Scaling Content Ops: Publish 100+ Pages of Quality Content Per Month

Since SEO began, the professional SEO conversation has been dominated by backlinks and technical discussions. Today, I’m here to change that.

This 7,000-word Content Ops Magnum Opus has two goals:

1. Prove that content quality and content velocity are the most important levers in SEO
2. Show you step-by-step how to scale your content velocity to 100+ pages of high-quality content each month

Before we jump in, here are some stats from our team started in January 2020:

You can read our story on how we grew from a 1 to a 45-person agency in 18 months.

Here is a quick Playbook roadmap for you:

• Part 1 will show you how we went through every step of the Playbook ourselves, with multiple successful projects
• In Part 2, you’ll be able to see our strong thoughts on the state of the SEO industry and why our approach will help you create successful outcomes over and over again.
• To read about our entire playbook, jump to Part 3, where I’ll give you our entire software stack, our knowledge transfer process for all types of projects, everything you need to hire your Content Team, and how to delegate content editing and SEO ASAP.

Part 1: We know Content Velocity works because we did it!

Within 24 months, we grew our team from 1 to 45 writers and editors. That team published over 8,000 pages of long-form content, driving 200,000 keywords on the first page of Google and 15,000,000 organic visitors in 2021 alone.

And not only that, we did it across different types of ramp-up periods: from producing 15 pages/month to 800 pages per month depending on the project. 

We have completed projects in both B2B and B2C environments across more than 50 niches.

1.1. Our Call to fame

Content Distribution ran one of the most successful SEO & Content projects on the Internet, driving DoNotPay.com from 0 to 1,500,000 organic visitors per month in just 24 months.

Our team created content for DoNotPay that ranged anywhere from legal topics (divorce, small claim courts, SEC rulings, etc), fintech, online tools and converters, to daily consumer challenges, such as accessing free trials, support, neighbor disputes, etc. 

Here is a short list of some of the things DoNotPay does:

• Filing for unemployment
• Suing anyone, or any company, in small claims court
• Canceling hard to cancel services
• Filing chargebacks
• Securing flight compensation for delayed or canceled flights
• Skipping the company’s phone queues
• Scheduling DMV appointments
• Studying for government tests
• Communicating with inmates held in state and federal prisons
• Send faxes without a fax machine

As a result, our team researched and produced content for over 153 verticals and content series.

1.2. What quality content means

Content Velocity does not equal programmatic content.

It does not mean creating AI-generated content at scale.

It doesn’t mean publishing tens of thousands of nice words across multiple pages.

It means publishing content that drives conversions and revenue.

It is exactly what we did for the Do Not Pay project.

Our campaign resulted in over 1,000,000 MAUs (monthly active users) and 100,000 subscriptions to the DoNotPay app.

Focusing predominantly on organic traffic acquisition, DoNotPay reached a Series B round of funding, valuing the startup at $210 million, backed by Andreessen Horowitz.

1.3. What we do today

We didn’t stop at the DoNotPay campaign. In 2020 and 2021, Content Distribution continued to kick-start organic campaigns for VC-backed startups and ambitious brands who wanted to dominate their space.

These include but are not limited to:

Subscription-based e-commerce brand in the United Kingdom, with over 200 pages produced across 2 verticals.

Social Media Agency specializing in influencer marketing, with 43 pages produced in 3 months.

Play Store and iOS App for Earning Cash Rewards, with a total of 200 pages published, ramping up to 200 clicks per day in less than 60 days.

Part 2: Best SEO Campaigns are Content-Driven

Content Distribution grew 4 projects from 0 to 100,000 organic visitors per month.

We focused on publishing the best content for any given search query. And did it fast.

✔️ 0 to 103,000 organics/month in 13 months for LogicInbound.com

✔️ 0 to 116,000 organics/month in 13 months for Doggypedia.org

✔️ 0 to 166,000 organics/month in 13 months for CampusReel.org

✔️ 0 to 47,000 organics/month in 13 months for AnyLeads.com

Did you notice something interesting here? We did…

No, we don’t think something magical happened in month 13 of publishing content. 

We realized you don’t need to build backlinks or deal with anything but technical SEO basics. You just need to consistently publish great content.

While we worked on these projects, we closely monitored the landscape of our industry. We saw that some of the best SEO campaigns were content-driven.

2.1. Some of the most successful campaigns have A LOT of pages

If you look at some of the most successful campaigns in the last few years, you can see that 4 out of 7 will generate less than 500 monthly visitors per page of content.

