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A Lightning-Fast Guide to the AI Content Marketing Workflow

Written by Aidan McClain | June 3, 2023

Most businesses understand the importance of delivering quality evergreen content on a consistent basis. 

But many companies face challenges along the way when trying to determine what type of content and topics their writers should cover.

That's where artificial intelligence, or AI, plays a crucial role in helping companies quickly generate click-worthy content that their target market wants to see.

In this post, we cover four AI content marketing workflows to streamline your SEO content creation process.

Table of Contents:

 

What Is a Content Marketing Workflow?

A content marketing workflow is a systematic process that outlines the steps and activities involved in creating, publishing, and promoting content as part of a content marketing strategy.

It serves as a roadmap to ensure that content creation and distribution are well-coordinated and aligned with the overall marketing goals.

 

Why Marketers Should Create a Content Workflow?

Marketers should create a content workflow for several important reasons:

  1. Organization and Efficiency: A content workflow provides structure and order to the content creation and distribution process. It outlines the necessary steps, roles, and responsibilities, ensuring that everyone involved is on the same page. This streamlines the workflow, saves time, and increases overall efficiency of marketing campaignsstrategsdfsdfsfsdfs.

  2. Consistency and Quality: A well-defined workflow helps maintain consistency in branding, tone of voice, and content quality. It establishes guidelines and standards for content creation, editing, and review, ensuring that each piece of content aligns with the brand image and meets the desired quality standards.

  3. Goal Alignment: A content workflow ensures that content creation and distribution activities are aligned with the broader marketing goals and objectives. It helps marketers stay focused on the target audience, key messages, and desired outcomes, improving the effectiveness and impact of the content.

  4. Scalability and Growth: As businesses grow, content marketing efforts become more complex and require scalable processes. A content workflow provides a framework that can be adapted and scaled as the content marketing strategy expands, allowing marketers to handle larger volumes of content and maintain consistency even with increased demands.

  5. Optimization and Learning: By implementing a content workflow, marketers can track and analyze key performance metrics at each stage of the workflow. This data provides insights into what works and what doesn't, enabling marketers to make data-driven decisions, optimize content strategies, and continuously improve content performance over time.

Overall, a content workflow is essential for marketers as it brings structure, efficiency, consistency, and alignment to the content creation and distribution process. It enables marketers to deliver high-quality content that resonates with the target audience, supports marketing goals, and drives business growth.

 

Three Types of Content Every Writer Creates

Before we dive into the workflows, let's consider the types of content your team likely creates as part of their content strategy - content that our workflow sets out to help you produce.

Your content can typically be divided into these three categories:

Evergreen

These topics and the keywords surrounding them remain fairly consistent and are of prolonged interest to readers. The topics create a constant flow of traffic, since the core of the topics does not change.

A good example of this is a blog post that explains how to save money. The basic principles of personal finance won't change too drastically over time.    

Building topic clusters helps build authority in a topic and ultimately makes way for greater search visibility.

Sparks of Genius

These are newsworthy, trending topics that typically surround current events in the marketplace. This type of content will usually create a brief spike in traffic to your site, but it comes with a higher risk.

For example, it's likely that your content will be in competition with thousands of others like it, and the overall payoff in traffic can’t compare to the traffic from evergreen content.

Problem-Solution

This type of content is nearly always evergreen, but it is not necessarily universal in the way that evergreen content is universal. It often answers a question with subsequent step-by-step instructions.

If you are an seoClarity user, this post will walk you through the quick and easy workflow for creating each of the above types of content. Artificial Intelligence is important in helping our users generate content consistently to drive the best results for their marketing needs.

Looking to optimize your content? Head over to Optimized Content: How to Leverage Your Content Arsenal to Drive Precise Organic Traffic

 

AI Content Marketing Workflows for SEOs

With limited time and resources, your content marketing team can leverage the speed and power of AI within the seoClarity platform to give you the results you want faster.

Our team at seoClarity provides you with the tools you need to truly create data-driven web content in a matter of a few clicks and workflows.

Let's dive in.

 

#1. Content Ideas Workflow: Questions Your Audience is Asking

Great content begins by understanding what your audience is looking for, and what better source to pull from than Google itself?

Google's People Also Ask is a repository of real users questions that you can leverage for your own content marketing. 

Use the questions as inspiration to form your content ideas, or answer the questions directly in your content. 

But marketers need a way to scale this process. While the insights are invaluable, manually scouring the SERPs and recording People Also Ask questions would be a time-suck.  

Content Ideas gathers all of this information — we're proud to say it's the largest People Also Ask dataset! — and presents you with the following:

  • Ideas: questions directly from People Also Ask
  • Relevant keywords: the count of keywords for which the content idea was discovered in the SERPs
  • Total search volume: the total search volume of the relevant keywords
  • Recently ranking URL:  URL found as the source of the People Also Ask information
  • All rankings URLs: all URLs that have ever been found for that People Also Ask question

 

One filter that our clients frequently use is isolating the idea around a certain topic. For instance, say you want to only see the questions associated with Tesla cars. You can filter content ideas around a specific term (in this case, “Tesla”) and use the results to inspire new content creation.

It is tremendously easy to train your content writers to use Content Ideas to conduct relevant research and write a unique version of content that’s both newsworthy and trendy for your audience.

This workflow is especially relevant for publishing houses and content teams that churn out a large amount of daily content.

