How to make SEO planning for your Blog » Portal Insights

Yes, everyone knows the importance of SEO for a Digital Marketing strategy, and that there are hundreds of criteria that Google takes into account when ranking websites in its search results. But how to do SEO planning for your Blog in practice?

The objective of this text is to answer this question and many others that will arise naturally in the research process. Our goal is for you to finish reading this text fully prepared to develop a content strategy, focused on SEO, for your Blog.

What is good SEO?

Before we understand what SEO is and how to do real planning, let's make one thing clear: good SEO is SEO that generates profit for your business.

No sophisticated tool or Drive with dozens of spreadsheets will convince me that your planning works if, in the end, all of this doesn't translate into money in the company's cash flow.

Understanding this is the first step to taking advantage of this guide.

Now, what is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a set of strategies whose objective is to increase your company's visibility on the internet in organic search engines – Google, Bing, Play Store, Facebook and many others.

As the search market in Brazil is dominated by Google, it is natural and completely understandable to relate SEO to “appearing in the top positions on Google”. And among some options we have to make this magic happen, having a Blog with quality content prepared based on planning is still one of the best strategies.

There is no SEO without data

If the objective of an SEO strategy is to increase the visibility of a business in search engines, we can consider that it is only worth investing resources in being visible in topics where there is already a demand in the market – after all, there is no value in being visible in something where no one wants to see anything.

The question that arises after this premise is: how to find out what people are looking for?

Basically, through keyword research.

How to do keyword research

Contrary to what many people imagine, the first step in keyword research is not hiring a tool like SEMRush, Ubersuggest or Moz.

The first step is to brainstorm words and terms that have some relationship with the product and/or service offered.

Meet with everyone involved in the project (the more people, the better) and write down all the terms that people suggest. Because it's a brainstorm, the goal is just to accumulate as many ideas as possible without any judgment.

At the end of the SEO brainstorm, which can last 10 minutes or 2 hours, depending on the team's engagement and the complexity of what is being sold, you will have a document with several possible search terms.

And now a keyword analysis tool comes into play.

Use Ubersuggest, SEMRush or Moz (they are the best on the market) to validate whether the terms raised in the brainstorm have search volume and, most importantly, find keywords related to them that were not suggested.

All recommended tools will have these two functionalities, but if you still want a complement, you can use Google itself to find related terms.

What about keyword search volume?

In a perfect world, upon discovering that the keyword in your segment has search demand, you would move on to the content production step.

But unless you have unlimited financial resources, this perfect world doesn't exist, so you need to prioritize those keywords that can bring you the most benefits in the short term.

To do this, I like to spreadsheet keywords with three indicators (KPIs): search volume, competition and relevance in Search Console.

• Search Volume: This is the average monthly number of searches that a given keyword receives on Google. This metric indicates the demand for that keyword.
• Competition: Also known as KWD (Keyword Difficulty), it is the difficulty in competing in the ranking for that keyword – to obtain these results, the tools evaluate the domain authority of the results that are already on the first page of Google.
• Relevance in Search Console: If you already have a history of results in Google Search Console, you can see if this keyword (or related term) is already generating organic traffic to your site.

In the end, you will have a spreadsheet like this:

The data in the spreadsheet are just examples! Do your own research 🙂

Now, it's time to organize the terms in order from highest search volume to lowest. Don't worry about Competition and Relevance in Search Console for now.

It is worth mentioning that there are many other metrics relevant to SEO. However, the objective of this article is to be practical and, let's face it, if you are researching how to do SEO planning, you are far from needing to worry about more metrics than those presented.

Turning this research into editorial planning for your Blog

With a spreadsheet listing all the terms related to your product and their respective indicators, it's time to choose what will be produced.

The first question that must be answered is: how many articles will I be able to publish per week?

Be realistic. Producing a bunch of generic texts that don't answer users' questions won't work – Google's algorithms are getting smarter and, at the end of the day, quality is more important than quantity.

Speaking of quantity, it will largely depend on the budget and production capacity of each company. For teaching purposes, let's consider that you decided to produce one text per week, which is a reasonable amount to start with.

Considering that we are going to plan every six months (which is what I recommend), select the 24 terms with the highest search volume from your spreadsheet. After that:

• Eliminate terms with competition above 90
• Move unrelevant terms to the end of the list in Search Console

Now, you have a list of terms organized by priority.

With the 24 terms selected, it's time to think about text titles and briefings. Below we provide the standard briefing that we use in our projects – compact, simple to understand and even simpler to create.

With the titles and briefs finalized, it was time to find a writer and begin production. If you don't have an in-house person to do this, I recommend looking for a freelancer with experience in professional banking.

And of course, remember that to achieve SEO results, in addition to producing the right content as we teach in this guide, you need to take into account many other factors – site speed, user experience, domain relevance, etc.

To continue studying, I recommend the texts below: