If your content development is an afterthought, you’re doing it wrong.
That is, unless you don’t mind volatile performance and results that won’t last through the inevitable algorithm shift a few months post-publishing.
Content development without strategy simply adds to the noise and endless sea of mediocre content, and it rarely produces tangible marketing results. If you’re one of the nearly 67% of content marketers who reported they don’t know how to allocate their resources, then you need to start thinking strategically about your content.
In this post, we’ll walk you through our content development process and why it works, including some real case studies to give you all the inspiration you need.
- What Is Content Development?
- Our Content Development Process
- Analyze
- Ideate
- Strategize
- Create
- Promote
- Measure
- Optimize
- High-Value Content Examples
- Content Development That Delivers
What Is Content Development?
Content development is the strategic process of creating relevant, high-quality content tailored to your target audience. It involves planning, writing, editing, promoting, and optimizing content across various formats (articles, blog posts, videos, etc.) to achieve specific business goals.
High-quality, strategic content can:
- Increase website traffic
- Grow topical authority
- Boost brand awareness
- Drive conversions
- Generate leads
Successful content development drives significant traffic. Just ask Purple how their traffic increased by 137% with this strategy.
If you’re hard to impress, maybe the 6,409% traffic growth for FSC will make you sit up a little straighter.
Both sites utilized a content marketing strategy that employed our seven steps for effective content development: analyzing, ideating, strategizing, creating, promoting, measuring, and optimizing.
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Benefits of Online Content Development
Some company stakeholders might see content development as an outdated or ineffective process, but the truth is that well-done content can be your golden ticket to transforming online success into tangible business growth.
Content can serve a variety of purposes, such as lead generation, brand awareness, increasing website traffic, boosting conversions, assisting the sales process, and more.
Such content development strategies often focus on either:
- SEO: Creating SEO content to rank high in search engine results, building organic traffic and consumer interest
- Link building: Creating content that attracts links from other websites, building brand authority and buzz
The most effective strategies, however, do both.
Content that generates links and dominates the SERP is incredibly valuable. Once you have a significant audience and authority, you can get even more out of content, optimizing it for conversions, public relations initiatives, and other high-value marketing goals.
That said, it’s not always possible or practical to create content that does it all. Beginning with easy wins — keywords with low search volume and low competition — can be a good way to build momentum and help lay the groundwork for future content.
Many businesses know they need to work on content development but lack the resources or expertise to overcome major hurdles. Like any marketing initiative, creating content requires upfront investment, and it can take time to reap the benefits.
Here’s how working with experts at Siege Media can help:
| Content Development Pain Point | Solution |
|---|---|
| Inconsistent traffic growth | Siege’s expert content strategists align your business’s goals with proven strategies to build consistent traffic. |
| Lack of design resources | Siege Media’s graphic designers pair their killer eye for content with SEO best practices, creating value-additive images in your unique design style. |
| Low team bandwidth | The Siege Media team can manage the entire process, from ideation to reporting. |
| Poor conversion rates | Conversion-focused content can be more difficult to achieve, so trust an agency like Siege with a proven track record. |
| Lack of technical experience | Our team of top-performing content marketers can work in any content management system (CMS), help you achieve better web design, and develop the tools you need without touching a line of code. |
| Lack of subject matter experts (SMEs) who are also skilled writers | It’s hard to find someone who’s both an expert in your niche and a skilled writer. We do the hard part for you, working with your team to achieve the perfect balance. |
Our Content Development Process
After generating more than $85 million in traffic value per year for our clients, we consider ourselves experts at creating content that generates real value.
At Siege, our content development process consists of seven primary steps. This process captures traffic opportunities and acts as a framework to create something that outranks the competition in the long term.
Step 1. Analyze
Content audits take on several forms. In the spirit of this post, we’ll discuss these audits for the purpose of content development.
Reviewing existing website content is critical to finding traffic opportunities. Even if your site creates little to no value, it’s almost always better to start from that, rather than deleting it all and starting from scratch.
When analyzing content, take note of:
- Posts that generate the most links
- Posts with keywords that rank in the top three organic results of the SERP
- Posts that rank on page two or greater
- Existing content gaps between you and your competitors
- Pages that generate the most conversions
- Posts that compete for the same or very similar keywords
Segmenting into these groups helps visualize potential content and uncover existing posts that can be optimized to boost rankings, creating early success with fewer resources. Ideally, you’ll marry the easy-win gaps in competitor content with a proven promotable concept in a receptive outreach market.
