Here you find the link to the full recording of the webinar, the slides & my key takeaways regarding the October 2020 online Content Strategy Lausanne meetup with Gemma Fontané about content calendar.
Introduction by Isaline Muelhauser, host of Content Strategy Lausanne.
Talk by Gemma Fontané SEO specialist with strong knowledge in digital marketing. Gemma achieves results for her clients thanks to her ability to translate their needs into sound action plans involving SEO, SEM & Ads. She has a knack for monitoring results with Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager & Data Studio. She’s passionate about knowledge sharing and a part time professor of Digital Marketing.
A huge thank you to Gemma. Preparing a presentation and being present to the meetup take a lot of time. Content Strategy Lausanne is nothing without speakers willing to share their knowledge. I am happy Content Strategy Lausanne got to welcome Gemma for her first international talk!
Learning from people is my favorite way to learn! Seeing so many participants connected Thursday October 22nd made me happy. Many thanks to you all for you support!
? Gemma’s template Keyword research & Topic categories
? Gemma’s template content calendar
Full Webinar Recording
Key takeaways about content calendar
A content calendar helps to:
- keep you accountable to achieve the goals that you have set for your blog, for example increase traffic, engagement or conversion.
- optimise organization between teams: content/writer + SEO + business.
- Focus your writing on the right keywords without risks of cannibalisation: you have all topics and keywords organised in one place,
- classify your topics easily, focused them for your right audience & increase loyalty
- publish timely topics, for example Christmas and black friday campaigns. You need to start a few months before to rank.
- optimise internal link building. It is important to link the internal web pages between them.
For more insight on how to optimise the writing of a blog post for on page SEO, see the article (in French) Checklist On Page SEO Pour Copywriters.
The slides about content calendar
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Content Strategy Lausanne was founded and is hosted by Isaline Muelhauser. Isaline loves SEO and writing.
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Full transcript of the webinar: content calendar with Gemma Fontané
Isaline Muelhauser: Hello everybody. So, I will need you to say hello in the chat and tell me if you can hear me well and if you can see me well and, you know, just flag anything that is not working correctly. And also, so we can know that you’re here before we can start. Okay, so I get a few answers. It looks like everything is fine. Can you tell me a little bit about you? Like what kind of backgrounds you have, your more marketing side, more tech side, more SEO side, like, so we know a bit who we are talking to. It helps us just adapt the language, you know, like what kind of words we use and so it’s good to have a little bit of an idea.
Like I’m from the marketing side initially, and then I turned into SEO specialist. So now I’m more on the technical part of things. Oh, so we have an in-house SEO. Oh my God, with two in-house content writer and six plus freelancers. That looks like a big website. Anyone else? Don’t be shy.
So it’s pretty good for me also to know that the chat works well, because this is where you can ask the questions later. So you can choose if you want to write just to me or if you want to write for everybody to see. So that’s the magic of Zoom. So we have some people who say like, they are more also marketing side. We have a trades professional. Oh, you’re here to learn a few things for a personal blog, then you are at the good place. This is definitely the place to be.
Okay. Well, so if everyone can hear as well then we’re going to start. And first thing, I’ll share my screen for a little introduction and let me check where I can share my screen. There we go. Can you see my screen? Yes. Good. So welcome to Content Strategy Lausanne. It’s a meet up. I have started like, I can’t remember now, I think about three to four years ago. It was when I decided to turn to content strategy and then more SEO thread. So I thought, hey, let’s learn, let’s share with other people. And also it was a really good way for me to get to know other people who are interested in the same thing than me about content strategy.
And so basically the meet up is about sharing knowledge. So I’m always asking the participants, the speakers to come and share about a subject that they are proficient with. And so everyone who comes here can learn something. And I really like when we can learn something very practical and we don’t go too much into theory because personally I get lost when things are too theoretical. So I’m really happy when there are Google Sheets and tables and stuff. And I really like reusing all of this.
And also let me tell you how this presentation is going to go. So first Gemma is going to present her subject. It’s about 30 to maybe 40 minutes. And then we have time for questions. I will be moderating the questions. You can send your questions either through the chats that you’ve used already, or you can use also the Q&A, there’s a Q&A in Zoom, so you can choose whatever your favorite way is good for me. And then I will ask the question to Gemma and she will answer. So really don’t be shy with your questions. You can just fire them whenever they comes and I’ll share them for everyone to learn at the end of the presentation. And if there is anything that goes wrong about the connection or technical side of the presentation, I will be monitoring the chats. So just tell us. Don’t let us go like five minutes and when we don’t know that something goes wrong. Okay?
