SEO Strategy Tip: Use a History Log for Content Management
With the sheer amount of content that is produced by companies on a daily basis, keeping track of everything can seem like a daunting task. But even in the digital age, organisational skills are necessary to help website owners, managers and administrators maintain a solid SEO strategy. Since optimising your website requires consistent maintenance and updating, it’s considered an SEO best practice to keep a history log of every single article, blog post or campaign your company publishes.
Why do you need an SEO strategy?
SEO is all about improvement. It requires consistent research, updates and maintenance to ensure that your website is functioning at its best, giving you a leg up over your competitors.
But in order to improve on your existing site, you first need a clear understanding of its composition. Then, the SEO strategy that you adopt should help you organize your website pages according to different topics. This will help give your site a boost in organic search engine results, whenever a person searches for a given term.
A data-driven SEO strategy will reap better results for your website. Instead of guessing what your audience is searching for, you can gain real insight into the actual search terms that are popular and create content for your site that will be useful to your audience. This will make it easier for search engines to rank your site pages and identify the areas of authority that your business operates in.
Who should keep a history log for content management?
Every company functions differently, and there’s no hard rule on who should be in charge of maintaining an up-to-date history log of all your content. However, the person responsible should have access to the backend of your website, either as a website owner, manager or admin. This will allow them to get a full picture of all the content that exists on your site, including any draft or hidden content.
How to build on your SEO Strategy using a History Log
Once you’ve begun implementing your SEO strategy, you’ll need to have the tools in place to ensure that it’s working. This is why having metrics installed is crucial; metrics show you what your content is doing, but also what it’s not doing. In this way, you can identify areas for improvement and build upon the success of the well-performing areas too!
Using an Excel Sheet or a Google sheet, you can keep track of each and every piece of content that is produced for your business site. Articles, campaigns and blog posts can all be listed alongside a few important details such as date of publication, weblinks and creative materials.
1. Update existing content with new information
Since search is constantly evolving, so are keywords and SEO best practices. The person in charge of creating a history log for content management can dedicate a few hours per month to identify which blog posts, articles or pages on your site could be updated using new information. This will help the content to continue ranking in search engines.
2. Identify top keywords and emerging search intent to create new content
By carrying out routine check-ups on your web content, you will be able to identify the keywords that are leading most users to a specific page. You can then use this information to further optimise your site, such as by editing your page headings and copy to give a better answer to your audiences’ search queries. You may also be able to find new search terms that might be better answered using a new blog post or a new dedicated page.
3. Make existing content more readable
Information can become outdated pretty quickly in the digital age. Most often, statistics and data sets may be deemed irrelevant after a year or two, so an in-depth explanatory piece that you wrote when launching your business might have lost its value by now. In this case, you could opt to refresh the content by adding more recent statistics, introduce a new section for more depth and even add quotations that might be relevant to the topic.
There’s so much you can do to make sure your website reaches all your targets, but having a good history log is by far the best place to start. Once you’ve set it all up, you can easily look up any past content that you produced and find inspiration for new content ideas for your team to create and continue improving your SEO strategy!