Compelling content is a cornerstone of any modern marketing strategy.
More than 50% of businesses currently invest money, time and energy into content marketing, with most of them publishing
new material every single day.
So we know how important publishing quality content is, but what should your first steps be?
What should you do? Well, in this video, I'm going to walk you through a quick and very easy process to create a great content
Plan based on competitive research in just seven minutes.
Yes, I said seven.
By following the steps in this video, you will be able to compile a list of keywords and topics that you want to go after and
easily prioritize which ones to go after first.
And if you haven't yet, please make sure to subscribe to this channel so that you see more videos that will help you make the
most of your online marketing. A great place to start when building a content plan is to take a look at the competition.
Understanding which keywords your competitors are focusing on can clue you into areas where you may lack content or even
missing out on potential customers.
And even if you don't know who exactly your competitors are, that's no problem.
I'm going to introduce you to a tool that can identify them for you.
Let's dive in. The first Semrush tool I'm going to be showing you is our Keyword Gap tool.
This is a great tool that compares your site with your competitors and shows keywords that you share and most
importantly, the ones that you're missing.
Now, this tool will actually suggest competitors here that you can compare your site to.
So even if you don't have an exact idea of who to compare yourself to, the tool takes care of that for you.
For example, I'm going to be using Elle.com which is a fashion magazine.
And you can see here that the tool has suggested the websites of other fashion magazines.
Then click compare. The keyword overlap
visualization is a great way to get an idea of how much or how little you share with your competitors.
And you will get to also a quick list of the top opportunities.
But let's scroll down and take a look at the detailed list for the sake of creating a content plan, let's filter the results to
only see keywords that are missing from your site.
Let's stop for a second, because I really want you to understand how useful this is.
You're seeing immediately which keywords you don't have on your website and
you're not ranking for on your website and all your competitors are.
This is just basically a whole list of topics and keywords that you can immediately target.
You can also filter by traffic volume to help prioritize content topics by focusing on ones that are bringing significant traffic
to your competition. Let's refine even further and take a look at a list of keywords that we're missing
AND our competitors are ranking in a top ten position for.
Now, let's select a few keywords and add them to a new keyword list.
Clicking on a keyword is going to take us to the Keyword Overview tool. This tool shows helpful stats about that
particular keywords such as search, volume and difficulty score.
The Question section can provide very useful insights into the questions people are asking about your keyword.
Again, I need to stop.
This is so huge. You need to understand.
I need to highlight this.
These are questions that people are already asking about the keyword that you want to target.
Basically, the people are giving you content ideas.
How great is that? Understanding what information people are searching for, what questions they want answered can guide your
content writing. Your content should provide valuable information to people asking these questions. Add these keywords
to your keyword list. Clicking on the name of your keyword list is going to bring you directly to the Keyword Manager tool.
Well, all of the keywords here are compiled along with key metrics.
And let me add that in Keyword Manager
you can always update to get the freshest data available, which is usually the same day's data.
So it's always the freshest information you can get.
All of these different metrics can help you organize and more importantly, prioritize which topics to go after.
First, pay close attention to the Click Potential column.
This metric tells you how likely it is that people will actually click on your content. So there you have it.
You can use this list as your master list for content creation and use the different filtering options to choose which content
to create first.
And I'm actually going to go even further and show you how some can actually help you write the actual content.
So once we have decided all of this, what are we going to do?
Very easy. We're going to go and write our content and we're going to do it in the SEO Writing Assistant, which is in our Content
Marketing Dashboard.
This tool allows you to check your content against SEO best practices and get recommendations for writing the best content.
I'm going to pull now an article from one of my earlier examples competitors and use it to show you how the SEO Writing Assistant
works. And we're going to write it right here.
We enter the right keywords.
What is purple shampoo?
And my database is in the U.S.
I'm going to click on "get recommendations".
And we see that this is a good content, good job, Harper's Bazaar!
We get suggestions on the readability of the content, we get SEO your suggestions, which keywords we should actually use.
I'm going to show you this in real life, for example, something that we should use is "sulfate free formula".
And you can see that the keyword became immediately green because we are using something that is helpful right now and that is
related to the content that we searched for.
And the tool already gives us the keywords that we should be using.
It gives us also suggestions on the tone of voice and originality.
You can check it, of course, it's going to come out that I copied all of it because I did.
But this is just to show you, of course, that you can even check if your content is one hundred percent original.
And that's it. By following these steps, you'll be easily able to create a content plan and even actually start writing some of the
content. So if you haven't yet please subscribe to this channel, hit the like button and activate the notification bell
to see more videos on how to make the most of your online marketing, and if you want to suggest some topics to make videos
on, please leave a comment in the comments section below.
I'll catch you guys in the next video, bye!