So just a few words about Gemma, Gemma and I, we met through a community that is called Women in Tech SEO. It’s a community that aims at, that let us meet all the peer who works in SEO on an international level. So I was really happy to met her. She’s a SEO specialist with a strong knowledge in digital marketing and analytics. So she’s a bit like me. She likes Google Sheets and stuff. And today we discussed about what we should talk about and we were like, oh, content calendar, that is useful because it’s something that is often overlooked because we’re like, oh yes, I’m creating content from a blog. And then we get caught up in daily business sometimes, and we don’t do it exactly where we plans and sometimes also for SEO is really good to follow a strategy about the keywords and the topics to be really efficient and to be very relevant with the blog.
So we thought that was a really good subject to share today. So really just anything that we don’t say, just ask your question and we’ll answer whatever you need during the during the meet up. Also, if you’re really, really interested in SEO, you can join me and my friend, Sara in the meet up called SEO Nerd Switzerland. This meet up is a little bit more technical about SEO and not about writing. So join us and have a look. We have two meet up plans for November. Well, October already and November. About content strategy, we will probably have another meet up in November. And if all goes as planned, it’s going to be about the tone and voice guides, about someone I very much admire that created an open-source tone and voice guide.
So either November or next year, we’ll see how his planning goes. And I am now done with the introduction. So without further speaking now Gemma, you can share your screen and we can happily start your presentation.
Gemma Fontané: Okay, perfect. So let’s go. Okay. Can you see my screen?
Isaline Muelhauser: Yes. All good.
Gemma Fontané: Yes. Perfect. So then I start. Well, today I’m going to talk about how to create a content calendar for your blog strategy, yeah, for your blog post. Well, as Isaline said, I work in SEO in agency and I do content calendars almost every week. So I’m really used to doing it and well, and now I’m going to try to show you how do I do it and why is it important to do it because actually it work a lot for your SE study? Okay, so let’s go.
Okay, have your blog traffic felt flat after a while and you don’t know how to improve it? Or are your blog posts too repetitive and you don’t have new ideas or topics to write about? That has happened to you then maybe you are writing posts, but you’re not following an order or a calendar and maybe all the topics are the same and you don’t get, you can’t get new traffic for your website. And are you looking to achieve this with your blog? Do you want to increase the traffic that your website is getting? Do you want to increase the numbers of users that you are getting through your website, through search engine machine such as Google or this, by better connecting with your audience interests? Do you want to have a lot of shares, a lot of comments, a lot of likes? Do you want to interact with your audience better, then this is a solution; creating a content calendar for your blog post.
Here we can just see a photography, but this is an Excel template that later I will share it to you and it’s really helpful to have a good SEO strategy for your website. Okay. So let us start. Right now, first of all, why it’s important to you? Why it’s important that we prepare a content calendar strategy in our business, in our website? Well, first of all having a content calendar that is more than just a template, we can also call a content calendar as a SEO content strategy help us to keep us accountable and in focus to achieve our goals that we set for our blog. Okay, even if they are for traffic, engagement, conversion, whatever. If we get everything set up, it’s easy for us to always roll in the right direction.
Second of all, because getting a content calendar helps us to set a better organization within all the teams. I’ve seen that some of you working who are in digital marketing in general, so this will help you to have maybe a better organization. Why? Well, because for example, it will have a content calendar for our blogs. It will be easier for our social media team to know when we are going to publish some news or some products or some services, or it will be also easier to set and align a strategy with business and sales department. Okay, so this is good for our team First of all because well, it will help us to have a better organization and so for our content.
And why these are really, really important? Well, first of all, because if we have a content calendar, we will have in one place all of our topics and blogs gathered together. And why is this important? Well, because then we will never repeat that content again and why it’s important to not repeat some content, some topics or some [inaudible 00:13:02] because one, our audience don’t want to read the same thing twice and second, because Google doesn’t like that we repeat the same topics or also known as keywords, the terms that we’ll use in each blog. That it does so call that’s cannibalization. If you are more in the SEO sector, you will know that.
So it’s important that we never repeat exactly the same key word in different blogs because well, we’ll compete against ourselves and we don’t want that. So this is important also. This is important. Also it‘s important because a content calendar will help us to classify our topics easily. And why is this important? Well, because then this will help us to focus every blog to our right audience and increase their loyalty. If we gathered all the topics together for our audiences, our different kind of audiences, then we can create content more focused to them and give a better range of competition. Okay.
