Let’s talk content marketing, and more specifically, content distribution. What are the advantages and differences of publishing to your own business’s blog, third-party “guest” blogs and high-authority publications?
All three will have a significant impact on not only your business’s brand but also on your personal brand. But each one carries different weight; on-site content helps push SEO efforts, making your product/services more likely to be found on search engines. Content published through third parties also helps with SEO efforts by garnering backlinks, which builds your site’s authority, but has more of an impact on building your personal and business brand through thought leadership.
Let’s further analyze these three types of content distribution and highlight the advantages of them in terms of SEO and brand value, while providing some tips to create higher-quality content.
What’s The SEO Value?
When it comes to SEO value for on-site content – whether a blog or the actual page-level copy describing your product or services – the old adage “content is king” never rang so true.
Search engine algorithms get smarter every day, and continue to put more and more emphasis on not only continued content creation across your website but also on the quality of that content. Through intense algorithms, search engines can think almost like humans. Like people, they can identify thin and irrelevant content, immediately disqualifying it. This is where an on-site blog has the most significance.
By constantly updating your website with blog content, SEO value raises because of an increase in keywords; more chances of garnering backlinks due to people sharing your blog posts and increasing engagement.
Where you want your specific product or services pages ranking for some broader terms, you can really capitalize on longer-tail terms with blog content. We can use my company for an example. Sure, we want to rank for SEO services and pay per click services, but there’s also longer-tail terms. By writing blogs based on such terms, you will naturally see your longer-tail keyword rankings increase, providing more ways for people to land on your website and be exposed to your products or services.
Create quality blog content, and the other two SEO value adds are the possibility of people sharing your posts or linking to one on their own site and increased engagement. The former is a must-have for high rankings; the more links you get back to your website from quality sources, the more authority your site achieves, which moves it up in the rankings. As for engagement, the more the better. Search engines equate time spent on site with quality content, which also helps improve your rankings.
For SEO value in regards to publishing content on third-party guest blogs and publications, always try to get a backlink to your site – ideally, a page which has a topic discussed in the content piece. Linking that published piece back to your company's website can have a tremendous impact on SEO value, again providing more authority to your website.
Remember to always check backlink profiles of the publication you are after; we use an SEO tool called Majestic, which rates a website with a number based on the authority of that website. The higher number, the more authority, and the more you’ll want to earn a link from them.
How About The Brand Value?
This is where we can touch on some ancient philosophical modes of persuasion created by Aristotle, or what he called “artistic proofs” – ethos, pathos and logos. These are the root to all brand building. When you have all three working in unison, your brand’s value – either personal or business – will skyrocket.
In simplest terms, ethos means building credibility; pathos means persuading through emotions; and logos means persuading through logic. For this conversation, we’ll focus on ethos. The ultimate way to do this is through publishing a constant flow of content on your site in forms of blogs, and on third-party sites in terms of guest blogs and larger publications.
When quality content is published, it establishes credibility. The more in-depth you get on a subject within your industry, the more you’ll be known as an expert. Having expertise naturally builds your brand’s trust, which as a natural byproduct helps increase brand awareness.
This takes time, so the more aggressive you are in creating quality content, the faster you will build valuable brand awareness. It can take years to establish credibility as a brand, but once you do, there will be no stopping you.
Using the ethos approach means knowing all the jargon within your industry, and exploiting your expertise on whatever subject you are creating content about. Always remain unbiased and sound fair; let the others be the critics.
Concluding Thoughts
By publishing on a range of platforms, you’ll not only increase the value of your website’s SEO and brand, you’ll also be garnering much attention to your products or services. This type of content marketing is an underlying tactic to success – one that can push your brand well ahead of the competition.
But if you only have the bandwidth for one, publish a thought-leadership article on a major digital media outlet. Not only will that amplify your personal and business brand, it will also provide a link back to your website, adding a bit of SEO value.
