Essential Terms for Content Marketers and SEOs

Technical, on-page, and off-page SEO are all important to make your website rank in the search engines. But the foundation of all these is your website content. You cannot improve visibility in search engines or drive organic traffic to your site if your content does not resonate with your target audience. 

Moreover, your SEO efforts will fail if your content lacks depth, relevance, or the main keywords your users enter as a search query. So, you need to conduct a competitor analysis to identify the content gap, thin or duplicate content, and the opportunities for optimization.

We have explained the main words that every content marketer should know to make the process easy for you. First things first!

Content Gap Analysis

It is a strategy in content marketing that helps to identify the topics your competitors are covering but are missing on your website. The competitor research also highlights the underrepresented topics on your website that need more valuable content to rank in the search results. 

During the analysis, experts compare your website’s content with your competitors’ to find keywords or topics where they are outperforming you. The identification of these gaps can help you optimize your content strategy and ensure it meets the search intent of your target audience.

Thin Content

Evaluating your website’s existing content can help identify pages that have thin content—content that offers little to no value for your users. While it’s important to have unique pages for different topics, it does not mean creating an individual page for every iteration of your keywords with no meaningful content.

Some businesses also create multiple pages for each city or region where their target audience lives. However, they keep most of the content the same except for changing a few things, like the location name, adding no value. This strategy may lead to creating tons of low-quality, thin content pages, but it won’t boost your rankings in the search results. 

In 2011, Google rolled out the Panda update that specifically targeted website pages with low-quality or thin content and demoted them in search rankings. Google continues to take strict action against such websites. So, it’s better to create a comprehensive, valuable page on a specific topic instead of multiple low-quality pages for each of its keyword variants to avoid penalty.

Auto-Generated Content

Automatically generated content is a perfect example of low-quality, thin content. As the name suggests, this type of content is created for search engines by using a program or code. Auto-generated content usually makes no sense to the users and looks like a group of keywords strung together. 

While auto-generated content is getting better with advancements in machine learning, it usually lacks coherence or value. Google considers the use of AI to generate content for deception, such as spreading false information or manipulating search rankings, as a violation of its spam policies. 

Doing so may lead to a manual action resulting in demotion in search rankings or the removal of your website entirely.

Duplicate Content

It refers to the same or similar content that appears on different pages of one website or across multiple websites. You may have internal or cross-domain duplicate content for various reasons. Many marketers think that Google penalizes a website for duplicate content and takes manual action, which is not true. 

However, if a page has multiple duplicate or near duplicate versions, Google chooses a canonical (source) to show on the SERPs and hides the rest. You can add the rel=canonical tag to send a signal to Google and tell them which is the master page or the page you want it to rank.

While duplicate content does not lead to a penalty, it can negatively impact your SEO by showing undesirable URLs in search results or burning your crawl budget. Content duplication may also cause backlink dilution. This means all URLs with the same content may attract backlinks, splitting the “link equity” between them.

Content Relevance

It’s a critical factor that helps determine the success of your content strategy and shows whether your content aligns with the needs, interests, and preferences of your target audience. You cannot attract traffic to your site or build trust with your audience if your content is not relevant to them. 

So, you need to create high-quality content that can help you establish authority, increase engagement, and drive more sales and conversions. You can make your content relevant by:

• Understanding the wants, interests, preferences, and pain points of your target audience
• Incorporating keywords into your content that your potential customers use as search queries
• Keeping your content fresh and updated to increase visibility on the SERPs

Content Marketing

It’s a form of marketing that businesses use to create, publish, and distribute relevant content for their targeted audience online. The purpose is to attract and retain a qualified audience and ultimately compel them to take the desired action.

Content marketing allows you to provide useful content to your target audience and solve their issues. This strategic approach focuses on building trust and encouraging engagement instead of directly selling your products or services. 

Moreover, you can align your SEO and content marketing strategies to boost your search rankings and sales. As a marketer, you can use different types of content to reach potential leads, such as 

• Blogs
• Articles
• Infographics
• Videos

10x Content

It’s a marketing term coined by Rand Fishkin that means the content needs to be ten times better or as good as the top search result ranking for the given keyword or topic. 10x content does not only apply to blogs or articles; it also includes video content and landing page copy. 

You can’t beat the competition by just adding keywords or links to your content. It’s an ongoing process that requires you to focus on providing quality content that is better than the page appearing on the top of the SERPs. 

You can use content gap analysis to find what’s working for the pages at the top and what’s missing in their content. Filling in those gaps and meeting the E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) requirements will help you create 10x content.

Branded Content

The name says it all—it’s the content that a brand creates to promote its products, services, or message. The main purpose of this type of content is to engage with your target audience and increase brand awareness instead of directly selling your product or service. 

The branded content is educational, motivational, or entertaining and subtly reinforces the value and identity of a brand. You can use different content formats, such as 

• Ad campaigns, 
• Social media posts and blogs 
• Podcasts
• YouTube videos

Moreover, you can also choose various channels to share your branded content with your target audience, including social media platforms, email newsletters, and your own website or partner websites. 

Evergreen Content

It’s a type of content that remains relevant for a long time and doesn’t go outdated. A new piece of content usually leads to a sudden boost in traffic, but the interest may fade when something new comes up. Evergreen content helps you maintain a steady traffic flow for months or even years and does not require frequent updates. 

However, finding topics for evergreen content and ranking it on search results can be tricky. Usually, authoritative sites rank for evergreen queries. So, you need to acquire backlinks from credible sites and promote your content through different media to make it rank on Google. 

Some common evergreen topics include how-to-choose guides, product reviews, book reviews, and best practices articles.

Now that you’ve reached the end of this glossary, check out our Knowledge Center to learn about keywords.