The new year has just begun, and it’s time to give your business a good boost through a proper SEO editorial plan. In particular, we’ll focus on the PED for your company blog.
Get ready to discover how to transform your content into a powerful tool for engagement and conversion!
Why is the SEO Editorial Plan (or PED) important for your brand’s positioning and engagement on the web?
The SEO PED is used to improve your site’s visibility in search engines. Through the strategic use of relevant keywords and quality content, it helps position your site higher in the SERP, making it more accessible to your target audience.
By scheduling and producing relevant, quality content, you significantly increase engagement because you encourage visitors to interact with your brand, share your content, and return for more information.
Example of a PED from one of our clients for positioning a single page – Image blurred for privacy
We were talking about scheduling, and to do that, you need an editorial calendar to help you plan and maintain a regular and consistent publishing frequency. To build a trusting relationship with your audience, you certainly can’t publish just once a year!
After this necessary digression on what a PED is and why it’s so important, let’s now get to the heart of the matter and look at the 6 steps to create a PED useful for your business.
1. First of all, establish the goals you want to achieve with your SEO editorial plan
The first step is to define SMART objectives (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timely). Always remember that the objectives must be clear and detailed (specific). It’s much better to aim to “increase website traffic by 20% in the next 6 months” instead of just setting out to “increase traffic”.
Make sure each objective can be measured with precise metrics, or KPIs, (measurable). You can establish KPIs such as number of visitors, conversion rate, or search result rankings. Certainly, the objectives must be realistic and achievable with the resources you have (achievable).
The objectives should also align with your company’s broader goals (relevant). And don’t forget to set a deadline (timely) for each objective to maintain focus and motivation at the top!
Each objective should be accompanied by a detailed strategy on how you intend to achieve it. Additionally, you need to regularly check the status of these objectives to ensure they remain relevant and ambitious, yet realistic.
2. Thoroughly analyze and understand your target audience and competition
Knowing who your audience is, who you need to address, and how, is as fundamental as knowing in detail who your competitors are and what they do on the web.
So how do you analyze the target audience?
- Define who your ideal audience is: consider demographics, interests, online behaviors, and specific needs. The more scrupulous you are, the more directly you’ll go to the point and to the heart of the people you want to reach.
- Gather as much data and information as possible: use tools like Google Analytics 4, Answer the Public, Ubersuggest, Google Search, surveys, and social media to collect data about your audience. Try to understand how they reach your site, what they’re looking for, and which content they prefer.
Keyword research “editorial plan” on Answer the Public
- Create your buyer personas: develop multiple buyer personas that represent the various segments of your target audience. This helps personalize and make your communication more effective.
- Always monitor interactions accurately: observe how your audience interacts with your content already present online. Which posts receive more attention? Which pages have a high bounce rate and, therefore, don’t retain the user?
- Don’t underestimate the power of direct feedback: comments on social media, surveys, and emails always offer valuable insights!
Competitor analysis: observe what others are doing and get inspired!
- Identify who your competitors are: conduct a competitor analysis and list the main competitors in your industry. Don’t limit yourself to direct competitors, but also consider indirect ones.
- Analyze their websites and content: look at what topics they cover, how they structure their content, and which keywords they target.
- Use SEO tools like SEMrush, SEOZoom or Ahrefs, to obtain data on competition, such as the keywords they rank for, backlinks and site structure.
- Strengths and weaknesses of competitors: identify the strengths and gaps in their strategy. Try to understand what you can do better or differently. Play your best cards!
- Constantly monitor what competitors are doing: “competitor analysis is not a” one-time activity. You must always stay up-to-date on their strategies and changes.
3. Carefully search for keywords that are relevant to your business. Understand well what users are searching for
- Start with specific keyword research, which represents the core of your product or service. These are usually short, consisting of one or two words, and have a high search volume but also high keyword difficulty. Make sure the chosen keywords are highly relevant to the content you offer.
- Expand the search and focus on long-tail keywords. From specific keywords, start expanding by adding details. Long-tail keywords (long tail keywords) are longer phrases that capture the user’s search intent. Long-tail keywords often reflect specific questions or needs. Understanding the intent helps you create content that responds exactly to what your audience is looking for.
Example of keyword research with SEOZoom
Using resources such as Google Keyword Planner, Ahref, SEMrush or SEOZoom, you have the opportunity to effectively discover and evaluate the potential of long-tail keywords for your SEO strategy.
At this point, all you have to do is determine which keywords you want to scale and insert them into your content naturally.
4. Create quality content and always answer your audience’s questions
Ensure that within your content strategy, each piece of content provides value to your audience. Otherwise, avoid boring or even disturbing them with useless, already seen, or poor-quality stuff!
Answer your audience’s questions and provide solutions, share your experience and your value. Insert keywords fluidly within the text, as well as in titles, meta descriptions and image alt tags.
