Involving SEOs in the content creation process

If you plan on creating content for digital marketing purposes, it is imperative you include an SEO in the creation process.

Content comes in many forms. In order to be successful you need a multifaceted team of highly skilled individuals working together. It is important to also involve an SEO in the content creation process and have them work closely with your content team. Here are the ways they can help:

Offer suggestions based on past SEO performance of similar content
Provide insights into competitor’s strategies
Guide decision making by evaluating niche
Find others who have shared or linked to similar content in the past (backlink analysis)
Locate potential websites and communities interested in sharing (link prospecting)
Ensure there are no issues with crawlability and indexation

Let’s look at each of these points individually.

Offer Suggestions Based on Past Content

One reason SEOs should absolutely be involved in the creation process is because they can make suggestions based upon past SEO performance of similar content.

Superb content is essential to online marketing success, but it must also be coupled with solid SEO practices in order to be effective. Even the most spectacular work can get buried online without proper SEO implementation and promotion.

SEOs can offer technical solutions to ensure best practices in terms of indexation and crawlability, but they can also utilize other skillsets to make content suggestions.

An SEO will know how your existing content has performed in the past. They can look what you’ve already produced and examine what garnered a lot of social share and what led to the most backlinks. Utilizing this information, an SEO can offer suggestions in terms of:

Type/format – blog post, infographic, video, interview, roundup, podcast, etc.
Length
Popular topics
Target audience
Proper promotion channels
Etc.

If you are creating content you need to also consider how to optimize it for maximum visibility. Including an SEO in the creation process will allow them to guide your decisions and provide strategic analysis in order to optimize for success.

Provide Insights into Competitors’ Strategies

Another reason for involving an SEO in your content creation process is that they can provide you with insights into your competitors’ strategies.

SEOs have the skills and knowledge required to conduct a proper competitive analysis. They can use the information gleaned from this analysis to provide insights into what has worked for your competitors (and what hasn’t).

Typically as your competitors, these companies will have a similar target audience, and although you don’t want to simply copy their strategies, knowing what has been successful for competitors can help your own efforts.

An SEO can tell you what types of content are attracting links for your competitor (as well as any manual strategies they might be using to build links), and you can take this into consideration when crafting your own. Also through competitive analysis, you can see what is popular with specific sites by looking at what they typically link to in regards to your competitors.

Guide Decision Making by Evaluating Niche

An SEO can also contribute to the creation phase by guiding decision making with information gained through niche analysis.

Much like competitor analysis, evaluating your niche can also provide important information you should know before even beginning content creation. Primarily, a niche analysis will show you where content gaps exist within your niche.

Niche analysis can also reveal previously successful content that is now outdated.

An SEO will be able to analyze the linking habits of your audience to help you optimize your content so it lends itself to links.

Finding gaps is best done with niche analysis, and SEOs are best suited to perform that analysis.

Conclusion

Producing compelling content is no small task. Crafting quality work requires a multifarious team of trained professionals. An SEO should be involved the creation process because they have a unique skillset and perspective that can be beneficial. SEOs can perform a strategic analysis to ensure any content that is created lives up to expectations. Here are the ways an SEO can contribute during content creation: