There are so many content marketing “best practices” out there these days it can be overwhelming to figure out which ones are actually helpful and which ones you should prioritize. To make things a little easier, I’ve gathered up the most common best practices and assigned a priority and effort rating to each one listed below.
The priority level refers to how much of an impact that best practice can have on the bottom line. The effort level refers to the time and resources required to implement that recommendation. These ratings are based on my own experience using these strategies for client work as a content specialist at Portent.
With these ratings included, you will be able to more realistically assess which content marketing best practices to focus on that line up with your individual needs and resources.
Let’s dive in!
Table of Contents:
- Conduct Keyword Research
- Analyze Competitors
- Maintain an Editorial Calendar
- Create Content for Each Stage of the Marketing Funnel
- Update & Repurpose Existing Content
- Balance Publishing Evergreen & Trending Content
- Measure Analytics for Your Content
- Create Content Hubs
- Implement Web Usability & Accessibility Standards
- Utilize AI-Generated Content
1. Conduct Keyword Research
Rating: High Priority, Low Effort
This content strategy and SEO best practice is definitely worth the hype. Keyword research is the process of finding what words, phrases, and questions people are entering into search engines to look for information about a particular topic. By using tools like Ahrefs and Semrush to conduct this research, you can discover foundational insights about your audience and understand what type of content they are looking for.
By understanding what questions people are asking, what type of content is currently ranking for those questions, and what the user’s search intent is behind those queries, you can craft valuable and relevant content for your users. If you only have resources for one item on this list, make sure it’s keyword research.
2. Analyze Competitors
Rating: High Priority, Low Effort
Your content does not exist in a vacuum online. It is always put in context next to other people’s content. Therefore, it is crucial that you understand the competitive landscape for whatever content you are working on so you can assess how your own content can do better and rank higher in the SERPS. This is where competitor research comes into play.
Competitor research is the process of analyzing what your competitors are doing well and not well, so you can use those insights to inform your own content. This best practice is also a great way to identify gaps in your content if your competitors cover topics you don’t.
As long as you have your competitors identified, you can start learning from the successes and failures of your competitors right away. The implementation of those insights, on the other hand, might take a little longer depending on your resources.
3. Maintain an Editorial Calendar
Rating: High Priority, Low Effort
An editorial calendar contains all of the key publishing information and deadlines for each piece of content that you’re creating for your site. Maintaining an editorial calendar for all of your content allows you to plan out content that aligns with your marketing objectives, track progress, consistently publish, and foster better collaboration. An absolute must if you have lots of different content and contributors to keep track of.
Fortunately, there is a fairly low threshold to starting an editorial calendar and many benefits to gain. Once you find a template that works for you, start filling in your content details and continuously keep it updated. Your future self will thank you!
4. Create Content for Each Stage of the Marketing Funnel
Rating: High Priority, Medium Effort
The marketing funnel has four major stages: awareness, interest, desire, and action. It’s crucial to create content for each stage of the marketing funnel so you can help guide users down the funnel to convert.
For example, if you only have content for the awareness stage, your content won’t ever push users to action. And if you only have content related to action, you won’t have any content to help bring in new users to your brand. Having content for every stage means that at whatever stage a user interacts with your brand, there will be content ready to help move them down the funnel.
Before you start mapping out your content to each stage, you’ll want to make sure you have a clear understanding of what the buyer’s journey looks like for your specific brand.
5. Update & Repurpose Existing Content
Rating: High Priority, Medium Effort
This best practice can get easily overlooked since it might not sound as flashy as creating new content, but don’t let that fool you; it can be extremely useful. Updating and repurposing your old content means identifying underperforming content and finding new ways to re-optimize that content.
The best part about this strategy is that you don’t have to start from scratch with your content. For example, let’s say you have an older blog post on “The Coziest K-Dramas to Watch During Fall” that has some great backlinks but is losing rankings and organic traffic. Instead of writing a brand new blog post that doesn’t have any of those backlinks, you can update your existing post with fresh content relevant to your users to increase your keyword rankings and organic traffic while retaining those backlinks.
This is a great way to efficiently allocate your time and resources since updating content generally takes less effort than creating new content but can still pack a punch when it comes to impact. Even small updates, like refreshing the title tag, meta description, and publish date can have a larger impact on keyword rankings than you might think.
