March 20, 2017

The Content Lifecycle – Keeping Things Up to Date

Uncategorized content creation, content lifecycle, keyword analysis

Keeping content recent and relevant is perhaps one of the most time-consuming, yet crucial parts of running a website. The content lifecycle exists for a reason. If you’re going to keep your audience engaged and your subscribers on your mailing list, you have to consistently publish fresh, original content.

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, it doesn’t matter which niche – if you’re quiet, your followers have no indication that you’re doing anything in your specialty. There’s no reason to purchase your products or services because you have done nothing to prove your credibility to them.

Content isn’t just king, it’s supreme ruler of your universe (or at least it should be).

Getting into a Routine – The Content Lifecycle Workflow

Content generation is a bear of a task, but having a routine in place to get it all done definitely helps. Much of what your content cycle workflow looks like is going to depend on how many skills you have in your wheelhouse and how much you need to outsource, but here’s a rough idea of where to start:

Establish an editorial calendar – Get things on your schedule at least a few weeks in advance, so that you have adequate time to cover time-sensitive subjects, and can plan your email promotions and newsletters accordingly. Google Calendar is a great, simple tool for content planning.
Goal setting – What’s the purpose of what you’re writing? Where are you directing traffic?
Audience research – Before you even begin to draft your copy, do a little digging on your target audience. What problems do they have in common? What emotional triggers do they have? What do they really want to read?
Competitor research – Take a look at your competitors’ sites to get a feel for things they’re covering. Are you missing anything in your own coverage? Don’t steal ideas, but definitely don’t lose out on a key audience because you’re out of the loop.
Topic research – Both keyword and topical – know what you need to know to write what you need to write. Put together the keyword data to make your copy as effective as you can, without over-engineering.
Creation – Time to draft it up! Make it engaging, readable, and give it a solid direction. Outlining headlines first is a great way to establish a solid framework for content.
Revising – Go over it with a fine-tooth comb before your audience sees it. Use a tool like Grammarly to double-check your work. Place any relevant links.
Publishing – Get it in the queue for publication, and make sure your images and links are ready to go. Always double check your formatting in a preview before you leave that content to post.
Promoting – Get the word out, or you’ll be talking to an empty room. Get the word out in forums, Facebook groups, your email list, and coordinate with partners that might be interested in exchanging a little promotion – it’s a great way to reach new readers.
Maintaining – Always revisit your content with updates, respond to comments, and keep links up to date to keep it relevant and ranking. Get into a cyclical routine to keep things organized.

Out of Ideas? Use TF-IDF to Get the Headlines Flowing

TF-IDF is the perfect solution for the content creator stuck in a rut with their content. This simple algorithm generates fresh, semantically related keywords based on the keywords you input. It’s a great way to get a fresh set of ideas that your top competitors for your target keywords are already using.

If you’ve been stuck for a while, don’t stay there. Using TF-IDF software like Text Tools, you can breathe new life into your content lifecycle. Take that list of keyword recommendations, and run with it. Here’s what a brainstorming session with the help of TF-IDF looks like.

How to Use TF-IDF for Content Creation

We start with an article that did really well on natural medicine. The target keyword was ‘natural medicine’, and now we want to build on that topic in the most efficient way possible, so we run it through Text Tools for some semantic analysis.

In a few minutes, we have the results of the analysis in our inbox.

Let’s take a look at what it pulled up.

When you zoom in on this data (just use the bar at the top of the chart to narrow your results down to 20), you can see that you have a nice set of related keywords tied to information about where they’re showing up the most on the web.

These are your top competitors, and this is what else they’re talking about that’s bringing in the traffic.

Now we ask ourselves, what can we write about within these subjects? Let’s start with the words that specialize the subject the most, and build some headlines around them:

Menu
The Natural Medicine Menu – Gut Health 101
Food as Medicine – Menus to Help You Fight the Flu This Season

Online
The Best Online Natural Medicine Courses
Online Resources for Home Remedies

Physicians
Finding a Physician On Board with Natural Medicine
Physicians Roundup: The Consensus on Natural Medicine

Health
Alternative Health Care – Natural Medicines
Natural Medicine for Everyday Health

You get the idea. Some of these words might be related to the layout of the actual site, depending on their context (you can follow the links to find out for yourself). Ultimately though, you just need to go through this information and find the gaps in your content.

Basically, you take this list of keywords, and you build an arsenal of ideas around it, using it to put together a content calendar that’s relevant to your audience, while also expanding it. Take TF-IDF and run with it. It’s a great way to get unstuck when you’re trying to come up with fresh ideas to round out your calendar.

Ready to put some new ideas into your content lifecycle? Click here to learn more about Text Tools semantic keyword analysis.

I Don’t Have Time to Publish Fresh Content

Then outsource it. Make it happen. Find a way.

If you have any hopes of growing your mailing list and building a lasting rapport with your customers, you’re going to have to do more than send them the spammy promotional email.

