Blog Post Checklist To Improve Quality And SEO

Automated Transcription

OK. Hello. Hello. Tyler Bryden here. I hope everything’s going well. Interesting phase with PKI. We have recently received an investment with some of that they want you to accelerate growth and one of the driving channels for us has always been organic search. And So what I’m doing right now has been an effort to scale up the writing team, the content team here at speak I and really starting from scratch. We’ve had some great writers in the past who have helped us get to a decent stage in this to the point where we’re ranking. For a lot of terms and seeing steady flow of people sign up every day. But of course we want to accelerate that. We want to see more people signing up and we want to see people signing up for even more relevant queries. And so that’s some of the effort that is going on. And it’s been really interesting. I’ve been hiring and basically testing different, right different writers through platforms like Upwork, Fiber and have now started to get the first versions back, the first draft and then have even published.

Goals with these writers and during that phase, during that testing, I’ve seen a lot of different levels of quality, of feedback, of SEO, understanding of how to optimize a blog post to improve the quality not just for SEO purposes but just overall readability and just an overall experience. And where I’ve ended at is putting together a little bit of a basically A blog checklist to improve quality and SEO for these writers. And it’s basically a framework say, hey I need to ask these questions. Throughout the process of creating this from research all the way to publishing this article. And there’s so many different things that I could talk about here. But I thought this was a really good start and maybe a framework for you to help whether you’re writing content yourself or maybe you’re hiring people and are trying to have some sort of sort of quality assurance mechanism maybe when you still have limited capacity and not the the best sort of review process built in. So I’ve got a Google doc here I’m going to share the questions in.

The YouTube video description below and some of these are apologize, some of these are a little bit directly related to our company and everything here. But overall, I think there’s some really good takeaways that are possible here when you are creating content online and ideally or most likely you’re trying to rank that, you’re trying to see it perform better, you’re trying to get it into search engine rankings or trying to make it have a be a good content experience. And so these are good questions to ask, so I’m just going to go through. Read these out, I’ll add any context to them, and then at the end if you have any other things that you would like to add. Police phone cards. I would love to grow this checklist. I would love to know if there are things that are maybe out of date. It’s been a long time since I’ve refocused, you know, been focused solely on this from my marketing agency days and things have changed in the SEO world. And I know that has rise of tools like Surfer SEO and then there’s content like automatic AI generator thing like Jasper and all this stuff. But overall.

A lot of that core. Goal of creating content is that it’s high quality for readers, that readers stay on that page, it’s engaging, that they click and it’s informative, it’s educational, it’s worthwhile content, and if you do that then you can have success. So let’s jump into it. Questions to confirm have I done enough research on this topic to create a valuable and informative article? And I think this one could be a little bit vague or a little bit too loose. But I think if you’re truly asking yourself this question.

Then you know it’s not a certain amount of time, it’s not even a certain amount of keyword research. But if you are to be tasked maybe something that you don’t necessarily have full expertise on, have you done some reading, have you done some research to figure out and have a comprehension of that? And just an example, there’s been a couple articles that we’ve done some comparisons or listicles sort of around best say Google Chrome extensions or things like that. And you know, in one case those were really well researched and put together. In another case of the art listicle sort of article, um, they were sort of putting companies in a bucket that they weren’t necessarily in. That bucket was competitor analysis and they’re not really a competitive analysis tools. And so there was sort of this lack of research or understanding of the entire sort of piece that that sort of came through as I reviewed the draft and that’s not really.

You know, not necessarily the Creator’s fault. This is not something that they spend. They’re as deep on in life as I am. So there are gaps there and you’re not always going to be able to get experts, especially if you’re trying to scale up at high speeds who know your industry intimately. But overall that is the goal, that if you are doing that research that when you’re writing that article and that you know you have your audience to find that it speaks to them and it’s at, you know, a comprehensive level so that the information that you’re sharing is then of higher quality.

Enough that it’s trustworthy that it makes sense to the reader and is informative and not maybe just a regurgitation, regurgitation, or generic thing that doesn’t really give them any insight. Now here’s another big one, which is a lot of times to help with that research process. You can do this in sort of this content brief where you provide reference URLs to help guide that creation. And a lot of times you’re doing this idea, you know, people like it, they don’t like it. This idea of the skyscraper technique where you’re looking at Google for maybe the query that you’re trying to rank for and you’re trying to see, hey, what opportunities are there in these top ten articles for me to create content? What information is missing and where can we add some sort of differentiation to add more value and make an even more worthwhile article so as I’m trying to move at speed sometimes.

