5 Content Marketing Strategies to Improve Your Website

Anyone can start a website, but the question is, can they market it? 

From strategy to planning to output, success in marketing requires carefully thought-out sequences and processes.

And not just any kinds of sequences and processes. 

We’re talking about the kinds that generate major traffic for your website. The kinds that sharpen your domain’s authority. The kinds that build trust, loyalty, and connection with your ideal customer. ‍

We’re talking about Content Marketing.‍

Content marketing can draw in your ideal audience like nothing else. But in a sea of blogs, websites, and landing pages, how can you ensure your content stands out? And more importantly, how can you attract the right leads to your website?‍

That’s what we’re here to share today. 

In this article, we’re sharing five content marketing strategies you can start using right away to generate traffic and attract potential new customers. 

Okay, enough chit-chat. Let’s get to it.

Why is content marketing important? 

Businesses depend on content marketing as an integral component of their global revenue strategy. 

Why?

Put simply, content attracts high-quality leads. Couple that with lead nurturing and relationship-building? You’ve got a match made in heaven for attracting new customers.‍

Content marketing is a win-win for both businesses and customers because it solves problems.  ‍

For customers, content marketing provides solutions, guides, and important answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs). For businesses, content marketing becomes an outlet for sharing value and building long-term relationships.

That’s why search engines will gladly boost your rankings if you deliver valuable, customer-centric content. In short, you need more than just a stellar website design. You need to optimize your site with content marketing. 

Have we convinced you that content marketing has the power to transform your website? 

Good. Now, let’s get to those content marketing strategies. 

1. Develop a solid blogging strategy 

Think of your blog as the motherboard of your content marketing operation. Sure, you’ll have optimized landing pages and a knowledge base, too — more on that in a bit — but your blog will house most of your content. 

So to start, you’ll need to develop a solid blogging strategy. 

Here’s a summary of how to do that, step-by-step:

Step 1: Know your target customer 

You can’t create value-driven content if you don’t know your target customer.

Knowing your target customer means understanding everything that matters to them.

So, document everything you know about your ideal customer, including: 

• Who they are — personality traits, beliefs, demographic information, etc.  

• What they need

• What they want 

• What pain points they have

• How you can help them

• How much content they consume

• What kinds of content they consume

• Their spending habits 

Step 2: Know your company's purpose

Next, document your company’s purpose and mission statement. Your mission statement includes what your company is about, who you help, how you can help, and why. 

Here’s an example for inspiration:

Step 3: Study other blogs

If you have no experience blogging, we highly recommend combing through a few successful blogs for inspiration. 

When studying other blogs, keep in mind that you’re there to light the spark of your own creativity — not to copy someone else’s style or content. The most successful blogs have unique, fresh content their audiences need most. 

Step 4: Conduct keyword planning research 

We can’t stress how important keyword planning research is. 

Keyword planning is the foundation of your blog content. Every article, guide, and resource you create will need its own target keyword informing the piece’s structure.

To conduct keyword planning research, you can use tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Soovle.

If you don’t have time to conduct the research yourself, consider hiring an SEO strategist to handle it for you.

Step 5: Use the results from your research to create a topic list 

After combing through potential target keywords, make a list of those you’d like to target on your blog. Create a spreadsheet or use a keyword planning template that your content team can easily reference. 

For instance, if you sell courses for e-commerce businesses, then some target keywords on your list might include:

• E-commerce startup

• How to start an e-commerce business

• E-commerce course

• Courses for e-commerce

• E-commerce education 

Step 6: Decide what kinds of articles you’re going to post 

Now that you’ve got a list of topics to target on your blog, you’ll need to decide what kinds of articles you’re going to post. 

You can structure articles in a variety of formats, including: 

Listicles 

Articles with itemized tips or steps, like this article on debit cards for kids, are called listicles.

How-to’s 

A how-to post breaks down how to do something with step-by-step instructions. 

FAQ articles 

Articles that answer common questions and concerns. 

Complete guides 

In-depth, informative guides that tell the reader everything they need to know about a specific topic. A great example would be this guide on travel nursing.

Reviews and recommendations

Product and service reviews and recommendations, affiliate marketing articles, or product comparison articles. 

Industry analysis

A breakdown of what’s going on in your industry today.

Industry forecasts

What experts are predicting will happen in your industry in the future. 

If this seems overwhelming, remember that content marketing is about quality over quantity. It’s not about publishing a different type of blog post every day. It’s about showing up consistently with valuable content your audience craves.

In the end, your keyword planning research will help you shed light on what kinds of articles you should write about. To start, we recommend choosing two to three types of article styles to focus on. 

For instance, Sleep Advisor’s blog focuses on recommendations, product reviews, and listicles. The blog over at monday.com focuses on how-tos, listicles, and guides. 

Step 7: Create a style guide, outline templates, and draft templates 

You know what kinds of articles you’re going to write and what topics you’re going to write about. But how can you guide your team to produce those articles on brand every time?

Easy. You create a style guide they can easily reference:

• What tone they should write in 

• What language to include or avoid in their writing 

• What types of fonts, images, and colors they should include in the articles 

• What official stylebook you’ll be following, i.e., AP style, Chicago, etc.

• How they should optimize the article 
  

To kick it up a notch, consider creating outline and draft templates your writers can reference or fill in. 

Step 8: Create an SEO protocol for each topic on the list 

Work with an SEO strategist to decide what kind of SEO protocol writers should follow for each topic on your list. 

You’ll also need to decide on an SEO-friendly tool that writers can use to generate outlines, headline options, and semantic keywords. We like GrowthBar SEO, MarketMuse, and Clearscope. 

Step 9: Plan out your content calendar 

You’re almost done.

