How to decide what content you should publish

Assuming you understand the need to keep producing fresh content on your website, the hardest thing is often what type of content to produce. You can publish news related to your sector, or even about your company if you have lots to say. You can blog and you can add additional pages to your existing structure to widen the content you already have.

Briefly, let’s look at those ideas:

• Industry news – helps you to build authority in your sector by keeping your customers informed, while hopefully attracting new eyeballs from news feeds, social shares etc.
• Company news and press releases – These serve the same purposes as news, but they also give you something more meaningful to share with existing customers and a reason to communicate with them beyond trying to sell them something.
• Blogging – this can take different forms. You could use your blog to publish evergreen content, such as how-tos, general features or just opinion pieces, or perhaps even a round-up of your products in an interesting way (“Our top ten widgets this year”).
• Product service pages – sometimes your customers want to know a lot more about a product or service. You could add more information to the site to answer these questions to help them through the buying process. This could be a page with a video of the product in use, a walk-through with images of the product being installed, an explanation of how to troubleshoot, clean or replace a part. Anything that helps a customer undertsnad your product may improve the chances of them buying it.

(You may also find this post useful: Content marketing is not the same as marketing content). Planning a strategic content marketing strategy in this way can help not only your search engine optimisation but also conversions from your website.

How, though, do you decide what people want to read?

This is where our good friend the Google Adwords Keyword Tool comes in. This free tool helps you to see volumes of searches for any word or phrase.

Let’s say your company sells wifi printers. You can type this phrase into the tool to find out how many times, on average, the phrase is searched for in a month. When it comes to content ideas, though, you need to look for the longer phrases that have less competition.

There will be some potential customers who want answers to questions before they are ready to buy:

• How much does the ink cost for this printer?
• How many pages will it printe before the ink runs out?
• Is it compatible with Windows XP?
• What if I have three laptops with different operating systems?
• Which is the most economical printer to buy for printing photos?

Potential customers doing research online type all manner of questions into Google. If you are one of few companies answering those questions, you may appear in search results and then have a chance to impress that potential customer enough to get the sale. The Keyword Tool can help you narrow down to phrases that are customer enquiry phrases that also signify an intent to purchase.

Try different phrases in the keyword tool to see how volumes vary for different choices of word. For example, do more people search with the word ‘advisor’ or ‘adviser’? Do people type ‘wi-fi’ or ‘wifi’, or do they put ‘wireless’ when searching for printers? Do more people type ‘how much is…’ than ‘What’s the price of…’? The Keyword Tool can help you identify potential phrases that have low competition (ie, less competing pages in the results) and significant volume (ie, lots of people searching with that phrase).

Once you have found what lots of people search for (see How to write a blog: Knowing Your Audience), you can tailor your editorial plan to give them what they want.