One of the biggest misconceptions in content marketing is that SEOs don’t know good content. Maybe the notion comes from the fact that many SEOs spend their days analyzing code, coordinating 301 redirects, or haggling with stakeholders over the need to make changes to site structure.
Don’t believe the hype.
At most companies, SEOs are in the thick of content creation, often in the room making the case for the content team to get the resources they need to create the content that makes search work successfully for the brand. So, yes: SEOs know quite a bit about content creation and truly good content. And as such, your voice is a valuable one in any discussion of the who, what, and why of content creation.
Before we go any further, let’s tackle the 800-pound gorilla in the room when it comes to content marketing: quality vs. quantity. Given the choice, which should your brand choose?
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Don’t be deceived: Few things will hurt your brand’s reputation faster and more thoroughly than developing a reputation for producing and sharing poor-quality content.
When web searchers encounter low-quality content, they are likely to lose respect for the brand and ignore its content in the future.
The essential elements with regard to creating quality content include:
It should be of sufficient quality to attract and retain the attention of the audience
It should be search-friendly, meaning it’s easily found and crawlable for the search bots and can be delivered for the most relevant queries
It should be relevant, important, and useful
Provided you can accomplish those goals with every bit of content you create and share, the quantity versus quality issue is moot.
You should only produce content at the rate that you can do so and have it be of high quality. Whether that’s one post a week or one post a month, your brand should never prioritize content creation volume over utility.
We know well the temptation to throw a blog up to get some content out there. However, your goal must be to get noticed for the right reasons — and that means your brand should become known as being an authoritative resource whose hallmark is producing quality content.
But before your brand’s content gets read, it needs to get found — by search bots and web searchers. That’s where your SEO team shows up in a big way.
Content that's simply the best — 10x better than all the rest
An oldie but a goodie, this Whiteboard Friday introduced the idea of 10x content, or the need to create content that's ten times better than anything else out there if you really want to win in the SERPs (and serve your customers well.) Creating that content is no easy task — but with the guidance of this follow-up video on creating that 10x content, you'll be well on your way.
We mentioned editing elsewhere in the guide, but it’s important enough for us to mention it again here.
Any content your team produces to share should go through at least one editing cycle, whereby someone other than the author peruses it for structure, typos, grammatical mistakes, and inaccuracies. Many content teams peer-edit work, which can be great. Other organizations prefer to run their work by a dedicated editor. At the very least — and only in extreme situations — self-edit from a quiet place free of distractions. (This post shares some self-editing tips borrowed from journalism.)
How to create a killer piece of content
It’s easy to talk about quality content. But too often, online, great content is a lot like Sasquatch: everyone professes to have seen it, but few can offer up proof of having done so.
As we’ve mentioned before in this guide, quality content is essential for content marketing success. But taking that a step further, a great piece of content must not only meet the needs of the audience; it must be search-friendly as well, ensuring that the search engines find it relevant, valuable, and worth serving up to web searchers.
Instead of continuing to tell you how to create great content generically, we figured it would be best to show you what should be taken into account to produce one specific piece of content.
In the graphic below, you’ll notice the official starting point is the gathering of the team. That’s important: Before any content is produced, everyone should be on the same page. If this is done upfront, everything more easily falls into place.
Team kickoff
Content outline
Promotion planning
Writing
Design
Optimization
Pre-launch QA
Launch!
Again, don’t worry if you don’t have the team or the answers for each of the elements listed above. Remember that your teams are doing what you can with the resources you have.
Content outlines
These tools, often one-sheeters, succinctly highlight the elements that should be taken into account for a given piece of content, ensuring that each team’s goals are met.
The outline (shown below) acts as a starting point for the entire team, but is really invaluable to the writer because it allows him or her to track the various elements as the project moves toward completion.
As an SEO, the outline serves as a one-page playbook that can be pulled out anytime and used by teams creating content, ensuring your work is consistent.
Additionally, the outline makes it far easier for quality content to be created more easily and consistently since the sheet can act as a veritable standards statement, highlighting what each piece of content must include.
☑ Title
☑ Target audience
☑ Goals of the content
☑ Target topic and keywords
☑ URL (if existing content) or recommended URL (if new)
☑ Title tag
☑ Meta description
☑ Outline of the content, including main topics and subtopics, internal links, and format recommendations
Once the teams have made certain the content is ready to go, the final step is to make certain you’ve optimized the information so that both users and the bots can access the information.
