Marketers: Don't Blow Off the SEO Content Map

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seo content road map for marketersI hear crickets every time I talk to prospects and marketers about an SEO content map.

I’m not sure why it seems like such a foreign topic to many people.

If you are going to invest time and risk money on SEO, wouldn’t you want to face the facts and see what’s going on with your content?

An SEO content map isn’t just a list of your pages. Hopefully you already have that in hand.

Add different sets of data to broaden your perspective while sizing up the condition of your content.

You should include the following in an Excel document:

  • Existing page title (near the meta data)
  • Meta description
  • Header (like what’s in the H1)
  • Nature of the content – who you’re targeting
  • Amount of content (number of words)
  • A possible target keyword phrase
  • Whether the main images have alt tags and are named with reasonable words with dashes
  • Other notes

It not too much of a time burden for a small site. For larger web sites, the task of making an SEO content map may seem daunting. In that case, select a priority division, key categories, high margin products, new products, etc.

At a minimum, get a handle on how much content you appear to have on your pages. Even a large site may have a certain pattern you can follow. In other words, certain types of pages may have short content (maybe a call to action for a white paper). Or, a service page may have more text than some other pages.

Depending on how the site is designed – and you’re familiarity with it – you might be able to estimate that pages you don’t inventory have similar content structures (i.e. the page headers are keyword rich or they simply reflect the navigation).

All of the effort you devote to an SEO content map sets the stage for you to get a feel for how your SEO strategy might take shape.

Inevitably, you will discover that you simply lack content to support keyword phrases that interest you. Pages may be too light on content or you may lack pages about the keywords.

If you don’t know what shape you’re in from the start, how will you make crucial SEO decisions in the future?