I wasn’t really sure how I was going to piece this one together.
We contracted with Knoxville, TN, to do a tourism story. The problem is, we had just done one the year prior, and it covered a lot.
I needed a different angle for this one because a) it’s pointless to regurgitate the same thing over again, and b) duplicate content can actually hurt overall SEO rankings because search engines aren’t sure which story to prioritize, so they end up splitting traffic between them rather than ranking one of them really highly.
I decided to focus on gravel cycling in the region, using Knoxville as a homebase. Searching around, there’s a dearth of good resources for riding gravel bikes in “Knoxville” and “Eastern Tennessee”.
So, you’ll notice that the subheadings, image alt text and phrasing throughout the story includes these keywords and phrases, which should help it do well in search over the long term. Check it out here.
The article is an example of long tail content. It won’t get a viral hit of traffic now, but it becomes a reference piece that’ll rack up traffic and domain authority for years. It’s one part of a complete content marketing strategy.
How could you make “reference content” for your industry, brand or category?