This means that to catch up with, say, Kinsta, you would need to publish 50 articles each month for four years. If you want to catch up to them in a year, you would have to publish 250 pages each month.

More content = more traffic. Simple as that.

Since you’re probably not WireCutter or NerdWallet, you most likely won’t generate 800-2500 monthly visitors for each page of content.

Why? Because these campaigns are powered by years and years of publishing and ginormous content teams. NerdWallet has over 130 writers!

The more content, the greater the chase for amazing outcomes. We have seen this to hold true for almost every niche. Within the last 4 years, our team has researched and worked on content in over 200 discrete niches, ranging from the doggy niche to end-to-end software QA.

2.2. Page Efficiency matters

There is no website that generates 80% of its organic traffic with just 20% of the content. The only exceptions we’ve seen are web browser tools such as calculators and converters, achieving high traffic with just a handful of search queries and pages live.

Let’s look at an example in the pet space.

Column E shows how much traffic websites in this space generate per page of content on their site. We call it Page Efficiency.

It’s all in a pretty tight band. On average, a top site in the dog niche will generate between 180 – 800 visitors per page of content they’ve published.

The last row — Doggypedia — that’s our project. 

We grew it from 0 to over 100k organic visitors per month by publishing 200 pages.

Read more: How we achieved the Fastest SEO Results.

2.3. You cannot be an Authority with just a few pages

In the SEO industry, we get mesmerized by a concept before we truly understand it. One of them is Topical Authority.

In a recent article, former Shopify Director of SEO Kevin Indig tackled the issue of how we can measure this “mystical” concept. 

Kevin goes on to say “there is little agreement on the same definition, and the reason is that we don’t have a common way to measure Topical Authority. Only when we’re able to measure something are we able to understand the inputs and outputs.”

There are many interesting definitions and approaches, and it will probably take many forums and round tables in the SEO industry to arrive at an agreement. 

To Kevin’s point, we don’t yet seem to agree on when topical authority would be achieved.

But, perhaps we can agree on establishing a solid footing on a very simple hypothesis — you cannot be an authority with only a few pages.

We’ve seen similar takes from Google recently.

When you think about it, it makes sense. Can you truly be an authority on a subject with a few dozen pages?

For us, the answer is — no.

Part 3: The Content Ops Playbook

I’ve had a devoted affiliate tell me, “I have too much on my plate, I cannot do it.”

I’ve had a niche website builder tell me, “Too many systems to set up, I can’t manage that many pages or people. I’ll start writing by myself.”

I’ve had in-house SEOs and Heads of Content tell me, “There are too many variables. It’s hard to scale.”

I’ve had SaaS founders and CEOs tell me, “No way, too much product dev, cannot focus on that big of a marketing push.”

I’ve had SEO consultants and agency owners tell me, “Setting up infrastructure is HARD, I need to focus on my business.”

If you see yourself in one of these roles or messages, I have two things to tell you:

1. You ARE right → you DO need to focus on those other high-value levers.
2. But, you CAN make SEO your #1 acquisition channel.

3.1. Intro: What you are getting yourself into

Before we dive into the strategy that will get you to 100 pages/month, I’ll show you exactly what you’re signing up for. 

1. You will need to build a team to hit your goals. We could never have scaled so fast without great writers and editors that care about their work. The best way to find amazing writers? Have a steady stream of candidates. I break that down below in the Hiring Writers section. The trick to hiring an editor who cares? Promote from within. More on that in the How to delegate Editing section.
2. People are harder to manage than 301 redirects. We’ve learned this while growing our agency from 1 to 45 writers and editors. Some of the most important aspects to take into consideration are:
   • Establishing clear communication systems.
   • Documenting work to hold your team accountable.
   • Establishing a basic system of benefits (such as PTO, performance bonuses, and comp increases for high-performing team members.)

I’ll talk about how we tackle People Operations in the What our editing team does section.

