Coalition’s SEO Copywriting Process: How We Get Pages Live

Coalition’s SEO Copywriting Process: How We Get Pages Live

A chart naming different types of SEO copy

Coalition Technologies creates thousands of optimized copy pages each month. If you’ve ever wondered how we do it, here’s our SEO copywriting process.

The Copy Pipeline

What is SEO copywriting? Some branches of marketing, such as PPC campaigns, focus on immediate results. Search engine optimization, however, builds gradually over time. Marketers create web copy that will index well and rank highly on results pages, but it usually takes six to nine months of following a disciplined strategy to see results from SEO.

That can be good or bad. The extended timeline gives more opportunities to look at data and make adjustments, but the lack of urgent deadlines can sometimes slow progress and weaken a marketing campaign.

As an agency that grew from small beginnings to an industry leader with hundreds of clients, we’ve had to devise a copy pipeline that can efficiently handle a massive workload while also giving each client the attention they deserve.

Every step of our SEO copywriting process, from intensive research to post-production, requires a careful approach to understanding what your business needs.

Research

All copy at Coalition starts with you—the client. We take the time to understand every facet of your business, whether that’s your Unique Selling Propositions (USPs) or a brief timeline of your store. We ask questions such as ‘What does success look like to you?’ from Day 1 to ensure that our copy and your goals are completely in sync. 

What is special about our SEO copywriting system is that it eliminates the repetitive back-and-forth communication most agencies engage in with their clients. We begin each campaign with a client kickoff call. We use detailed notes from this conversation to produce documentation that guides our SEO copywriting process. These documents contain everything that producers need to know about your business, minimizing the room for error and confusion.

Research doesn’t stop with your business and goals. We also take a deep dive into your industry and competitors. Our team scouts out unseen opportunities and identifies existing weaknesses in the already published copy on your website. There are multiple layers to the research involved in this stage:

  • Content Strategy: An effective SEO copywriting process revolves around a tight content strategy. In fact, 72% of marketers believe that a proper strategy plays the biggest role in their success. Our strategists are in charge of creating a tailored approach for your business, keeping in mind your goals and how to best achieve them.

Part of the strategy is figuring out the type of copy that your business requires. For example, an ecommerce website will often need an array of optimized product and collection pages, but a service industry might rely on a long-form knowledge base to win new customers. In any case, our goal is to drive traffic and increase conversions.

  • Keyword Research: What is SEO copywriting without keyword research? This step reveals how your customers are looking for your products and the most efficient route that we can take to reach them. We perform careful research through planning tools and competitor analysis to arrive at the most effective set of keywords for a given page–whether we’re writing new copy from scratch or optimizing an existing webpage.
A graph comparing keyword performance for SEO copywriting

Writing

All of our research in the SEO copywriting process lays the foundation for our talented group of writers. Coalition works exclusively with subject matter experts to deliver copy that requires minimal revisions and meets our high-performing SEO standards. 

The first batch of completed copy is yet another opportunity for us to align with your expectations. We review our copy with our clients, and we ask you to let us know if we’ve missed anything.

While style and brand voice are often core components of your business, we recognize SEO copywriting is what helps a page rank highly in search results. We consider the user experience and layout of the page, and we combine our technical recommendations with your vision for your business.

We add notes from each copy batch to our client documentation for future reference. This eliminates recurring errors in the SEO copywriting process and makes sure that each page of writing is better than the last. 

Editing

Experience in SEO copywriting is what makes each of our writers skilled at creating content that performs every time, but we still put in the effort to ensure that your content is always aligned with our writers’ strengths. If we’re working with a client in health and wellness, we place writers on their campaigns who have experience with that industry. This specialized approach has helped us increase our live copy rates.

Our editors and strategists will prioritize client expectations and needs when editing, molding each first draft into a high-performing piece of copy. This part of the SEO copywriting process requires editors to balance stylistic considerations like tone, flow, and voice, with factors that affect search engine rankings such as keyword spacing. Once it’s ready, the pages can go live on the website.

Post-Production

Supporting elements such as infographics and images are what elevate great SEO copywriting to content that draws in traffic over the long term. Once strategists and clients agree on a final draft for the copy, our team of designers puts together all the necessary supporting visual elements. 

Post-production is an inseparable element of creating SEO-friendly content. A compelling infographic or engaging animation can capture the user’s attention. If readers are on your page for a longer time, search engines will view your website more favorably. This is why Coalition includes design as an integral part of the SEO copywriting process. For example, strategists can plan an infographic for summarizing the content of a long-form blog before the first draft is even finalized. This speeds up the overall process and ensures that you get faster results.

