Content Strategist – FatRank

Many affiliate marketing companies or SEO agencies do not employ a Content Strategist and it is debatably the most important role in your team.

A Content Strategist requires versatile writing, expert-level knowledge of in-depth research and SEO know-how.

If you’re not sure what a content strategist does, don’t worry, you’re not alone.

Content Strategists understand a website’s content is a business asset

We will break down everything you need to know regards to Content Strategists.

What does a content strategist do?

A content strategist role is to carry out the following tasks.

Keyword Research to Find Content Gaps

Arguably the most important part of SEO is carrying out the best keyword research techniques.

When mapping out articles to write checking the search volume, keyword difficulty and search intent can make or break your strategy.

Using tools like ahrefs or semrush to plan the keyword research is a great help for your efforts.

Grouping of Keywords

Not every keyword deserves its own page and the content strategist needs to carefully group keywords into buckets.

A single page can rank for thousands of keywords if the content is crafted perfectly.

The manual process of grouping keywords is crazy in September 2022 because there are some amazing keyword clustering tools to do the hard work for you.

Trying to write multiple topic pages are very difficult to rank nowadays and the majority of sites ranking focus on single topic articles (one single topic can still have thousands of keywords to go after).

For more information on single topic pages, I strongly recommend reading the one page for one corpus article where I break down live examples.

Content Writing

A content strategist rarely writes new content from scratch because usually manages a team of content writers.

However important pillar posts are sometimes written by the content strategists because these articles can prop up the site with insane levels of traffic.

You should hire a content strategist full time to only carry out content writing though as his time is better spent on the strategies and managing the content production output.

Content Strategy Plans

The strategy plans delegated by the content strategist should include:

Content Expansion

Once an article is uploaded to the website it certainly is not finished.

Every few months your progressive optimisation team should look for content expansion strategies to enhance the rankings further.

During the progressive optimisation stage, you will find accidental keywords which you can add to the content or give ideas to write a new post on the accidental keyword.

What Skills Are Needed To Be a Content Strategist?

The skills needed to be a content strategist are:

• Great Reading and Writing Skills
• Be well versed in research
• Being able to learn from failure
• Adapt for constant algorithm updates
• Educate team members consistently
• Blame the process and not the people
• Love for content

To become a content strategist, you’ll need at least five years of experience as a digital content manager, web writer or content editor.

Two Types of Content Strategist

There are two types of content strategists:

• Front-end content strategists
• Back-end content strategists

Both content strategist types are integral to the quality and quantity of content production.

What is a Front End Content Strategist?

A front end content strategist is primarily focused on the customer user experience.

With a love for the content, a front end content strategist makes recommendations about the content itself.

The front-end content strategist answers questions like these:

• Who’s our target demographic audience?
• Why (for real) are we creating content for those people?
• What content do they need most?
• How well do we meet those needs today?
• How can we meet those needs better tomorrow – while also serving the goals of the business?
• How can we better coordinate the efforts of all our content creators?

The user journey and tone of voice is the main focus of attention here.

But a front end content strategist alone cannot scale the content production fast enough.

This is where a back-end content strategist compliments this role.

What is a Back End Content Strategist?

A back end content strategist is primarily focused on structure, scalability, and technology.

With a love of scaling the content production, a back end content strategist makes recommendations on more efficient ways to handle more content in efficient and powerful ways.

The back-end content strategist answers questions like these:

• How can we organise content so that our authors can easily store and retrieve it
• What automation tools can we use to syndicate the content to all social media channels
• How do we set up SOPs so that modules are consistent and can be easily assembled (mixed and matched) on-demand to meet customer needs?
• How do we make sure that we creating content as quickly as possible to build out all topical clusters
• How do we scale our processes so we can do more with the same resources?
• How do we take advantage of the wealth of content we have and surface it for our customers in a way that is fresh and valuable?
• How do we future-proof our content to take advantage of the next big thing?

Summary

So the content strategist has a lot of tasks from planning, writing, editing and ensuring the compelling copy adheres to the brand philosophy.

When creating a team of SEO content writers to triple or even quadruple your content production you certainly need a great content strategist to manage the growth.

Having all the SOPs for onpage checklists, onboarding new writers and processes for ordering new content really needs to be bulletproof.

Measuring and analysing what’s working and the areas which need huge improvements is worth the content strategist wage alone.

Successful companies need both front-end content strategy and back-end strategy to deliver content that wins over customers while achieving business goals.

What do the Best Content Strategists say?

We asked some of the best content strategists to de-mystify the job role.

Scott Calland

The best content strategists understand the tone of voice and pain points of the brand’s target audience.

With the task to map out content roadmaps then keyword research skills is a must.

Liaising with content writers to create compelling content that resonates with your existing subscribers, yet is differentiated and engaging enough to draw in new customers.

The content strategist role brings together concept to completion.

Kasra Dash

As a content strategist, I use my understanding of psychology to shape the narrative of the website copy.

A content strategist job is to explain the direction of the web pages being written on the websites.

Guiding the content writers with the tone of voice, desired outcome and create content experiences tailored to the company’s target audience.

The best content strategists research the top-ranked websites and drive the decisions based on data.

With Natural Language Processing engrained into the algorithms, content production has become more scientific and mathematical than ever.

Content strategists primary goal is to make sure all content creators match the search intent for the topics they are writing about.