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Any marketing team creating SEO content to promote their business should focus on their SEO workflow. Use this SEO friendly URL checker to ensure your website is SEO friendly. Workflows help you build a robust search engine optimization strategy, reduce confusion and errors, and monitor progress. In this post, you will learn about the SEO workflow process and how to create an optimal flow for your team.
An SEO workflow is a process for completing SEO projects in a team environment. There are different steps that need to be completed in order, and they range from coming up with the keyword research to launching the finished content online, with the aim of hitting your organic traffic, lead, or revenue goals.
The SEO manager, utilizing tools like an SEO content checker, is responsible for devising the strategy and managing the project. They work with different teams, including the technical team that builds web pages according to specifications and the content writers who create and optimize copy. The editorial team also reviews the copy before it’s published on the website.
When you define an SEO workflow, everyone knows their role and what needs to be done in order for the project to be completed successfully. This can help ensure that tasks are completed on time and that no steps are missed along the way.
Workflows are an essential part of any organization, and they play a critical role in the success of SEO campaigns. By using workflows, you can improve the quality of your projects, ensure consistency across different teams and regions, reduce errors, and increase productivity. Additionally, workflows provide managers with visibility into what every team member is working on so that they can stay up to date with project status.
The benefits of using workflows are clear: improved quality, consistency, reduced errors, increased productivity, and better visibility. If you want to optimize your SEO efforts and see greater success as an organization, then be sure to implement workflows in your daily operations!
Now, let’s understand how teams can create workflows for each type of SEO project:
In this guide, we will look at how new content creation, optimization of existing content, and creating an SEO content strategy should work.
Creating a workflow for SEO content creation is important to ensure that all stakeholders are on the same page and that your process is efficient. It is also important to create engaging and consumable content that promotes interaction with your target audience. Finally, it is critical to implement SEO throughout the entire process in order to improve your results.
Creating an SEO team doesn’t have to be difficult. You can start by assembling the following roles:
The SEO manager provides the strategy and research for the content. They can help set up the necessary structure and workflows for producing quality content that will rank well on search engines.
Copywriters provide support in the outline and ideation phases. They also offer the creative touch necessary to craft a compelling story and call to action, so you can see tangible success from your content investments.
Web designers and developers can help with your digital assets as well as setting up posts and ensuring that schemas are properly implemented and that alt tags are assigned to images.
Digital marketing managers can help with the promotion of the content once it is released.
Now that you have a team in place, it’s time to establish some goals for your content strategy. Your company’s size and scale will play a role in determining the best approach.
If you have an in-house team of content producers, outsourcing may be the best option for increasing your production capacity without sacrificing quality or editorial control. However, if you’re looking to outsource your content creation, be sure to carefully vet any potential partners.
SEO management goals should always align with your overall business objectives. Some common goals include:
This step in developing SEO content ideally starts with looking at your strategy document and identifying the focus keyword you want to target. You can perform keyword clustering research to identify the keyword with the right difficulty, CPC, and volume you want to go after.
Now that you have a good overall understanding of the project, it’s time to start planning the content in more detail. The next step is to hold a kickoff scrum with your team. This meeting will help everyone understand their roles and what’s expected of them. You’ll also want to outline your key objectives and target audience. Finally, establish a timeline for publishing the content and completing the project.
Creating a content brief is essential for producing high-quality SEO content. This step involves outlining the meta descriptions and creating keyword recommendations. The goal of this step is to ensure that you produce quality content that can outrank your competitors’ content. Outranking’s AI-assisted SEO content generator and research automation platform can help you create detailed content briefs.
Copywriters and designers should collaborate to create successful content. Wireframes need to be created in tandem, with one informing the other. This ensures that the content flows well within the overall design—an important factor in creating a positive user experience.
A thorough review cycle is essential to a seamless launch. Make certain that you’ve executed all the items on your checklist before publishing your content.
Check for rendering issues, on-page SEO recommendations using Outranking scoring, and external and internal link suggestions before going live. After verifying that everything looks good, hit Publish and share it with your team.
Once your SEO team has implemented the above steps, it is important to track and measure the performance of the page. Measuring your results will help you determine whether your content has a positive or negative impact on your site’s visibility and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). In addition, it is necessary to revise and improve your content based on this data so that you can continue to achieve better results.
To effectively track your website’s SEO progress, work with your team to report on keyword performance and share successes. This way, everyone will be aware of what is working well and what needs further improvement. Additionally, make use of Outranking’s Actions feature for quick access to meaningful data from Google Search Console to drill down on content that needs optimization. Doing so allows you to keep tabs on how well your site is performing at all times while also providing valuable insights for future optimizations.
Finally, communication and collaboration with your SEO team should be regular in order to achieve maximum impact from your optimization efforts.
The optimization of existing content and its workflow is likely quite different from your new content strategy. In the optimization process for existing content, the strategy that was originally created is adjusted, or more optimization parameters are introduced.
Optimization of existing content should be an ongoing practice. If done right, this single task can very quickly increase your traffic by as much as 3 times.
Having the right tools and data is the key.
