Something we recently noticed that we haven’t covered in blog form as an internet marketing agency (despite it being a question we’re often asked by clients) is how exactly a business manages to consistently produce blog content with the tight schedules that usually accompany any role within those businesses? The answer is pretty straight forward, but not quick to explain. But that’s what we’re here for! We’ve been producing content for clients across a large number of different industries for a lot of years and the vast majority of it SEO optimised. So as per usual, let’s dive in!
What is SEO Optimised Content?
Honestly, there’s not a lot to it on face value, but that’s only when you look at it singularly. Sure, you want the content marketing that you produce via your blog to target the right search terms, but it’s not quite as simple as that. There needs to be an overarching narrative that feeds into the keyword targeting of the overall SEO project, including the terms that your static pages on the website are targeting. Mostly, as an internet marketing agency, we view SEO Optimised content marketing (blogs), as a way of “filling in the gaps” in terms of relevance for the weightier terms you’re targeting. Do you have pages on your website targeting “property in Brisbane”? Why not do a short series of blogs on the inner suburbs?
Is your website targeting “bicycles in West End”? Then why not break that down into a few smaller blogs around different types of bicycles which probably have their own separate search volume but would also increase relevance for the parent term? Are you close to page one for a particular search term but can’t quite get across the line? Perhaps a blog or two on that topic could do the trick! It all requires planning (as we’ll go through below), but the most important thing is to understand the context of this material from an SEO standpoint.
Setting SEO goals with your other marketing goals.
Obviously when you’re producing blog content for your site you don’t want to come across as robotic or miss the huge amount of opportunity around addressing your customers/clients directly, so you wouldn’t want to lose track of those things while focusing too strongly on keyword density/assignment and SEO goals. After all, one of our major recommendations as part of any internet marketing agency planning we could provide you would be to distribute these blogs via social media to your audience, so they need to be genuine.
The thing is though, in our many years of assigning keywords to blogs (and we generally assign blogs 6 months in advance), we’ve never found that the keyword requirements have interfered in any significant way with the desired agility that businesses want to have with their blog topics or direct to client interactions. Sure, it can sometimes require a bit of compromise and pre-planning, but it really isn’t that much of a problem to include a main keyword and two related keywords into an 800 word or more blog in a way that feels natural if the topic of the blog is relevant to the business. They just make natural sense together.
How to find, Use and Assign SEO Keywords.
We produced a killer guide that describes how to plan content marketing in general (including assigning keywords to blogs) a while back. Read this SEO Content Writing Guide for the step by step process and logic you need!
How to Plan for Digital Marketing and SEO.
Again, we definitely covered this off succinctly in the previous internet marketing firm blog on content marketing but we’re putting it as another heading here to make sure you definitely do read those instructions (particularly with regards to planning via spreadsheet). So head on over and then come straight back for our last two points!
You back with us? Okay, so the next one is important…
Hire an SEO team Member or Delegate.
We understand that there can be a natural inclination to want to control your business output. We also understand that you might feel exactly the opposite and not view blogging as something that you should ever participate in. But whichever is the case, one thing rings true: you need variety. No one person you choose to blog for you can ever be an expert at blogging around all of the topics relevant to you. So while you might find a great writer and it might be a perfectly reasonable thing to want them to do the majority of content, it’s important that someone else steps in every now and then to avoid repetition of topic and tone. Especially when you’re planning to blog at least once per week. The more blogging workload you put onto one person, the lower the quality will be at various points. You need to mix it up a bit. So if you have a 6-month content plan then why not pass it around so that you have a few different staff from within your business contributing different points of view on different topics? However, with that said…
You should always have someone in charge.
While spreading the copywriting part of your blog around the business might help lighten the load on staff and ensure a varied tone of voice and topic, the plan still needs someone to hold it all together between these various staff members. As evidenced in the parts above about assigning keywords and marrying those goals with the overall goals, this does not happen effectively when managed between multiple people. You need a content marketing head who oversees everything and ensures SEO compliance, marketing goal compliance, consistency of narrative (or enough of it to balance out the variance in narrative) and can keep track of where everything is at, so be sure to appoint someone to oversee everything, be that an internet marketing company or someone internal.
And that’s all we’ve got for you today! We’re pretty sure we’ve given you a few things to consider moving forward but as always if you think we’ve left anything out then please feel free to leave a comment below. Alternatively if you’d like more context or to explore your SEO Service options with us then please feel free to get in touch!
