Creating valuable content with SEO in mind remains the highest-performing strategy.

Content is still the primary pathway to a search engine’s ♥

Your perfect customer is looking to you to be the expert on what you’re selling and the topics related to it. Like a friend telling you about their specific experiences with a product, a service, or a brand in general. You want your content to be found, but more importantly, found by your best customers.

#1 Content Creation Cycle

Working content creation into your everyday routine is a great way to start developing a content creation cycle. Whether you have a start-up with just you, you and a few employees, or an organization with thousands of staff, you can build a system with incentives to capture content-worthy moments into most layers of your organization.

For the solopreneur,

Use moments throughout your daily life: at conventions, events, vacations, projects with clients, friends, family, strangers, and everyday encounters. Look for moments while grocery shopping, on a walk, at a game, activity, or advocating for women with disabilities in another country; use it to build your why, how, when, what, and who of your brand.

Journal and record how you felt, planned, and experienced before, during, and/or after. Reference pictures and videos you took or memories from learning about a place or incident in your past that might relate. You can always build the story later, but capture it.

Build an asset library of memories, moments, feelings, thoughts, ideas, blueprints, quotes, and verses. Nothing is off-limits here. Typically known as Mind Maps >>>>

Draw from your experiences to build the content for your brand. So no matter what you’re doing, whether it’s learning a new craft or upgrading equipment, tools, staff, and so on, use it as an opportunity for content creation cycle building ;).

Mind-Mapping for Brand Building

Jot down every word that makes you happy about your product, service, or business, even industry.
Next, take the time to marinate on these words. Think about the meanings, stories, and relations among them.
Now, circle and square the very best ones. The words that keep coming back around.
Write additional notes and phrases next to those common words.
Star and doodle around more words that stand out to you.
Continue to write other phrases and words around those secondary words.
You will eventually come to the center of your brand and offering, and if not, tweak the variables and do it again.

For companies with more people, creating content collaboratively has many benefits. When supported company-wide, operations flow more cohesively, and cross-department job sharing is more manageable.

Promote regularly capturing share-worthy pictures, videos, themes, office parties, holidays, values, new products, services, and sayings. Create a culture of rewarding the sharing and comradery of innovation, positive interactions, customer service, and networking efforts. Promote and train content creators from within for the most cost-effective win.

Build a system into your everyday routine, including jotting down notes at a client’s appointment or after completing a job, meeting, or event. Build a template of the questions you would ask someone doing your job. Attach picture or video references; if time allows, review the best images or videos and mark them as favorites.

As you find time, schedule your follow-up to progress the content through the development stages of this particular project. Sometimes, it’s actions like selecting assets, editing selections, gathering more content, summarizing, pulling more research, and editing images and video.

build a system

Templates, Playbooks and Full-Content Services

Schedule a Consultation

Creating Content-Creation Opportunities:

Set up a GoPro and camera on a tripod during regular business activities, events, meetings, or birthdays.
Instruct your top sales and management to record at least five videos, each 2-3 minutes long. Provide a list of ideas.
Product testing or products being used in application or on-site.
Interview a creator, developer, customer, or engineer.
Employee sponsorships or volunteering.
Hold contests to submit pictures or videos.
Hold internal product testing and demos.
Hold more events and content-worthy opportunities.

How to Spark Content Ideas:

Hold creative sessions regularly!
Mind map sessions with the creative team, select leaders, programmers, etc.
Brainstorm meetings with departments but also form committees of non-managerial, unlikely participants.
Vision Board workshops for personal and professional dreams.
Collaboration sessions at the start or end of each meeting.

Be sure to take a few videos and pictures while holding creative sessions. Designate a summarizer to jot down a recap to catalog and share with the team. Develop as many ideas surrounding your product, service, and industry as possible. You’re not just pitching a product; you’re selling a brand, including employees, processes, partners, associations, principles, every day, etc. This generation of reviewers and referrals demands authentic brands and seamless user experiences; AI forces uniqueness. Delivering perfectly crafted information at the ideal time in a buyer’s journey is a tall order.

The best type of content is thought out and carefully crafted with your audience’s problems or needs top-of-mind. Create articles, videos, stories, guides, apps, websites, and courses. Engage in online forums by solving issues and giving references to your articles. Content is indexed, and better content = higher rank = more visibility. A search engine’s goal is to be what people like, so write and craft content for the people, and you’ll rank high.

#2 Content Optimization Strategy

Fueling the Content Cycle

You will find that including more people in on content creation and the cycle feeds itself. For solopreneurs, partner with others to share on equipment and labor costs, rent fees, etc. It’s also much easier to build content in a group. I don’t want to discourage solopreneurs; however, there are many benefits to investing in your content as you scale up. For small to large businesses, cross-department content cycles also contribute to the asset library, angles of perceptions, different phrases, options in general, and division of labor for the cycle tasks themselves.

