After a post I made on facebook a lot of people got interested in the content plans I make for the writers I work with. I’ll try to keep it short and to the point so if you have any questions, use the comments.
For this demo article, I will target ‘best car vacuum‘.
For every article I have 3 goals:
- to rank in the SERPs (by answering fully and better than the competitors the searcher’s query)
- to attract links
- to convert (send people to my affiliate offers and convince them to buy it)
Preparation
Before I start with the content plan I like to see what is the searchers intent and get an overview of the keyword and what other things people search for in relation to the keyword.
The searchers intent is a very important factor. You want to head over go google and search the keyword that you want to rank for. In our case best car vacuum. Now check what results rank on the first page.
If there are long-form blog posts, you will continue with the content plan. If the results are e-commerce sites and products, you want to emulate that. If the results are tools with almost 0 content, you want to make a tool and so on.
To get an overview of the keyword I like Soolve and this Amazon suggestion tool (free tools) and ahrefs(paid).
If you go over to Soolve and type best car vacuum in the search box, you’ll get something like this
best car vacuum – soolve
Now if you do the same with the Amazon suggestion tool
And you get a pretty good idea of what are the main keywords you need to target in the article: cordless, portable, handheld, high power, most suction, 2018(year modifier), pet hair, 12v
What this overall picture tells you is that ideally, you want to also check the wirecutter and Reddit and get some info from there, include snippets and link to it as a source.
Now that you have seen in google that the searchers intent for this keyword is a long-form blog post and what people are searching for, you can start your content plan.
1. Introduction
The intro section of the money article is the most important part. In a few sentences, you want to explain why you are the expert in this field, how much time and resources you have spent on the research, what sources you have used.
In the example with the car vacuums, the best would be if you have made the research, but even if you haven’t, you got to make it sound believable and that you really put effort and can tell the reader for them from personal experience and other sources that this is really the best place to read for the best car vacuums.
And that in this article you provide all the necessary information in one place so the reader can make an educated buying decision after reading the article.
2. Get to the point
Here you should start with the first H2 and it has to be about the about the process of selection and the factors
H2. How to choose the best car vacuum cleaner
To get an overview of the factors, open the results on the first page of Google and start getting ideas. You can also search Reddit, they usually have some real unbiased information that can help you determine the factors. In the case of the car vacuums, I found the necessary info in this Reddit post and in this article and this article from the SERP. So here goes the subheadings:
- H3. Cord or cordless (Battery or Plug-In in the article, but I see the search is for cord or cordless, so I am adjusting)
- H3. Battery Life
- H3. Suction power (Watts) (just Watt in the article, again, changing according to search intent)
- H3. Bagless Design
- H3. Portability (Dimensions in the article)
- H3. Tools and Attachments
- H3. Handheld or Full Size
- H3. Weight
- H3. Price
Then after the factors are explained, I like to go straight to the point and based on all those factors to give the solution for the problem
H2. The best car vacuum cleaner for 2018
Here obviously should be explained why this one is the best. Include test scores, how it answers to the factors from above, customers reviews, social media snippets, videos, w/e other media you can find to prove your point. Also, link to sources in the footer. (I like linking to footnotes because this way they tend to read the article and not click on the links, but you still got credible sources for the information.)
Then I like to go with the other search modifiers answered in the same way.
I get those either from the competitor’s articles like this one here or from ahrefs. If you type ‘best car vacuum’ in the keyword suggestion tool and it throws results like this with the search volume
H2. The best budget car vacuum
H2. The best vacuum for car detailing
H2. The best cordless car vacuum
H2. The best portable car vacuum
H2. The best car vacuum for pet hair
H2. The best corded 12v car vacuum
At the end of the article, I like to include an FAQ section.
I look for FAQ in a few places.
- Google people also ask
- Answer the public
- Quora
- Ahrefs Questions
The content structure continues like this:
H2. Car Vacuum FAQ Answered
H3. Are car vacuum cleaners any good
H3. Can car vacuum cleaner be used at home
H3. How to vacuum car carpet
H3. How to vacuum car air conditioning
H3. How to connect car vacuum cleaner
H3. Where to buy car vacuum cleaner
H3. How to find a car vacuum near me?
How I choose my titles?
I like to keep it to the point and choose the most searched keyword variation as a title. And also make it look reliable and informative because we want humans to click on it.
In this example, I would go for something like “The BEST Car Vacuum of 2018 [Based on 178h research]”
It has the keyword, the uppercase word makes it stand, I have found that people like stuff in brackets and whats in the brackets should be the proof that your content is genuine and the best they can read on the topic.
