking yourself why right about now. Creating an efficient, fluid content strategy is arguably one of the most important phases of defining and designing your website. This is by far more important the the look and feel or the technology used to make the site…because content is what users are coming for at the end of the day. If you don’t have high quality content that informs and helps users, the fancy flashy things and innovative technological implementations don’t mean a thing. Users demand content. That being said, what’s involved in developing a content strategy?

Content Strategy Process

This checklist is a high level view of the things that should be considered when developing your site’s content strategy.

1. Define Your Site Objectives: First, you will need to define what exactly you intend to accomplish by building the website. Are you looking to educate people, provide product support, or what?
2. Define Your Target Audience: Secondly, once your objectives are clearly defined you need to establish WHO you anticipate and expect will be coming to the site. This could be as simple as stating that it is a consumer site or a physician site…or you could identify a specific demographic if you want to take it that far.
3. Research Your Targets: This is where you leverage a variety of different information to help define your long-term content strategy. If it is an existing site, dig in to the web analytics (hopefully you have this) and find out where users have been engaged historically. Find out if users like specific types of content more than others. This is also your opportunity to perform SEO research to discover WHAT people are searching for and how they are using search engines to find that information. Could also be beneficial to “listen” to discussions around social media channels to discover what people are talking about. All of these things can help educate your content strategy development.
4. Create a content matrix: A content matrix essentially outlines they information you want to have content about on your website. Within this content matrix, you can also start to define HOW you want this content to be presented – i.e., textual content, video content, infographic, etc…The content matrix will be a living/growing document, IMO.
5. Develop a content schedule: To me, the content schedule lays out in general detail how frequently new content will be generated. This content schedule will be created and updated in conjunction with the content matrix.

Those are the first 5 steps of developing an effective content strategy. If you don’t know the answer to these 5 things prior to beginning site development, you will find yourself with a significant dilemma at some point in the future. Knowing the long-term objectives of your site and the long-term content strategy will help ease the growing pains of necessary site growth. For pharma companies, the days of building a site and leaving it with the same content for years needs to come to an end. Brand marketers need to embrace the concept of ongoing content strategy and updates in order to capitalize on search marketing and social media needs. For both search and social, the core principle is to develop high quality, relevant content that users are searching for and talking about.