We’ll discuss what is editorial SEO, its difference from other types of SEO, and how you can apply it to enhance your SEO and organic traffic in this post.

What is editorial SEO?

When an organisation uses CGC (company-generated content) for editorial SEO purposes, the company creates content to draw in visitors and leads from Google.

Editorial SEO is, in simpler terms, writing blog posts and landing pages that will be ranked in Google for different search terms and drive organic growth to your brand.

The most widely used of the various SEO methods, and often the one that will send the most people to your website (with a few exceptions that we will cover in a moment).

So, what is the editorial SEO in comparison to other SEOs?

Editorial SEO is in the content category, while other types of SEO are more technical.
Technical SEO is about making your website faster, more navigable, and easier to use. This can include using optimised title tags, internal linking architecture, and keeping your pages compliant with technical SEO.

Editorial SEO is the other thing you have to write something that will appeal to your audience and which Google can recognise as useful and authoritative. This means publishing valuable, fresh content that your audience will value.

Types of SEO (with examples)

The three types of SEO that you can employ in order to bring more visitors to your site. They are editorial, programmatic, and technical SEO. Let’s dive in a little deeper with each one.

Editorial Content SEO

This is the type of SEO editorial that Google will love and you will love reading. Blog articles, landing pages, FAQs, etc.

This is what you’re reading now; it’s editorial SEO creating articles with the intent of informing people but being ranked in Google so search engines can show me my site.
HubSpot, Zapier, Monday.com, ClickUp, and many other websites that are really succeeding using editorial SEO.

For those of you looking for guidance on how to do editorial SEO, I have a couple of posts on this blog you can read. You can read the first one, How to Write SEO Blog Posts that is all about keyword research and how you should approach writing blog posts online with the aim of organic search.

Another article of mine is about writing a content outline that will allow you to write blog posts such as this one quickly and effortlessly.

OK, now let’s jump over to the other forms of SEO.

Programmatic SEO

Programmatic SEO means that a website uses UGC (user-generated content) or a product-based SEO algorithm to generate exponential growth in website traffic without having to manually create every single piece of content (think of it like blogging).

If you’re asking me, programmatic SEO is kind of the heaven on earth. But it is a very difficult SEO to do well in large part because of the fact that this all depends on your product construction.

e.g., Yelp: Yelp is one of those websites that do well with programmatic SEO. Local companies make listings on the site, and then those listings are repurposed into standalone landing pages that rank on Google.

Yelp doesn’t have to spend on content development then to continue to expand. So long as they have new businesses and people who review the businesses, Yelp’s organic traffic will keep on growing (unless there’s some crazy Google update and they all disappear).

This time, though, Yelp must watch very closely how UGC gets generated on its platform. Engineers need to make sure that automatically generated landing pages adhere to SEO best practices and that Yelp still runs all their technical SEO.

This is the best SEO imaginable, but not for the majority of businesses. Well, actually, you don’t think about programmatic SEO if you already have your product or site created. 

Typically, the SEO team designs a programmatic SEO campaign before any website (or even website part) is constructed. Almost you have to structure your product and website to be able to leverage programmatic SEO, which is why it’s such a pain but such an asset to get right.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is all about making your website as technical as possible so Google search engines can crawl it. The list goes from page loading, crawlability, on-page SEO practices, page URL structure, etc.

This does not have to be a win-win scenario with SEO, but it’s an important point to address if you opt for editorial and/or programmatic SEO.

As long as you are working with an up-to-date website platform and CMS (e.g., Webflow, WordPress, Ghost), this shouldn’t be too hard for you to fret over.

You know it’s going to have a lightning-fast site, be desktop/mobile responsive, be easy to read, you can add your sitemap to Google Search Console, and no pages that you want to rank in Google aren’t noindex tagged.

What are the benefits of editorial SEO?

For a lot of sites with thousands of organic traffic, editorial SEO is the lifeblood. That is because this kind of SEO is used often to create brand value, reach new customers, and establish credibility and trust with your audience.

Even with editorial SEO, you will be able to present yourself as an industry expert. You can even use SEO to show up in Google’s featured snippets, which can drive searchers to click on the links.

You can rank in featured snippets if you follow the content outline guide, I have linked earlier in this post.
Lastly, if done right, editorial SEO is also one of the cheapest methods of traffic. It’s time-intensive, sure. But if you don’t have the engineering skills to create a programmatic SEO strategy that makes sense, then you’re going to have to shell out big bucks on content.

And the other great thing about SEO compared to other marketing mediums is that it does not require a constant budget like paid search or social media advertising, and it only requires an initial cost of writing content.

Postal Marketing Articles from Big Brands Examples.

A few testimonials of companies with a successful editorial SEO strategy.

HubSpot

No doubt HubSpot made editorial and blog SEO more attractive for marketers.
HubSpot blog receives 17M+ monthly visitors and 13,000+ articles!

So, as you can see, you can even get crazy traffic with just blog posts. But you have to write a lot to get there. Among those 13,000 blog posts is a monster, and only with an army of SEO, content marketers, content writers, and editors could this be possible.

So, SEO is “free” traffic; however, you still have to spend a lot of money and resources in order to take advantage of it.

If you do, however, establish SEO MOAT for your website, competitors will find it very hard to do it.
HubSpot did with editorial SEO, and now it’s indefensible against any other competitor in the industry HubSpot has one of the best editorial SEO practices in the game.

Monday.com

As we mentioned earlier in this piece, Monday.com released more than 1,000 articles last year—that’s a little over 2,000 content pages on the site (source: Ahrefs).

And with all that content comes a pretty good increase in their blog visitors.
From CRMs to task management, Monday.com has managed to develop a super-accurate organic growth machine a tool that is actually better than Asana and Trello at driving SEO.

Conclusion

Article SEO is one element of any organic-intensive content strategy. If you write quality SEO material and a user experience that is good, then you can go far.

SEO: What most people don’t realise about SEO is that SEO is nothing but search engine optimisation. But I mean, real SEO growth is through content development. SEO is just a fancy name for Google’s (or any search engine’s) algorithm.

There is no need for the latest SEO strategies, million backlinks, or to make sure every keyword you target has an insane search volume.

But all you’ve got to get right is an idea of what people’s problems are and how to deliver solutions to them.

All you have to do is post. And enough with all that SEO talk.
As long as you start with that, your Google Analytics traffic bar will start rising up and to the right. After you get the rhythm of putting up content consistently, you want to try and either make some edits on your content or be more strategic about what keywords you want to rank for.
Anyways, we hope that this article explains something to you about editorial SEO and what makes it different than other SEO. Ultimately, editorial SEO is really nothing but content SEO or blog posting.
So, stay with the content, and in no time, you’ll start to get featured on the SERP (search engine result page).

As long as you focus on that first, your traffic graph in Google Analytics will start to go up and to the right. It’s after you get in the groove of publishing content on a consistent basis that you should focus on optimizing existing content or being more strategic about what keywords you’re trying to target.

Anyways, hopefully this article gave you some insight on what editorial SEO is and how it differs from other forms of SEO. At the end of the day, editorial SEO is pretty much just content SEO or blog content creation. So, focus on creating high quality content and over time you’ll start to show up more in the SERP (search engine results page).