Let’s see what improvement of existing content looks like in a real wireframe:
This step is difficult if you rely only on Google Search Console data because it is not easy to attribute keywords per URL. Using Outranking’s business SEO platform, you can connect your search console data and capture this to precisely gather CPC, volume, CTR, impression, click, and position data.
Over 20% of keywords you rank for are ranking in the 4th to 25th position on Google. Improving on-page SEO and prioritizing efforts around these keywords can help you accelerate growth and increase traffic by several times. Use a SEO scoring tool to check your on-page SEO and ensure your SEO score is optimized. We cover this comprehensively and explain how to prioritize keywords and content for optimization in our guide for improving on-page SEO for existing content.
With Outranking’s SEO keyword strategy tool, you can narrow down these keywords and create a project to track and optimize the keywords that make the most sense.
After you have narrowed down the keywords for which you want to improve your ranking, start drilling down into what is missing or could be improved. You can divide these suggestions based on your team structure. The above chart replicates the optimization workflow in an enterprise team structure. These roles can be consolidated based on the size and structure of your company or agency.
Outranking distributes these suggestions and tasks by default between “content team” and “web team.”
Many on-page optimization tasks can be implemented by the web team without getting content teams involved. This speeds up the time to complete the project and see the return faster, with fewer people involved in the project.
Grab all the suggestions that you want to implement and print out the optimization briefs for your teams to work on.
Depending on the scale of the optimization efforts and the project, extensive collaboration might be required. See the above workflow image to understand the roles involved in the process. The SEO manager is in the middle, managing the project execution cycle.
With Actions, the Outranking optimization brief creation tool, collaboration becomes extremely easy, with well-defined tasks for each team to execute.
What good is watching a race when you don’t know the outcome? After all the tasks in the optimization briefs have been executed, get back to tracking that keyword and watching it improve in the rankings.
Outranking scans the tracked pages every three days and reports on the improvement in rankings.
Optimization projects tend to be easier, less time-consuming, and very focused on the on-page improvement tasks. To get the most out of the content you poured your heart into, ongoing optimization projects are needed. These projects are vital for beating your marketing OKRs.
Google is paying more and more attention to topical authority on your website. This basically measures the level of expertise you present in a particular niche. Performing keyword research on a number of websites refers to entering a keyword in SEMrush or Ahrefs and narrowing the results down to the important ones you want to go after.
The new method of keyword research is about how to build topical authority. The way you build a strategy around your important pages, page categories, blog posts, product and service pages, and even your homepage should focus on building this topical authority.
In 2022, a content strategy workflow looks like this:
Your team’s workflow will look something like this:
You can include a wide array of projects in your marketing campaign. For instance, off-page audits and technical audits will also help boost your marketing success. You can set your KPIs and goals and create new and engaging content.
Regardless of the project you choose to boost your online visibility and credibility, we recommend that you create an SEO workflow process. Without a solid workflow, you cannot determine whether your team is heading in the right direction or not.
Recognizing the importance of the SEO workflow process is essential to increasing the ranking of your website. It simplifies complicated tasks and keeps your marketing team moving in the right direction. Your SEO content editors, writers, and IT team will be on the same page if they follow this SEO workflow process.
However, marketing teams need to use an effective strategy to create a workflow. When you have the right structure in place for SEO marketing, you can easily evaluate your progress. Since the SEO workflow process is important as a step-by-step strategy for optimizing the content and user experience of your website, we’ll explain the optimal technique to create those steps.
The SEO workflow process has different phases that every SEO marketing team should follow. The phases of an SEO workflow are:
If you want to create an SEO workflow process, follow these steps.
SEO teams consistently deliver similar projects for SEO campaigns. That’s why it’s useful to create a structure or framework for each type of SEO project. You can ensure consistent results and help teams to evaluate their progress by creating an effective workflow process.
There are many types of SEO projects. Your marketing team might not use every type of SEO project to achieve your goals. Therefore, it’s best to create a list as part of your marketing strategy.
While creating the list, look at your typical projects throughout the year and mark the ones you deliver regularly. Map out how you typically deliver each project using a list of common tasks.
After creating the list of projects you want to include in the SEO workflow process, you will create the SEO structure. But, before that, it is important to mention the stakeholders and their roles. When you define roles for each employee, you can easily divide tasks among them.
Outlining the roles of stakeholders is an important step in creating an SEO workflow process. Organizing the list of employees will help you with the planning process. Also, you can easily determine how things will look after creating the workflow.
Many business owners create roles before listing the members in the team. In this case, they may not be able to distribute tasks to the employees fairly. Your team is part of the workflow, and you have to define the role of each team member for effective task distribution.
There are a few tools you’ll need to efficiently create the optimal workflow for your SEO projects.
To ensure success, it is important to have alignment between stakeholders. One way to achieve this is by sharing key results with everyone. This will help avoid misunderstandings and disagreements, leading to a more cohesive team. Additionally, it will help keep everyone on the same page, so that everyone understands the organization’s goals and objectives.
Mapping your SEO workflow and team structure is vital in hitting the KPIs and goals you have set for your content marketing efforts. Getting help from tools that can help you set priorities and execute on them can greatly improve the efficiency between teams and keep you laser-focused on what matters most.