3. Spend a minimum of $2,000/month on content. In our case, this will cover the cost of our software stack and compensation for a Senior Writer, who will deliver 20 pieces of content to amount to 32,000 words (an average of 1600 per piece of content). This content needs minimal editing, and one editor will manage 3 Senior Writers. Depending on where you hire, your content costs can be significantly lower than what you’re used to. You can read more below, in the Content cost is a competitive advantage section.
4. Expect to spend ~5 to 10% of content costs on software. Whether your team is two writers and an editor, six writers and three editors, or 18 writers and six editors, you should expect that software will take approximately 5% to 10% of your content costs. I cover the details in the next chapter, Content Ops Software Stack.
5. You have to create quality content. If you want great results while you’re publishing a vast number of pages, you need to produce quality content that drives conversions and ranks on SERPs. Every word is a liability. Every time someone else writes for your website, you risk variability in your messaging. Both challenges can be mitigated with a meticulous Knowledge Transfer process and a team that cares about the outcomes of their work.

3.2. Content Ops Software Stack

Figuring out the most complementary collection of tools to support your work doesn’t have to be hard.

But, it often is.

For two reasons:

1. Budget → The more you pay, the better the solution (kinda).
2. Time investment → You need to spend time on processes to figure out what exactly works for you.

After testing dozens of variations within our own stack, gluing together solutions where some worked, and others failed, testing more than 100 different software solutions within a span of 4 years, and building 2 for ourselves, we have the right combination of independent components.

We needed a consistent stream of writing candidates to support the growth of our organization. We’ve built Workello. We realized that to hire the top 1%, we needed to talk to and test a lot of candidates. We spent tens of thousands of dollars paying for the content we couldn’t use. We hired many candidates with great portfolios that performed quite poorly after they joined our team.

After pre-screening over 3.5k candidates, we realized we needed pre-hire assessments to help us find perfect writers that are passionate about content. We couldn’t find a pre-hire assessment software that works for the content team, so we invested thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars in building something that works!

Integrating web applications can save you the time you won’t get back. This is especially true for content team leads, founders, and independent consultants. Zapier solves automations so you can save time for more important work. It might have the steepest learning curve, but I remember a story our CEO Nick shared that he spent 12 hours figuring out our most complicated multi-step automation. This saved us 1000s of hours of repeatable work and comms between team members.

With a fully remote team across three continents, scheduled video stand-ups via Zoom helped us efficiently solve problems and nurture team spirit through group virtual socializing and 1:1 follow-ups. In our team, outside of team leaders, everyone uses the free version, which allows for up to 45mins of consecutive meetings.

Using GeekBot helped us hold our team accountable and report on daily work asynchronously. An interesting example is our editors and PMs reporting their daily progress, which is automatically fed into a Slack channel. Later, as our team grew, we were able to have our Project Managers report biweekly on the most relevant project progress.

Slack can be more than just live communication between team members. Let me show you my favorite set of Slack channels. With simple cross-app integration and sometimes gluing stuff together with Zapier, we were able to create an automated reporting system for anything that happens in our organization, from sales and marketing efforts to production and team sprints. The count of notification channels was 5 when we just started, now it looks like this 👇

Airtable is like Google Sheets on steroids. Six months before I joined Content Distribution, I had coffee with Nick and Gordana, showing them the “effectiveness” of my content plan in Google sheets while managing a team at another organization. I had everything I needed to follow the work of my writers and editors. Yeah, right. Today, I cannot imagine my life without managing content with Airtable. Fast forward a couple of years, we have a dozen bases that help us keep track of EVERYTHING. 

Here are some of the most important ones. Basically, everything besides Recruiting. Workello does that.

In the last three years, dozens of people on our agency team have contributed more than one thousand knowledge base articles to our internal documentation. And we host them all in Slite. If you want to see why Mike Bartlett, VP of Product @ Slite, calls us nerdy, check out Nick’s article on Building a Culture of Documentation.

With team members from 20 different countries, we found that Wise and DocuSign allow us to easily send payments and contracts.

3.3. Knowledge Transfer

3.3.1. The Importance of Enablement documentation

Unless you document expectations, you can’t hold your team accountable.

I cannot emphasize this enough. 

Still, I will say it one more time: If you don’t document everything, you cannot hold your team accountable.

When we start a new project, we always create Enablement Documentation.

It is a set of 4 to 8 project-specific documents that allow consistency across different content types, workflows, and stakeholders.

These documents are dynamic, meaning we will add information and update them whenever something changes.

Here are four examples of documents that we’ve seen across all projects:

1. About the project → This document will help you understand what a certain project is, how it works, and what its biggest benefits are for our target audience. This is essential since all of the content we create for the project will include product promotion.
2. Project Language Guidelines → Includes brand guidelines on general principles such as the tone of voice, use of plain language, and industry terms.
3. Onboarding Checklist → Will include all the action items for kicking off the project, anything from CMS access and plugin setup to Google Analytics and Google Search Console access. 
4. Client questionnaire → This one is really important to kickstart everything. Let’s dive deeper 👇

Here’s how to make a client questionnaire:

Step 1: You and your team sit down and write down ALL of the questions you can think of, organized by type/topic. Our team will, in most cases, do this in a shared document asynchronously, with the Project Owner doing a final QA. 

