5 Ways To Create A Content Plan

Here you can slightly get away from the topic. Coffee is a drink, and food and drinks are a part of our lives. You can write how coffee influences your health; coffee and the medicine, etc. The list is endless. Here I gathered some ideas:

You can go deeper: types of coffee trees, ways to make coffee, types of coffee drinks, best local coffee bars… Take any coffee-related topic and go into details. Here are some ideas:

What beverages do people drink besides coffee? What drinks have the same invigorating effect? Pick up the related topics and expand them as you like.

Time is the next metric — here you can cover all topics related to the history of drinks: how they were/are produced, outlook on the future.

You can turn any topic to a different audience. This works every time, trust me :)

This way is collective as you should use several means to get a full view. You need to:

Let's imagine that we have a new site and we still don't know our competitors. But they certainly have a blog to attract organic traffic. How to find out who they are? Enter the keyword from our semantics into the Serpstat search bar and choose the search engine. You'll automatically go to the Keyword Analysis module. Then select the section SEO Research and Competitors. Here you can see the list of competitors' domains.

We can take an online store of pot plants as an example.

Some of the sites listed here may not be your direct competitors, even though the given keyword is present in their semantic core. YouTube, online magazines and news sites should not be considered. We are interested in more highly specialized resources. The task at this stage is routine. You need to manually select the five to ten most relevant competitors and keep them in the spreadsheet.

Click on the address of the competitor's domain in the report and find yourself in another section - with a list of search queries. We don't need the whole list of keywords; we'll focus only on those phrases that lead to a specific section of the site - blog or news. To do this, use the filter and select the URL → Includes, enter the required URL in the empty field, and click Apply. Get a list of keywords. You can use them to enrich already published blog posts or as topics for your content plan.

The Serpstat service has a special section that contains search suggestions in the form of questions ( how users are looking for them). They are perfect for creating headlines for new articles. Choose one of the keywords you received in the previous report, click on it and go to the section Content Marketing → Search Questions.

Voila! We get ready-made headings for posts, divided into groups by question words. Repeat the same with other keywords which you received earlier.

Lifehack: not to mess with each keyword individually, you can use the batch export of search questions. To do this, select the Batch export filter in the Search Suggestions, put the list of keywords into the empty field. Then tick the box only questions and without toponyms and click Export.

At this stage, you'll already have a bunch of ideas for your content plan.

If you want to get even more visitors from organic search, analyze the competitors' pages that bring them traffic, and borrow their ideas for articles. Let's return to the competitors of our pot plants website. Go to SEO Research → Top Pages, set the filter URL Prefix (Starts with URL), enter the address of the necessary section of the competitor site, select the region and click Find.

Wait until the results are loaded, and click on Potential Traffic to sort this indicator in the descending order.

Don't forget that Potential traffic is calculated according to the ratio of real and maximum possible traffic (the latter assumes that the page is in the first position for all phrases), therefore this indicator is indicative.

The first places in the ranking took pages with the highest potential traffic. Copy the topics of these articles to our content plan and return to the report. Then click on the URL of the page and go to the section with a list of search queries for which the page is visible in the search.

These key phrases can be used to optimize a future article by clearing the semantics from unnecessary phrases. Do the same with another 5-10 publications of a competitor.

The next stage is similar to the previous one - we'll work in the same tab Top Pages. However, this time we'll look at indicator FB shares. Sort our pages by shares to find the content of competitors which has received the largest number of shares. Be sure to use this technique if you want to get additional traffic from Facebook.

Then we follow the link, borrow the topic of the article and return to the report with search queries to match the semantics. In the same way, we process other competitor's popular posts.

Put all received headlines to a spreadsheet, divide into groups Subject and Keywords. Delete repeats in keywords and make headlines more attractive.

Many experts use this way to gather topic ideas or combine it with other methods:

One of the most popular methods to collect ideas is brainstorm. Many content experts plan a meeting of the whole department: they gather together and exchange ideas that come to their minds. Many experts use it:

The last but not the least is the method of translating. You can borrow the whole articles and translate them, adapting to your needs. Here everything depends on your language skills :)

Finally, we make a document with a detailed content plan for the year. The average frequency of publications is at least one post per week. Topics themselves can be allocated according to weeks, months, etc., — it depends on the marketing strategy you chose. The main thing is trying to alternate between different types of content (reviews, guides, case studies, text + infographics, expert opinions), and also trying to keep approximately the same intervals between publishing posts.