How to Set Up a Content Spreadsheet

There are a few things that I would keep in mind when it comes to creating this spreadsheet and then using it to improve your SEO:

1. Google Docs – I would highly recommend using Google docs to set up your content inventory because it updates in real time. Everyone can have access to the spreadsheet and it is always readily available when an employee is logged into his/her Gmail account. This makes it easy for one employee to pop over and see what the other employee is doing. This helps ensure that two people are not going to guest post on the same website or write about the same topic for the company website.

2. Analyze Keywords – When it comes to helping improve your SEO efforts, it’s important you analyze the keywords that you’ve used. This goes for both the articles on your own website as well as guest posting. In many cases, it actually helps to have separate logs for the two different types of content. You will want to look at the keywords you were targeting and see which content did well, which keywords seemed to get the most attention, and which websites you may not want to post for again.

3. Make Changes – Once you have all of your content and the keywords you used laid out in one spreadsheet, you can start deciding if you should delete pages that did not perform. You also want to look at the pages that did perform well and see if you can figure out a pattern or optimize the pages further.

I have been using a content inventory spreadsheet since I began this career almost one year ago, and I can tell that it directly affects the way that we approach SEO. Our team looks at this spreadsheet monthly to determine the type of content that does well on our site and the keywords that have gotten a lot of attention. Aside from only SEO advantages, a content inventory makes it easy to hold employees accountable for their work.

Have you ever used a content inventory spreadsheet before? Did you find that it helped make your SEO efforts easier?

Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer on topics ranging from social media to VoIP phone service. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including errors and omissions insurance to small businesses and entrepreneurs for the leadingbusiness directory, Business.com.

What’s the Value of a Non-Branded Visitor?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis    

A non-branded visitor is someone that finds your site by searching for a general keyword in the search engines, as opposed to searching for your brand or products by name. Depending on your industry and niche, someone that finds your site via a non-branded keyword might not be ready to convert the moment they land on your site. Especially in the B2B world, it’s hard to build that consumer confidence from one interaction with a potential customer. However, just because it might take a while to turn that visitor into a lead and then into a paying customer, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to drive more non-branded traffic to your website!

I was recently pulling together an annual SEO visitor report for one of my e-commerce SEO clients. Having a year’s worth of data really gives me the opportunity to look for emerging trends and have a better idea of where opportunities for their ongoing SEO campaign might be. I noticed that there had been a steady uptick of visitors throughout the year, even if some months showed slight dips (part of the seasonality of the business.) But what I was really glad to see was that the amount of non-branded visitors coming to their site was through the roof compared to last year. This is a fairly established brand offline, but online they hadn’t been competing well for important keywords against their top competitors. Branded searches had always been strong, but non-branded was where the real opportunity for growth was and I was pleased to see our SEO campaign had capitalized on that.

Why should increasing non-branded visitors be so important for SEO and your online marketing efforts in general? First and foremost, when non-branded searches go up, it’s a good sign that your SEO is working incredibly well; your site is ranking well for your top keywords AND is attracting the right audience! It also means that your online brand presence is increasing. People are finding your website in more and more places, even when they aren’t actively searching for your company. This could mean a social networking profile, blog post or video or internal page is showing up in the SERPs for a related search and is driving targeted visitors through to your site. You want to attract people to your site that have never engaged with your brand before! Even if they don’t convert right then and there you have established the first touch point in their buying cycle.

Of course branded visitors (the ones that search for your company by name) are valuable. In my experience, someone that searches for a company by name is nearing the end of their buying cycle and is looking to convert. That is why I like to focus my PPC efforts on branded keywords as opposed to non-branded keywords. I’d rather pay for someone that I’m fairly confident is going to become a lead. I’ll leave the driving of non-branded visitors to my organic SEO.