Using technology and software allows you to expand what you’re able to create and accomplish on your own or with your existing team. In this article we’ll walk through a typical organic/SEO content creation process and how you can use cutting-edge content tools to automate or expedite parts of the process and expand your capabilities without adding to your team or extending timelines.
SEO content tools and software for each step of the process:
2. Developing a content roadmap
3. Creating content briefs and outlines
4. Writing content (including graphics)
5. Publishing content to your website
7. Refreshing content over time
The typical organic content process
In today’s quality-focused content landscape, here is what the typical content process looks like:
- Do keyword research.
- Develop a content roadmap.
- Create content briefs and outlines.
- Write and create the content (can be done in batches).
- Publish the content to your website.
- Report on results.
- Refresh content over time (to keep up with your competition).
Some of the best SEO content tools to consider
- Semrush
- Ahrefs
- Content At Scale
- Jasper
- Page Optimizer Pro
- Grammarly
- HubSpot
- Contentful
- Asana
- Canva
The next sections will cover these different SEO content tools, addressing how they can make the organic content process more efficient and effective. Each section will specifically address common challenges or pain points and show how the software can alleviate those challenges.
1. Doing keyword research
In this first phase of organic content development, you’ll research and document all relevant keywords that potential customers and current customers type into Google. The keyword research will inform what content you create.
Common challenges in this step
Organizing large amounts of data. Many businesses have thousands of relevant keywords that you’ll want to categorize by product/service, content format, and more.
Organizing in a methodical and actionable manner can take days or weeks of focused effort. This easily comes out to 30-50 hours of work, especially for businesses with thousands of keywords.
Tools and software to make this easier
It’s hard to talk about SEO content tools without first talking about keyword research software. Reduce keyword research time by around 50% using keyword research tools. Let's take a look at two popular tools:
- Semrush. Semrush’s Keyword Magic tool allows you to research core topics, see exactly what people are searching on Google, and organize them into different lists, which creates a structure that can help streamline and reduce organizing time. When I personally implemented a keyword research process using Semrush, I cut keyword research time in half.
Learn more here on how to do SEO keyword research using Semrush.
- Ahrefs. Ahrefs works very similarly to Semrush in that you can research by topic, collect relevant keywords, and organize them into a list. You can expect the same time savings with Ahrefs.
Using keyword research tools to organize keyword research can lead to a roughly 50% time reduction.
Cost
Current Semrush pricing | Current Ahrefs pricing
2. Developing a content roadmap
This involves prioritizing which pages/pieces you’ll work on first, what types of pieces and formats you’ll execute, how many phases there will be, and what resources will be required.
Common challenges in this step
Determining priorities for a content project will be unique to each business, but one universal challenge is juggling resources needed, coordinating among team members, and setting appropriate timelines.
Planning resources and setting timelines. Coordinating across teams and planning resources can get complicated. For example, you would like to create your first batch of content drafts in two weeks, but your copywriting and/or editing team only has five hours a week to offer. Juggling timelines with available resources is the challenge in this step that often causes projects to slow down or miss deadlines.
Tools and software to make this easier
Asana. While there are many project management and resource planning tools to consider, my experience shows that Asana is the most flexible, allowing you to customize it to your specific project and needs and manage multiple aspects of your content project within one tool. Asana’s premium version includes resourcing tools and resource management as well. Although it isn’t natively geared towards being an SEO content tool, its customizability and wide range of features make it great for managing organic content projects.
Cost
3. Creating content briefs and outlines
This step is important whether you’re working independently, with other team members, or with any of the AI tools we’ll be suggesting below. In this stage, you’ll use your keyword research along with search results analysis to create an outline for each content piece.
The outline should be based on how to best meet the intent behind the keyword search and how to optimize for the specific types of results showing for that query. For example, if the featured snippet showing at the top of the results features a bulleted list, you know to include a summarizing, bulleted list in your outline.
For each piece, you’ll want to plan the outline and content brief around the following SEO factors:
- Inclusion of the target keyword(s) throughout headings and body copy.
- Inclusion of relevant “People also ask” questions that show for the keyword search.
- Optimizing for answer boxes and featured snippets (like this one) by formatting direct questions and answers, or formatting in bulleted lists or tables. Learn more here about how to get a featured snippet on Google.