Step 2: Send the questionnaire to all project stakeholders and ask them to document answers in as much detail as possible.

Step 3: Look at the answers and jot down additional questions and notes. Make sure to leave comments on any ambiguous information or statements that are not clear. Be thorough!

Step 4: Schedule a knowledge transfer meeting and allocate at least 90 minutes.

Step 5: Record the meeting. Usually, our team members will also take notes to track everything more easily. Use the questionnaire to go through everything covered.

Step 6: Create written documentation that covers everything discussed. In 2022, we started using voice-to-text transcription to get all of the meeting discussions into text.

Important reminders:

1. Keep updating this documentation as new requirements are added.
2. Go through this process for an internal project as well, or information will get lost

3.3.2. Examples of how to Execute

If you are wondering, “well, what are all these questions?” 

I got you covered. 

We’ve found that if you start with these, everything else that is project-specific will fall into place:

1. Tell me everything you know about the industry you’re in.
2. Where do you fit in that industry?
3. Why do your customers choose you over your competitors?
4. What is your strong stance/opinion on the industry?
5. How do customers purchase this kind of product?
6. What are their evaluation criteria?
7. How do they research solutions?
8. What’s your tone of voice? Examples?
9. What are the best communities for this industry?
10. What are the best / most authoritative resources to learn more?
11. What pieces of content, either by you or someone else that everyone needs to read?

Here is a good example of the industry positioning question and answer.

3.4. Hiring writers

Within a span of 18 months, our agency grew from 1 to 45 writers and editors. 

In that time, we evaluated over 3,500 candidates.

We’ve learned four important things:

1. Most candidates are not qualified 
2. Poor candidates will submit good portfolios
3. Every step of the hiring process is manual
4. The lack of systems is chaotic

Below, I’ll show you that content cost is a competitive advantage. I’ll explain why hiring writers is so challenging. I’ll show you how you can automate it in less than 3 minutes and present what our team looks like today.

3.4.1. Content cost is a competitive advantage

3.4.2. Why hiring writers is SO challenging

3.4.3. How to automate Hiring writers

3.4.4. What our writers & editors look like

3.4.1. Content cost is a competitive advantage

The content cost per page correlates directly to the location you hire from.

A writer’s yearly compensation in Austin, TX, will amount to $45,000. Meanwhile, in Thailand, compensation for 12 months will amount to $24,000.

Let’s say that that writer can produce around 200 pages of content per year. That means: if you hire in Texas, your cost per page will amount to $225. Meanwhile, a content writer in Thailand will probably charge half as much, which allows you to produce twice as many pages for the same budget.

The presented data is an approximation sourced from Glassdoor and Indeed.

Let’s say that you have a yearly budget of $100,000. 

If you hire a writer in San Francisco, it will take you a year to produce approximately 200 pages of content. That same budget would amount to over 800 pages of content with a content team in Thailand. 

Need a reminder on how that affects the success of your campaign? Scroll back up to Part 2: Best SEO Campaigns are Content-driven.

Finally, we hired from and worked with writers from almost all continents and 20 countries, with both ESL and native speakers.

Our experience has shown:

1. Native English speaker does not = “good writer”
2. The non-native speakers we worked with were better content writers than most of the United States and Canada-based writers we worked with
3. If you have a limited budget, isn’t it better to pay someone living in a lower-cost country well than to underpay someone from the U.S.?

3.4.2. Why hiring writers is SO challenging

In the process of growing our agency and scaling to 600+ pages per month, we’ve grown our community of SEOs and content marketers to 6,000 members.

You can click here to Join.

All these professionals and so many more content producers across Reddit, LinkedIn, and Twitter have been saying one thing in different ways:

Hiring good writers is hard.

Here are some of the complaints we’ve seen the most:

Most who say they can write — cannot — not even basics.

Even if I find someone good, it takes soooo much effort → too inefficient.

Then, the big one. 

One I hear all the time:

“The quality of the final draft was massively different from the sample & I had to redo it entirely”

And here is Alexander Heinle of Zavvy, saying the same thing to our CEO Nick.

