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Building a comprehensive topic cluster requires more than simply linking a few pieces of content together as an SEO hack. A solid content strategy lays the groundwork to make certain your content covers all possible angles of a given topic.

About two years ago, I became managing editor of a 20-year-old parenting site. It contained tens of thousands of pieces of content that dated all the way back to the 90s. I desperately needed a content inventory and audit to take stock of the content I had and then determine what we should keep and what we should do away with.

As content marketers, we often find ourselves caught in a discussion about user personas and Jobs to be Done (JTBD). Many parties vouch for one’s usefulness over the other.

Maybe Carl thinks in-depth buyer personas are the best way to design for an outcome. Stacy feels a more innovative task analysis that goes beyond our current processes turns out best results.

What’s the right answer? Is there a correct answer? Let’s dive into this together and see what a buyer persona is, what is Jobs to be Done, and what both can do for your marketing.

Content marketing is overwhelmingly focused on publishing new content. Yet there is so much value to be gained ensuring existing content is optimized and kept updated.

Content optimization entails refreshing old content by expanding its topical comprehensiveness and relevancy such that its information remains current and matches a search engine’s subject-matter matrix.

Your rankings are suffering, and you’re not getting the traffic to which you’ve been accustomed. You’ve optimized your pages using every trick in the book. You’ve gone after less competitive keywords, and still, nothing works.

Topic optimization is the practice of optimizing your web content around specific topics and concepts relevant to your business. You can optimize topics on a single page of content (built to describe a "focus topic") or in a collection of material.

The quicker you can build authority, the better. But how do you prioritize content creation?

When it comes to prioritizing content initiatives, a lot of people go off their gut feeling, brand priorities, or search volume. But some alternatives can help determine the urgency and likelihood of success for any content opportunity.

Comparing MarketMuse Suite to Content Analyzer is like watching Andy Kauffman vs. Jerry “The King” Lawler. Back in the early 1980’s this famous comedian took on a wrestling icon in a televised match. Not surprisingly, it was a very sad spectacle.

Just when you think you’ve got this search engine optimization stuff figured out, someone comes along with yet another new term: semantic SEO.

Learning how to write SEO optimized content is not easy. If it were, every blog post would be number one.

The majority of SEO friendly strategies struggle because they lack an understanding of search engine ranking factors and how Google evaluates content. Often, SEO tweaks are hard to implement by writers as they lack context and relevance. Peppering posts indiscriminately with LSI keywords doesn't help.