Content Marketing in Modern SEO

In today’s SEO strategies content marketing holds an undisputed king position followed by relevant social signals. Long gone are times when people could just slap some low quality content on their blogs, over-stuff it with keywords, buy a few thousands of keyword-optimized cheap paid incoming links from questionable sites and enjoy first page rankings due courtesy of Google and other search engines.

Short Summary of

the Linking Strategy in SEO

Since then the link factor has been transformed through thousands of permutations and evolved into socially-oriented and authority-dominated search parameter. In fact, it’s a whole series of different parameters.

However, if you’re not a SEO expert, you can use the below sentence as a simplified recipe for the entire linking component of the search algorithms: “share your content though social networks, preferably through social influencers, find the way to get keyword-rich links from authority sites, and tastefully cross-link the content on your own site or blog, but don’t overdo it”.

The Problem of Frequent Content Updates

The recipe takes care of the linking component. Yet, as mentioned earlier, linking is now secondary to high quality content. And it’s strongly preferable that this content is updated frequently. Otherwise it’ll be difficult to rank high, especially for competitive keywords.

And here lies a problem.

First, you might not be a good writer. Second, you might not be an expert on the topics covered on your website (after all, smart marketers identify money making opportunities but they are not necessarily subject experts in the targeted niche markets). And third, you might not have enough time for frequent updates.
Sure, you can hire article writers or find guest writers or purchase PLR content and publish it with minor revisions. All those solutions have pros and cons.

If you ran dozens of blogs in different niches, it’s hard to find a writer who will be proficient even in a few topics. Writer who is good in reviewing apps and mobile marketing might know nothing about fashion, for example. So you have to hire a lot of different writers.

Guest writers are a great content source, but not very reliable – you don’t know when an expert would decide to write for you and when you’ll have a blank spot in the publishing schedule.

And PLR content… Well, it’s not unique. And if the majority of your site will consist of the duplicate content, you will be penalized by search engines.

The Difference Between Duplicate Content and Curated Content

However, let’s not confuse duplicate content with curated content. While search engines frown upon duplicate content, they love curated content. So what is the difference between the two types of content?

When you curate content, you take different pieces of highly relevant content from different authority sources and you put them together in one readable and informative piece.

If you take time to research the content and combine 5-6 pieces of information from different sources in easy-to read and logical order, there is a good chance that the resulted piece of content will be considered original.

Of course to increase the probability even further you should add your thoughts about the pieces you curate at the beginning, end and possibly somewhere in the middle of the article. Make it media-rich, add images and videos, and you’ll truly create a unique content.

So content curation is a possible answer to the frequent content update request from search engines. It takes less time to creating a content curated post than writing your own article yet it provides value to your readers and is welcomed by search engines.
The only problem is you have to go through different sources, analyze the material, try to find relevant videos and images… Though less time-consuming than writing your own content, it’s still a rather long process.

The Excellent Solution for Content Marketing

Though there are many content curation and video publishing plugins that can help you to speed up the process of publishing and turn it into an easily accomplished daily routine (instead of agonizing necessity to come up with your own content on a regular basis), they all fell short in one way or another.

Content sources are usually limited to Google news and Google Blog Search. For video curation you often have to buy a separate software or plugin. More often than not your license is limited to one site and for a multi-site license you’ll be charged arm and leg… And usually you have to pay a monthly or yearly fee for using the software…

I feel your pain. Here is a great news. Today the Ultimate Content Curation Solution was released. It’s not new, it’s been around for over a year now, and it’s been utilized by 6500+ members to discover, review, and publish curated content.

It’s called CurationSoft 2.0 and it curates content from multiple sources:

-  Google Blog Search (popular blogs)
-  Blekko Blog Search
-  Blekko News
-  Twitter (status updates)
-  YouTube (video)
-  Google News (mainstream news)
-  Flickr (images)
-  Wikipedia (wiki content)

and it also helps with link building from authority sources…

However, it’s never been available at such a low price (50% discount for 7 days) and probably will never be again. Plus, they usually charge users a yearly fee (as everybody else in the content curation industry). The yearly fee is dropped for 7 days. So you can get this software free and clear and use it forever. The team behind this Content Marketing and Curation Software is really good with updates too.

