How to create a content plan in 5 easy steps

Content planning is the process of deciding what to publish and when. Its main role is to give priority to creating content based on marketing and content strategy.

If you create content on a regular basis (as you probably should), you need proper content planning to prioritize creation based on what makes the most sense for your business at any given time. This is because the resources needed to realize the content ideas you imagine or throw at you usually far exceed the resources you have.

We will go through five steps in this content planning guide.

Want to create a content plan for your social media accounts, newsletter, YouTube channel, or website? You can do this for everyone, but you need to do it separately. This is because each channel it has its goals and there are many ways to achieve them.

Some channels also do not necessarily require their own content plans. For most companies, for example, it’s enough to schedule posts on social media a few days in advance in a tool like MeetEdgar, and rarely do plans require a lot of effort.

In general, the more resources you invest in creating content, the more you should invest in efforts to design it properly. This will of course be the biggest payout for long articles, blog posts, landing pages and videos.

For this reason, we will focus here primarily on planning the content of websites. Most people still want to learn this. Let’s delve into that.

An extensive list of topics you will love to address is essential for content planning. How else will you be able to prioritize what is best to do at a given time? We want the list to minimize opportunity costs by not covering very valuable pieces of content you don’t know about.

That’s when keyword research comes into play. It is the process of understanding the language that your target customers use when searching for your products, services and content. It then includes analyzing, comparing, and prioritizing the best keyword opportunities for your site.

Keyword research is the best method to determine which topics are popular with your audience. It also allows you to later prioritize the list based on the metrics provided (more on that later).

For example, we can consider a few initial keywords that indicate the niches we are in. Then include keywords in a keyword research tool like Ahrefs’ Keyword researcher. Here you will see:

Do you see the check marks on the left side of each keyword? This means that the keyword is part of the list you have created. This is an easy way to keep all relevant keywords in one place. Here’s what the “coffee” keyword list extension looks like:

The process of discovering and choosing the right keywords will take hours, but it’s worth it. When you’re done, export your keyword list to Excel or Google Spreadsheets, because you’ll need to add your entry in addition to all the metrics Ahrefs offers. Here is an example from a subsection of our own list of topics:

However, it’s not all about getting search traffic that converts to customers. Of course, this is the most common SEO goal. However, you can write about topics without or with little demand for search, which can also be very valuable for SEO. I’m talking about link bait: Content designed to attract backlinks that can transfer your link capital to your other sites.

You can find out which type of content gets the most backlinks in your niche by searching for any site in Best by links report in Ahrefs’ Website researcher. What works best in our case are the unique data studies:

Let your creativity shine here. You can even design content parts that you want to go viral as part of a PR campaign. These, of course, also have the benefits of SEO in the form of links and mentions.

Now you might think I’m too focused on SEO. Yes, but that’s because search engines are usually the best, constant source of traffic.

But there are times when it makes sense to publish content without an SEO goal. For example, consider important product notifications or updates. We have a separate section on our blog for these and are just as important as any other part of the blog:

When you finish your keyword research, you will find that 2 of the 3 metrics we will be discussing here are already available in Ahrefs’ Keyword researcher: Traffic potential (TP) and keyword difficulty (KD). The last metric you need to fill in manually is something we call “business potential”.

Let’s look at each of them.

Traffic potential (TP)

Targeting a high-search keyword alone is not enough. You need to look at the whole TP because one piece of content can rank for thousands of different keywords.

For example, the keyword ‘how to make cold brewed coffee’ has a search volume of 29,000 in the US, but its TP is estimated at 93,000, and the main keyword responsible for most of this traffic is ‘cold brew’:

If you look at the box above, you may have already guessed how we calculate the TP metric. This is the sum of the organic traffic that the first page for your target keyword receives from all the keywords it ranks.

Consider the scope of the search on steroids.

Keyword Difficulty (KD)

This metric is an estimate of how difficult it is to rank a particular keyword on a scale of 0 to 100 based on the strength of the link profiles on the top-ranked pages. The lower the score, the easier it is to rank at the top for the keyword.

If you were to target the keyword ‘cold brew’ from above, you would probably need a lot of backlinks to be able to rank in the top 10 search results:

Business potential (BP)

To attract the right audience that encourages conversions, you need to focus on writing content that highlights your product as a solution. To quantify the degree to which you can present your own products, we have prepared this BP metric. Here is how we work with him in Ahrefs:

Now comes the most important part of content planning: setting priorities. Unless you’re in a narrow niche, you’ll probably have hundreds if not thousands of content ideas if you follow our process.

In general, the best keywords (topics) to target are those with high traffic, high business potential, and low keyword difficulty. In fact, you will almost never find such opportunities, so you will have to compromise.

The easiest trade-offs are made with KD metrics. This is because in the long run you will probably want to cover almost any topic with solid TP and BP.

Also, the sooner you tackle topics with a high KD level, the more time you will have to gather the links you need organically. This is because content can be ranked for long keywordsyou show more internal links on it eventually, or look through it content distribution.

As far as TP and BP are concerned, inverse proportionality can often be observed for these two measurements. Usually, the more demand there is for a particular topic without a brand, the more distant those searchers are from buying.

This shows the distance from the purchase customer travel illustration:

Someone looking for a high TP topic like “what are backlinks” is probably not yet ready to become our customer. But this person may later look for something like “link building tools” that has a lower TP but a much higher BP.

The best solution to this is to balance everything. If you plan your content based on your customers ’travels, you’ll end up with a nice mix. We give the highest priority to BP. So if to in all other things are the same, then we choose topics based on lower KD and higher TP.

It can also be a good approach to focus on one topic at a time, such as “building links” from above. We have 42 articles on this topic on our blog from now on and many of them run a good amount of search traffic:

This is important for creating thematic groupsAlso known as content hubs, sometimes used as an effective SEO tactic:

Now that you’ve chosen the topics you need to focus on first, it’s time to put them in va content calendar. It is a system that organizes, manages and plans the production of content to give you an overview of everything that will be published in a given time frame. Here is a brief look at our own content calendar:

It is created in Notion, with each card in the calendar structured as follows:

I recommend planning content for one to three months in advance. If you’re just getting started, don’t worry if you can’t meet your initial plans and deadlines. It takes time to get used to content production ratings based on your resources (writers, SEOs, designers, etc.).

One thing needs to be noted here. Choosing quality over quantity is usually the right decision, so don’t rush at any cost. Creating great content it takes a long time, so adjust accordingly.

Recommended reading: How to create a content calendar that suits you

Final thoughts

Content design is not a rocket science and is something you should do at all costs if you are serious about content marketing. Your prioritization criteria are likely to change over time; you will add more keywords, topics, etc. Content plans are not one and complete.

As you post more and more content, you will inevitably have to take this into account updating older content you will also get to the point where this will bring you a higher return than creating new pieces of content.

In Ahrefs, we are exactly at this stage. And as you can see, 20% of our articles published so far this year (29 out of 144) are republished:

Do you have questions? Call me on Twitter.