So, here is how the final content plan looks like:
Title: The BEST Car Vacuum of 2018 [Based on 178h research]
(intro section with proof)
H2. How to choose the best car vacuum cleaner
- H3. Cord or cordless (Battery or Plug-In in the article, but I see the search is for cord or cordless, so I am adjusting)
- H3. Battery Life
- H3. Suction power (Watts) (just Watt in the article, again, changing according to search intent)
- H3. Bagless Design
- H3. Portability (Dimensions in the article)
- H3. Tools and Attachments
- H3. Handheld or Full Size
- H3. Weight
- H3. Price
H2. The best budget car vacuum
H2. The best vacuum for car detailing
H2. The best cordless car vacuum
H2. The best portable car vacuum
H2. The best car vacuum for pet hair
H2. The best corded 12v car vacuum
H2. Car Vacuum FAQ Answered
- H3. Are car vacuum cleaners any good
- H3. Can car vacuum cleaner be used at home
- H3. How to vacuum car carpet
- H3. How to vacuum car air conditioning
- H3. How to connect car vacuum cleaner
- H3. Where to buy car vacuum cleaner
- H3. How to find a car vacuum near me?
H2. Conclusion
Well, that’s about it. Hope it helps someone and good luck!
Almost forgot, some further reading, Nathan Gotch got a good article on creating SEO content.
And another practical guide I saw today on the Affiliate Marketing Ninjas group on FB courtesy of Shaye Kaylee Bettine.
If you got questions, I’ll try to answer when I can in the comments.
Awesome George, thank you so much. I was the one who requested this post and I am very glad that you did it.
Got some very good points from your post. I can now fine tune my content even better.
Glad I could help! Good luck with your projects.
I love seeing how others do things. I managed to snag a few ideas from this guide too. Kewo an eye out on how I do review articles in the future.
It’s time consuming but these types of articles are insanely valuable and many of them hit on the points no one else thinks to cover.
Looking forward to comparing.
-Shaye
Thanks, Shaye, looking forward to part two of your 🙂
Great article George.
My content format is similar to your but with a few tweaks.
I like to go straight to the point and put my buyer’s guide after all the product reviews.
The aim is to get people to click and make a purchase , right?
I feel putting buyer’s guide before the main meat (product reviews) is just too much distraction/walls of text and could make the visitors leave.
Hi Kevin, yes, you are not wrong, everybody is doing it this way.
That’s exactly the reason I am doing it the other way around. I want my articles to not seem that pushy to get a specific product, but rather be a story and emotional based and help the user make an educational choice.
Also, most bloggers and people who you aim for to make links to your article are prone to the affiliate style of the articles and are more likely to link to a more informative and unbiased piece of content.
Of course, after you rank the article you can experiment with different layouts and see what converts best. Put one product on the top or a comparison table etc.
For new articles that I am trying to rank, I go with the ‘how and why to choose this product’ and then I list buying options.
Hey mate a kid here not an expert like most of you out there , I would really like to have an article/ ideal content sample link one according to your standard or extremely good in terms of answering user’s search intent
If you know any such articles/ published blogs can you please share with us so that we can learn more about the art of writing such articles
P.S – any of your own articles would be a bonus for a new learner like me to understand the art deeply
Articles that already rank for the demo keyword that I have linked to are already well written. You can get many ideas from them. This guide is how to create a content plan and be better than the current articles in the SERP. You can do that by combining what these articles already say + use the tools I have mentioned to dig even deeper for related searches and questions to the queries.
Best guide so far on Content Planning! Thank you so much.
Thanks, glad I could help 🙂
Hi, one small question if you don’t mind, it’s about keyword density. As your example above, the keyword phrase “best car vacuum” has been used quite a lot in H2s and it probably appears few more times in the body and image alt tags as well (not to mention individual words of that keyword phrase i.e. car, vacuum.) Can that be over-optimized and if yes, how do we tackle it? If no, can you explain why. Thank you :).
Correct. I don’t use keyword density but rather TF-IDF. It is the wight of the keywords compared to other top ranking documents.
Usually those content plans got a lot of text so the weight of the exact keywords is not that big and got to be improved further.
However, if the document is overoptimized, you can always use synonyms. eg. the most effective car vacuum; good car vacuum; good vacuum for cars; powerful car vacuum and so on.
George I must confess that this is one of the best guide I have ever read. Short and straight to the point. You nailed it sir.
Hi George,
I just found your blog and I’m happy that I did so! This is an excellent content planning guide. My questions is would you apply this strategy in 2020 aiming to create such a long post. Or would you suggest to for instance separate the FAQ into a separate post and share the juice?
It is an outdated article. The algos change. I would not do it like this at the moment. I would analyze the niche with a tf-idf tool, get the right content and do it similarly as the top results.
I mean, I would still use the tools and the process, just keep to the patter of the top ranking blogs at the moment and then adjust if necessary.
Thanks for your reply! It would be awesome to have an updated 2020 guide. The tf-idf tool seems like will be helpful.