Go grab it now and then post your thank you comments below.

If you search on Google for the keywords related to local businesses you will often find that top positions are occupied by results from Wikipedia, online yellow pages, about.com or other similar authority sites. The obvious explanation would be that those sites rank well because they have a lot of relevant content, are regularly updated, have numerous keyword-rich back links from other authority sites and also meet the changed layout requirement and other algorithm changes that have been lately so frequently introduced by Google.

All those are good pointers to get your sites rank higher. But let’s look at this situation through the eyes of small and mid-size business owners.

Brief History of Google Search Updates

During the past 2 years alone there were 21 panda updates, 3 penguin updates, a couple of page layout updates, Venice update, EMD (exact match domain) update, and a few other significant algorithm changes that don’t have the word “update” in the name yet also resulted in a considerable SERPs (Search Engine Result Page) shift.

What are the chances that businesses which don’t have SEO experts on staff are able to comply with the updates and modify their sites accordingly? None. Zip. Nada.

You might argue that there is no need to closely follow all those requirements since Google always says that site should not be optimized for search algorithm but rather for visitors. Presumably, if you give visitors what they want, you should be able to rank well, right? Wrong.

Positive and Negative Search Ranking Factors

While some algorithm changes seem to support this theory, others don’t. Sure, the artificial back links, link trading, publishing of duplicate content, thin content sites, page layouts over-populated with ads, especially above the fold, – all those factors have the logical right to negatively affect the search engine rankings. In other words, I agree that it makes sense to apply these filters to penalize the over-zealous web masters.

There are also factors that positively affect the rankings. Such as the quality and quantity of naturally acquired back links and AuthorRank. If back links are natural it doesn’t mean they could be acquired without considerable effort. Only a small percentage of these links is natural in the true sense of this word. People read the content, they like it, they want to share it with others, and they link to it using relevant keywords.

Other links, though they might be natural and high quality, are acquired through tedious work – comments in a blogosphere, engagements with influencers in social networks, building relationships with influential bloggers, etc.

AuthorRank is a relatively new rank factor that takes into consideration the content quality and influence of the author who is writing the article. It’s more intuitive and less arbitrary than a PageRank and probably will serve as its replacement in the nearest future.

Unfortunately there is a little chance for businesses to take advantage of positive factors without SEO expert and established content writers. Thus, small business owners will always be at disadvantage. It might seem unfair to apply these filters, but I have to admit that they are required to identify the authority sites.

Frequency of Content Updates and SERPs Rankings

However there is at least one factor that requires a considerable re-evaluation. I am talking about the frequency of content updates.

If the site is not updated frequently it doesn’t mean it provides poor experience for its visitors. For some small businesses frequent content updates are not justified by their business model.

Let’s take a look at a restaurant’s web site, for example. Visitors come to such site to find out what looks good on a menu, and to make reservations. If this information is provided then site serves its purpose. Restaurant only needs to update its content when there are changes in the menu or location. Sure, some other updates could be posted from time to time such as discounts or reward programs, but in general frequent content updates are not necessary in the restaurant business.

Large Companies versus Small Businesses in SEO

For other small businesses frequent content updates are justified. But it doesn’t mean they have a sufficient budget to keep extra staff (such as content creator) and SEO expert to advice on the right keywords to target. At the very least a content creator is required with basic SEO knowledge.

Big companies have marketing departments. SEO experts, content creators and social media managers are regular members of marketing teams. For them it’s easy to comply with a frequent content update requirement imposed by Google.

As you can see, the rankings odds are significantly skewed in favor of big businesses. Google tries to present the most relevant search results to its users. Yet the small business web sites, however relevant they might be, especially for local searches, often find themselves far behind of large authority sites.

(If you can’t afford to hire SEO experts, content creators and social media manager, but realize that your business desperately needs help of these professionals, take a look at Digital Marketing Services, this just might be a salvation for your small or mid-size business.)

The relevance of search results related to small business terms, especially local ones, could be increased if the weight of a content frequency factor in a search algorithm is adjusted.