What Is Content Development?

Content development is researching, developing, and publishing content as part of a website content marketing strategy. The primary purpose of content development is to increase website traffic, grow brand awareness, provide value to readers and increase revenue.

Why is content development important?

Content on your website, whether it be blog posts, articles, press releases, and even videos and infographics can pay big dividends over the long-term.

With a consistent publishing schedule of high-quality content, you’ll increase organic traffic to your website and scale your business.

If it’s the right kind of traffic then this should explode your revenue.

This blog post on content development is the perfect example.

In this post, we are providing you with information about content development.

Chances are you’re a marketing director or a founder of a company, who is interested in learning more about content development and what processes are involved in creating good content.

You’re also potentially interested in commissioning content development, rather than developing it yourself, which ties in perfectly with the content writing services we offer.

Similarly, you should develop content around keywords that your ideal customer is searching in Google.

The 3-step content development process

Content development for your brand will be unique to your goals and needs, but these 3 steps will help you form a predictable content development process that will ensure you’re consistently publishing quality content and getting a great return on your investment.

1. Establish clear goals

First, you must know your audience, your competitors, what your goals are, and what “success” looks like for your content marketing.

Here are some great questions to ask to help you set goals. 

• Who are our top competitors? 
• How much content are you going to create? 
• How much are you going to pay content writers? 
• Who is our ideal target audience?
• Why are we developing content? 
• What are our most important content KPIs?

It’s important to understand why you’re developing content. Where is it leading to in the future? What are two years going to look like from now? If you go into creating content without having clear goals or understanding who you’re creating content for or why, you’re not going to be able to monetize your content well.

2. Research and plan 

There are various forms of content, but based on research we’ve done, you’re most likely reading this sentence if you’re most interested in developing written content, such as SEO blog posts.

We recommend finding topics for your blog that focus on “evergreen” keywords, meaning the content will be relevant to your target audience for many years to come. 

The reason this is so important is that you can develop momentum with your traffic as you publish more and more of it, unlike “newsy” content which only provides periodic bursts of traffic.

You’ll need to research keywords to understand exactly what your target audience is searching for, and then be selective about the keywords you choose to develop content around based on factors such as their competitiveness, and the current domain authority of your own website, which plays a key role in determining how likely it is you are able to rank for keywords that have a certain level of competitiveness.

Here are some good keyword research tools to use:

• Ahrefs
• SEMrush
• Moz
• Google keyword planner

Using these SEO tools you can also look at top-ranking pieces of content of your competitor’s websites to understand what is performing well already, and then reverse engineer their success to establish your own — but of course, doing so in a more comprehensive way to provide more value to your audience and increase the chance that your content will perform better.

For example, we found that a competitor of ours had a blog post that was ranking well for the focus keyword “content development”. 

The top-ranking article was bringing in 938 organic views per month from Google.

The keyword itself has 1,400 searches per month in the US.

“Content development” as a keyword isn’t overly competitive

The current top-ranking post wasn’t very comprehensive or valuable

The keyword “content development” and closely associated keywords weren’t overly competitive, and finally, “content development” is super relevant to the services we offer, and therefore this keyword and article topic became one that we can feel more comfortable investing in because it meets these criteria.

You should use a similar process to determine if a topic is viable for your website, and repeat this for all your content to ensure you develop a large library of relevant content that helps build your business and provides massive returns on your investment. 

3. Create your content

It’s time to create your content. Here’s the process we use at Writing Studio broken down into 7 easy steps.

1. Assign

First, you have to assign your content. Depending on your company size and structure, you may decide to work with one in-house content developer, a team of in-house content developers, contractors, or a content development company that provides fully managed content development services.

You’ll need to assign your team keywords, titles, editorial guidelines so that they can begin creating your content. It’s useful to come up with blog post templates for your content to streamline this part of the process. 

2. Create

Next comes the creation process, which is pretty self-explanatory. Your team of content developers will start creating your content based on the requirements and set goals. 

3. Revise

Revising content is an important part of quality assurance to make sure that the content you produce is factually accurate, relevant to your audience, has the right tone, technicality, and is all-around valuable. This may require a revision with your team or two, or if you work with a content development company, they may handle this internally for you. 

4. Editing

When creating written content, content editing and proofreading are especially important. This helps with user experience by making the content flow more smoothly, ensuring it’s free of simple spelling and grammatical errors, and it gives you another chance to pick out logical inconsistencies and factual errors in order to ensure the content you develop is as good as it can be.

Grammarly is a good software to use if you’re editing yourself, but of course, hiring a team of editors is ideal if you’re looking to scale things. 

5. Publish

The next step is to publish your content in your content management system (CMS), such as WordPress, Webflow Shopify, or any other. 

6. Assess results 

The last step in content development, which is too often overlooked is to research in detail the results of your content. Which content is providing you with the best return for your main KPIs? Is a certain type of content leading to more leads, and revenue (please track this).

If so, figure out why, and invest more resources into developing this type of content. You must get analytical and understand what’s working, what’s not working, and why, so you can continue to get better and better results with time.

7. Repeat  

Repeat this process over and over again. Take profits from your content, and reinvest it into the most profitable and valuable content you can provide. This way you will form a fuel to add to the fire that is your business growth. 

The bottom line

Content development is an important part of any effective content marketing strategy. While the results from creating content don’t necesarilly come quickly, with time, this can be one of the most effective ways to increase your traffic and bottom line

If you focus on creating optimized content that provides value to your target audience, you’ll get great results.

If you need to develop content for your website, consider Writing Studio’s content development services. We can create any type of content you need, on-demand.