SEO
How To Repurpose Long-Form Content Into Supplementary Content
Everyone knows good content needs to serve a purpose. Whether it’s informative, persuasive, or awareness-focused, every word on your website should have a clear goal it’s trying to achieve.
But there’s so much more to the content on your website than just a body copy and/or a flashy video.
Every website also has an unsung hero, playing the Kato to the main content’s Green Hornet, Penny to its Inspector Gadget, Groot to its Star Lord. Of course, we’re talking about the supplemental content.
Not familiar with the term? Don’t worry. Many marketers aren’t.
Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines describe it as content that “contributes to a good user experience on the page, but does not directly help the page achieve its purpose. (Supplementary Content) is controlled by webmasters and is an important part of the user experience.”
In other words, it is any content that makes it easier for visitors to use your webpage. It can be navigational buttons, embedded content, header menus, or even user-generated content.
It doesn’t have to add value to your main content or directly serve the page’s purpose, but it should be relevant.
From a pure UX point of view, it’s pretty apparent why supplementary content is essential.
But you may not have considered its role in supporting, promoting, and adding value to your big content.
In this piece, we’ll take a closer look at both big and supplementary content and discuss creative ways you can use the latter to support the former.
What Is Big Content, And Why Is It Valuable?
You don’t have to be from Texas to appreciate bigger sizes. Not only is it great to get extra fries with your combo meal or unleash the power of a huge F250 (current gas prices notwithstanding), but in marketing, bigger is usually better.
You probably already know about big data and how you can use improved technology to target with extreme precision. But are you familiar with big content?
There’s a lot of discussion about what is and isn’t big content, but for our purposes, we’re going to define it as a content format that requires more time and effort to produce than ordinary content.
For our purposes, we will use it for long-form (over 2,000 words) blog posts.
If you’ve been in the blogging business for a while, you’ve probably noticed this number climbing steadily upwards.
Between 2011 and 2015, most blogs were between 991 and 1,111 words per post. By 2019, that had climbed to 1,231-1,351 words.
Wix’s 2022 study offered a more comprehensive range between 1,500 and 2,500, with the sweet spot landing at 2,450.
And, of course, big content isn’t restricted to just blog posts; it also comes in whitepapers, ebooks, case studies, comprehensive guides, and more.
So, we aren’t limiting the definition of long-form content to blogs. Instead, it’s the example we’ll explore in this post because:
- Fresh content is a proven way to drive traffic to your website.
- 90% of marketers used articles and blog posts in their content marketing strategy.
When it comes to long-form content, blogging is where it’s at.
So Why Use Big Content Pieces?
Aligning your content calendar around big content pieces gives your content marketing a campaign-based structure.
It enables you to focus your efforts and resources on one area, maximizing the value of each piece.
The massive value in properly executed big content makes it the ideal foundation on which you can layer supplemental content for the most significant ROI.
Capitalize on this opportunity to outperform competitors. You’re not just competing against other businesses like yours for eyes and attention in the SERPs, though.
You need to outperform every type of publisher – bloggers, news outlets, social content, and more – in SERPs dominated by product listings, videos, and other multimedia content.
According to Orbit Media, the average blog post in 2021 was 1,416 words, a 75% increase from 2014.
You can see in the chart below that blog posts have been trending towards long-form over the last couple of years.
So let’s be clear: The bar is high. Content needs to be longer than ever to perform optimally.
Now let’s see what all of this looks like in action and how you can use supplemental content to create more substantial and more productive content campaigns of your own.
Embedded Content Enhances Your BIG Content Object
Supplemental content pieces enrich your main content object (the long-form blog post) but are also optimizable and can be shareable.
Lots look at a few types that add to the big piece but also have value on their own.
Mini Graphics & Image Cards
Embedded images help break up the dense text, visually tell your story, and are also helpful in SEO.
For supplemental content, you need to go beyond static photos or stock images to mini graphics or other storytelling aids with as much utility as visual appeal.
Take this image, for example:
The graphic adds utility to the larger post, but you could share this directly to Facebook, and it would also stand on its own.
Here’s another example. A juice press brand has created image “cards” as an alternative format for presenting information about healthy city rankings.
In both cases, the author could have presented the information in text-only.
The extra effort it takes to create images as supplemental content gives you an entirely new shareable piece of content to share on social media and help expand your blog’s footprint in the SERPs (via Image Search results and images that Google pulls into regular SERPs).
It’s fairly easy to resize these images for optimal display on various networks.
Using Photoshop or Canva, you can resize your images for Facebook (940 x 788 px), Instagram (1080 x 1080 px), Twitter (1024 x 512 px), and more.
Don’t forget to add them to your Google Business Profile albums.
