Rethinking company's monthly content production process.
-
I'm trying to rethink my company's content production process. I believe that we're stuck using a formula that works but can surely be improved.
Our Current Process
It essentially boils down to posting a certain number of content pieces per month for each client. After the pages are approved and live, there isn't much thought given to them.
What We're Thinking
After taking a step back, we realize now that a lot of these clients have sites with a tremendous amount of content that is rarely, if ever, revisited. In hopes of creating higher quality content and avoiding having to write that certain number of pieces per month, we're investigating alternative strategies to ensure each client has fresh content.
What We're Looking Into
Page Edits/Refreshes - I'm beginning to wonder if we can get similar gains by simply refreshing the content that already exists. We can include additional keywords and improve the content in a fraction of the time that it takes to produce a new piece.
We're struggling to come up with a process for refreshing the content, however. Ideally we'd be implementing a process where content is revisited 6-12 months, but that still doesn't take care of the problem of creating too much new content.
Simplified Version
I believe that my company is creating too much content. Editing/refreshing seems like a better use of resources, but I have no idea how to implement a process and develop procedures.
Questions
- What does your content production process look like? Do you produce a certain number a month, a quarter, as needed, etc?
- How do you go about refreshing your content?
-
I believe that less quantity and more quality is going to be the answer in this situation. Rather than creating multiple new content pieces each month, we should create just one premium content piece and divert our other resources link building for that premium content.
This sounds like an easy solution but putting it into practice is going to be difficult. It's easy to say that we're going to focus our energies on doing more great things and less good things, however it's often more difficult and it's less certain.
Reasons for multiple content pieces:
- We're constantly producing indexable content.
- We're sure to cover more ground when trying to rank for longtail keywords within a niche
Reasons for a single premium piece of content
- Better long term strategy
- Helps with link building efforts
- Reduces website swelling (contractors often don't need 200+ pages of content)
Has anyone else working on content struggled with this kind of balance?
-
Your article was a great read!
-
Google Sets (living on in docs) is a brilliant find. That's definitely going to be added to our process.
-
Making a page "media rich" is also the perfect way to describe what we need to be doing. Producing varied, resourceful content seems like the kind of long-term strategy we need when creating content (especially after Google's own debacle with "thin content".
-
I never got a chance to use the LDA tool. I recall reading about it a few months ago, becoming tremendously excited, then finding no trace of it on the SEOMoz tools section. What happened to it?
-
-
What does your content production process look like? Do you produce a certain number a month, a quarter, as needed, etc?
We are a small company with all aspects of the web done in-house for a few websites. Two people work full time on content creation and site maintenance.
How do you go about refreshing your content?
For our two retail sites there is no content refreshing... only new content creation.
On the information sites content is created daily... there is no refreshing other than genuine updates when content is out of date. However most pages of content have a list of related blog posts and lists of related articles. These are updated several times per day as new content is added to the blog and as new pieces of content go live. The homepage is updated several times per day with featured content items from a database. The content does not change, just what is featured changes.
-
In Danny Dover's book Search Engine Optimization Secrets he writes that each page on your site should be at least a little link worthy. If you think that updating or improving a page gives you a better chance of earning more links than creating a new page, then I would consider the former.
-
Interesting question, although very hard to give much specific advise without understanding a lot more about your site
1 You content production process should be driven by the keywords you are trying to tagert, woven into your site architecture; spewing out a lot of content randomly is a bad return v.s. targeted, educated content development
2 I wrote before on how to put together a process for improving site content http://unbounce.com/seo/a-5-step-process-for-content-optimization/ WIth the death of SOEmozs LDA tool, its a bit harder, but I think the learnings are the same
I think in general, smaller numbers of pages with better content is going to be much better than many mediocre pages (hello, panda!)
Cheers
S
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Some Content The Same
Hello. I am about to publish some landing pages that target different industries that we are trying to market to. X for Accountants
On-Page Optimization | | smithandco
X for Financial Advisors
X for Fitness Trainers
X for X While a good portion of the content is unique on each page "the benefits of using X for accountants" some of the content on the page is duplicate which explains more about how our software works (the features), this will be the same content on every page. Is this considered duplicate content? What should I be aware of in term of Google rankings and penalties? Thanks,
David0 -
Duplicate Content Re: Product listing body copy on Website, Amazon & Ebay - issues ?