And then this one, I also like it a lot. It’s important to have a content calendar to not miss good opportunities because we are late. Having a social media calendar, I mean, I think it’s really common and a lot of people have it because it’s important to know when I said, no, we need to start preparing the Black Friday campaign or Christmas campaign or some Valentines campaign, but what happen with SEO, what happen with blogs? Can we, if in one month it’s Black Friday, can we write a blog now? Is it going to appear on Google if we publish one week ago, one week before Black Friday? No, our blog it’s really difficult that will appear on Google if we just publish it that week. Because sometimes we’ll need some time to show our blogs on the index.
That’s why it’s important to have a content calendar because then we will know everything some months before and we can start preparing well our strategies and finally, because with a content calendar we can work internally in building. This is really important from SEO perspective because we’re like a lot that we have all of our blogs, our content guide together in a logical way. When we talk about a topic that is important that all the links, all the pages are linked together, if it’s relevant for the user.
With a content calendar, it will be easier for us to know other blogs that we did before and to bring them when the writer is writing the blog. Okay. So well, these are the six most important points for my perspective, for why it’s important to have a content calendar. Okay. As you see, a well scheduled and aligned blog strategy will help us a lot within our SEO strategy. Yes, and we can see, for example with some other websites examples, for example, here with SEMrush, I check how that works, how they are doing their blog strategy. And we can see how during these last three years, their organic traffic increased a lot thanks to a blog strategy.
For example here Ahrefs blog, the doubled their traffic thanks to blog or let’s say SEMrush, they doubled also here their traffic during the last two years a lot thanks to the topics or the blogs that they are doing. So that’s why it’s important to have a good blog strategy because it can help you to increase a lot, a lot, a lot the traffics and the users that you are getting from organic channels than just Google. Okay. I go, if you have any questions, then later we can talk about all of them.
Okay. So I explain you why it’s important to have a content calendar and how this can help you to improve your SEO strategy, but let’s go through that process. Let’s learn how to create a content calendar for your blog. Okay, first of all, well, this one, if you work in the digital marketing sector, you already know it, but it’s important to repeat it. The first thing that we need to know, it’s to identify your audience, to know who our audience is because then it will be easier for us to find new topics that they are interested in, that’s related to our products or services. Okay, what they need and what they are looking for. If we don’t know our audience, then it will be really difficult that our content strategy actual works.
After that, once we know our audience, once we did all of this, it’s important that we start working. Now we know the theory. Now we know why it’s important. Who are we trying to arrive, but let’s go through that process. What do we have to do? Well, now we will have to do a keyword research but not a normal keyword research. In this case we need to do a keyword research within to find new topics to attract potential clients. What is a keyword research? I don’t know if you are familiar with that concept, but we do keyword research, we look for … Keyword research is when you look for terms that you think that people, that interest that are interested with your product or service use online.
For example, if you sell shoes, you will look on certain teams to see which kind of things people are looking related to your product or service. Okay. But here, I’m going to tell you how to do a keyword research within to find new topics for your blogs. Okay. So first of all, the first thing that we need to do, it’s always define our objectives and our competitors with the clients. I say with the client, because when I work in an agency and I also always get clients, but maybe we work in an organization or in a company, you are right now the objectives and our competitor. Okay. So first, you need to know this.
Once you know that, the first thing I recommend you to do is to think how people will look for your services or products. You either know you can do it with an Excel sheet, or you can do it with a paper, but you just need to write down how you think that people will look for your service or products. And that’s also you’re serving exactly but also it’s something additional, something related such as how to fix it, clean it, cook it, build it, whatever relates to your product. Why, because these trends will help you to think about different topics or blogs to write about. Yes and they will help you to arrive to maybe new clients or I don’t know, new audiences that you didn’t know that maybe they could convert on your website. Okay.
So once you’ve done that, once you think how people will look your services or products, then you just need to go to Google and check if that’s true. You just need to go through Google and see okay, I think that people, for example, imagine that you are a wedding planner and you are, I don’t know, so you just go in Google and you say a wedding in the … And Google will give you a lot of different things that this is what I was calling yours. Wedding in the woods, beach, dream, forest, garden, backyard. Well, here Google gives you a lot of ideas about terms that people are searching. With these, you can select the things that you think that will fit on your blog, on your website, because these are the services or products that you are selling that you are offering.
