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.

One of the toughest questions for businesses – especially businesses who don’t sell products directly through their website – is: how can we generate return on investment after launching our new website?

If you’re asking this question, you’re on the right track. Many businesses never bother to ask about website ROI, and instead pay for flashy web design and copywriting, only to realize that none of it had any effect on their revenue.  If you fall into this category, please be sure to read on, as you may be surprised at just how much your website can do for you.

Goals and Analytics

Website ROI comes down to two things: goals and analytics. In this article, I’m going to focus on setting up website goals. A followup article will detail how to measure and report on the effectiveness of your implementation of those goals.

Too many businesses think of their website as an online business card – a place where people may go if they’re directed there by a salesperson, but nothing that is going to drive new business opportunities.  Oftentimes, we find that our clients have never viewed their website in the appropriate light, and instead subscribe to an antiquated idea of what it means to do business on the web. Regardless of your industry, your service offerings, or your target demographic, your website should be a tool for generating new business, for creating and maintaining contact with warm leads, and for decreasing their overhead costs.

Setting Goals

So, how do we shift our thinking and get started with ROI on our website? First, set a goal.
Many companies have never asked themselves: “why do we have a website?”. Other questions too rarely asked include: “Ideally, what types of visitors would we like to attract to our website” or (this one is very important) “what do we want them to do when they get there?”

For companies that sell products online, the answer to these questions is generally pretty simple – “we want our visitors to go through the buying process and purchase our products”. There is still plenty of room for creating efficiencies & identifying goals in that process, but right now I will take a moment to talk about those companies who don’t sell products online. Maybe they are service based or have a lengthy sales cycle due to custom or niche products. These are quite often the companies that overlook the value of their website, assuming that because they don’t have an online store, the web can’t be at the forefront of their business. This type of thinking is toxic to a business model in 2009, and needs to be addressed and updated.

Why do you have a website?

The answer to “why do we have a website” should be something to the effect of “to drive new business to our company through search engines and to offset our customer service costs by providing information and online support to our clients, employees, and investors”.

The first part of this answer is handled by search engine optimization, or SEO, which is the process of positioning a website high in the search results for given keywords and phrases. This process should be handled by a capable SEO firm, but be wary of SEO companies that promise big results but don’t ask many questions, or who seem to be unable to give a clear idea of what you should expect from the process.

The second part of the answer – offsetting customer service costs – is often overlooked. Consider how many man (or woman) hours your company might save if you were able to reduce the number of customer service calls by 20%? What about 40%? What if you directed your customers or investors to a web page rather than mailing out hard-copies of presentations, white papers, or financial reports? For many companies, having complete, constant control over their website content is something they think is out of their reach, because the old method of content control is to email your web design company and have them make small changes to existing text (usually at a hefty hourly rate). However, content management systems (CMS) are the standard for building websites in 2009, and if you are operating on anything else, you are at a disadvantage. A CMS makes updating your website as easy as word processing, and is a staple of a successful website.

What types of visitors would you like to attract to your website?

The answer to this question should be: “everyone in your target demographic”. Often we find companies who are convinced that their target demographic is not using the web. Actual statistics show otherwise. According to Internet World Stats, 248,241,969 people in North America have access to the Internet (consider that the entire population of North America is 337,572,949, according to the 2008 census). Additionally, a recent PEW research study concluded that “Contrary to the image of Generation Y as the ‘Net Generation,’ Internet users in their 20s do not dominate every aspect of online life.”. Make no mistake about it: your target demographic is on the web, and right now, they’re browsing your competitors’ sites.

What do you want visitors to do when they get to the site?

The simplest answer here, if you’re not selling products directly, is “contact us”. It is extremely common for companies to purchase warm leads, why not use your website to bring in your own? Browse through your website and ask yourself “how hard is it to figure out the specific services we offer, and what value we bring as compared to our competition?”. Also ask, “how easy is it for a potential customer to contact us from any page of our site?”, and “how easy is it for visitors to get to specific information about our products and services?”.

Implementation

After you’ve determined what you’d like to do with your website, you need to implement changes to help reach your goals. A competent web strategy firm will be required to help you with this process. If you have separate marketing and web development teams, you should ideally have your marketing team develop a clear plan for the web team, who should then implement the changes.

Context can help you get the most out of your website by developing and implementing your goals, then measuring and reporting on the progress and ROI. Please read more about our SEO, Website Optimization, and Content Management services.

What’s Next

Once you’ve identified your goals and updated your site to best suit those goals, you need to find out how successful you’ve been in your implementation. This is where analytics comes in, and I will be following up shortly with an article about measuring ROI.