How to Create an Effective SEO Content Calendar

The Create, Engage, Optimize Framework at Your Fingertips

You’re ready to take your business to the next level with highly-focused content marketing. Your product or service is good to go, and you fully understand your target audience.

Now you want to make sure you stay on track. It’s easy to get so wrapped up in your business that you put your content to one side. What does a day matter? Then a day becomes a week. You can’t decide what you should write about. You rush out a piece and it flops. Your audience starts to drift away. You miss your business goals.

An SEO content calendar will keep you on track and make sure you produce content that matters to your audience, gets shared, increases your leads, and boosts your revenues.

Here’s how to create a winning SEO content calendar.

Stage #1: Audit and research

You’ll want to start by looking at your current content. Which is performing well, and which is performing poorly? You might want to repurpose some content. How do you start?

Gather your research

The first step to creating a content calendar is to gather your research. This includes the type of content you're looking for, data and information that will support you, and the time that you want to focus on.

Perform extensive keyword research

Keywords are the magnets that draw your target audience to your content. If your content isn’t peppered with the right keywords, it will never be found ─ no matter how terrific it is. As you’re doing your keyword research, make sure that the words (which could be phrases) are:

• Relevant to your audience and your website ─ words and phrases that your audience would use

• As low as possible in difficulty to rank for ─ this will help to get you to the top of search pages and build your authority

Prioritize quality over quantity in search volumes ─ key in the phrase ‘cars for sale’ and you’ll find there are 2.2 million searches each month. Now, key in ‘cars for Denver’, and you’ll find only 3,600 searches per month. But the quality of those searches is far higher if you are selling cars in Denver. And if you have ‘classic cars for sale in Denver’ ─ you got it, fewer searches again, but boy, are they highly targeted. Now you’re getting down to attracting the audience you really want. Always target quality over quantity.

Analyze competitor content

Understanding what your competitor is doing well (and not so well) is crucial to jumping ahead of them. Use keyword research tools like SEMrush to learn which keywords your competitors are ranking for. Visit your competitors’ blogs to learn what they are producing and how you can produce better, more engaging, and informative content.

Consider seasonal factors

Seasonal content may have a shorter lifespan than evergreen content (‘10 New Year Resolutions’ vs ‘10 Life Hacks’, for example), but it can be enormously powerful to pull an audience. If you sell or hire party costumes, then you might want to write about ‘The 10 scariest Halloween costumes for kids in 2022’. That’s a blog that has a shelf life of just a few weeks at best ─ but it could pull a big audience.

Stage #2: Follow the CEO Framework

Do you know the real secret to success with SEO content? CEO, which stands for:

• Create ─ Produce content that your target audience is going to love and share.

• Engage ─ Convert visitors with dynamic calls to action that help to convert more readers into leads, and leads into customers.

• Optimize ─ Produce more of what generates sales, and less of what doesn’t.

Let’s look at each of these a little more closely.

Create

How do you create content that is going to be irresistible, eye-catching, and engaging? Here are the steps to take:

• Brainstorm topics that matter to your target audience

Take all the information you know about your target audience, and kick around content ideas. What is it that your audience wants to learn about? What topics get their juices flowing? What ideas will they discuss and share?

• Make your content schedule

Okay, so when will you publish your content? You’ve got to think about when your audience is likely to be searching for your content, and the order in which they want to read it and tie it in with your business goals. Don’t write your content too early or too late.

• Create SEO content

Now, write and produce your content. (Or better still, have a professional writer create it for you ─ it’s going to be higher quality, with all the SEO tricks and techniques included, and will save you time that you should be spending doing what you’re good at.)

• Schedule using a content planner (BJX)

Now it’s a case of managing and publishing your content to your website, social media accounts, email campaigns, etc.

The BlabberJax™ Content Planner takes the hard work out of this. Simply develop your content schedule, manage, and approve content as it is developed, and then publish it automatically across all your channels.

Engage

Engagement is key to conversions, and here’s how to maximize engagement with your content:

• Allow your visitors to interact with your site 

One way to increase interactions on your website is to allow visitors to interact by giving users options such as to ‘like tweet’, or comment on a post or blog article. Let them rate your blog posts. Encourage comments on Facebook, and then interact with those comments (seriously, your audience will love acknowledgment for what they say.)

• Use smart calls to action coupled with dynamic content

Calls to action are important in any content marketing strategy. They can help you to convert visitors into leads and customers. There are two types of calls to action: explicit and implicit. The explicit call to action is an obvious request for the reader to take an action like ‘visit our website’ or ‘join our program’, while the implicit call to action is more subtle, like simply mentioning something and linking to it.

• Set up forms to drive conversions

Smart forms can support multiple calls to action at the same time, such as subscribing users to an email list, updating your CRM system, and redirecting users to content such as free downloads.

Optimize

As you start to build your audience and website visitor numbers, you’ll want to optimize your content to achieve the best results. Two of the key strategies to employ here are:

• Use built-in analytics and reports to cut or change the content that isn’t working

Content marketing isn’t a set-and-forget strategy. Markets change, and so will your target audience.

Insight has the power to help you grow your business. It can tell you what people are reading and how they’re interacting with your content. Built-in analytics and reports (like BlabberJax™ Contacts) can help you identify what content isn’t working so well so that you can amend and improve it.

• Repurpose and update existing content

It can be time-consuming and expensive to continually create new content. Repurposing and updating existing content will help to improve your performance while keeping the cost of content production down.

See the future of SEO content marketing in action today

Get your SEO content calendar and content production right, and you will start to grow your business organically. Don’t know where to start? Download our SEO Content Calendar template, to make sure your team is always on top of your SEO content plan.

Once your strategy is perfected, you’ll need a system that allows your business to scale rapidly. The BlabberJax content marketing platform comes with all you need, including:

• Unique website design

• Creating unlimited content

• SEO built-in

• Managing files and users

• Separating test and production sites

• 100% customizable platform

• Custom apps and integrations

• Scalable web hosting

Would you like to see a live demo of the future of your business? Contact BlabberJax today.

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