For example, if you are preparing weddings in the, I don’t know, in the mountains, well, the keyword wedding in the beach, we don’t need it. We don’t need to use this one, so we don’t need to select this one. We just need to take the kind of terms that we think that will be, that would match in our blog for our audience. Okay. Well, when we have this, we just need to check if these terms are being searched a lot and just we need to make sure that people are already looking for that term and how the trend is.
Let me explain it better. For example, imagine that you are a tech company and you want to write a new blog about trends for next year. Okay. So you think, okay, we tell the most popular trend for next year, a blockchain A, or data science, well, are you on Google trend, for example, that is one of the marketing tools that you can use. There are a lot of marketing tools that you can use. And you just put your keyword there. And for example, what can we see here? Well, in 2017, we can see that blockchain was the keyword and most people were looking for. What’s happened, well, we’re in 2020 and I don’t know if you can see good, but the thing that most people is looking for right now is data science. More people are interested more in data science instead of blockchain.
So for example, we can say, oh, maybe there are more or less the same volume of people looking for each term, but data science has an increased trend. So maybe if I have to choose a keyword for my blog or a topic to write about, it will be data science in this case. So this is a good way to think about keywords or topics to validate it on different marketing tools. You can do it on Google Trend or you can also do it here in, for example, this is the keyword planner from Google that I just put here some keywords, some terms, and then they give me ideas, well, they give me how many people are looking for that keyword every month, the average and how the competencies, how many, if there are a lot of people or not a lot of people are competing against this keyword.
You can do this with Google Ad, with the keyword planner from Google Ad or you can do this from a lot of other kind of marketing tools, such as SEMrush for example. And with this, well, this will be really helpful for us because these will give us ideas about whichever best topics to write about, and it will be, well with the steps if we want to create our content calendar.
Okay. How do you need to select the terms? Well, this depends a lot depending on your objective, on the ends of your business, and also, I don’t know, the size of your business. There are some keywords, for example here, imagine that you sell gifts, you have a store here that you sell a lot of kind of gifts. Imagine that, I don’t know, you want to rank the keyword or talk about Christmas gifts for mum. Well, I don’t know if you can see it, but the competency really fine. 86 out of 100 is the level of competence. This is a lot of people trying to compete with that way in an organic level in Google. So maybe if you, I don’t know, if you’re a smaller store, you cannot compete against multinationals. So it will be better for you to use long-tail keywords.
What are they? Long-tail keywords are such terms that maybe are longer, they are not as generic as Christmas gifts but these will help you to be more specific and to focus more to your right audience, maybe so that they have less searches, maybe instead of one million people looking for that, you have 70 people, but these 70 people are going to find your website and maybe are going to compare more. So this will help you to choose which one is better, depending on your business always. Here, you have more examples. And when you’ve done that, what you can also do is to work with whichever vis-à-vis what our competence is doing and who your competence are.
For example, if you are SEO agency, you can come here and write on Google the best SEO agency in London, in New York, and here to give some example of people that are ranking with that wedding. This will give you an idea of your competitors, the size that they are, the blogs that they are doing, whatever. And also, while you can use keyword research tools such as a SEMrush to discover more about our competence. If you come here and you write your competence, then it moves their website, these tools give you ideas about who your competitors are, and these will be easier for you because then you can see what they are doing and you can get inspired and you can see the levels that they are ranked for and all of these will help you to prepare your content calendar strategy.
And when you’ve done all of that, this is only the first step for your content calendar strategy, we will go to the template such as this one. What is this? Well, when you’ve done your keyword research, when you select all the terms that you think that will be a good idea to talk on your blog, on your website, you just need to come to that Excel sheet. I will give you here the template. You will just need to bring it and you can copy. Well, here I’m going to show you an example of how I did this one. For example, imagine this, we are the cheapest store and we sell gifts, a lot of kind of gifts for Christmas, for birthday, for Valentine’s Day, for Black Friday, whatever. First of all, the first thing that we need to do is to gather all of our topics well. For example, here I have topic one, topic two, topic three and like you were related to that topic.
I have these keywords here from the Google Ads keyword tool that I showed you before. If you go on here and you download it, you just need to download it. And then you have exactly this and you just need to copy all the information here and then you will have the folders. Okay, it’s really easy to use. You just download it and copy all the information here. And then with these sheets, you will find now in which period there are more people looking for each content, each term, each keyword and this will be very helpful for you for deciding when it is more optimal to work each topic.
