To stay relevant on the Internet and to prevent your website from becoming a ‘static / outdated brochure’ of your company, you need good quality and relevant content.
But how do you ‘produce’ good content?
There are basically two categories of good content:
- Created Content
- Curated Content
The best content is of course the unique content that you (or one of your community members) creates: This content showcases your expertise, positions you as Though Leader’, makes you as a person or company relevant to potential customers.
The more Created Content the better?
Yes, but only as long as the Created Content adds value to your visitor.
So always write with your potential customer’s challenge in mind: what are his / her challenges that your services / products could be the answer for? Before you create content ask yourself “what does my potential customer search for via Google on the Internet”. This will help you think like a customer and write in the language of a customer.
But there is also a lot of good content out there from ‘competitors’. You can simply try to ignore this content. Ignoring it and keeping your fingers crossed, hoping that your potential customers find you before they find the content of the competitor.
But why should you do that? Remember: you are the expert! You are the Thought Leader!
So why not just ‘use’ the competitors content and turn it into value you provide to your website visitors?
Curated Content?
That is where ‘Curated Content’ comes in.
Curated Content is content from another website on your website. Curated Content is made relevant (read: added with value) for your websites visitors. Using Curated Content in a mix with Created Content strengthens your position as expert and Though Leader: you are not only found on Google with your own content, but also on the content (curated by you) of your competitors!
If you are running a Joomla! Site, producing Curated Content is easy as 1-2-3 with the ochGotNews component:
1. Add why the article you found is relevant;
2. add the link to the source article;
3. fetch the article’s information (title, description, image)… That’s it!
Do not mistake Curated Content with Duplicated content!
Duplicating content is really a NoNo. When duplicating content you do not add value for your visitors. Next time they read a duplicated blog they might as well directly go to the source of that blog. That is not what you want!
Duplicating content is also a big NoNo when it comes to your Search Engine index.
You create a ‘problem’ for Google. Which page should Google show its customer (a person who is searching): your duplicated content or the original content.
The Google algorithm will recognize that the content is the same (even if you have made some changes to the text). It will display your duplicated content lower on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) then the original.
If you have a lot of duplicated content your search result may even completely disappear from the SERP. The ‘penalty’ is not only for the duplicated content, but for all content from your website!
You know you are on being penalized by Google when your website links are ‘behind’ the following Google message and link:
“In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 10 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.”
So staying relevant with your companies website requires work.
By using Curated Content in a mix with Created Content you are able to bring the workload down whilst still adding value for your visitors.
Using ochGotNews will make your ‘life’ a lot easier: especially when you leverage the tool to also have community members (or coworkers) easily add Curated Content.
Remember: when it comes to Google and #SEO > "Content IS king!"