Content is sought after by bloggers, publishers, and digital marketers. It keeps audiences engaged, grows your site’s brand equity, and helps generate traffic to your site. However, many site owners find it difficult to produce content as often as they’d like. As a result, they turn to content curation for additional content. But for those who are producing content for SEO purposes, the big question is if content curation helps SEO.
What is Content Curation in the First Place?
If you aren’t aware, content curation is simply a method of producing content by curating it from other sources. A good example of a piece of curated content is a top 10 knitting video tutorial list. Another example is a list of interesting stats about the use of social media. As a curator, you’re bringing together different content sources to bring your readers a unique presentation.
How Content Curation Can Benefit a Search Engine Optimization Campaign
There are several ways in which content curation benefits a search campaign. First of all, curating content allows you to produce content more regularly. The reason why is because it’s easier to produce content via curation than through regular means. To add to that, content freshness is actually a ranking factor for the search engines, so you’ll be getting on edge over competitors that are not producing regular content.
The More Content Produce, The More Links You Get
If you are working with a sizable audience, then you know that publishing great content leads to shares on social media, blogs, and other websites. Just going by this simple fact, you’ll be generating more links back to your site by increasing your content production. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you can simply publish garbage. Curated content can still be of great quality if you put in the time to research topics and ideas beforehand.
More Incoming Links Means Links Going to Important Internal Pages
One of the reasons why some people do not see content curation as a valuable search engine optimization strategy is because the links don’t point to their important pages. But what they need to realize is that they can still benefit from the links going to their curated content pages. All they need to do is reference internal links on the curated page.
One of the things you often notice with curated content is that the publishers often link to relevant resources on their site. For example, a top 10 social media tools list may link to a social media starter guide. What this does is that it passes the link value to important pages that they want to be ranking for in the search engines. This is a roundabout way to give your important pages ranking value.
It Even Helps You Develop Valuable Link Partners
One thing you’ll be doing regularly as a content curator is linking out to related websites. Rather than just linking to the various sources and calling it a day, it is a great way to open up the dialogue with these website owners. You can simply let them know via social media or email that you thought their content was valuable to their audience, and you’ve decided to mention it in your article.
They’ll be grateful that you decided to mention them and provide them with a link. This opens the door for potential partnerships where the website owners may offer a link reference a page on your site. The idea is to play on the psychology of reciprocity. This is one of Robert Cialdini’s influence principles, and increases the chances of them returning the favor.
Now don’t expect all of the website owners to reciprocate. Some of them will and some of the won’t. You were going to link to them anyway, so there’s nothing lost by not getting a link back from them. Also, building relationships take time. If you mention a specific site multiple times, you’ll definitely get their attention. You can bet the site owner will be more obliged to share your content with their audience because of the value you’ve given them.
A Few Content Curation Hacks to Get You Going
Sold on the idea of content curation? Excited about implementing it for your site? Here are a couple of content curation hacks to get you started in the right direction.
– Content doesn’t always have to be text based. You can easily curate videos, images, audios, and more.
– Prepare topics, sources, and ideas beforehand. Make sure there’s some kind of flowchart for curating content. Don’t expect the curation to happen in a matter of a day.
– Combine curated content with repurposed content. If you have a video, audio interview, or infographic you’ve used in the past, why not combine it with curated content for something original?
– There are many content curation tools that make it easy to curate content. In fact, here’s a list of over 10 tools. Here’s a quick video on automating your content curation.
Content Curation Mistakes that Can Cost You Dearly
Now that you have a general idea of how to go about your content curation strategy, here are things you definitely want to avoid. Do NOT:
– Quote large blocks of content as it will get seen as duplicate content.
– Publish low quality in an effort to keep your content production up.
– Forget about giving credit to the original sources as it’s a copyright violation.
– Publish content on the same topics, formats, and sources. Keep it interesting.
– Rely solely on curated content. You still need original content for your site.
– Compile short blocks of content from other sites. You must add your own commentary to make the content unique.
Wrapping Things Up
To sum everything up, content curation can be an amazing supplement to your existing SEO strategy. It’s a great way to keep up your site’s freshness factor, generate links, and form relationships with other publishers. There are many technology solutions that make the content curation process easier, so make sure you take full advantage of them.
If you aren’t curating content at the moment, you should start as soon as possible. It will help you with your content production woes. It will help you keep your audience engaged with great content. It will support your search campaign without consuming much time and money. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be a part of your strategy.