The one thing that completely blew my mind?

I was reading one Redditor’s test about hiring from 17 different websites…

He soon realized MOST of his candidates were scammers.

With years of data from our own hiring pushes and surveying the broader community of content marketers, we came to realize that hiring writers is hard.

Here are the 7 conclusions to why hiring writers is SO challenging:

1. 95% of writing candidates are not qualified to be writers. It is one of the lowest barriers to entry into the job market. You need to know English. The numbers spiked as the world shifted to more remote-centric working environments.
2. Poor candidates submit good portfolios. Let me give you an example. Before we built a sophisticated hiring funnel, we would evaluate writers by their portfolios and short interviews. We would hire them and give them a chance to deliver content on par with what their portfolio suggested. In more cases than not, that would result in not one, not two, but three to four articles that would need substantial editing. As an organization with a focus on quality content production, our editorial team would have to completely rewrite these articles to prepare them for publishing. We terminate the writers. They go on to have those articles in their portfolios. And we’ve seen that across multiple other examples — portfolio articles will, in most cases, be heavily edited.
3. Every step in the hiring cycle is manual. And tedious! We’ve seen it will take 10 to 15 touch points with candidates before sending an offer. Writer candidates will have questions about your Job ad, they will slide into your DMs, emails, website chat etc, etc. Because you want to work with the best people out there, you want to respond to every message request and minimize the risk of losing that perfect candidate.
4. It takes many discrete steps to bring 1 candidate through your hiring funnel from application received to hired status. For example, when you move your candidate through a hiring funnel, you assign them statuses like “applied –> portfolio reviewed –> invited to test –> test submitted –> invited to interview –> offer sent –> hired. If everything goes smoothly, you’ll need to send and receive between 10-14 emails to hire just one candidate.
5. You will only evaluate a handful of candidates. We’ve seen that the best hires came from our editing team being involved in evaluating candidate tests. We’ve seen this across the industry. Head of Content, Head of Marketing, and Content Leads need to be involved in the process of evaluating future team members. Their involvement usually results either in a candidate backlog (hundreds of CVs sitting on the team leader’s virtual table) or taking shortcuts and evaluating just a handful of candidates. If you are owning content quality, you don’t have the time to evaluate a lot of candidates. That way, you get stuck into multiple hiring cycles, not finding the best candidate… 
6. You won’t hire the best, you’ll hire the least bad. If you have limited resources and only test a few candidates, you’ll end up hiring the best from that batch. The best from that batch does not equal the best you can find. So… You may end up hiring someone who will underperform.
7. They underperform, and you spend too much time editing before you terminate. We’ve been through this so many times before developing Workello. 
   • A great portfolio 
   • A friendly personality during a video interview 
   • Poor first article 
   • Everyone gets a second and third chance once part of our team
   • We reach the 4th poor article and realize we are not a good fit
   • Too much time on editing 

These seven scenarios will be repeated again and again.

Rinse and repeat.

Rinse and repeat while spending valuable resources. 

Rinse and repeat while your budget and time investment goes down.

Irrevocably.

3.4.3. How to automate Hiring writers

The solution? 

You need to evaluate more candidates with less effort. 

Your time is valuable, you should spend it on the best candidates.

With Workello, you have a centralized dashboard where everyone is sorted by status.

You have an integrating pre-screen test that you can tweak to fit the type of content you want to test for.

Your best candidates are engaged and invested with our automated emails.

One-click to change a status → your candidate will get an email with the next step.

No fumbling between inboxes and chats. Zero.

Our delivery system is optimized for crazy engagement — we have an 89%+ open and click rate!

Writer-facing dashboard is optimized to keep your best candidates invested and engaged.

You can set up your Job Ad and start accepting candidates within 3 minutes of creating an account.

Here are the steps:

1. Post your Job Ad in just a few places
2. Receive 200+ writing candidates within 72 hours.
3. Invite the best ones to take a pre-screen writing assessment
4. Hire the top 1%

3.4.4. What our writers & editors look like

We’ve grown our team to what it is today by having a consistent stream of writing candidates.

All of our editors, senior editors, and project managers started as writers in our organization.

Here’s what our team’s days look like today:

1. Writers will deliver a 1,600-word article per day.
2. The compensation for our writers is $.05 per word
3. This amounts to 20 articles/month, not counting PTO
4. But our team gets 2.5 days of PTO per month
   1. Or 30 PTO days each year
   2. With an additional 8 holiday days off, chosen by team members depending on the country they come from
5. Every editor will work on editing and QAing two writers

Many of our team members are first-time content writers. Most of them are former English teachers, and almost all of them have a Bachelor’s or a Master’s degree in the English Language and Literature.

