3 Ways SEO Professionals Use Content Distribution as Part of Their Organic Search Strategy
Content Distribution is the act of promoting content in one or all of the following ways:
Earned Content Distribution: This is when third-parties share or publish your content through social media, guest posts, media coverage or product reviews.
Owned Content Distribution: This includes publishing content to web properties that belong to you, like your blog, email newsletter, or social media profiles.
Paid Content Distribution: As the name implies, this is through paid channels, often using a pay-per-clickadvertising model.
Here’s a handy diagram from the great content marketers over at Buffer that visualizes this concept quite nicely:
In many ways content distribution has become the new “link building”. While the inbound link still drives Google’s algorithm, the blending of social and semantic signals has made the quest for page one rankings vastly more complex and difficult to game with traditional link building tactics.
The one thing that remains constant is the need for content promotion. Ranking your content in the SERPs for high volume competitive keywords is nearly impossible without a solid content distribution strategy.
Here are 3 content distribution tactics SEO professionals use to climb the elusive Google ranks:
1. Build Co-Occurrence and Co-Citation Relevance with Earned Media Content Distribution
The importance of high authority relevant third-parties publishing content about you or you publishing on these sites yourself is taken to a new level when you consider how Google’s algorithms work even when the site does NOT link to you with a hyperlink.
The two concepts that drive this part of Google’s algorithm are called co-occurrence and co-citation.
Co-occurence – Co-occurence is the presence, frequency, and proximity of similar keywords across various websites. This includes keywords that are topically related, but not exactly the same.
Co-citation – Co-citation is when one website or brand is mentioned (not linked) by two different sources.
Here’s a nice diagrams from Jayson DeMers, Founder and CEO of AudienceBloom, that explain the concept of co-citation:
Co-occurence and co-citation basically emphasize the importance of obtaining earned media on authority publications and from social influencers that are relevant to the niche of your target keywords. For example, if you’re a marketing SaaS company, guest posting on MarketingLand where related marketing concepts and brands are discussed it’s probably going to help with your marketing keyword rankings more than a general business website like Inc.
Because Outbrain is mentioned so frequently in the context of “websites,” we were able to rank #1 on Google for the keyphrase “how to make your website look professional”, without doing any link building at all. As you can see below Google likes the content so much they’ve decided to include a snippet of its contents in the Knowledge Graphbox.