Beyond the marriage of content gaps for promotable pieces, this analysis gives a valuable springboard for SEO content ideas you can create to rank organically.
Also, note your current CMS and explore its full capabilities. Features like no-code capabilities, multi-device support, large plugin libraries, and customizability can all turn a simple web page into a content powerhouse.
Step 2. Ideate
The second step of the content development process blends creativity with data. Think of concepts and topics that meet your business’s goals, audience needs, and development resources.
Consider different content types and where each type performs best:
- Written content
- Video
- Podcasts
- Images or illustrations
Synergistic content development across your website, social media channels, ads, and more will give you the best shot at a higher ROI.
But it’s better to dominate one space than to struggle in all of them. If you don’t have the capabilities to maintain high-quality content across channels, start small and build on your success.
Let’s say you’re a fintech SaaS company with development resources looking to build authority in the investment space.
If you conduct an original study and publish original content, this could be a promotable asset that sets you apart from competitors and generates buzz. Alternatively, thought leadership content published on your business’s blog and promoted across socials can achieve a similar effect with fewer resources.
| Goal | Content Development Strategy |
|---|---|
| Build traffic | Create top-funnel, informational content with low competition |
| Establish authority | Write in-depth guides and thought leadership content |
| Generate leads | Create mid-funnel comparison content and solution-focused resources |
| Increase conversions | Create bottom-funnel content addressing specific purchase concerns |
| Build links | Publish original research, data visualization, and uniquely valuable resources, promoting them to relevant outlets |
Step 3. Strategize
You’ve analyzed your potential opportunities; now it’s time to vet those ideas. Sometimes, an idea you were initially super excited about doesn’t work out.
It’s just like when you have the perfect outfit in your head, but you try it on and lo and behold, it looks like a toddler dressed you. We’re trying to avoid any toddler fashion fiascos and think about potential ROI early in the content development process.
Essentially, you’re looking for proof that an initial idea is worth the investment. You can do this in a few ways, but we’ll talk specifically about social proof.
Of course, validating linkable content comes with plenty of caveats, but generally, social proof is when a comparable website has created a similar piece of content and seen success.
Social proof can be repins, retweets, upvotes, links, and everything in between. What to avoid here is validating an idea with something that looks like social proof but isn’t.
Let’s say we’re a consumer-facing website that helps find apartments, and we’re trying to validate an idea for a post about apartment decorating ideas.
| What to look for in social proof | What to avoid in social proof |
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Keep these factors in mind to determine whether your topic can be built out to be bigger and better and generate the same, if not more, links.
Step 4. Create
You’ve analyzed your current web content strategy and validated content ideas. Now it’s time to put the legwork in.
Because web content development has gotten a bad rap for pumping out mediocre pieces, there are likely hundreds of other websites also covering your topic. That doesn’t mean your page can’t be the one readers click on.
Your content needs to be showstopping to stand out from the crowds, pleasing publishers, Google, and — most importantly — the people actually reading it.
Don’t settle for regurgitating the same surface-level information already out there. Think about how to make your content the best resource on any given topic. Conduct extensive research, leverage subject matter experts, create an interactive element, and develop something users can’t find anywhere else.
Leveraging AI can be incredibly useful — in fact, 99.6% of content marketers plan to use AI tools in 2025. But AI shouldn’t replace human creativity and expertise. Instead, use it to accelerate research and outline creation or as a collaboration partner for fleshing out complex ideas.
Developing better content that answers more questions, is more visually appealing, and has a better user experience adds value that will give you a leg up in competitive landscapes.
You should also consider your content calendar, strategizing when updates and new pages go live. Whether you start with easy wins to build momentum before tackling competitive keywords or choose to work off a topic cluster model, find a cadence that makes sense for your goals.
Step 5. Promote
You’ve successfully identified and validated topics worth creating and subsequently built a beautiful piece of content.
So the hard part’s over, right?
Unfortunately, without promotion strategies like digital PR link building to gain links and visibility, much of that time and effort spent creating content is wasted on an incomplete content development strategy. In fact, the number one result on Google generally has nearly four times as many links as positions two through 10.
Paying for links is an unsustainable strategy for content development and will nearly always penalize your page in some capacity.
