A Typical Content Plan for SEO

In the old days of SEO, ranking more or less followed a simple formula that went something like this:

  • Write a page of content for every phrase you want to target
  • Put your keyword in the title, heading and body of the content
  • Link to the page from other pages and other websites, using anchor text (the link text that the user clicks) that matches the keyword target

It’s not so simple anymore. User experience, and content quality are more important than ever. While we are capable of producing amazing, multi-media, rich content that requires 100+ hours to produce a single article containing thousands of words, static images and videos, the reality is that most clients don’t have enough budget to afford it.

For many clients, we are able to get good results by producing long-form text content. It’s high quality, keyword-driven, engaging and generally revolves around the concept of answering a question or providing a solution. Below is an outline for a typical content plan that’s designed to get results:

Deliverables

  • Approximately 8-20 blog articles per month (2-5 articles per week) depending on budget
  • 800-1,200 words per article
  • 1 small stock photo per article from a site like BigStockPhoto.com
  • Publishing to website
  • Posting to Facebook, Twitter and/or LinkedIn, depending on the industry
  • When budget is available, additional amplification on social media and through PPC advertising

Purpose

  • Establish authority and rankings for keywords that are relevant to the audience
  • Engage readers who find the content useful and may consider sharing it with others
  • Build an audience among people who could be customers in the future, or who may influence others to make a purchasing decision
  • Recommendations:
    • Most content should be purely for the audience’s benefit without advocating for a purchase
    • Some of the content can incorporate your product into the body of the article if it is relevant to the topic

Process

  • 8-16 hours research per month:

    • Keyword research (using past data as well as new research). We use lots of tools including SEM Rush, Ubersuggest and Buzzsumo
    • Topic development (a list of proposed titles for the month’s content)
    • Resource research (finding and quickly reading relevant articles on the web to link to)
    • Past content review (finding other content on your website to link back to and build authority)
    • Author research (when possible, finding social media profiles for authors of resource articles, then tweeting at them, or otherwise contacting them in the hopes that they will amplify the new content)
    • Stock photo (finding a relevant stock photo for the article, preferably one that hasn’t been used for past content)
  • Writing

    • Brief summary of topic, resources to include & point to get across
    • Initial draft of 800-1,200 words
    • Professional editing for voice and grammar
    • Client approval and one round of revisions if needed
    • Final round of optimization (one more scan of content to embed additional links & tweak phrases if necessary)
  • Publishing & Syndication

    • Post to website including text, featured image
    • Quality assurance
      • checking links
      • quickly re-reading content one last time for mistakes
      • tweaking URL if necessary
    • Social media
      • Post to Twitter & Facebook with #hashtags
      • Post to LinkedIn (depending on company/audience)
      • Post media to Pinterest, Instagram, or elsewhere if relevant
      • Outreach to authors when possible, hoping that some of them will amplify the content to their networks

This sort of plan is designed to get results for most clients, and we use this strategy effectively for many websites. However, when budget permits, we prefer to include content pieces that fit into the category of 10x Content