SEO checklist for content editors
How to optimise your article pages before and after publishing them
Morning team Cultural Content,
If you’re a digital content editor/creator primarily working with text, one of the more technical aspects of your role is going to be around understanding Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), and how writing for web is different from print.
Despite that, we’re not – in the sector - terribly clued up about SEO.
I do a lot of training at One Further on topics like around writing for web, SEO, better blogging and so on.
Something clients have started asking for is a SEO checklist…
…So I thought I’d create one for wider consumption!
Let me know if you have any thoughts – particularly if there’s anything you’d add / change.
SEO checklist
Note, these tips do not replace a robust SEO strategy. In fact the impact of all the items on these checklist may be limited if you have not:
conducted a technical SEO audit to check that your site code is well optimised and pages are loading fast (including on mobile).
conducted a keyword analysis to determine what the greatest topic opportunities are for your organisation, and what the subtopics, keywords and most important questions to answer are within these major sections.
looked at the overall architecture of sections like your ‘discover’ or blog section and your collections section. Most cultural organisations’ editorial sections are missing a trick in not structuring these sections in a search-friendly way.
All of this may be difficult to change if – for example – changes to the site or budget are not in your direct control. So below is a checklist of things that you can do to optimise web content right now.
Before writing a new article
Research Your Topic
Before you begin, conduct a thorough search on your chosen topic. Has it already been covered extensively on the internet? If so, how can you make your page distinctive? Consider incorporating original pictures, multimedia elements, or unique insights and expertise to set your content apart. We have tonnes of these in knowledge-based institutions with accessioned collections, but we don’t always think about that USP when planning out our digital web content.
Address Frequently Asked Questions
When you search for a keyword, Google will typically also serve you ‘“People also ask” structured snippets around these topics. This is a great (and free!) way of getting an insight into the most popular longtail keyword searches around your search term.
These suggested questions can serve as headings within your article. By addressing these questions, you can improve your chances of appearing in relevant searches.
Choose Keywords Carefully
Think about the keywords that users might use to find your article. Keyword opportunities exist in the intersection between i) topics you can cover / have expertise in, ii) frequently searched-for terms, and iii) relatively low competition in search. It’s unlikely you’ll have a good sense of the best opportunities without using a competitive search tool and/or having a robust SEO strategy in place. So - in the absence of this - this may involve a fair amount of guesswork. Include what you think are the most important keywords in your title and then use subsidiary/ supporting keywords in your page headings.
Optimal Article Length
There’s a misconception in the sector that shorter articles are best. But Google deliberately prioritises ‘in depth’ articles (this is probably something you’ve found yourselves when reading Wikipedia pages from search or even bringing up a recipe; long articles rank highly). We generally recommend aiming for a word count between 1,200 to 1,500 words. This equates to a 7-minute read time and allows for around 16 paragraphs of content.
Linking
Another misconception I’ve come across in the sector is that linking out of your blog is bad, because it’s better to keep people on the page.
But from an SEO perspective this is shooting yourself in the foot. One of the key metrics Google has as to how trustworthy your content is is how widely it references other high credibility sites. If Google has a choice between two articles, one of which evidences a lot of other websites in its text and one of which has no external links at all – in the absence of any other metrics – the first is more likely to be credible. Links are the lifeblood of the internet and what Google uses to understands the context in which your content is important and who it’s relevant to. So include them; both internal links to other pages of your site and external links to related content on other websites.
Use Proper Headings
Instead of using bolded text, use H2 and H3 tags for subheadings. This allows you to present a hierarchy of information and makes it much easier for Google’s bots to parse what the structure of your page is. Include important keywords in these headings.
And do use headings – avoid presenting readers with large walls of text. Create section headings when there's a lot of content to make it more digestible.
Once you’ve written your first draft, think about…
Meta Description
Write a custom meta description for your article. Include a quick summary of what the page is about and why it's interesting. This is what users see on Google's search results page.
Improve Readability
Once you’ve written your text, pass it through a tool like the Hemingway App. The Hemingway App is a free browser based tool that marks up your copy in real time and scores it for readability and clarity. Aim for a readability level of Grade 8 (ages 13-14). This ensures your content remains accessible to a broad audience.
