Do you know you can improve your CTR by 200% by tweaking your title?

Improve your CTR with web page and blog post titles

Your web page and blog post titles are very important. I have lost a new client who insisted that I create titles for his blog posts for the same amount he was paying for writing the blog posts. The titles are so important that I charge extra for coming up with them.

Your web page and blog post titles are so important that they come under content marketing and content strategy because they can pretty much define the direction of your entire content marketing approach.

What are your title tags and why they are important?

Although your page heading and title tags can be the same, they can also be different. The heading is something that you enclose within <h1> and </h1>.

The title tag is something that you enclose within <head><title></title></head>.

Both are important. It is your heading, or the headline that hooks people to your web page or blog post when they come to your link. But, on search engine result pages, it is your title tag that matters.

It is your title tag that appears as a hyperlink when people search for your business:

Web page title as hyperlink in search results

Your web page and blog post titles are not just important for CTR (click-through ratio), they are also important for your SEO.

Google re-ranks your content according to your CTR. If your appearance in the search results does not attract many clicks, Google lowers your ranking for that link. If it attracts more clicks, it increases your rank for that link.

This blog post on Seige Media gives an in-depth analysis of how to test which web page and blog post titles perform the best through A/B testing, with the help of Google Search Console (previously known as Google Webmasters Tools). The writer also says that if you improve your title, you can experience a click-through increase of 20-200%.

Good web page titles can increase your CTR by 20-200%

A/B testing, as explained in the above link, can be a time-consuming exercise but it is worth your effort if you really want to make sure that you create optimized web page and blog post titles for maximum CTR.

It basically involves

coming up with the best title you can think of in the beginning,
publishing your web page or blog post with that title,
and noting down when your link begins to appear in the search results.

This is assuming that you are using Google Search Console to track your search engine appearance and your clicks.

Let things happen for two weeks.

Start noting down values such as number of clicks, click-through ratio and impressions for that particular link in the past two weeks.

Then, change the title and resubmit the link. Make sure the link has appeared in the search results.

Repeat the above process after two weeks.

This way you can create a detailed analysis of how various titles perform.

How do you write web page titles and blog post titles for maximum CTR?

Aside from the main keywords in the search terms that you should use within your title, the intent is also very important. What moves people to click your link?

The most commonsensical way of knowing what matters the most to people is, addressing their main concern within the title.

If you are looking for a blog writing service, then obviously something about a blog writing service is going to attract you towards a certain link.

But you are not just looking for a blog writing service, you are looking for a blog writing service that can help your business in a certain way.

This is where longtail keyword optimization can help you. Try to pack as much information as possible without making things too complicated.

“Blog writing service” may get me a good CTR, but “blog writing service for my car repair service” may get me even better CTR.

So, if people have a question, provide an answer. If people have a problem, provide a solution. If someone asks for “how many?”, give him or her “these many”.

Neil Patel suggests that you can use emojis in your titles to improve your CTR. This is something I didn’t know. Of course, if all the links on the search engine result page are without emojis and there is a single link that is with emojis, people will tend to click it.

Neil also suggests that mention numbers when you are creating titles for your blog posts and web pages.

“77% increase in CTR after this” gets more clicks than “awesome increase in CTR after this”.

Be more specific when writing titles

This Hubspot blog post on creating web page and blog post titles people cannot resist clicking suggests that you make your titles very specific. For example, if your web page contains an interview, then mention it somewhere in the title. If it contains a podcast or infographic, mention it. The post claims that titles that contain specific information that says exactly what the web page or the blog post contains get 38% more clicks than those titles that don’t.

The Hubspot post also has some rules of thumb on how to come up with clickable titles. Even small things matter.

Some title formats that always work

“How to” titles seem to work quite well, especially with search engine and social media users:

“How I increased my website traffic by 200% with just this simple SEO trick”

The title clearly tells that you are going to reveal what SEO trick you used that increase your traffic by 200%. Such titles draw lots of clicks.

“10 ways you can sell your old mobile phone online within 24 hours”

“Painstakingly learnt 25 content marketing lessons that are 100% failsafe”

“If this method doesn’t give you an 8-hour peaceful sleep, nothing will”

“Why” and “how” seem to do quite well because they trigger a sense of curiosity and also provide some valuable information in a concrete form.

