If you’re going to spend hours writing thoughtful blog posts for your business, shouldn’t those posts actually do something for your business? Not just fill up the “Blog” page on your website, or give you one more link to share on social media, and definitely not become another piece of content you publish, promote twice, and then forget exists.
Your blog should earn its internet real estate.
It should help the right people discover your business and make your expertise easier to understand. It should give you a growing library of ideas you can point people toward, reference in conversations, and repurpose across the rest of your marketing. Most importantly, you should know why you’re writing each post in the first place, and that’s where a blog content strategy comes in.
I use an SEO-backed content strategy with my clients to figure out what their businesses should be writing about before we worry about filling a content calendar. It combines business strategy, audience understanding, search research, your actual expertise, and a plan for connecting those ideas over time. In this post, I’m walking you through the five parts of that framework: KNOW, UNDERSTAND, FIND, BECOME, and REPEAT.
Because the goal isn’t to publish more. It’s to build a body of work that helps the right people find you, learn from you, and understand why your work matters.
Ready? Let’s get into it.
First: What Is a Blog Content Strategy (And Why Does Your Business Need One)?
Here’s how I think about it:
A blog content strategy is the plan for turning what you want to be known for into a searchable, connected body of content that helps the right people find you, learn from you, and understand why your work matters.
And when you use blogging as the foundation of your larger content strategy, those posts can become the source material for the rest of your marketing, too.
That definition matters because it changes where we start. A lot of blog strategy starts with some version of What keywords should I rank for? And look, SEO matters. A lot. But I don’t think keywords should make your business decisions for you.
When I develop an SEO-backed content strategy for a client, the goal is to identify topics directly connected to where she wants to take her business, and then use search data to figure out how we can put those ideas in front of the people looking for them. That means we start with the business.
Step 1: KNOW — What Do You Want to Be Known For?
Before you open a keyword research tool, look at your business. What services do you want to sell? What problems do you want people to hire you to solve? What expertise do you want to demonstrate, who do you want to reach, and what ideas, perspectives, and approaches do you want people to associate with your name?
One of my favorite questions to ask when developing a whole blog strategy is:
If someone read ten posts on your blog, what would they assume you’re an expert in?
Take a look at your existing blog through that lens. Would the answer be obvious? Or would those ten posts make it look like you know a little bit about twelve different things?
Keyword research can tell you what people search for. It cannot tell you what your business should become known for. That distinction is important, because without it, you can end up with a blog that technically gets traffic but attracts people around a bunch of loosely related subjects. You’ve created pageviews, but you haven’t necessarily created a strong connection between you and the work you actually want.
The goal isn’t traffic. It’s getting the right eyeballs on the right ideas. That’s why KNOW comes first.
Step 2: UNDERSTAND — What Does Your Future Client Need?
Once we know what you want to be known for, we turn our attention to the person you want to reach, and we go deeper than a basic ideal-client profile. Think about the questions, problems, goals, frustrations, misconceptions, and decisions she has at different points in her journey. What does she know right now? What is she struggling with? What might she be searching for? And, just as importantly: What does she need to understand next?
Your future client isn’t necessarily searching for the exact service you sell. Someone who could eventually hire a blog strategist, for example, might be searching How do I get clients without social media? She knows she’s tired of feeding the social media machine. She doesn’t necessarily know yet that a strategic blog could be part of the answer.
Someone further along might search What should I blog about for my business? And someone who already understands what she needs might search blog content strategy. All three searches can lead the right person into my expertise.
That’s what a strong blog strategy does: It creates multiple entrances into your work. You aren’t only writing for the person who already knows your service exists, knows she needs it, and happens to use the same language you use to describe it.
She may not be looking for you yet, but she is looking for something.
Your content can meet her there. And remember, the stage she enters your blog post at isn’t necessarily the stage she has to leave at. A useful post answers the question she arrived with while helping her see the next question, problem, or possibility.
Which brings us to search.
Step 3: FIND — What Is She Actually Searching For?
Now we do the keyword research. We take what we learned in the first two steps and investigate how people actually talk about those subjects online, looking at search volume, related searches, competition, search intent, and what’s currently ranking. Essentially, we’re looking for the overlap between:
What you want to be known for × What your client cares about × What people actually search for
That overlap is where things get interesting. Without search research, you can write a brilliant, thoughtful article that nobody knows to look for. But if you start with search research, you can make the opposite mistake: choosing topics simply because a keyword tool says people search for them. That’s not much of a business strategy either.
Search data should inform your strategy, not dictate your strategy.
I didn’t decide I wanted to be known for blog content strategy because a keyword tool told me people were searching for it. I already knew this was territory I wanted Five Fathoms Creative to own. Search data helps validate that people are actually looking for information about it, and it shows me the language they’re using to find it.
Your business strategy tells us where you want to go. Your client tells us what matters to her. Search data helps us find the roads connecting the two. (And if you want the deeper dive on why the SEO side of this works differently for your blog than for the rest of your website, I wrote a whole post on blog strategy for SEO.)
Step 4: BECOME — Become the Answer
Getting someone to your website is not the finish line. Now we have to make the visit matter.
