Content marketing is key for generating brand awareness and engagement, but tangential topic building is not a topic which everyone knows about.
In short, tangential content is content about a topic which is related to, but not directly about, your specific product or service.
By creating tangential content for your site, you are adding a depth to your content strategy which will bring in new audience branches and skyrocket your semantic SEO potential. Here are our 9 tricks to build your tangential topic superpower.
1. Consider how your audience engages with your product or service
Ultimately, your product or service is purchased by customers, so you want your tangential content to serve them as well. You want to ensure that you understand what your customers’ interests, needs and challenges are, so that you can create content which gives them valuable information or addresses their pain points.
If you were an organic skincare brand, you may uncover insights about the other wellness topics your customer is interested in. For example, you could provide tips on natural remedies for skin issues, or branch further out and create content about mindfulness and meditation practices to sit under the wellness topic.
2. Harvest information from dynamic forums
Keyword research will always be useful, and should definitely form part of your content process, but you want to make sure your content resonates with specific, niche questions people are asking. One great way to uncover this information is to browse dynamic forums such as Quora and Reddit.
These sites are great content repositories, filled with genuine, real-time and niche queries your customers are thinking about. By picking out topics your audience cares about and building out topic clusters, you’re harnessing untapped keywords your competitor isn’t likely to have in their arsenal.
3. Don’t be afraid to go down rabbit holes
As you browse keyword research tools and dynamic forums, you will likely find yourself going down ‘rabbit holes’ and finding increasingly niche topics. As long as you can see the demand (keyword volumes and/or engagement in forums) for these topics, don’t be afraid to indulge in them.
If you can justify writing on the topic because there is a market for it, you will be creating a thorough content strategy that could bring in a wider audience.
4. Organise clustered keywords and topic branches efficiently
When you begin organising your tangential topic ideas, they will naturally belong to particular groups. As you cross-reference your ideas with keyword research, you want to ensure you’re clustering keywords and allocating them to content ideas accordingly.
For example, you may want to target 2 or 3 related keywords in a single blog, which all have varying keyword volumes. Just ensure they all match the same search intent.
As you continue to build out ideas and find related keywords, you will naturally form more branches. Ensure you are using a good process so that you can keep track of information without it becoming tangled or unorganised. For example, you may use a dedicated mind mapping and/or keyword clustering tool.
5. Apply specific goals to your tangential content
Each piece of tangential content needs to have a specific goal behind it – just like all of your other content. You want to hook in the reader so that they build trust with your brand.
For example, if you have managed to get a new user onto your meditation and mindfulness blog post, and they didn’t know about your organic skincare brand, now is a great time to ensure your product can easily be navigated to – or promoted within the copy itself.
You may want your tangential content to drive a customer towards performing a specific action, such as requesting a quote or clicking through to the product page. Ensure you are tailoring your content for this purpose, test it, and continually adapt until you are achieving the conversion rate you desire.
6. Invest time into your internal linking strategy
Tangential topics are a godsend for semantic SEO efforts, as search engines will understand your site offers a depth and breadth of knowledge that competitors may not. You are therefore more likely to be awarded better positioning in the SERPs as you will be seen as a greater source of authority.
To make the job of index crawlers even easier in this regard, you want to ensure your internal linking strategy is on point. Highlight anchor text in your tangential pieces with keywords you want to link out to other site content, and try not to have any piece of content live on the site without a couple of internal links.
7. Assign an emotion to each piece of content
Content will resonate the most strongly with people if it makes them feel something. Therefore, it’s a worthwhile strategy to ensure each piece of content has an emotion assigned to it.
Let’s take the example of the organic skincare brand. The company may be targeting a persona who has a core value of confidence and empowerment. Therefore, they may want to read a blog about unrealistic beauty standards and challenging the definition of beauty.
If you know you want them to feel empowered by the end of the post, then focus on making the tone happy and upbeat. Make happiness the target emotion, ensure your reader feels positive enough to keep reading – and perhaps they might pick up a skincare product at the end.
8. Don’t follow the herd – ensure you provide unique insight
This rule applies to all content you create, not just tangential topics – ensure that you are providing original, insightful content that people would not find elsewhere. Not only does this help with adhering to Google E-E-A-T principles, it also helps you to stand out from the crowd and establishes your brand as unique.
You can, of course, research a tangential topic online before writing, but once you are in the creative flow, ensure you aren’t relying purely on those pre-existing pieces and just rewording them. Apply what you’ve learned and come to an original set of insights which will inspire and inform others.
9. Follow influencers to spark tangential ideas
A good way to keep up to date with trends in your industry is to follow influencers in your niche. For example, the organic skincare brand may wish to follow clean beauty influencers and use their content to spark tangential topic ideas.
For example, the company may see an influencer posting about a winter hand care routine, shower ritual and beauty storage hacks. All of these ideas can be turned into tangential topics for the site.
Ready to harness your tangential superpower?
If you’re ready to begin building out your tangential topics, but don’t know where to start, we’re here to help. Book in a Free Acquisitions Workshop, where we can assist further with content gap analysis, content map or overall content strategy to help build out your site and make it more appealing to both users and search engines.
