When it comes to creating a website, the most important thing for you to focus on is the content. Regardless of how pretty your site looks, the content has to be great. Good content can help you generate free traffic from search engines, build relationships with other webmasters and help you develop loyalty from readers. As a webmaster, you have to put an emphasis on developing a content marketing strategy and then building the highest-quality content in your market.

Internal Research

First things first, start with your own company, knowledge, employees and other assets. Look at your own company or your own goals as a webmaster. What exactly do you have to offer that other sources cannot? Do you have a degree in your chosen area of expertise? Do you have a lot of experience in the industry that others don’t have? You have to figure out how you will approach the creation of your content and what voice you will use. Your unique voice is what separates you from all the rest of the noise out there in the market. If you don’t have your own voice, you will probably sound just like everyone else and visitors won’t have a reason to read your content.

Keyword Research

Another critical aspect of content marketing is keyword research. Now don’t get antsy all of the sudden and start building content for the highest search terms you find, this is not what keyword research is about. Here are a few great posts on keyword research you can use:

How To Do Keyword Research like a Pro [DIY]

SEOmoz Keyword Research Guide

The Ultimate Guide to Keyword Research

Market Defining Keywords – Difference Between MDK and SEO Keywords

When doing keyword research you have to keep one thing in mind, the ration between search volume and keyword saturation, or how many websites are already covering the term and related topics. It is generally best to find keywords that have low competition and a relatively high number of searches associated with them, but that is not always easy to do.

People will be looking for what you have to offer, but you have to use the terms that they use to find the content. Everyone will use their own language to find what they’re looking for online. This gives you opportunities to reach people who would otherwise not be able to find your content. Keyword Tools are great, but not perfect, so tweaking the search queries, going for long tail and using semantics can increase your overall target traffic and exposure. Read the guides above and you will learn how to do keyword research the right way.

Positioning

Once you have an idea of the type of content that you are going for, you also need to think about brand positioning. How you position your content will go a long way towards getting people to respond to it. Do you want to position yourself as an expert in the industry? How about positioning your content as if you were a trusted friend offering advice on a particular topic? There are many different ways and angles to present your content to the right audience. Evaluate your subject matter and then think about the best way to position your content so that it reaches the right people, not just a big number of them.

Analyze the Competition

When developing your content marketing strategy, you also need to look at the competition. Look at the top 10 search results in the search engines to see what type of content they provide on a particular subject. Is anything missing in the results? Do you see anything that could be improved upon? Your job is not to simply take what the competition is doing and reword it or repackage it. You should create content that is clearly better than your competitors. You won’t be able to sell what is better than the competition unless you spend some time looking at the competition.

Analyze Your Customers

In addition to looking at the competition, you should also spend some time looking at your customers. If you don’t know who you are marketing to, you probably won’t be able to reach them. Determine who your target market is and then figure out what they are looking for. To get information about what your customers are looking for, you could send out surveys, do a focus group or simply browse some forums to get ideas. Get as much information about your customers as you can, so that you can tailor all your content to them.

Find the Best Guy (or girl) For the Job

Once you’re ready to start creating content for your site you need to carefully analyze if you have the right person for the job? Are you going to need to hire a professional writer or do you have someone on staff to handle this responsibility? Figure out potential earning and how much you will be willing to part with in order to achieve the desired results, hire a professional if necessary!

Set Your Goals

At this point, you need to create some specific and measurable goals to work toward. If you don’t have some kind of concrete goals to work for, you probably will not get very far in your content marketing. For instance, you may want to set a goal of producing a certain number of pages within a certain amount of time, products of that or subgoals may be increasing leads, contacts, social media following, brand saturation etc… Internal goals such as these are easier to control than outside factors like getting traffic or views. At that point, you are ready to start building content for your site and promoting your brand.

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Zarko Zivkovic

Author: Zarko Zivkovic works as SEO consultant for Dejan SEO, an Australian SEO company. Managing several large clients with both strategic planning and link building Zarko manages to run his own website and blog, Practical SEO.