Managing Growing Teams
A global online travel booking company based in Seattle, WA needed assistance with content production in their SEO department. They needed to produce heavy loads of content that focused on their targeted user and audience, while also maintaining SEO best practices across all content.
The client was responsible for managing several different content marketing teams and wanted to improve workflows between different teams in the hope that their writers could then increase their content output as well as require less guidance from managers. Their current workflows needed close manager supervision for content messaging and copy editing before content could be pushed to production. The result was tedious and time-consuming with the three teams producing less than five pieces of finished content each month.
What We Did
Content
In collaboration with the client’s internal team members and managers, Affirma built out and managed a new workflow that dramatically increased the amount of content produced by the client’s writers. Affirma created content brief templates that contained pre-filled information on messaging guidelines, meta tags, and header and paragraph suggestions. The briefs allowed internal writers to quickly create content for different destinations and themes with much less direct oversight and guidance from managers, especially for SEO best practices.
SEO
Under the client’s previous workflows, content writers, SEO team members, and managers shared the responsibilities for implementing SEO best practices into the content. This often led to content publication being delayed due to SEO reviews requiring rewrites to a writer’s content. Additionally, writers were responsible for finding topics to write about and performing the necessary keyword research. This added responsibility often took time and effort away from their writing.
As part of their workflow optimization, Affirma created a new system in which content briefs would already have meta-tagging and SEO keywords for the content filled in. The brief would also provide which target keywords needed to be used, and in which headers, sub-headers, and paragraphs. Writers could easily follow the guide and write with less review and manager oversight.
Affirma also created a content calendar with different pieces of content scheduled for different times of the month. As part of the creation of the calendar, Affirma performed all necessary keyword research and created a list of topics that would maximize the client’s SEO reach. Affirma also helped create pieces of content directly, helping to write, edit, and publish over fifty pieces of original content.
The Result
The client completed their engagement with a new content workflow that consistently published thirty-six pieces of original content each month for their US, CA, and AU blogs. The new workflow and content calendar separated tasks for the teams according to expertise and experience. Writers could focus solely on writing, while SEO team members and managers could focus on content analytics, keyword research, and reporting of metrics. The engagement and resulting workflow increased the client’s content production by over 700%.
