Spear Digest Production Process
Editorial strategy lead @ Spear Education
Spear Digest is an online publication that features clinical content for dentists and their practice partners. It serves as the primary traffic driver and lead generation channel for the highly respected educational brand. The goal of this project was the create and operationalize a new editorial process for the publication so we could publish higher-quality content with greater consistency.
Project highlights:
Developed a new Smartsheet database and calendar to manage week-to-week publication of Spear Digest articles in collaboration with front-end developers.
Designed reusable article templates that guided content creators and contributors (often dentists and dental surgeons) in writing publication-ready, SEO-friendly content.
Spearheaded a new content ideation process that focused on keyword gaps and opportunities, and aligned these concepts with article types and templates.
The challenge
A high-volume publication featuring articles written by and for a technical audience, and published using a proprietary CMS.
How might we…
… create processes and templates that streamline production and introduce better information architecture at scale?
Process
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Domain audit
To better understand the type of content that worked (and didn’t work) within this niche domain, I conducted a cross-sectional audit of competitor content types and common keywords used by dental clinicians.Brand audit
I combined this analysis with a closer look at how our brand was performing — article types and topics that worked well, keywords we ranked for, and marketing channels that drove the most engagement. -
Editorial taxonomy
To create greater structure around content types, formats, and topics, I created an “article type” taxonomy to which type-specific templates could be applied.
This allowed us to optimize content for specific SEO goals, including “spot zero” formats like video, FAQs and definitions. -
Article templates
Using this pre-defined “article type” taxonomy, I created reusable templates in Word. These templates served as the vehicle through which content was written, edited and submitted for production, and included key info like metatitles, metadescriptions and image alt text.
Production calendar
Article types were used as an organization theme for a Smartsheet production calendar, which tracked the article status as well as its role in the larger editorial vision.
Outcomes
My work helped increase our production output from 2 to 3 times per week. We were able to produce content faster and plan topics as far out as 2-3 months, which allowed us to better align with product launches and events. Ultimately, this project created a baseline for coordinating production efforts across multiple teams.
Artifacts
Content ideation spreadsheet
Editorial production calendar
Article templates by type
Tools
ScreamingFrog
SmartSheet
Microsoft Word
This ideation sheet served as a central database for new article and content ideas, driven by keywords needed to improve ranking for high-value topics.
The content ideation sheet also included information about SEO requirements, including "spot zero" tactics for our rich video content.
This mapping document was part of an effort to optimize our existing set of infographics and eBooks by including related CTAs within that content. This not only improved ranking of the host content, but also improved conversions with this increased traffic.
This editorial calendar included information about an article's status, author, type, format and publication date. It served as a collaborative production environment between content creators and our front-end developers.