Some content gets hundreds of shares but never gets picked up by Google, while other content will rank well in searches but rarely appears on social. What's the magic behind creating content that gets both shares and backlinks?
I recently spoke with Steve Rayson, the Director of Buzzsumo, to find the secret sauce.
Have a listen on iTunes, SoundCloud or scroll down to read a summary of our chat.
What are the 5 types of content that get both links and shares?
"So number one, the obvious one is content that answers questions - in particular, authoritative content that answers questions. It might be as simple as, "What is content marketing?", "What is shareable content?", "What is a bad link?". Often those sorts of posts, those posts that answer questions, they get shared quite well, but they also gain a lot of backlinks, because people will refer to them I think almost as references.
The one that I think surprised me a bit more was strong opinion posts, or controversial posts. There seems to be no question that controversial content gets shares, but it also gets links.
The best example that I've seen of this in our own space is Mark Schaefer's post on Content Shock. Mark wrote a post a while ago saying that content marketing is not a sustainable strategy, or words to that effect. So that's slightly, well Mark would say that's not controversial, but it was certainly a strong opinion piece. Just looking at that, it got over four and half thousand shares, which is quite good, but it also got 900 domain links.
The third type of content that always get links is research posts. We found this again in our research last year where we looked at a million posts. We were looking for correlation of shares and links. The one site where we found a really strong correlation of shares and links was Pew Research. They publish research content and it gets lots of shares, but it also gets lots of links, and there's very little question for me, really, that if you publish good original research, people will not only share it, they'll link to it, and it's much more likely to gain links.
Another post type that gets lots of links is authoritative posts about new developments - and that's hard to produce. Unless you're an authority, it's hard for you to post something authoritative about a new development, but people who do this well - I think Search Engine Watch did one about confirming Google to no longer put ads on the right. It seems fairly small but that's got masses of links.
And the last big one is trending topics. If you just piggyback on a trending topic, those posts tend to get shares but not links. But if you can provide some real insight - and a good example of this was Inc.'s story on Pokemon Go, which was how small businesses are using Pokemon Go to drive sales - that got about 1000 links."
Follow Steve on Twitter @SteveRayson and read the full article on the Link Humans blog.