 

#2. Answer Box Opportunity Workflow: Secure the Featured Snippet 

The first step for any brand hoping to own the Answer Box is to assess the opportunity that exists to do so. This is super simple for brands to do within the platform.

Let’s continue to assume that your brand is in the automotive industry. Using the Answer Box opportunity within our Research Grid, you can type in your URL and view all of the opportunities available for your brand to capture the answer box.

 

Above, you see that there are nearly 160,000 keywords for this brand that already rank in the top 100 and trigger an answer box in the SERP. But, which one of these are truly opportunities? How can you determine what to prioritize when you have 160,000 terms to consider?

The real opportunity here is for where your brand is ranking in the top 3. Our research on voice search shows that 95-98% of all results in the Answer Box come from the top 3 ranking results.

By applying a rank filter, we’re able to see that there are over 6,700 keywords for the brand that rank in the top 3. We also see that currently, about 1,200 terms appear in the answer box for this brand.


The report also reveals the terms where the brand does not appear in the Answer Box by applying a filter to exclude the brand URL in the Answer Box.

This is the net opportunity for the brand’s content team to tackle. They can do so by reformatting existing content where they rank by making changes that affect visibility (adding related keywords, bulleted lists, and internal links are a few common, quick changes).

Our research on the Answer Box has a quick 14-step checklist to follow to secure the position. 

 

#3: Topic Explorer Workflow: Uncover the Language of Your Audience

seoClarity has innovated how to do keyword research through the application of artificial intelligence. Using AI, Topic Explorer helps group vast lists of keywords into their root topics the same way that Google does.

By understanding the user intent behind these topics, the platform significantly reduces the human intervention to filter these massive lists of keywords with a single click to gather only the core, unique topics.

It sounds too good to be true; but, rest assured, Topic Explorer is the real deal and is one of our clients’ favourite workflows for their content marketing.

After all, each piece of content needs to be aligned with the right audience. 

Our Intelligent Match uncovers hidden connections between your target keywords and its associated topics (did you know that people that search for "survival kit" also think of it as a "bug out bag" and "go bag"?), while the Intent Similarity shows how closely the searcher behavior for a topic resembles that of the target keyword.

Using the same term, used cars, users can click through to see all of the topics and subtopic clusters that center around the topic. 


To be an authority on the topic, content teams must write content that targets as many subtopics that are relevant to a brand. Instead of navigating lists of tens of thousands of keywords, you can consolidate the list to understand the topic and subtopics you need to win. 

Gain Even Deeper Audience Insights With Generative AI

In addition, Topic Explorer has recently been integrated with Sia, our AI-driven search engine optimization assistant, to automatically surface closely related and alternative ways that people search for the topic. Identifying these alternate keywords helps eliminate blind spots in your keyword research process. 

Sia also uncovers deeper audience insights such as their demographics or additional topic areas they are likely interested in. It even helps you understand the full buyer's journey by identifying what people search for before and after they search for a keyword.

Want to see the full power of Topic Explorer? Head over tScale and Expand Topic Research with Topic Explorer.

 

#4: Content Fusion Workflow: Write Authoritative Content

As we work our way through Topic Explorer’s topic suggestions, we begin to see related keywords listed within the topics.

For this example, I'm going to work with used cars for sale. For quick and easy AI content optimization, I run my search term through Content Fusion.

We instantly see key insights, like:

  • Search volume 
  • Search volume trend
  • Keyword intent
  • Keyword difficulty
  • Google rankings
  • Traffic potential

The real gold is in the keyword list, which reveals the topics talk about in the the content to demonstrate authority on the subject matter. 

Hello, authoritative content. 


Incredible, isn’t it? You can even see real-time feedback in the form of a content score

Recommended Reading: Is It Possible for an SEO Platform to Provide Full Content Automation?

With one click, turn these insights into a digestible, auto-generated content brief so your writer delivers what you were expecting.

Now your content writers can understand how to cover a topic to the fullest without having to hunt and gather the required information. All the data they need to create their content is right in front of them!

Not only that, but Content Fusion has also been integrated with Sia to help writers overcome writers block. With one click, it automatically generates outlines, drafts paragraphs, and rewrites existing content.

To ensure that Sia's outputs are relevant, Content Fusion's Content Profiles capability allows you to establish your target audience, tone of voice, output language, and content type for each piece of content.

 

Using this content as a starting point, your content team just needs to refine and optimize the outputs using their creativity and expertise. It is important to note that Sia's outputs should always undergo human review before publishing and should not be published as-is.

 

Final Thoughts

Every enterprise comes with its own nuances and challenges as well as its own workflows for how to create content that drives business. What we are finding, however, is that little to no structure exists when it comes to content creation with a goal of full topic authority.

Many still focus on creating content based on a list of keywords where their brand doesn’t rank well, which isn’t necessarily a bad workflow!

But, without using AI in your content marketing workflow, brands are missing out on the clear understanding of the entire landscape. Every marketer needs a full view of the landscape as it keeps changing for clear guidance on how to effectively capture the audience they desire to drive the business they deserve.

Editor’s Note: This series is designed to provide SEOs and content marketers with consistent and repeatable SEO workflows, showcasing the power of our platform and the solutions our clients are raving about, according to our extremely knowledgeable Client Success Team. If you’re not a client yet, book a demo with us today to see our platform in action!

This post was originally published in June 2021 and has been updated.