Content Marketing Plan – Quick Start Action Plan
- Need to find keywords for your website to attract your target audience?
- Looking for low competition gems that can quickly/relatively easily get you traffic?
- At a loss for additional article titles for your content strategy?
- Don’t have the tools needed to do quality keyword research and develop a content marketing campaign?
If you want help with advanced keyword research Maddie at ContentRefined is providing a keyword research service and niche selection service at discounted launch pricing here.
You need a content marketing plan! This little post is going to show you exactly how to do this yourself or get my team to help produce a HIGHLY actionable content marketing plan to get your started with content creation! PLUS I will reveal one of my sites and the exact plan I created for it.
This short tutorial on creating a content marketing plan if followed will provide you with the foundation for a successful site. What this post doesn't cover in detail is the next parts of your content marketing strategy including social media, editorial calendar and setting up an email opt-in with follwo up email.
Included will be the exact Google Document Template we use and one of my money sites revealed including the new blog posts I will be getting created as a result of this effort!
If you follow this process (or get us to help you) you will end up with a great content strategy!
Tools/Services Used - $8,760/yr Cost For Tools!
By leveraging world class tools my team can dig in and develop a quick start action guide that digs DEEP into the industry!
- SEMRush - $199.95/month Pro Account
- SECockpit - $80/month
- MarketMuse - $450/month
If you don’t want to buy these tools you can either have my team execute this plan for a fraction of the cost or complete the majority of these steps using the free but limited SEMRush account. If you are just starting out then the SEMRush solution may be enough!
Content Marketing Plan Case Study
Here is a live example of what I recommend someone do to create a quick start content marketing plan!
Here I will be revealing one of my sites and applying the exact process I recommend to it.
As always you can follow along and do this yourself or if interested have me, Maddie and her team execute this.
- My URL = IceChills.com
- Keyword = Best Portable Ice Maker
- Current Ranking = 2
Step 1 - Look at Site in SEM Rush & Identify What it is Already Ranking For
Step 2 - Review Site and Its Content & Compare to Competitors
In this step we want to see what kind of content the top competitors have on their site that is driving traffic to their site and see if we have it covered on our site as well.
First use SEMRush to see the competitors.
Then check each in SEMRush on their own to see what pages/keywords are driving most of the traffic.
- Advanced Tip - Export the data from a competitor into Excel and then use a Pivot Table with URL as row and a Column of Traffic % (summed) to show which pages account for what % of your competitors traffic.
Finally compare what keywords/posts are driving the traffic for your competitors and see if you have covered that topic.
Step 3 - Enter Potential Keywords into SECockpit
Based on the analysis of the main competitors and your own site enter some potential keywords into SECockpit to identify keywords to go after.
What you are looking for are keywords that have search volume of greater then 500/month and competition under 30% with confirmation that similar sites to your own are ranking on the first page.
Start adding the potential keywords to a Google Document for tracking purposes.
Here is an example of the spreadsheet we like to use...
Free Template - Do It Yourself...
Done For You - Keyword Research Service
Step 4 - Enter Each Target Keyword Into MarketMuse
The goal of this step is to assess both the competition of the keywords as well as the quality of that competitions content. We don't want to go up against all top 10 results that have 4,000 word posts that deeply cover the topic. We want low competition both in terms of the SECockpit scoring as well as low competition when it comes to content quality.
In this example it shows that if we are wanting to go after the keyword "Ice Crusher" which has a great competition score in SECockpit we are going up against some quality articles according to MarketMuse. So although this still looks beatable we should be prepared to create an article with over 3,000 words and make sure it covers the topic better then the 2 main competitors that are similar to us.
Additionally at this step we want to arm up the writer with the related topic keywords that MarketMuse (which is intended to act a little like Googles search algorithm Hummingbird) thinks a good article covering "ice crushers" would be covering.
We copy these keywords into either a spreadsheet or document to help the writer. See the example in the template below...
Free Template - Do It Yourself...
Done For You - Keyword Research Service
Step 5 - Create an Engaging Keyword Title With the Target Keyword
Again using the spreadsheet template shared above you can create an engaging Title...
- How To ...
- Best ....
- Top # ....
- # ....
Step 5 - Review the Final Content Plan Including All Metrics
We now want to review the overall plan to see that we have a reasonable split of very low competition, higher traffic potential, review and informational articles.
As Ewen from an earlier post on the topic of keywords specified it is important to also ensure we have some buyer intent keywords into our article titles.
Additional Steps and Resources for a Complete Content Marketing Plan
It is a good idea depending on your business goal for your marketing campaign to not just have high-quality content but also come up with additional plans for your content marketing plan. If your plan is to be a content marketer who attracts your ideal customer through great content it is a good idea to think about this marketing effort more holistically and include additional promotion steps in your content marketing program.
The plan outlines above gets you some GREAT keywords which you can use to create long-form content / blog posts and attract search engine traffic. But, you need to consider more in your successful content marketing strategy. Not just content creation but also content promotion through social media marketing, what your editorial calendar/content calendar will be, what is your overall marketing goals, are you going to use an email opt-in with follow-up emails, who your target audience is,
Other great resources for creating a content marketing plan include HubSpot Blog and the Content Marketing Institute and help definte your marketing goal and marketing objective.
Summary
Starting with good keyword research is foundational to the success of any content.
Keyword research now needs to go beyond simply a “keyword” and dig deeper into covering both the related content to feed Googles Humminbird algorithm and deeper into the competition analyzing how well they are covering the topic. The strategy above with the use of advanced (and expensive) tools achieves this.
Whether you are looking to create your plan yourself or get some expert help with it I hope this post has provided a lot of value! If you have any questions please let me know!
Now go... create content!
Free Template - Do It Yourself...
Done For You - Keyword Research Service