Use colour to categorise your content pages
Planning your SEO colour wheel project.
The SEO colour wheel theory is a concept created by Annie Veale that allows the psychology of search. To be applied strategically to the content planning stages of any SEO project.
The theory states that there are three primary colours (red, yellow, and blue) and three secondary colours (orange, green, and purple) that can be used to represent certain emotions and therefore provide a useful map on the structure and content that exists or is required.
According to this colour theory, different colours can represent the emotions and psychologies of a person looking at particular pages on a website. This psychology of search can also be helpful at looking at the structure and linking opportunities that exist within a category.
For example, red is said to evoke excitement, energy, and urgency, while blue is said to evoke trust, reliability, and stability. Yellow is said to evoke happiness and optimism, while green is associated with growth and tranquillity.
However, it is important to note that each website may attribute the emotional colour representation to different categories of site content.
Annie Veale suggests that most websites can and should start with 5 base categories and that these can be adapted to suit your particular business or website strategy.
Brand – Brand ethos, team and culture core pages.
Product – eCommerce product pages, main services offered, product range.
Application – the product in action, case studies, examples, tutorials.
Emotion – the emotion of purchase – do people purchase to feel good, to be safe or for environmental persuasions?
Presentation – the media, your videos, podcasts, photos, infographics, social etc.
More visualisation can be found at: applying the SEO colour wheel theory.
How to divide an SEO project into manageable workflows.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is considered a complex discipline because it involves a combination of technical and creative elements that require expertise and experience to master. With this in mind, it is likely best to utilise a team of specialists to implement your SEO project and starting with an audit in the first instance is a good idea. This should provide you with a timeline of activity and focus areas. There are two common reasons why people will prioritise SEO work:
Technically the site is preventing the pages from being indexed in the SERPs.
The Content is not written to optimise the topics of interest to the user, or is badly structured.
The specialisms of SEO
The main specialisms you will require to complete an SEO project successfully are:
Data Analysis and Reporting Experts: Search engines like Google are constantly updating their algorithms to provide better results to users. As a result, SEO professionals need to stay up-to-date with the latest changes to keep their optimization efforts effective.
Knowledge of ranking factors and how to implement appropriate features on-page and off-page: SEO involves optimizing a website for many ranking factors that search engines consider when determining which pages to show in the search results. Some of these factors include the quality and relevance of the content, the structure of the website, and the presence of keywords.
Business Analysis and Strategic Planning: With more and more businesses vying for the top spots in the search results, the competition for organic traffic is fierce. SEO professionals need to constantly adapt their strategies to stay ahead of the competition.
Technical and Developer expertise: SEO requires a good understanding of the technical aspects of website design and development, such as site architecture, coding, and server configurations.
Integrated (Omnichannel) Marketing specialists: SEO is not a stand-alone discipline. It must be integrated with other marketing channels, such as content marketing, social media marketing, and paid advertising, to be effective.
Copywriters: Experienced Copywriters and knowledgeable content are of paramount importance to be able to provide an interesting and engaging experience for the user. This content should also be SEO’d and usually, the content topics should be derived from an SEO who is able to structure this content within the context of the site as a whole. We would suggest using our services to obtain Quality Content Writing, for affiliate areas of your business activity or to put into words, professionally the services and content that you require for your site.
How the SEO colour wheel theory can help you plan content.
As the above specialisms for workflow denote, any SEO project requires some degree of knowledge on SEO for it to be fully implemented.
The seo colour wheel theory will however, provide you with a useful tool to expose content gaps, or identify cannibalisation issues or poorly structured content. It will also serve as a project management tool to help you implement new content logically and to ensure that the topic categories exist for you to populate with a relevant mix of informational, transactional, commercial page types, all serving to provide a boost to your site structure and content marketing.
I would suggest this be a good model for those of mid-weight expertise or those involved in project management of SEO and Content marketing specialists, those with a Marketing Manager responsibility for the marketing of a SME or those from larger corporations wanting to be able to visualise the content strategy for larger, more complex sites.
For more information about how to get started with your SEO colour wheel please visit:
