When forming a partnership with an agency, it’s easy to get excited and start thinking about the amazing results that you’re content marketing is going to bring you. But before you can start considering these results, you need to consider the content maturation process that has to take place.
But what is content maturation? This post will outline everything you need to know, including why the process needs to take place, how long it will take and some examples of how Red-Fern can help you with your content maturity needs.
We’ll cover:
- What is content maturation?
- Why does content maturation need to happen?
- How long will the content maturation process take?
- How Red-Fern can help with content maturation
What is content maturation?
When you first start to create content, where is it usually displayed on Google? Towards the bottom of the SERP is where you’ll find it - if you have the patience to troll through thousands of results that is. For your ranking to improve, you need to build up your content archive, establish a good relationship with Google and show SEO best practices.
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Quite simply, content maturation is the time it takes for your content to be picked up by Google.
This is all dependent on how much trust Google has in your work to see that you’re knowledgeable about the topics that you’re blogging about. So, you need to give it maturation time for this to be established.
During the maturation process, it’s important that you utilise social media and paid marketing for quick wins. Your social media channels allow you to push content out to an audience that might not necessarily see it if you relied on organic search. Therefore, you’ll be increasing the amount of traffic that’s being driven to your blogs on your website.
Paid marketing is another way in which you can drive traffic to your blog before it ranks organically. Whether it’s paid social media ads, video pop-ups or paid search ads, there are various ways you can get your content in front of it’s intended audience right away. It’s an effective way of getting more clicks and extending your brand reach.
After all, an effective content strategy has many factors. It doesn’t just rely on one tactic.
Why does content maturation need to happen?
You want your content to be easily discoverable, don’t you? Well that in itself is a reason why content maturation needs to happen. So that your amazing content isn’t displayed on page 100 of Google but right at the top of page one. If they’re at the top of the first page, you’re seen as a more credible source and will attract more clicks.
And the beauty of it is that you won’t have to pay for it being there, it’ll be there completely organically and completely free. So, how do you help your blogs reach the top of Google? Well, Google’s algorithm crawls your blogs and looks for SEO best practices and a high domain authority.
A high domain authority is one of the most important ranking factors. Google looks at this as your website’s reputation as a thought leader and uses it to determine how trustworthy your information is about your subject matter. If you can prove that you provide the highest-quality content you’ll have good domain authority and Google will boost your rankings. However, if you don’t you won’t be able to rank and you’ll end up with a poor score.
Developed by SEO software company, Moz, domain authority ranges from a score of 1-100. A good score depends on the scores of the pages that you’re competing with to rank. With this in mind, you shouldn’t overestimate what domain authority you aim for. So, don’t aim to have the highest score ever, just aim to be higher than your competitors.
The three main ways to improve your domain authority are:
- Audit link your profile. Link to a high variety of sites and other high authority sites too. Google recognises this as a marker of a trustworthy site.
- Create compelling and engaging content. The metrics that Google rank this off are total traffic, on-page time, organic traffic, bounce rate, return visits and more.
- Earn high-quality links. Earning high-quality inbound links from websites with high authority scores is vital for boosting your domain authority.
The content maturation process is vital for those companies who’ve never produced content before and have poor SEO practices.
How long will the content maturation process take?
The million-dollar question that agencies around the world are asked by clients, “when will I start to see my pages ranking?” Unfortunately, if you’re looking to put a timescale of when you can start to see your blogs on Google, we’d strongly advise that you didn’t. Content marketing requires a level of patience and a willingness to be successful.
Your site authority is taken into consideration before you start ranking. So, if your website isn’t following SEO best practices throughout, then you’ve got no chance of ranking. At Red-Fern, when first forming a working partnership, we take a step back and look at both your content production and website structure. From there we can advise on whether the following areas need looking at:
- Website architecture.
- Domain security.
- Inbound linking.
- Topic authority.
- Keyword intent.
- Content structure.
- Meta tags.
- Page speed.
Improving all of the above will speed up the time it takes for your future content to start ranking. However, there are a lot of factors there so it may take some time to work through them all. Patience is a virtue when it comes to search engine ranking protocols. As we said, there is no set time and no one size fits all approach to this, so be prepared to play the long game to reap the rewards.
How Red-Fern can help with content maturation
At Red-Fern, our team of experts can help with your content maturation. Our marketing team are skilled in their own specialisms and are dedicated to helping your content rank as highly as it can. From top-class, engaging content to our multi-channel social media experts, we know what it takes to help your business organically grow.
It’s not just results that you’ll see from the partnership too. Honest and transparent management of your account from day one will ensure that expectations are never unrealistic and that both parties are fully content with the service provided. Our expert team will show nothing is too much and that your business is always a priority.
So, to further your enquiry into how we can help drive your business forward, why not set up a discovery call with us? One of the team will be on hand to give you their full attention and offer guidance on any questions or queries you may have.