But, there is one more thing.

The most important aspect.

Everyone in our team cares more about storytelling and the English Language than rankings or on-page optimization.

This is what allows them to focus on quality and follow documentation for on-page optimization for queries.

This is what allows them to create the best possible content Google can show on the SERPs. 

No keyword stuffing. No fluff.

They just focus on answering the searcher’s intent.

3.5 How to Delegate Content Editing and QA 

When you have a team of writers in place, one of the most important things you can do is delegate editing and content QA as soon as possible.

I bet that you need to focus on high-value systems if you are reading this article.

Focusing on revenue-generating activities is the best use of your time.

3.5.1. Why you need to delegate ASAP

Still, I almost hear you asking, “Shouldn’t I focus on content quality instead of delegating?”

And, my answer is, yes, absolutely!

In content, every word is a liability and an opportunity to mess something up:

• Spelling
• Grammar
• Tone of voice
• Messaging 
• Positioning
• You name it!

If you want to delegate QA and move on to other high-leverage activities, you need to hire someone who cares.

You need to hire an editor who cares.

“How do I do that?”

3.5.2. Why you should promote from within

Promoting an editor from within is the best decision you will make when building and running a content team.

We promoted 13 writers:

• 8 of them were promoted to editors
• 3 of them were promoted to Project Managers and Content Strategists
• 1 promoted to Senior Editor
• 1 promoted to Executive Editor

The main reason: You cannot fake caring for 2 or 4 months.

Think about it. You can’t evaluate caring with two to four touchpoints in the hiring cycle. 

For new and growing content teams, your best writer is going to be your #1 candidate for editor.

It is much easier than you think.

Here’s how:

1. If you are looking to onboard only 2 writers…
2. Hire 2x to 3x more and have them write fewer pieces of content in the first 2-3 weeks
3. That will allow you to spread your workload and virtually create your editor pipeline within the team.
4. The more writers you work with, the better your chance of finding a perfect editor.
5. Within just 6 to 8 weeks, you will have an editor AND 2 to 3 writers.
6. You are ready to fully delegate.

3.5.3. What our editing team does

To give you a better understanding of your future editor’s workflow, let me show you what our editing team’s responsibilities are:

1. 2-3 stand-ups per week with the project management team (initially founder and CEO)
2. 2-3 stand-ups per week with other editors
3. 1:1s with writers and their manager (this will happen bi-monthly or once per month)
4. Reviewing tests from new writing candidates (1-2 times per month)
5. Onboarding new writers
6. Creating Content Series Templates (writer briefs)
7. Content QA

3.5.4. The impact

Everything we’ve achieved can be supported by proprietary data.

But, here’s something that’s as important as our experience…

Everything in this playbook is deeply woven into our organization’s culture.

Our CEO and co-founder, Nick Jordan, started working with Gordana Sretenovic in 2019.

Gordana was one of the 10 writers Nick worked with.

She was by far the best.

She got promoted to editor.

Then, she started running client projects for Content Distribution.

Two years later, she became our organization’s Director of Operations, running a 45-person team.

Today, she is the co-founder of Workello and is running Customer Success for companies dealing with issues she has been solving ever since she became an editor.

Here’s what Nick tells everyone: “The more writers you work with, you have more surface area to find a Gordana.”

3.6. Remove SEOs from an SEO Content Campaign

I know. It sounds so counter-intuitive.

As an editor and an SEO manager for such a long time, it hurts my heart to say it.

But here it goes…

The ability to scale content production and drive amazing organic traffic acquisition campaigns is so much more efficient without additional SEO roles.

I am here to tell you that all you need is one SEO strategist. It’s either gonna be you or your SEO consultant. That’s it.

Here are the high-level notes:

1. If you can run an SEO campaign without SEOs, it simplifies hiring sooo much
2. The simple fact is → it’s harder to find a good SEO than a good content writer
3. Your most talented and most curious editors can be taught SEO workflows
4. Your team members can deliver quality work if supported with documentation

This has been the case with our organization as well.

Aside from myself and our CEO Nick Jordan, no one had previous SEO experience. Everyone in our team learned after they were hired.

