SEO: Automating Article Posting from Google Docs to WordPress Sites

Content management is a huge part of SEO when done properly, with careful consideration going into every word, image, tag and slug of an article. Unfortunately, that also takes quite a bit of time. After spending all of that time creating the perfect article who wants to spend another hour or two getting that blog setup on you or your client’s website? While some basic tools exist to grab a document and post it on a blog, most of them miss out on the most important aspects of SEO such as leaving in Google’s preformatted URL structure or omitting important header and alt tags. Until now!

Can It Be Automated? Yes, it can!

Check out this easy to use automation from CIBA – “Automatic Article Posting to WordPress from Google Docs”

How It Works:

TRIGGER

• The trigger for this is simple – place the article you have prepared into a designated Google Drive “Convert” folder and the automation will do the rest!

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

• The first image in your article is stripped out and uploaded to your WordPress site, removing the Google URL structure and adding in any alt-text you have designated.
• Next, the html code from the Google Doc is cleaned up with anything extraneous removed
• Then, your article, complete with the necessary H1 – H6 tags is uploaded to the website using the name of the Google Doc as the title and the URL slug
• All relevant information is stored in a Google Sheet and if necessary, an email or slack notification can be sent out to yourself or a client
• Finally, the file is moved from your “Convert” folder into a “Done” folder.

LIMITATIONS

While the current workflow is some pretty slick automation, this pre-built automation has a limit of one re-hosted image per article. That is, the first image in the article will be stripped out, loaded into the WordPress site for hosting and Google URLs will be removed. Other images in the article will remain in the post, however, they will retain the Google image hosting properties. If you need this removed please let us know and we can set up a custom automation for you which will work for multiple images.

VARIATIONS

Looking to extend this automation? Here are a couple of suggestions!

1. An automated content approval process that sends your post through a number of approvers and moves it into this folder once everyone has approved it.
2. A content distribution automation which takes new blog posts (like the one you just made!) and cross-posts it to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or other social media channels