The internet isn’t getting any younger. Every day hundreds of thousands of pieces of content hit the web, all vying for the top spot in the SERPs and social.
The competition is fierce, which means you need to get creative!
Getting creative doesn’t have to mean throwing yourself into buzzy trends like VR marketing or AI. You can still utilize the same old strategies: keywords, content, and links. But with a creative SEO project plan, you can put a spin on those strategies to stand out from the crown in 2019.
Why is an SEO Project Plan Important?
In this day and age, you can’t underestimate the importance of creating a comprehensive and effective content strategy. It could be the difference between success and failure for your content.
Today, SEO has many different moving parts. For this reason, it’s imperative that you have your entire team on the same page from the very beginning. This includes having a solid project plan and keeping track of all work being done in one accessible place.
This will ensure that your team can openly communicate with one another. Your content creators need to be in direct contact with your keyword wizards, and your outreach team needs to be able to communicate with your project managers – the list goes on.
All of this means that you must cover all the elements of an effective SEO project plan. Let’s discuss strategy.
Looking at the Elements of Your Strategy
1. Keywords: Hub and Spoke
Identify Keywords: The first step is to identify your keywords. This means that you need to recognize high-traffic keywords that are viable for you to target. There are many keyword finder programs available online to make this task easier.
If you want your project plan to be effective, you’ll take a step back before you dive into keywords and think about the topics you want to cover. To do so, create a small list of ten topics in the form of one or two-word phrases that are closely related to your service or product.
Identify Pages: Once you’ve got an idea of the type of keywords you can target and use as well as your topics, you need to take note of the pages on your website that are performing the best. What are the keywords being used on these pages and what are they ranking for?
No man is an island – and no page is going to rank by itself. This means that the more content you have, the higher your chance is of ranking. With your ten topics on hand and researched keywords, it’s vital that you create content for each one – which we’ll talk about below. Your keyword list will determine how many pillar pages you need to create.
Hub Keywords: These keywords that you identify within your landing content are your ‘hub’ keywords. For each ‘hub’ keyword, it’s essential that you link a long-tail keyword to it. This gives you options for your keywords. Some content will require short-tail keywords while other content needs long-tail versions.
2. Content: Long-Tail Keywords
Create Pages: once you’ve identified your long-tail keywords, you need to make new pages to accommodate for them. This content should be long form to reflect the nature of the keyword – at least 1500 words if not more. If you’ve already got your long-tail keywords embedded in existing content, then optimize and expand.
Remember, the more pages you have, the better your chances of being ranked. The best way to approach it is to have a page of content for every keyword you’ve chosen to associate with your industry. While there’s really no limit to how many keywords you can have, it’s better to start with ten or so and concentrate on building them up with quality content.
Spoke Page: each of your long-tail keywords needs their own site page and blog post to connect and correctly embed them. They will be responsible for ranking your entire website, so it’s crucial that they feature in all the right places. These pages are called the ‘spoke’ pages.
3. Link Strategy
Linking Internally: once you’ve produced all this content for your site, you may consider this to be sufficient for gaining exposure of your long-tail keywords. However, it’s not – you need to build internal links between your hub pages and your spokes content. This connection is going to do wonders for the hub pages – it will boost the profile of the embedded keywords, helping to drive more traffic to this part of your site.
Linking Externally: As well as making sure you’re linking internally, you also need to develop a strategy that encourages backlinks from other websites. The more diverse your links are, the more industries you’ll cover which will increase your chances of being backlinked by another site.
There are a number of ways to catch people’s attention so that they start linking to your website. These include sharing your links with other small businesses in exchange for linking to their site as well and writing your blog posts before sharing them on your existing social media sites like Twitter and LinkedIn.
4. Measure Your Performance and Refine
Everything’s Constantly Changing: the SEO industry is changing all the time. This means that staying on top of current trends when it comes to content marketing can be time-consuming and difficult.
This is going to require you to be continually updating your SEO project plan and keep an eye out for these changes when they occur. You don’t want to be caught out months behind and add more work to your time playing catch up.
How to Execute Your Plan With Gryffin
As well as keeping on the ball with your SEO project plan, there are also a number of resources who can help you. There are a couple of ways that Gryffin can help you take control and keep up with the times when it comes to SEO content strategy.
Gryffin seamlessly brings all the different parts of a project together. When you start on a new project, you can quickly generate a document through Google Drive where you can create, write and edit your plan in real time.
As well as creating it on the platform, you can also attach a document if you’ve already got your plan written up. You can also attach other documents as well, like keyword lists that you’ve exported from SEMrush or similar. Through the Gryffin app, you can chat with members of your team and assign tasks.
If you’re working on large-scale projects, you can use the Associations tab to break it down into easier sub-projects. You can create and then associate all of your sub-projects to your Main project so that everything is in one place.
When it comes to content creation, our workspace hierarchy means that you can effortlessly scale your content creation project. Your project template is customizable to allow for the inclusion of links and keywords as well.
With outreach tracking, Gryffin has inbox integration which means you can track, attach, and send emails through your project. As an example, you can create a workspace for outreach and an individual plan for each of your target sites. You can then track your conversation, any content you’ve already created for a website as well as any expenses that have incurred.
Final Thoughts
Creating an SEO project plan in 2019 is no easy feat. You’re up against a lot of competition, and content that is being distributed every day that could serve to make your chosen keywords harder to rank.
It isn’t impossible, though, especially if you use Gryffin. Because Gryffin streamlines the SEO project plan process, you never have to worry about feeling out of your depth with content strategy again.
Keep all your information in one place and access it whenever you need it. With Gryffin, make 2019 all about working smarter, not harder!