Content Strategy: The Ultimate Guide 2023

How To Craft A Content Strategy: The Key Steps

Here are the steps to follow:

Get to know your client

Understanding who your client is, is half the battle won.

The best way to get to know your client is by asking them the right questions at the beginning of your relationship. This will help you get the right context and craft a compelling strategy based on where they are and where they want to go.

The first step I do is send a questionnaire before our kickoff call. I find it gives my client more time to reflect, and doesn’t put them on the spot. And it also helps me. As a visual person, I prefer to read and save the info instead of just hearing it. Of course, we go through the most important and relevant answers during our call.

The questions vary depending on the type of project we are working, it’s complexity, and so on. Here are 5 general topics I make sure to tackle:
1. Aim(s) of the project
2. Deliverables the client is expecting
3. How we measure the success or failure of the project
4. What is the client’s preferred communication method (even if I send a document in my welcoming pack explaining my preferred way of communication)
5. Timeframe & Resources (if not agreed before)

Congrats! You now know your client!

Now that you know where your client is at and where they want to go, it’s time to assess their current situation to know the path you’re going to guide them on. This is where the content audit comes in.

Do A Content Audit

Doing a content audit can be tricky because it depends on your client having their strategy aligned with their goals.

If you prefer a more thorough approach, then I recommend you check out the Content Marketing Ultimate Guide 2023, where I discuss about a more in-depth strategy that include the likes of customer research, competitive analysis, and more.

And if you are confident of your client’s goals, you can go ahead with the following four steps (which brough success to my clients):

1. Check the basic SEO metrics of your client’s website or online presence

Here we tend to measure 5 indicators: UR, DA, DR, backlinks, and incoming traffic.

Where UR stands for URL Rating, DA stands for Domain Authority, and DR stands for Domain Rating.

This stage will help you gauge the quality of the content being produced, the age of the website, and how fast you are likely going to see results.

2. Analyze the website’s internal linking maps (and if you have the time and resources, then a full SEO audit would be even more powerful)

Here we want to start preparing search engines like Google by telling them what matters and showing our topical authority. We do that by internal linking.

An example of internal linking can be found in the beginning of this section where I hyperlinked and invited you to read the content marketing ultimate guide 2023.

The best tool I found to help you with internal linking (and that I use): Screaming Frog.

3. Analyze the historical content quality and publishing frequency

The answer to these questions will give you a snapshot of the content you are being heredited:

How often is your client publishing?
How long or short are their content?
Is the content relevant to the goals your client is trying to achieve?
Is the content too salesy and product focused?
How well (or poor) do the content rank?
How does your client’s content compare to their competition?

Those questions should give you a head start.

4. Map out the content opportunities by looking at their competitors

Here’s where we bring out our inner Sherlock Holmes to investigate the competition.

This is not your traditional type of competitor analysis, rather we focus on topic & keyword competition.

We can find three types of competitors:
Direct competitors – they are your nemesis
Adjacent competitors – they can be publications
Random competitors – someone that tries to rank randomly

The goal of this audit is to assess your client’s current situation and their capabilities to reach their goals with their current assets. At the end of the audit you will turn the results you got from the audit into a SWOT analysis.

Project An Organic Growth Traffic

Having assessed their:
1. Current situation
2. Target or objectives

And having complied a solid SWOT analysis based on your content audit,

you can now project the organic growth of your client to see how your SEO and content strategy will pan out. And here are the 5 steps:

Step 1: Look at the historical content (part 3 of the content audit) and understand how the traffic worked for the last year.

Step 2: Ask your client what topics and ideas they want to be known for and who is their competition (note: I usually ask those questions during the getting to know your client phase)

Step 3: This is where you start by organizing and filtering the keywords. You may want to look at user intent, KD, MSV.

Step 4: This step will show you (and your client) if you are able to rank in the short-term for specific keywords for the #1 spot depending on the keyword difficulty and CTR (click-through-rate)

Step 5: You create the full projection table for the next 12 months. If your client is looking for sales as part of their objective, you may want to add a CVR (conversion rate) in your calculations.

The Content Strategy

Congratulations and well done, you’ve now done a lot of research and analysis.

This next step is crucial as we are starting to prepare for the future in a very concrete way, and we are going to do that in two steps:

The first step is to look at the content economics or how much each piece of content would cost your client. Ideally you already have an idea of:
1. The level of difficulty of each content type
2. The level of competition of each content type
3. Your website authority

To give you an idea, the more complex a type of content, the more costly it is. Simply because you would need more people to work on it.
If you are looking to create an original research study for example, you would need:
+ Writer
+ Researcher
+ Outreach Specialist
+ Population Sample
+ Time

But at the same time, you will have less competition and your content would be more original. And keep in mind, the lower your domain authority (DA) is the more orignial content you need to stand out from an already crowded marketplace.

Reminder: We tend to forget this simple and yet powerful message from Adrienne Smith, “Your content strategy shouldn’t reflect what you think. It needs to reflect what your audience needs and areas of opportunity within content.”

The second step is to choose the type of content.

Now that you know the cost and you know your client’s budget (or have discussed with them), it’s important to choose the type and quantity of content you will be creating.

While creating a masterful original research is great but it won’t be enough. Diversity is important and will depend on which business stage you are at in the content world.

Are you a start-up? Then you need to create more original content.
Are you a seasoned brand? Then you have already got some content and online presence, you can manage to have more generic content.

I love the 80/20 rule, so here’s my suggestion to you:

If your client is a start-up, then create 80% of original content and 20% of generic content (6 for 2).
If your client is a veteran, then create 20% of original content and 80% of generic content (2 for 6) – after all you’ve already spent time and money on build some content and you can leverage on that.

Tip: One thing I do for my clients when I’m doing the audit is to make sure to note down how many original and generic content they have. This helps when I’m building my strategy to know where to focus most. I also note down the intent of each article (where it is on the customer’s journey) and if they are targeting a customer pain point.

Original Content

When you create original content, it helps increase your domain rating (DR) which in turn helps you rank higher on search engines. Original content also helps you:

+ Build Backlinks
+ Build Authority
+ Attract quality Audience
+ and maybe even virality

The different types of original content you can create:

+ Long form guides or Ultimate guides (like this guide)
+ SME articles
+ Original research
+ Opinion pieces

Generic Content

This type of content is less ‘volatile’ and more scientifically measured, you’re basically following a proven process/system that others (or yourself) created. Generic Content helps you predict:

+ Traffic
+ Conversion
+ SEO

Generic content are a high intent and high conversion model. Here are some examples of generic content:

+ How-to guides
+ Listicles
+ Easy articles

The generic content is centered around your client’s product or service. That is also why when your client doesn’t have online authority (yet) it is best for them to stear creating too much generic content to avoid looking across as salesy.

Content Roadmap Report

The report is a great tool for your client to use, as it is in fact a centralized system that includes all the resources (content, people, research, etc.) in one place. And it is explained in such a way that anyone having the report can easily read and understand it.

Here is a short version of the steps I undertake to build the report:

Step 1: Organize all the keywords in a column (user intent, level of difficulty, etc.)
Step 2: Start filtering keywords based on my client’s DA (if less than 50 for example, I’d focus on keyword difficulty of less than 50)
Step 3: I choose my pillar content and keywords
Step 4: is basically plug and play

Here is an example from BeOmniscient (I used a similar variation of it):