Editorial Plan, effective strategies with SEOZoom

Despite some opposing voices that have emerged in recent years, the realization of an editorial plan is still a fundamental preventive activity for any type of online project, as it is very useful to outline not only the strategy that you intend to carry out for your site, but also to set the goals to be achieved and the target audience that you are trying to intercept.

What is the editorial plan

Trying to extremely sum it up, the editorial plan represents the framework of the site and identifies the essential points of your online presence, as it is the document that builds and formalizes on a temporal basis the content and economic programming of a publisher of any type, from the Web to the printed paper, thus establishing the articles to write and publish (what the editorial calendar actually is) but also inserting an estimate on the traffic that they can generate. More specifically, then, the editorial plan of a website (but also a blog, a newspaper or a social profile) contains the strategy that we intend to follow in the planning of content for any activity concerning, indeed, the production of texts and articles to reach a specific target and a certain goal, that are quantitatively and qualitatively measurable, transforming the online presence into a marketing tool.

A complete strategy for your own project

It is quite clear that the ultimate goal of online activities is always to increase visits and sell/convert, and this tool goes in that same direction, as well: whatever the strategy that is carried out, a correct planning allows you to achieve the desired results, always remembering to identify “step by step” targets that allow you to achieve “step by step” conversions. The editorial planning – and not only starts – from a classic “SWOT analysis“, the famous analysis that allows you to identify the profile of your “brand”, company or product, and in particular its strengths and weaknesses, exclusive features, the main competitors, and then again to highlight the core business and corporate values that are intended to communicate. Still in this preventive phase, it is also good in the digital field to pay attention to the messages to spread, the “basic” tone of voice and the target you want to reach to establish the topics to cover.

Detecting targets and goals

At the heart of the strategy of good editorial plans, then, we cannot overlook the analysis of the target audience of our project, which ultimately represents the decisive factor of success; we also said in the article about ideas for articles, to write well also and mostly means to intercept the interest and attention of the public (and search engines). If producing topical contents and offering the sharing of interesting elements made by partners and collaborators is a good starting point, but it is also important to try to deal with topics of a more general nature, writing evergreen or “Pillar” articles that are precisely the basis of the structure of your website. An effective editorial plan allows you to better plan the activity and vary the publication of content focused on seasonal keywords and the more general ones; this way avoiding, on one hand, the risk of producing and publishing articles with too similar contents and, on the other hand, it is possible to pay attention to the time factor, trying to anticipate or at least to keep up with the trending topics, especially for initiatives related to particular periods of the year (Christmas and so on), while always respecting the editorial line set in the beginning.

How to create an editorial plan for a website or blog

In short, after so many words, here is a brief and quick example