Common challenges in this step
Lack of structure that leads to more work down the line. While a lack of structure or lack of outlines may not slow you down in this stage, improper planning from the start may add work to your plate later in the content development process, or cause you to unintentionally hinder results.
By structuring the content to support SEO right from the beginning through well-thought-out outlines, you’ll speed up the optimization process because the optimization will be built into the structure.
Tools and software to make this easier
This stage is more about structure, process, and discipline, so SEO content writing tools don’t require as much sophistication in this step. This is a stage where you may be able to keep your software stack simple.
Google Docs. As mentioned, sometimes simple is better. Google Docs is a great space to collaborate. You can build your outlines in Google Docs and pass off each document to the respective resource, or use this space to build out the drafts from the AI copywriting tools recommended below.
Google Docs allow for live versions and the ability to link to each draft/content piece instead of having to attach and reattach each updated version.
4. Writing content (including supporting graphics)
This stage is where modern software and SEO content writing tools stand out. Executing the content pieces on your roadmap includes many different steps such as research, subject-matter-expert interviews, product team interviews, copywriting, and graphic design (to create images, charts, etc. to support the written content).
Common challenges in this step
The most common obstacle in this phase of the project is the sheer number of resources needed to create the content.
Intensive copywriting resources are needed. Long lists of keywords require many pages and articles since we’re creating a unique page or article for each keyword. This may mean hundreds of pages of content needed. To write all of this content, you would traditionally need to bring on additional copywriting resources or hire a team of writers and editors.
Long timelines to completion. It also typically takes months of work to complete copywriting, which delays the time frame in which you can post the content and see results (rankings, traffic, and conversions).
Additional graphic design resources and personnel are needed. Beyond the copywriting resources needed to write and edit the text, many content pieces on your roadmap will require or benefit from the addition of graphics, whether that’s in the form of supplemental charts, images, or infographics..
Tools to eliminate the need to hire, and to reduce project timelines
Content At Scale (best for long-form content automation). This is a new, up-and-coming SEO content tool that just left beta mode. Content At Scale is a very powerful AI software geared towards creating and scaling quality, keyword-focused articles. This tool will churn out a 2,000-word article in about three to five minutes. There will be some editing required to review style, check factual accuracy, and verify keyword optimization, but nevertheless, the tool saves a large amount of time and would reduce or eliminate the need to hire copywriters. You will just want to be sure you have team members who can review, edit, and approve the content.
Using a tool like Content At Scale also greatly speeds up the timeline at which you can launch the content, which means faster business results.
📣 According to Justin McGill, founder of Content At Scale, “you can [feasibly] do a month's worth of content in a day.”
In my own experiment with Content At Scale, I was able to create this article on how to do your own SEO and publish it to my website in a shocking 1 hour and 25 minutes, compared to the roughly 5 plus hours it normally takes. Note that the editing I performed was fairly extensive due to my own preferences and in order to incorporate subject-matter-expert knowledge. If you’ve created the outlines as mentioned in step three, then you can use that to further guide Content At Scale and produce a better output requiring fewer revisions.
Content At Scale produced a 2,000-word article around four times faster than if I had written it by myself (based on personal time tracking data).
Jasper (best for short-form content and more hands-on content creation). Jasper is another up-and-coming artificial intelligence writing tool that focuses more on short-form copy like product descriptions, single paragraphs, social media copy, ad copy, etc. However, you can easily and effectively stitch these together to create custom long-form pieces in less time.
Looking at Jasper’s library of templates, you can see what types of short-form copy Jasper is best for:
Note that the Boss Mode version of Jasper at the time of writing this article does have a Documents template and live document editor for writing long-form content. In my experience using Jasper as an SEO content writing tool, I found the long-form “Document” template’s output was too redundant. For me, using the short-form snippets and templates to fill in my content outline (which was completed in a previous step) was the most effective.
Jasper produced a 1,200-word article around 5 times faster than if I had written it by myself (based on personal time tracking data).
Grammarly. To expedite the editing process for my Content At Scale and Jasper articles, I enlist the support of Grammarly, a plugin with advanced spelling, grammar, and style suggestions. This eliminates the need to bring in an editor.
In other content projects I’ve managed, using Grammarly reduced resource costs by 12.5%
Canva. By now you’ve likely heard of Canva. Canva is an easy-to-use, browser-based graphic design software with thousands of templates and pre-loaded graphics that allows anyone regardless of their background to create professional graphics and videos. This is an easy way to create supporting graphics for your content without waiting for your graphic design team’s bandwidth to open up (or hire graphic designers if you don’t have in-house resources).