Remember that, before writing, you need to know what your target audience is asking. Use valuable tools like Answer the Public, Google Trends and Google search, an inexhaustible source of suggestions!
Use images, videos and infographics to make your content more attractive and easy to digest. And above all, make sure your content is unique and offers a perspective or information that can’t be found elsewhere. Always put your own spin on it!
Include clear call-to-action (CTA) to guide readers towards the next step, whether it’s reading another article, signing up for a newsletter, or purchasing a product. Monitor comments and interactions to understand what people like and what doesn’t work.
Use this information to adapt and improve future content. No one wants to spend hours creating and publishing content that no one reads, not even you, right?
5. Don’t move randomly: create your SEO editorial calendar and establish when to publish
- Always avoid a random and disorganized approach, which never leads to anything good. You need to create a well-structured editorial calendar that precisely establishes the frequency of publications. Based on the resources available and your audience’s expectations, decide how often you will publish new content. Every day? Every month? The important thing is not to bite off more than you can chew and have achievable goals!
- Develop content themes and ideas weeks or months in advance. This gives you time to do thorough research and create quality content.
- Make sure to vary the types of content (blog, video, infographics) and topics to maintain your audience’s interest and engagement.
- Use tools like Trello, Asana, Basecamp, or a simple Google spreadsheet to keep track of content, deadlines, and the many things to do.
- Consider using automation tools to schedule content publication, so you never miss a release.
- If needed, change programming based on feedback, emerging trends, or unexpected events. Some flexibility will allow you to remain relevant and current!
6. These are some of the best tools for optimized editorial plans that convert
Use the right tools to plan, create, and monitor your strategy. Here are some of the main tools we recommend:
- Google Keyword Planner, ideal for keyword research and for obtaining data on search volume and competition.
- SEOZoom, provides a comprehensive overview of SEO, PPC, content, social media, and competitive research. Great for keyword analysis, position monitoring, and backlink analysis.
- Ahrefs, a very powerful tool for backlink analysis, keyword research, competitor analysis, and ranking monitoring.
- Google Analytics 4 is essential for monitoring website traffic, user behavior, conversions, and other important metrics for your SEO-oriented strategy.
- Google Search Console is the free tool that helps monitor and maintain your site’s presence in Google search results, providing information on site performance and potential issues.
- BuzzSumo and Google Trends are useful for content analysis and discovering which topics are most popular and shared in your industry.
Use Google Sheets to create your SEO editorial plan
We’ve explained how important it is to organize the contents of an editorial plan, now let’s see how to do it in practice.
Use a Google Sheet file, or Excel if you prefer. Both are great for sharing with the work team and always being available in your storage space.
Go to Google Sheets, open a new file, rename it, and create a table with:
- publication date
- title (heading title)
- author
- URL
- Keywords/topics to use
- Sources and documents
- Internal links
- Notes
What will you put in this file? To know, you must follow the 6 steps we indicated above, starting with understanding your goals and who your audience is.
Ask yourself a straightforward question without beating around the bush: “Who do I want to read my content and what are these people looking for?” Answer this with a clear understanding of who your buyer personas are, and how you can be important to them with your texts, images, videos, and more.
Organize your website and blog well: decide on the categories of topics you want to cover
Okay, you have a clear understanding of the blog’s objectives and who you’ll be addressing with your content, but now you need to do another very important thing.
You need to establish the topics and organize them carefully into categories and possible subcategories, so that it’s always clear what you’re dealing with, both to users and search engines.
Practical example: the SEO editorial plan of Qreativa’s website
The SEO editorial plan for the Guides section of our Qreativa website contains topics related to the services we offer and the web marketing sector. In detail, the categories included in the SEO editorial plan are:
- SEO
- Websites
- Communication
- Content Marketing
- Advertising
- IT Security
- Link Building
- eCommerce
For each topic, we have dedicated hours of careful keyword research and competitor analysis, to which we always add the understanding of the search intents of the audience we want to reach.
Once we’ve established how many and which contents we want to publish, we schedule the frequency on the editorial calendar, define the sources and documents to study and from which to take important notions and information, to make our content even more relevant.
If there are no more doubts or gray areas to clarify, we start creating the content, following SEO writing methods and copywriting rules.
To help you understand better, we’re sharing with you a row from our 2023 SEO editorial plan, which as you can see shows an article published on December 18th titled “Marketing for physiotherapists: how to attract new clients”.
The spreadsheet also includes the author’s name, topics, sources, pages of other blog articles to link to, and finally notes with some clarifications. This way, the work is clear not only to the copywriter but also to the marketing manager and the entire team.
How about trying to create your own SEO editorial plan now? Your business really needs it.
Download Qreativa’s SEO editorial plan template and customize it for your business!
If you want, talk to us and have your SEO Editorial Plan created by a certified SEO agency. Creating and following an SEO editorial plan is a big commitment that requires experience, skills, and a lot of time. Don’t try to be a magician, or your hat will remain without a rabbit!