The key with successful and lucrative content creation is building the rapport with your audience before the sales pitch. Otherwise, what you send them is going to fall on deaf ears.

Find a writer you can trust to get their head around your vision, or hollow out some time in your schedule to get back into a routine with your content lifecycle. Schedule it like you would any other client work, only the client here is you. You’re working for yourself, and it’s all part of building the business.

Keep it fresh, keep it relevant, and keep it up to date. A stagnant site with dull copy is going to do you no favors, so get into a routine with publishing new content so that your subscribers have something new to read, and a reason to keep coming back.

Get into a routine with your content lifecycle, and I promise – your consistency will pay off.

February 4, 2017

by blog

Why TF-IDF is the Most Effective SEO Formula Around

What is TF-IDF, and how does it improve SEO?

Uncategorized algorithm, keyword analysis, semantic keywords, seo, tf-idf, tf-idf seo

The internet is a treasure trove of information, but as content strategists, we all know: it’s a jungle out there. There are so many schools of thought as to what the best way to rank higher is, what you absolutely must do to bring in more traffic, and reach a higher volume of your target audience. You’ve read it all, but have you heard about TF-IDF yet?

Who has time for it? You’re busy enough, and you just need to know what you need to know to make the magic happen – to bring searchers to your pages, turn clicks into conversions, and readers into subscribers. Let’s get right into it.

Spammy SEO – When Google Knows You’re Up to No Good

Over the years, Google has gotten smarter and smarter, and the crawlers are now more aware than ever of the techniques sites are using to bring traffic to their pages. This savviness has resulted in Google penalizing sites doing cheap, spammy things to bring in more traffic.

The problem is, at a certain point in the content marketing craze, it became more about rankings and numbers than it did about just having naturally engaging, unique content. The keyword density craze took hold, and copywriters took to keyword stuffing to the tune of 3-5% per document, putting off readers with robotic and obviously engineered text.

Bounce rates went up, Google took note of the tactics that content creators were using, and new algorithms were created to ensure that sites had to actually provide content of value to readers if they were to land in the top SERPs.

The result now is a better user experience, but a tougher than ever challenge for content marketers. The competition for traffic is fierce, so how do we reach people and employ advanced SEO tactics that Google isn’t going to penalize us for?

What is TF-IDF?

TF-IDF is an algorithm that goes beyond the keyword stuffing techniques of yesteryear, and instead focuses on delivering relevant content to your audience, and helps you reach more of them.

TF-IDF stands for Term Frequency – Inverse Document Frequency. Sure, makes a lot of sense, right? TF-IDF might sound at first like keyword density, but it’s a much more reasonable approach to the dated practice of stuffing content full of your target keyword.

TF-IDF works in two steps. First, it identifies the frequency of important terms in a given text – like, say, a blog post – and then compares that information to the uniqueness of the term to provide a value to every relevant keyword in your document.

So what does this mean for you? You get a list of semantically related key terms that you can use to optimize your content, and add a few keywords to your focus. The results is an information-rich text that will pop up on more SERPs, and be visible to more readers.

Why TF-IDF Kicks the Pants Off Keyword Density Techniques

Initially, this might sound like a really fancy and technical way of keyword-stuffing (which is never cool), but let’s be clear here – TF-IDF is what you make of it. It’s just information, and if you use it to create some 6% keyword dense abomination, that’s on you.

What really makes TF-DF for SEO amazing is that it gives you a unique insight into creating organically engaging content that will rank all on its own, by giving you a list of semantically related keywords to tie into your piece.

Let’s look at an example to paint a picture of what a bit of text might look like before and after a TF-IDF analysis:

Carrots are a rich source of vitamins and minerals, but much of the nutrient absorption is determined by how you prepare them. For the best results, always eat carrots raw. If you must roast them, then make sure you use a cooking oil with a high smoke point. Baste them, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and cook uncovered at 400 degrees F for 30-40 minutes, and enjoy.

Turns out, after a TF-IDF analysis, we can see that lots of sites mentioning carrots also mention food, so we work that one in. Now we apply this new information to further optimize our text:

Carrots are a vitamin and mineral-rich food, but much of the nutrient absorption is determined by how you prepare these foods. For the best results, always eat carrots raw. If you must roast them, then make sure you use a cooking oil with a high smoke point. Baste them, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and cook uncovered at 400 degrees F for 30-40 minutes, and enjoy.

TF-IDF – SEO for People

You don’t stuff ‘em, you don’t overwhelm your reader with obvious keyword choices – you just work natural, semantically related keywords into your text to reach more people, and ultimately, rank higher. TF-IDF gives you the information and tools you need to make your content richer and more applicable to a wide range of searches, without using dated methods like keyword density.

If this is the first you’re hearing of this simple SEO tool, I highly suggest you take a look at Text Tools. It’s a very simple platform to use, and provides you with the information you need to optimize new or existing content to organically rank, and blow your competitors out of the water.

Start optimizing your content the right way now – get TF-IDF with Text Tools.