As SEO has progressed in its complexity, writing unique content has become more challenging—particularly when you have to include the same old key words and phrases as you used last week or the week before. So how do you consistently produce something fresh and new while still maintaining SEO best practices, time after time? Assuming you’ve done your keyword research and know which words are your main ranking options, a valuable approach to finding new topics and avoiding duplication is to “drill down” into your subject matter.
A Common Mistake
One of the most common mistakes marketers and blog writers make is addressing a topic too broadly. The recent popularity of the “listicle” format is partly to blame for this; clients (and writers) became obsessed with headlines such as “6 Secrets of X” and “9 Ways to Do Y.” Unless you’re writing a 2,500-word piece, 9 ways of anything is too many. Instead, those 9 ways can give you nine different blog posts, each one using the same focus keyword you thought you could only use once.
Related: 5 Ways to Get Excited About Content Again
Breaking it Up
This example from 2015 lists 9 reasons to use visual content in your marketing. Let’s assume the keyword is “visual content” and take the first three reasons as individual blog posts.
1. Attention spans have shrunk from 12 seconds to eight seconds between 2012 and 2015.
Some points you could cover under this topic are:
- Reasons why attention spans have shrunk,
- The information overload users are subject to these days,
- How we know visual content takes less time to process than written content (refer to experts/statistics),
- How/why this works better for lower attention spans
Conclude that these reduced attention spans show the value of using visual content over or in addition to other formats.
2. Processing visual content involves almost half our brain.
Points to cover for this post could include:
- The science behind our brains’ efforts to process visual content,
- The importance of capturing the audience’s (shortened) attention span (this is a perfect spot for a link back to the first post),
- The value of having users digest our unique content and remember it over competitors,
- Mention case studies where consumers remember a brand more easily based on their use of visuals.
Conclusion: it has been proven over time that visuals work and the evidence is available to follow and apply.
3. Social posts with visuals see 180% greater engagement than posts without.
This one is a beauty, isn’t it? Remember, you’re still talking about visual content, and using the related keyword. Points to cover here are:
- The importance of engagement for digital marketing, and how to create sharable content.
- Average statistics on engagement achieved by various types of content – blogs, social media updates etc.
- The 180% statistic mentioned, and how it was ascertained.
- How to plan and schedule social media updates using visuals, tools to use e.g. HootSuite, Buffer, etc
- Where to find visuals, copyright issues to note, etc (this could even be a separate post)
- Examples that prove visuals are better received.
Conclusion: using visuals in social media is an important aspect of digital marketing and no matter how easy it is to post updates without images, marketers should definitely work at achieving a balance.
Spacing the Posts Out
We aren’t suggesting you write nine posts consecutively on the same keyword and publish them all right away. Leave a reasonable period of time between them, and publish other posts in the interim. And when you publish the second or third in a “series” like this, be sure to link back to the previous post on the topic. That will give your site’s SEO a nice little boost in Google.
Related: 7 Keyword Research Tips to Boost Your SEO Content Strategy
Proof of the Pudding
Since the pudding’s proof is always in the eating, these three examples should give you enough creative juice to try it yourself. Revisit some of your old listicle-format posts and give them some new love. Formulate a short statement that captures each of the points in your list, then search for that phrase on Google. The results should give you enough ideas to develop an outline of three to four section subheads, then research each of those independently to find real, meaty material you can use to craft unique content. Don’t forget to cite sources of any statistics you quote, which provides you with qualitative outbound links.
And then, for some extra SEO charm, go back and link your old post to the new ones you created, as well. Hasta la vista, baby!
