How To Create A Content Strategy That Delivers

(This is the transcript from our new video so it may not read as well as a normal blog post would)

Hi everyone I’m Alex, Head of SEO here at Koozai, and I’m gonna talk to you about how to create a content strategy that delivers. So here at Koozai we work through a number of different documents that basically underpin data to understand whether the content is definitely going work or not. So, for example, one particular document we work through is a competitor content gap analysis and we look at all of the keywords that are targets for not just our clients but also closely-aligned competitors. We look at their ranking positions for those keywords, associated search volumes and even the amount of backlinks that are going to the specific URLs for a particular keyword. Now, actually understanding all this data allows us to gain insights that we know how a particular piece of content can be structured in a way that works, how it can engage links, and which particular keyword targets can we go for that we can understand if they will be realistic or not based on their ranking positions and how strong they are in terms of search volume. So that’s one thing we look at. We also look at a content audit across our client’s site specifically, so taking it away from competitor sites and looking specifically at the existing content that’s already there. So as part of our content audit, we look at analytics data. We understand you know, what is the organic sessions for a particular landing page. We look at the bounce rates we even look at the crawl areas that may be coming up for those URLs. For example, if we are looking at a top-performing page that is not being crawled effectively then we can prompt SEO recommendations as well. However, the analytics metrics that come back from this content audit will also allow us to basically understand you know, if there is a high bounce rate, then why are people leaving this particular piece of content. Or you know, if it’s a well-performing page, we’re not sending enough internal links to it. So by actually kind of understanding the data around content performance, we will know that our recommendations will work. As we’ve seen that happen when looking at competitors for example. But now we can apply that to the current site for our clients. Something else we can look into as well is actual social listening. So social listening reports we can carry out we can understand if there’s a particular content theme we want to focus on as part of our campaign. Or any keywords around that. We can understand the social noise. We can understand if there’s a positive, neutral, negative sentiment around that. And if there are actually these topics of conversation or content are getting the shares that we require. So we don’t just know from an SEO data point of view what works and what will deliver in terms of content. We also can understand what will go viral. Which is what social listening can tell us as well. So we can look at various insights that prompt recommendations around content but how do we know it’s gonna work? Well, it’s through measurement. So in terms of our measurement, we make this a key part of any content campaign that we do. And how we actually measure the impact of a successful content campaign is through a number of metrics. So, all your typical engagement metrics in Google Analytics or any other analytics platform. Also monitoring ranking performance. Any associated backlinks and social noise which I previously spoke about as well. A typical example in analytics for example, so if we’ve hosted a particular landing page or a content piece on the website. We can measure the pick-up for that landing page over time. We can measure the pick-up for the category URL over time to see if that piece of content has added authority to the overall category. If we’ve associated any target keywords in our content campaign we can start to track those and see if there’s performance. Similarly, with backlinks, we can see if there is a particular spike in backlinks to a new landing page we’ve created. And it’s coming back again to when I talked about social listening. So we can basically see if the keywords and the content type that we’ve talked about on a particular new landing page or asset has received the positive sentiment we want. So, yeah, very much we don’t just know what content will work from a strategic point of view. We also measure this to inform and solidify that going forward for our clients.