For example, let’s go back on what we were talking before. Imagine that we are [inaudible 00:28:52] and we are deciding when it’s more important to work each content, each of this content, for example, it will be a good idea to post a blog related to Black Friday on November. No, why it’s not a good idea? Well, because in November it’s when most people are looking about term related for Black Friday use. Okay, if we post a blog on November, it’s probably unlikely that our blog appears on the first page of Google. Why? Because Google needs some times to index a blog, to rate it, rank, whatever.
So with this, with this course this well, so first to give us an idea for when it’s more optimal to publish it. For example, if we want to publish a blog related to Black Friday, maybe we can do it on May for example. But he will say yeah, like Gemma, if I publish it May, it’s not a good idea because I don’t want to tell people my discounts of May. And I will say, yeah, but to me, you don’t need to tell all of your discounts, maybe in May, you can post a blog related, just explaining that you’re going to do a promotion on Black Friday and same with Daisy. So you publish it, Google knows that you’re going to talk about this and it starts to indexing your page.
And then when it’s October, November, you just upload information with your actual discounts. Then you repeat, these are where you’re ranked, you are linked. You have all the departments in the same way. So it’s easier for you. Okay. So with this kind of template, this is not exactly a content calendar template, but these templates give you an idea for when it’s more optimal to work each content. And as we can see it here, so our engagement will be in December, November, December, Valentine’s Day January, February. That’s why maybe it’s a good idea to publish it on August.
So and once we have this, then we have everything that we need for our content calendar. Without that information, we just need to fill that out. Fill that out is the templates that I show you at the beginning, and how are we going to fill that out as well? Let’s go on with the example that we are doing. Imagine this, we have a Christmas gift store. So the first thing that we need to do is to our there’s all of these companies you need to fill in. And these are examples that I write it for you for now. But if you come here in the template, there is no example.
So first, the topic. Here, I will write the topic that it’s a good idea that we talk about. Why, because here in that blog, the main keyword would be Christmas gift for teens. So it will be a good idea if the topic is Christmas gift for teens. Why it’s a good idea to do all of this? Because then the writer, the person that is going to write the blog doesn’t need to do all the process and wait until now. So the writer just need to focus on the information that I gave to him or her here and to start writing because he will have all the information to where he doesn’t need to more research anything. Everything will be here for that person to write. So he won’t waste time. He won’t need to know a lot of SEO with strategy consents because everything will be here for that.
So it will tell that person in the topic, that kind of post analysis, so for example, imagine, I don’t know, here it’s Christmas, right? Our Christmas gift. Well, maybe we are, I don’t know, a mobile store. If we talked about a mobile, it’s different like if we are talking to people that are, I don’t know, 60 years old or people that are 18 years old. That’s why it’s important to tell to the right, who are our audience, because then the way that he writes it’s going to be better to connecting with our audience. Okay.
So I’ve said that I also gave two examples of similar posts. Similar meaning these are for example, with that key words, with these key words, the words that nowadays, or the way that I said, we’re in better position were these ones. So now the writer will know, okay, who are like my competitors? Who are the blogs that right now are in the first position and he or she will know that okay, so these two websites are the ones that are in the better position for these keywords. And well, they have blog with more than 1000 words or less than 50 hundred.
So this will give to that person an idea of how it’s better to write this blog. If this blog was full of images or if this blog had 10 videos, then we’ll give as an idea about how Google likes this kind of blog. Okay, well, so well, I give this here, then I also write who is responsible, because maybe in a team we have more than one writer, so it’s important that we know who is the person that is going to write it. The publication date, why it’s important to say the publication day? Well, because then for example, the social media team will know which day the blog is going to be published and then they can prepare the campaign or the social media calendar because the social media calendar depends on our content calendar.
So that’s why it’s important to write it here because sometimes it’s not only for us, it’s for the whole team. Finally I also write, which is the main keyword that we’re going to talk about. And these are so helpful for the writer and for the SEO team, because then we won’t repeat this keyword never again, because we will have this written now. So it’s more difficult that we use the same keyword again in anther blog in two months. Okay. Finally, well, I also write synonyms for the writer, because then he or she has more ideas about keywords that they can use. And finally, what they also do is I mean, with this content calendar you give to a writer a lot of information. And I think that’s good.
I also give to them internally building. For example, if this blog is about Christmas gift for teens and in my website, they have a category page with Christmas gift and another category page for Christmas gift for kids. I already give it to that person here because then he will know, okay, oh, so we know that blog we already have, I don’t know, a category for the teens or a category for the kids. So from here I can know information or maybe I can do internally building with these pages. It will be a good idea. So I give it to them here. Okay. I hope you understand.
