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How to choose what developer content to build

How to choose what developer content to build

One of your biggest challenges as a Developer Advocate will be determining which topics to focus on with your content. Often, Developer Advocates are given an edict to "build content and drive growth," without any clear roadmap for doing so. To address this challenge, especially if you work at an early-stage startup, you need a rudimentary knowledge of SEO, and you need to work closely with your broader Developer Relations team, especially Product Marketing and Growth, to build a content list.

For larger Developer Relations teams, I created the Content Program Manager role specifically to coordinate content production across all members of the team.

Many early-stage companies just start building content without a plan. They also make the mistake of thinking "inside-out". Inside-out content is content that's about your products or services. The problem is that with early-stage companies, nobody knows or cares about your product or services. Inside-out content certainly has its place. Docs, screencasts, and other materials that explain your product are essential components of both pre- and post-sales marketing.

However, in order to drive top of funnel growth, you need to think "outside-in", meaning your content needs to address topics or ideas that everyone is already searching for and talking about. Moreover, this outside-in content should be closely related to areas where your company can speak with authority…an engineering approach, technology choice, engineer on staff, or whatever else you can use to claim expertise.

In this post, I'll give you a high-level view of SEO and then some prescriptive guidance to find the topics that will perform best for you. When thinking about applying this guidance to your business, think about the outside-in topics that will drive the most attention to you and which you already have topic authority.

SEO for developer content

In the early days of SEO, Google would reward pages that addressed a single keyword. Thus sprang the notion that one must create a page for each keyword of interest. As a result, the Internet became rife with weak content and people who searched for a keyword would quickly bounce from pages that didn't offer the answers they sought.

Today, the Google algorithm is different. Through a combination of PageRank and analysis of user behavior in Google Chrome, Google is able to identify if search results fulfill user intent. For example, if you searched for "web analytics dashboards," Google is able to determine which pages actually provide the user with the answers they sought. Pages that provide answers are ranked higher than pages with a fast and high bounce rate.

A more modern approach to SEO is to think about broader topics of interest. In this way, a single page ranks for many keywords. The end result should be something we all desire more of from the web: comprehensive content that is highly useful.

In fact, you could literally throw out all the rest of my advice and focus on this one thing and you’d already be ahead of the game: build deeply technical and singularly authoritative content that developers will love to read.

So, the first prescriptive guidance I'll offer about what content to build is to begin with a brainstorming session. Each phase of this session will help you get to a list of relevant keyword topics and a rough outline for each:

  1. List all the keywords that you feel like your company should rank for. Be exhaustive.
  2. Analyze keywords to ensure that they have sufficient volume
  3. Start clustering keywords into topic areas.
  4. Use the keyword clusters to write a high-level outline for each topic area.

Step 1: List all keywords

Getting back to our example of a company trying to rank for web analytics dashboards, some ideas for keywords could be:

  • topic web analysitcs dashboard products
  • best web analytics frameworks
  • standards for web analytics
  • how to use web analytics dashboards
  • questions to answer when building a web analytics dashboard
  • (and so on)

You don’t need to overthink this. Just go with the flow and list all the keywords you think people who should be using your product would search for.

Step 2: Analyze keywords for sufficient volume

Using a tool like Clearscope, you can evaluate the strength of each of your keywords. Remember, depending on how focused your company's subject area is, your keyword volume may be really low. This is where your best judgment is going to come into play, and you'll need to determine if your keywords are too niche to focus on.

From here, you can input your keywords into Google itself and examine the results. The results help you determine the different types of "intent" users are searching for. If the top results are all related, then you know you have a strong keyword by both volume and focused intent.

If the top results are not related, consider splitting your keyword into additional keywords. Again, use your best judgment since developer-focused content tends to be highly focused and niche anyway.

Repeat this process for all your keywords.

Step 3: Organize into topics

From here, you'd start to cluster keywords. You can use a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush to analyze the top ranking results for each of the keywords you've listed. If there seems to be overlap between the keywords, those keywords probably belong to the same topic. If there's no overlap, then you're probably better off splitting into separate topics.

I should note: there's no real algorithm for this kind of thing. And, often, developer-focused keywords have such low search volume that even if the technique I've described indicates they should be different topics, you may be better off combining them into one page. You have to use your best judgment, and this is where it is particularly difficult for developer-focused companies. Because topics in our subject domains are often low volume (relative to the rest of the population), it is often hard to hire an outside agency to help you. Seek out others with experience doing this for a developer audience, specifically.

Step 4: Create your outline

This list of keywords can then be reorganized into an outline. And the resulting content will be a comprehensive, and likely very useful, primer on your topic. As I mentioned before, don’t try to “optimize” the page for keywords. Instead just focus on writing great content. The end result should be content you’re proud of.

Your page will subsequently answer many different user questions, and users will probably spend a good chunk of time on your page reading your high quality content. It's a win for your search rankings, and a win for the user, who will come away having hopefully learned many new things.

I find it helpful to use Clearscope to help me outline. I start with my keyword research, and from there, Clearscope helps me identify related topics, questions, or concepts I should cover in my outline.

Prioritizing the right content

After your first phase, you've built a list of topics and outlines for each topic based on relevant keywords. The next step helps you prioritize which topics will be most effective in helping you drive inbound traffic and growth.

For this, you need a very strong Product Marketing discipline to help you identify your biggest competitors. Remember, your top competitors may not even be another company or product. Rather, your top competitors may be ingrained behavior or techniques developers already use today. We often say that our biggest competitors in developer marketing are "I'll build it myself" or "What I'm doing is good enough for now." Developer hubris and developer inertia are often the most difficult barriers to adoption of new developer-focused products.

Again, using a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush, you can analyze your competitors for their highest ranked pages.

At this point, you need to determine whether or not you will have the appropriate level of site authority to depose one of the existing top-ranked pages. For developer-focused products, competing against Microsoft or Google is difficult. It doesn't mean it can't be done. But you may be better off picking off some of the other topics on your list, building your site authority from the ground up, and then taking on the Big Kahunas.

How long will it take to see results from SEO?

First off, SEO is a very wise investment to make. Ranking high for organic traffic attracts potential buyers with high intent and a predisposition for trying your product or evaluating your company. It is, dollar-for-dollar, a much stronger investment than paid search.

That said, SEO is the long game. It will take around 6-12 months to build your site authority and grow your organic traffic to a good level. If you have high existing site authority, it will be on the lower end of that spectrum. If not, it will be on the higher end. Further, add in about 3 months of research and writing so that you can start your SEO flywheel spinning.

In the end, however, once your SEO engine is running, the growth potential becomes exponential. Small, focused investments to start will yield large results over the long-term.

Are there any SEO shortcuts?

You or your founders may be daunted by the long-lead approach to SEO. The typical shortcut is to "just put out a page with some keywords," and while this kind of lightweight SEO can work, more often than not, you will end up lucking into success without understanding the fundamentals of why people may search for you in the first place.

Proper research and planning, as long as it may take, can help you do more than catch lightning in a bottle once or twice. It can help you establish high site authority, drive a stronger reputation among developers, and, consequentially, build and maintain a self-sustaining growth engine.