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Creating a Framework for Content Creation: Content Creation and Management

This is a Standard Operating Procedure for Content Creation and Management. This post was originally a Google Doc – if you want to read the Google Doc instead (and Make a Copy) feel free to do so.

You should have arrived here via the KW Research SOP – if you didn’t, you should read that document before you proceed with this one, or it may not make much sense.

Grouping and Prioritizing KW Concepts

So, you’ve completed your KW Research and you’ve got your Target KW Concepts and their respective Add-ons in your copy of this spreadsheet.  

The next step is to organize and prioritize your KWs so that you can produce content guidelines that are extremely easy to follow. You can then write the content yourself based on these guidelines, or you can pass them to your writers.

The articles we are writing are longer and more in-depth resources.  1000 words at a minimum – 1500 is a good target.

Grouping KWs

• First, you’ll need to separate your KW concepts into articles, and those articles into groups of keywords.  Keywords should be grouped together based on common themes, IE a single group will be a sub-section of an article.
  • Go to ‘Kw Groups and Priority’ on the spreadsheet
  • Copy your list of Main KW and the relevant KW Concepts over to this sheet from ‘KW Target & Addons’.
  • Begin grouping your KWs concepts together. If you feel like you’re lacking enough Add-on KW concepts to structure a high quality piece of content, you can go back to Keyword Planner Tool, put it on ‘Only show ideas closely related to my search terms’ and put some of your KW concepts in. This should help you with coming up with more Add-on KWs concepts to target.
  • It’s not completely necessary to fill out all the information here – but it doesn’t hurt to do so. I’ve filled out the volumes on all the KWs but not the other information. The more competitive the KW your targeting is, the more detail you should put into this sheet (so that you have a clearer knowledge of which KW concepts in any given batch warrant more focus).

Prioritizing KWs

• After you’ve grouped your KWs together, you’ll need to prioritize your KW Concepts by separating them into Primary, Secondary, and Supporting categories.
  • Generally, an article of 1000-1500 words will have 2 or 3 Primary KW concepts
  • There can be 3-5 Secondary KW concepts.
  • There can be 10-20 supporting KWs – it largely depends on how broad your article topic is. I would be wary about including too many supporting KWs though, because sometimes writers will think you want to include all of them as ‘exact match KWs’ rather than KW concepts and you’ll get back a garbled mess of an article.

Example:

You can see my groupings and prioritization in the example sheet. I also added a couple more super LT KWs that fit well into this overall article.

Creating a Content Outline

Why  designate Primary, Secondary, and Supporting KW concepts? It’s so that you can create an outline that is crystal clear for your writers (or yourself).

The first thing you should understand is what the 3 Tiers of KWs mean:

• Primary KWs will be mentioned (in Natural Language, not KW stuffing) in the Title, Primary Header, and Meta Description of the page of content, and each will have its own Section and subheader.
• Primary KW sections of the content should have at least one outbound authority link, at least two  images (with an appropriately optimized file name and alt tag), and either a video, a quote block, or a table. These are the most ‘resourceful’ sections.

• Secondary KWs will get their own sections and sub-headers, but don’t need to be included in article headers, titles, or meta descriptions. They should also have at least one image, and one external outbound link, but they don’t need to have additional media in their respective sections.
• Supporting KWs will each get a couple sentences at most, and if possible should have an external outbound link.

You need to be able to communicate these requirements clearly to your writers while emphasizing that you do not want exact match KW stuffing.

Your content outline should be precise, going over exactly what you’re looking for in terms of ideas that need to be covered and article structure.

Here’s a template that you can use with your writers – it’s an example of what I might give a writer (who presumably knows French and English) Keep in mind that this template can definitely be improved – it’s up to you to tweak your content outlines for the level of writers that you have so that they produce content that satisfies you.

Content Management

A lot of people think that they don’t need a system for managing their content creation. While this may be true for small-scale content creation, if you’re looking to scale up your sites with large amounts of outsourced content, you will need a robust content management system to keep up with everything.

• There are a number of options here – you can use paid tools for managing your content creation.
  • Some possible options include Trello or Copycog.
• We want to keep this process as low-cost as possible for those of you who are less experienced, so we just use yet another google spreadsheet.
  • This spreadsheet is relatively straightforward – share it with all your writers and ask them to update it so you can track their progress on new content.
  • Without this kind of content management system, it’s impossible to scale content creation.
  • You also need to provide links to your completed KW research sheets and content outlines so your writers can refer back to them easily when needed.

Finding Writers

This is probably the trickiest part of this process.  Good writers at reasonable rates are hard to find – and when you do find them, they often disappear once better paying work comes along (and who can blame them?)

It’s important to keep in mind that you’re not looking for the next Stephen King. You need good content, but you don’t need outstanding content.