Check out 12 Important Image Tips You Need to Know for more on image optimization.
Embedded Social Posts
Adding posts from Instagram, Facebook or Twitter is an easy way to add an element of interactivity and visual interest to your long-form blog content.
Embedding your own post rather than a static image promotes your Instagram presence to your blog readers, as in this example from our own Instagram:
Or embed posts from others to provide social validation of a point you’re making, cite them as a source of information, etc.
Embedded Video
YouTube is the second most-visited website, with users spending an average of 23.7 hours per month on the platform.
You don’t need a huge production budget to publish YouTube-worthy videos, either.
Authentic videos tend to resonate better with YouTube audiences than commercial productions.
In addition to the amazing content they bring to your blog, YouTube videos can dramatically improve your visibility in search.
How else would a smaller business like Runtastic (a running coach and certified fitness trainer) dominate Walmart in the SERPs as in the above example?
Calls To Action As Supplemental Content
Maybe your reader is really into the content and wants to read or skim to the end before deciding on their next step.
But maybe not.
Always give your audience the option to take the next logical step. Using buttons rather than plain text makes your CTA an appealing element that helps break up the text.
You can even design your own “ads” to run inside your content. Think of what external ads inside blog content look like:
Like the example above from here at SEJ, ads inside your content are a valuable commodity because they work.
But if you’re running a business, you don’t want to look spammy or send traffic to someone else.
Use this space and apply the same design principles to drive traffic to your own content, products/services, or offers. Use it to give visitors the option of taking that next step if they’re ready.
You don’t want to spam your visitors; instead, use this space to offer utility and added value.
Complementary Content That Supports Your Big Content
This is the content that appears elsewhere on the page. Think in terms of the overall user experience you’re offering:
- If I like the content in the larger piece, is there a clear next step I can take without having to look for it?
- Does everything on this page support me in my journey of making a decision and taking action?
- Does all page content speak directly to my needs?
What’s In Your Sidebar?
On the desktop, your sidebar is a valuable piece of real estate. Are you using it to support users in taking their next steps?
Use your sidebar to feature a lead generation piece that will help the reader access more in-depth information, even as they self-identify you as a certain type of buyer.
Anything you put in the sidebar appears on every blog page, so make it good. There are the basics you don’t want to overlook: search functionality, RSS feed subscription, and links to your social media accounts.
Then consider a few other intelligent ways to make use of this space:
- A (very) short tagline or another critical brand message.
- For ecommerce sites, key conversion elements like your shipping options or product guarantee.
- Featured content: your most popular or highest converting pieces.
- Any lead generation offers (a free trial, demo, etc.).
- Upcoming webinars or other events that give users a chance to interact.
(Sidebar content might appear below your larger content piece for mobile users. This is why the embedded calls to action we looked at above are more important than ever.)
Pop-Ups
The misuse and abuse of pop-ups has given them a bit of a bad rap, but that shouldn’t keep you from using them to supplement your best content.
Again, it’s all about adding value for your audience and using supplemental content to help them in discovery, decision-making, and taking the next steps.
Making It All Work Together
The point we’ve been trying to make should be clear by now. I mean, it’s in the name: supplemental, meaning “provided in addition to what is already present or available to complete or enhance it.”
In other words, your supplemental content should work hand-in-hand with your main content, with each piece corresponding to a specific need and pushing the customer another step forward in the sales and marketing funnel.
Of course, this is why we suggested you use a campaign-based structure way back in beginning.
By planning ahead and having a shared vision of what you want to accomplish, you can create pieces that complement each other, instead of trying to create a cohesive narrative around a bunch of disparate pieces.
In addition to moving your visitors along the customer journey and keeping everything focused on your goals and allows you to extend the lifespan of your big content pieces, sometimes by months.
By adding utility and interactivity to your main content, supplemental content helps you appeal to different types of visitors without muddying the waters of what you want the piece to accomplish.
Wherever that content appears on your website, you are looking at the big picture: How each element that user sees and interacts with supports their goals and your business goals as a result.
In this way, you might extend the life of a single concept – one large content object – by months.
You’ll significantly improve its efficacy, and most importantly, you’ll have content tailored to appeal to different types of consumers in their discovery, consideration, and conversion decision-making moments.
Questions? Fire away or share your own content planning tips in the comments.
Enhance the power of your main content by leveraging supplemental content to add interactivity, support the customer journey, and drive action.
More Resources:
Featured Image: ViDI Studio/Shutterstock
SEO
Measuring Content Impact Across The Customer Journey
Understanding the impact of your content at every touchpoint of the customer journey is essential – but that’s easier said than done. From attracting potential leads to nurturing them into loyal customers, there are many touchpoints to look into.
