To make your SEO strategy work, relevant and incredibly useful content is a must. One cannot expect on-page and off-page SEO to work without well-crafted content that provides value to the readers. However, creating content that drives engagement and eventually leads is not easy as one would assume. In this post, we are going to discuss the best content curation tactics for SEO.
Content Curation is the process of compiling existing articles, videos, photos that are already available on the internet & using it for your new piece of content. It is basically searching the internet to get the relevant content that has already been created and is useful to get your content reach more audience. It provides exposure to your content in terms of SEO and better search ranking. To add to that, content curation is extremely important when you incorporate your perspectives on the curated content.
Things to keep in Mind
- Knowing your audience is significant. Who are you are writing this piece for? What are their likes, dislikes and what motivates them to read this kind of content?
- Is it valuable? Why should people read your content? Does it provide any new insight or value? What are the key points that are yet to be out in the public domain?
- Take lessons from the past. See what has worked for the creators before and also why some creators failed to attract the eyeballs.
Research what’s worked well in the past for others, using platforms such as:
- Reddit.
- HackerNews.
- Slashdot.
- GrowthHackers.
- BuzzSumo.
- Zest.
- Twitter.
It is not necessary to create content from scratch, sometimes translating content in a different language without twisting it much also works. It is most effective when you know what your audience wants. To do this, you can monitor the content created by your competitors. In order to make the most of this exercise, it is important to go through various platforms. The reason why we recommend this is not just because you get more content to look at, but also to see what works for which audiences. To do this, it is important for you to examine all the platforms. For instance, the audience at Reddit, for the same niche, might react differently to what the audience at twitter will do.
Content Curation Tactics
1. Aggregating: Events or Articles
Everyone is so busy these days, they don’t have time to check their social media platforms every now and get relevant information. Aggregating content that is important for your audience is a good form of content curation, be it Videos, Photos, Podcasts, etc. It just needs to be in a format that is less cluttered and provides valuable insights without taking much time.
Example – https://fs.blog/ Farnam Street is a blog run by Shane Parrish which encourages people to live a better life by thinking better. From philosophy to mental models, this blog add values to people’s lives by sending them curated articles every week right in their inbox
2. Synthesizing: Reducing long, complex information into digestible chunks
There are very few people who like to read a long-form article to form their opinion on a topic (AKA Nerds) but most of us prefer to get the relevant information or key takeaways without going through the hassle of reading a 1000 page report, no matter how important the issue is. There is a gap which can be filled by people who are willing to go the extra mile and deliver what their audience wants.
Example – When the new Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines came out in the summer of 2018, Jennifer Slegg dug in and wrote a summary of what had changed, and her thoughts on these changes.
3. Curating Survey Results
Another example of content curation is running surveys and curating the responses for your audience. Running a survey on twitter/Reddit and publishing those responses to your audience can add value. Apart from getting ideas to create content, there are many other benefits of running such surveys. These surveys can also help you to position yourself as a brand that cares about their customers and users. Not only does it help to ensure
Examples:
*SEO pricing surveys such as those by Ahrefs and Growth Ramp.
*A survey on Reddit where I asked the BigSEO Reddit community about their biggest SEO fails.
4. Visual content
The kind of engagement that visual content garners is not unknown. They require a separate section of their own. It’s easy on the eye, the audience grasps more and will remember it for a longer period of time.
Examples:
*24 Photos of the World’s Most Beautifully Designed Homes by the Business Insider.
*The most beautiful travel destinations — a selection of the most beautiful travel destinations, neatly organized on Pinterest.
5 – Curating Statistics in Digestible Format
We know the horror of looking at an excel sheet which is full of data but has no idea of how to make sense of any of it. Most people feel the same. Provide them with the final conclusion from those bulky datasets in a digestible format.
Examples:
*Glassdoor: Read about what it’s like to work for different companies and the salaries that people make there.
*Numbeo: Learn the cost of living in other countries, and how they compare to each other.
Content curation tools
Tools might be small but their impact is huge in the overall development of a final product. Here are few for you to make the most use of –
RSS Feed Managers
Tools to Keep Track of Textual Content
Tools to Keep Track of Visual Content
Tools to Easily & Quickly Put Together a Newsletter
Tools to find popular content
- BuzzSumo (freemium)
- Anders Pink (freemium)
So, these were some of the battle-tested tactics for content curation. Have any new hacks in mind? Feel free to share with us. We publish amazing marketing insights here on Dojo every week, be sure to follow us on FaceBook to stay updated!