But when are you actually going to publish your content? Take a look at the month ahead and plan deadlines for your upcoming articles.  

Step 10: Divvy out topics to writers 

Is your calendar ready? Great. Now you can divvy out topics, assignments, and deadlines to the writers on your team. 

If you don’t have time to assign topics, consider hiring an account manager to handle them for you. 

Step 11: Conduct quality analysis (QA)

After all the work you’ve put into your content, the last thing you want is subpar articles. 

To guarantee that all of your articles are pristine when you publish them, consider hiring a QA team and creating a QA protocol.

In your QA protocol, consider including tasks like:

• Double-checking that the article is SEO-friendly 

• Making sure the readability score is for 6th to 8th-grade level readers 

• Proofing the article for grammar mistakes, punctuation, spelling, and style issues 

• Making sure all images and links are good to go 

• Scanning the article for plagiarism and aiming for a score of less than 3%

Step 12: Post the completed content on your blog 

Phew, if you’ve made it this far, congratulations. You’re about to have a full-blown blog operation on your hands. 

Refer to your content calendar to publish your posts as planned.

Step 13: Market your blog content 

Time to market your blog content through ads, email campaigns, social media posts, and landing pages. Work with a marketing director to develop an approach that’s customized for your business using marketing automation. 

2. Create an optimized knowledge base 

Similar to a blog, a knowledge base is a collection of resources, articles, and videos that help educate your customers. 

Brands create knowledge bases to improve their SEO rankings and lighten the load on their customer service teams. 

After all, the more a customer can solve a problem independently, the less effort your team has to exert to help them. That means you're saving time and resources while simultaneously boosting your web presence. 

To create a knowledge base, you’ll follow the same steps in the section above — SEO research and all. But you’ll also add one other step — pain point research. 

Pain point research means understanding everything your customers struggle with regarding your brand and industry. 

For instance, if you sell skincare sets, your customers may struggle with pain points like:

• Trouble managing oily or dry skin

• Having itchy, painful, scarred, or sensitive skin 

• Not understanding which order to use products in 

• Not understanding how much to use of a particular product

• Side effects from a particular product 
  

After you conduct pain point research, meet with your content team to come up with a plan for your knowledge base. 

Let’s say you own a project management platform, and your customers have the following pain points:

• They experienced too many bugs and issues with previous project management platforms 

• They need to create project timelines but don’t know how to use your timeline tool 

• They need to collaborate with their team, but they’re not sure how to use your collaboration features 

• They’re having trouble adding a new employee to the team portal 
  

In this case, you might decide to create the following knowledge base content:

• An ‘updates’ section that breaks down every update your platform has gone through 

• A video tutorial explaining how to use the timeline tool 

• A listicle breaking down every team collaboration feature and how to use it

• An FAQ page with screenshots showing how to add an employee to a team portal 
  

While these are condensed knowledge base examples, you can imagine how large a collection like this can grow. 

3. Optimize all landing pages for search 

This tip is an easy one but still equally important. 

Create an inventory of every landing page your company has. Then, create an SEO plan for each landing page on your inventory list.

If you have a ‘Home’ page, an ‘About’ page, a ‘Products’ page, and ad landing pages, how can you optimize each of them for search? 

Get with your SEO strategist to discuss internal linking opportunities, expert copywriting ideas, and target keywords. And if you need to optimize the design, you can use a drag and drop website builder to make your page SEO friendly.

4. Develop a guest posting strategy 

Developing a solid guest posting strategy is an effective way to build quality backlinks to your website. 

Why does that matter? 

Because the more quality backlinks search engines can find of yours, the more likely it is that they’ll raise your website’s authority score. 

In other words, guest posting tells Google: “Hey, this person is smart. You should send more searchers to their website.”

Yes, it’s as simple as that. 

Here are some tips to help you develop an effective guest posting strategy:

• Use Google to identify high-authority (HA) websites 

• Make sure the HA websites accept guest posters and allow do-follow links back to your site 

• Check the HA websites’ blogs to see if their topics and writing style align with your expertise and preferences 

• Check out the HA websites’ “About” pages to ensure you align with their mission statement

• Comb through their blog posts to check for hints about possible topics and angles you can pitch 

• Before submitting a pitch, make sure these websites have never covered the topics you’re pitching before —  or that you’re bringing a valuable and unique angle 

• Use a customizable pitch template or make your own 

• In your pitch, include: who you are, how you can help the website, and three unique topics/angles you’d like to write about

• Attach links to your previous work in your pitch 

• When describing topics/angles, provide a short blurb explaining what you’ll cover and what keywords you’ll optimize for. Alternatively, you could provide an outline for each topic
  

Finally, it’s important to give readers a reason to click the do-follow links included in your guest post and bio. So, how can you entice them? 

Can you point them to one of your resources that will allow them to go more in-depth on the topic at hand? Do you have a free webinar coming up soon that they can join to learn a new skill? Do you have an elite Facebook group with like-minded individuals they can network with? 

Spend some time brainstorming ideas for all of the do-follow links you’d like to include in your guest post. Consider making a master document you can refer to in the future so you can save time on future guest post planning 

5. Give social media followers a reason to visit your site 

Sharing your content on social media is an easy way to increase website traffic.

Kick this up a notch by giving your followers extra incentive to visit your site. 

For instance, can you entice them with a sneak peek of your article and then send them to your blog to finish reading it? Can you enter their name in a giveaway drawing if they head to your website and sign up for your email newsletter? Can you encourage them to visit your website to claim a freebie, gift, or printable? 

You get where we’re going with this.

Wrap up 

These are our top five content marketing strategies for improving your website. 

What did you think? Are you looking forward to trying any of these tips? 

Leave a comment below and let us know how it goes.