You need high-quality content to improve your SEO.

You need high-quality content on an ongoing basis to improve your SEO.

Sometimes it becomes difficult to come up with great content ideas.

Then, curated or aggregated content can come to your rescue.

Sometimes, even if the ideas are there, it is very difficult to write full-fledged blog posts and articles around those ideas.

Such situations can be stumbling blocks. They can stunt your content marketing efforts and they can even discourage you from publishing quality content on your website or blog.

How do you overcome such stumbling blocks?

By publishing curated or aggregated content.

I am not suggesting that you carry out your entire content marketing strategy on the strength of curated or aggregated content, but when it has become difficult to publish full blog posts, it is better to publish curated content rather than posting nothing.

When you stop posting for a long time, it begins to have a negative impact on your existing search engine rankings.

Even the search engine crawlers begin to visit your website less often when they observe that you are not publishing as regularly as you used to, a few months or a few weeks ago.

Yes, it is important to publish original content for long-term branding and even for better SEO, publishing aggregated content is far better than publishing no content at all.

What is curated or aggregated content?

Read Difference between content writing and content curation

We often complain that there is lots of junk content on the Internet. This is true.

But a great thing about the Internet is, there is also lots of great content.

There are many blogs, websites, and even social networking accounts, that are constantly publishing awesome content.

Since you might already be tracking scores of such websites and blogs, it might be easier for you to keep track of the various blog posts and articles they publish.

But your visitors and your social networking followers may not have access to a big repository of updates.

They will really appreciate if you can find excellent content on other sources and then mention them on your own website or blog with a little bit of your input.

There are two ways of curating and aggregating content from other sources: you either link to an individual blog post or article along with your view, or you can create a list of, something like, 10 best articles of the month on a particular subject.

How to find quality content to aggregate?

As I have written above, if you are routinely publishing content around your subject, you might be tracking many blogs, websites and social networking profiles to keep track of what the others are writing.

If you are not, you can track your favourite experts on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

You can use Flipboard, Medium, Pocket and Feedly to track your favourite subjects.

Even while doing day-to-day research you come across lots of valuable content that you may not use immediately, but sometime in the future. You can create a repository of such links using the notetaking app like Google Keep, Evernote or OneNote (both Evernote and OneNote have web clipper add-ons that allow you to save information immediately).

Then, later on, you can come back to the links that you have saved, and then use them to create curated or aggregated content.

How curated or aggregated content helps you improve your SEO

A big part of SEO is publishing high-quality content regularly.

Regularity is very important because search engines, especially Google, are constantly looking for new content to index and rank.

Your competitors are constantly pumping new content into the search engine indexes to stay ahead of you.

So, it is very essential for your SEO that you publish content regularly.

But constantly coming up with new content writing ideas can be a Herculean task.

You may require a dedicated person just to come up with great content writing ideas.

If you don’t have a dedicated person, the second-best thing is to curate or aggregate the best content from the web.

Curating content not only helps you publish content regularly, it also gives you new content writing ideas.

When you are constantly curating or aggregating content on a specific topic, you become a repository of knowledge about the topic.

Google begins to consider you as the go-to destination for the subject.

For example, if I start aggregating lots of content on content writing and content marketing, Google begins to think that I am managing some sort of an online directory or forum with lots of information on content writing and content marketing, and hence, starts giving me preference over other websites.

Can you completely depend on curated or aggregated content for SEO and marketing?

Read Can you use content curation as a viable content marketing tool?

It depends.

If you want to create your own brand, you need to publish original content. You need to come up with  original thoughts and ideas.

Sure, you can curate lots of focused content, but then you will be known as a curator or an aggregator rather than a thought leader.

Ideally, people should be curating your content.

So, what I suggest is, use curation and aggregation as a break from your routine publishing original content.

When you feel stuck, but you still want to publish content, resort to curating and aggregating.

Otherwise, there is nothing like publishing original content.