Content strategy can feel like a mess if you just go with the tide.
I mean, if you write content after what your competitors have, or worst case- some random keywords you’ve found on Ahrefs, this can exploit your SEO game.
Rather, following a set of templates that stitch to each other to create an organic funnel made of contents is the best move to make.
In this blog, we’ve explained 5 sets of templates that combine into a solid content strategy for a SaaS or Startup’s content marketing. We’ve kept SEO in mind though, but this could tweaked for social media content strategies as well.
Let’s dive into it.
TL; DR;
- There’s a 4-step process of content marketing which has been taken into account while portraying the template.
- The first template will help you to enlist the best-performing competitors of yours whom you can aspire your content marketing.
- The next template reverse-tracks actionable you can take from a competitor’s content marketing success/failures.
- The 3rd template helps to track and break down competitor’s content performance to a granular level.
- The next template helps you to build a content strategy for yourself, and validate the priorities.
- The last template gives you content calendars of each type of content that you can hand over to your writers.
Content Marketing Process That Connects The Templates
To have a 100% hold on the templates in this article, you need to understand the content strategy we follow for SaaS and startups.
There are four steps to creating a complete content strategy-
Step 1: Industry and Competitor Research
It begins with understanding your product use cases, user personas, user demands, user’s inbound demands, and identifying who are the competitors who are dominating on search.
Both competitors and use cases could be a mix of direct and indirect.
For example, if you are a customer support SaaS, you’re targeting support agents or heads of support. If there is a non-SaaS company that targets the same people for a similar purpose, you need to consider their content performance.
Step 2: Competition Content Performance Reverse-tracking
Once you understand your direct and indirect competitors, we will now put their SEO data into a cavity that breaks down their winning content ideas and the ones that they’re not focusing on for SEO.
This will reveal not only their SEO gameplay but also their funnel design and value propositions.
Step 3: Keyword Research and Content Strategy Stacking
With the competitors’ reports in hand, you will end up with a lot of content ideas. Researching for keywords will even solidify those ideas.
Using these two data points, we will create a content strategy stack where all possible content strategies will come in one place.
You will have to make a choice of which contents make sense for you to create and which don’t.
Step 4: Publishable Content Calendar
The final step is to research all possible contents of each selected type from step 3 and turn that into a month-by-month calendar.
This is something that you can directly hand over to your writer and will be backed by data to accelerate your success in organic content marketing.
Organic Competitor Research Template
Next, we move into a template that assesses the competitor’s SEO success, and filter it through some relevancy metrics like-
- Types of business (SaaS, Agency, Community, Marketplace)
- Competitive relevance (direct or indirect)
- Target users persona
- Do they have a blog or not
Along with these factors, we’ll take SEO parameters such as monthly traffic, Authority Score(domain rating in Ahref’s terms), total backlinks, and total referring domains(# of sites the backlinks are from).
Done so, this template will give you a 100% insight into which competitors are bagging how much SEO success, and how much you could aspire from their SEO(content and backlink) strategy.
How to Fill in the Data?
Steps to fill in the data are-
- Make a generic list of competitors first who are directly/indirectly competing with you, and could be SaaS/Marketplace/Agency or any other kind of business.
- Go to SEMRush/Ahrefs, and use their bulk domain checker feature to collect their SEO data.
- Add only important SEO metrics (Traffic/mo, Authority Score, Backlinks, Referring Domains) into consideration.
- Sort out the sheet by Direct to Indirect competitors to keep the most important competitors’ data first.
Here’s a worked-out template, and here’s a black template for you to use.
Why Use This Template?
- To identify and prioritize your competitors to several extent.
- To have an understanding of who is prioritizing SEO as a marketing channel and who is not.
- To select the best competitors to aspire your own SEO content strategy
Competitor Content Strategy Breakdown Template
Once you get to know your winning competitors, it’s time to understand their content game in and out and take action from those breakdowns.
To be honest, this is the most important part of your content marketing strategy. Because this is where you can read through the secret sauces of your competitors, and maybe make it better for your content game.
