Building a continuous process for SEO success using SEO software

Introducing the Authoritas 6-Step SEO and Content Marketing Process

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The Authoritas platform is aimed at large agencies and enterprises who want to create a continuous process of improvement that helps systematically increase team efficiency and results. This is why we have created a flexible 6-step SEO and Content Marketing Process to help you reach these goals.
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This process is supported with a comprehensive array of agile tools and data to help you achieve more success in less time. We help you optimize the way you work to give every chance of producing a better result with your current team and resources.

This process will help both the individuals within your team and the team as a whole continuously learn, communicate, discuss, adapt and refine your approach to your SEO and content marketing campaigns.

Benchmarking and goal setting
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Every marketing campaign should start with an analysis of the current situation, competitive benchmarking and gap analysis. From here you can take stock of the opportunities and your resources and set a strategy and measurable goals for your campaign. The platform is built to support this whole process for example, the Results vs Targets module allows you to clearly communicate progress against your goals. If you have configured your Google Analytics to track goals and configured our system to track specific targets, then this module will show you how well you are doing against those targets and the automatic benchmarks taken at the start of your campaign.

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Effective collaboration, communication and cooperation
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Integrating all the SEO data and content marketing insights you’ll ever need in one place is great, but the real value is delivered when you can collaborate and act on these insights in context with a range of powerful team management, productivity and collaboration tools.

For instance, the task table provides a built-in workflow for you and your team to use. It keeps you informed and on track and is great for team collaboration where a single client account or site is worked on by multiple people. You are able to see comments from other people regarding any issues. It also has a reminder functionality which is handy if you are working on a lengthy issue and have to return to it.
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If you are an agency and have white-labelled the platform and given your clients login details, you can notify them when there is work to be done. It is also particularity helpful when you have an international team that works across time zones. These agile tools help scale your business efforts across hundreds or even thousands of different campaigns.

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1. SEO Research

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The first step in the Authoritas SEO and Content Marketing Process is Research. We help you to conduct a SWOT analysis of your industry, competitors and audience to gain valuable data science-driven insights that you can use to underpin your strategy. Enterprise accounts can benefit from a complete market analysis of the top 100 sites in your marketplace and automatic identification of content themes at both page and keyword level in your market.

Your business goals and strategy

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Our platform helps you set and achieve goals for both your team and each individual within your team. If you have Google Analytics configured to track goals and also configured our system to track your specific targets, we have the resources and tools to help you achieve them.

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Market analysis and competitive gap analysis

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Most competitive platforms only tell you how many keywords selected competitors have and how many one or more competitors have in common with you. We compare every competitor with you and each other, giving you all the opportunity keywords you could also rank for  in the market. No other platform can give you this complete perspective on your market.

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Demand for your brand/products vs competitors

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It is important to know what the demand for your brand and/or products is. This can be done by benchmarking your keyword search volumes against your competitors’. You can find the trends and your keyword popularity over time and optimize them accordingly.

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Audience research & persona development

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Both audience research and persona development are important for companies to consider as it is vital to understand your target market. Performing in-depth audience research could save and make your business a lot of money by developing the right product or service that will appeal to the right people. Similarly, understanding how the content of your website is performing across the buyer journey can be achieved easily by cleverly grouping and tagging your keywords. For instance, if you tag your keywords that are generally used through the research phase of the buyer journey, you can filter the data to track and improve them.

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Opportunity identification

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This is the newest section of the Authoritas platform and something that we as a business are very excited about. We have released Market Share that identifies thousands of prioritized unique content marketing opportunities. We analyze your existing content and give you suggestions on how to improve your rankings with keyword and content topic suggestions. We also identify the keywords that your competitors are ranking for and provide you with topic suggestions to write content about based on these keywords.
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Key features to support your research process

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• ‍Market Intelligence –  leverage our unique big data and graph technology to analyze and segment your entire market
• Competitive Audit – dive deeper into how your competitors are doing compared to you
• Keyword Research – obtain global, local, mobile and universal rankings in over 100 countries daily, on a weekly basis or on-demand
• Keyword Visits –  automatically estimate your keyword-level traffic you are receiving that was previously ‘Not Provided’

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2. SEO Audit

The research process (and our tools and data) will have helped paint a picture of your market, the demand from your audience, the gap versus the competition and the best opportunities for your brand to consider.

The ‘Audit’ phase now helps you to analyze and evaluate key website performance versus the competition. The platform does a complete crawl of your website to find the technical SEO issues your site may be facing. Some of these errors include: page errors, site structure, page speeds and bounce rate.

We also analyze the quality of your content for SEO issues as well as the popularity of your content in terms of social shares and links. Finally, we undertake a detailed competitive backlink profile analysis to help you understand how far ahead or behind you are.

Site architecture, structure and errors

In order to improve your SEO and content marketing strategy, you need to know what requires improvement. We systematically crawl your website once a week to look for these errors. They could range from 5xx errors to whether or not your site has an HTML sitemap or robots.txt files.

Page structure and errors

It is important to know if any of your website pages have any errors. These errors can include unfriendly URLs, 404s, 301 and 302 redirects to name a few. If your pages have unfriendly URLs for example, the search engines might not be able to crawl and index these pages therefore resulting in them not appearing in the SERPs.

Content quality and user experience (UX) research

We analyze your home page each week and check for page speed issues. The longer it takes for a page to load the more likely it is that the user will revert back to the original page or away from the site altogether. For this reason, we do a comparison of your server response time with that of your competitors.
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Quality content also plays an important role in UX. If a user finds themselves on a landing page which contains content they weren’t expecting, or do not find it particularly interesting, this user would be inclined to leave the site as well. This is why we suggest content topics for your site based on data science-driven insights. These content suggestions are calculated based on what your customers and potential customers are searching for, as well as what your competitors are doing which you are not.
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Link profile and quality

For pages you want indexed in Google, it is sometimes necessary to improve your internal link structure and external backlink profile. You are able to investigate this by identifying the individual pages of your site that you need to build more internal and/or external links to.

