Content Expansion Strategy: 4 Key Questions to Ask Yourself Before Diving in

The content expansion process has made the search marketers today become overwhelmingly obsessed with fresh new content. SEOs have been working, assuming that creating new content is the only way to make a website successful.

However, in this rapidly changing environment, these upsurges’ downfall includes a lot of professionals producing content hand-over-fist even before realizing its primary purpose.

A couple of years ago, when the trend of blogs first hit the search world, marketers started producing blogs and publishing them on websites just because everyone else seemed to be doing the same thing at that particular time. This approach also stands true for when the other trends in the new content genres hit, like infographics. Back when these were the trend, marketers were hastily creating infographics. But once more, this was all because everyone else was doing it.

However, in order for your content expansion efforts to be genuinely successful, a level of critical thinking is essential. You need to give some thought to why you are producing that content, and what the content needs to do in order to benefit your website or brand?

Thus instead of hastily diving in and adapting to whatever the latest trend is, you must first try and answer some crucial questions.

This blog will break down the four key questions that every search marketer needs to ask themselves before diving into any content-driven strategy.

1. Why Are We Producing Content?

Prior to embarking on any content marketing effort, first of all, you need to understand why you are producing content? And well, from an SEO point of view, instinctively, we can only think of one most common reason, i.e., organic traffic.

However, while publishing keyword-rich content consistently on a credible website might help its SEO, does it still fulfill the website’s goals?

There can be numerous reasons why content is produced for a website, such as:

• Earn more social engagement
• Boost on-site conversions such as lead generation and sales
• Increasing brand awareness or thought leadership
• Imitating tactics of the competitors

Different brands can have different purposes for creating content, and this was only the tip of the iceberg. In a nutshell, it would be best if each and every person involved in the content creation process knows the purpose of producing content.

2. For Whom Are We Producing Content?

Once you have clarity on the part of why you are producing content, it’s time to understand who your audience is, i.e., who for whom you are creating content?

If you have a decent volume of content and types of content on your website already and you are planning to produce supplementary content to support the existing ones, analytics can provide you with very useful insights that can offer you guidance.

Make sure that you take some time out to examine your analytics during your planning phase. Check your Pageviews by gender, interests, age, etc.; reassess sections and your website’s landing pages.

While the existing content on your website might not be the first-touch conversion point, it sure can help in bringing in users to the website and lead them in the conversion funnel.

Review your analytics and see which types of content are performing better in terms of sales and lead generation on your website? If you are thinking about adding a good amount of videos on your site and you observe certain demographic groups performing better than others, you may serve your content to this particular audience group.

3. What Content Works?

By now, you know the reason you are producing content for your website and for whom. You also know the types of content that works wonders in driving visitors from sources such as social media and organic search and how effective this content is in preserving the initial visitors. However, we still need to work out the content’s real purpose.

To build more website awareness and conversion potential, you need to take some more time out to understand your analytics. If you are producing this content to create a digital ripple, you must contemplate how well it is received by your audience outside.

Many tools are available in the market that you can use to find out which types of content have performed well for your website.

This will enable you to see which topics have driven the most social media engagement and the social media attributes that are generating the best engagement. You can also use some link building tools to get an idea of what content has earned the most inbound links.

4. How to Test a New Type of Content?

Testing a new type of content is completely fine. It only gets dicey when you go all-inclusive on something just because everybody else seems to be doing the same. It is highly advisable to avoid such an approach at all costs strictly.

Considering that you are ‘testing’ a new content type, it is understandable that you are not familiar with the creation of this type of content, meaning relying on archival data (as we did in the previous points) is not an option here. Therefore, the best thing to do here is to take the help of your content tracking search tool.

Perform a search for the keyword, and you will be able to see all the content pieces with top social engagement across various domains for any given topic. You can also evaluate their performance by content type. Does this keyword category highlight competitors who excel at blogs, articles, infographics, videos, etc.? Indeed, this will help make it a bit clearer which type of content you should embark on first.

Now you know which content type you want to seek and have an idea of what demographic groups are engaging the most with your website. Although you might be thinking that you have the keyword to focus your content on but don’t just get started yet.

Survey your existing consumer base through email, social media polls, or focus group surveys and question them about a keyword category in order to discover what your current audience is interested in the most. Doing so will help you shift from a keyword category to a specific keyword topic.

Surveying specific questions will help you focus on precise demographic information. Remember, your budget may limit you, but you can still acquire useful insights on the content types your current customers are interested in at the moment.

Wrap Up

To conclude, we sincerely hope that the information gained through this blog post has helped you become a bit more confident about testing out new content opportunities. Having this information at your disposal will surely help you get the most out of your content-driven efforts.

The crucial thing to keep in mind here is that the only place where you can go wrong, in this case, is blindly following the digital crowd and embarking on a content expansion strategy only because everyone else is doing it.

Figure out what your target audience finds most appealing in terms of content, and then use the findings to lay the foundation of your content expansion strategy to ensure its success. Just be sure to ask these four key questions to yourself before you begin with the process.