Simple Content Strategy and Planning Workflow

Here’s a simple step-by-step process to identify the best opportunities for creating new content and optimizing existing pages using Inventory. It’s based on two premises:

First, you’ll have the most success by building out content around topics for which you already have demonstrable authority.

Second, each page should focus on one topic — it’s the one for which you’ll always optimize. A page may rank for adjacent topics, in which case you’ll need to decide whether to make a small adjustment to the current page, or create a brand new one.

Step 1: Create a Spreadsheet to Organize Your Work

It should have the following columns:

• Task (Create/Optimize/Update)
• Topic
• URL

Step 2: Use a Saved View

Use a Saved View to get a short list of opportunities based on your specific criteria. 

Step 3: Evaluate Each Item in the List

Each topic in the list represents an opportunity to either create new content or update an existing page.

• Determine if it’s an appropriate topic to target. Put the topic in Research to determine if it’s appropriate, if you’re unsure.
• Determine if the page is about that topic. Click on the URL to open that page, if you’re unsure.
• Now you have three possibilities to choose from:
  • The topic is the main subject of the page (add the topic/URL to the spreadsheet and mark this as Optimize).
  • The topic is adjacent to the subject of the page and you want to create a new piece of content (add the topic to the spreadsheet and mark it as Create).
  • The topic is adjacent to the subject of page but you can add a section to the existing page addressing that topic (add the topic/URL to the spreadsheet and mark this as Update).

When finished, you’ll have a list of opportunities classified as:

• Create — create a new page
• Optimize — optimize an existing page for its subject
• Update — update an existing page for an adjacent topic

Step 4: Execute Your Plan

For each item in the spreadsheet, you’ll always want to enter the topic and URL (if available) into Research. Here’s how you’ll use Optimize:

• For Create Opportunities — use Optimize to create new content and aim to hit the Target Scores
• For Optimize Opportunities — use Optimize with the existing URL and aim to hit the Target Scores.
• For Update Opportunities — use Optimize with the existing URL. Ignore the Target Scores and use the topic model to make sure the new section adequately covers that topic.

Additional Considerations

1. When creating a new piece of content, link to it from the existing page whenever possible.
2. Look at any pages from the previous quarter that you updated (not optimized). If they didn’t perform as well as expected, consider creating a new page. Make sure to link to it as well.