This blog post takes me almost full circle, when I got my first taste of SEO (outside of my own personal websites) I was putting out press releases for various truck and van manufacturers – that was over a decade ago now, it wasn’t long after this that I was advocating companies use news from other people’s websites on their own website. The addition of all this industry news to a website had the desired effect however there came a day (something like 2009) when Google said no more and started to degrade those websites that used copied and pasted news content on their own website. However, those websites that spent the time and effort to rewrite the content that they were adding to their website maintained their rankings and maintained their successes.
When thinking about content marketing we’re often told that we need to answer questions the customer wants and I believe that a huge part of your strategy should indeed be in delivering the type of answers to questions about your products and services that will lead to conversions – but content marketing is about seo as well as marketing and I know that if you attempt to create a content marketing approach based purely on answering questions you’ll start to run dry of questions and therefore won’t be keep it up (unless you’ve worked out the kind of sales to marketing process that delivers more questions than you can deal with!).
To get round this, I advocate using industry news. Industry news is laced with relevant keywords that you can link up to the right pages on your website, the thing is you need to be rewriting it and turning it from generic industry news into the kind of news that reflects your own business, your businesses back story and the needs and requirements of the audience. We’re all being told as online marketers and especially content marketing professional, that we need to think of ourselves as publishers, and I say we do of our need to have a nod in that direction but not get too bogged down with trying to create really clever content that converts your audience – as a freelance seo consultant I know for certain the more content you add to your website, and specifically the more content you add that you can promote and get good user signals for, the more the other pages on your website will climb through the rankings. This is because you’re creating trust and authority – news is perfectly position for this, it gives volume and that’s what you’re going to need to get things moving quickly.
You can still use all those juicy statistics to create infographics and other types of interesting content but in reality it’s the text based content that Google is after right now and you still need to weight your output to that and you need to be creating a lot of content – and I’m talking about relevant several posts a day for months, and months, and probably months before you start to see the return – but it will come, just stick with it!
So if you’re still wondering can you use industry news as part of your content marketing strategy, the answer is yes, but make sure it’s a part of the strategy and not just the only type of content you get out there, if you don’t answer he relevant questions you’re on a much slower road and conversion seo wise (voice of experience speaking!).
