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
-
Timeline on Moz's About Page
There has been a lot of talk about improving “About” pages on websites as of late. Moz actually has a really interesting About page, which includes a timeline. Are there any recommended WordPress plugins that can achieve a similar timeline effect?
On-Page Optimization | | VicMarcusNWI0 -
My site's articles seem to never show up in Google.
This is in regards to a previous post that was answered for me:
On-Page Optimization | | Ctrl-Alt-Success
http://moz.com/community/q/my-site-s-name-not-ranking-in-google I was talking to a friend and he suggested I try to type in an article in google with the exact name followed by my site's domain name without the .com For example, I have an article entitled: "MULTITASKING IS BAD FOR YOU, MKAY?" Obviously it's a title most would not word in that way. I typed it in and followed it up with my site's domain minus .com. So "MULTITASKING IS BAD FOR YOU, MKAY? ctrl-alt-success" But I'm not even getting listed in the search. There's got to be something I'm missing. I understand backlinks are important for ranking, but when I'm trying to find an exact match along with my site's url minus the .com? I just have this strong hunch that something is awry. NOTE: It seems this is only with google. If I use Bing or Yahoo, it comes up just fine.0 -
My Site's Name Not Ranking in Google
Hey all, I've seen a few posts like this. But I wanted to start a new thread in hopes I may find the underlying issue. I've had my site: http://www.ctrl-alt-success.com for about 2 years. Recently I've started really adding a lot of content to it. (about 2-3 posts a week). I get zero organic views which is fine as I know it's still in the beginning. But here's my main question. If I type "ctrl-alt-success" into google. I get some site that shows up. "ctrlaltsuccess.com" I've been looking at this issue forever. That site has been "coming soon" for nearly 2 years. lol My site doesn't even show up on the first 10 pages of google. However in Bing and Yahoo it ranks on the first page. What could my site be doing wrong that it's not even ranking for the exact domain name? Keep in mind, if I google "ctrl-alt-success.com" my site comes up fine. Any help would be appreciated, thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Ctrl-Alt-Success0 -
Duplicate content on events site
I have an event website and for every day the event occurs the event has a page. For example: The Oktoberfest in Germany the event takes 16 days. My site would have 16 (almost)identical pages about the Oktoberfest(same text, adres, photos, contact info). The only difference between the pages is the date mentioned on the page. I use rich snippets. How does google treat my pages and what is the best practice.
On-Page Optimization | | dragonflo0 -
Duplicate page content
what is duplicate page content, I have a dating site and it's got a groups area where the members can base there discussions in a category like for an example, night life, health and beauty, and such. why would this cause a problem of duplicate page content and how would I fix it. explained in the terms of a dummy.
On-Page Optimization | | clickit2getwithit0 -
Image URL's have knocked my sub-pages down (WP)
I had most of my keywords within the top 10 for this site, some were even ranking in the top 5. For a possible minor boost, more-so to cover all the bases, I decided to add images to all of the pages, and they were uploaded as a gallery with most of the image file names being the same as the keyword. Thus, url's were created with our targeted phrases, extending off of the corresponding sub-page. After that, Google quickly picked up the url's to the images and began indexing them, when that occurred the sub-page which was to be the landing page, quickly tanked. Nothing else on-site changed besides the uploading of the images, so I'm sure they're conflicting and for whatever reason Google can't decide which page to index. The page that contains the images used, or the actual intended landing page. With WP I didn't see a way to not have them link to anything at all, and just be static when using a gallery, stock at least. So, my question is how can I quickly alleviate this problem and what should I do in the future to avoid this? I believe if I change link thumbnails to image file instead of attachment page, that should fix the issue... Then, I'll have dead URL's which I suppose I should 301 to the sub-page. Alternatively, is there a better solution that will work, I was also thinking about no-indexing the attachment URL's, but that doesn't seem to be an option.
On-Page Optimization | | JayAdams320 -
To Optimize Brand Name or Product Name First on Product Pages for E-Commerce Website?
We are using your free month trial for optimization of our E-Commerce website. In regards to individual product pages such as this one http://www.amgair.com/air-purifiers/iqair-healthpro-plus-air-purifier/, would it be more effective to have the page title start with the brand name and then the product (as we have it now) or forgo the brand name and start with just the product. IE: IQAir Healthpro Plus Air Purifier or HealthPro Plus Air Purifier by IQAir. These are commodity type products and are price restricted so all competitive websites advertise at the same pricing and it would be helpful not only to have a keyword phrase that is searched for a lot but also one that is easy to rank for. Please give me a recommendation when possible.
On-Page Optimization | | youhow0 -
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