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
-
Should I be worried about our 'Duplicate' content
Hi guys... I've just been working through some issues to give our site a little cleanup. I'm working through our duplicate content issues (we have some legitimate duplicate pages that need removing, and some of our dynamic content is problematic. Are web developers are going to sort with canonical tags this week.) However... There are some pages that are actually different products, but are very similar pages that are 'triggering' MOZ to say we have duplicate pages. Here an example... http://www.toaddiaries.co.uk/filofax-refills/filo-12-month-inserts-personal-size/fortnight-view-filofax-personal and http://www.toaddiaries.co.uk/filofax-refills/filo-12-month-inserts-personal-size/week-to-a-view-filofax-personal They are very similar refill products, it's just the diary format is different. Question: Should I be worried about this? I've never seen our rankings change in the past when 'cleaning up' duplicate content. What do you guys think? Isaac.
On-Page Optimization | | isaac6630 -
What to do with repetitive content
Hi, I recently took over a site from another SEO firm. They created lots of articles targeting the same terms. The articles aren't bad but I fear they could dilute the site's ranking power for a given term. I don't want to give away the specific industry, but let's say they have eight pages targeting the term "______ billing software." I'd rather focus their resources on ranking one page for that term. Does that make sense? And if so, how do I do that? The company has a writer that can see if any of the content is good enough to add to their primary ______ billing software page. Would you 301 redirect all these pages to the one you want to rank, or would you canonicalize them? Or am I way off base in my thinking?
On-Page Optimization | | rich.owings0 -
Content with changing URL and duplicate content
Hi everyone, I have a question regarding content (user reviews), that are changing URL all the time. We get a lot of reviews from users that have been dining at our partner restaurants, which get posted on our site under (new) “reviews”. My worry however is that the URL for these reviews is changing all the time. The reason for this is that they start on page 1, and then get pushed down to page 2, and so on when new reviews come in. http://www.r2n.dk/restaurant-anmeldelser I’m guessing that this could cause for serious indexing problems? I can see in google that some reviews are indexed multiple times with different URLs, and some are not indexed at all. We further more have the specific reviews under each restaurant profile. I’m not sure if this could be considered duplicate content? Maybe we should tell google not to index the “new reviews section” by using robots.txt. We don’t get much traffic on these URLs anyways, and all reviews are still under each restaurant-profile. Or maybe the canonical tag can be used? I look forward to your input. Cheers, Christian
On-Page Optimization | | Christian_T2 -
How to Manage Comparison products website
Hi Mozzers I have been Working on a Comparison Website ; Where We are comparing Single products to many other Products with same specs. E.G : Product A vs Product B and Product A vs Product C ? How We can manage it So that WE donot have duplicate Content issues. Remember: Products are digital so cannot change much Content in there.
On-Page Optimization | | Asjad0 -
Product page reviews issues
Hi, We've implemented pagination on the reviews with rel=next/prev, but have seen no improvements since this. An example page with reviews is here. Can you see any issues on this that would be causing the problem? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | pikka0 -
Impact of rogue keyword in content
I have a page that is optimised - title, URL, content etc for the chosen keywords. However, within the content are some batches of bullet point text that has repeated text throughout. So for example I have 5 instances of my chosen keyword within the content and 24 instances of the two word text within the bullet points. Does this kind of scenario have any impact on ranking?
On-Page Optimization | | MickEdwards0 -
Duplicating content on multiple domains
Hey guys, I've started working with a new client recently called Resource Investing News. I'm more a Social Media person, though I do have SEO experience. RIN has about 40 URLs all of which have original news content published on them. One SEO-related issue that I can see here though is that the primary domain re-publishes all of the original content that the other URLs do. In other words: resourceinvestingnews.com will have an article on it that is also published on goldinvestingnews.com with the same date stamp and a link out to the original article. E.g. http://resourceinvestingnews.com/42539-molybdenum-goes-far-beyond-steelmaking.html http://molyinvestingnews.com/5301-molybdenum-steelmaking-vehicle-demand-electronics-lubricant.html Does anyone have an idea if this is something that should be reviewed and/or whether the content is being negatively affected in search? Many thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | blahblahblah20150 -
Strategies for revising my duplicate content?
New to SEO and SEOmoz. I tried searching for this first and I'm sure it's on here but I could not find it. I have a site that markets fishing charters in a few dozen cities. Up to now I was relying on PPC and using each city page as a landing page of sorts. Each citiy page is very similar (there are only so many ways to write about a type of fish or fishing). What would be the recommended way for optimizing this, keeping in mind the duplicate information we provide on each page seems to be important to people. Site is www.vipfishingcharters.com Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | NoahC0