Canva reduces or eliminates the need to hire graphic designers or wait in your existing graphic design team’s queue.
Cost
Current Content At Scale pricing | Jasper pricing | Grammarly pricing (free version works well in most cases) | Canva pricing
5. Publishing content to your website
At this stage, all your hard work and valuable information is ready to be shared with the world! Many organizations rely on bolt-on CMS and content tools to make this stage possible and lower the level of effort.
Common challenges in this step
Inadequate developer resources or long developer queues. Depending on your organization, you may have an in-house development team or you may outsource the work to an agency. In either case, development resources are often scarce. In-house development teams (dev teams) typically have long queues, and in my 10 years in the SEO industry, new content rarely takes priority. This means long wait times to get your content published. Outsourced dev teams may have more bandwidth, but accrue extra costs.
Tools and software to make this easier
Headless CMS tools such as HubSpot and Contentful. In layman’s terms, headless CMS systems allow you to bypass the technical elements of implementation, allowing those without any development experience to publish content. Examples of headless CMS systems include HubSpot, Contentful, and Kontent.ai.
Headless CMS tools (like HubSpot) can decrease completion timelines by several weeks by allowing anyone on your team to push content live without waiting for development support.
The initial integration of a headless CMS tool will most likely require developer support, but once it’s implemented, you and/or your team will have control over when and how your content is published. This shaves weeks or even months off your timeline, and in some cases makes the project possible where it might not have been before.
Cost
Current HubSpot CMS pricing | Contentful pricing | Kontent.ai pricing
6. Reporting on results
When all is said and done, the ultimate question for the project will be, “did this work?” Making a case for continued resources will rely on proving that the efforts resulted in revenue, traffic, or the accomplishment of other business goals.
Common challenges in this step
Focusing on actionable and meaningful insights. With a plethora of data available, it’s not only challenging to find the data points that adequately inform the next steps and highlight important business insights, but it can also be time-consuming to compile pages upon pages of data.
The software suggestions below don’t necessarily do this for you, but they make it easier to create a framework and templates to extract the most meaningful insights that you decide upon. These software and tools also save time and decision fatigue by being able to come back to templates instead of creating reports from scratch each time.
Tools and software to make this easier
Semrush or Ahrefs. Semrush and Ahrefs were previously suggested to do your initial keyword research and organization. Semrush and Ahrefs also have reporting tools that allow you to create report templates, as well as connect Google Analytics to bring in traffic and conversion data. My experience has shown that using a tool like Semrush for reporting instead of something like Google Data Studio or custom Google Analytics reports saves additional time due to a decreased learning curve (Data Studio requires some learning and configuration knowledge).
If you decide to use Semrush or Ahrefs to perform and organize keyword research, use it as your reporting tool as well, as that allows for fewer tools and more consolidation.
Using templated reports to showcase content performance (featuring only meaningful data) can cut reporting time in half.
Cost
Current Semrush pricing | Current Ahrefs pricing
7. Refreshing content over time
While the freshness of a site’s content has been previously cited as a ranking factor, the details of what constitutes “fresh” content, how much of the content should be changed, and what industries are most affected by “freshness” is still largely ambiguous. The most compelling reason to refresh content is instead to keep a leg up on your competition.
Common challenges in this step
Being outranked by competitors. Is your competition adding more keyword-rich content and beating you in search results? Have they added new content that now outranks you? These things can change over time, so coming back to each piece for scheduled refreshes could be advantageous and drive better results.
Tools and software to address this challenge
Page Optimizer Pro (POP). This up-and-coming SEO content tool automatically scans your published URL, evaluates it against other top-rankers to see where they are out-optimizing you and offers suggestions on how to enhance your content to beat competitors.
The advantage to using this tool compared to other automated SEO suggestion tools is that this tool accounts directly for what your competitors are doing, and therefore which optimization updates would be most impactful in beating your competition.
Cost
Current Page Optimizer Pro (POP) pricing
Conclusion
Through the strategic use of SEO content tools and software, you can expedite your content project and reduce resources needed, allowing you to achieve business goals through organic content more quickly and at a lower cost, which drives better ROI and more impressive results!