An infographic about 3d printing

An example of optimized copy with an infographic and user-friendly page layout.

Tracking with ScoreTask

Alright—that’s how it works for one page. But how do we keep track of thousands?

ScoreTask is a unique in-house project management tool we developed to empower every stakeholder in the copy pipeline. From our writers and copy strategists to our clients, everyone has the features they need to do their best work. For example, strategists can use ScoreTask to manage copy requests, assign projects, and edit them as needed. 

Access to software like ScoreTask is what allows us to maintain our SEO copywriting quality, even with the high volume of copy that we regularly produce. This is especially important considering a large part of our SEO copywriting process revolves around an agile and remote workforce, including experts from different US cities and around the world. 

We also set up client accounts on ScoreTask, giving them the power to access performance reports and track progress with copy statuses. Other benefits of this software include:

  • Faster Production: No more bottlenecks. ScoreTask lets us spot the exact department that is currently working on the copy and the specific reason for the hold-up. Managers also receive updates on who they can contact to resolve the issue.

    Some bottlenecks may be inevitable in the SEO copywriting process, but our software goes a long way to minimize their effects. Copy gets published faster, and clients can look forward to results sooner rather than later.
  • Easier Collaboration: What is the most important trait of an efficient SEO copywriting pipeline? Collaboration. ScoreTask significantly reduces the back-and-forth between clients, editors, and writers by creating a cohesive platform that enables productivity. Writers can quickly access client guidelines, feedback on past copy, and requested edits at a glance. 
  • Transparency: Our copy pipeline is designed to be as transparent as possible, giving our clients a window into how we work and the ability to reach out at a moment’s notice. ScoreTask fosters this transparent approach by including easy-to-understand copy page statuses and contact information for the strategists responsible for a given page. 

Watch Out For Slowdowns

Even with the smoothest systems, a few slowdowns can occur during the SEO copywriting process, particularly when dealing with first batches. Here’s how we manage them.

  • Frequent Changes: Our strategists and writers are always trying to push the boundaries and craft powerful content that helps you stand out. Part of this strategy is getting optimized pages on the site as soon as possible, maximizing SEO benefits for your pages. Frequent changes and edits can sometimes slow this process down and create bottlenecks.

    Our strategists and producers will always welcome client feedback, keeping the bigger picture in mind while going back to the drawing board and accounting for client expectations. Sometimes, we may recommend applying a new idea to a future page for the sake of getting the current page live and indexed by search engines.
  • Delayed Approvals: Sometimes the slowdown is not because of a strategy change but rather a delayed approval to push new pages live. We are committed to making ourselves available in whatever medium our clients prefer to communicate. Text us, call us, send us an email, or ping us in Basecamp—as soon as we have the green light, we are ready to get our clients’ pages into production.

    When clients do not provide timely feedback or approval of web copy, the delay can slow down results for the campaign.
  • Missing Information: Generally speaking, punchy and to-the-point writing is one of the key considerations of SEO copywriting, but sometimes a lack of information can keep a page from achieving this. For instance, it is challenging to describe the unique features of a new product line without knowing the details of the products.

    Clients can help out here by providing detailed information about the aspects of their business they want featured on their sites. This gives our experts time to adapt to client needs and allows for more tightly-focused copy. 

Improving The Copy Production Process

Collaboration Tools

A survey of content marketers indicated that a lack of time was the top challenge in publishing effective content. Implementing a few collaboration tools can speed up the SEO copywriting process and aid time management. Our teams rely on tried-and-tested tools like the Google Suite to drive up productivity and keep everyone on the same page. Our proprietary ScoreTask software also boasts native integration with Google Suite, Analytics, and Basecamp. 

Security is right at the top of our list of priorities here, especially considering the number of clients we work with on a daily basis. Our platform keeps client credentials secure by restricting information to a need-to-know basis and following best practices like multi-factor authentication. 

Monitoring Performance

What is SEO copywriting without analytics? We’re not done with your copy once it’s been released into the wild. Our team keeps an eye on how your pages perform after optimization and is ready to make changes if needed. Certain tools like Google Analytics are useful here, letting editors know how site visitors react to a certain change by providing detailed information about bounce rates and changes in conversion rates. 

An SEO Copywriting Process That Gets You Ahead

We’ve fine-tuned our content production process over the years to create a system that can handle large volumes of copy while giving each client the space they deserve to grow and flourish. Find out how this optimized process can help boost your business by reaching out to Coalition Technologies for a free strategy review today. 

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