One of the biggest benefits of informational content is link building.
Sometimes you may wonder what is the use of publishing lots of educational or informational content? This is the content through which you share your knowledge, experience, and wisdom with your visitors.
For example, what is the benefit of writing a blog post like What is search intent and how knowing it improves your SEO?
You must think that clients are looking for a content writer or a copywriter. They don’t want to be educated; they just want a talented writer for their websites.
One of the widely recognized benefits of sharing your knowledge through writing is that it establishes you as an authority figure.
I can write extensively about content writing only if I know a lot about content writing.
If I don’t know how to write engaging content, how am I going to write engaging content for my clients, and how do my clients know that I actually know how to write engaging content?
Sure, I can share my portfolio with them. I can send the links of various websites for which I have written engaging content.
Why publish lots of educational content or content for informational search intent?
Educational and informational content gets you more backlinks
You need backlinks to improve your search engine rankings. People are ready to pay for quality backlinks.
When you have lots of quality educational content on your website or blog, people link to it voluntarily.
I have so many blog posts people have linked to.
How do they find my blog posts?
Mostly when they are searching for relevant content on Google or some other search engine.
I also share links to my existing and latest blog posts on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Once they start linking to your content, it becomes self-perpetuating. It is like, your links are appearing on the third or fourth page of Google. People find your content and link to it. Your links move to the second or third page. It becomes easier to find your content. More people link to it. Then your links move to the first or the second page. And so on.
Due to better rankings of the present links, even the rankings of the links that were previously not ranking higher, begin to appear higher.
Hence, more people start linking to them, and the cycle continues.
It is not an exact science. You never know at which juncture people begin to find your content with greater regularity. But eventually, if you keep on publishing quality, link-worthy content, it happens.
Educational content is easier to rank on Google than commercial content. Google gives informational content preference over commercial or transactional content because maybe it wants people to promote commercial or transactional content through advertisements.
People publishing educational content are looking for educational content. And if you are publishing informational or educational content that is link-worthy, people start linking to it.
This improves your search engine rankings for your relevant keywords. This makes it easier for your prospective customers and clients to find you.
How much educational or informational content should you publish for backlinks?
There is no limit.
I will give you an example of my own website.
Mine is not an e-commerce website. People don’t come and buy stuff here. It’s mostly information. I share information with them, and they hire me as their content writer or copywriter.
On my website, my content falls primarily under two categories:
- Transactional content
- Informational content
Transactional content is the main website content that I have that talks about my website content writing services, my blogging services, my email writing services, my content consulting services, and so on.
These must be around 50-60 pages. Even among these pages, not every page is transactional content. Even on my main website, I have published lots of pages that simply explain to my visitors what different services mean. I inform them and then leave it up to them whether they want to contact me or not.
Among all the content on my website, 90% of the content exists on my blog. There are over 800 posts and counting. This is all educational and informational content. It is this content that is responsible for my rankings. Whatever visibility I have on the web, it is because of this educational content.
My educational content has improved the rankings of my transactional content.
Is link building the only benefit of educational content?
One of the major benefits, yes.
It’s not that your informational or educational content doesn’t get your clients. Mine does.
Even when I didn’t enjoy better search engine rankings, I got content writing assignments on the strength of my content.
For example, once I published a blog post titled What are topic clusters and pillar pages and how they improve your SEO… within a couple of days a client wrote to me that he loved what I had written on the blog and he was looking for a similar blog post for his company website. I’m still writing for him.
There are multiple examples like this one.