In the increasingly competitive realm of organic content marketing, it’s crucial for success to commit to the long term and make a robust plan. Adding half-decent, semi-relevant content to your website every other week might have cut it with Google in the past. But now, if you’re serious about rising through the rankings organically, you need blogs tailored to what your customers are searching for, planned and pushed out in advance of the seasons they’ll be searching for it, and published at a set cadence that search engines like Google recognize and reward.
What is a content calendar?
A content calendar is a text file or spreadsheet that documents seasonal trends or events about certain months, weeks, or days of the year. This is used to help set what your content will be about that time of year.
How do you make a content calendar?
A content calendar can be a plain text document containing a bullet point list of notable events each month. A more elaborate calendar could be a spreadsheet using the y-axis for months and the x-axis for many types of fields, seasonal air conditioning trends, disease awareness months, and more. Another option is highlighting particular months, weeks, and days in your Google Calendar.
What’s a good industry as an example?
Seasonal content calendars for air conditioning companies are king. If you’re writing content for an air conditioning client over the course of a year, the longest trend worth highlighting is the Atlantic hurricane season — from the start of June through the end of November. During May and June, you should post content about preparing your air conditioner for hurricane season.
Two months into the year, the focus is on spring. It’s a great time to encourage maintenance in preparation for summer. For the summer, the hot topic is that AC use is higher than at any other time of the year. When they break, owners will want to fix it immediately. Content that describes the signs of a broken AC performs best here. For example:
- AC Won’t Turn On
- AC Isn’t Cooling
- AC Keeps Making Clunking Noise
By the summer, the Atlantic hurricane season has already started and will last through November. Hurricane prep content should then transition to content about recovering from a hurricane.
Healthcare Awareness Content Calendars
In a broader context, the medical fields have many awareness months, weeks, and days throughout the year — and all of them overlap with at least one thing or another. October is known as National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but it’s also Down Syndrome Awareness Month, and contains Mental Illness Awareness Week, and additionally, October 6 is recognized as World Cerebral Palsy Day.
The advantage of having this content calendar for SEO purposes is that a good amount of the work is already done with it. You know your topic — the rest is researching the best framing and phrasing for these topics. For example:
- How to Perform a Breast Self-Exam
- Is Mental Illness Hereditary?
- Will My Child With Cerebral Palsy be Able to Drive?
Having the foresight to plan, write and publish relevant titles ahead of these seasonal trends means that by the time they arrive, your blogs are already recognized by, and ranking with, search engines like Google. You already know the subject has a decent search volume due to its timeliness — and you framed the question in a way people are most likely to search. The next steps are finding the right keywords for your content and producing and sharing this content in a timely manner.
Allegrow Utilizes Many Strategies to Improve Your Digital Marketing Presence
If you need help communicating your services — home, healthcare, or otherwise — to an audience, Allegrow can help. Contact us for more information about our digital marketing services.