#104 Content marketing VIP newsletter
Creating more content is no longer a moat. But creating content with improved page design and blog UX is.
Hey, Rafiqul here. Welcome to the #104th episode of Content Marketing VIP, which delivers actionable insights, SEO case studies & free resources every other Monday.
First time here? Read past episodes.
1. Routines.club's SEO Breakdown: Impact of UX and Page Design
One website I’ve been following for some time is routines.club. It is a simple website with only a couple of pages published.
The website doesn’t have hundreds of pages to build topical coverage (only 13 live pages)
The pages are not well optimized (as per so-called SEO best practices) for the target keyword
Still, the website is ranking in the top 3 for most of the possible keywords.
Here are some of the stats:
Site name: Routines.club
Website theme: Daily routine of successful people
# of indexed pages: 13 (only)
# of referring domains: 69
Monthly organic traffic: 4290 visits
1-year Traffic trend: upward
The website routines.club is a great example to understand how important the role of UX and information structure is.
HERE’S THE QUICK BREAKDOWN:
First, Google the search term ‘Daily routine of Andrew Huberman’ and you will notice that all other pages (except routines.club) are typical blog articles that look similar to this:
When you compare other daily routine articles with routines.club, you will find a huge UX design difference— the way routines.club has structured the page, added custom visuals and organized the whole routine.
This makes the webpage 10x better in terms of easy-to-find information and gets important insights from daily routines categorized by timing.
THE BEST PART:
Currently, the website has smartly implemented affiliate links to products or tools in the daily routine that are helpful to readers and have a higher click conversion.
An example:
The fun fact is that the website only has 13 indexed pages— which proves the point that in some niches you don't need to publish hundreds of pages to start ranking.
WHAT’S NEXT FOR ROUTINES.CLUB:
When I messaged the founder of this site, he asked me to suggest new topics— this shows that the team is constantly hearing the audience, instead of 100% relying on SEO tools.
From an SEO standpoint, the site has high growth potential if they can scale the number of daily routine pages.
Here’s what I’d do to scale the SEO performance:
Find influential people that people are interested to know about
Align with search volume to prioritize the content creation
Categorize the daily routine pages by interests such as entrepreneurs, tech founders, politicians, athletes, and more— so readers can find the daily routines of their favorite people.
Basic on-page optimization like adding metadata, structured data
Reaching out to these individuals to get unique quotes for the daily routine— this way, the page will be more unique and these individuals might share these pages with their audience as well.
Creating the content (which is difficult as the structure of the content is a little different from usual blog posts) — it’s a good idea to train writers or journalists who know how to write factually correct information and extensive research to extract insights from podcasts, books, interviews, etc.
Include affiliate links within content— not adding too many CTAs or affiliate links. The idea is to make the affiliate links natural and an integral part of the routine page.
2. Build your content and editorial guidelines to train your writers (14 examples)
Since I am running a small SEO team that works for selective clients, I know how important it is to train my content team to create helpful content (better than competitors, useful, adds unique value).
For my content team, I have created SOPs and guideline documents to train every writer— this saves my time to train new joinee from scratch.
If you also want to save time and improve content efficiency from your team, you should build content writing SOPs for your writers.
BUT DON’T BUILD ONE FROM SCRATCH.
I have researched 14 content and editorial guidelines that you can use as a base and create your SOPs faster:
Here’s how:
Visit the following resources one by one
Pick the helpful point and lesson and turn it into a guideline or instruction for writers
Build your list of guidelines in a document
If there are any specific instructions that you want your team to follow, include them as well
Done. You have created a SOP that will train your writers without your involvement.
Editorial guideline examples:
NOTE: These guidelines have a lot of action items to improve content quality with real examples. Take the screenshot and include them in your SOP.