There’s no real hard and fast method to finding good writers – it’s a lot of trial and error. That being said,  here are a few tips:

• The platform doesn’t matter as much as your process. There are good and bad writers on every outsourcing/writing platform – Upwork, Textbroker, Freelancer – all these platforms have some good writers on them. It’s not about which platform is the best – you need to develop a platform that screens good writers from bad.
• There’s a section in this NHD article about finding good writers for reasonable prices on textbroker
• Another place
• Always ask for samples. Reading a 1000 word sample is worth your time if it means you don’t end up with an article that’s so bad it needs to be rewritten.
• When posting jobs on platforms like Upwork, I usually include an unusual request somewhere in the middle of the article – for example, I might include one sentence that says ‘When you reply to this job posting, please include the word “Orange” in your reply. If you don’t, you will not get the job” – this basically filters out anyone who doesn’t carefully read instructions.
• If you find a good writer that you like working with and does a good job consistently, it’s worth trying to keep them happy. Even if they ask for a higher per-word rate – sometimes it’s worth it if you factor in the time you would spend looking for a replacement of the same quality.

Creating a Framework for Content Creation: Keyword Research

This is a Standard Operating Procedure for doing Keyword Research. This post was originally a Google Doc – if you want to read the Google Doc instead (and Make a Copy) feel free to do so. If you’re done with this SOP, you can move on to the Content Creation and Management SOP.

Figure Out What You’re Looking For

The first part of KW Research is coming up with Broad KW Ideas to look into.

• First thing you should do is ask yourself the following questions
  • What niche are you in?
  • How do you currently make money?
  • How do you want to make money in the future?

Example:

If you had a site selling a course that teaches French, while KWs about french recipes might be tangentially related and easy to rank, they’re unlikely to convert organic visitors into paying customers. Have your eye on your target (profit) when doing KW research.

If you sell products either as an affiliate or as a product creator, you should think about what KWs will likely convert well, not just on volume or CPC.

Generating an Initial List of KWs

There are a number of ways to generate initial KW lists. Here are a few:

Competition Analysis

• This method is much easier if you have access to paid tools like SEMRush that scope out the competition for you. Here’s how we do it with SEMRush:
  • Find a website in your niche that has high SE Traffic, yet a low DA /Domain Rank (I prefer Domain Rank in Ahrefs). I like to focus on smaller sites that have a DA/DR that is no more than 5 above my site.
  • Focus only on the terms they are ranked on the first page for. Go through and record these terms. Most smaller sites will be getting most of their traffic from just a few articles.
  • Rinse and repeat until you have about 30 keywords.

• It is also possible to do it manually. Here’s how:
  • Look up the SERPs of KWs you’re already ranking for. Find some sites that are in your niche, ideally find some sites that are not massive players, they should have a link profile that’s not much stronger than yours (IE no more than 5 DA more than your site).
  • Scope out their content, paying particular attention to article headers and title tags. These will often let you know what KWs they are targeting. Most websites will be targeting key phrases – try to work out what these are.
  • Collect a batch of about 30 KWs that you want to do further research on

Example:

If I was doing research for a site about learning french, I might check out the SERPs for ‘Learn French Online’ and find the site http://ielanguages.com/french.html (ranks bottom of page 1). I decided that this was a good fit because some of the higher rank sites look very authoritative and less niche focused. Looking at their content briefly, I see that they’re probably targeting the following KWs:french tutorials, french listening resources, informal french slang, french phonetics, etc.

Brainstorming

• Think about the content that is already on your site. What areas does it make sense to expand into? Pick an area that makes sense. You can then follow that thread by making use of free or paid tools.
  • The obvious free tool to use here is the Google Keyword Planner. If you put in the broad area that you want to find KWs for, Keyword Planner will generate a list of up to 800 related KWs for you. I suggest you put a basic filter to not bring up keywords with less than a few hundred searches. You will need to prune this down later, but it’s a good base list of KWs to have.
  • Paid tools like LongTailPro, Keywordtool.io and SECockpit.com or any other KW Tool that you prefer will typically also include a function that allows you to generate a list of related KWs based on a single root KW.

Example:

With my theoretical french language site, I’d probably want to hone in on my niche – I put learn french into the Google KW Tool and got a list of 800 KWs to filter. Not all of these will be directly relevant to learning french, but a list of 800 KWs is plenty to start with.

Filtering your KW List

Quick Filters

Exactly how you decide to filter your KWs will depend on the strength of your site and how confident you are that you can attract links.

