Every SEO company knows that high quality content is a staple of a good campaign. Compelling, relevant content helps a site rank (due to keyword density and by capturing long tail search traffic), greatly increases the potential for generating organic inbound links, and helps to increase conversion  thanks to increased traffic and a heightened perception of value and thought leadership in the marketplace.

However, developing content that is going to capture the attention of your target demographic is no easy task, and, to add another element of difficulty, it needs to be an ongoing process of developing and distributing compelling pieces. Even if you have a great hit with a single piece of killer content, you still need to be thinking about what’s next.

Unless you happen to have an insane genius on staff who simply can’t help but come up with killer content every time he or she touches a keyboard, you’re probably going to need a plan. I’ve spent some time outlining what I think are the core elements of an ongoing content development strategy, and I’d like to share them with you.

Building a Visual Outline

First, let’s take a look at this diagram, which I will explain below:

Let’s break down what the diagram is showing.

1. Expertise Categories

   Every piece of content generated needs to be based on the expertise of the person or organization it’s supposed to help promote. Blogs, for example, are wildly popular and useful because so many of them are written by knowledgeable, impassioned people who are providing useful, relevant information to their readers. You need to make sure that you follow the same model when crafting content. Don’t write about Paris Hilton because Google Trends is showing that she’s a hot topic today – write about what you know. Most likely, your expertise or the expertise of the organization you’re generating content for can be split into multiple topics. For example, a financial services firm might have expertise in risk management, retirement planning, and estate planning. Each of these would fit into the categories section, and would drive ideas for the types of content you should be generating

2. Buyer Personas

   After you’ve figured out what categories your content is going to live in, you need to think about the market for each of those categories. Who is your audience, and what writing style will appeal to them? In our example above, the markets for risk management and retirement planning might very well be quite different, and the types of people who will be consuming the content will be hooked in by different writing styles and topics.

3. Trends

   You need to know what’s going on in your industry right now if you have any chance of being considered an authority in your field. So, when generating content, it’s good to make note of current trends in the market that are worth commenting on. It’s always a good idea to have content in the pipeline that’s not time sensitive and can be used at any time, but late-breaking industry news is generally ideal to comment on.

4. Content

   Once you’ve figured out precisely what you need to write about, go ahead and generate the content. Make it compelling, make it personal. Afterward, you’ll need some kind of distribution mechanism. I discuss below the different distribution categories that content can fall into, but actually implementing a distribution plan is outside the scope of this post (though I will be writing about it later)

Applying it to a Real Website

Let’s take a look at what the diagram might look like in a real world example. We’ll use one of my personal favorite sites, seomoz.org. Seomoz offers a variety of SEO related services and is generally considered to be a leader in the SEO industry, especially thanks to their daily SEO blog. These guys pump out quality content on a daily basis, so I thought they’d be a good example for how toimplement a content creation plan. Note that this diagram is far from complete and probably far from accurate, but it’s meant only to serve as an example:

Expertise

I’ve taken three of the categories of expertise that SEOmoz has – SEO, tech startups, and online advertising. Additional categories can be added, but for the sake of our example, we’ll use these three.

Buyer personas

Next we have potential buyer personas for each of the areas of expertise included at the top. The colors indicate which areas of expertise are applicable to which buyer persona, with some areas being applicable to multiple or all personas.

SEOmoz provides search marketing consulting to high-end businesses, so that’s obviously a market they want to connect with. Additionally, they offer tools & services (branded as SEOmoz pro) to other SEO agencies who want to make use of their expertise, so I’ve also included a buyer persona titled “potential SEOmoz pro customers”.

A less obvious buyer persona

The other buyer persona, “colleagues and competitors”, is particularly interesting. Targeting this persona is useful not to generate sales directly, but to establish leadership in the industry. I have never hired SEOmoz, nor have I ever spoken to one of their clients, yet I have the distinct impression that these guys know exactly what they’re doing. Why is that? Because reading their content has given me that impression. This is a very important component of content development, usually dubbed “thought leadership”.

Trends

The trends indicated above were generated just from my knowledge of what’s going on in the industry right now. I was pleased to find that it was very easy to find content on the seomoz site dedicated to these trends, since it helped to reinforce my ideas on quality content development. For example, I know that a lot of large companies are dealing with budget cuts right now due to the economy, so I figured there would be a post about how SEO is the best place to spend your marketing dollars.

Content Distribution

Great content will not only get people to read it, but will generate inbound links. A full inbound link plan it outside the scope of this post, but I did want to break down the distribution categories a piece of content can fall into. Deciding on where you want to publish content can be integral to your success, and I may actually add that decision step in a next revision of the diagrams above.

Content distribution categories

• Internal / Generated
  This type of content is created by you and posted on your own site. It can include general website content, blog posts, or anything else that comes internally from you or your organization, and ultimately lives on your own site
• External / Generated
  The external/generated content type is where something like a guest blog post might live. You wrote the content yourself, but it didn’t get posted on your own site.
• External / Acquired
  The external/acquired type of content is where a newspaper article about your organization would fit. You may have had to request that the article be written (as in traditional PR), or a writer/journalist may have come to you for an interview. Either way, your involvement was an integral part of the process, which is what separates this type from the External / Organic type
• External / Organic
  The external / organic content type is covers content that was written about you or your organization, but that you had no involvement in whatsoever. For example, a blogger creating a post specifically as a reaction to a post on your blog would fall under the external / organic category

Conclusion

Engaging web content is the new way to market any business. With 113 billion searches being performed every month, you need to have a plan in place to get your expertise into the marketplace so that people looking for answers find you first. If you’ve already solved a problem for them before they’ve even gotten in touch with you, you’re way ahead of the game.

We signed up for Raven a few months ago, although I have to admit that we didn’t really start digging into its features until recently. After working with it in a bit more detail, I thought I’d give a quick run through of what we’ve found so far.

For those who don’t know what it is, Raven is a web-based application for managing Internet Marketing campaigns. It’s a hosted solution, so there’s nothing to install, and it is either $79/month or $199/month depending on the number of users you’ll need. It has a whole host of features that you can check out on their website, but the three I’ll go over here are the SERP tracker, Link Manager, and Social Media manager.

SERP Tracker

Initially, we weren’t too impressed with the SERP tracker in raven, but we found that it’s important to let it run for a few weeks before you can really see the value here. You don’t get immediate results the way you do with a local application like WebCEO, but I’ve come to really like Raven’t SERP tracker, especially since it supports graphing of SERP history (pictured left)

Link Manager

Another feature we’ve been utilizing in Raven is the Link Manager, which provides a handy way to keep track of all the inbound links you’ve acquired or requested. It also has link monitoring so that it will let you know when a requested link becomes active, or if an active link becomes inactive.

Social Media Manager

This is a feature we just started delving into, but it’s pretty cool. Raven allows you to manage “personas”, which are accounts on social media sites that you’ve created for your clients. Especially interesting is the Twitter account manager, which provides a concise report of Twitter “key performance indicators”, including ReTweets and followers (the image to the left was taken from the user manual). Raven also allows you to perform brand management by tracking mentions of your client’s name – kind of like a Google alerts for social media – but admittedly we haven’t really investigated this feature too much.

Conclusion

So far, we’re digging Raven as a campaign management tool. We’re currently using it on the $79/month plan, which is a pretty reasonable price for what you get, though I do think that they could stand to give more than two user accounts at that price. We don’t have any relationship with Raven whatsoever, so this isn’t supposed to be a promotional post, I just thought I’d post some thoughts after using the package.