Here is what you need to do to

1. Automate keyword research  and select topics for your content calendar
2. Empower your writers and editors with documentation
3. Give clear on-page optimization instructions

3.6.1. Automating Keyword Research and Selecting Topics 

Keyword research is a process of discovering all the ways your target audience is searching 

for your product, service, or content using search engines.

It is one of the most powerful processes to help you understand the landscape of opportunities in your target market.

Here’s why keyword research is hard:

1. Time-consuming
2. Heavy on qualitative analysis
3. Includes decision-making driven by intuition

But, here’s why you absolutely need to do it:

1. It allows you to find the best opportunities to prioritize content production
2. It allows you to design a content plan 
3. Helps you project your content ROI 

There is a way to save time (and money) on keyword research without losing the quality of your end product.

Seems that even in 2022, a big part of the industry is doing manual keyword research.

Here’s what else I’ve been seeing in the past couple of years:

1. Experienced SEOs are delegating everything but keyword research because it’s too hard to get right → I was soooo guilty of this myself
2. Keyword research deliverables are inconsistent from person to person

SEOs that are manually doing keyword research are constantly in danger of messing up: 

Making a gut decision because they are short on time.

ClusterAi, our keyword grouping tool, uses data from Google to determine which keywords can rank together.

“​​The problem is content is the #1 expense in SEO, and every developer with a “good idea for a clustering algorithm” is publishing a clustering tool.

None of these devs battle-tested on their own content investments before asking other people to bet their content investment on it.

We spent $500k on content, published thousands of pages, got 200k page 1 keywords before asking our community to trust ClusterAi with their own content budget.”

-Nick Jordan, CEO @ ContentDistribution.com

Here is how you can automate your keyword research.

1. Start with making an intake sheet. You should identify your main terms, i.e. terms that you expect to find in all keywords you want to target. Then, start adding terms that you expect to find alongside those main terms.

2. Import into Ahrefs or Semrush. In Ahrefs, paste your main terms into the Keyword explorer. Then go to Matching Terms and paste your included keywords. In the example below, we used 28 terms we identified in the “Repair” vertical.

3. Export your CSV and upload it into ClusterAi. Choose your Keyword list import type (in our case — Ahrefs) and click Submit File.

4. Receive the Keyword Opportunity Analysis. In less than 60 minutes, ClusterAi will group your keywords, and you will receive a spreadsheet with all the topic ideas you need. Every row in this list represents a page you can create. Column A contains your main keyword, and column C will contain variations that are grouped together with the main keyword.

Check out more keyword research demos below.

All you need to do now is select the topics you want to target from the keyword opportunity analysis.

To get our entire process on Topic Selection, ask for access to our Content Ops Framework by clicking here.

Screenshot from the Table of Contents of the Content Ops Framework

That’s all you need to create a content plan.

Now it’s time to distribute the plan to your writers and empower them to execute it.

3.6.2. Document everything

Holding your writing and editing team accountable is possible only through detailed documentation.

If you are an SOP nerd like me, take a look at our Building a Culture of Documentation and How to Get Everyone Sending Meeting Recaps playbooks.

If you need a refresher on how to kickstart a project, scroll back up to read about The Importance of Enablement Documentation and Examples of how to execute Knowledge Transfer.

One of the most powerful tools a team has at their disposal is a Writer’s Brief.

A quality brief:

• Unifies the outcomes of SEO, editorial, and brand strategies
• Sets up expectations clearly
• Assists the writer in research and production
• Saves time and stress in the editing process

But, what happens if you are producing, 30…

50…

100 articles…

How do you ensure a quality content brief is delivered to every single writer?

Can that one Senior Editor handle so much work? How many briefs should that editor create?

30…?

50..?

100…?

No. And I speak from previous experience.

When our team faced this challenge when we started publishing a lot of pages, we solved it with a Content Series Template — one brief for all of the pages you will publish in one series of articles.

To get our entire process of creating and distributing Content Series Templates, ask for access to our Content Ops Framework by clicking here.

Screenshot from the Table of Contents of the Content Ops Framework

3.6.3. On-page optimization essentials

Our writing and editing teams receive instructions for on-page optimization for each content series we produce.

These instructions will be part of a Content Series Template and fall into 3 groups:

1. Content structure and on-page basics
2. On-page optimization for keywords
3. Internal links

1. Content Structure and on-page basics

Make sure to give your team basic guidance on the structure itself and include some examples of competing content.

Start with basic writing requirements with clear outcomes.

