You can research a niche all day long, but if you do not target the right keywords in the beginning you are wasting precious Google sandbox time… and we do not have time to waste!
So, let’s get into exactly what we mean when we say, “You should have a 30-Article Content Plan” for your website.
Article Content Plan Explained
The list of suggested articles is based on keyword research with the aim of getting organic traffic to your new blog. To get this organic traffic, we need to get your blog posts at the top of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
The strategy to get to the top is two-fold:
- Learn what people are searching for online (Keyword Research).
- Choose to write articles that can rank well (Competition Analysis).
The content plan does these two things at once. The primary keywords column shows us queries that appear in Google’s autosuggest. Since they appear in the autosuggest, we know that people are searching for it.
Every suggested article in the content plan is researched manually, not machine produced!
The rows in the “Type” column called Response, Staple, and Pillar (based on Income School’s P24 method) show the level of competition we are dealing with for that particular query.
Response posts have the lowest competition, the pillars have the highest, and staples are somewhere in between.
The 3 Levels of Competition
The 3 levels of competition (response, staple, and pillar) matter for two important reasons. First, a new site has no trust, no authority, and no history. Google will always choose an article written by a website with better authority than those without.
We go around this by tackling low-competition keywords first. These keywords are underserved (or not served at all) so Google has no choice but to give you a chance.
This will establish some credibility to your new website, and it will be the foundation for what’s to come. The issue, then, is that we don’t expect a lot of traffic from response posts.
This is why you need staple posts and pillar posts. The keywords for the staple posts are a little bit more competitive but they should also bring in more traffic.
The keywords for the pillar posts are the most competitive but once they do well, they bring in the most traffic.
That brings us to a full circle: You can compete for the more competitive keywords only because we established some trust with the response posts in the first place.
Length of Articles
You should always aim at creating long, detailed articles that bring real value to your readers.
The time when we could write a 400-word post and “trick” Google into ranking our posts with various tricks is long gone.
Rumor has it (and statistics show it) that the long 6,000+ word articles may be trending down and shorter, value-packed articles are trending up. What does this mean? Don’t focus on the length of your article. Focus on the content and jamming it full of value for the reader.
You must cut through the noise with real, helpful, and interesting content.
To this extent, we suggest these word counts for your articles:
- Response posts from 1350 to 1500 words.
- Staple posts from 2000 to 2500 words.
- Pillar posts from 3000 to 3500+ words.
As you can see, the pattern is clear: The more competitive the query is, the more detail we need in our articles.
From the reader’s point of view: the broader a keyword is, the more helpful they need to be.
The Title and Sub-header Columns
The title and sub-header columns are just a little bit of extra help for you. Sometimes the keyword (or key-phrase) is perfectly fine as the title of an article. Other times you need to work on a title that is more appealing, increasing your chances of getting the click.
The sub-headers are suggestions to help you with the structure of the article. (You can ignore them if you decide to take the article in a different direction.)
Hopefully, this helps explain why it’s critical that you have an article content plan in place. If not, you’ll never build authority and no one will ever find you. And most importantly, you’ll never grow your business and make money.
So… enough said, contact us and order your 30-Article Content Plan, and get to work building your business.