To identify what content needs to be updated, re-purposed, or deleted, you’ll want to start by auditing your existing content.
6. Balance Publishing Evergreen & Trending Content
Rating: High Priority, Medium Effort
Evergreen content means that content will always be relevant to your users, whereas trending content relates to something timely and only relevant for a short period of time. Both types of content are beneficial to create.
Evergreen content, like a how-to guide, can be updated yearly and continuously gain traffic and rankings for years to come. It’s also a great way to showcase your expertise and authority on topics that are particularly important to your brand. Trending or topical content allows you to capitalize on the buzz from a current event that is getting a lot of attention and direct some of that engagement toward your brand if you’re lucky.
It’s important to diversify the types of content you produce so not all of your eggs are in one basket. Having both types of content allows for more diverse sources of traffic to flow to your website.
7. Measure Analytics for Your Content
Rating: High Priority, High Effort
Tracking analytics for your content is a game-changer. By measuring how your content is performing, you can understand what is and isn’t working and adjust your strategy accordingly. It’s important to track KPIs and metrics that focus on your content’s conversions, engagement, and reputation that tie back to your main business goals so you can measure the ROI of your content marketing efforts.
Having a data-driven content strategy approach will allow you to make more informed decisions so you can spend your time and resources focusing on content that will have the most impact.
Setting up analytics for your content will require a higher amount of effort to set up, but once you do, it can provide a lot of valuable insights.
8. Create Content Hubs
Rating: High Priority, High Effort
A content hub is a strategy that involves having one central hub page for a topic with several pages of related content (spoke pages) that all internally link back to the main hub page. This allows you to improve your topical authority and increase keyword rankings (see this content hub case study that illustrates the impact a content hub had on a client’s keyword rankings and traffic).
Content hubs can be an excellent way to show Google that you are an authority on a key topic related to your business. Especially with Google’s latest E-E-A-T update, it’s more important now than ever to showcase your brand’s expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness with your content. The spoke pages also allow you to create content for users at different stages of the marketing funnel.
However, it’s important to note that this best practice requires a good amount of time and effort to both research and create all of the necessary spoke pages.
9. Implement Web Usability & Accessibility Standards
Rating: High Priority, High Effort
Nielsen & Norman defines usability as, “a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use.” and the Web Accessibility Initiative defines web accessibility as “when websites and web tools are properly designed and coded so people with disabilities can use them.” Both web usability and accessibility are essential factors to consider so all users can easily access your content.
These two best practices are particularly important for pages where you want users to take action and convert, such as a Contact Us page with a form or a product page with a CTA button. It needs to be as easy as possible and accessible for all users to fill out that form or select that CTA button so they can convert.
But for pages where the main goal is for users to read the content, like a blog post, the usability of the page is less of a priority since the text is the main focus and there are less complicated design elements on the page.
Updating usability and accessibility elements can require a fair amount of web development support, depending on what CMS platform you use.
10. Utilize AI-Generated Content
Rating: Low Priority, Medium Effort
Everyone and their brother has been talking about AI-generated content and, quite frankly, to quote Taylor Swift, “you need to calm down.” Yes, AI is revolutionary and exciting, but it’s also not very good at writing content for humans. Fortunately, humans are still better at that.
For example, ChatGPT is good for short and simple content like updating title tags, meta descriptions, and product descriptions. It’s also a good option for topic ideation since it can quickly pull information from many different sources. However, ChatGPT can’t generate new information and can easily repeat misinformation. While it may sound easy to have ChatGPT start writing all of your copy, it actually still requires quite a bit of time and resources to have someone review and edit the AI-generated content to make sure it makes sense, is accurate, and fits your writing style.
It’s important to think of AI-generated content as a tool that can assist with content marketing, not as a full content strategy by itself. Whenever you’re writing more complex or thought leadership content that requires new ideas, unique opinions, and a strong creative voice, stick to having a human write it.
Wrap-Up
There are so many different strategies you can use in content marketing, but before you leap into doing all of them at once, it’s important to assess which strategies you have the time and resources for that will make a significant impact on your bottom line. Use these priority and effort ratings to decide which content marketing best practices you can focus on first, so you can make the most of your content marketing efforts.
For other resources and tips, make sure to check out the Content Strategy section of our blog to read about other insights from our industry experts.
