Content Development: How To SEO-Charge Your Content For Higher Rankings

I'm here to tell you that outsourcing your content campaigns isn't as easy as you may think.

The reason why content outsourcing isn't easy is that content writers, SEOs, and business owners do not think and/or work in the same way.

There's a beauty behind having all these types of brains on your team, but when you try to get them to do other people's jobs, it may get messy.

You need to have a reliable procedure that can keep everyone on the same page when developing content.

Content writers, by default, are more creative people. If they have a topic to write on, they will ensure the content will be easy to digest according to their audience.

Plus, they will pay attention to the flow of the writing, spelling & grammar, plus include some much-needed facts to sprinkle a bit of authority into every piece.

SEO's, however, will have a different writing procedure. These types of writers will base their decisions strictly on data and numbers (overpack the content with keywords).

When SEO's write, they can't help but make the material seem "robotic" (thanks to their overoptimized writing).

I find that this writing service has writers that are unbelievably creative but can supercharge my content with the keywords I need as well.

Now, let's discuss how we can take the creativeness of content writers, with the statistical thinking of SEOs, to create engaging and SEO optimized articles.

Firstly, why outsource your content development? Can't you just write yourself?

Simply put, no, you probably shouldn't write it yourself, and let me tell you why. If you want to ensure your website content is optimized AND creative, outsourcing it is your best answer.

It's a great way for businesses and marketers to expand and scale up their SEO and marketing efforts.

Having a dedicated content development team can be a very costly thing to do. So, outsourcing is an excellent option in a lot of cases, especially if you run a small to medium-sized business.

In fact, 44% of business marketers outsource their content development! (Source)

Affiliate SEOs are also known to outsource most of the content development.

These types of SEOs love to outsource content, simply because it allows them to focus on things like guest posting or on-page optimization.

Breakdown of benefits for outsourcing content development

Here are only a few benefits of outsourcing your content development:

1. Save money on hiring in-house employees
2. Let's you focus on other jobs you may be better at
3. Quicker turnaround time
4. No need to train a team of people to do the content development
5. Take advantage of others' expertise
6. Opportunity to grow and scale-up without any limitations

Don't get scammed, here's how to stay informed when outsourcing

As with all tasks, to make the most out of content outsourcing, you will need to introduce solid, clear, and easy to follow procedures.

Having good Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in place will allow you to generate consistent, standardized, and reliable content pieces every time.

When it comes to content writing, creating Standard Operating Procedures must be multidimensional.

You need to cover the following elements:

• Article Development guidelines

1. SEO related guidelines – Provide information regarding keywords, topics, questions, headings, and formatting
2. Styling information – Provide information regarding Purpose, Audience, Problem/Solution, Tone, Style, Call-to-Actions

Applying standard operating procedures for SEO content writing

To be able to come up with SOPs for your business, you need to think about what guidelines you want your writer to follow.

A proper SOP for SEO content writing will have specific instructions:

Style Related Guidelines:

• Purpose of the article
• Audience (sex, age, career, etc.)
• The problem that your audience is facing
• The solution to their problem
• The writing tone and the writing style
• Call-To-Actions

SEO Related Guidelines:

• Suggested Page Title – Provide the page title to the writer. This will set the foundation for what they need to write on.
• Suggested Content-Length – Based on Analysis, you need to provide the target length of the content.
• Primary Keywords – Based on your Keyword Research, you need to provide the primary keywords. A good range is 1-3 primary keywords.
• Secondary Keywords - Based on your Keyword Research, you need to provide the secondary keywords. A good range is 2-5 secondary keywords.
• LSI Keywords – You can use tools such as Ultimate Keyword Hunter (FREE) or SurferSEO (paid) to get the keywords that would be beneficial to be in your content.
• Meta Description – Provide Instructions to your writer on how to create a proper Meta description (CTAs, Engaging copy, etc.)
• Content Structure (as subtopics) – A great way to ensure your writer stays on-track is by proving sub-topics that should be mentioned throughout the content. You can even tell the writer to follow the list from most important to least important.
• Questions that need answers – Similarly to the above, provide all questions your audience asks in your industry, and allow the writer to answer these in the content.

When your audience lands on your page for information, the most important aspect to remember is to ensure the content is creative and enticing.

The content on your pages should weave in keywords to grab Google's attention, but should NOT be obvious to the civilian reader.

With that said, you should provide all the information listed above to your outsourced writers. However, you need to allow the writer to express their knowledge creatively as well. They are talented writers, after all, with the ability to SEO-charge your content.

Resources:

- Content Campaigns (SEO Content Writing Service)
- On-Page Optimization Service
- Surfer SEO
- Ultimate Keyword Hunter