A scalable content creation team often includes a mix of in-house contributors, freelancers, and external partners.For anyone working in content-focused SEO, this is a question that surfaces again and again:
What should I focus on now?
In marketing, there are a million things you could be doing, but the hardest part is deciding what to invest in first. The same goes for SEO.
So we asked some of our friends at some of the most respected marketing brands (, , and ) to help us explain the three pillars of SEO, in which order you should tackle each pillar, and how to tell you鈥檙e ready to move on to the next stage.
If you want to hear our full explanation of how this all works, let鈥檚 dive into each of the three pillars: technical SEO, on-site content, and off-site authority.
Jump to:
A special note: To the folks who feel like they couldn鈥檛 accomplish all of this if they had a marketing team with 50 people on it: This guide is designed to show a path to success by combining the power of these three pillars. But know you鈥檙e not going to get everything perfect. Pick and choose what you can achieve from each pillar in this guide, and you鈥檒l still be in the top 5% of all marketing teams.
Technical SEO is the foundational pillar but it can sometimes feel unapproachable due to the specialized language and expertise typically involved. You are trying to serve two audiences 鈥� an actual visitor to your site and search engines 鈥� and those two audiences evaluate your site differently.
You can think of your technical foundation as helping search engines to understand your website鈥檚 structure and content in the way a visitor would visually consume it. Your technical efforts can help align Google鈥檚 and other search engines鈥� interpretations with your website鈥檚 intentions.
Technical SEO must happen either first or concurrently with the second pillar, on-site content.
Why?
Because in order to be eligible to rank, your site needs to be set up for search engines to discover, crawl, render, and index your site.
Let鈥檚 take a brief look at :
Discovering: Finding the location (URL) where content exists from links, XML sitemaps, RSS feeds.
Crawling: Bot requests the URL鈥檚 content from the website鈥檚 server, sifting through the content that鈥檚 accessible to the search engine
Rendering: A subprocess of crawling 鈥� processed/parsed, converted to format 鈥渞eadable鈥� by search engine
Indexing: Analyzed, stored, cataloged (the library of content, labeled and ready for search results)
Ranking: Served in search results, based on searcher data and the cataloged content in the index
Your job is to help search engines accomplish the above goals. If you鈥檙e not doing that, scaling won鈥檛 be possible, because all of your hard work in content and link earning won鈥檛 reach its full ranking benefit.
If you鈥檙e just starting out with technical, your initiation into technical SEO should involve Google Search Console (GSC). Claim or verify your site in GSC so you can be alerted to issues GoogleBot is encountering.
Then, submit an XML sitemap in GSC, which will allow Google to identify and crawl your site.
The next stage is to monitor GSC; this is especially important when major changes and updates are being deployed. If you are launching new content, migrating the site, updating code, or expecting seasonal or news-related traffic, monitor the site daily for indexation and performance.
GSC also offers clues on areas of opportunity, such as Discover, Core Web Vitals, and enhancements, such as Schema markup for FAQs, products, videos, etc. Depending on your site or other initiatives you are working on, it is worthwhile to monitor this weekly or monthly.
Some include blocking content from search engines and assigning improper canonicals. You can to spot a few of the following problems:
Once your technical foundation is secure, you鈥檝e ensured that search engines and visitors can access your site鈥檚 content and you can establish a technical health monitoring process and cadence. The next step is to fold your on-site content and technical monitoring into your SEO workstream.
Some digital marketing gurus love to complicate things. And it鈥檚 true that some parts of digital marketing are very complicated.
But when it comes to on-site content, you can really boil it down to a darn simple formula:
Relevant to your ICP (ideal customer profile) + deserves to rank = SEO-worthy content for your brand
Maybe you get a bit fancier and layer in some concept of funnel-depth to your content, or you can keep it simple and think about it as:
Here鈥檚 all that in visual form for you visual learners out there:
Let鈥檚 break the formula into its component parts to outline a plan for building a content engine...
that turns the formula into traffic (and eventually money).
With technical issues resolved, you still need to make it worthwhile for search engines to visit your site. You do that by creating original and helpful content 鈥� the type that proves your expertise and authority. In other words, it deserves to rank.
But it鈥檚 not how much content you have. Rather, it鈥檚 about how it all fits together. And if your goal is scaling your SEO program, this piece is critical.
Connecting pages into is how you transform content from an expense into an investment 鈥� one that will continue to pay dividends far into the future.
To do this, think in terms of clusters of content as opposed to individual pages. Yes, individual pages still need to:
Beyond that, the content you鈥檙e scaling needs to be organized into semantically connected clusters, each with:
Content strategy goes hand-in-hand with the operational aspects of creating quality content at scale. The ramifications of (now bad content can weigh down your entire site) make this even more critical.
Content is ultimately built for humans, not robots 鈥� but the robots are gatekeepers, determining what the real people searching find first. (This is why technical SEO is critical.)
But our goal as content creators is to write for the readers. Content 鈥� and scaling your SEO program 鈥� requires quality content. But what is quality content?
Quality content:
Now, that doesn鈥檛 mean talking about your product, but it does mean authentically connecting with your target audience and speaking their language/solving their problems.
is a good example of this: It solves a problem for their audience without directly promoting their offering.
Because it meets search intent, it ranks for a ton of keywords that help expand Slack鈥檚 brand awareness and authority among audiences that care about improving the employee experience at work.
Source:
Once you鈥檝e created quality content pillars and clusters, it鈥檚 time to scale.
