Andrew Grinaker | Digital, SEO and Social Media Strategist Blog | Seattle, WA

Establish a Content Strategy before SEO and Social Media
by Andrew Grinaker

Every business has come across this dilemma. They have identified that their SEO strategy is flawed or their Social Media strategy isn’t engaging their audience deep enough. They ask questions like, “how do we get to the first page of Google for our industry terms,” or “why do we only have 250 followers if we are a Fortune 1000 company?”

Nine times out of 10, the core issue is content. Not enough relevant, intriguing content for their audience to share and for the search engines to gobble up and serve to their audience. Good content solves many problems, including search engine visibility and providing your social media audience something to share to their friends.

Before you start talking about your visibility on the search engines or your Facebook strategy, you must first establish a cohesive content distribution strategy on the internet. Here are 7 steps to creating that content strategy and how to leverage that for search engine optimization and social media purposes.

1.    Audit your current content assets – Talk to every team within your organization (product, engineering, customer support, technical, etc.) who has produced “customer facing” content in some fashion or another. This will identify any assets that may not have been leveraged in the past. Think white papers, case studies and other quality content that you could share with your audience.

2.   Review content channels and performance – Have you started a blog? Are you managing a Twitter account? Work to understand what is currently working and what can be improved. Look at competitors for inspiration, do not rest on your laurels. For the performance aspect, review which channels (if applicable) are driving traffic and for which terms.

3.    Identify roles and responsibilities – Creating (good) content takes time and effort. Assign roles within your company to developing content and more importantly managing the content through your social media channels. Tie goals and measurement into these responsibilities. Have one educated and informed individual have final approval on which content will be published. This person preferably will have intimate knowledge of the public relations strategy of the company.

4.    Create hierarchical content topics – Whiteboard out everything you can think of that your company should be the experts on and be sharing with its targeted audience. Narrow that shotgun of ideas down to 10 that are most relevant. From there organize those 10 from most important to least important.

5.    Cross reference SEO goals with topics – What keywords (mostly long tail terms) do you want customers to find you for? Write articles, white papers and other information that can be indexed by the search engines based on topics and terms you want to be found for. If you are in the mobile marketing business, you might write a topic on, “how HTML5 will change the mobile advertising industry.”

6.    Coordinate a schedule – Once roles have been worked out and it’s clear what topics you are targeting, map out a schedule for when content will be written and subsequently delivered. One example would be (blogs – 1 per week, white papers – 1 per month, Facebook posts – 3 per week, Twitter post – 1 per day + any time content is added). Stick to the schedule and use every opportunity to share content in more than one area. If an employee has written a great blog post, share it on Facebook and Twitter.

7.    Review and Refine – When content is published, that page and content channel should be monitored for its effectiveness. Review engagement on the social media outlets; how many people view/responded on Facebook and/or how many people retweeted that on Twitter. Each content piece published should be analyzed to allow your organization to adjust its content strategy to what your audience is responsive to.