Conclusion

Your web page and blog post titles need to cater to a strong desire, or need. They should also give concrete information. Something like “Get 1500 leads in 3 weeks” will always be more convincing than “Get more leads faster”.

The importance of image link building

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Using images for link building

Some of my clients have observed that in my blog updates I am paying special attention to the quality of the images I use these days.

Although normally they are a mash up of images that I find in Google images and other places, these days I try to make them as unique as possible by combining multiple images and text.

Not everybody can create nice-looking images, and this is where image link building can help you.

Have you ever noticed that when people use an image from another website or blog, they normally mention the “source”?

This gave me an idea. I normally find it very difficult to approach other publishers and bloggers (doesn’t mean I don’t) for backlinks.

As you know, people don’t go on distributing their backlinks. They either really need to know you, or you need to offer them something really compelling, or something they cannot resist linking to.

Being a content writer, writing blog posts comes easy to me, but most of the time, either I’m writing for my clients, or for myself.

Somehow, I cannot bring myself to writing blog posts for other websites and blogs. At least not right now. Maybe in future, when I will feel that my own blog and website have had enough of my writing, I will start writing for other blogs and websites.

Most of the backlinks that I currently have come from a few news websites because I also write journalistic articles and opinion pieces. But that is not sufficient.

I like creating images. This is not my profession and I don’t do this for money, so maybe I enjoy it more. But that’s beside the point.

Many bloggers and online publishers are constantly looking for good images. Major search engines like Google and Bing have dedicated image search sections. There is a complete website dedicated to curating images: Pinterest.

Talking of Pinterest, if you want people to pin your images try to make them as relevant as possible to your blog post or web page. This will get you more clicks from Pinterest.

What I’m trying to say is, there is a big world that revolves around images. This opportunity can be tapped into. You can encourage people to link to you due to the quality of your images.

Will give you a small example: Recently I published a web page dedicated to my blog content writing services. Actually, I have created multiple web pages, but I was just testing whether the images that I have used with these web pages show up in the image search results or not.

Just to make sure that Google was giving me unbiased results I used the “incognito mode” of the browser.

When I searched for “blog content writing services” on google.com I found the following images from my website:

Google image search results for the phrase blog content writing services

I hovered the cursor over the image thumbnail and this is why the various thumbnails are showing image dimensions and the website link.

There are other images too, but I haven’t shown all the images here.

Before the weekend I also published “6 Indisputable Benefits of Content Marketing” and I created two graphics for it. If you search for “benefits of content marketing”, you find both these images in the image search results:

Google image search results for the phrase benefits of content marketing

How to use images for link building?

When you are creating or mashing up images for your website or blog, think from the perspective of a person who would one day like to use your image.

Does it offer some useful insight? A statistic, for example?

Many people creating presentations and slides will like to use your image with data.

After you have created the image, do you think people would like to use it?

This brings to my mind that with my images, I use my website link to make sure that one, people know that from where the image is coming, and two, they don’t use the image as their own. I’m not sure if this is a good tactic or not because if I include my link, it may deter them from using the image and linking to my website as “source”.

Anyway, the idea for this present blog post that I’m writing about the importance of using images for link building, came to me when I was going through my Twitter timeline and came across an update from Moz.

They publish weekly videos titled “Whiteboard Friday” in which they give very useful SEO tips.

In their latest Whiteboard Friday video, they have talked about how to use images for link building.

Aside from creating very striking and useful images, I think you should also aim for improving your search engine rankings in the image search results.

I have recently started following these points while using images on my website and blog:

Name the image file with a descriptive phrase. For example, if I’m creating a blog post about content marketing, some way or the other, I try to make sure that the phrase “content marketing” appears within the name of the image file.
Use the .PNG format when saving the images. This will allow you to create very light images without losing their quality and sharpness. This is something that I discovered just recently. Google prefers the .PNG format.
Describe the image using the ALT tag. Never misguide – the text in the ALT tag must represent what is being shown in the image.
Use image captions. This is also something that I have just started using a few days back and this has shown a marked improvement in my image search engine rankings. Caption is an HTML tag that you can enclose your image in and in the caption text, try to use your keyword. Again, use the caption text contextually, not irrelevantly.
Use appropriate text around the image. Although technology these days allows computers to read text with images and there are many algorithms that can tell what is inside the image (a tiger jumping over a fallen tree, for example), the image ranking algorithms still depend upon the information existing around the image to make out what the image represents.

These are the few measures you can take to make sure that your images enjoy better search engine rankings.

Rankings are important. No matter how good your images are, if people are not able to find them, they’re not going to help you in image link building.

6 Indisputable Benefits of Content Marketing

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Benefits of Content Marketing

What are the benefits of content marketing?

Although in the history of advertising, marketing and business promotion, you can find innumerable examples of entrepreneurs using content marketing to its utmost advantage, people are still sceptical about it.

And this is when, everything that exists on the web is content. According to this description of content marketing on Moz:

Every email, every tweet, every landing page, and every product description—they’re all examples of content, and one of the best ways of describing what they all have in common was summed up brilliantly by Ian Lurie, of Portent, Inc.:

Content isn’t ‘stuff we write to rank higher’ or ‘infographics’ or ‘long-form articles.’
Content is anything that communicates a message to the audience. Anything.
— Ian Lurie, CEO, Portent, Inc.

Also read What is Content Marketing? Explained in detail

One of the major reasons why people cannot make sense of content marketing is that its benefits are not immediate.

For example, if you get a website designed, after a couple of months, you will have an online presence and you will be able to see the various parts of your website. Whether you like it or not, the website will be there right in front of you. You will be able to look at it yourself, and you will be able to show it to whomever you feel like.

Beyond the basic content – the text and the images and the videos that you have on your website – the benefit of content marketing is not visible. You can either predict it or imagine it.

Content marketing benefits seem very far away

To an average businessperson, concepts like building an audience, providing good quality content and expanding presence on the web, seem like “big business”-talk and consequently, intimidating. But they are not.

Just like these concepts work at the macro level, they also work at the micro level.

Also, most of the content marketers cannot guarantee success, primarily because the clients are reluctant to invest enough money (within appropriate budget, content marketing success can be guaranteed).

Unless all the parties involved are on the same plain and totally understand what they are trying to achieve, it is very difficult to experience success in content marketing.

Fortunately, there are various organizations, evangelists and interest groups that are constantly endeavoring to educate business managers and decision makers about the power of content marketing.

Doing research on the same topic, I came across an interesting graphic. I didn’t want to use the graphic so I reproduced it by slightly altering it. The graphic below summarizes the 6 indisputable benefits of content marketing.

Benefits of Content Marketing

When we talk of the benefits, we assume that everything necessary to carry out a well-defined content strategy is being done.

Below I’m going to describe these individual content marketing benefits and will also tell you how you can derive these benefits for your own business no matter what size your business is.

Benefits of content marketing

1. Increased website traffic

Website traffic

90% of Credible Content clients hire us because they want to improve their search engine rankings, which means, they need more website traffic from search engines.

This is the most sure shot advantage of using high-quality content to create your presence on the web.

To rank your website or individual links, Google needs to access, crawl, index and rank your content. Without content, Google has got nothing to process.

How the strategic content marketing increase your website traffic from search engines and other sources?

Improving your search engine rankings has multipronged benefits. You begin to get more search engine traffic. More people are able to find your content.

When they find your content on search engines, they don’t necessarily do business with you. They may simply link to your content, which sends you direct traffic and also improves your SEO.

If it is interesting and useful, they may also share your content on their social media and social networking profiles, giving you a social presence.

Google takes your social presence into account when writing your content.

The marketing part means that you distribute your content through as many channels as possible.

Once you have published a blog post, for example, you share your link on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. You may also republish it on Medium and LinkedIn.

You may also encourage other influencers in your industry to share your content.

This way, Google has multiple opportunities to come across your content. If somehow its crawlers are not crawling your website, they will be able to find and index your links from other sources, mostly from social media and social networking websites.

Google+ is Google’s own social networking platform so even if it doesn’t look for your content on other social networking websites, it is definitely going to find it on its own network.

2. Brand awareness

Brand awareness with content marketing

Again, branding isn’t just for big businesses.

If you come across some reference of Credible Content on another website or a blog or a social networking platform and immediately you know that it is an agency that provides quality content, it’s branding.

Read Statistically most B2B enterprises use content marketing for brand awareness

Whether you realize it or not, whether you admit it or not, an average customer or client has multiple choices these days. Your competitor’s website is just a click away, or a new Google search away.

Unless you give them a reason to remember you or recognize you, they’re going to forget about you. Persistent content marketing creates an awareness of your brand and people always remember what you stand for.

If you regularly publish a newsletter, say, one broadcast every week, when people recognize your newsletter, when they know and remember who has sent the newsletter and what the newsletter contains, that’s brand awareness.

3. Customer engagement

Content marketing for customer engagement

Why should people do business with you? Especially for the first time?

Why should they choose you over another business?

Through content marketing you can keep your customers engaged in conversations.

If you offer a solution, if you offer a suggestion, if you offer some sort of help, people are going to respond, in whatsoever manner. This is engagement.

Read 10 ways to write highly engaging content

You need to engage your prospective customers and clients positively. This way, the more you engage them in meaningful conversations, the more eager they are to do business with you.

How do you engage your customers with quality content?

I will cite the LongtailPro example.

A few days ago I purchased a LongtailPro subscription. Before I had purchased the subscription, I had used their trial version.

After using their trial version, I didn’t purchase the subscription for more than two years. But, to be able to use their trial version, I had given them their email ID and once in a while they used to send me some data about my website and also, how I can use LongtailPro, if I start my subscription, to improve my search engine rankings.

These were not just promotional messages. Their messages were constantly helping me.

After I purchased a subscription I still get tutorials on how to make the full use of their app. They have uploaded numerous YouTube videos and they keep prompting me to have a look at them to properly understand how to use the app.

I can also give you my own example. If you have been an old subscriber of my Credible Content updates, you may have noticed that I have started broadcasting my newsletter regularly after quite a while.

Ever since I started again, I have received 5 queries from my subscribers (it has just been two weeks or even less) and one among these 5 queries has turned into a paid assignment (Hello Francis!).

This way, content marketing helps you keep your audience engaged.

4. Leads and conversion

More leads and better conversion

This is quite simple. As your website traffic increases, as your brand becomes known, as you engage with your target audience, you naturally get more leads and these leads naturally convert more.

5. Your own broadcasting channel

Develop your own broadcasting channel

When you publish a blog regularly, when you send out your email newsletter regularly, you build an audience. People start paying attention to you.

Whenever you publish a blog post, you draw people from the search engines. If you post your updates on social media and social networking websites, people either respond to you on their own timelines, or they visit your blog. They become a part of your audience.

Since you are constantly posting quality content on your social networking profiles and people are constantly engaging with your content and interacting with you, your friends and followers go on increasing.

Since more people land on your blog, more people subscribe to your updates and hence, you grow your mailing list, and when you grow your mailing list, you grow your email newsletter audience.

These are all your broadcasting channels.

You can use these channels whenever you launch a new product or a new service or you launch an update or you add a new feature to your product or your service.

Since you have got an audience that pays attention to you, whenever you need to broadcast the message, you will be able to do so.

This brings to my mind an incident that one of my clients had with one of his customers. The customer left a very bad review on Yelp, despite it being her own fault.

My client used his blog and his newsletter to explain his point of view and a lot of his visitors and subscribers took a personal initiative and left positive responses on Yelp.

You can use content marketing to build such a broadcasting channel for yourself.

6. Competitive advantage

Competitive advantage

Although many of your competitors might already be using content marketing, there might be many who are not. If you pursue strategic content marketing, you will not just have a competitive advantage over your competitors who are not using content to promote their businesses, you will also have competitive advantage over those competitors who are.

Content marketing sort of, democratises marketing. It’s all about innovation, ingenuity and initiative. If you use these three traits with sincerity, you can compete with IBM despite being a small IT firm (that is, if you want to).