But well, the aim of this, to put in one place, like all the SEO strategy together for the writer to do it, to have all they need in one place. Okay, and well here, I also use different color for each topic because then they know, okay, so blue it’s about Christmas, with yellow it’s for Valentines and with green it’s about birthdays. Because when the writer I have in my team, and he loves that I do it with colours and use this, so it’s a good idea. And here, well, I give you more examples. For example, in case it’s, I don’t know, if the keyword is Valentine’s day gift for here, so well, you do exactly the same as we did before, or maybe the next blog is what should I gift myself for birthday. Why, because I found that a lot of people were looking on Google, but they give ideas for myself. So I say, hey, let’s talk about the blog for this kind of people that are looking for this kind of birthday present.
Okay, so with all this process, with all the keyword research, with knowing what it’s more important to write each topic, I prepare my content calendar. Okay. But it’s important to do this step by step with my clients so all the goals are aligned. It’s important that when we prepare all these structure or all this content calendar, I’ll do it with my client or with the business team or with everybody because if not, then we get problems like oh, but this is not the right publish, oh no. But it was supposed to be in December, so it’s important to do this.
Okay, and finally here I told you why it’s important to have a content calendar and how to do it. But then it was okay, so we do all of these and we managed to bring more people to our website, then what? For ending my work, I will give you like four tips that I recommend you to use when you’re writing a post to generate more conversions on your website. Okay. First of all, my recommendation for your blogs when you are doing it, it’s to have a correct blog post structure. Why, because if we do all that effort and we bring all these people to our websites, and then they don’t have a good experience, they leave. And we didn’t want them to leave, we want them to read it, to enjoy it and to start navigating inside our websites.
That we recommend you to read, I don’t know, like a newspaper, where you can find the headings, paragraphs, images, in a good order, in a good structure. So for me, a lot should be the same. Obviously always happy to every design and every business, but well, a good user experience, okay. Also what you can do on your blogs is always answer your client’s needs and questions. And this is also related to the keywords and keyword research. And this will also help us to appear in better, in rank, in better positions on Google and to have more clicks in our website. That’s probably one at the end.
So, I don’t know, if we know that a lot of people related to our product have some kind of questions. Why, with our blog we can answer them. For example, with the best Christmas, then I can give to myself on my birthday. So then we just need to give to that person the answer and they will have a good experience in my web, okay. Create good titles and snippets. Focus on your main topic. It’s important that we do all of these and then people go through, I don’t know, to the search engines and they are looking for, and it’s important that we attract them that they can, I mean, maybe we are in the fifth position, but our title is funnier than the one that is in the second position.
So having a good title and good snippet related to our topics and keywords will help us also to increase these TTR, the range of clicks through our website. Okay, here, there’s some funny title such as powerful marketing strategies that you should steal in 2020 or the 11 best marketing strategies we tried this year. These are funny titles. Of course it depends always on every sector, right? But well, this is some ideas. Here in some slides you will see that I leave you some other pages with more information.
And finally what’s also important to do is to use different formats depending on your audience. Maybe at some, I’m always talking about text in here, but sometimes maybe depending on your keyword, your topic or your sector, it’s better if you do videos or if you use a lot of images because this kind of explanation, it’s better to do it by, I don’t know, by a podcast or with a video or whatever. Okay. So it’s important to go on Google and check this too.
And last but not least, always, always, always in my digital marketing, I recommend you to track your results to verify if your strategies are working. For example here, this is Google search console, I don’t know if you are used to it, but this is, I mean, you can put, you can have this in every website in the world for free, and this give you an insight of how your performance is going. So you will have like the top page for your website, the picture with more clicks, more impressions and whatever. And then this will give you an idea of which blogs are working better than other ones. Okay.
And well, that’s all, I think. I hope you enjoyed, I hope you learned new things. You will have this template for you in case you want to use it in the future. And well, thank you very much.
Isaline Muelhauser: Oh, there, I’m back. I was muted. Thank you Gemma. That was awesome. So now we have a little bit of time for questions. You can ask whatever you want, you need to ask in the chat or in the Q&A to Gemma.
Gemma Fontané: Yeah, I think I explained a lot of information. Maybe you have some questions.
Isaline Muelhauser: Where do we find the templates? We will share the links and the slides and the recording, everything tomorrow. So, but maybe what you could do Gemma is go through again one of your templates.
Gemma Fontané: Yeah, look, I have some here.
