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
-
CTA first content next or Content first CTA next
We are a casino affiliations company, our website has a lot of the same casino offers. So is it beneficial to put the content over the casino offers, then do a CSS flex, reverse wrap, so the HTML has the page content first, but the visual of the page displays the casinos first and the content after? or just the usual i.e image the HTML as content first, and CSS makes offers come first?
On-Page Optimization | | JoelssonMedia0 -
How can I make sure pages with similar content don't damage the other's SEO?
I work for a travel company and I have a 'tour page' targeted for pre-booking and a 'booking pack page' post-booking page, with some similar content but with details such as hostel locations, meeting places and times etc. I want to make sure the tour page keeps the authority as this is what I want to rank on SEO. I've got a couple of similar problems to this across site, there are a few pages on site that are post-sale and don't really need to rank on Google but it would be great if they could contribute to other pages' rankings. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | nicolewretham0 -
Product Tags
So Opencart allows the use of product tags (please note, this are NOT meta tags) which I believe are used for when customers want to search for a product using the search function. So one of my tags could be ''star wars socks'', and when a customer types this into the search it brings up every product containing the tag for socks. This is all good and well, however, these tags appear on the product page itself, right below the Manufacturer/Brand, and above the price. Will Google look kindly on this or could it be considered as keyword stuffing? Or will Google know they're for search and ignore them? I just need to know whether or not removing them entirely will be a good or bad idea.
On-Page Optimization | | moon-boots0 -
Nice looking ecommerce menus with featured product categories - bad for SEO due to duplicate content?
My ecommerce website has menus which contain 'featured product sub-categories'. These are shown alongside the other product sub-category links. Each 'featured product category' includes a link, an image (with link) and some text. All menu content is visible to search engines. These menus look nice and probably encourage CTR (not tested!) but are they bad for SEO?
On-Page Optimization | | Coraltoes771 -
Will google put logo's in as author snippets?
Are they smart enough to tell it is not a mug shot and then not show it? Has anyone ever seen a logo as a snippet? What are some of the factors to with whether they show them or not?
On-Page Optimization | | Adsau0 -
Index Page Content
Mozers, I am of the believe and as a person who puts the utmost emphasis on the index page of any website I am trying to rank, especially with a new domain ... insuring content is relevant, structured, optimized and we have some link juice flowing in. I find once we get the index page ranked, Google's little bots then start to index and rank accordingly the rest of the website ... and we start producing results. We also develop websites (dare I say its where we expertise in) and unexpectantly the client has asked us to carry out SEO work additionally to their web development. Problem lies here, their index page, has absolutely no written content at all, just one large image with a logo (Fashion Website) ...Which I identify as a huge issue as per my explanation is paragraphs one or two. I am sure withe the many more qualified SEO experts and gurus within the SEOmoz community, you have also come across this issue So a few questions, if you don't mind adding advice. 1 - Am I putting too much emphasize on content within the index page, in terms of indexing and actually ranking ...yes I appreciate that terms within the website will be ranked against other pages other than the index page, but will it harm us for having no content at all within the index page 2 - If so, and yes is the answer to above, how do we handle it, we have spoke with the client and he is pretty adamant that he want the index page as is, he has been through out the whole website building process. As suggested, any advice would be really appreciated, its a difficult market to rank within a it is, and i can only see this index page making the task a lot more difficult Cheers John
On-Page Optimization | | Johnny4B0 -
Duplicate content
Hello, I have two pages showing dulicate content. They are: http://www.cedaradirondackchairs.net/ http://www.cedaradirondackchairs.net/index Not sure how to resolve this issue. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | Ronb10230 -
Duplicate Product BUT Unique Content -- any issues?
We have the situation where a group of products fit into 2 different categories and also serve different purposes (to the customer). Essentially, we want to have the same product duplicated on the site, but with unique content and it would even have a slightly different product name. Some specifications would be redundant, but the core content would be different. Any issues?
On-Page Optimization | | SEOPA1