The Lifecycle [and the Death] of SEO Content Documents As We Know Them

Table of contents:

1. Documents are getting old…or is it the approach itself?
2. Documents are not fundamentally efficient
3. Documents as learning tools
4. Documents as a audience development tool, sales enablement and science impact without boundaries
5. Next-gen documents are FAIR

Digital natives experienced the birth and the death of regular content documents.

If you are like me, you bought your first computer in the 90s and performed your first searches in a text-based browser. Back then, it was not easy to be visionary, because no one knew what direction the web would take, even though we were always excited by the idea of connecting people, knowledge and opportunities as efficiently as possible. At least, that was supposed to be our manifesto.

Documents Are Getting Old…or Is It The Approach Itself?

But something does not seem right. The way we used (and still do!) to interact with SEO content documents (articles, blog posts, research papers, whitepapers, webpages, whatever you call them) was:

1. Make a research about what needs to be written;
2. Write the article (or document existing work);
3. Publish it and/or share it through your content distribution channels;
4. Set and forget approach: once you’re done, the article stays in the back.
5. Or re-optimize when (and IF) the time is right, if the resources and the demand allow you to do so as well.

Documents Are Not Fundamentally Efficient

It turns out that SEO documents are anachronistic for most of their life: Once they have satisfied transient user needs, they are either deleted from the system entirely or content teams forget about them because they do not benefit the user. They are deemed obsolete, which results in them not reaching their full potential. And believe me, their potential is enormous if only they were properly semantically tagged and modularized, as they should have been from the start.

If we could just change that logic and start seeing them as islands of knowledge, we could take advantage of more than 3 sites: Voice (Chatbots), Automation (Content Operations) and Knowledge Exploration across the web (Linked Data). This has not been possible until now:

• Behavior changes were happening very slowly;

• We didn’t have the right, democratized technology in place;

• We were in the early stage of fostering knowledge developers positions on the job market.

Documents As Learning Tools

Given the multiple touch points and interactions with content, we need to shift to this new way of thinking about SEO documents to discover the ultimate truths about the world around us beyond a tiny fraction of what’s out there. That’s the power of functional, effective content documents: exploring new worlds of knowledge that are yet to be discovered – just like new lands in ancient times.

A document is a magnificent structure that we can only imperfectly understand because we as humans are limited in our ability to reuse and analyze it in a variety of ways, as machines can. Content documents are a tool to express opinions, but also an exploration that allows us to discover new facts about the world around us. They are tools that help us satisfy our desire for more knowledge.

To go beyond what is known, we need to think critically about our current SEO document content operations, systems, and overall strategy for developing SEO content documents over time. Imagine a world where we can work more cohesively with everyone and help others solve their problems through the intelligent use of SEO document content. It’s no longer about dealing with Big Data: from now on, smart data counts through smart content engineering.

Documents As A Audience Development Tool, Sales Enablement And Science Impact Without Boundaries

Interconnected worlds of data are not primarily limited by language comprehension but rather lack of structure. They are limited by not being organized in your content management systems (CMSs) according to WWW standards which limits their usability and discovery potential over time.

So imagine you are an entrepreneur with a limited budget selling your services online via content marketing, or a researcher looking to find a way to cure disease. Even though they are two different professions, both face the same challenge in practice: they both lack comprehensive sales channels to promote their services, get funding, or uncover new facts. The process of document creation and SEO document dissemination is very manual:

• You would go to a given search engine or social media.

• You use some marketing techniques (ads, SEO, search operators) to promote your work or target platforms for prospect opportunities and/or search for related papers.

• You search for foundations and NGOs that can fund your work.

Very, very manual. It’s not just about automation, it’s about a better approach to how we share knowledge and promote things so that each document is a valuable node in the world of the open knowledge graph. This is a critical factor in finding cures for diseases and supporting online document distribution channels. Therefore.

Next-Gen SEO Documents Are FAIR

The concept of FAIR data is not new. FAIR stands for findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability. These principles enable machine usability: “the capacity of computational systems to work with data with no or minimal human intervention.”

Even though this concept has been around for some time and was first introduced in the world of research, we can apply the same logic to any SEO content document that exists. Watch the video below to learn more about it👇

In this way, the value of SEO content documents will never go away, because the way they are created and maintained is evergreen and strategically different than before. They are:

• True to their original intent, so their purpose is clear and to the point.

• Modular, so that can be reorganized and redistributed in different and multiple ways.

• Accessible, no matter the spoken language that it is used.

• Measurable and testable, so it’s easy to restructure them as needed.

• Trackable and self-describing: you can query and analyze them in the Linked-Open-Data world.

How To Get Perfect SEO Content Documents

If you want to apply these principles to your SEO content documents, you can start with the following:

• Our SEO Add-On for Google Sheets™ – by using it you can look at the SERP by analyzing unique entities that characterize each search query (and intent).

• Bring this same layer of metadata (entities) inside your own knowledge graph that can be created by using cutting-edge techniques that we employ here at WordLift.

• Integrate the entities in your publishing workflow by adding a unique identifier to each document, to each author and to each relevant content piece (example: in our Knowledge Graph a FAQ has its own ID).