Isaline Muelhauser: So here we go. So that’s the one with the examples. Yes.
Gemma Fontané: Yeah. So for example, this is the one that you put all the keywords and here you have a content calendar template, okay. Here are my examples and as you can see, I do month one, month two, month three, well, like January, February, March, and then week one, week, two week three because in my case I do for example one blog per week. Okay, with this client, so here, just the writer just need to come here to open the Excel for each project, for each client and he will go, okay, so this week, what do I have to write? Okay. So this blog and this topic, and he doesn’t need to go through the information. Then week two, week three. So every week you have the topic you need to write about.
Isaline Muelhauser: Yeah. So that is very useful to be organized.
Gemma Fontané: Yeah. And it didn’t bother. I mean, this time, you always say, yeah, I’m going to have time to write blogs and it’s not important, but then you see that when you are in a big agency or some places like that, it’s a good way to have all your information tied together and not forget to the blogs.
Isaline Muelhauser: Thanks. And we have questions. Oh, this is a question I have very, very often. So Gemma, about the tools, what do you recommend and what do you suggest? Like what are you favourite tools?
Gemma Fontané: Okay. Well, I mean, my favourite tools are other ones that I use, but I think that they are all amazing depending a little bit on your objectives and well, and what you are used to. In my case, for example, I really like to use Google. I mean, from where I can extract a lot of information, I mean, as you can see, I find my competitors thanks to Google. Or even now, I mean, with Google, you can find a lot of things but also through SEMrush, for SEO it’s really a good as well.
Isaline Muelhauser: Yeah. So I think this question I get so often, so many people use SEMrush. SEMrush has some features to have as you could see on Gemma’s slides, some templates that to visually show you the data. And I think Ahref, I use personally Ahref, I’m a big Ahref fan, but I think we have little less types of visualization, but the data is as good. So I would say between SEMrush and Ahref for the keyword research is really what you prefer using and what you used to.
Gemma Fontané: Yes.
Isaline Muelhauser: So from a more SEO perspective for the back links, use both Majestic and Ahref, you know, just to compare things, to have two different sources of data. And if you go, if you want to dig into the more technical sites, then you need Screaming Frogs and Screaming Frog is like not so expensive. So I think that would be my three go-to tools, but I mean, you can ask, everybody has different answers. So I think at some points the best is just to, you know, you can try them, like Ahref for $7 you can try it for two weeks. So, and SEMrush probably has a trial period as well. So I think probably the best is just to get through, to Dutch them and see how it goes, if you feel comfortable ‘cause…
Gemma Fontané: Exactly.
Isaline Muelhauser: They are all good and the data is pretty good, so.
Gemma Fontané: It’s good to have more than one tool if you can have it because then you can compare them better because sometimes, you know, it’s not exactly everywhere, so yeah.
Isaline Muelhauser: And for the idea gathering, I do exactly the same. I do in incognito search with my keywords, to see a bit what it’s like as a user. To gather ideas, I use also the keyword planners and also the public is really good to have ideas like…
Gemma Fontané: Yes, that’s true.
Isaline Muelhauser: Because you have so many ideas and like you just put one words and then you have all of the questions people ask on the web. So for this phase of idea gathering is also pretty good.
Gemma Fontané: Yeah. I don’t use it a lot because, well, I’m from Barcelona and we write a lot in Catalonia and Spanish, and sometimes in some languages you cannot, well, you don’t have as many options as in English, for example, but yes, I will love to use it.
Isaline Muelhauser: And let me see if we have any other questions. And also how often, I mean, how long do you take to prepare all of the subjects and how often do you do it? Because you mentioned that you work with writers to publish one blog post month, but then when you do the content calendar, like how long and how often do you do it?
Gemma Fontané: Okay. Lately like I have a lot of project right now luckily, I used a lot of time. I mean, most of my time is preparing these and doing this pure research. Usually I do it for the next three months because then I don’t need to do it every week. Although sometimes it’s important to check every month like, okay, what I did for this month, do we change the strategy with the client? Do I need to change some blog? And with a lot of the clients I can do this way because some sectors are more changing, but in the ones that are more specific, I have a lot of clients. So sometimes it’s easier for me to plan it like in a long-term. So then what I do is I spend maybe one day or two, but I have it for a long time.
Isaline Muelhauser: Oh. And I see here, and what do you do when you already have a blog post published? Because like you have your Christmas gifts blog posts or your Valentine’s gift blog post and then what do you do in your content calendars for the next year?
