Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

NOTE: Many of our services and deliverable types can be requested a la carte. However, we recommend one of our popular packages or a custom SEO plan suited to your exact needs.

Having created tens of thousands of content deliverables, our agency is adept at facilitating the creation of any content type, and we have clients who engage us for content creation without organic consideration.

However, the vast majority of content deliverables we create are part of an organic-focused content marketing campaign. These campaigns are intended to draw in sustainable organic traffic that compounds with time. This is where our passion and most potent expertise lies, and is the process explained below.

Content Strategy & Planning

Although content strategy is an ongoing service we employ for all of our content marketing engagements, It is most prominently undergone during client onboarding.

When we onboard you as a client, your dedicated project manager and supporting team spends time getting to know you and your business through multiple avenues. We will have several collaborative meetings, ask pointed questions, collect crucial information from you and analyze your brand’s online profile with multiple professional tools.

We then extrapolate content marketing strategy recommendations, combining the findings from our data with the contextual discussions we’ve had. We create one or more proposals for a monthly content marketing engagement, quantify deliverables and our intended goals.

Content Strategy Example 1: Big Business with Poor Rankings

In one theoretical example, you might have an established brand with an authoritative domain and lots of blog articles that aren’t ranking well. You probably need expert keyword research to help both revise your existing content and properly guide future content efforts.

In addition to a one-time audit of your existing content, we might propose a monthly split of data-driven writing briefs for revising existing articles and a few new SEO articles completed start-to-finish by us. Once the existing articles are revised, the monthly budget for those can be reallocated to other content marketing efforts.

Content Strategy Example 2: Young Business with No Authority

In another theoretical example, you might have a less-established company that has minimal content and very little online presence. In addition to quality content, you need links from other websites back to that content to validate its legitimacy to Google. This content strategy builds a foundation of quality backlinks and proves to Google that you are an authoritative source for information for the content pieces we help you produce.

We might propose a one-time audit of your 3rd-party web presence, and recommend a monthly backlink outreach effort alongside a content creation campaign. If your content begins to rank well, we can scale back on outreach and focus more of your budget towards 1st party content creation and publication. But if your content struggles to gain traction with rankings, we might scale up backlink outreach more until your domain’s authority has begun to allow your content to rank in SERPs.

All Clients Are Unique – And All Clients Need Content Strategy

In reality, most of our clients fall somewhere in-between the two above examples, and require a combination of content creation and complimentary backlink outreach.

Every client is different; yet every client needs ongoing strategy to ensure their content marketing budget is being applied in the most appropriate ways. In both of the above examples, we identify initial needs, address them, and then pivot our efforts based on ongoing strategy considerations.
At Jack & Bean, we love the challenge of identifying the best content strategies for each of our unique clients.

Keyword Research & Writing Briefs

Similar to top-level content strategy, our keyword research is an ongoing effort that has a hefty upfront component during client onboarding. This recurring service ensures we find the most lucrative and relevant topics for your audience to maximize engagement and SEO returns.

Informed by our strategy findings, our SEO specialists perform in-depth audience, competitor, and keyword research to compile a prioritized queue of topics. We then create deliverables (writing briefs) for those topics for our writers’ use. Most of the queued topics we find will be written topics, but occasionally we will identify graphic and video opportunities as well.

We use a slew of industry tools during our research and analysis, but our agency’s SEO tool of choice for organic research is Ahrefs. Other prominent tools (some of which we also use) include SEMrush and Moz.

We consider our keyword research and related writing briefs to be our most unique and powerful offerings as a boutique content marketing agency. We also offer them as an a la carte keyword research service as well.

Content Creation

The bulk of our content creation takes place in the form of written pieces such as blog articles, web page copywriting, and long-form content like case studies. The remainder includes forms such as infographics, videos and in some rarer cases, audio-only and podcasts.

We rely heavily on our keyword research services to determine the appropriate deliverable(s) for any given topic, which can end up being two or more content types, such as a blog supported by a video.

Our agency’s writing process typically includes distinct outline and draft phases, and our creative deliverables offer 2 rounds of revisions by default.

Quality is a huge focus for us. When drafting written content we utilize Textmetrics, a proprietary writing software solution. Textmetrics helps actively manage prose, reading difficulty, passive/active voice, feminine/masculine/neutral tone, sentence and paragraph length, and much more as we draft your content pieces. This helps us create quality content that accurately matches the profile of your audience.

At least two writers (or one designer, if visual deliverable) and one strategist are involved in the creation and editing of the deliverables. We ensure your content pieces are error-free and align with both your larger content strategy as well as the intentions of the keyword briefs provided to the writing team.

Although we strongly recommend pairing our content creation and writing services with an organic-focused keyword research component through a content marketing campaign, we also offer a la carte creative services and content writing services.

Search Engine Optimization

Our team is highly experienced in white hat SEO best practices – that is to say the kind of SEO techniques Google encourages, actively avoiding anything that might incur SEO penalties. Most of these SEO techniques revolve around providing accessibility enhancements and shortcuts to help site visitors find and consume the content they’re looking for more effectively.

For visual deliverables, this involves minor considerations such as meta data inclusion and file name considerations, in addition to any applicable content guidance from the keyword research.

As previously mentioned, for written drafts we utilize Textmetrics. In addition to its content tools, Textmetrics’s SEO components check that your keyword and variations are included in headings and content body an appropriate amount of times (and not too much either).

And of course, our keyword briefs are heavily utilized when drafting written content to ensure any required SEO strategy and topics are adhered to.

We also utilize other SEO tools to draft SEO title and description fields for use with publication.

The end result is a content piece that is not only high-quality, but perfectly optimized to succeed organically, so your content can conquer the SERPs!

Publication & Promotion

Most of our clients prefer us to publish written content we draft for them.

Wth a draft approved by you, we publish your new content to your CMS (usually a custom WordPress website also built by us) and ensure the required SEO aspects are covered, including letting Google Search Console know to prioritize crawling your newly-published page.

As part of publication, we can source stock photography and videos, or create custom infographics as needed.

We can also create related posts on social media and other platforms, typically as supplementary posts promoting your 1st-party post on your website.

Lastly, we offer post-publication promotion of articles through link building and guest blogging. The goal is to acquire quality backlinks from other high-ranking websites to promote the authority of your content and website profile as a whole. Proper outreach can greatly improve the organic potential of your content and can take your website from SERP obscurity to top of page one!

Reporting & Analysis

Measuring results and success is key to any digital marketing campaign. We believe it is important to know your return on investment for SEO and content just as much as it is important to know your return on advertising spend for more transactional campaigns like paid advertising.

In addition to monitoring your website’s key performance indicators (KPIs) like SERP rankings for target keywords, domain authority, backlink profile and organic traffic, we also help clients track conversions and assign value to these actions to provide insight into their content marketing campaign performance and ROI. We utilize Ahrefs, Google Analytics, Search Console, and Data Studio to provide up-to-date, accurate and relevant data.

We also use this information to inform our campaign strategy on a monthly basis, identifying new opportunities and iterating on the content pieces or strategies that are producing the best results. In this way, we can limit the effect of diminishing returns when targeting certain audiences or keywords by continually applying our engagements towards that which will produce the best return.

Our content marketing service packages include monthly summary emails, reporting/strategy calls, as well as an online portal to track and comment on your current projects.