How to Create a Killer SEO Content Calendar

This roadmap helps marketers determine the upcoming content marketing strategy and stay on track with any changes. In this article, we’ll cover the importance of a content calendar for your SEO strategy and tips on how to create one, so keep on reading. 

How to Create an SEO Content Calendar

A content calendar, or an SEO editorial calendar, is a tool that helps marketers plan out all aspects of content creation for an SEO strategy. It includes everything from keywords and titles to topics, deadlines, and content briefs. 

In its essence, a content calendar is a guide that covers the entire content creation process from A to Z. It helps all team members understand exactly what they need to do and when they need to complete certain tasks. 

Why do you need a content calendar? To improve your team’s performance, eliminate human error, and improve customer satisfaction. Sounds good, right? Let’s see how you can create your own SEO content calendar. 

Identify your target audience

If you have a SaaS business, everything you do should be for your target audience. But first, you need to identify who you’re going to target. Do thorough research on who your customers are, where they are from, what they like or dislike, and what type of content they want to see.

This is an essential step that will prevent you from creating content for the wrong group of people because if you target the wrong customers, you won’t see any results in your SEO strategy.

There are three main ways to identify your target audience:

1. Current audience analysis

If you have been in the industry for some time, you already have an audience base and have collected a certain amount of customer data. Thus, go through this data, analyze it, and see what type of content gets the most engagement from your customers. For example, they might prefer shorter articles over research studies or engaging social media posts. 

2. Competitor analysis

Research what your competitors are doing regarding content: what they are posting, when, where, and what posts have the most engagement. Then, add this information to your calendar.

3. Creating reader personas

Create various reader personas; those will be the ideal readers of your blog with details about their age, nationality, sex, occupation, location, requirements and pain points, etc. 

Do your keyword research

Next, you need to do your keyword research to make your content more visible to your target audience. You can check the list of best SEO reporting software available online to perform thorough keyword research and discover new opportunities. First, you need to identify your blog topics’ target keywords. Use the SEO tool of your choice to check the historical data and see what keywords have already driven more traffic. 

According to the survey, the most popular way to find new content ideas is keyword analysis.

It is a common practice that every category on your website will have different target keywords. For example, if you have a cosmetology clinic, the keywords in the categories “Cosmetic Procedures,” “Massage,” and “Hair Care” will be different. 

These categories are too broad, so you need to break them down into keyword clusters or subcategories. For example, the category “Cosmetic Procedures” will have sub-categories “Chemical peel,” “Botox,” etc. 

Each sub-category will include a list of keywords that drive traffic to that content. Those will be more detailed keywords, such as “chemical peel cost,” “chemical peel types,” “chemical peel for acne,” and so on. 

In short, you need to know exactly what keywords to use to meet your customers’ search intent and ensure that Google ranks your website higher so that your target audience can find it easily. You can use a WordPress ChatGPT plugin to help you generate keyword ideas, research your competitors, and plan your content topics.

Plan your content topics

Once you have identified your target keywords, you can plan your content topics based on these keywords. Again, you can use SEO tools to research what your competitors are writing about and what pages include the exact target keywords. Choose topics with high volume but low competition if you want to be in the top ten pages in SERP. 

What’s more, competitor research can help you identify content gaps in their strategies and create unique content that no one else has to offer to your target audience. Your goal here should be to outperform your rivals, so plan your content topics wisely.

It’s a great idea to create a spreadsheet with all the topics, keywords that should be on the page, volume, and subcategory. This way, all members of your team will have access to the spreadsheet and will know what you’re going to do next.

Create a content schedule

You should have a long-term schedule of when you will publish your content. For example, you can decide to publish four blog posts per week, so you need to have a plan for at least two months ahead, including the topics and deadlines.

Thus, the goal of a content schedule is to determine the frequency of your publishing and the dates when you publish specific types of content. You can’t post your content randomly because planning is the key. Moreover, some days of the year demand themed blog posts, and following this rule is better. For instance, you can create special types of content for Christmas, Valentine’s Day, or Halloween.

Promote your content

Your calendar should also include information about promoting your content. Where are you going to promote? When will you be sharing it on the chosen platforms? How much money are you ready to spend on the promotion of each piece of content? 

You can share your blog articles on various social media platforms, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, depending on the type of content you create and the audience you want to reach. Facebook was the top distribution channel for B2C marketers in the past year that drove the best results. You can also promote your content through virtual events. This will help you get high audience engagement from different parts of the world and instant feedback.

Research what people engage most on those platforms and tailor your promotional posts accordingly. Make them engaging, fun to read, informative, and visually appealing. This will increase the chance of it being shared by users, and more people will discover your website. 

Creating an SEO Content Calendar: Conclusion

Following these tips, you can create an effective SEO content calendar to help you achieve your business goals. Think about a content calendar as a roadmap or guide to help you navigate the marketing world easily. By including all the essential information about your content plan in the calendar, you can plan ahead, avoid mistakes, and help your team be on the same page.