Building and Sticking to Your SEO Editorial Calendar

How To Create a Content Plan To Support Your SEO

At the heart of all SEO strategies is one crucial element: Your content marketing. It is often said that content is king, and while that may be a cliche, it’s true. Your content determines how you represent yourself, both to your audience and to search engines for indexing, so it’s important to ensure you have a strong content plan, driven by your editorial calendar.

In this guide, we’ll take you through the basics of putting together an editorial calendar to help you improve the effectiveness of the content you plan to use to bolster your SEO, including all the elements you need to bear in mind when preparing your strategy and share our top tips for sticking to it.

Why You Need To Create an Editorial Calendar

It might be tempting to forgo creating an editorial calendar entirely. If you’re thinking about your upcoming content, you may consider a month-to-month approach, determining potential subjects for articles and guides as and when you need them. However, a well-structured framework that considers your overall content hierarchy is essential when it comes to creating a well-organised, strategic content plan.

A structured framework for planning and organising your content strategy will help you align your output with your business objectives and any key events that may be upcoming. Whether it’s an important month for your business itself or capitalising on industry trends, an editorial calendar will help you visualise when your content will be most effectively deployed, and give you time to plan and prepare.

With your content mapped out, you should easily be able to align keywords and topics to your upcoming pages and articles, and identify and cover any content gaps that may currently exist or jump out at you as part of the planning process.

On top of that, consistency is key when it comes to getting indexed on search engines. Algorithms prioritised websites that regularly update with relevant, high-quality content, and sticking to a consistent publishing schedule will earn you favour with search engines and contribute to your visibility, gaining you higher rankings for your target search terms.

Building a Great Editorial Calendar

Before you begin creating your content calendar, take some time to define your target audience and your overall SEO goals. What do you want your content to do, and who are you writing for? Without taking the time to consider this, you run the risk of creating an unfocused, ineffective strategy unlikely to make any significant impact on your SEO efforts.

You may have done this already, but we recommend conducting comprehensive keyword research to identify relevant terms and phrases specific to your business goals. This will help you keep your content focused and relevant to what your audience is looking for.

Once you have an idea of the sort of content you should be creating, take the time to examine the SERPs for relevant search queries. What do search engines already rank, and what extra value can you add to what is performing well? Not only will this give you insight into the intent of your target search terms, but the opportunity to learn from existing content and apply your findings to your approach to your work.

Top Tips for Planning Content

• It’s important to ensure your output is a diverse range of different formats to appeal to different tastes and perspectives. This will help you keep your content engaging and fresh.
• Consider whether articles, videos, infographics, or any other type of content may be best suited for your particular goals with each piece. To keep things current, you could align your strategy with any anticipated industry trends, events, or seasonal considerations.
• Once you have a list of content you want to explore, think about how it all fits together. You could begin to think about content clusters, but at a minimum, you need to think about how you can weave in internal links, both from the content you’re planning to write and from other pages on your site. Your internal linking strategy will help search engines determine where your content will fit into the hierarchy of your website, improving the chances of getting ranked and increasing user engagement as readers will find an easier path to relevant related pieces on your website.
• While it’s important to be consistent in your efforts, the only way to do so is to establish achievable publishing targets that balance quantity with quality. Sustainable success will only come if you are realistic with time constraints and set goals you can reach, rather than being over-ambitious and setting yourself up for failure.

Sticking To Your Content Plan

There’s no overstating the importance of prioritising a consistent, regular publishing schedule, but there are some steps you can take along the way to make life easier for yourself and increase your chances of sticking to your editorial calendar.

Plenty of task management systems provide workflows that can allow you to easily and successfully track your content strategy. This will help ensure your deadlines are met and tasks are executed efficiently, and identify any holdups that may impact your ability to deliver on time.

A more efficient way of working is to tackle similar tasks in batches – you may choose to dedicate time to drafting several blogs at once, group your editing tasks, or choose to review in bulk. A batched approach will help streamline your way of working and provide a boost to productivity.

Regularly monitor the performance of your content against your goals to ensure your strategy is working as intended. Flexibility is a crucial skill, and if something isn’t delivering, it may be worth taking the time to assess why.

Create Your Editorial Calendar

Crafting and maintaining an effective SEO editorial calendar is a journey of strategic planning, consistency, and adaptability. By aligning your content with SEO goals and staying responsive to industry changes, you can elevate your online presence. If you need further assistance in optimising your content strategy, feel free to get in touch with our team.

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