Ready to Up Your SEO External Linking? Experts Share How To Create Content That Ranks
You can’t advance in SEO if you don’t have high-quality original content — the king of SEO nowadays, even blurring into a new discipline: digital PR. But how can you create attention-grabbing and educational content without a round-the-clock editorial staff?
We have a solution: You can build your content strategy by hiring a freelancer. Storyhunter is home to thousands of journalists telling compelling, researched stories for brands and major media companies like Hearst, CNN, and The New York Times, through our network.
We asked SEO experts for more specific tips on creating content. Read on to get exclusive insight.
Identify the content type that works best for your business
Avoid the “build it, and they will come approach,” says Weights & Biases Lead SEO Dave Davies, who focuses instead on short-term strategies that lead to a higher SEO ranking for blog content.
“Each site and niche is different in this regard, and so I suggest looking at your niche as a whole and finding out what type(s) of content gets links,” Dave told us. “In our case, tutorials work, as does news. So, we produce both frequently and are rewarded with high-value natural links.”
But make sure you are sharing your content across social media and paid search so people can find it in the first place, Dave said. You also need to build content within your “weight class” for link building: “Make sure you’re targeting terms at a competition level you can reasonably expect to rank in, or it won’t be found to be linked.”
Every business doesn’t have a team of writers who can constantly produce high-value blog content. If this is the case, your business can use platforms like Storyhunter to discover and hire writers well-versed in your niche. For example, we at Storyhunter wanted to start a series but didn’t have the in-house capacity. What did we do? We turned to our network to hire freelancer Bill Arceneux, an independent film critic, to tell this story about a streaming platform conceived as a place for films by people with disabilities. We published the article during National Disability Awareness Month, increasing its relevance and chance of being linked.
Focus on topics, not keywords
While content type matters, so do the topics you choose to cover. “The copywriters of old would kill for the tools that SEOs use these days for ‘keyword research,’ but the thing is, it’s not about keywords, but about topics,” says Jeff Ferguson, the CEO at digital marketing agency Amplitude Digital. “Create more content for topics that your target audience is actually looking for in the first place.”
Jeff says his favorite tool is AnswerThePublic. “The site literally tells us what questions people are asking — inspiration for days! While Answer The Public doesn’t provide the number of searches for a given question, you can always feed that information back into a more standard keyword tool to help you prioritize your creation schedule.”
Once you’ve identified your topics, you can check who is linking to the top content for those results, Jeff says. “And then present your new content to them as ‘new and improved!’
Promote your amazing content
The basis for building your SEO strategy is creating out-of-this-world content, which includes choosing the most engaging way to showcase your content and topics relevant to your audience. All of this sets you up for the next step: Digital PR.
“Digital PR is all about creating content that tells stories that are so good that journalists actually want to cover and link to them,” according to this SemRush blog post.
Digital PR is the chance for your brand to earn valuable links from topically relevant, high-quality publications. Plus, it helps position your business as an authority in a particular field: “Top-tier publications in your sector that link to you as experts on a particular topic are a strong signal that you’re a voice worth listening to, especially when this comes at scale.”
Digital PR is on the rise. Now is the time to jump on board and get in front of even wider audiences.
By Shivan Sarna, Head of Stories