Content Optimization

Create profiles on various external platforms and engage with users often. 2-way exchanges!
Create video content regularly > script into articles and other content.
Build repositories of questions and answers for FAQs and for use in training. Integrate this into your onboarding procedures to automate training and encourage engagement, apprenticeships, and networking with senior personnel. Encourage senior employees to take on new employees as guides.
Post articles and other content pieces with an idea or plan for who will answer questions internally. Have employees work together on answering questions and turning them into FAQs and sometimes case studies.
Start the internal discussion with experts on the topic and in the industry; build articles, webinars, etc.
Expedite answers and, in some cases, use drip replying to remain in the discussion.
Drip replying campaigns can be carried out by someone with less related experience but in a related field, such as a sales assistant who fields the question to a senior or more specialized personnel.
Find topics related to your brand and include longtail keywords, images, and videos.
Write lengthy posts (~1000 words) in a mix of formal and friendly tones.
Don’t post the same duplicate content.
Use the brand name in every post (but don’t overuse it).

Sidenote:

Negative interactions on forums and review websites need quick and polite replies. It’s always better than a late reply with detailed information. It is never good to let readers assume negative comments because there is no response.

This is just a snapshot of the Content Optimization Strategy. If you’d like to learn how to impliment this strategy for your company, – Let’s Connect –

#3 Content-Keyword Strategy

Keywords and search queries are terms that your audience searches for to find information, products, or services that solve their needs. Your digital environment, whether it be your website, a video, or a Google Business page, is the answer. How well you structure your website, content, and user interface directly affects your appearance in their search queries. So you must consider your keywords at some point unless you stumbled upon the ultimate niche offering or one-hit-wonder (i.e., LOL dolls). Even those one-off successes have competition at some point.

For most business models, we prefer our customer’s information-seeking activity to be done digitally instead of in person or on the phone, which takes up precious time and personnel. This is called “warming up the lead” online and is quite a useful technique to qualify your traffic before ever making contact with you. For those questions you keep getting, start cataloging them into a document to start a FAQ section on your website. Use your FAQs to pull from as those assisted answers for your prospect when filling out your contact form (a technique used in my Content Optimization Strategy).

Okay, enough ranting–Let’s get down to business.

Where do you start? I’m keeping this basic for article purposes; if you need more assistance getting set up with keyword research or tools, please reach out.

I like to start with the terms people use to find all my wonderful digital instances. You can find these terms many ways and across a plethora of tools; here are some of my favorites:
- SEMrush
  My all-time favorite SEO tool takes some time to set up and maintain. There’s a bit of a learning curve and administrative duties, but it’s well worth the time and investment.
  *Pricing is similar to most CRM structures; the more you use and the more you keep inside their system, the more it costs you. A common strategy is to move credits around and extract the data for analysis on your own time and with your own tools.
- Moz Keyword Explorer
  A fabulous tool for budget-friendly endeavors or just a bit less volume and need for accuracy, a snapshot or introductory way into keyword research.
  *A perk of redundant tools is that they can reveal niche keyword opportunities from your comparisons. Some of my highest-performing content strategies came from comparing results from multiple tools.
- Ahrefs
  Similar to SEMrush, which has a few more features and is built for developers, while it gets more granular, the platform is not suited for today’s account manager-style marketers.
- Google Services
  Search Console, Analytics, Trends, Keyword Planner, etc.
  Google Search Console:
  - Log in to Google Search Console
  - Select the website you want to analyze
  - Go to the Performance report
  - View the list of queries that led users to your site
  - Filter keywords by condition or create a new filter
  - Export the data as a CSV file, Google Sheets, or Excel file
Next, I do some research on the industry, related products, and other services using those same tools and some of the following:
- Soovle: The best free keyword research tool available, and data extends across the top search engines like YouTube, Amazon, Google, Yahoo, etc.
- Answer the Public: Find the questions people are asking and the conversations happening around your keyword.
- Keywordtool.io: Uses Google Search Autocomplete to gather suggestions and ideas around a subject.
- QuestionDB is another great tool for question-related keywords and answers from popular people-driving databases like Reddit.
- Keyword Surfer: a Chrome extension that overlays your standard Google searches with stats and other helpful information around topics.
- AI services, such as ChatGPT, Copy.ai, and GitHub Copilot, are fabulous ways to prompt your way through keyword research.
Finally, create a document to plan your content strategy and track what works and what doesn’t.
- This is where I offer my services… let’s connect!

Raya Bass

Content Marketing is the Best Strategy