So how do you identify and take advantage of these opportunities for growth?
Watch this on-demand webinar and learn a comprehensive approach for measuring the value of your content initiatives, so you can optimize resource allocation for maximum impact.
You’ll learn:
- Fresh methods for measuring your content’s impact.
- Fascinating insights using first-touch attribution, and how it differs from the usual last-touch perspective.
- Ways to persuade decision-makers to invest in more content by showcasing its value convincingly.
With Bill Franklin and Oliver Tani of DAC Group, we unravel the nuances of attribution modeling, emphasizing the significance of layering first-touch and last-touch attribution within your measurement strategy.
Check out these insights to help you craft compelling content tailored to each stage, using an approach rooted in first-hand experience to ensure your content resonates.
Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or new to content measurement, this webinar promises valuable insights and actionable tactics to elevate your SEO game and optimize your content initiatives for success.
View the slides below or check out the full webinar for all the details.
SEO
How to Find and Use Competitor Keywords
Competitor keywords are the keywords your rivals rank for in Google’s search results. They may rank organically or pay for Google Ads to rank in the paid results.
Knowing your competitors’ keywords is the easiest form of keyword research. If your competitors rank for or target particular keywords, it might be worth it for you to target them, too.
There is no way to see your competitors’ keywords without a tool like Ahrefs, which has a database of keywords and the sites that rank for them. As far as we know, Ahrefs has the biggest database of these keywords.
How to find all the keywords your competitor ranks for
- Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Enter your competitor’s domain
- Go to the Organic keywords report
The report is sorted by traffic to show you the keywords sending your competitor the most visits. For example, Mailchimp gets most of its organic traffic from the keyword “mailchimp.”
Since you’re unlikely to rank for your competitor’s brand, you might want to exclude branded keywords from the report. You can do this by adding a Keyword > Doesn’t contain filter. In this example, we’ll filter out keywords containing “mailchimp” or any potential misspellings:
If you’re a new brand competing with one that’s established, you might also want to look for popular low-difficulty keywords. You can do this by setting the Volume filter to a minimum of 500 and the KD filter to a maximum of 10.
How to find keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t
- Go to Competitive Analysis
- Enter your domain in the This target doesn’t rank for section
- Enter your competitor’s domain in the But these competitors do section
Hit “Show keyword opportunities,” and you’ll see all the keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t.
You can also add a Volume and KD filter to find popular, low-difficulty keywords in this report.
How to find keywords multiple competitors rank for, but you don’t
- Go to Competitive Analysis
- Enter your domain in the This target doesn’t rank for section
- Enter the domains of multiple competitors in the But these competitors do section
You’ll see all the keywords that at least one of these competitors ranks for, but you don’t.
You can also narrow the list down to keywords that all competitors rank for. Click on the Competitors’ positions filter and choose All 3 competitors:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Enter your competitor’s domain
- Go to the Paid keywords report
This report shows you the keywords your competitors are targeting via Google Ads.
Since your competitor is paying for traffic from these keywords, it may indicate that they’re profitable for them—and could be for you, too.
You know what keywords your competitors are ranking for or bidding on. But what do you do with them? There are basically three options.
1. Create pages to target these keywords
You can only rank for keywords if you have content about them. So, the most straightforward thing you can do for competitors’ keywords you want to rank for is to create pages to target them.
However, before you do this, it’s worth clustering your competitor’s keywords by Parent Topic. This will group keywords that mean the same or similar things so you can target them all with one page.
Here’s how to do that:
- Export your competitor’s keywords, either from the Organic Keywords or Content Gap report
- Paste them into Keywords Explorer
- Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab
For example, MailChimp ranks for keywords like “what is digital marketing” and “digital marketing definition.” These and many others get clustered under the Parent Topic of “digital marketing” because people searching for them are all looking for the same thing: a definition of digital marketing. You only need to create one page to potentially rank for all these keywords.
2. Optimize existing content by filling subtopics
You don’t always need to create new content to rank for competitors’ keywords. Sometimes, you can optimize the content you already have to rank for them.
How do you know which keywords you can do this for? Try this:
- Export your competitor’s keywords
- Paste them into Keywords Explorer
- Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab
- Look for Parent Topics you already have content about
For example, if we analyze our competitor, we can see that seven keywords they rank for fall under the Parent Topic of “press release template.”
If we search our site, we see that we already have a page about this topic.
If we click the caret and check the keywords in the cluster, we see keywords like “press release example” and “press release format.”
To rank for the keywords in the cluster, we can probably optimize the page we already have by adding sections about the subtopics of “press release examples” and “press release format.”
3. Target these keywords with Google Ads
Paid keywords are the simplest—look through the report and see if there are any relevant keywords you might want to target, too.
