How to Create an SEO Editorial Calendar So Customers Find You

You can spend thousands of dollars making your website beautiful, but if you don’t know how to create an SEO editorial calendar with strategic content, your efforts could be wasted. Your beautiful website will just hang in the ether gathering dust.

The best way to draw traffic (hello, potential customers!) is to demonstrate your business services and leadership using quality content. But not just any content will do; you’ll need well-written, well-organized SEO content to add power to your SEO editorial calendar.

What Is SEO Content?

SEO content is content optimized for search engines. This means you have content that observes a set of best practices to improve the appearance, positioning, and usefulness of your various forms of content. This applies to all sorts of content, including blogs, videos, podcasts, and content offers like e-books.

How to Create an SEO Editorial Calendar

The most effective content is SEO-friendly, and you want it friendly because search engines like Google and Bing will stand a better chance of finding your content organically.

While every organization has challenges unique to its industry, there are some guidelines everyone can follow to create SEO-driven content.

1. Pick a theme that’s rich with opportunities: Your theme for the month will influence your keyword research and the kind of content you’ll create.

2. Narrow your target audience: Define exactly whom you’re creating content for and why they should care. Tailor your content to this lucky persona, and establish your site as their valuable go-to resource. This might seem contradictory as you want to reach a wide audience, but think of this as targeting a group of buyers rather than readers. You’re trying to attract people inclined to make a purchase or work with you.

3. Identify your persona’s most common questions: Now that you have your persona(s), consider what they’re looking for and how they’d go about searching for it. What words do they use? What you’re trying to do is discern what your persona’s most common challenges, concerns, and motivations are and how they search for answers. If you’re at a loss, you can interview customers or ask your sales and customer service teams to copy you on replies to emails they receive or monitor your prospects and customers online to see what conversations they’re having. Use this information to brainstorm for a blog or other content topics.

4. Strategize your SEO editorial plans: Once you have your list of common questions, objections, and informational needs, create an easily shared SEO editorial calendar.

5. Conduct keyword research: Research keywords relevant to your business and audience and have a strong search volume, meaning people are actually searching for the words. Incorporate short-tail keywords (furniture) and long-tail keywords (early American furniture) into your SEO editorial strategy.

6. Brainstorm topics and headlines. Once you have a keyword, think about how it relates to your business, and then brainstorm your topic. Ask yourself what the searcher hopes to find and what needs the searcher wants to fulfill. Then, take time to create interesting meta descriptions and create an appealing descriptive headline with fewer than 55 characters:

• Good headline: How to Find Antique American Furniture
• Better headline: The Antique Hunter’s Guide to Early American Furniture
• Best headline: Where to Find — and Buy — Early American Furniture

7. Nail the meta description. Keep your meta description short and punchy — it should be around 120-160 characters and give readers an idea of what to expect while encouraging them to click through. For example: The best place to find vintage furniture might be around the corner! Our guide will help you pinpoint your next stop and offer tips on what to look for.

8. Analyze competing content: Pretend to be your persona and search for your keyword(s). Read the first few entries that appear to glean important details to inform your content, such as the angle, content length, and images and assets used. With that information, you can create your own valuable content using interviews, research, and original thought leadership. This will help fulfill Google’s E-E-A-T rule: experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. For example, for a guide on early American furniture, the author must have actually searched for or helped others find the furniture. This helps your content gain recognition on SERPs.

9. Know how to write SEO content that feels natural: Within your content, make sure the keywords align with the user intent behind the search. This will ensure your users will find the answers to their questions and be presented with the information they want to find. Place keywords strategically in the story, but avoid overstuffing. Include keywords no more than one to two times in headers, once in the first 100 words, and two to three times in the body copy and alt image text. This creates SEO-optimized content.

10. Add internal content links and remove or update old content. You’ll want to create opportunities to create two to three internal content links because they:

• Allow users to navigate your website
• Help establish the information hierarchy for your website
• Help spread link equity (ranking power) around your website

 And you’ll also want to cull or update old content listed on your SEO editorial calendar to keep your content relevant.

11. Promote backlinking. Do this by creating credible content that other websites will pick up on. Other ideas include guest-posting on blogs, reaching out to journalists researching related stories, and encouraging social sharing among your employees. You can also research social influencers and develop relationships with them by using them as sources, commenting on their posts, offering dedicated articles, or swapping relevant articles in exchange for a link. Do not link to competing websites.

12. Think before you link from keyword phrases. This is especially true when linking to external content. You want to keep your keyword phrases anchored to links within your website. When you do insert external links, make sure they open to a different tab so your readers can continue reading your content uninterrupted.

Ask The Content Strategist: FAQs

Q: How do search engine algorithms determine the relevance and authority of a webpage?

Search engine algorithms assess factors such as keyword usage, content quality, website authority, user engagement metrics, and relevance to determine a webpage’s ranking.

Q: Can SEO content alone guarantee high rankings on search engine results pages?

While SEO content is critical for visibility, other factors like your website’s authority, backlinks, user experience, and technical optimization will also impact search engine rankings. Focusing on optimizing content and keywords for aspects like search intent is just one of many tactics to improve your Google rankings.

Q: Are there any SEO practices that can harm my website’s rankings?

Yes, practices like keyword stuffing, buying links, cloaking, duplicate content, and doorway pages can lead to penalties or de-indexing by search engines.

Q: How important is mobile optimization for SEO?

Search engines prioritize mobile-friendly websites in their rankings, so it’s absolutely necessary. With the majority of internet traffic coming from mobile devices, ensuring a seamless mobile experience is essential for maintaining visibility and engagement.

Want to learn more about Contently’s SEO content and writing services? Visit our scale content production page.