• First, make a copy of this spreadsheet, then copy and paste your initial list of KWs into the sheet (tab) named “KW: First Filter”. You’ll be using your copy of this spreadsheet throughout this process.
• These are some of the first filters we’ll run on our KW lists – note that you can do some of these filters in the Keyword Planner itself, but I’m just used to working in Excel/Google Sheets.
  • Single word KWs (these are typically too competitive)
  • Irrelevant KWs and KWs that are only tangentially related to your niche.
  • Branded KWs where people are searching for a page on a specific site ( e.g french grammar wiki – rule this out because even if you rank your CTR will be low)
  • KWs with too little search volume. For a small or new site, you can use 100 search volume as a minimum. You may want to raise this minimum if you’re working on a larger site.
  • KWs that you don’t think will convert well for the product you’re selling if you’re monetizing via a specific affiliate offer or your own product.
• Obviously, there is no need for you to use the “Pass?” and “Reason” columns. These are just to provide a clear example of how we complete our first filters

Example:

The template spreadsheet has an example sheet with 200 KWs relating to ‘Learn French’. I’ve filtered out some KWs based on the criteria above and marked them accordingly. Obviously, you don’t need to provide reasoning when you’re doing your own filtering – I included the extra columns to make it clear. The KWs that are not filtered out will be the KWs we’ll use in the next stage. Keep in mind, I truncated the original list of 800 to 200 KWs for brevity’s sake.

Difficulty Filter

The next step is filtering for difficulty. The metric that we’ll use to filter out KWs that are too difficult is Average PA. This metric isn’t super robust, but we’re using it here because

• It works as a pretty effective initial filter .
• You can access PA/DA metrics for free, and we want this KW research method to work for everyone.

If you have your own preferred metric or tool that you use to measure KW difficulty, feel free to replace Average PA here with your favorite metric.

If you’re happy using Average PA and you already have a tool that can generate Average PA for KWs in bulk, you can ignore the three alternatives below. If need a tool to bulk-generate the average PA you can choose one of the following options:

1. For those of you without access to paid tools, you can opt to sign up for a one month Moz Free Trial and use their Keyword Difficulty Tool to find Average PAs of SERPs
2. You could download the Moz Bar and do it manually for each SERP
3. Alternatively, we’ve devised a DIY way to calculate average PAs on SERPs. The instructions on how to do this can be found here – it’s image heavy so we created a separate doc.

• Once you’ve got the hang of calculating Average PAs, you can start running through the filtered KW list that we created earlier.
  • Open up your copy of the template spreadsheet and go to the sheet named “KW Secondary Filter” – paste your filtered KWs from the first filter sheet here.
  • Start working on filling out the Average PAs. Don’t worry about the other columns for now. Make sure you fill out the sheet as you go along – there’s nothing worse than not noting your results and having to go back and redo a KW.
• The rule of thumb that we use is you want to filter out KWs with average PA higher than the DA of your site. If the site you’re working on has DA under 30, filter out KWs with average PA higher than 30.
  • If you’re using our DIY method to calculate average PAs, I’d recommend starting with lower volume KWs (less than 1000) and working your way upwards. High volume KWs tend to have higher difficulty. Start with lower volume KWs and you’ll be able to find some KWs that pass the Average PA filter. This will help you uncover some immediately targetable KWs.
  • The manual method is obviously much less efficient than just running a set of KWs through a tool, but it’s free, and we wanted this process to work for everyone, not just those who have access to tools.

Example:

The tab named “Example KW Secondary Filter” shows all the Average PAs for the KWs that passed our initial check.

Revenue Potential

The next thing we’ll do is try to work out the revenue potential of each KW based on its volume, conversion rate, and profit per conversion. We calculate this as follows:

Visitors to Page = CTR from SERPs x KW Volume

Visitor Value = CTR on Adsense x 66% of CPC OR Conversion x Profit per Sale

Revenue Potential = Visitors to Page x Visitor Value

The default settings that we’ve used are:

1. SERP CTR: 20%
2. Adsense CTR or Conversion Rate: 1%
3. Monetization Model: Adsense
4. Product Profit/Commission: $20

You can see and adjust the settings on the Settings tab – your own copy of the spreadsheet will have a settings tab that you can play with.

Spreadsheet Usage Notes: On the settings page, if cell B5 is set to ‘Adsense’, revenue will be calculated based on the ‘Suggested Bids’ column, which is unique to each KW. If cell B5 is set to ‘Product’, revenue projections will be based on the profit/commission per product sold, which is set at $20.

On the sheet ‘KW Secondary Filter’, column L can be used to override the default CTR. If you enter any % into an cell in column L, the CTR column will change to match it.

The idea here is that if you’re using adsense to monetize, chances are your CTRs will be similar across the board, but your CPCs will vary based on the KW.

On the other hand, if you’re selling products (either affiliate or your own), your profit per product will be stable, but your conversion rates for different KWs will change.