Optimization process
The phrase "search engine optimization" is misleading. Yes, your content does need to be found by the search engine bots and deemed worthy of serving up for a specific search query. But where the rubber meets the road is in what happens after a web searcher encounters the content and interacts with it. If they click the link, visit your site, and then hit the back button, you’ve missed out on an opportunity, because these visitors are far less likely to return in the future. To cut this off at the pass, focus on creating content that will resonate with your target audience.
...Easier said than done?
Not if you focus on three areas: keyword research, reviewing search engine result pages and competition, and keeping on-page optimization best practices in mind.
Keyword research
This will seem like old hat to you as an SEO, but make certain your team is matching the content to the most relevant keywords, which helps ensure your brand ranks for the terms that impact the business and that your content is found by people looking for what you offer.
Use the SERPS to help you determine what content you should create
One of the simplest, easiest ways to get a handle on what the competition is doing well and what you’ll have to do to overtake them is to see who already ranks for the keywords you’re going after in the search engine results pages (SERPs), while paying close attention to the content type as well.
It’s likely that content that shows resilience in the SERPs (i.e., ranks high and for a considerable amount of time) is viewed favorably by the search engines and web searchers — that is, searchers are likely visiting the page, which is a signal to search engines that the page is relevant and valuable.
For example, if you see a PDF ranking for the keyword phrases you’re going after, it might make sense to create a competing piece of content (like a blog post) that contains compelling visuals, then do some outreach in hopes of getting authoritative links.
Ensuring proper basic SEO
Search engines are growing ever more skilled at understanding and processing natural language. So quality writing (including the natural use of synonyms rather than repeating those keywords over and over) provides a huge leg up as it relates to SEO mastery.
Why?
Because quality content acts as a bait to draw not only search bots to your site, but (more importantly) visitors as well.
Think of it this way: You need the bots to find and crawl your pages, but you also need the search engines to deliver your content for the right queries and to the ideal audience. That’s where doing the “little” things listed below come into play:
Using your keyword in your title
Using your keyword (or long-tail keyword phrase) in an H2
Making sure the phrase appears at least once in the text
Using image alt text (including the keyword when appropriate) to help visitors find and make sense of images in search
Learn about how SEOs and content writers can work better together in this Whiteboard Friday with Helen Pollitt:
Tools to help with content creation
There are tons of tools and processes your teams can use to manage the content creation process. We’ll share a few of ours, but make certain to search the web for other ideas and tools that might better suit what your team is trying to accomplish.
Research
BuiltVisible’s Content Strategy Helper is excellent for discerning what content is trending and might be of value to your ideal prospects.
For creating attention-grabbing titles, Portent’s Title Maker can deliver an eye-popping result with very little effort.
Other great tools include Survey Monkey for fast, simple surveys and Storify for listening in on conversations of topics across numerous platforms.
You can also use Storify to save those references and turn them into a piece of content or an illustration for one.
Format
As an SEO, you already know that many of the best-performing pieces of content aren’t text-heavy blogs, so don’t limit your content to solely those formats! Screenshots, videos, infographics, or even SlideShare presentations embedded in a post can go a long way toward turning site visitors into site regulars. Experiment with format to find your ideal blend of content types.
Illustration
Strong images and visuals capture and retain readers’ attention far better than text in most instances. Something as simple as adding a screenshot from Evernote’s Skitch can work wonders for a wall of text, and tools like Canva can help you quickly create interesting custom graphics.
While stock photography should be kept to a minimum since it can make your brand look just like every other company out there who’s purchased the same image, when used judiciously, they can add a bit of flavor to a page. A few great options for free images include Morgue File, Free Images, and Flickr’s Creative Commons.
Don’t stop with static graphics, though. There are a plethora of tools out there to help you create gifs, quizzes and polls, maps, and even interactive timelines. Dream it, then search for it. Chances are whatever you’re thinking of is doable.
Artificial Intelligence
You can use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help you create content for your web pages. The rise of tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E have made SEOs and marketers' lives that bit easier, however, it is important to use these tools with caution.
Check out the below blog posts to learn more about how to use these tools in your content creation and strategy:
Design and development are huge pieces of the SEO and content pie. How well your content performs in search has a lot to do with how well it appears structurally and visually — no one is likely to return to an unappealing page even if it does have the right keywords and is well-written.
Here, we’ve outlined a few suggestions that could help convey your vision as an SEO to the design team so that everyone is on the same page:
Keep the lines of communication open
Most SEOs have a healthy respect for design and development. Take that a step further by opening the lines of communication well in advance of working on a content project.