When someone lands on one of your posts from search, give her the answer she came for and satisfy the search intent. Then give her something Google can’t manufacture from a list of keywords: your expertise. Bring in your perspective, your frameworks, your experiences, your client stories, your distinctions, and your opinions, plus the things you disagree with and the questions you think she should be asking next.
Let’s say someone searches How often should I blog? I should definitely answer that question. But I might also tell her that frequency actually isn’t the first decision I’d make, because publishing four random posts every month isn’t necessarily better than publishing one or two posts intentionally connected to what you want to become known for.
Now she didn’t just get an answer to her question. She got access to how I think.
That is the difference between creating searchable information and creating searchable expertise. Getting a ranking isn’t the ultimate business goal. You want the person who finds you to leave knowing something about you: how you approach the problem, what you believe matters, and why she might want your help.
You don’t just want to find what people are searching for. You want to become what they’re searching for.
Step 5: REPEAT — Connect and Reinforce Your Ideas
This is where your blog stops being a collection of individual posts and starts becoming an actual body of work. Don’t treat every blog post as an island. Connect related posts through internal links, let a specific question lead into a bigger idea, and build groups of content around the expertise you want to own. Then take the strongest ideas from those posts and repeat them elsewhere.
Think of your blog like a library. A useful library isn’t just a room with a shitload of books in it. It’s organized so people can find what they’re looking for and discover what they need next, and your blog should work the same way.
Let’s use mine as an example. Someone lands on How Often Should I Blog?, which leads her to How to Build a Blog Content Strategy (this post), which leads her to Marketing Without Social Media. Maybe along the way she grabs One Blog. Thirty Days of Content.
One Google search didn’t create one pageview. It created an entrance into your world.
And as she sees the same core ideas reinforced across your blog, email, and social content, she starts to understand what you stand for and what you can help her do. That’s a much stronger foundation than coming up with a brand-new content idea every time you sit down to post.
The Use of Blogging as a Content Strategy
One of the most useful ways to think about blogging is not as another channel you have to create content for, but as the starting point for your content strategy. This is the work I’ve been doing with clients for years, and one of the biggest shifts came when I realized we didn’t have to keep coming up with entirely new content ideas every month. In fact, doing that can make your marketing harder.
When you’re constantly asking What should I post this week?, you’re essentially throwing spaghetti at the wall. Will this stick? Is this worth talking about? Did I already talk about this too much? What the heck am I supposed to say tomorrow?
But when you use blogging as the anchor of your content strategy, you start with the bigger idea. You give yourself room to fully explain what you think, answer the questions your future clients are asking, and create something useful enough to be found through search. Then you pull the smaller content from it. Your email can come from the blog. So can your social posts, Reels, carousels, examples, opinions, and little “this has been driving me nuts lately” posts, all from ideas you’ve already taken the time to think through.
Instead of:
Instagram idea → email idea → blog idea → Reel idea → start over → lose mind
You get:
One strategic idea → deep blog → a month of focused messaging.
That’s the role I want blogging to play in your content strategy. Your blog isn’t one more hungry mouth you have to feed. It can be where the food comes from.
And if you want to see exactly what that looks like in practice, grab One Blog. Thirty Days of Content. I’ll show you how to take one strategic, SEO-backed blog post and turn it into a month of connected marketing.
“But How Do I Know If My Blog Strategy Is Working?”
You might be wondering how you know whether all of this is actually paying off. There are numbers you can watch. For example, you can set up Google Search Console to follow how your website is performing in Google search, including which queries are leading people to your site and which posts are gaining visibility.
But I also think there are signs of a good content strategy that don’t fit neatly into a traffic report. You may notice you’re spending less time trying to keep up with social media and less time explaining your point of view from scratch. When someone asks a question, you already have a thoughtful post you can send them. Your marketing starts sounding more consistent because you’re reinforcing a defined set of ideas instead of constantly creating new ones. And you become more confident about what belongs on your blog because you can connect your topics back to what you want your business to be known for.
Those changes matter. The question isn’t only How many people saw this post? It’s also: Is my content making my marketing easier? Is it making my expertise clearer? Is it attracting the right people? Is it helping people understand what I want to be hired for?
Because that’s what your blog is there to do.
Build a Blog That Actually Supports the Business You’re Building
You don’t need another list of 50 blog post ideas. You need to know which ideas make sense for your business, and that’s the work behind my SEO-backed blog strategy.
We’ll figure out what you want to be known for, what your future clients need, and what they’re actually searching for. From there, I help develop strategic blog topics, write the metadata, and review your posts to make sure they’re optimized for both search engines and the humans you’re trying to reach. The goal is for you to stop second-guessing what to write and feel confident that your blog topics are directly connected to moving your business forward, and to getting the right eyes on exactly what you want to be known for.
Explore my SEO-backed blog strategy if you want help figuring out what your business should be writing about and building the strategy behind it. And if the strategy sounds great but the actual writing is the part you don’t want to do? Check out Anchor Content and let me handle the writing, too.
Not ready for either? Start with One Blog. Thirty Days of Content. and see how much farther one strong piece of evergreen content can take you.
Your blog doesn’t need more content for content’s sake. It needs a job. Let’s give it one.