We’ll work on calculating revenue potential on all the KWs that pass our Average PA filter. Keep in mind that these revenue potentials are just assumptions – this is a relative metric as opposed to an absolute metric, you use it to compare different KWs to each other, not to establish exactlyt how much any given KW will earn you per month.

• Adjust the settings in the spreadsheet.
  • If you’re selling a product rather than using Adsense, change cell B5 on the settings sheet to ‘Product’
  • You can also adjust CTRs individually for each KW using the CTR Override column. You only really need to do this for KWs that pass your Average PA filter (marked green)
• Sort your KWs by Revenue Potential to see which KWs are both rankable and profitable.

Congrats! You should now have a couple of base Keywords to target.

Example:

You can refer to the “Example: KW Secondary Filter” sheet to see a fully filled out sheet with revenue potentials calculated.

Finding KW Concept Add-Ons

We no longer live in a world where micro-targeting a few specific exact match KWs makes sense. It’s not necessarily because this strategy no longer works – you can still target exact match KWs with below average content and rank for them. However, in terms of ROI on both your time and your money, it makes more sense to try and create content that is above a certain quality threshold.

This is doubly true if you’re a website buyer – low quality content can affect the long term value of your asset by damaging your site’s reputation and potentially putting you at risk of a Google penalty.

So, instead of focusing on the exact match KW, we’ll focus on KW concepts. Your target might be french conversation.

If you were targeting that as an exact match using the old-school method, you would try to include French Conversation in your article X amounts of times to reach Y Keyword density.

Instead, what we’ll be doing is thinking of the KW as an umbrella concept – so conversation in french and french conversational dialogue would all fall under the same umbrella concept. We’re targeting the concept rather than the exact KW.

Another thing that we’ll be doing is trying to find out what information Google thinks is relevant to the KW Concept of french conversation and serving up that related information to Google on a platter.

We want to reverse engineer Google to see what information they think is relevant to our KW concept. We then create content that’s targeting not just one specific KW, but a whole range of ideas relevant to that KW. How do we do this?

It’s easy – Google tells us what they want. Here’s a few ways to work out what information Google wants to see for each KW:

• Before you start, make a copy of this new spreadsheet.
• We’ll be using this new spreadsheet in this section as well as in the following SOP about content creation.
• Search one of your target KWs into Google
  • The first way you can find related ideas is to scroll to the bottom where it says “Searches Related To” – right off the bat, there are 8 KW ideas that Google believes are relevant to our target KW.
  • Another way is to take a look at the pages that are currently ranking. See what ideas and topics those pages cover on top of whatever is directly related to your target KW and note these other KW concepts down. In particular, take a look at Page Titles and Meta Description tags – these often give away a lot of useful information.
  • Use Google Instant (that’s where Google instantly gives you suggestions based on what you typed into the search bar)
  • Use Google Adword’s Ad Group Ideas to see what other KWs Google groups together with your target KW – when doing this, you should actually click into the group and see which KWs fall under which semantic umbrella in the mind of Google.
• Gather up all these KW concepts that you’ve found and fill out the sheet “KW Target & Addons” – it’s more or less self explanatory. Check out the example if you’re not sure what to do.

That’s pretty much it for the KW Research portion – if you want to see what we do with all these juicy KW concepts to target, check out our Content Creation SOP.

Example:

If we’re targeting the KW concept french conversation, we’ll likely naturally pick up a bunch of LT KWs that fall under the same umbrella like conversations in french or french conversation practice depending on what our content covers. You can take a look at the example sheet to see how we record down our add-on KW concepts.

The rule of thumb for long tail KW volume is that on average it will add up to be equal to the volume of the root KW. So French Conversation has 1000 volume, all the KWs that are Long Tails of French Conversation and it’s supporting keyword concepts will have volumes that add up to 1000.

We’re looking for Add-On KW Concepts to include in our article.

First we’ll take what Google explicitly suggests:

Next we’ll scope out the competition.

From the above screenshot, I got the following KW concepts:

French Phrases and Expressions

Translations of common words and Phrases

Common conversational phrases in french

After a brief glance at the pages that are currently ranking, I see that many of these pages discuss french phrases and expressions and common conversational phrases in french, and french translations of common words and phrases.

Finally,we’ll use Google Instant:

All in all, we’ve found that a page targeting the KW concept french conversation should also include information about the following things:

french conversation topics

french conversation starters

french conversation examples

french conversation audio

common french words, phrases and expressions

french translations of common phrases

beginner french conversations

waiter/customer conversation in french

french conversation practice

french greetings

french dialogue videos

Again – we aren’t trying to target these KWs specifically – we’re targeting the concepts. We’re not going to try and force mentions of certain KWs. Instead, what you’ll see in the Content Creation SOP is how we break articles down into sections and subsections in order to target these KW concepts.