All actors want to win an Oscar. All businesses want to win the equivalent—the top ranking on a Google search result. They like your content, they really like your content! Ranking at the top of search results quite literally rolls out the red carpet for new customers, clients, and/or patients to discover your products and services. But how does one rank organically at the top of search engine results? By creating content buckets for SEO blog posts.
Sorry, not sorry, but you can’t just sit down and write whatever you want about whatever topic comes to mind and hope you get rewarded with optimal SEO value. You have to have a well thought-out content strategy.
What Are Content Buckets?
Content buckets, or content categories, are subjects related to your organization’s products, services, and mission that speak to your target audience. They’re the overarching topics you use in blog posts, social media marketing, website content hierarchy, and email.
Using content buckets ensures you speak to your entire target audience and fully communicate your brand throughout your content. For example, if you own a health supplement company, your content buckets may be products, health tips, news and events, testimonials, and popular FAQs.
The whole point of content buckets is to curate a diverse and dense library of content that speaks to every member of your audience and put your eggs in different baskets for optimal SEO value. Yes, you should 100% do an SEO audit to help determine content buckets.
What Should You Use For Your Business’s Content Buckets?
Don’t know where to begin with your business’s content buckets? You can start with the following general content bucket ideas and tailor them to your mission and demographic.
1. Trending Topics and Holidays
Is something happening in the news that your target audience is likely already talking about? Is a holiday upcoming that your target audience is already thinking about? Write about things that are already on your audience’s mind and that are relevant to your brand. This helps you borrow from the popularity (think hashtags) of things people already are interested in and reading about.
2. Giveaways and Promotions
People love deals. They love getting something for free even more. This content bucket allows you to offer discounts or attract new customers through promotions.
3. Product or Service Spotlights
You don’t want to write about your product or services too frequently so that your blog seems like one big sales pitch. But it is ok to do this from time to time. Remember to use the 80/20 rule—spend 80% of your content space providing your audience with educational or entertainment value and only 20% promoting your organization.
4. User-generated Content and Testimonials
Everyone loves a success story. Seeing others praise an organization, product or service helps minimize the risk of using it. Curate comments from satisfied customers and share them as a post or share a testimonial from a happy client.
5. FAQs and Comments
If you repeatedly get the same question, that means your audience needs help with that issue. Turn these frequently asked questions or common comments into a content bucket by writing posts that not only help your audience but that you can share and reference repeatedly.
6. Business Insights and Educational Content
Establish yourself as an expert in your industry by sharing news and information, including your take on the happenings.
7. Company News and Events
Share announcements or information that impacts your business and your target audience. Your customers want to hear information from you first. Just remember the 80/20 rule referenced above.
8. Demographic Specific Content
Your various audiences and their niches can make a content bucket. Think about the audiences you serve. Could you write (or even rewrite) a post specifically for that audience? For example, we offer SEO services, so we write about SEO as the general topic as well as SEO for our specialty industries like health and wellness, dental, and CBD.
The content bucket ideas above should work for any organization, as long as you tailor them to your mission, brand voice, and business goals. Here’s more information about how to come up with content buckets for your business and a content calendar.
How Do Content Buckets Help Your Website’s SEO?
SEO is all about weaving a web of broad to niche content ideas. By using content buckets, you ensure your website content speaks to a wide variety of topics (often keywords found in your SEO audit). That way, you increase your chances of ranking in search engines for a number of terms.
That being said, you need to optimize your blog posts for SEO. You need to work SEO keywords—the keyword phrases or terms your target audience members actively search for—into your content bucket post ideas. These are your areas of expertise. They’re the concepts you want your organization to be associated with and known for. Building your content strategy around these keywords will help strengthen your blog’s SEO and put you at the top of search results.
SEO Best Practices
Not sure how well you’re doing with SEO practices or how to set up good practices before you launch a new site? Complete an SEO audit to set the groundwork for successful content ideas and SEO best practices.
Performing an SEO audit helps you ensure that you aren’t just creating content. It helps you focus your content on ideas you know will generate blog traffic.
Once you determine the best SEO keywords to use for your content (which, remember, should be based on your content buckets), create a content calendar, and start writing. To help out, here are three SEO best practices for content that converts.
- Consider length
Publish blogs of at least 800 words. Usually, 800–1,200 words are best to provide a good look into a topic and keep your readers on the page. - Build in keywords
Always use keywords in the URL, title, alt tags, metadata, headlines, and body copy. Don’t forget everything you’ve learned about SEO when you start writing. It doesn’t do you any good to create content if no one reads it. - Break it up
Readers are overwhelmed by big blocks of text. Break up text with images, and always remember to put keywords in image alt and title tags.
SEO can be intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. Using content buckets for SEO blog posts focuses your content strategy on the words and phrases you want to be known for. Still not sure about all of this SEO stuff? Contact us! We can help.
