Are you curious about…
how one idea can power your entire content strategy?
Start by topic mapping
Identify key topics that showcase your experience, expertise, thought leadership and trustworthiness. Think about what you want to be known for or hot topics in your industry and how to break those into several pieces of content to educate your audiences and compete for digital rank.
Identify core topic or idea
Develop subtopics and titles
Validate and rank
Choose formats and cadence
Start with this topic mapping example and worksheet. Once your topics are identified, outline which pieces of content fit with your audience’s buying journey (awareness, consideration, decision). This can help prioritize content production and channel distribution.
Prompts to identify key topics and content
There is so much information out there you can use to think about new content ideas, ways to educate your audience and add value to your brand. When topic mapping, consider the following prompts and ideas:
- What repeat questions to you hear from clients or customers?
- What are the top pain points of those who need your product or services?
- What holds people back from doing business with you?
- Google your main topic, services or product. What appears in the ‘people also ask‘ area of the page?
- Utilize AI. Describe your product/service and then ask what customers main questions or pain points are.
- Know your metrics. What are the top pages, blog posts, social content, etc. that users engage with?
Tools for content validation
How do you know your prospects are interested in the content you create? What are your competitors doing? Download the free content validation and optimization tools list.
Is it working? Know your data.
Understand your domain authority
Your website’s domain authority indicates how your site may perform in search results over your competitors. It also provides you insight into topics or keywords that may be easier to rank for than others.
Review your competitors’ rankings
Use third-party tools to review competitor activity, keywords and search trends. Keep tabs on other websites’ domain authority to know where the easy wins are and where you need some work.
Monitor your metrics regularly
Set up systems to track results so that you can answer questions such as top pages viewed on your site, top channel engagements, top referral traffic, most shared and most-viewed content.