How to Curate Content across your SEO and Maximize the Long-Term Benefits
In digital marketing, ‘content curating’ is recognized as the process of selecting topics relevant to your audience and using these to produce unique, high quality content. Note that these topics may have already been used for content in the past but can be re-used in a curated strategy to produce new pieces.
Think of content curating sort of like this. If you have a home page where you can only feature eight articles and you have 40 articles in your blog catalogue, you naturally would choose your eight best articles to feature. This is an example of content curating as it maximizes the value for new readers, resulting in more shares, links, and better SEO rankings.
Paying attention to your content catalogue, you may choose to feature the timeliest articles, those with the most shares, or those with the most views in the past six months. These are all ways websites curate content to their audience.
Ultimately, there are four elements to how to successfully curate content – knowing your audience, knowing which content will provide the most value, using inspiration from what’s worked in the past to produce new pieces of content, and testing your content curating strategy to determine whether to continue.
Across those four elements, there’s a lot of different things to weigh. If you don’t know what drives your audience, it’s going to be very difficult to write for them in a way that adds the most amount of value. If you’re a new website that does not have a lot of past blogs to look to, don’t hesitate to examine competitors’ sites and popular social platforms to see what content is generating value. Sites like Reddit, Twitter, and crowdsourced blog sites provide insight into what resonates with the audience.
In developing curated content, keep in mind that it doesn’t always need to be serious in tone. Oftentimes, the most successful and engaging content is humor-driven. Then again, a very successful strategy used by many content curators is to aggregate news or articles or companies into a single article, such as a top 10 list, a newsfeed recap, or an easy-to-digest format. For inspiration here, look to long-form blogs, news, infographics, podcasts, and more. Also, many websites use a ‘synthesization’ strategy which simplifies more complex information into easy-to-read and easy-to-understand pieces of content. If you are writing something long and complicated, you might want to take this on.
Another great content curation strategy is to focus on academic studies, research, and surveys that have been written. Interpret and analyze the results, and create unique, original content unlike what you’ll find on a competitor’s site. Consider using images which are share-friendly and easily digestible, statistics from larger data sets which may not have been explored on a niche level before, put together a panel of experts discussing an industry subject, or create lists from large amounts of information.
Regarding curated content, there is no simple formula that will always work. That said, when curated content does work, you’ll see an increase in SEO numbers and the long-term benefits strengthens your site popularity. As experts in the field, Unlimited Exposure can help with your content management, content curating, and content marketing strategy. Speak with a representative today to find the perfect partner in creating and executing an SEO-friendly curating strategy.