A good thing about content marketing is, it’s not about quantity, it’s about quality and uniqueness. Okay, sometimes quantity does triumph over quality, but in most of the cases it does not.

Joe Pulizzi’s book, Epic Content cites a nice example. There is a River Pools and Spas company that installs fiberglass swimming pools in the Virginia and Maryland areas. In 2009 they were in deep trouble. Some sort of recession was going on and people were requesting their deposits back. The company was over drawing its checking account. the closure of the business seemed imminent.

When the CEO, Marcus Sheridan decided to use content marketing to promote his fiberglass swimming pools business, they were drawing approximately $4 million in annual revenues and spending $250,000 on marketing.

With two years of content marketing, they brought down their marketing cost to $40,000 per year, and by the end of 2011, they were selling more fibreglass pools than any other fibreglass pools installer in North America.

Marcus Sheridian’s content marketing was so successful that he started traveling the world lecturing other business owners on how to use content marketing.

You can read the Marcus Sheridian content marketing case study.

This is just one example. There are many.

Does content marketing just mean publishing a blog post?

Although blog publishing is a big part of content marketing, many small business owners confuse blogging with content marketing. The entire ecosystem of content marketing includes and involves

Understanding what type of content your target audience is looking for
Creating/writing high-quality content that informs, engages and if possible, entertains – on an ongoing basis
Analysing incoming website traffic to find out what sort of content is attracting people to your website
Making changes to creating/writing high-quality content according to your findings
Using the right content dissemination channels to distribute your content
Search engine optimizing your content so that it is easier to find it on search engines
Updating and repurposing existing content on an ongoing basis
Publishing a regular newsletter or email mailing list

So, basically, content marketing consists of continuously publishing valuable content and then making an all-out effort to make it easy for people to find it. Sometimes, you have to deliver the content where your audience is. For example, if your audience is on Facebook, then you have to post links to your content on Facebook. Similarly, on Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.

Content marketing at the outset may seem like very hard work and this may undermine whatever notion of benefits you have in mind, but actually when you get down to implementing your content marketing strategy, to your pleasant surprise, you will find that it is not that difficult.

Besides, the benefits are so great, as you have seen in the case of Marcus Sheridan and his fibreglass swimming pools, that after a while, the effort and investment tend to move towards practically zero.

How to double or triple your traffic by using long tail keywords in content writing?

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Do you know what are long tail keywords? How can you use them, incorporate them, into your content writing? What are the benefits of using long tail keywords when writing content for your website or blog?

In terms of improving your SEO, the concept of long tail keywords isn’t something new. It has been around for many years, but you come to know of it only when you do some careful reading, some persistent reading.

What are long tail keywords?

The phrase “long tail keywords” originates from the dragon-like long tail the traffic graph of long tail keywords generates.

Long tail keywords are those keywords that are low competition, that is, not many people are searching for them, but if some people are searching for them, and if you have optimized your web page or blog post for those long tail keywords, your link can be found by them easily.

To understand better, look at the image given below:

As you can understand, it would be very difficult for me to rank for the phrase “content marketing”. Aside from the fact that it makes no sense to optimize for this particular phrase for me right now simply because no intent can be attributed to the phrase “content marketing”, since thousands of people are already ranking above me, it wouldn’t be worth it for me to spend so much effort trying to rank higher for it.

Although this keyword or phrase is very competitive and may generate lots of traffic for websites ranking high for this keyword, in terms of competition and conversion, it has no value for me.

“Content marketing for my website” on the other hand is a clearly-defined phrase that I would like to rank higher for. A person who wants to use content marketing to promote his or her website should be able to find my website.

But again, it is a highly competitive phrase, though, it can be termed as, by definition, a long tail keyword because it contains more than three words.

Still, thousands of businesses might be looking for “content marketing for my website” because, well, one, almost every business these days has a website, and two, almost every business wants to promote itself some way or the other, and among these businesses, who are aware of the concept, would like to use content marketing to promote themselves.

Now we come to “content marketing for my web design website”. It’s an out and out long tail keyword because fewer people (compared to the two phrases described above) are searching for it and hence, it is not as competitive as the keywords mentioned above.

So, it is easier to rank higher for this phrase and since it is easier to rank higher, even if fewer people are searching for it, it can generate decent traffic.

This example can be applied to any business.

Suppose you sell “handwoven socks” from your website. Although it is a very attractive keyword or key phrase, thousands of people might be searching for “handwoven socks”. On the other hand, if you try to rank for “handwoven socks for babies” or “blue handwoven socks with white pattern” it will be easier to rank higher and get very specific traffic with greater conversion rate.

Such keywords or phrases are called long tail keywords; they are normally 3-4-5 words long and are very specific.

Why you can ill afford to ignore long tail keywords

Long tail keywords are also important because most of your traffic is already coming, or is going to come, from mobile devices. On mobile devices, since search is supported by voice, people tend to use phrases or common sentences to search for information.

There is a greater possibility of someone searching for “content writing service for my boutique website” then “content writing service”.

So, it is better to optimize for search terms and keywords your prospective customers and clients are actually using.

Another big reason is, the more specific the search is, the greater is the chance of the person buying from you.

This is where “intent” comes in.

If someone is searching for “content marketing” you never know what she is looking for.

Does she want to learn about content marketing? Does she want to find websites on content marketing? Is she a journalist writing an article? Maybe she is looking for books, articles and blog posts on content marketing? You can never be sure.

Even if someone is searching for “content marketing for my business” you cannot be sure whether she is looking to hire someone, or she wants to do it on her own.

“Content marketing service for my business” is more targeted and it means someone is looking for a content marketing service for her business.

“Content marketing service for my interior design website” is even more targeted. You know precisely what she is looking for.

Targeting for long tail keywords gives you an edge because it sends you highly targeted traffic that in turn, improves your conversion rate.

How to improve your SEO and double, or even triple your traffic with long tail keywords

As I have already explained above, since long tail keywords are less competitive in terms of SEO and may attract even less traffic, since they are more targeted, they enjoy better conversion rate and easy, higher search engine rankings.

You can either use common sense to create a list of long tail keywords pertaining to your business, industry or profession, or you can use something like LongtailPro (disclaimer: affiliate link) to find the long tail keywords in your niche.

With LongtailPro, you can enter a “seed” keyword and based on that, the app will suggest all the combinations that you can optimize your content for.

A good thing about LongtailPro is that along with giving you all the possible suggestions, it also shows you how competitive a particular phrase is for your website, specifically, and how many queries are done using the phrase for the long tail keyword.

If you don’t want to use LongtailPro, you can also use the Google AdWords tool. Just be wary, since Google would like you to bid on maximum number of keywords and phrases, it throws at you all sorts of keyword combinations that may confuse you. It is better to use the tool to get the ideas but eventually, create your own list, manually.

Remember that the amount of search engine traffic that you get is not important, what is important is, how many people do business with you. For that, you need to target very specific keywords and search terms.

Once you have created the list, start creating content around those long tail keywords.

The best thing to do is, create a web page or blog post with the title having your long tail keyword. For example, I can have something like “How to use long tail keywords for content marketing?” or “how my content writing service can help your restaurant website?”

If you have a TV shop in Lajpat Nagar it doesn’t make any sense trying to optimize for “Sony TV”.

On the other hand, you should optimize for “TV shop in Lajpat Nagar” or better, “Sony TV shop in Lajpat Nagar”, or even better, “Leco Sony TV Lajpat Nagar”, because this is how people search when they really want to buy.

Below I’m summing up how and why optimizing for long tail keywords can improve your search engine rankings as well as conversion rate:

Long tail keywords are less competitive in terms of SEO and hence, you can easily rank higher for them
Since you can easily rank higher for them, even if fewer people are searching for them, they will come to your website
Since search terms for long tail keywords are very specific, the traffic generated through these keywords have a clearly-defined intent and this is why, they enjoy a greater conversion rate

In fact, while writing content for my clients, I have experienced that writing content for long tail keywords is a lot easier than writing content for generic, high competition keywords because, since long tail keywords use logical phrases, it is easier to write conversational, engaging content for them.

When to use curated content for content marketing?

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Although I would suggest that you don’t base your entire content marketing on curated content, it is a nice way of keeping the channels of content smoothly flowing when you are not getting some great content writing and content publishing ideas.

