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At this point, your company is aligned, and your team understands The Big 5 content and The Selling 7 videos you need to create to be successful with inbound. But what comes next?
To achieve the results you are looking for with inbound through your content, you must understand the following:
This playbook will show you how your company can overcome these challenges, while also leveling-up the performance of the content you're creating.
A content publishing retrospective is a meeting, during which you discuss the state of your current content publishing (cadence and performance), any issues contributing to content underperformance, and what actions need to be taken.
If you are having trouble publishing content consistently for whatever reason -- time, lack of commitment, and so on -- you should hold a content publishing retrospective. You should also consider having a retrospective once a quarter or biannually, even if there are no issues to address -- given the framework below, it can be a great opportunity for you to celebrate wins and provide an opportunity for people to share ideas.
Your content retrospective should have four parts:
Yes, these conversations can be challenging, depending on what issues you uncover.
But we've seen first-hand (with ourselves and with clients) how immensely rewarding and transformative they can be if you are willing
Although the primary objective of search engines -- to deliver the most relevant content results as quickly as possible, in response to online search queries -- hasn't changed, much of how those search engines (Google, in particular) evaluate the "relevance" of content and use technology to map and crawl content online has changed.
In response to voice search, the rise of mobile devices, and how much more conversational and complex our search queries as buyers have become, a new content strategy framework involving topic clusters and pillar content has emerged, and the old ways of doing keyword research no longer apply.
In the following video (length, 12:30) from IMPACT Live '18, IMPACT Director of Web and Interactive Content Liz Murphy explains how exactly search has changed in recent years, why our old ways of doing keyword research are broken, what topic clusters and content pillars are, and why this new framework is the future of building content strategies:
Watching this video will be critical to your understanding of what's to follow. Do not skip over it.
Also, we've mentioned a few times in this playbook step that we need to rethink how we perform keyword research. But what's actually changed?
It used to be that we would create content strategies from a list of arbitrary long-tail keywords we thought search engines would like. Then we'd retrofit content topics to those keywords. It was a
That no longer works.
Whether we're talking about The Big 5 or the topics you choose for your topic clusters and content pillars, marketers must now embrace a people first, robots second approach to keyword research.
Using your products, services, and business goals as context, your keyword strategies need to be hyper-focused on the needs of your buyers first -- the questions they're asking, the topics they care about the most, and so on.
For example, going back to our pillar on website redesign for businesses, we knew we wanted to focus on that as a
Only then, with that understanding, did we turn to keyword research to validate and optimize those topics for search. (We highly recommend SEMrush for keyword research.)
For more information on how to do keyword research the right way, read our How to Do Keyword Research guide, which outlines what's changed and how you need to adapt your processes.
No matter how evergreen or insightful an article or video might be, at some point, you will need to update content you've already published. Either because the content is no longer accurate or up-to-date, or its performance is unexpectedly lackluster.
You address these shortfalls through historic optimization of your content.
Additionally, historic optimization is a process you should use to further amplify the reach of an already powerful article. For example, you may rank second for an article in search engine results, and a few tweaks could bring you into that first place spot.
That said, be aware that this is not a step you complete once and check the box. Your content manager will need to integrate the tactics described below as part of their monthly content publishing processes.
After three to six months of producing content, integrate the following historic optimization steps into your processes:
Again, historic optimization of your content is an ongoing process. At IMPACT, we have a Slack channel just for our editorial team, where we all share articles that should be put in the pipeline for historic optimization.