While fashions and trends come and go in the world of online marketing, the importance of content is something that hasn’t changed in decades. You can have impactful images on your site, spend huge amounts on graphic design, and it won’t be wasted money - but, without the right content to back it up, it will never catch as many new customers as it should.
Naturally, it will play on your mind that quality of content is important in turning potential customers into actual customers, and it can be hard to get the best quality. What does help, in this regard, is knowing how the process of commissioning good content should look - and below, we have a run-through of the essential steps.
Keyword and SEO research
To enjoy your content, people first need to find it. Obviously. And while there is no single step that will get you into the top pages on Google, you can get a lot done with the right SEO. There are lots of excellent tools designed to carry out keyword research, some of which are even free of charge. Once you have your keywords, you can come up with broader topics and titles around which to write your content.
Concepts
As noted above, your keywords should be a guide to what type of content will work in your marketing. For instance, if your niche is the keto diet, putting the words “keto diet” into a keyword tool will show that a lot of people search for terms such as “keto snacks” and “ketosis”. So posts about quick snack recipes, and about the science behind ketosis, will work well.
Writing
Once you’ve got a range of articles to write, the next step is obviously to write them. Keep in mind that you’ll want to use the keywords you’ve found, at a density that gets your content noticed by search engines. You can use an AI writer to create a lot of this content - the better information you give the AI, the more convincing the content will be. Some topics may need to be handled the old-fashioned way, but a good AI can handle the bulk work.
Quality assurance
A catch-all term that takes in both proofreading and editing, quality assurance will ensure that a second pair of eyes get to look over the content before it goes on the site. This task should be performed by a human, and one with a keen sense of what reads well. At this point, any errors can be corrected by the “QA” or sent back to the original writer to make good, before the document goes to the next stage.
Integration
In any good content management system, you’ll be able to integrate and upload the content in such a way that it displays on the page with maximal effect. This can include adding internal, external, and pretty links which are essential in monetizing and building your content strategy - it also gives you a chance to display the most important information “above the fold”, where even a casual visitor can see it without scrolling down. When the content is first integrated, it should then be privately published. You’ll see why.
Publishing
The final step in your content creation journey will be to publish your posts. This should be done after someone has looked at how the information will look when it goes live. This step is important. When your page is live, it can be crawled by search engines. It can be read by visitors. It is therefore important that it is fit to publish: free of bugs, typos, and inaccurate information. Once you’re satisfied that you have content that is fit to read and monetize, you can publish it and give the world its first look.
Updating
Once everything is live and any potential bugs have been ironed out, it is worth keeping an eye out for any changes that occur and result in your content falling out of date. Amending those details and republishing can even give your site a shot in the arm when it comes to SEO performance. Also, it is worth investing in software to keep track of broken links on your site. Even if those links were working fine when the content was published, it doesn’t mean they’ll stay that way.
Keeping your content as effective and impactful as it should be isn’t so difficult - you just need to keep to the sequence above and know how to fix things when they go wrong. The more you work with content, the easier it gets.