A typical content strategy breakdown looks like this-
Both in the table and the graphs, we have a few metrics-
- Total traffic vs content groups
- Average traffic vs content groups
- Number of pages created vs content groups.
All this put together, you’ll get to know what types of content a brand is creating, which content are bringing them the most SEO traffic in total, and which is bringing good traffic per content. Plus, how many contents have been created under each type will also show up here.
How to Fill in the Data?
You have to have an SEMRush subscription to go along with the steps. The steps are-
- Down the top SEO pages and their traffic data from SEMRush/AHrefs
- Identify the URL patterns and label them against content types. For example, any content with /newsroom/ URL slug goes as company news and any content with /service/ slug goes as service pages. Conditional formatting could be the easiest way to go for this.
- Add the total and average traffic info from the SEMRush/Ahrefs file into the table. Try to make sure you’ve covered the majority of the contents from the top pages this way-
- Sometimes, some content can’t be put under URL slug patterns. In this case, highlight them with different colours and identify the content groups with colours in the table instead of slug patterns.
- Create pie charts by selecting ‘slug’/‘types of pages’ as one data row and ‘Total Traffic’, ‘Avg Traffic’, and ‘No of Pages’ separately as the second data row. This will end up with three pie charts that go as ‘Avg traffic vs Slug’, ‘No of pages vs Slug’, and ‘Total traffic vs slug’.
Once these pie charts show up, go and study which contents are contributing to the website’s SEO success, and what’s the extent of contribution.
Here’s a worked-out template, and here’s a black template for you to use.
Why Use This Template?
- To understand a competitor’s content marketing playbook beyond what you can see on Ahrefs SEMRush or Similarweb.
- Pick up and adapt to the winning content ideas of your industry, and give it a flair of your brand tone.
- Gather seed or root keywords and research to find untapped content ideas that most of your competitors have missed.
- To understand the demand side of your audience, and what’s been driving them towards your competitors’ websites.
- The ToFu, MoFu and BoFu tier contents, their internal linking, CTA placement, conversion technique etc.
Content Performance(Traffic-Keyword) Tracker Template
This template is a pivot table that helps you to have a detailed breakdown of what contents are fetching SEO traffic from which keywords, and at which position they are ranking at. This can be done for both your competitors and your own, as long as you have the keyword positions file from Ahrefs and SEMRush.
Say, you have found a particular content group performing very well in terms of total/average traffic, and you want to see the exact keyword ranks this traffic is coming from. This performance template helps you to have a closer look at it.
The template contains-
- Keywords that a particular URL is ranking for.
- Keyword metrics such as search volume, keyword difficulty, position of the URL, and the traffic the URL is getting from the template.
The whole list is in order of the traffic Z-to-A, meaning the more total traffic, the higher position a URL gets in the list.
How to Fill in the Data?
- Search the domain in the Domain Overview tool of SEMRush.
- Select the keyword number under Organic Search Traffic-
- Download the keyword file from the Export button. SEMRush might limit your number of rows to export to 30,000. In that case, limit the search volumes to a minimum 20, 50, etc(because they are mostly long tails or irrelevant to the content’s context), and the position to up to 50, 40, or 30(since they won’t be responsible for SEO traffic).
- Import the file to Google sheet, and insert a pivot table with the following format-
Done, you can play around and expand the rows to find the keywords, volume, traffic, and other data.
Here’s a worked-out template that could be used for your own
Why Use This Template?
This template could be used for-
- A broken-down analysis of any content’s success of your competitors.
- To pick up content patterns for ToFu, MoFu, BoFu tier contents and brainstorm further content ideas.
- To pick up keywords(and create pages) that the competitors have not optimized, but contain good SEO potential.
- Also, to keep track of your performing content and non-performing ones.
Content Strategy Stack Template
This is a template that solidifies your ideas around what contents to include in a strategy, which funnel positions they will be, and evidence/potential of success.
We call it the Content Strategy Stack.
If you’ve done your market analysis, user search pattern(keywords) research and competitors’ content strategy breakdown right, this template helps you to visualize how your content marketing playbook is right.
This template contains-
- List of ToFu(landing pages), BoFu(lead magnets, templates, tools, etc), and BoFu(blogs, glossaries, tutorials, etc) contents.
- At least one example of competitors which have written similar content and fetched good organic traffic out of it.
- If no competitor data is found, keyword data(search volume, difficulty) could be added.
To understand the context better, let’s take a customer support SaaS as an example.
From the hundreds of ideas you’ve bumped into(in the previous steps), you will only find some of them relevant to what a customer support SAAS has to offer. Among those, even fewer of content ideas will have evidence/potential of success.
By evidence, we mean that at least one direct/indirect competitor is getting good traffic and has put CTAs on those pages.
And by potential, we mean the keywords of the content will have good search competition and somewhat decent keyword difficulties.
And finally, the funnelling indicates how much of a priority they should be. Example- a Top of the Funnel content idea with good competitor’s success evidence should be in higher priority than a competitive MoFu/BoFu content idea.
How to Fill in the Data?
There is actually not a very structured guideline on how to fill in the data of this template.
Instead, what’s recommended is to keep an eye open to any content ideas you bump into while analyzing competitors’ content strategy, take note of that, and later do some keyword research around it.
Often, you’ll have those ‘aha’ moments after you consider how good of an idea it would be for your SaaS to write content around a particular group.
Later, collect those competitor URL+traffic data, or the keyword+search volumes and put them into the right funnel labels.
Usually, the three funnel tiers contain these contents within them-
| BoFu(Bottom of the funnel) | MoFu(middle of the funnel) | ToFu(top of the funnel) |
| Feature Landing Pages Industry-type Landing Page Business-type Landing Page Use Case Landing Pages Role-based Landing Pages Competitor ComparisionIntegration PagesEvent/occasion Based Pages | Tools/calculatorsGenerators/creator toolsTemplatesPillar Resources | Blogpost Listicle articlesGlossariesPR materials(news, interviews, podcast episodes, etc)UGC contentsDirectoriesWebinar pages |
Here’s a worked-out template for you to use.
Why Use This Template?
- An organized presentation of what content ideas from different funnel positions would look together, and prioritise accordingly.
- To cross-check whether you’d get good traction out of investing in a certain type of content.
- To gather confidence about whether you’re maximizing your last mover’s advantage in SEO or not.
Content Calendar Template
All of the templates you’ve gone through serve the purpose of creating your content calendar that you will implement and grab that last mover’s advantage in SEO.
Hence, this last template is something that takes the most amount of work. Done right, you will have a complete list of which ToFu, MoFu and BoFu contents to create, along with these data sets with each content-
- Type of Pages (blogpost, templates, landing pages, tools, etc)
- Existing page (Y/N), and if yes, then link of your existing page.
- Funnel position(ToFu, MoFu or BoFu)
- Content-Type
- Content title
- Target keywords with keyword data(search volume, KD etc)
- Competitor reference URL with the monthly traffic data(from SEMRush/Ahrefs) of that particular URL
How to Fill in the Data?
To fill in the template data, you have to make a conscious choice of which types of content you are going to write for your brand from the previously mentioned template(content strategy stack).
If you can select those, follow these steps-
- From the content performance template, gather keyword ideas of the type of content you have chosen to write.
- Brainstorm around the keyword ideas and find a complete list of keywords that could be targeted. The raw keyword file will look like this for each content type-
- Filter the keywords by intents, relevance to your product, difficulty and whether you’ve already written articles on those keywords or not.
- Create content titles based on the keywords, and fill in the other essential information of the content calendars.
- Once you’re done with creating a list of contents, create a separate file containing the month-by-month content execution plan. This will take keyword competitions, funnel positions, relevance to your product features/use cases, and several other factors in mind based on your content execution bandwidth.
- For those of the contents which overlap with your existing pages, consider re-touching the contents instead of creating from scratch.
Here are worked-out templates for BoFu, MoFu and ToFu content calendars.
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