For those of you who found this post by searching for “content marketing strategy template,” let me be 100% honest with you – there is no such thing and you don’t need one. Is there another business in your own industry that is exactly like yours in all regards? Probably not. So we can safely assume when we factor in all businesses in all industries, there is no other business just like yours. With that said, if what your business provides in the way of goods and services, customer service, and corporate culture is unique, so too should be the strategy you use to market your brand and the content it produces. You don’t need a content marketing strategy template; you need a content marketing strategy.

I attended a web marketing event, Elevate, here in Atlanta over the last few days. Elevate is the annual user conference for Pardot marketing automation software. I could go on and on about how powerful the Pardot marketing automation tool is, but I’ll save that for another post. What is important to note here, is that Pardot allows sales and marketing teams to effectively target and nurture leads through the buying process by leveraging content, email and the Web. It also allows marketing and sales teams to track and measure the success of their efforts, both inside of the application and via a variety of innate connections it has to tools like Salesforce.com and Google Analytics and AdWords. With a tool that provides richly multifaceted marketing functionality like this, you can probably imagine that the conference sessions touched on a wide variety of web marketing topics, tactics and trends as well.

I have spent years writing and am truly passionate about the infinite power of the effective use of ideas put to words. I began writing regularly and more seriously (what I would now rather refer to as daily hard copy personal blog posts than journal entries) at about age 13, which continued for over a decade. I have worked for local newspapers, written for student newspapers and have started and made progress in writing about 3 books. Post college, my experience lies in the areas of web technology and web marketing, specifically as they relate to web content development and content marketing strategy, including SEO (obviously), SEM and social media. Strangely enough though, it was a [not-so-]chance decision to double-major in Sociology and Marketing in college that truly changed and shaped the way I feel about both writing (content creation) and content strategy and marketing.

If you’re reading this blog post, you know what marketing is, so I’ll spare you the details of my decision to choose that as a focus area while studying at Tulane. Sociology provides a unique lens and framework through which to evaluate patterns of human behavior. It allows us to observe, analyze and synthesize the ’social’ elements and patterns of humans, i.e. development, relationships,  interaction and collective behavior.

My early inclination was to pair marketing with psychology while studying at Tulane. It wasn’t until after taking a few specific courses–Sociology of Sports, Urban Sociology and Sociological Research–that I saw the obvious relationship sociology has to marketing and the potential utility of pairing the two subject matters. If marketing gives us the tools to reach and convert our target markets, in my opinion, sociology provides a framework through which to understand these markets.

I say this not to make you feel like you need to return to school, or go purchase 17 sociology publications tomorrow, but to say that it is the intersection of these fields that has rendered me uniquely passionate about and cognizant of the power of a strong content marketing strategy. Creating yours doesn’t require a degree. It requires a willingness and desire to truly understand other human beings and meet their needs. If done well, your business will be efficiently generating high quality content in its unique area of industry expertise that will in turn facilitate improved marketing reach, sales for your business, consumer engagement, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

Is your business is meeting a consumer need that you believe in? Is your goal to reach and meet the needs of more potential consumers in your field? Then the right content, in the right way, at the right time is how you do it. Stay tuned for Part II, where I’ll start helping you determine what strategies and tactics might work best for your business. This shall be fun.

For those of you out there doing DYI SEO, or serving in web content contributor roles at your organization, you probably often struggle with choosing which keyword(s) to optimize your page(s) for. To be clear, I’m referring to the situations in which your page’s topic may be referred to in several different ways. To use a few examples from recent conversation/consultation: pc repair vs. computer repair, or millennial keynote speaker vs. gen y keynote speaker, or sports medicine expert vs. sports medicine specialist. When narrowing down the core term for which you’re optimizing and thereby, what keyword you’re seeking to rank for, there are a few ways to make sure your decision is a wise and informed one:

Define Your Target Audience and Goals

If you operate a local and/or small business, let’s say a pc repair shop, ranking on the first page of Google results for “pc repair” probably isn’t what you want to be aiming for. Will you generate targeted interest from that ranking? Probably not, and because of that, you also probably wouldn’t remain on the first page of results for very long even if you did get there.

