Search Marketing Guidelines

To be completed by the managing editor

1. Use GA to identify popular, quality content that received a spike of traffic in the past but doesn’t receive any traffic today. Topics should be “evergreen”, bounce rate should be below 50%, and the time on page should be relatively high. The bounce rate is subjective, it depends on the subject matter. This post by Firas is a great example.
2. Read through the article and identify keyword(s) you believe people would likely use in Google to find it.
3. Use the SEOMoz Keyword Analysis tool, or the Google Adwords Keyword tool to identify the target keyword(s) to optimize for in the article. Note Check the number of Google results to determine the organic competition.
4. Package together for hand-off to an intern.

To be completed by an intern

1. Login into SEOMoz and add your keywords to the corresponding campaign on the Manage Keywords screen to begin tracking the SERP (search engine results page) rank for your article.
2. In WordPress use the Yoast SEO tool to do on-page optimization for your target keyword(s) using the Focus Keyword & Page Analysis tools. (provided by Linkdex)
3. Search the web for your target keyword(s) and identify 5-7 high quality related sources. Add these to the article as links within the text or as a list of links at the bottom. Be sure to use your keywords, or highly related keywords in your link text. Avoid stop words like “click here”, “learn more”, etc.
4. Identify high authority link building sources that we can post or add links to with our target keyword(s). Common sources include: forums, blog comments, pingbacks/trackbacks, questions and answer sites (like Quora). For ideas use the SEOmoz Link Research & Analysis tool to gain insight into the incoming links competitor website’s have.
5. Find people that influencer your target keyword(s) on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook & Google Plus+. Draft mentions or messages that inform them of your content or article. Sell them on why they, or their audience, would be interested in your content. The goal is to have them mention your article publicly to their audience.
6. Hand off a list of potential link building sources, targeted social media influencers and drafted messages to the managing editor.

To be completed by the managing editor

1. Post link building comments/posts that include keyword rich, anchor links back to the source article.
2. Send social media messages to influencers.
3. Monitor, measure and modify the same approach as necessary, and watch the traffic roll in!