For example, Mailchimp is bidding for the keyword “how to create a newsletter.”
If you’re ConvertKit, you may also want to target this keyword since it’s relevant.
If you decide to target the same keyword via Google Ads, you can hover over the magnifying glass to see the ads your competitor is using.
You can also see the landing page your competitor directs ad traffic to under the URL column.
Learn more
Check out more tutorials on how to do competitor keyword analysis:
SEO
Google Confirms Links Are Not That Important
Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed at a recent search marketing conference that Google needs very few links, adding to the growing body of evidence that publishers need to focus on other factors. Gary tweeted confirmation that he indeed say those words.
Background Of Links For Ranking
Links were discovered in the late 1990’s to be a good signal for search engines to use for validating how authoritative a website is and then Google discovered soon after that anchor text could be used to provide semantic signals about what a webpage was about.
One of the most important research papers was Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment by Jon M. Kleinberg, published around 1998 (link to research paper at the end of the article). The main discovery of this research paper is that there is too many web pages and there was no objective way to filter search results for quality in order to rank web pages for a subjective idea of relevance.
The author of the research paper discovered that links could be used as an objective filter for authoritativeness.
Kleinberg wrote:
“To provide effective search methods under these conditions, one needs a way to filter, from among a huge collection of relevant pages, a small set of the most “authoritative” or ‘definitive’ ones.”
This is the most influential research paper on links because it kick-started more research on ways to use links beyond as an authority metric but as a subjective metric for relevance.
Objective is something factual. Subjective is something that’s closer to an opinion. The founders of Google discovered how to use the subjective opinions of the Internet as a relevance metric for what to rank in the search results.
What Larry Page and Sergey Brin discovered and shared in their research paper (The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine – link at end of this article) was that it was possible to harness the power of anchor text to determine the subjective opinion of relevance from actual humans. It was essentially crowdsourcing the opinions of millions of website expressed through the link structure between each webpage.
What Did Gary Illyes Say About Links In 2024?
At a recent search conference in Bulgaria, Google’s Gary Illyes made a comment about how Google doesn’t really need that many links and how Google has made links less important.
Patrick Stox tweeted about what he heard at the search conference:
” ‘We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years we’ve made links less important.’ @methode #serpconf2024″
Google’s Gary Illyes tweeted a confirmation of that statement:
“I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that”
Why Links Matter Less
The initial state of anchor text when Google first used links for ranking purposes was absolutely non-spammy, which is why it was so useful. Hyperlinks were primarily used as a way to send traffic from one website to another website.
But by 2004 or 2005 Google was using statistical analysis to detect manipulated links, then around 2004 “powered-by” links in website footers stopped passing anchor text value, and by 2006 links close to the words “advertising” stopped passing link value, links from directories stopped passing ranking value and by 2012 Google deployed a massive link algorithm called Penguin that destroyed the rankings of likely millions of websites, many of which were using guest posting.
The link signal eventually became so bad that Google decided in 2019 to selectively use nofollow links for ranking purposes. Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed that the change to nofollow was made because of the link signal.
Google Explicitly Confirms That Links Matter Less
In 2023 Google’s Gary Illyes shared at a PubCon Austin that links were not even in the top 3 of ranking factors. Then in March 2024, coinciding with the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update, Google updated their spam policies documentation to downplay the importance of links for ranking purposes.
The documentation previously said:
“Google uses links as an important factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”
The update to the documentation that mentioned links was updated to remove the word important.
Links are not just listed as just another factor:
“Google uses links as a factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”
At the beginning of April Google’s John Mueller advised that there are more useful SEO activities to engage on than links.
Mueller explained:
“There are more important things for websites nowadays, and over-focusing on links will often result in you wasting your time doing things that don’t make your website better overall”
Finally, Gary Illyes explicitly said that Google needs very few links to rank webpages and confirmed it.
I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that
— Gary 鯨理/경리 Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) April 19, 2024
Why Google Doesn’t Need Links
The reason why Google doesn’t need many links is likely because of the extent of AI and natural language undertanding that Google uses in their algorithms. Google must be highly confident in its algorithm to be able to explicitly say that they don’t need it.
Way back when Google implemented the nofollow into the algorithm there were many link builders who sold comment spam links who continued to lie that comment spam still worked. As someone who started link building at the very beginning of modern SEO (I was the moderator of the link building forum at the #1 SEO forum of that time), I can say with confidence that links have stopped playing much of a role in rankings beginning several years ago, which is why I stopped about five or six years ago.
Read the research papers
Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment – Jon M. Kleinberg (PDF)
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
Featured Image by Shutterstock/RYO Alexandre
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