Here鈥檚 a 7-step process for going from the high-level strategy to actually publishing and reaping the rewards:
There are a handful of page-level technical considerations you should check on here:
Various schema types make you eligible for rich results on Google鈥檚 search engine results pages. Rich results are visual experiences that enhance the way your listing is shown, typically making it more appealing and specific to searchers鈥� needs. Rich results can drive more traffic to your site as they surface your content in a more visible manner.
Examples of markup which are include Product, FAQ Page, How-To, Event, Review, and Video. You can use the to see if pages are eligible for these enhanced listings.
How your web pages are coded and the elements that are used can help search engines (and visitors using screen readers) understand your content. Using semantic HTML markup such as hierarchical headings, tables, and lists can provide descriptive clues about your content and its relationship to what surrounds it.
Images can support the experience of your content as well as the organic performance of your pages. Image optimization can include serving properly sized, named, and formatted files as well as including descriptive alternative text and deferring images that are offscreen with lazy loading.
Google uses metrics called Core Web Vitals to measure the performance of a page. These Core Web Vitals (CWV) are collected from Chrome browser user data that users opt-in to providing. Investigate issues here for desktop and mobile users.
Want to dig into all of this a little more? Here鈥檚 a great on-page technical SEO resource:
Once you鈥檝e made headway on Pillars 1 and 2, you鈥檙e ready for Pillar 3, the one that can dramatically amplify everything you鈥檝e done up until this point.
While it鈥檚 fine to do some of this work while focusing on Pillars 1 and 2, it鈥檚 best to fully invest in it once you have your technical SEO and on-site foundation set up. Earning a bunch of links to a piece of content that sucks is like watering soil that doesn鈥檛 have any seeds 鈥� it鈥檚 not going to get you very far.
When we talk about earning links, we鈥檙e talking about getting other authoritative people/brands/sites to mention your company. Google relies on this reputation system to assess whether your page is useful and trustworthy and thus should rank higher than other pages.
So if you have a great site and you鈥檝e created killer content, and yet you鈥檙e not ranking as well as you鈥檇 like, Pillar 3 is ready to be of service.
The catch? It鈥檚 tough.
And because it鈥檚 not easy to secure those authority signals, countless companies don鈥檛 invest as much as they should in earning them.
The good news is that if you invest in link earning, you have a real chance of surpassing your competitors in the SERPs.
How much you鈥檙e able to scale will depend on your budget and resources, but any investment in this area can really bolster your content鈥檚 rankings, which can significantly impact how much relevant traffic you drive to your site.
We鈥檙e not going to talk about buying links in bulk, because it鈥檚 not a safe way to scale 鈥� quality is dicey, and there鈥檚 always a chance you鈥檒l be penalized by Google for taking the shady route. This isn鈥檛 a feasible approach for folks who can鈥檛 or won鈥檛 take the risk and prioritize long-term scaling over short-term traffic spikes.
So just like we talked about earning our Page 1 ranking for our on-site content, we鈥檙e also going to talk about earning links vs. building links. When you create something that鈥檚 link-worthy, you鈥檙e more likely to attract higher-quality links, meaning links from sites that are actually relevant and authoritative.
One way to do this is through creating linkable, high-quality on-site content; there鈥檚 a beautiful overlap here with Pillar 2! (Particularly, the more top-of-the-funnel content we mentioned.)
Folks in the industry call on-site content 鈥渓inkable content鈥� if they think it has a high probability of being linked to. Some examples of this type of content are:
The way to think about this in reverse is to consider what type of resources people like to link to when they write something; what can you create that would be a source for someone else?
For example in the original research vein, was mentioned by (domain rating of 91), for example, because it helped support a point they were trying to make.
This is a more passive link earning approach, but it鈥檚 a good fit if it has a dual goal with ranking for top-of-the-funnel awareness keywords.
But there鈥檚 a more active approach, as well, that gives you more control over the link earning process.
For years now, link builders have used the approach of offering to write guest posts for blogs or pitching their own blog post that has no newsworthy value.
This approach doesn鈥檛 work anymore.
Publishers are inundated with pitch emails daily, and unless you鈥檙e pitching something truly remarkable, they鈥檙e not even going to open your email let alone bother to read the content in earnest.
That鈥檚 why creating newsworthy content is the best approach. Content that is new or carries some sort of timely, localized, or contextualized significance is much more likely to be appealing to publishers than your latest 鈥淗ow to鈥� post.
Going in depth about what makes something newsworthy can be its own post, which is why we wrote one all about news values.
But, the simplest way for a brand to create newsworthy content is by:
Pitching this type of content to publishers will improve your chances of earning media coverage and high-quality links.
For example, about the future of work was cited in a (domain rating 92).
It鈥檚 unclear whether Slack actively pitched this study or if it was discovered organically or if the BBC writer found this study and knew it would be a great data point for their story.
But what we do know is that studies like this are much more likely to be covered by news sources, and if you do actively pitch/promote them, you can earn multiple top-tier placements that are considered link-earning gold and provide massive authority signals to your domain, which then helps your pages rank higher and your organic traffic increase.
We鈥檝e covered a lot in this post. If you鈥檙e exhausted just scrolling through it, we totally understand. Achieving this type of scaling often requires a robust internal team and/or the perfect set of SaaS and agency partners.
To help you assess where you should spend your time now to have the most impact, reach out to our team here to schedule a free demo and strategy session.