Suggest Related Content
Think about 3-4 related articles or webpages that you can link to at the end of your article. This can reduce the exit rate and keep readers engaged with your content for longer.
Optimize Images and multimedia
Images and multimedia are a great way to draw a user’s attention and eye and break up walls of text. In the culture sector we have at our disposal brilliant images and/or the ability to create digital versions of unique, beautiful and distinctive objects and/or artforms.
But Google’s bots (and screen readers) are going to have a tough time working out what’s in this visual content unless you provide a text back up, for example subtitles in videos and alt-text in images. Supercool have written a great guide to writing accessible alt-text. Adding appropriate alt-text also means that your content can appear for relevant queries in Google image search.
Ensure images are resized to the correct dimensions as this will improve the speed your page loads (particularly important on mobile). Faster-loading pages improve user experience and SEO.
Once Your Article Is Published:
Seek Backlinks
Backlinks are other websites that link back to your website. We tend to ignore them in the sector, partly, I suspect, because there’s no free tool that allows you to measure how well you’re doing in terms of backlinks (again paid tools do do this, and show you how you stack up with the competition).
Backlinks also aren’t widely understood – why should it matter which and how many websites are linking to my site?
Well, think about things from Google’s perspective. If lots of reputable sites are linking to site ABC’s page on spinning wheels, it’s likely that ABC is quite a reputable source on the topic. If someone searches for ‘spinning wheels’, Google is going to heavily weight the site with the highest number of quality backlinks in the order that it returns search results.
Backlinks work similarly to citations in academia: if your webpage is widely linked to by authoritative sources, this gives Google a good signal that it’s got high credibility and influence in the field.
Another reason we are perhaps a little hesitant around backlinks in the sector is it requires us to get in touch, and ask a favour of, people we don’t already know.
An effective ‘backlink strategy’ is simply seeing who’s writing on similar topics to you online, and reaching out and making them aware of the new articles/resource/website section you’ve created. You want to outline how your new content is different from what’s already online. Perhaps it’s more authoritative than Wikipedia, or shows sides of an object that no one has seen before, it might contain original research. You then want to ask if that site owner would consider linking to you on their page. You could offer to build reciprocal links, by linking to their content in your article where it provides additional information/context on the same topic.
We don’t tend to think about backlinks as part of SEO when publishing web content, but it’s arguably one of the most effective things you can do for making your content more visible – and making Google more aware of it. It also feels to me like good web practice; you’re joining the dots up of what’s already been written and situating your content as providing something new in the context of what’s already been written elsewhere on the web.
You could consider collaborating with external experts/organisations on your article, which will make them more likely to link to your article from their own web presence.
Contribute to Wikipedia
Wikipedia is still quite a misunderstood and underused resource within the cultural sector.
Many practitioners I’ve spoken to have said they thought they would be banned if they edited their own Wikipedia page.
That’s pretty unlikely. The golden rule is that you want to be adding to the impartial knowledge on the internet. Wikipedia doesn’t want your marketing copy and press releases, but it does very much want your images, facts about your collection, and expertise.
Consider adding non-promotional content related to your collections and information from your articles that links back to your page on Wikipedia. This can improve your article's authority and visibility.
Here’s a lovely quote from Loic Tallon when he was Chief Digital Officer at the Met talking about Wikipedia (from The Digital Future of Museums (2020), p. 116):
We have Henry VIII’s armour, which is viewed 180 times a month on our website. But the Wikipedia entry on Henry VIII is viewed 405,000 times a month and The Met’s object is part of that article. And whilst the experience of the armour is very different within the context of a larger Wikipedia article, and as one of 22 images on that page, the access to the artwork in that content is really important. It’s doing it in ways, in languages, in a context which we cannot replicate internally.
Adding more imagery and information to Wikipedia about your collections is a great way of bringing in new audiences who are interested in the topics your museum can talk about, but might not know that you own the material they are interested in.
Regularly Review and Optimize:
One of the satisfying things about working in digital is that we have so much digital data. That can also turn into a frustration if it’s not planned and factored in properly. Chris has written a great blog on how best to measure content performance in GA4, which factors includes assessing its effectiveness in terms of SEO.
Finally good luck!
If you’ve got questions, about the checklist or about more structural ways of improving SEO, get in touch.
Great piece Georgina - super clear and practical as ever - many thanks!