Thread by @patientpublish

Establishing TOPICAL AUTHORITY doesn’t happen by accident. 📣

You should be INTENTIONAL about how you attack content clusters.

I achieve this with the help of 2 primary documents:

1️⃣ Content strategy plan
2️⃣ Keyword ‘hit-list’

Here’s my EXACT process.

🧵👇 #SEO #blog

First, some important points. 👊🏼

🟢 These are LIVING documents.

They are constantly changing and evolving.

🟢 My content strategy plan informs my keyword hit-list…

…AND my keyword hit-list informs my content strategy. 🔄

1️⃣ Content strategy plan. ♟

Just hearing the words ‘content strategy plan’ will immediately put some folks off.

But, this is NOT something you need to over-engineer.

You can keep it SIMPLE!

I think of my plan as the 30,000 foot view of the ARCHITECTURE of my site.

Let’s use an EXAMPLE so we can talk SPECIFICS.

Our hypothetical niche site builder is a bit of a GEARHEAD - and LOVES fixing anything with an engine. 🛠

As it turns out, she has a bunch of experience with jet skis in particular. 🌊

BUT, instead of backing herself into a corner with a domain name that is specific to JUST jet skis…

She decides to choose a domain name that’s more broad - one she can grow into it over the long run.

…she ends up landing on…

“GearheadAuthority(dot)com” 💪

The world is her oyster, with seemingly endless topics to pick from. ♾

In fact, it’s at this very stage in the process where you can become paralyzed with the possibilities.

With so many directions you can take, how do you even begin to decide what to write about? 🤔

This is where your content strategy plan comes into play!

By ZOOMING all the way OUT first, you’ll find zooming IN becomes EASY.

Here’s how I would tackle this site…

At the highest level, I quickly recognize that the machines and equipment our mechanically
inclined enthusiast will most likely write about cover both LAND and WATER.

So I’ll start by writing these two main categories down.

…yes I start this HIGH LEVEL and this BASIC!

The tools 🛠 you can use to house your content plan are endless.

Lots of people use Excel, I choose to use PowerPoint - both because I prefer the visual output and because I’m very comfortable with it.

Figure out what medium works for you!

At this next stage, I want to identify ~5 main topic clusters or verticals.

The first content vertical is the easiest. Our site owner loves jet skis!

Here’s some others I quickly came up with:

🟢 Jet skis
🟢 Boats
🟢 ATVs
🟢 Motorcycles
🟢 Snowmobiles

Our plan and the architecture of our site is slowly coming together!

Remember, the aim here is to use the concept of topical authority to your advantage. 👊🏼

So, the next step is to uncover about 10 long tail keywords per topic to write our first 50 posts on.

I’ll start with one content vertical, publish ALL 10 posts with thoughtful internal links 🔗 and then move on to the next vertical.

The reason I approach it this way, is for reasons mostly unknown, the Google gods will LOVE us in one content cluster and HATE us in another.

Pursuing 5 different verticals hedges our bets, and offers us multiple chances to WIN.

AND as soon as Google shows it’s hand, we’ll add another 40 posts to the best ranking cluster, pouring gasoline on a fire. 🔥

…but where are our keywords being housed?

2️⃣ Keyword hit-list. 📝

My keyword hit-list is exactly what it sounds like -

This is where I keep track of every keyword 🔑 I plan to pursue in a single, Excel document.

It’s how I stay organized and maintain a consistent publishing schedule.

Without it, I’d be aimless.

Here are the exact column headers I use in my keyword hit-list 🎯:

🟢 Blog post #
🟢 Published date
🟢 Post title
🟢 Category
🟢 Keyword
🟢 Ahrefs volume
🟢 Ahrefs competition
🟢 SEMRush volume
🟢 SEMRush competition
🟢 Google keyword planner volume
🟢 Post indexed date

As I perform my keyword research across jet skis, boats, ATVs, motorcycles, and snowmobiles - I’ll log each of my “winners” in the hit-list.

Getting this part right is CRUCIAL!

You can check out @nichedown’s keyword research process here. 👇

https://twitter.com/nichedown/status/1512441532351135754

Remember how I said earlier that both my content strategy plan and my keyword hit-list INFORM each other? 🔄

Here’s what I mean by that.

Let’s say I get a few hours into my keyword research for my planned ATV content cluster, and for any number of reasons I discover it’s a dud.

Maybe the competition is way to high for my new site, or perhaps there simply aren’t as many keyword opportunities as I initially anticipated.

That’s OK! Remove it from your content plan, and rethink this specific vertical. 🧐

Perhaps during your research you stumbled on a bunch of golden keyword nuggets for cars.

Go ahead and replace ATVs with Cars. 🚗

Again, these are living documents!

ADAPT your plan and strategy as you are presented with new information.

You content strategy plan and blog hit-list will grow and evolve along side your site.

My content plan is currently about 6 slides and my keyword hit-list has about 150 keywords on it (119 published, 31 waiting for glory).

It’s also worth highlighting - these documents, systems, and processes are meant to serve YOU.

Any aspect of this process that becomes ‘busy work’ or that isn’t making you more ORGANIZED and EFFICIENT should be discarded immediately.

And remember…

“If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time.”

Use these documents to start taking aim and be INTENTIONAL about your content strategy and end goal. 🎯