Figure out how much they know about SEO and the importance of search for the brand, then offer any help they might need. The best teams have a high degree of give and take between design, development and SEO, with each group feeling comfortable making and taking suggestions. Make them aware that their feedback is always welcome and to come to you with any questions. Most importantly, make them feel like teammates by continually making the case that design is important for the work you do.
When teams share a healthy respect for one another, they are far less likely to become territorial and attempt to hoard work for themselves. But, don’t simply offer up your opinion; offer design and development your eyes and ears as well. By doing so you make it far less likely that errors (like the one below) occur with your brand.
Building a robust SEO strategy is more than just publishing content on your website. Follow along with Chris Giarratana of StrategyBeam as he describes how to build high-quality supplemental content that ties into your strategy.
Why build supplemental content for SEO?
Supplemental content is a great way to expand your scope and reach. This type of content creates a hub/spoke architecture with different content to support your primary pillar content and offers several benefits, like:
Interlinking opportunities: As you build out supplementary content to your primary content pieces, you'll add more internal links between the content.
Content clusters: You need to support your primary content pieces with supplementary content that helps your readers understand the topic at hand. Links between content pieces offer contextual relevance for your readers and Google.
Answer additional questions: Each piece of content needs to answer a few questions. Additional content allows you to answer more granular questions and link back to your primary content in a strong support structure.
Not only has this approach to content marketing been shown to have a significant impact on rankings, but Google also says in their Search Quality Raters Guidelines that supporting content adds value and utility to your main pieces of content.
How to ID supplementary content opportunities
1. Find keywords the core piece of content is ranking for
Supplementary content goes hand-in-hand with your overall content planning cycle. As you invest time and resources into content, you will need to identify pillar content to support additional content and internal links. As you discover this content, you need to balance between your business goals and what Google thinks is valuable on your site.
While determining your business goals is a whole other process, you can use Moz Pro to find keywords and ideas around a topic to improve your rankings.
For example, if I wanted to write blog posts around "content planning" on the Moz blog, I would first search Google for articles that Moz is ranking for around the term:
This content planning post ranks top in Google results within the Moz directory. I'll enter the URL into Keyword Explorer to discover what it's ranking for so I can build additional supportive content based on those topics.
We'll see that the core piece of content is ranking for some competitive terms. If it's a piece of pillar content, I'd recommend updating the post. For this exercise, we'll look for additional content opportunities for the keyword "content planning" since it has high volume and moderate difficulty.
2. Find additional keywords the article is ranking for
To do this, I'll enter our keyword ("content planning") into the Keyword Suggestions box to grab related terms. This begins the ideation process.
Based on my needs, I chose to go with a core set of keywords for five pieces of content to supplement the "content planning" pillar piece.
Potential topics to write about that will link back to the core piece of content include:
How to repurpose content to different social media channels
How to keyword research based on your content planning strategy
5 business cases that prove the value of content planning
How to determine if your business model relies on content strategy
Top 7 social media tools that help with content planning
I think these topics will do well based on the data Moz displays and from my own research. It's important to note that these pieces should be published around the same time so you can interlink all articles together and link them back to the pillar piece of content using exact-match keywords in the anchor text.
3. Factors to consider when publishing supplemental content
It can be challenging to build great supplementary content for your main pieces of content. Whether you want to build content around a sales page or a "pillar" blog post, you need to map out the strategy to discover, write, and execute this aspect of content marketing.
You must follow the basic rules of blog writing to ensure your content supports your primary pieces of content to yield maximum results.
Remember to answer the main point of the blog post in the first paragraph and make the first link in the supplementary content a link back to the core content that you want to support.
Make sure you also create a rich environment between all your supplementary content. These links help Google and your readers understand your content pieces since they all link to each other.
This interconnected web of content will provide a powerful push to each other and to the primary piece of content that you want to support.
Support your primary content for maximum gains!
There's no better way to bolster the visibility and rankings of a pillar piece of content than by adding internal links from supplemental content. You can use supplemental content to answer additional questions, provide context to the main content, and even boost the number of links to the content with a sophisticated internal linking strategy.
Take the time to build out the right cluster of content to supplement your "pillar" content. This approach to content marketing can make a significant impact on your SEO efforts and support your overall content marketing strategy!
Craft a stronger content strategy with Moz Pro
Now that you've learned how to research and create powerful supplemental content using Moz Pro, put your new knowledge to use with the help of a free 30-day trial:
If you’ve made it this far, you’re committed to creating the best content for your organization.
One very important thing to keep in mind, however, is that compelling content won’t do much good for your brand without strong promotion, which we cover in Chapter 8: Content Promotion.
Written by the Moz staff and our good friends at Seer Interactive.