Gemma Fontané: For next year?
Isaline Muelhauser: Yeah.
Gemma Fontané: Okay, for example, in this case well first I just, well, I hope that people are interested in it and they share it and they on social media and in other websites and then next year, if it depends a lot on every, every project and every client and every strategy. But sometimes I use the same blog and I have loaded with new information for that year. Or in this case because it’s stationary but all sectors, what I do is like, okay, if I am talking to all these machines, maybe two years later or after two years, I upload information about this machine with new information or new images that I have, or with maybe more tapes or yeah. I always, I never do a blog and just leave it there. I’m always checking on that blog after some months to see how this is evolving. That’s why it’s important to have, for example, a web search console or the tools to check how your keywords and your pages are ranking.
Isaline Muelhauser: Okay. So basically you check how the blog post is performing and then you just improve the same blog post every year.
Gemma Fontané: Exactly.
Isaline Muelhauser: Keep it and you modify stuff, you edit, change pictures and stuff, but you keep the URL.
Gemma Fontané: Yeah. Always because it’s important that if you change the name of a URL and you don’t do a redirect, you have an error page and this is really bad because they’re not able to see you. It’s a loss. So it’s important that when you change a content, the content of your blog, you never change URL or in case you do it, if it’s really important to do it, or you need to read for something, you do a redirect in this case.
Isaline Muelhauser: So optimizing the content and never delete a page.
Gemma Fontané: Exactly.
Isaline Muelhauser: But you have the same events every year. Just have one page for the event, and one URL without the dates and you just keep it and change the dates on the page. So that’s yeah, that’s really good tip.
Gemma Fontané: That’s important. Yeah.
Isaline Muelhauser: And let me check, do we have any other questions? Oh, so we have many, thank you, Gemma.
Gemma Fontané: Oh, thank you.
Isaline Muelhauser: That’s so nice of you. So now we can do all the standing ovation because that was Gemma’s first international talk and you did awesome because I can tell you that it’s a big challenge to do a talk in another language and to do the slides in another language. That’s a lot of work. So I have a special thank you for you Gemma. You did awesome.
Gemma Fontané: Thank you very much.
Isaline Muelhauser: And I would recommend you to all the good conferences as a speaker at Brighton the next time you can go.
Gemma Fontané: Okay. Great.
Isaline Muelhauser: And today I have posted something special for you. I have posted, can you see that?
Gemma Fontané: Oh yes.
Isaline Muelhauser: So I have posted a Swiss army knife with a very special inscription. I have an SEO Swiss army knife.
Gemma Fontané: Oh, I love it.
Isaline Muelhauser: Because we always say that in SEO and basically it’s also true for digital marketing, you have to know stuff about many different subjects. Like you have to know about Google Sheets, you have to know about a little bit of both, social media, you have to know about technical stuff, you have to know about so many different things that you’re like a bit, a Swiss army knife, so many different factors, so.
Gemma Fontané: Oh yeah. That’s so true. Thank you.
Isaline Muelhauser: So, I guess it’s on its way by now. I’m not sure when it’s coming, but it was pretty much the easiest to send. I wanted to send like cheese and chocolates, but I thought it was not such a good idea.
Gemma Fontané: No, I love it. I mean, it’s great. And it’s really funny.
Isaline Muelhauser: Okay. So if we have no other questions. Oh, we have many, many thank you comings.
Gemma Fontané: Thanks.
Isaline Muelhauser: And so thank you everybody for being here and for following us. Well, this meet up would be nothing without people speaking to us and asking questions. So I’m really happy that you got something interesting out of the meeting. And if you have any late questions, don’t hesitate to come back to Gemma or to come back to me. If I can’t answer, I’ll just transfer to Gemma. And well, now we are probably going to have a break and eat something for tonight, but I’ll be sure to post the recording in YouTube and the slides and the templates and everything. And I’ll send you an email with all of that through the meet up platform.
So and in case you don’t find that email, check his spam box, it’s probably there somewhere. Okay. So thanks everybody for being here.
Gemma Fontané: Thank you.
Isaline Muelhauser: And I wish you all the best. Stay safe people.
Gemma Fontané: Yeah. Goodbye.
Isaline Muelhauser: Goodbye.
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¿Cómo crear un calendario de contenidos para un blog? | Gemma Fontané Especialista SEO & SEM
01/03/2021[…] Watch the full presentation called: “How to create a content calendar for your blog”, I did on Content Strategy Lausanne. […]