Giving direct, you know, direct reference URLs, ones that I’ve liked and done enough research on. Other times I’m saying you know you go ahead and you can do this process yourself by taking the title of the article, the main keyword, putting it in, looking at those results, and then starting to build your content structure and framework there. And obviously the goal is that you make completely original content, but generally the content that is ranking there already is showing some indication of quality that audiences are liking and that it’s. Table. So it could be a very useful tool and frame for you to then apply, build the framework and create the content that you’re putting together there now.

Next question here is, are the paragraphs nicely structured and the right length? So I’m moving from research and I would like to build this out even further. But that’s really the first step. Before you do any writing, even before you put together the Google Doc or wherever you’re doing this in, you should have this research understood. You should have you know, and I might even add 1 here as I go, which is, you know, do I know the?

Additional keywords that I should be using in the article so that I would say it would be in the research phase as well as the two because you’re not just writing around that one word anymore. There’s this idea of clusters or topics or you know additional keywords within that article that then are related to that core topic and you should use that to then structure the writing so that’s in the research phase so that then when you move to the writing phase that that it’s it’s it’s got all those. Embedded in the content naturally and then can come together now. As I move towards the writing, I think generally this idea of paragraphs nicely structured and this can be around 5:00, I think 55 sentences, 250 words. Once you get over that threshold it starts to become too blocky and too long and can be really intimidating as a reader. And some of this sometimes has to do with also how wide the you know the blog article or is is on the pages you know. If it’s 760 pixels that’s a nice with sometimes people go a little too wide and it can get very long.

Or if it’s too short, then that paragraph looks really, really thick, and so that’s not necessarily the craters up to the crater, but if you build in that sort of structure then. You can of of that length, then the content will look as good as it. As it possibly can. So now is the content suited towards the defined target audience? And I think this is super important question. In all cases I give the target audience, I give not just sort of who the companies are, but their actual job titles. And really I should be going even more in depth with demographic, information, age, technical knowledge deeper and deeper so that when you are writing is that message going to intimately connect with the core audience.

That you are, then you know, writing this article for and. You can write a lot of great content, but if it’s not tailored or if you’re saying writing towards someone who is I I see a split a lot of times. Maybe someone who’s non-technical and someone who’s a developer, they’re looking at things from a very different perspective on their technical understanding is better as a developer. Maybe their execution is better and so maybe they’re looking for more specific code implementations and things like that versus someone who’s non-technical is maybe looking for more higher level concepts or how to do this without needing. To know how to code so those can be really, you know, diverse of things that you need to ask yourself, am I doing this right?

And. These are now more questions as I move on is have I reached the agreed upon word limit? And this is more for you know in my case as someone who’s hiring and trying to hit at least a word count range. And I think this is, you know, an iffy thing because he can say, hey, I want to write 2000 words, but they’re just stuffing the article and it’s not necessarily creating good content, but overall, you know, there’s this idea of. Short and sweet is good, but we’re seeing 1015 hundred 2500 three thousand word articles really being the ones that rank because there’s so much content, there’s so many opportunities to enrich that information with SEO, with keywords and overall rank. Those articles and there are seem to be sliding scales of this at different times and the quality of content. But overall that word limit, at least the range can be important and it’s a way for you to settle on so that the price point and how you structure that arrangement with the creator.

Now as I continue to move forward, it’s like have I drafted the article in WordPress and notified the speak I team. So this is again very specific to our pipeline here of how we do it. But the way that we’ve done it is with an author profile within speak. They can log in, they can draft the article. That’s really the only area that they can see and I can even go more advanced permissions so that they don’t have the ability to publish the article that they can only draft and then it’s my you know, role as an admin to then publish this article.

