After spending hours lovingly crafting engaging, timely and thought-provoking content, it’s only right that you’ll want to squeeze every last drop of SEO goodness out of it. You host it on your blog and create an outreach strategy to share your masterpiece with the world — but could your content be doing more harm than good?

Duplicate content is defined as large chunks of content that are identical across different websites and domains. This proves problematic for Google, as it becomes difficult for the search engine to determine which domain to rank higher. As a result, your rankings could take a serious hit.

So, the question remains: to outreach or not to outreach? Mediaworks investigates…

 

Available audience

Online success rests heavily on having a solid understanding of your audience. If you don’t know what users want, like and need, how will you ever give them the content they crave?

Different platforms offer varying levels of outreach potential:

* On-site blog — the amount of traffic your blog receives will depend on a number of factors, including the quality of the content you are pushing out and how well-known your brand is. Generally speaking, blog content will largely help you to reach your current customer base.

* Niche sites — Niche sites can be a great platform for those with a specialist service offering. For example, those in the engineering field may connect with their audience via heavily technical sites and forums.

* User-generated platforms — Sites like YouTube offer great reach for user-generated content, helping to get niche topics in front of a wider audience.

* Major media sites — Regarded as the Holy Grail of outreach, large media sites like The Guardian and The Huffington Post help brands reach a whole new audience.

 

Decisions, decisions

With so many routes available and increasing competition online, it’s important to make the right decisions to ensure your content achieves maximum impact.

Before hosting content on your own blog, you should ask yourself if you can realistically rank for the topic. Popular keywords are highly competitive, so you may find it difficult to topple an industry leader off the back of a generic piece about ladies shoes, for example.

Utilising long-tail search phrases in your title can be extremely beneficial. While the average monthly search volumes may be reduced, people who search for these phrases are usually further in the buying cycle and are more likely to convert. As a result, they can actually be more beneficial than generic searchers.

By successfully targeting carefully considered keywords, you can enjoy a steady stream of visitors many months down the line. Because of this, you should ensure the biggest and best version of your content is hosted on your site — after all, you’re the expert.

 

Going off-road

How often do you stumble across a great piece of content and wonder why the share count is so low? Often, it’s because the site has chosen an incorrect medium. If your blog has a relatively small audience, you may want to consider amplifying your content via a third-party site.

For example, while your in-depth article about subsea cabling may go relatively unnoticed on your own blog, it can reach a huge audience of like-minded people on a dedicated engineering website.

Where possible, use cross-domain canonical tags that link back to the original source to make it clear to Google that your original piece is the most authoritative.

 

The end is nigh?

So you’ve uploaded the post to your blog and it’s been featured on The Telegraph but have you really got all you can from these morsels of great content? In short, no.

Repurposing your content will not only help you connect with your audience further, it can increase the number of links to your initial blog post, helping you to climb the rankings. But what do we mean by repurposing content?

Take your subsea cabling article. You’ve found a great snippet of news about how sharks are damaging undersea cables. You decide to write a piece about it for outreach, referencing your original article. By doing so, you increase the authority of the original piece, while reminding new readers of its existence.