Everyone wants links these days, which makes link building extremely competitive. It’s time to throw out those mass-sent, cold outreach emails. If we’ve learned anything as the internet has evolved, it’s that people want interaction with people, not a generic template.
May we present to you, being human:
Believe it or not, 50 personalized emails will go much further than 150 mass-sent emails. That’s because most people on the internet have been around and see through link building schemes.
Link building might be popular, but it’s not the only way to promote your content. Leverage other resources to distribute content like newsletters, social media, or even as part of the sales process for synergistic promotion.
Step 6. Measure
Content development without a reporting plan is like scuba diving without a mask. Yes, you’re technically doing it, but is the trouble worth it if you can’t see where you’re heading?
First, take a look at your goals and see which KPIs will help you measure content marketing ROI. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach here, but some KPIs might include:
- Traffic: Page visits
- Brand authority: Links
- Brand awareness: Social media mentions
- Conversions: CTA clicks
- Qualified traffic: Time on page
Content development often (but not always) relies on organic growth, so it takes time for content to mature. Start reporting as each project goes live, but set up automatic reporting or revisit your metrics regularly, giving it some time before claiming whether a topic has succeeded or needs more work.
Step 7. Optimize
Optimization is key to a content development strategy that builds passive links and maintains your traffic.
Updating content to remain relevant and improving SEO when applicable can generate continuous traffic long after the original posting date.
For example, this statistics post by Nextiva generates passive links year after year (at the time of writing, it boasts 1.2K links.) This wouldn’t be possible if it were never revisited and updated after the initial upload.
Perform a content audit to find opportunities to improve on-page SEO for existing posts. For example, the statistics post above should be revisited annually to update the data (delete stale data points or add new ones) to remain relevant.
You can refurbish this strategy with evergreen content by updating any older information.
Generally, you should aim to avoid being *that guy* on the SERP that searchers scroll past after seeing the aged date of the post.
Content Development Strategies: 3 High-Value Examples
We know this is a lot of information to consider, but any content worth making is worth making well. If you’re still on the fence, let’s chat through a few examples of how this process has worked for different client goals.
1. Conversions
Let’s start with the beast: conversions. Many content marketers hesitate to promise conversions based on content, but we know how to make it happen at Siege.
The key to creating converting content is to find what your qualified traffic really needs. For example, this post from Zapier earned over 200 conversions.
This post provides valuable free resources that their target audience needs — then converts that qualified traffic when it demonstrates how Zapier is an easy solution to their problems.
2. Promotion
Next, let’s talk about links. We have many clients looking to maximize links and cash in on the buzz they provide.
We use a couple of different approaches, so we’ll discuss Kraken’s PR content strategy, where we used our favorites to earn over 440 links in just eight months.
We started with organic link content, creating guides and resources that users would link to and share without our PR experts lifting a finger. Next, we had them focus on survey posts, gathering original data to promote and share with high-authority industry publications.
These approaches work together nicely, earning authority from organic links and using that momentum to drive our manual promotion.
3. Traffic
Let’s head back to basics. After all, we haven’t forgotten our roots and know that traffic is the key to online content development success. Any solid content marketer can increase traffic, but a real test is if they can maintain performance through a major site change.
Zoom brought this challenge to us as they migrated from Zoom.us to Zoom.com. Not only did we maintain their success, but we helped them grow through this migration, earning a 22% increase in sitewide traffic value and generating over 2.3 million impressions.
To achieve this feat, we took advantage of Zoom’s authority, which they earned through the popularity of their Zoom Meetings product, to help boost their newer hybrid work and AI-based products. We paired authority-earning content like statistics posts and trends reports with bottom-funnel content about Zoom’s products to find qualified traffic in a growing niche, getting Zoom’s content to searchers early.
Content Marketing Development That Delivers
Content development done right involves careful planning and continuous review of strategies, knowing when to pivot a project and when to ride out changing attitudes or algorithms.
Sound like a lot of work? We won’t lie to you — it is. But we do it time and time again because we know that this content marketing strategy works.
We’ve used this approach to generate over $86 million in annual traffic value for clients like Zapier, Zendesk, and QuickBooks.
This development process has doubled our client’s traffic (more than once), and that’s being modest. We’ll be the first to admit that content development is not for the faint of heart, but it’s always worth it.
