SEO Content Strategy for More Targeted Customer Traffic: Make Your Writers Feel Respected

Table of contents:

1. The Content Journey – Past and Future
2. Valuing Content Writers – Is It Possible?
3. Democratizing Content
4. Linked-Data Content As a Competitive Advantage

The Content Journey – Past and Future

Content has evolved a lot in the past decade – we have UX writers, technical writers, content engineering and even content operations. Content has become “the way” to win customers online because they are constantly searching for answers to their problems and opportunities to educate themselves before buying something.

If we analyze the past decade, we would see that what seemed to be an SEO content strategy in the past, it simply does not fit the definition of today. In the past, when speaking about “content strategy”, you would define it as a process of hiring copywriters, giving prepared, non-data-driven topics to write about, increase their salaries from time to time and be satisfied with whatever was produced on their end. It was easy to post content online and game the web search systems to get visitors to your website and that was enough.

Valuing Content Writers – Is It Possible?

We need to adopt a new way of thinking about content. We need to talk about content operations and have deeper conversations around how the work that the content writers are doing is having an impact across the field. This is necessary if you want to make your writers feel respected: instead of constant content creation that does not demonstrate deep expertise and creating content for the sake of search engines, you need to shift your mindset and produce content that fills the gaps and helps you stay ahead of your competition. 

What we know from experience is that constant content creation can make your writers feel overwhelmed, disgruntled, disorganized and pressured to deliver something that does not satisfy anyone’s criteria: the readers (end consumers), the business and the writers themselves just for the sake of writing something every week. Who does not want to get up in the morning and produce something that others find useful and has a purpose? Every true content professional likes to pour their heart into their work and drive business results back, by doing what they are best at.

This is where advanced SEO content strategy comes into place. Ask yourself the following questions:

• How do you organize your content in order to pop more on search engines?
• How can you position your content to be reusable and easy to distribute to ensure semantic interoperability?
• How can you make your content fit different content management systems (CMSs)?
• How can you establish new content practices in order to stay ahead of your competition?
• How can your content be designed so that it can be consumed by AI for processing?
• How can you tailor your content by persona, vertical, industry and develop audiences based on these criteria?
• Finally, how can you make your content people feel valued and believe that their work has a real impact on the business?

Advanced SEO content strategy is now shifting and what the modern content writer needs to be a skill-based polyglot: combining a bit of everything. It is like having a big tent covering multiple things – it includes not just a skill to create content but also understanding the information systems that keep the data in behind and the whole lifecycle starting from content creation and going up to content delivery.

The question is: when having limited resources and little insights on the ongoing trends in the content industry, how can you deliver something useful and at scale, while optimizing for efficiency for your content writers?

Democratizing Content

Content creation nowadays is more than just opening a GoogleDoc document and writing some stuff down. Today, every content designer should be able to communicate the effectiveness of the content that is produced by defining a set of key performance metrics and standards that need to be taken care of.

However, if you are constantly changing your content team or on-boarding new writers in a short time span, it might become challenging to introduce intelligent content practices business-wide. New on-boardings mean training for a specific skill set that requires HR involvement and training budgets that your organization might not have planned for. There is ongoing frustration and confusion – how to approach this problem then?

Linked-Data Content As a Competitive Advantage

We worked with over a dozen customers and we got insights from their content and team structures and we can predict with confidence that you are facing the same problems as them.

Long story short, you need to find a way to democratize the process of content creation and distribution. Every writer should be enabled to do his best possible work, writing user-centric content and not something for the sake of search engines. 

One way to make it easier for your content writers is to enable them to distribute their content further and go beyond traditional SEO. You need to help your writers understand their end consumers better and increase the clarity in their existing content pieces rather than forcing them to produce content more and more. The solution is to employ a user-centric approach and linked-data backbone which focuses on smart content delivery as easy as possible, ideally in just a few clicks during and after the content creating process.

We at WordLift have helped content writers deliver more than 2000+ pieces of content in a more structured way by using our own custom tools, like some plugins and dashboards but also linking this content with the Linked Open Data Cloud. In simple terms, this means that we enabled our writers to focus on what they are the best at: writing genuine, original and useful content that answers their potential customers’ needs and spending less time on optimizing for search engines.