And I think that’s a worthwhile sort of quality assurance control mechanism for you to put on. And in the end, WordPress doesn’t really have an automated notification. So the goal there is just for them to inform when the draft is done, when that’s uploaded into WordPress. And in the first iteration, people were, even though this was defined, we’re sort of sharing it in a Google Doc and said, hey, this is great, the content looks good, but until I can see it on the web page and sort of the final output that it’s going to look like, we’re not at the stage yet there. So please go ahead and draft it. So that’s it.

Got a big part, I think this last, this next part is have I drafted the article or sorry have I included the relevant final call to action with proper links and overall you should have a call to action on every article. That’s just the best practice in terms of SEO and I have incorporated ones that are no relevant for the articles that are hand. Mostly it’s somewhat generic, hey free trial book, a demo and with some social proofing and that should be at the end of the article and I recommend you to set that up. Provide a call to action if you do have one, and let those be sort of the final piece of the article. And after a great informative educational piece, there’s a relevant call to action to drive action there is the article, original, engaging. This is, I think another good question that maybe sounds a little vague but overall is super important and we can actually do a check on this with something like and I can see it in the step down with copyscape with Grammarly.

Where it actually checks it for duplicate content, for plagiarism. Those are definitely not things that you want to have. And more than just that, it’s like if you just sort of regurgitating the contents, not original, it’s not engaging, it’s not going to rank, it’s not going to create more value. And so you should, you will sort of struggle to, you know, get the results that you’re looking for when you’re doing that. I think the other piece here is, you know, in in this case, most likely you’re hiring these writers to publish something that’s.

Maybe informing it’s educational informative piece of content. Maybe it’s a how to guide but in the end you want to bring it back to your product or your service in a natural way. And so in this case you know have I did I include references to speak? I that’s the company that helped convince readers it’s a worthwhile solution. That’s a great question to ask hopefully. And again all the ideas that all the answers here are yes as I move along it’s a have I referred to a company to the company properly and speaking you know it’s sort of confusing speaking as the company.

Product, we call it speak and and a few of the first variations I would see different links to websites that weren’t not relevant or misspellings of it. And you really do want to protect your brand even if you it’s not as clean and clear as I would like it to be the best you can. And so if you as you are helping scale up your writer team making sure they understand is the company name different than the product name, making sure that’s clear and they’re doing a check on that. Apologize. I’m out of breath. Give me a second here.

And the next part that I sort of. Sort of mentioned already content and copyscape and shared a report. I asked for a report on this article to say this is not duplicate, we’re good to go and draft, draft it and publish it to the site. I know that we’re creating then original quality content and not going to see penalization for our copy, copy or duplicates or anything like that so. And there are other tools that allow you to do.

Woo. We’re now moving on to phase three and this is now generally when the article is, I would say now there are pieces that should already be done right in the writing phase. But overall this is like when they’re drafted in the WordPress site or whatever CMS content management system you’re using. And these are important questions to ask. So in this case, are all images under 100 KB, that’s sort of a periphery number. I don’t know periphery is the right word for that, but it’s a goal number to set. And what I’ve saw from the original ones, some of the drafts is that were included on.

WordPress on image that was 5 megabytes and that defeats the entire purpose of creating articles and content because you are then ranking. Like you’re not gonna rank or if they do someone has the experience is going to take a long time to load that page. You’re going to get a bad page rank page sort of optimization experience or a rating and that experience is going to be poor overall. So it sort of defeats the purpose of the writing originally. So optimize your images you can use. I’ll let me pull it up here quickly. Tiny PNG. This is one that if you don’t have Photoshop or something like that, I have a big recommendation with this. I love this tool you just dump in the image automatically optimizes.

And I see sometimes up to 60 seventy 80% optimization on image. Generally the image should be at Max. 19120 pixels wide. You can use tiny JPEG com to optimize the image even further. Our image type titles nicely. Now there are some, you know, questions around how they can impact this has, but an agent in general should be titled nicely. There should be, there should be, and I should have this. Are there alternative descriptions?

For the image and basically. This is for people who maybe can’t see. It’s also for search engines to understand. Basically there’s this idea of providing a text description of the image so that it will that the search engine and people can have an understanding of it. So the image title and then the alternate description are Super valuable, super important and questions that you should ask yourself. In this case, we’re using a tool called Yost SEO and it’s, you know, installed on many people’s websites. Basically allows you to set the keyword that you want to rank for and then.

