By Harry Mackin

For much of the world, spring has sprung. As readers may know, however, TopRank is a Minnesota-based company and — though we all work remotely now — I’ve made the somewhat-questionable decision to remain here in the land of 10,000 lakes.

This is what April “spring time” looks like here in Minneapolis.

Pictured: a beautiful spring day

But despite (or perhaps because) of the fact that my own spring is taking its time outside, within my closed-up, heated apartment, at least one spring is springing: Content marketing in 2023. It’s going to be a very big year for content marketing, with marketers everywhere responding to big and often surprising shifts in our discipline by going back to basics and rethinking their content strategies from the ground up.

And it’s the perfect time to do so: to stick to the metaphor, the seeds we sow right now as content marketers will make or break our success in the season to come. So, in the spirit of spring (wherever it may be), let’s discuss a few ways we can all start growing our content gardens right now to ensure a beautiful bloom in 2023 and beyond:

1 — Prune your keyword lists with search intent

These days, most content marketers worth their salt start their process by cooperating with their SEO teams (even if they are their SEO teams) to derive a list of pertinent keywords. While this is still a great place to start, however, it’s not all content marketers should be doing to home in on what their audiences are interested in.

Search intent is a fundamental aspect of SEO, but it tends to be a little overlooked in content planning — especially when content marketers have limited time and/or resources to present their initial plans. While keywords alone can tell you what your audience is searching for, they can’t tell you why. That’s what intent is for.

By paying attention to search intent from the beginning of your content ideation, you can “prune” down your list of keywords to the most relevant to your goals… and maybe even discover some new subject matter in the process. Focus on keywords with intent you can actually build into your marketing pipeline, such as “commercial” intent keywords or “informational” intent keywords you can use to educate your audience on a Category Entry Point (CEP) they may not have considered before.

The more relevant and valuable your initial keywords are, the more relevant each piece of content you produce to support them will be! Before you keep producing, therefore, it’s worth taking a step back this spring to reevaluate how you’re speaking to your audience’s intent.

[bctt tweet=”“By paying attention to search intent from the beginning of your content ideation, you can prune down your list of keywords to the most relevant… …read more

Source:: Top Rank Blog

Author: Aaron