Content Curation & SEO: Myths and Realities - Webinar Recap

Posted in Exclusives By Pawan Deshpande
  • On Tuesday, Lee Odden from Top Rank Marketing and I presented a webinar entitled “The Myths and Realities of Content Curation and SEO” through the American Marketing Association (AMA). If you missed it, you can watch a webinar replay. Here’s a summary of the highlights of the webinar as summarized with selected tweets.
  • #AMACURATA “SEO starts with content”: dig magazines, newsletters, whitepapers, websites, microsites, press releases, blogs, video, etc.

    November 9, 2010 at 13:11
  • SEO or Search Engine Optimization starts with content. When people find you or your company online, they don’t actually find YOU or YOUR COMPANY as an entity. They find content about you or your company. The only way you will get found is through content.
  • When you create content that’s indexable by a search engine, whether it’s a digital magazine, newsletter, whitepaper, website, etc… you are creating content that will appear on search engines — and that’s the building block of SEO.
  • The problem is that for marketers to succeed, they need to create a lot of content. And they often cannot keep up these demands. If you are like most marketers, just look at your corporate blog. It’s probably stale and out of date.
  • For consumers, the problem is that there is too much content out there, and they spend too much time trying to find and filter relevant content, rather than consuming it.
  • From #amacurata - content curator finds, groups organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online

    November 9, 2010 at 13:19
  • Content curation is a way to continually publish relevant content on a specific topic. By curating content, as a marketer, you can publish more content more often. And for consumers, they now have a resource that’s up-to-date with the best and relevant content.
  • #AMACURATA Myth 1: Curated content = duplicate content = negative SEO. “Google will penalize me for publishing duplicate content”

    November 9, 2010 at 13:23
  • This is a myth that I have heard many times — almost every time I have given a talk on content curation.
  • Reality: In content curation, you only republish a small excerpt of content and not the whole original piece in full. Therefore, you are not duplicating content.
  • Reality: The more value-add you can publish in addition to the excerpt, the better off you will be with respect to SEO. For example, on digg.com, users embellish content with comments. On other curated sites, our customers add comments along with relevant quotes and article recommendations.
  • #AMACURATA Myth 2: Curation hurts SEO by linking out. “I’m helping other sites on the same topic gain PageRank while hurting myself.”

    November 9, 2010 at 13:33
  • Reality: Curation attracts inbound links. Digg.com had over 12,000,000 external links back in April of 2009. Yet they are one of the most well ranked sites on the internet because so many sites link to them as an information resource.

    The same is true on a smaller scale for many curation sites that marketers have deployed.
  • Reality: Curation can make you a thought leader. Over time, as you curate more and more relevant content, you will become a key resource for that specific topic or issue. As you become a thought leader, you will naturally become highly ranked for that industry term.
  • “Inbound PR” Kind of like uses “Inbound Marketing”. #amacurata

    November 9, 2010 at 13:37
  • As companies become thought leaders online by curating relevant content, some Curata customers have reported receiving “Inbound PR”. Rather than pitching outbound to journalists, over time they will come to you as an industry authority for commentary.
  • #AMACURATA Myth 3: Hosting curated content on a separate domain hurts SEO. (I.E. am I splitting my page rank in half?)

    November 9, 2010 at 13:38
  • Reality: Hosting on a separate domain increases your SEO footprint. By hosting your content on a different domain, you now can have multiple search results appear on a single search results page (one from your corporate site and one from your curated site). This also gives you an opportunity to bump down your competitors. 
  • Reality: A separate domain can make you more of an industry resource. Rather than hosting your content at mycompany.com, if you put your curated content at myindustrynews.com, you are more likely to be perceived as a credible thought leader on the industry versus a self-promotional vendor.
  • #AMACURATA Myth 4: Curating competitor content will drive away customers. (I’m guilty of believing this.)

    November 9, 2010 at 13:46
  • Reality: Curating competitor content let’s you capture their search volume. By including competitor content, you now are creating pages with their company and product names that are being indexed by Google. When prospects are doing research on your competitors, they now may come to you to learn about them on a site that you control.
  • Reality: Curating competitor content makes you more of a thought leader, helping your overall SEO. If you want to do well in SEO by attracting organic links by positioning yourself as a key industry resource, you will need to include competitor content. Without that content, people cannot rely on you as a key industry resource, undermining your SEO objectives.
  • Take away from AMA webinar on Content Curation - be relevant, and useful to your audience. Pervasive theme in Social Marketing #AMACURATA

    November 9, 2010 at 13:54
  • The take away is that you need content to do well in SEO. Curating content makes it easy for you to publish sufficient content. If you ensure that your content is relevant and useful to your audience, you will be perceived as a thought leader allowing you to do well with your overall SEO objectives.

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Pawan Deshpande

Pawan Deshpande is the founder and CEO of Curata, a Boston-based company offering content marketing software used by thousands of marketers around the world. He spearheaded the first-ever panel at SxSW on Content Marketing in 2011, and was a 2014 Finalist for MarketingProfs B2B Marketer of the Year. Pawan was an engineer at Microsoft and Google where he was awarded patents in social networking and machine learning. He previously attended MIT where his graduate thesis won top departmental and international awards. Pawan is also a blogger for The Huffington Post, the Content Marketing Institute, CMO.com, Forbes, Marketing Profs, and other technology and marketing publications. See Pawan Deshpande's full bio.