Write an explicit meta description. You know Google is doing interesting things with meta descriptions. They’re OK with meta descriptions, but some weird things they’re doing in search engine results. But ideally you set that up the word. And I should add, this does the.

Meda. Description. Have the main keyword in the start of. So basically what I’m saying there. Is that not only should there be a better description should be valuable engaging, it should also and engaging and make you want to collect. It should also have an. It should also have the main keyword in it and generally at the start. So if it’s how to do competitor analysis, we say in this article speak, I shares how to do competitive analysis and that should be embedded in that meta description and it should say maybe something like learn from an expert team today or whatever it is that sort of drives that click and makes makes it seem engaging. That’s super valuable to have. A couple other pieces that go along with this are is there a featured image? Yes.

Is it? And you can see down here, it sort of follows that is the feature image relevant and interesting to make people want to click on it. So do do ask that question. Are there relevant and then this sort of groups them? Are there relevant and valuable internal links, are there relevant and valuable external links and are there relevant and valuable images? All should be answer should be yes and they should flow naturally, they should fit in, they should enhance the quality of content. Internal linking is super important for SEO as well as providing resources links. Sorry.

All of that place links that allow you to drive to resources that are valuable and overall this should add to the site, not just be a checklist that you hit. It should be natural, engaging and makes make the better make the article even better. In that case you need to ask is my link text descriptive and clear? So if I link to another website is it clear what I’m about to click on so that you’re informing? Or same with even internal links. Few other last questions. I know this is already 20 minutes.

Hope that you’re finding this worthwhile. I’m learning as I go what I’m missing out and I’m constantly improving this. And if you have other things that you should add or think that I should add to improve the quality, please let me know and then I’ll have a couple other last tips I think to to share that I think are super important, don’t leave now because you should definitely double tap on that to make sure you’ve done everything right. So is my keyword in the 1st 150 words of the article, so that’s the main keyword. I’ll specify that.

It should be, yes, of course. Is there only eight? One. And that’s again for SEO ranking. It should be, you know, very apparent at the start of what the article is about and then what.

Is there only one H tag? And this is one thing I found is that there’s a couple articles being written who maybe seemed to be more student or research based people but not as experienced in sell and so when they structure their article they had multiple H ones which is sort of a big no no in SEO you should only have one H1 after that you should have H2H34 and it should be a really nice structure to that where if you’re breaking into section. At a hierarchal level, you know say the main titles are, you know the main titles how to do competitive analysis. This H2 is some of the best competitive tools and then H3 would be the actual competitive tools and H4 could be pros cons for those tools. Who have I added other relevant keywords into supplement the main keyword. So I sort of talked about this a little bit, but there apologize. There are are, you know there should be natural flow and injection of those keywords in the content and you know you can use a tool like SEM rush or something like that. Not maybe all writers are using that, but generally they have some idea of it and they’re inserting those in and you’ve naturally repeated the main keyword.

And those relevant keywords throughout the article. Another last one is, does the URL structure match the title of the content? So if it is how to do competitive analysis, then the URL structure should be that. What I wanted to double tap in, tap on at the end here is that you they should then once this is ready you can see the nice structure how to do competitor analysis. You should then run it through something like gtmetrix or page speed insights both of them sort of get it from the name same source performance structure quality. Make sure it’s good be I’ll take it probably definitely you know all these things you can optimize and and do but overall pretty good rating a couple things that that could make an impact but when you do this if you if you did this entire checklist.

And then you check, you publish it, you make sure that the performance is good. You put all that together, you should have a pretty high quality article that helps rank on search engine, that is engaging, that creates, you know, understanding for your target audience, that drives action and helps you grow and move your organization in the way that you want. So I know that was a lot. I apologize. It was a little coffee and stuff throughout the article. You heard some weird sounds coming out of me, but I, you know, this has been from.

Years of work and research from my perspective and then also a lot of quick iteration from scaling up content teams. And again I hope you found this valuable. Always open to suggestion, always open to making videos better. But if you have insights and tips into getting the best out of content creators, please let me know. I would love to hear. Thank you so much for checking this out. This is Tyler Braden. If you like it, comment, subscribe, all that good stuff. Have a wonderful rest of your day. Bye bye.