How to Plan a Content Marketing Strategy to Drive More Traffic

Your results depend heavily on the strategy you implement. A content marketing strategy can have different goals depending on your organization.

It doesn't matter if it’s for ecommerce, B2C, or a B2B website; content marketing can have a huge impact.

The importance of content marketing

Content should be an integral part of any SEO strategy and marketing agenda. Here are a few stats to hammer it home:

1. Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing. It also generates about 3 times as many leads
2. 93% of B2B marketers use content marketing
3. 53% of B2B buyers will read 3-5 pieces of content was typical before contacting the supplier
4. 82% of marketers who blog see positive ROI from their inbound marketing

4 content strategies to drive more traffic

These four tactics allow you to spot new opportunities, weaken your competitors and make the most of what you might already have to drive more traffic to your site:

1. Steal your competitors top pages

As the stats above confirm, your competition has likely been producing content for some time. They may even be quite good at it.

That's not necessarily bad thing. In some respects they’ve already done the hard work for you.

If you can find your competitors top keywords and the pages that are driving this traffic, you can steal it from them.

For this you’ll will need a tool like ahrefs site explorer. This makes things extremely quick and simple.

If you find your top five competitors you just need to enter their domain into the site explorer tab. For example, if you were launching some new email marketing software, you’d find the industry is very competitive with some strong players who have been in the SEO and content game for some time.

As such you can see above they rank for some essential keywords such as email marketing and email templates. As a new website with low domain rating, it wouldn’t make much sense trying to steal these from Campaign Monitor from the start.

But if you filter by keyword difficulty you may be able to find some better targets.

The above results are be two potential blog ideas you could steal from Campaign Monitor that are low keyword difficulty. They don’t have the highest search volume, but if you’re just starting out you need to pick your battles.

You can do the above for as many competitors as you want to find keyword opportunities like the ones above.

2. Find and solve problems

This is the be all and end all of content marketing. You're actively looking to answer users queries and position your expertise. This is where detailed and thorough keyword research is vital, and this takes time. If you want to save a bit of time there are services such as Loganix that can do all this for you.

This tactic can be used across all niches and industries. People will always have questions about your service or products; who, what, when, where, why and how will always appear in one way or another.

For example, if you’re an ecommerce fitness website selling protein powder you can use Answer The Public to find common questions people are searching for.

The questions highlighted in red focus on what and how. These questions are all being asked by people who may be thinking of buying protein powder in the near future.

Answering these questions is your chance to get in front of them and provide a useful answer while they’re in the first stages of the purchasing process.

You can export all of these keywords, put them into your chosen keyword tool and see which ones have volume.

You can do this for every type of keyword that Answer The Public throws out for you. You’ll get a lot of options to go through, but the best part is it’s completely free to use.

A great example of this strategy is action is SavvySleeper. They have dedicated sections addressing potential buyers' pain points and questions. They even have a search function allowing users to search for specific answers to their “sleeping concern”.

Creating a content hub like this is a sure way to drive more traffic and provide resources for website users.

3. Audit what you currently have

If you already have a blog with content in it, make sure you critically review it. If you content isn’t driving traffic or leads, it’s essentially dead weight.

You can find some potential quick wins by seeing where current content is ranking and figure out what you need to do to give it a little bump.

There are three things you should look at.

1. Is the content currently ranking and driving traffic?
2. Is the content currently matching search intent?
3. Does the content have a good amount of backlinks?

First point of call is to find content that is sitting in positions 5-12. You can use ahrefs site explorer to do this and filter to those positions. Other tools are available - SEMrush has similar functionality.

Here you can see five potential keywords that are ranking well but could be doing better. Push strategy has the largest volume and is currently at the top of page two, so it’s almost there.

The first step is to review the current search engine results pages (SERP) and see who you’re competing against, what type of content is ranking and how many backlinks do they have.

In terms of domain rating (red highlight) you can see competition is pretty strong, but there are some weaker domains that are above your result (position 12). Backlinks are quite far behind the top five results, so this would be an area to focus on to improve ranking.

This example shows that the content is quite varied; some talk about the difference, examples and strategies. A second thing to do would be to review the content that’s above your page and see if you’re missing anything that they cover. You want your piece to answer the search query completely.

Then it’s just repeating that process for the other four results above and you should see a nice increase in rankings and traffic.

4. Don't forget to diversify

As you’ll have some keywords to go after now, it's easy to just create a blog and leave it at that. But that means you're potentially leaving some traffic on the table.

For example, let's say your website was about yoga.

As you can see the SERP favors video, so if you just have a blog on yoga for beginners, you're potentially missing out on clicks. In this example, Yoga With Adrienne is taking up as much space as she can with a video and a blog. Her results are highlighted in red on this page.

If you go onto the blog that's ranking, you'll also find the main video that grabs your attention at the top.

So make sure you review the SERP for your target keywords. You may find similar opportunities.

Some other content types you might want to incorporate are:

• Videos
• Quizzes
• eBooks
• Whitepapers
• Templates
• Checklists

The impact content marketing can have: 3 examples

So what happens when you nail your content strategy? In short you can expect a lot more traffic; you’ll be able build your brand identity and you may even get a few more customers along the way.

Here are three examples of what this can look like.

GymShark

A shining example of an ecommerce website using a content marketing strategy to get in front of its audience effectively. Essentially any gym-goer or active person may be interested in buying GymShark clothing.

So GymShark ensures they get in front of this audience by providing useful content that its target audience is searching for. This goes back to finding and solving problems.

A quick look at their blog and you can see it drives a considerable amount of traffic for them according to ahrefs. (note, they have now changed URL structure so you may not see this data).

If you break down what type of content is driving this traffic you can see it’s all helpful content that gym-goers are seeking answers for.

Without a blog, GymShark will be limiting their website to appear for purely commercial terms such as “mens gym tshirt”. By adding a blog they’re able to go after every fitness-related term in the world if they wished too.

BestBuy

Another good ecommerce example is BestBuy. A quick overview of their blog and you can instantly see the value it brings to them.

You can see above there is some decent search volume for “vs” keywords which BestBuy is making the most of.

HotJar

It’s not just ecommerce websites that can benefit from a consistent flow of targeted content though. HotJar is a great example of a SaaS website driving relevant traffic with content.

Another quick overview from Ahrefs shows their blog brings in over 50K organic visitors every month worth over $100K in potential Ad spend.

Once you have a blog you can keep producing content, finding new keywords, jumping on trends and slowly start to build your traffic up. It wasn’t instant for HotJar either - you can see below how they have built this up over time.

Closing thoughts

The four strategies above should hopefully kick start your content marketing efforts or at least provide you with some inspiration.

Once you have your strategy in place you need to make sure you have the capacity to start producing content consistently. If you have a team, make sure they’re all on the same page; software such as Trello, Slack and Workcast can help.

Then you can start to think about how to promote that content so it has maximum impact.

Content marketing isn’t going away anytime soon. The longer you leave it, the bigger the mountain you’ll have to climb.