Biz Tips: 7-Step Content Development Process [Step-by-Step Guide]
GROWTH:
7-Step Content Development Process [Step-by-Step Guide]
You’ve probably heard the old adage that “content is king,” and perhaps you’ve even heard praise of the Inbound methodology.
If so, you know that the way people make purchasing decisions is changing.
People don’t want to be sold to. They want to do their own research and make their own informed decision.
So, how do you connect with those potential buyers while they’re in the decision making phase?
You serve them the content they’re searching for when they’re searching for it. This allows publishers to control the sales conversation so that readers purchase from you instead of your competitor.
One of the most effective ways to control the sales conversation is through content development.
This article explains the basics of content development, then dives into Junto’s proven 7 content marketing strategy.
What is Content Development?
Content development is the process of creating “content” for a website from start to finish. Content development includes strategizing, writing, optimizing (SEO), publishing, and promoting.
The term is interchangeable with content marketing.
Web content can be anything from blog posts to infographics to videos.
Some agencies and online content producers only handle one or two steps of the content marketing process. For instance, they’ll manage the writing, but don’t strategize or publish or promote.
However, an effective content development strategy is much more than just writing or just SEO.
Good content can only get you so far — without the right strategy, or with the wrong promotion methods, no one is going to see the webpage you spent weeks developing. At Junto, we provide a turn-key content development solution focused on long-form blog content designed to increase search traffic.
It’s hard work, but the benefits of content marketing are undeniable.
If you’re looking for a DIY solution for content marketing, here’s a peek at our 7 step process for content development.
1. Gather Information
The first step in content development is always to collect as much information as possible. When we’re working with companies, we compile information on target demographics, key competitors, past site performance, site goals, and more.
We’re kind of data crazy, so the more information and stats, the better.
Google Analytics and Search Console are great tools for looking at on-site data. SEMRush is our go-to tool for keyword analysis. And it’s hard to beat Ahrefs when it comes to backlink analysis. Moz is another good tool for looking at domain authority.
We also ask questions about brand voice, marketing goals, expectations and more.
The reason behind collecting so much information is so we can make data-driven decisions about what topics to cover.
2. Analyze
Once we’ve gathered as much information as possible, it’s time to break it down into actionable information.
One of the most useful pieces of information to look at is competitor performance. We look at what pages on a competitor’s site drive the most organic traffic. We’ll look at the backlink profile, length, and quality of those pages and determine if we can outrank the competition.
In the above example, I plugged in “site:thebalance.com” to Ahref’s content explorer to see their top performing pages. You’ll see that the top piece of content is 943 words, which is not that long (by our standards). But the domain rating is 89 (out of 100) and there are 614 domains linking to this page, which would make it very hard to outrank. If I were trying to outrank thebalance.com, I would look for other opportunities.
If a client provides a list of keywords or topics they want to rank for, we’ll look at search volume and keyword difficult to help prioritize blog posts to write.
What I like to do is pull in a huge list of potential target keywords into a spreadsheet so I can do a bulk analysis. Internally, I assign a “keyword score” based on a variety of factors. This makes step 3 of the process much faster.
3. Strategize
During the strategize phase of content marketing, we build out the content strategy and editorial calendar.
Typically, we’ll plan out two or more articles in the 1,000-word range per month, accompanied by “power pages” which are twice as long every few months. The reason for this is so we can target low-hanging fruit with shorter articles and more competitive, higher-value keywords with longer articles.
If you’re not sure where to start, try to identify keywords with a decent search volume and relatively low competition. Start with those topics and work to build your backlink profile and domain authority.
What would be considered good search volume and low competition? It really varies on your industry. For small industries, a search volume of 500 is great. If you’ve got bigger fish to fry, look for terms with over 2,000 monthly searches.
Competition is also difficult to measure. Many SEO tools have a “keyword difficulty” score that can be helpful in determining if ranking for a specific term is realistic.
Once you’ve built up a decent backlink profile, you can start targeting those higher-value keywords. Ahrefs has a great guide to keyword research if you’re new to this area of content development.
Depending on client goals, we might also decide to work on a link-building campaign to maximize the impact of our content.
4. Write
The writing stage is pretty self-explanatory. Here is where you write the most kickass piece of content possible.
If you want to rank well, you’re content needs to be better than every other result on the front page of Google.
That means the longer, the better. Longer content ranks better and attracts more backlinks, probably because it is more informative and covers more related topics.