5 Ways Startups Can Grow Content to Rank Quicker

Running a startup is no easy feat. One of the biggest barriers for startup founders is their ability to compete with other businesses, be discovered, and gain recognition. Because of this, ranking on the first page of Google is often an important part of the process. With that in mind, it’s important to understand that content is (still) king. Your content should be consistent and optimized in order to rank a healthy position on Google.

Google uses content to gain context clues about what your content is about. Quality content also is more likely to gain backlinks, and backlinks are the backbone of SEO. The more backlinks your content has, the more likely it is to be considered trustworthy by Google. With that in mind, here’s how you can leverage your content strategy to grow your business quicker
and put your company in a discoverable position:

Aggregate Content

You can aggregate content from other websites on your own publication to increase content volume faster. There are several tools you can use to achieve this. (For example, the news API from Webhose offers media and web monitoring and machine learning to continuously monitor high-quality news sources and data relevant to your organization.) However, there are many news aggregators to choose from, and many of them cater to specific niches. One of the biggest benefits of content aggregators is that you get a sufficient flow of content without having to pay an entire editorial team. The more content you have, the more SEO opportunity you can benefit from.

Include Visual Assets

Ideally, you’ll include visual assets in most of your content pieces. For starters, including images in your content gives you another opportunity to boost SEO by using alt tags and captions. Images are also more engaging for readers, who are more likely to share a blog post if there’s something captivating to show. Certain assets, like infographics, can do wonders for your shareability. According to Hubspot, blog posts with infographics generate 178% more inbound links and 72% more views on average.

Highlight Industry Experts

One of the best ways to create original content that’s appealing and has high shareability potential is to reach out to industry experts or growing
professionals for an interview request. This can help you for several reasons. For starters, it’s a great method of integrating original copy into your blog. Second, you get to gain an industry contact that you may not have otherwise, and can continue to build upon that relationship. And lastly, if you feature someone in your content, they’re more likely to share it with their audience, increasing your sphere of influence.

Keep in mind that you should choose your guest post opportunities carefully. Aim for publishers that have a higher domain authority than your website to help boost your content in search engines. You can use Moz’s free domain authority checker to see how different publishers stack up against one another. On the same token, vet your potential guest
blogger carefully to ensure you always get solid content from strong writers.

Build a Guest Posting Strategy

There are two sides to the guest posting coin; on the one hand, you can find publishers that are accepting guest blog posts and write for them. On the other hand, you can accept guest blog posts from other reputable writers. Guest posting on someone else’s website is a great strategy because it allows you to leverage the audience of other publishers and
secure backlinks to your website. Allowing others to guest post on your website helps generate fresh content; your guest authors will also share links to their authored posts, bringing in additional readers and potential followers.

Create Monthly Content Calendars

Your website should have a healthy dose of aggregated and original content if you want to grow your content marketing efforts quickly without a full in-house team to support it. Content calendars help you stay organized and focused, and can prevent you from being discouraged
about your overall efforts.

In fact, many marketers struggle more with consistent topic ideation than they do with creating the content itself. To address this, create a content calendar for one month in advance at a time. Ultimately, this will help you avoid spending too much time on individual brainstorming sessions. Of course, if at any point new ideas come into play, such as relevant industry news, you can quickly add into your calendar and adjust it as needed.