Hi Is it ok to have identical product body copy on market/platform listings same as the websites product listings ? In this case the products are the websites/own brand products (all pages canonicalised), so i take it shouldn't cause any issues or are you supposed to differentiate the product body copy on marketplace listings ? Im asking re seo reasons All Best Dan
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
No product descriptions
Hi all, Wondering if I could get the opinions from other Moz user's on this issue please... A client is building a new online store, it is in the flooring niche, using the drop shipping model. The plan is to launch the site with about 1,000 products and then add more as we go. All good so far (the site is magento based) However, the issue we are facing is down to product descriptions. The client needs to get the site up and running asap to start generating sales but the wholesaler has not provided any product description information for the products - save the size, shape and colour. Can anyone foresee a major issue in launching the website with no product descriptions, from a seo point of view, and then adding the descriptions as we go. Have been trying to establish what Google defines as being a thin site and all the information on the topic is suggesting it is more due to duplicate content where, for example, retailers are all still using the default manufacturer description or have spun the content. I cannot find much which would suggest that product pages missing a description would classify as thing. I am happy to be corrected though. I accept that it would be easier to rank with a good product description but the client is a two person business and it is pretty hard to find things to say about 1,000 different kinds of rugs! Any thoughts would be most welcome please. Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | daedriccarl0 -
Using content for cliche' terms, or content found on other sites
howdy, I have a basic question about using content found on other websites for your own use. I have started a pick up lines website for guys to search for pickup lines to use on girls. Anyways, my website has many, if anything a lot, of the same exact pick up lines as all my competitors are using. If I use the same pick up lines found on their site could i be penalized for this as far as SEO? thanks and hope to hear back
On-Page Optimization | | david3050 -
Sliders and Content Above the Fold
I was just inspecting a wire frame that is going out to a client and realized that the slider may interfere with the "content above the fold." Can't believe this had not struck me on others. If the Header has basic business info, etc. in it and you place a slider to display images in the area just beneath the Header or slightly down from it, does that decrease the amount of content seen a being above the fold? Or, is content above the fold established by virtue of H1,2, 3, etc.?
On-Page Optimization | | RobertFisher0 -
Using meta robots 'noindex'
Alright, so I would consider myself a beginner at SEO. I've been doing merchandising and marketing for Ecommerce sites for about a year and a half now and am just now starting to attempt to apply some intermediate SEO techniques to the sites I work on so bear with me. We are currently redoing the homepage of our site and I am evaluating what links to have on it. I don't want to lose precious link juice to pages that don't need it, but there are certain pages that we need to have on the homepage that people just won't search for. My question is would it be a good move to add the meta robots 'noindex' tag to these pages? Is my understanding correct that if the only link on the page is back to the homepage it will pass back the linkjuice? Also, how many homepage links are too many? We have a fairly large ecommerce site with a lot of categories we'd like to feature, but don't want to overdo the homepage. I appreciate any help!
On-Page Optimization | | ClaytonKendall0 -
Creating optimized content: how to standardize the process?
Hello there, we are creating the new content for a website. For each web page we have created a “Pages file” to have the advantage of the spell checker. For each page, in the “Pages file” we have written the title tag (70 characters) and the meta description (155 character), so we have a kind of “template” like this in every page: title tag meta desciption text content (included the alt of the images inside the text) Every page is optimized for a single keyword/keyword phrase. What we wanna know from you guys if does exist a kind of “best practice” to test keyword density to avoid keyword stuffing penalities. In our case we opted to use “Pages” as editor, does exist a “standard Numbers/Excel spreadsheet” to understand if a keyword is over optimized in a page and so might look spammy? And in your opinion guys, what’s the best way to standardize the process of creating optimized content? Take care and thank you in advance for sharing your experience. YESdesign guys.
On-Page Optimization | | YESdesign0 -
Link Product Thumb & Product Name with same anchor link?
We have an issue on one of our sites we're monitoring a campaign for that seems to have TOO many links on each page. I think the biggest reason is that each product listing on each category page has two separate anchor links into that page. One for the thumb and one for the name. So even though there should only be 60-70 links on each category page, that amount is being inflated because each product listing technically is being split into two separate links. Question is, should I place the thumbnail and name within the same anchor link? We do this on a lot of other sites we operate, but I'm not sure what's a better strategy. It would seem to me that it would be better to have a single anchor link that shares the thumb and product name.
On-Page Optimization | | AarcMediaGroup0