How You Should Review & Edit Your Content (5 Best Practices)
In the past content quantity beat quality… but not anymore! Now, it’s important to ensure that the content you are creating is engaging, relevant to your audience, and useful in solving customer’s questions. Not only will this advance your brand’s mission, but your search rankings and domain authority as well. To do this, you need to review and edit your content before publishing.
While reviewing and editing content can be daunting, no need to fear -- we’ll tell you why it’s so important, and how you can implement best practices for a more seamless content review process that will make your editor’s life easier, your content stronger, and your brand’s life longer.
Why Reviewing & Editing Content is Critical
Having a solid review system in place is an essential step toward long term content sustainability. It allows content managers to seamlessly ensure that content is aligning with their brand, is accurate and specific, and well-written. Most importantly, editors will be able to ensure content is serving target market needs and expectations for a given topic.
Establishing a content review process allows for repeatable and time-effective editing. Having a strong and transparent editing procedure makes for stronger content that will have a lasting impact, and can be more easily repurposed in the future.
A little reviewal can go a long way.
Best Practices for Content Review
1. Determine a Timeline
Creating a timeline with due dates creates accountability. When deadlines aren’t met entire content schedules may be offset or interrupted, which can be difficult for editors to get back on track. Our advice when establishing timelines is to introduce a rough timeline to your content team, ensure that everyone agrees to the timeline, and then finalize on an accessible schedule.
2. Utilize a Style or Writing Guide
An integral aspect of strong content is its authenticity and consistency over time. It is very common to have multiple content writers and creators with their unique styles and writing skills on your team. While differences are great, this can pose a challenge when trying to standardize your content’s voice. Creating a Style Guide that writers can use as a resource when creating content is essential in establishing consistency and making editors’ lives less difficult. With a guide, your content creators will be working with a common style for a common goal: driving their content toward success.
3. Track Edits rather than Directly Edit
Instead of directly editing articles, tracking edits and adding suggestions allows editors to have an open and transparent dialogue with content creators. Rather than creators figuring out what was edited after the fact, they will be able to easily identify areas of improvement, opportunity, and success that will lead to better content output in the future.
4. Adopt a Transparent Editing Process
Using shared documents or project management software to track content team roles, deadlines, and progress keeps everyone aware of the process and next steps. Having this kind of transparent system also allows for flexibility and adjustment if deadlines are met earlier or need to be changed. It's important to make sure that team members don’t feel they have too much on their plate during the content creation process. This shared approach will also serve as an outlet for creators and editors to reach out for assistance. Some strong and easy to use project management software include Trello, Nifty, and Asana.
5. Engage in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Ensuring that your content is optimized can increase your content reach, search results, and relevance. Editing your industry-related and high-quality content with SEO in mind will be music to Google's ears.
Correctly using keywords is one of the keys to success. Keywords help Google understand what your content is about -- so it’s important to include strong keywords that your audience is looking for when thinking about a given content topic and your brand.
Formatting your content to align with various platforms across mobile and desktop with correct heading tags allows for easier content consumption for your audience and is rewarded by Google. Editing to make sure all H1, H2, and H3 headings are properly formatted with keyword intent will help increase your content’s search ranking.
The Reviewal & Editing Process Will Evolve
As your business grows and your goals and objectives evolve, so will your editing process. Each quarter may see a new goal and with that, a new content demand. Content Marketing as a whole is always changing -- don’t forget that change is good! Continually reviewing your content and making changes that better align with your business goals will set your content up for success.
Need Help With Your Content?
Content Marketing is an essential piece of the Digital Marketing puzzle.
Developing strong Content Marketing Strategy, Content Creation Framework, and Content Audits aren't an easy task -- but there are luckily plenty of resources at your disposal! Taking the time to develop these foundational content structures will greatly impact your business by increasing your brand awareness, reach, and ranking. Digital Marketing firms with content specialists are a great resource if you are struggling with your content strategy or success.
MyArea Network's digital marketing specialists will help you lay the foundation to build your content marketing campaigns. We have highly-skilled content writers specializing in short and long-form content creation that will provide you insight into the world of content and optimization, so schedule a free consultation with our experts, and take the step toward content confidence.
