Is your content link-worthy?

More and more these days, an inbound marketing company is focused on creating quality content and promoting as a critical step in converting qualified leads into customers. Besides creating quality content and promoting it we want the content that we produce to be link-worthy. 

We are in a fast changing age of consumers being in charge of what they use to make purchase decisions and a significant majority of them use the Internet to do that.

Andrey Lipattsev of Google stated in a YouTube video, “Content and links going into your site are the two most important ranking factors.”

If you have focused on quality content, are you also focusing on the content that will help you drive links and your SEO link building strategy? Obtaining links is significantly more challenging than gaining shares, re-tweets, or reposts. An individual who reads your content must experience a visceral, emotional response to be motivated to send that link on to others.

What Makes Your Content Link-Worthy?

1. Author a piece in which you provide the user with pieces of original research, insight into existing research, or a combination of the two.
   This research is the most effective when it’s subject matter is of interest to your buyer personas. Are there published research articles that you could compare and contrast? Can you create a survey of suppliers that would yield information of interest to them? Is there something you can research that would yield a quarterly report or an annual report? Answering these questions will help you locate link-worthy content to blog about, and share on social media.
2. Do you have a strong opinion about an industry practice, a political position that affects your industry, or a proposed new marketing restriction?
   Thoughtful, provocative and edgy opinion pieces evoke emotions that readers want to share whether for or against. Disruptive opinions can elicit the type of reaction that will make readers want to share the link. However, be careful in your disruption. You don’t want to have your audience(s) overreact to your content.
3. Are you in a new industry? Do you need to educate your leads and your customers?
   If so, then creating an article or e-book which has baseline information of value to the user and can be updated on a regular basis is something that can be link-worthy. This content should be of an authoritative nature, one from which you are seen as having credibility in your field.
4. Are you linking to articles that answer very specific questions that your customers are asking?
   Do you have a FAQ type list from which the answers will be useful to both those who are in your industry and those that are new to your industry, product or service? Don’t confuse this with the creation of quick lists of items that generally answer a single question. They are great for engaging readers but they don’t historically convert to highly shared links. These ‘list-icles’ aren’t very valuable to a business’ bottom line, even though they typically have some of the highest amount of views.
5. Another type of content that shows evidence of garnering links is content that can be used by your customers as a reference item or as a guide to carrying out some task.
   It could be a list of key terms, definitions, processes, steps, tables or anything else task-related. Infographics can be an appropriate medium in which to convey this type of information.

The above are a few examples of how to focus your content creation to be deemed link-worthy. By building link-worthy content you are laying the foundation for link building. Link building is achieved through the process of marketing your quality content in a manner that others will want to link back to your site from their website.