How to Create an Editorial Calendar That Gives You the BEST Possible SEO Results

how to create an seo-friendly editorial calendar
Create a kick-ass, SEO-friendly editorial calendar that makes your content WORK.

Your SEO content strategy isn’t content creation alone. Knowing how to streamline the publication of your blog content can make a huge difference in how quickly you see results.

If the primary goal of your content plan is SEO, you need to first understand that there are a ton of factors in how long Google takes to rank your content. It’s virtually never instant.

 Every piece of content will need crawled by search engines. Seeing any kind of results could take weeks or even months, depending on how much content you have on your site, how often it’s updated, and how organized your website is. 

Let’s talk about how to create a solid workflow around your editorial calendar.

What Should an SEO-Friendly Content Calendar Include?

Here are three types of content you should consider when creating your content calendar. 

Content Clusters

One of the best things to write content for SEO is to create hub-and-spoke content that helps build topical authority. When you have topical authority–and quality content– Google can more easily categorize your website and determine how useful it is. 

When building your hub-and-spoke content (also known as topic clusters or content clusters), you’ll focus on several different keyword groups. This doesn’t mean, however, that you’ll want to publish each of your content clusters at the same time. 

For example, let’s say you’re a business coach, and you want to create three different content clusters for three different keyword groups: mindset, sales, and marketing. Let’s say you write six pieces of content for each cluster. You don’t want to publish all of your sales content consecutively on your website, followed by all of your mindset content, and then marketing content. 

You want to create a calendar that distributes your content evenly so that search engines don’t categorize your content as ONLY sales, mindset, or marketing. You can intersperse evergreen content cluster articles among other types of content, giving your audience a more diverse library of information. 

Tip: When publishing your content clusters, remember to go back to previously published articles and add links to your newly published content!

Time-Sensitive Content

Blog content isn’t like social media content–you can’t just post new content as soon as you want someone to see it, unless you’ve already got a lot of web traffic and regular site visitors.

For SEO purposes, if you’re publishing something time-sensitive, like a holiday gift guide, you’ll want to publish this type of content well in advance of the holiday season. Search engines can take a while to get to your content, and especially if you’re a small business, you’ll be competing with a lot bigger sites

Publishing time-sensitive content two-to-three months in advance of an important date gives you a better shot at seeing rankings when the time rolls around.

Content for Your Current Web Visitors

Not every blog post is necessarily SEO-driven. A blog post announcing a product launch, live webinar, or introducing new team members will be more for your current audience. These should be interspersed with your other posts so that you’re offering a plethora of interesting content for your readers. 

Guest Blogs

If you regularly post guest blogs on your site–whether for SEO purposes or just to expand your network–keep in mind how often you do so. And, when possible, use internal linking to drive traffic to other posts on your site.

How Do I Create an Editorial Calendar?

There’s no one-size-fits-all content calendar, but here’s a basic step-by-step of how you can create a content calendar that captures and keeps your readers’ attention and gives you the best shot at making Google happy.

  1. Brainstorm a list of every content type you intend to publish. 
  2. Schedule your time-sensitive SEO content two months in advance of when you’d like to see rankings.
  3. Schedule your Non-SEO content or guest blogs to go live on specific days of the month.
  4. Intersperse your content cluster pieces in a pattern, going back-and-forth between clusters (cluster A, cluster B, cluster C)

What are The Best Content Calendar Tools

There are several tools and other scheduling software available that can help you keep track of your editorial calendar.

Project Management Tools

Software such as Trello, Monday.com, or Asana can help helps you keep track of your content ideas and  due dates, with multiple calendar views and even drag-and-drop content calendar templates to give you a head start. 

Social Media Marketing Schedulers

Your SEO content marketing strategy is more than your blog posts: it’s world-wide-web distribution! You can schedule your articles to publish in advance, and then schedule social media posts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms and blast out your link to drive traffic back to your website. You can use tools like Later, Hubspot, or Hootsuite, or look for integrations that schedule posts directly from your website.

Manual Tracking

Want a more hands-on approach with minimal bells and whistles? You can do your content scheduling on Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, or even go as simple as Google Calendar. 

Nail Down Your Publishing Schedule and Make Your Editorial Calendar WORK

By keeping your calendar organized, publishing different content types and topics, and paying attention to your topic clusters and SEO, your website won’t just attract traffic–it will be like having another member of your marketing team that maintains your audience’s attention and even increases conversions. 

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