Content Plan – what is it and how to create it?

For many years, Google has emphasized how important content is in terms of appearing high in organic search results. The statement “content is king” has become almost a cliché in recent years. However, simply creating valuable content in a thoughtful way is definitely not trivial. In order for our website to grow consistently and appear for more and more phrases, we need a plan, or more precisely a content plan. 

Content plan is a document that is an outgrowth of the content creation strategy and is meant to be the basis for putting it into action. Building a content plan should be the next activity right after approving the concept of SEO activities. 

Where to start creating a content plan?

The starting point for building a content plan, of course, is always what we would like to achieve with the content we create. And the goals can be very different: gathering as much organic traffic to the site as possible, building a position as a specialist in a particular topic in the minds of potential customers, acquiring leads, education, etc. 

If we have a clearly defined goal, we need to verify what topics/issues we already have developed on a given site and to what extent. This will allow us to determine what doesn’t need to be in our content plan or will only appear there in a small way. 

When we know what we don’t need to write about, let’s move on to selecting the issues that interest us. Here, a list of keywords that we want to position for a particular site will be useful as a starting point. However, if one has not yet been created, it is worth creating a list of the issues, products or services that are most important to us – these will serve as starting data for tools that support content creation, such as Senuto, SEMrush or SurferSEO.

How to create a content plan?

Content plan we can, of course, create on our own by selecting the topics we think are relevant and then verifying their monthly search potential in Google AdWords, within the Keyword Planner tool. However, in doing so, there is a very high probability of overlooking very relevant topics that can generate additional traffic to the site.

It is always advisable to use commercial tools, which are a great support and resource when creating a content plan. The aforementioned tools, after we provide basic phrases/phrases related to our business, will show us a huge number of interesting results. Among which we will find lists of keywords, the most frequently asked questions by Google users or the titles of articles created in a given topic by our competitors. 

Analyzing this data, we can create a map of the issues we want to include and discuss on our site. This will be a solid base for our content plan. We should then break down each issue into specific article topics, in sufficient quantity to exhaust the content potential of the issue as much as possible. 

If we already have specific article topics, we should move on to selecting the keywords that should appear in a given text, in order to make the most of its potential and to give direction to the copywriter’s article creation. 

The next element, of course, is to schedule the creation of content over time, taking into account the regularity of publication and our capacity in terms of writing it. 

Why creating a content plan is so important?

In theory, we could write content related to a particular company’s business in general, on topics that just happen to “suggest the muses.” We would certainly gain some organic visibility, but we would not succeed in using the full potential of the available topics. 

Creating content according to a plan allows us to develop content, even the smallest element of a given topic, and this translates into building topical authority – in short, our position as a specialist in a given topic in the eyes of Google’s algorithm. And this always results, after time, in an increase in visibility and easier acquisition of positions for further keywords related to a given issue. 

An additional benefit is, of course, the ability to answer with content all the questions of a potential customer, which will make him see us as a specialist in a particular field.