Social sharing

Social Media is increasingly important for most businesses these days. It is a platform in which to grow your brand and also sell your product or service. Our platform collates social sharing metrics including Facebook comment and shares, Google +1s, LinkedIn shares and Stumbles, so you can audit how effective your content marketing campaign is at attracting social traction and backlinks.

Key features to support your auditing process
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Technical Auditing –  make sure your site is technically sound with a comprehensive analysis of key website and SEO performance issues.

Crawl Health – crawl your site to find technical and content issues which are holding you back

Content Audit – spot content and meta data issues that impact your SEO

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3. SEO Strategy
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The third step in the Authoritas SEO and Content Marketing process is selecting the right opportunities, setting goals and creating a plan to move forward with.

In other words, setting a strategy and organizing your activities to implement the changes needed to improve your SEO and content marketing efforts.
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Assess resources and budget

It is important to assess the amount of resources available within your organization. This helps give an idea of what is available and helps guide the direction and scope of you business over the long term. It also helps you plan where you will allocate certain resources in order to meet stake holder expectations and meet the needs of the market as a whole.

Set strategy, goals and KPIs

Setting your strategy and creating goals is made a lot easier with our platform. Our Market Intelligence feature uses big data and the latest graph technology to organize and segment your marketplace. It helps you pick the best areas of opportunity to help forecast your ROI. The platform also enables you to prioritize your plan of action for both the short and long-term.

Organize activities

After the site audit is completed, the various recommendations are noted for the improvement of your website and SEO strategy. But there is no point in starting with fixes that are less important than others. The platform helps organize your activities from your technical site changes, content and meta data changes to link detox and new content creation.

Key features to support the planning of your strategy

Market Intelligence – define your content marketing opportunities that will generate the best ROI

Technical Site Audit – take into account the technical errors found on your website

Link Profiling – research unlimited sites that you may gain links from

Content Strategy – automate your content strategy by discovering the best keyword opportunities from your top 100 competing sites

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4. Optimize
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The fourth stage or optimization stage is characterized by implementing the plan that was created in step 3. This involves fixing the issues that arose during the audit stage, creating content around the topic areas suggested by the platform and optimizing existing content with the keyword suggestions from the platform.

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Fix technical issues

The Authoritas platform finds the technical issues on your site. This phase in the SEO and content marketing process is to implement the plans laid out in the Strategy stage and fix these issues. By fixing these issues, you will be providing a much better user experience as well as providing a better experience for search engine crawlers. Poor page speeds and high bounce rates (bear in mind that sometimes a high bounce rate is not necessarily bad) are indicators of a poor user experience, you should also take time to improve these factors while optimizing the content on your pages.

Optimize pages and create new content

If a user is interested in the content that you are producing, they are more likely to stay on your site and share your content. Whilst not a universal truth, a good general rule of thumb is that the longer a user stays on your site, the more likely they are to become a customer.

Key features to support your optimization stage

Market Intelligence – decide on new content themes and ideas for your website

Content Analysis – fix content issues on your site identified within the platform
Content Assistant – use AI (GPT-3) to support your content team and automate meta data creation

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5. Outreach
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This is the outreach stage in which your promote and distribute your content. Listening, participating, sharing and engaging with other content distributors and influencers in your industry is how you get your content noticed.

This means that you should be engaging with others before your content is even created, aiding in continuous relationship building as well as the production of quality content which will hopefully be shared and spoken about.
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Listen, participate and engage
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Online marketing has changed considerably over the last few years. It is incredibly important to engage with your customers and potential customers online rather than just giving them a sales pitch. This helps you build relationships with them to find out what they are looking for and tailor the sales message to them.
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Engaging with others online will also help you to target influencers in your field and if you are creating great content that is highly relevant and those influencers understand this, it can help build your brand and bring in new customers and leads.
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Key features to support your outreach process
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• Competitive Link Analysis – piggyback off your competitors’ links
• Link Referrals – which linking sites and which relationships are bringing you real site visitors and customers
• Link Building – find and organize possible link partners, prioritize your outreach efforts using Majestic link metrics as well as social metrics to find authoritative sites with a real engaged user base

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6. Measure SEO Results
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The final stage in the SEO and Content Marketing Process is measuring your performance. Analyzing the insights that were given, assessing the impact of your actions and continuously refining your approach is how you will reach your goals as an individual and as a team.
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Leading indicators
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It is important for marketers to continually evaluate their marketing efforts against their predetermined targets. This helps to monitor the progress and success of the campaigns that are running. The leading indicators for the measurement of success within the platform are Google Analytics and Google Search Console integration as well as the platform’s Market Share and Market Visibility features.

Contributory factors

We also have a number of other contributory indicators that specify how well your campaigns have been doing. Your keyword rankings for local, desktop and mobile are a strong indication of whether or not your campaigns are working successfully. We also provide you with your keyword visit data with our ‘Not Provided’ solution. The platform gives you an indication of how well your content is performing as well as your link profile changes.

Key features to support the measurement of your performance

Analytics Integration – additional practical insights for more useful reporting

Automated Reports – create and schedule your own branded custom reports

Multi-Site Management – see all your performance KPIs for all of your sites on one screen to help you to track the performance of different teams

International SEO – track and measure the performance of all your websites globally from one platform