Have you slaved away on an article putting in hours of thought and research? Have you pondered over every word trying to craft the perfect sentences? Have you spent yet more time in Photoshop designing custom graphics to accompany it?

If you’re reading this then yeah, you probably have.

What was the point of all that work?

Maybe you’re trying to build a reputation as a writer? Maybe your content is geared at getting emails? Maybe you’re attempting to convince people to download your app?

There could be many reasons behind why you chose to write the content, but if no one is reading it then none of your goals - whatever they may be - will be achieved.

When we realized our top post for Process Street was languishing low on the second page of Google, we knew we had to take action.

Here’s a few steps to show you how we turned that situation around.

Take Preventative Action

I know this sounds strange, but bear with me.

Before you write any article you should take the necessary steps to ensure it will rank well. You want to employ a thorough keyword analysis, use SEO friendly structuring, and market it well.

At Process Street we use a series of processes to make certain each of these steps are followed correctly.

Keywords

We have an in-depth process for churning out the right keywords for the right situations. The three main steps are:

• Cast a wide net to begin with. Gather a list of as many relevant keywords you can think of related to your article. We use tools like Google Keyword Planner and Keywordtool.io and others to help us generate relevant keywords and variants of keywords.

• Find out how they rank. We use Ahrefs to calculate how useful different keywords are to us. With this tool you can find out the volume and difficulty of each keyword. Export this big list to start analysing it.

• Analyze and select. We employ Airtable as our cloud based database for our keyword analysis. We throw all the keywords in there and sort them by volume. Then we take the best keywords which are most relevant to the topic.

If you want a more in-depth presentation of this, you can find our Process Street keyword research process here. Click add to my Process Street account to start using this checklist yourself.

Structure and Link

We have a rigorous process to guarantee that every post we put out is structured in a way that is both good for the reader and good for Google.

We use subheadings to break up the text. We link to relevant useful content where possible. We add images to the articles.

You probably do many of the steps in our process too - or at least, you intend to. Maybe sometimes you forget, or maybe sometimes you could improve the structure of the articles?

Every time we publish work we run our blog pre-publish checklist to make sure we follow every step of our best practices.

If you want to use this process for your work, you’ll find the blog pre-publish checklist here.

Market Your Work

You need to give your writing a good kick start. We dedicate time across the team for every article to be promoted around the internets.

Your work is presumably awesome and someone will benefit loads from reading it. The simple answer is to put it in the places they are looking.

Are they looking at your Twitter feed? Are they looking at your Facebook posts? Are they subscribed to your blogs?

Hopefully, some of them are - and when you post to your social media channels those already interested users and fans will get the chance to read your work.

But the internet does not stop there. Across the sea of forums and aggregators you’ll find countless communities bound together by a shared passion for that very topic you have just written about! Give them the opportunity to read it.

Did you link to other articles on the topic which you enjoyed and found useful? Great. Now contact the authors of those articles and tell them you just credited them with being awesome in your recent post. The people who like their content will probably like yours too.

If you want a full breakdown of how to market your content online, grab this advanced content promotion checklist of ours which you can run every single time - and I mean every - you publish a new post.  

Begin Firefighting

Your post has already been published and is already struggling. So, why have I given you a load of resources to improve future posts?

Because you can do it all again.

Treat your post like it’s new. Run your keyword searches again. Use the results to edit your old content to improve your tagging, your long tail keywords, your alt tags, your everything!

If you’re launching a new product onto the market, you don’t just leave it there and hope it does well.

You iterate and improve based on available data.

This is what you can do with your blog post. Add improvements throughout the piece to make it friendlier to Google and more engaging for the reader, if possible.

We ran through our keyword research process checklist and our blog pre-publish checklist to make 100% certain everything was optimised to the be the best it could be. Then we employed our content promotion checklist to re-push the content again.

A whole new launch with the advantage of already ranking on the second page of Google at the very beginning.

Support Your Content

To propel that article back up the front page we then begun to scaffold around it. We created several guest posts of related supporting content to bolster our SEO.

These articles would hit the right keywords and provide added value to readers. From these articles we backlinked to our previous work to show Google its importance.

After this focused effort to provide backlinks we went for a more scattergun approach. We went back through all our posts and found instances where a link to the key article would be relevant. You can add links into old articles whenever you like to help Google find new work or to reinforce older pieces.

Where possible, we not only linked the key article we were looking to salvage but also the new scaffolding articles we’d recently written.

The stronger the network of links, the better we were going to do.

You can save your articles too. Just follow the steps we’ve undertaken and I’m sure you’ll see your rankings fly up, and your conversions benefit too.

If you have any suggestions from how you’ve had success bolstering articles in the past, shoot them at me in the comments and let's all rank together!