A Quick Guide to Great Content

Travis Bliffen
by Travis Bliffen 16 Jun, 2015

As I am sure most of you have heard, content is a key component of the SEO equation. Shares, links and engagement are all centered on having a piece of content that adds value to the readers.

 

Today, we are going to take a look at how you can stop guessing and start writing content that people want to read, share and link to.

 

The tool we are going to talk about today is Buzzsumo, a tool that allows you to view the most popular content on a website or by keyword.

 

 

As you can see above, this tool allows you to sort by the number of social shares, view links to different articles or even share the most popular content. In the example above I searched by URL. Using that function of a tool is a great way to come up with content topics and titles that will be well-received when reaching out to other sites for guest posting opportunities.

 

 

In this example, you can see that we pulled up the most popular posts based on a keyword and sorted them by social shares. This technique works great when brainstorming for content on your own website. The "view backlinks" and "view sharers" option comes in very handy when it comes time to promote your content since you will have a list of people who are likely to share or link to your content. Here is what that looks like in the tool.

 

 

As you can see, one of the posts returned for "content marketing tips" has nine referring domains. All you need to do is find the contact information for those sites and you will have nine people to reach out to about your new content, repeat the process for the top 10-20 results and you will have a sizeable and well-targeted outreach list.

 

We are going to take it one step further though to increase the likelihood of our content getting noticed by looking at who shared similar content.

 

 

Here are just a few people who shared the above post. As will the link list, this list gives you a very specific group of people to connect with via social and share your content with. 

 

As promised, I showed you one quick and effective way to identify popular content ideas and quickly build a targeted list of people to share your content with. 

 

Over to you

 

Have you ever used Buzzsumo? How did it work for you? Do you think there is a better tool for content research?