If you’re using your website as a way to generate leads in any form or fashion, you need to define your audience before you can target it. In the example above, if the PC repair company is serving the Easton/Lehigh Valley, PA area, which my awesome friend’s, Ryan Critchett does, then it’s better to optimize for terms around local searches. In other words, Ryan will generate business from ranking for computer repair bethlehem, pa, whereas he is not seeking to repair computers on a national level, so optimizing for the general “PC repair” term is not in his best interest. (Note in the linked example that Ryan has created landing pages for each of his local target markets, a smart move to ensures he ranks for people searching across a variety of areas in his region)

Do Keyword Volume Research

Once you’ve defined your target audience and it’s time to choose between this or that keyword, the first step is to research how people are searching. One of the easiest ways to do this is by using Google’s free Keyword Tool. If you’re already using Google AdWords, you can access it by clicking on Reporting and Tools in the top nav menu, and choosing Keyword Tool. For those of you who aren’t using AdWords, you too can use the Google Keyword Tool. You can put as many variations of your keyword in the box (for step by step instructions, check out my post on using the Google Keyword Tool), and I recommend checking the box that says, “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms.” Google will throw back some suggestions and terms it thinks are related that may or may not shed some light for you on how people are searching. To go back to an example from above, if you put just title search and title examination in that box, you’ll see that 165,000 people are searching in the U.S. per month for title search, whereas 1,900 are searching for title examination.

Taking a hint from the step 1 and determining your goals, you can infer from this data and pattern that if you’re company is providing title searches in Atlanta, you’d want to optimize around more regional metro area terms. If you were a large national title firm with a variety of franchise locations, you would first want to define your goals (i.e. is each location maintaining a website for which you’re wanting to rank? Is your branding initiative a global one that instead funnels potential clients through one site?). If your goals are to funnel leads through one overarching brand website, you’ll want to optimize for the more general terms, and pick the ones that more people ae using.

DISCLAIMER – competition is a piece you should also consider before picking between this or that keyword. There are situations in which you’ll be picking between this or that and will want to choose the less searched for word, so read on…

Evaluate Your Competition

Whether the product or service you’re offering appeals to a niche of a few thousand, or a niche of millions, you must evaluate what your competition is doing from an SEO standpoint. To go back to the pc repair example, pc repair and computer repair are searched for with fairly similar frequency. So in Ryan’s case, if his main local competitor in the computer repair market had an established site and was choosing to optimize for terms like computer repair Lehigh Valley and computer repair easton, Ryan would probably want to opt to optimize for pc repair Lehigh Valley, and pc repair easton, so he can immediately see improvements in search results without havig to compete. And because the volume is comparable, there is no opportunity cost of choosing pc repair as his core term. Should he decide he later wants to rank for computer repair, he will have a foundation of content around a very close derivative term (pc repair) that will make that process a faster and easier one.

Every organization and every SEO strategy is unique. Those differentiators are what will determine what else you add to this list, but these three steps are critical when it comes to keyword selection. Do you have others? What else do you do before deciding between this or that keyword?

Content is to search engine optimization what grass is to the food chain. Web content is at the core of all search optimization related activities, with the ultimate hope and goal that it’s the most useful, original, meaningful content that will rank highest in search engine results. You may come across posts that advocate particular tactics and techniques to place well in rankings for your key terms, and many of those tactics will be useful. But the truth is, if you create good content, much of the SEO momentum you achieve can happen naturally. After all, the terms we may want to rank for might differ, but the reason we [should] all want to rank is because our content is bringing value to people, and we want to share that value with them.

So, what makes for good web content?

1. It’s something we haven’t read/heard before.
2. It’s presented in a way we haven’t seen.
3. It provides easy to remember takeaways.
4. It makes us want to discuss it with our friends and colleagues.
5. It’s on-topic and presents a clear reason to watch/read.
6. It’s well constructed, edited and named.
7. It’s worthy of further contemplation. (Makes us think)
8. It makes us want to take action – share, comment, learn more.
9. It takes a firm stance. (Isn’t wishy washy)
10. It makes us feel something.

Before you worry about optimizing content, worry about quality content. Employing SEO tactics around content that doesn’t meet the criteria above is like giving a car that doesn’t run a new paint job. High quality content will be shared and linked to across the Web. Give your content legs and let it do some of the work for you.

What else do you think makes for high quality content?