Curated content, in case you don’t know what it is, is the content that you gather from other sources and then republish it on your own blog or website, or share it under your social media profile like Facebook or Twitter.

This blog post nicely explains how to differentiate between original content and curated content (of course curated content is also original, but not from your angle).

Original image source

The author of the blog post says that the original content is like the original artwork, but when you curate content it is like creating an art gallery where you showcase all the pieces of art that you have been able to gather.

Is content curation like using someone else’s content?

In content curation, although you are using someone else’s content, you’re not using it as it is. You either use the link, or you use the link to explain something else.

Take for example this present blog post. I’m linking to another blog post that talks about how you can use content curation for content marketing for your start-up when you don’t have a budget to create high-value original content.

There is no doubt about the fact that you need quality content for meaningful content marketing.

If you are constantly publishing lousy content it is going to cause irreparable damage to not just your SEO, but also your brand.

You rather not publish content at all.

So, for businesses that cannot right now invest in good quality content, it is better to start with content curation because when you curate high-quality content in some ways you are also creating high-quality content for your own website or blog.

In fact, sometimes curated content can fare far better than the original content, provided you use the right topic.

Suppose I want to write a blog post on “Content Marketing Trends of 2018”. I have already written some blog posts on the topic, but I have linked to other sources. For example,

What if I don’t write my own, original blog post, but create a list of 40 blog posts that talk about the 2018 content marketing trends?

Will people like to read my thoughts on the topic or from 40 experts?

I don’t mean to undermine my views on the 2018 content marketing trends, but I’m pretty sure, given a choice, people would rather read those 40 content marketing experts.

After publishing the post, I can also send a quick email to these 40 individuals notifying them of my latest blog post and even if five among them share the link either on their blog or on twitter/facebook, it would be more beneficial for my blog than me writing my own thoughts on the topic.

Many people curate such blog posts specifically for this reason and this is a good content marketing tactic. You don’t just create lots of quality content you also get to network with other people to whom you link and whose content you appreciate enough to curate.

Is curated content better for your SEO?

For SEO you need high quality original content. You must be wondering if you are curating lots of content that is published elsewhere, isn’t it going to harm your SEO?

Even when you are curating content, in some sense, at least for the search engines, you are publishing original content. Remember that whenever you link to other sources, you must include your own outlook, your own opinion.

For example, even if I am linking to blog posts and articles that talk about the 2018 content marketing trends, I’m writing about these posts in my own language, in my own style and sometimes I even add my own points.

Even when you are curating content like this (creating individual blog posts) never fail to add value. If people want to just read the original content, they will go to the original link. You must give people some reason to stay on your website and read your take on the subject than going to the original link.

Google likes it when you link to authoritative websites and blogs. This Moz blog post by Rand Fishkin shows that linking to other websites and blogs actually does good to your website in terms of increasing its authority as well as improving its SEO.

The best way to curate content is to choose a theme and then gather as many links as you can find that give very valuable information about that theme.

Don’t create a random collection of links just because they talk about a particular subject or topic. Create a context. Weave a story around those links. They should become an integral part of the narrative that you are expressing in that particular web page or blog post.

Curating content can be cheaper than writing original content

Unless you are planning on creating a portal of curated content, curating content for content marketing is obviously cheaper than writing original content, because all you are doing is, linking to other sources.

But finding and keeping track of high-value content can be a time-consuming activity especially when your niche is very narrow. Maybe for your niche it might be very difficult to curate good content. You may have to hire a researcher that may charge you a lot.

If that is not the case, content curation is always a cheaper alternative to writing original content.

Why curated content shouldn’t be your long-term content marketing strategy

You can fill up the gaps with curated content but eventually, you need original content for your long-term content marketing strategy.

Just as you are linking to high-quality content from other websites, wouldn’t you like the others to link to your high-quality content?

If all you do is link to other authority websites and blogs, you never get to share your own expertise. You are always living in their shadow. People will be finding their links on your website and then they will be doing business with them because they are the original creators of that high-quality content.

Remember that if you want to get business on the Internet based on your authority, then original content is a must.