Here is how all of our Content Series Templates start.

Here is a simple checklist to follow:

• URL → use the main keyword
• Meta Title → Make sure to make this catchy, as clickbaity if possible
• Meta description → contains main keyword + answers intent shortly OR shows social proof
• H1 → contains the main keyword in a creative informative context
• First paragraph → attention-grabbing and/or proof through data 
• H2s → use keyword variations
• Strong (bold) tags → designed for the reader to be able to skim the article.
• Tables → basic structured data Google can read, aim for 2 per article
• Numbered lists and bullet points → Basic UX and structure elements. Aim for 2 per article

Text is not the only content on the page. Ensure to give instructions on using visual assets, such as images and videos.

Here is an example of directions we gave for optimizing Image Alt Text in one of our campaigns.

2. On-page optimization for keywords

How often should I use my main keyword?

Should I aim to use all keyword variations?

These are the two questions I hear most often when talking to peers from the industry or those who want to start scaling content production.

And I’ve had over 250 demo calls and who knows how many DM chats with SEOs, marketers, beginners, founders…

Heard the same 2 questions.

I found myself giving somewhat cliche answers… “Don’t stuff,” “Use when it makes sense,” “Implement variations while keeping the flow of the topic”

But I would always follow up with specific examples. 

Specific solutions my team executes daily. 

And then it would all make sense.

Within the Google doc where they will create their articles, our writing team will receive:

• On-page basics 
• Main keyword and the variations 

Here’s what that looks like.

In the screenshot above, 10 keyword variations are highlighted. The rest of the 60+ are not. That means: in this article, with close to 1800 words, our writer was able to use a keyword variation 10 times. The rest of the variations were not used.

This wasn’t a requirement, this is something our writers started doing for their editors. <3

Here is another example, where it was easier to implement almost all variations as the number was relatively low.

Our team answers intent without overstuffing keywords and variations.

We give clear on-page optimization instructions. But, storytelling and the flow of content come first.

That’s it.

Well, that and internal linking.

3. Internal linking

Internal links can help with:

• Faster indexing or your pages being discovered faster. 
• users navigate your website. help search engines see what your page and website is about → after all, that’s literally what a Google bot does on your page, it follows links.
• building topical authority — showing the users and search engine your content covers a field or niche in depth
• Control your readers’ journey

If you have a keen eye for detail, you’ve probably noticed the minimum and self-reported requirement fields for internal links in the screenshot earlier.

This is not a random “I-want-as-many-links-as-possible-I-don’t-care” requirement.

We plan out our internal linking network meticulously prior to publishing.

We know the minimum internal links we want to have in an article because we know which ones should go in every article of the series.

We call these internal links Mandatory links.

Here’s how mandatory links are designated:

1. We select pillar page(s) that need to go into every article.
2. We select money pages where we want to drive all our readers to.
3. We incorporate pillar and money pages in the brief for the writers.
4. We instruct the writers to contextually link these pages in all content we produce in that vertical.
5. Writers include them during production even before they are published.
6. That way, when the pages go live, these pages are already linked everywhere.
7. We decide which links are mandatory while doing topic selection for the vertical.
8. Our decision is based on the goals of the campaign.

Here is an example of mandatory links in our Content Series Templates.

Check out our full Guide on Internal Linking in the video below. We cover:

1. What is an Internal link
2. Can internal linking help drive organic traffic?
3. What is anchor text, and how to use it?
4. Internal linking tips you won’t see anywhere else!
5. Internal linking tips: Basics
6. Internal linking tips: During production
7. Internal linking tips: Post-publishing

Conclusion: What’s Next for You

1. Set up your project (if you don’t already have one) → Domain, server, set up basic WordPress
2. Create a 6-month content plan → If you need help with that, use ClusterAi
3. Create your initial enablement documentation → Use my Qs from above if you don’t have more time
4. Sign up for Workello → Post a job ad and choose to test 1 best out of 200 candidates (it is free, you have no other commitments here, even if you receive 1000 candidates)
5. Test more candidates
6. Hire the top 3 to 5 and assign 1 article per week
7. Edit those 12 to 20 articles within 4 weeks and choose your editor
8. Have your editor create SOPs for writers (they already know everything, they worked with you for a month now)
9. Do another hiring cycle
10. Start publishing
11. Scale

There is a small optional step in between any one of these → Ping Bojan Maric on Linkedin when you feel stuck.

Content velocity works. Make it work for you.