Content Production Process with SEMrush in Five Steps
Digital marketing and SEO has always been a dynamic scene, however to this day producing informational content describing your product or service remains the best way to position your brand in organic search.
You can do this in a few very simple steps — choosing the right topics, choosing the right content ideas, building a content plan around them, producing it, and tracking the results.
Having a tool like SEMrush and Google Sheets (disclaimer — heavily used in our agency and across clients) can massively scale these efforts and provide valuable insights.
Chances are you already have a content planning process in place but we are sure a few interesting reports would only add up to it.
Seed Keywords
There is a common belief that you just intuitively know what keywords your target audience uses. This is not always the case. Especially in the tech and B2B software business that can be very industry talk heavy.
There are different ways to approach supplying good seed keywords and they all revolve around using tested data. One such way is to ask some clients directly. Another to use your Google Ads search terms report and highlight the top tier keywords that convert. The one approach I like the most is to check the keywords that bring the most traffic to your key competitors. Entering SEMrush Domain Analytics report.
Imagine you are the digital marketing manager at A Cloud Guru. Ideas for really good seed keywords would be keywords that already bring the most traffic to your solution pages. Another angle would be to check any of your competitors and their top pages.
These are the top five keywords that brought the most traffic to A Cloud Guru’s solution pages, and are a great start to further research their promising variations. Which brings us to the Keyword Magic Tool.
Keyword Opportunities
Having a few seed keywords that bring traffic to your competitors is a great find and in some cases these might be exactly what you need to start brainstorming content ideas. But it will not hurt to check what else has real potential for good organic positioning.
To get the sizing of the seed keywords you can use any keyword research tool on the market and there is an extensive list of them with the Google Keyword Tool probably being the most popular among clients. In our scenario, we will continue with SEMrush and the Keyword Magic Tool.
The sizing of ‘cloud based training’ looks like this.
A report like that might result in hundreds of keyword opportunities, and we definitely do not want to go into that extent. Actually to build your content plan for the quarter you need no more than 3–5 keyword opportunities. To rank for any of them you will need tens of content pieces which obviously needs significant resource allocation. Finding the right keywords is not the real struggle. Finding the content development resource to supply the needed content is, but that’s another post.
Let’s say ‘cloud based virtual training’ and ‘cloud based training solutions’ really resonate with our goals this quarter. So we will need content that helps Google see us as an authority on that topic. Which means we need content ideas.
Content Ideas
Getting impactful content ideas is probably the easiest part. Tools like the Topic research groups all content that is rankings on the first page of Google for different subtopics related to your seed keywords and practically shows you what Google prefers and relates content-wise to this search term.
For example, for ‘cloud based training solutions’ we have a list of around a hundred subtopics, with a list of the top 10 headlines and top 10 questions people ask for each. Let’s take ‘subject matter experts’ subtopic.
To be able to rank high, Google needs to consider us an authority on the subject. The more pieces you have per topic or subtopic the more authority you will have. This also translates into — the more competitive the search term you target, the more content pieces you would need to rank high.
Let’s highlight the headlines and questions that I assume would make sense for your business. Reminder, these are live, public web pages currently ranking on Google, and that means we have full access to their content.
All content ideas you select should go in a Content calendar, which is basically a tool to prioritize and manage the production of this content. It should look something like this.
Building and using a Content calendar is another post, for now what we care about is that we managed to put together a few content ideas we can use to start writing optimized content.
Optimized Content
If optimizing content for better organic visibility is not part of your job you will find the SEO Writing Assistant very helpful. SEMrush has a really good guide on what it is and how to use it. I put together a few resources myself that might help you get the most of it.
Use the content ideas as a baseline and the SEO Writing Assistant Chrome addon for Google Docs to decide what you need to cover in your content piece to actually outrank the already ranking competition.
Performance Monitoring
This is the final piece. After the publication and distribution of the content, we need to measure the results, analyse and readjust. We go back to the seed keywords and set ranking reports, updated almost every day.
Your report may include hundreds of keywords and up to four competitors measuring your rankings against, and the basic version looks something like this.
This content production approach has proven very successful for our B2B tech and software clients, and will be useful to other businesses in industries where content production is around informational content and on a smaller scale. Try it out and let us know if it worked for you.
This article was originally published on Linkedin as Content Production Process with Semrush in Five Steps
