Everything You Need to Know About Content Syndication

Quick Navigation

• What Is Content Syndication?
• What Is Content Syndication’s Impact on SEO?
• Content Syndication Steps

If you regularly create and publish stellar content for your brand or company but aren’t seeing the traffic you’d like from it, it’s important to know that this is a very common problem for marketers. Thankfully, there are many things you can do to boost your traffic, one of which is content syndication.

Content syndication is valued in the marketing world due to its ability to improve an SEO strategy and boost online performance in a cost-effective way. Read on to learn about the ins and outs of content syndication and how to get started with this marketing strategy.

Image via Unsplash by glenncarstenspeters

What Is Content Syndication in Marketing?

Content syndication is a content marketing strategy where you republish a piece of your business’s digital content on another website or several other websites. You could have syndicated articles, videos, blog posts, or any other kind of web-based content. This form of content promotion is popular among companies as well as third-party publications because it allows the publication to provide new information to its visitors while the company promotes its brand.

The difference between content syndication and guest blogging, another similar form of content marketing, is that guest blogging involves creating brand-new content, while content syndication involves publishing an exact replica of content that was initially published by its source. By republishing your content on a third party’s website, you get free publicity and exposure while the other publication gets free content.

When a third party publishes syndicated content for a business, it will include a piece of text such as, “This article was originally published on [original publication with link] and has been republished here with the original writer’s permission.” This sentence can vary, but no matter what, it’s important to credit the original writer and to establish that it’s a republished piece to avoid duplication issues.

What Is Content Syndication’s Impact on SEO?

There is a fine line between content syndication and content duplication. While syndicating content can improve your overall brand awareness and online traffic, blatantly duplicating content can negatively impact your search engine optimization.

According to Google, it’s important to syndicate content carefully and strategically. Google’s search engine will always show the version of the content it believes is most relevant and appropriate for a user’s search intent. They also state that it’s important to ensure that each website where your content is syndicated should have a clear link back to the original article.

Another factor to consider is your website’s ranking compared to other sites. If the content you’re syndicating is especially high quality and relevant and you decide to have it published on a well-known site, that site could potentially outrank you for the content. This could also hurt you in terms of SEO because the other site will appear before yours for relevant searches in a search engine results page (SERP).

In short, it’s important to weigh the pros and cons of content syndication and to have a good understanding of the performance of other websites. Additionally, it’s crucial that the site you share syndicated content with includes the proper attribution and links back to your website to encourage readers to visit your site if they like the content.

Content Syndication Steps

Follow these steps to execute an effective content syndication strategy:

1. Decide how often or how much you want to participate in content syndication. Depending on your goals, you may only want to syndicate one or two pieces of content, or you may want to syndicate many different pieces. If you want to increase traffic to your website, you could syndicate a simple paragraph with a contextual link on another site to encourage readers to visit your website. Alternatively, if you want to increase your brand’s awareness, you should repost entire articles on other websites as much as possible.
2. Choose the website or websites where you want to republish your content. It’s vital to republish your content on the right websites if you want to have an effective syndication strategy. You may want to choose websites that are bigger than yours to attract a wide consumer base, or you could focus on smaller websites to spread awareness without the risk that they will outrank you in the SERPs. Select websites that share similar traits or values to your company and that already have your ideal audience as a reader base. For larger websites, you should republish your latest or best content to increase your reach.
3. Republish older content on smaller websites. You can also syndicate older content that performed well on smaller publications with a more focused audience. Select publications with a similar readership to your ideal audience, and include as many contextual links as the publication will allow in order to increase the chances of readers visiting your site.
4. Be careful to avoid content duplication. To safeguard your SEO performance, you need to make sure that Google and other search engines do not view your syndicated content as duplicated content. Either include or ask the publishing site to include a canonical tag to help Google know that your site is the original authority and to avoid getting penalized for duplicate content. A canonical tag also shows Google that the original content is from your site and should be ranked higher than the sites where you placed the syndicated content.
5. Keep track of your syndicated content’s performance and your website’s traffic rates. It’s important to track the performance of your content syndication efforts to determine what is and isn’t working. If your syndicated content increases brand awareness and traffic to your website, this is a good sign that the strategy is working effectively. If you haven’t noticed much traffic increase, you may want to consider syndicating your content elsewhere or taking a different marketing approach.

Content syndication can be a great tool for marketers, but it’s important to do it the right way. The above steps should help you succeed in your syndicated content marketing efforts.

Knowledge Base: Content Marketing