Editorial Plan, effective strategies with SEOZoom
Despite some opposing voices that have emerged in recent years, the realization of an editorial plan is still a fundamental preventive activity for any type of online project, as it is very useful to outline not only the strategy that you intend to carry out for your site, but also to set the goals to be achieved and the target audience that you are trying to intercept.
What is the editorial plan
Trying to extremely sum it up, the editorial plan represents the framework of the site and identifies the essential points of your online presence, as it is the document that builds and formalizes on a temporal basis the content and economic programming of a publisher of any type, from the Web to the printed paper, thus establishing the articles to write and publish (what the editorial calendar actually is) but also inserting an estimate on the traffic that they can generate. More specifically, then, the editorial plan of a website (but also a blog, a newspaper or a social profile) contains the strategy that we intend to follow in the planning of content for any activity concerning, indeed, the production of texts and articles to reach a specific target and a certain goal, that are quantitatively and qualitatively measurable, transforming the online presence into a marketing tool.
A complete strategy for your own project
It is quite clear that the ultimate goal of online activities is always to increase visits and sell/convert, and this tool goes in that same direction, as well: whatever the strategy that is carried out, a correct planning allows you to achieve the desired results, always remembering to identify “step by step” targets that allow you to achieve “step by step” conversions. The editorial planning – and not only starts – from a classic “SWOT analysis“, the famous analysis that allows you to identify the profile of your “brand”, company or product, and in particular its strengths and weaknesses, exclusive features, the main competitors, and then again to highlight the core business and corporate values that are intended to communicate. Still in this preventive phase, it is also good in the digital field to pay attention to the messages to spread, the “basic” tone of voice and the target you want to reach to establish the topics to cover.
Detecting targets and goals
At the heart of the strategy of good editorial plans, then, we cannot overlook the analysis of the target audience of our project, which ultimately represents the decisive factor of success; we also said in the article about ideas for articles, to write well also and mostly means to intercept the interest and attention of the public (and search engines). If producing topical contents and offering the sharing of interesting elements made by partners and collaborators is a good starting point, but it is also important to try to deal with topics of a more general nature, writing evergreen or “Pillar” articles that are precisely the basis of the structure of your website. An effective editorial plan allows you to better plan the activity and vary the publication of content focused on seasonal keywords and the more general ones; this way avoiding, on one hand, the risk of producing and publishing articles with too similar contents and, on the other hand, it is possible to pay attention to the time factor, trying to anticipate or at least to keep up with the trending topics, especially for initiatives related to particular periods of the year (Christmas and so on), while always respecting the editorial line set in the beginning.
How to create an editorial plan for a website or blog
In short, after so many words, here is a brief and quick example of a schematic editorial plan: we start with the presentation of the project, we continue with the SWOT analysis and the study of the competition to then identify goals and Key Performance Indicators (with a lot of temporal references to put it into practice). Not less important is the identification of the referring target, which can be achieved by putting together the data collected by search engines, internal surveys, communities (online and offline) and reader personas, while the last step is the elaboration of a map of contents and taxonomies to give the website a logical, effective and efficient structure in every aspect (including categories and tags) and the definition of the editorial calendar.
SEOZoom tools for the editorial plan
Luckily, Seozoom allows to have a support also to those who ask how to create an editorial plan (here is an explanatory video you can use as a guide), either with the tools that help you perform your keyword researches or in the search of the most relevant terms for a given topic, in the discovery of the main news of the sector and to perform an Onpage analysis of the keywords, or with a precious tool that meets two needs: on one hand, it offers publishers the opportunity to realize an efficient and “SEO oriented” strategy, while on the other hand, it provides teams and agencies with a platform to coordinate work with their copywriters, assigning them specific tasks and monitoring the content creation process.
The first useful function is “Editorial Assistant“, which according to the target keyword and the secondary ones for which you intend to place the content, allows you to find out how to write a quality content with a score (established on the basis of automatic algorithms) as higher as possible, able to meet all the best practices of SEO optimization of a text. The suggested path starts from the insertion of the title and description, and the suite also presents a text editor in which to actually write the article; further suggestions come from the individual “SEO” sections (a summary table with the points to consider in order to have a well optimized article), “Keywords” (a list of other potential keywords related to the main, developed by Seozoom by scanning the SERP and identifying rankings obtained by competitors, but also informative keyword reports and commercial keywords, which can enrich the article), “Semantic Analysis” (which helps to find the topics present and used in a recurrent way in the sites rewarded in SERP), “H1,H2,H3” (a tool that scans the first 10 results of the SERP and shows the headers used by competitors) and finally “INTERNAL LINKS” (which precisely indicates the insights that were made by competitors who have used internal links, an indication that can be useful as a model to replicate a strategy that has proven itself effective). Other practical features found in the suite are “Suggest Keyword for Article” (which highlights keywords related to a topic starting from those used on websites located in the first three Google positions), “Niche News” (the most covered topics in a specific field), “Suggest synonyms” (which allows to evaluate linguistic variations to be inserted within the text ), “Keyword relevance analysis” (which shows the percentages of use of the keywords selected within the articles of the sites ranking in the first ten Google positions). Basically, then, with Seozoom it is possible to “discover” the editorial line of your competitors and use some functions to improve the ranking of your already published and less performing articles, by primarily performing a keyword research in a more accurate and efficient way.
A feature to manage both the editorial line and calendar
For those who need to create and control an efficient editorial plan, Seozoom has an innovative function within the suite to offer, available from the Professional subscription plan up, which is precisely called “Editorial Plan” and offers publishers a dashboard quite intuitive and clear, which allows you to have a complete picture of the work situation, with the editorial calendar of publications always at hand: in the boxes are reported the number of total articles (assigned and made), those accepted (meaning those already revised and meeting the previously set goals), the categories assigned, the articles waiting for drafting and, finally, the articles already published. In the central part of the page appear instead all the articles made, both published and in drafts, with indications of dates, main keyword and author of the piece recaps. As we said, the significant news is the ability to manage copywriters, who can be “invited” to be part of this virtual editorial staff. For each required article you can indicate the article’s title, main keyword, any secondary keywords, and also the minimum preferred length and other action notes for the columnist; after the copywriter has accepted the assignment and completed the task, the publisher will verify and proceed with publication. Moreover, Seozoom allows you to keep under control the performance of the various categories created, the performance of the keywords and traffic of the various articles, but also the performance of the individual copys that make up your editorial staff, so to find out the one bringing more efficient results.
