Content Syndication Explained + How to Properly Repost Articles

What is Content Syndication?

Perhaps you’ve heard of syndication in terms of broadcasting: a popular TV show airs reruns on a completely different network. The term has expanded to include the sharing of online content.

Content syndication is the process of republishing content from your website to any platform other than where it was originally published.

Let’s say you just published an article on your blog. To “syndicate” it would mean to display that same (or slightly adjusted) content on a different domain. Your content will live on both your blog as well as another website (or social media platform -  more on that later).

Good news for you - as the term implies - content syndication doesn’t just apply to blogs but all types of content: videos, infographics, podcasts, ebooks, and more!

Blog Optimization vs. Content Syndication

Before getting into the what and how of content syndication, you must distinguish between this tactic and blog optimization. 

Blog optimization is when you update a pre-existing piece of content on your website to improve its search engine rankings, click-through rate (CTR), messaging, relevancy, accuracy, and/or depth. 

These goals can be combined or be the sole focus for blog optimization. To give an idea of when blog optimization would be appropriate, here are a few examples:

• The blog’s content is not a featured snippet or “People Also Ask”  and/or it doesn’t show up on the first two pages of Google. A blog optimization focusing on information organization and keywords in headings would help improve your search engine rankings. 

• You have a blog that performed well several years ago on a trending topic, but the landscape has changed and the content is no longer relevant. Optimizing the content by updating the information to be more relevant and accurate would be your next step. 

• One of your blogs has a high bounce rate and people are not clicking on the CTA at the bottom. If this is the case, ensure that the keywords the blog is ranking for actually meet the searcher’s intent. Perhaps more content and organization would show the value of the content to keep people reading (depth). Additionally, confirm the CTA is in alignment with the logical next step for the reader. Experiment with power words, different graphical designs, and the explanation of benefits to increase the CTR. 

While not an exhaustive list of the ways you can tinker with your content through blog optimization to improve these metrics, the tactics display a consistent approach of:

• Patience. Wait for the content to perform for at least a month before making any major changes. You want to have enough data to justify any optimization. 
• Analysis. Any changes must be supported by consistent data trends. 

As mentioned above, content syndication occurs when you repurpose your content from its original form to a new platform for greater exposure and subject matter authority. 

Here are a few ways those goals could be accomplished through content syndication.

• One of your pieces of content is performing well on your website with your existing audience in terms of click-through rate and internal linking. You want to amplify the piece of content to drive more people to your content to go through the conversion. The additional data will provide more insight into what works and what doesn’t and may even give you a wide enough audience to start A/B testing. 

• Your audience prefers searching for information on social media instead of traditional search engines. Syndicating content on social media will reach your audience where they are and drive traffic back to your site. 

• Your piece of content is keyword aligned but needs the authority of other websites to improve its rankings. 

Here are a few distinct key differences between the two tactics.

You can choose to pull the levers of content syndication and optimization separately or in concert. 

So, when would you choose one or both?

• Just blog optimization: your content isn’t relevant, keyword-aligned, and/or organized to garner the attention of the right audience. 

• Just content syndication: your content is optimized for search, in alignment with your buyer’s journey and ICP, and is salient to your products/services but needs a viewership boost to produce the results you’re looking for.

• Content syndication and blog optimization: the meat of the content is good but needs a boost of search engine optimization and the platform potential of other websites to increase views and click-through rates. 

The Benefits of Content Syndication

There are a number of benefits to syndicating your content across multiple domains.

• More traffic. When done well with great links, syndicated content gives you a vehicle to increase site authority through strongly linked domains (Google loves that) and to drive inbound traffic back to your original content for more information. (jump down to read how to make sure you’re not getting outranked by the third-party publisher)👇

• Brand awareness. More established, authoritative resources who host your syndicated content can serve as a rubber stamp of trustworthiness, creativity, and accuracy to a segment of your audience who does not know you yet.

• Engagement from a wider audience. For those who know nothing about your company, products, or services, a piece of syndicated content on a more authoritative website or source gives you more credibility. If you know your ideal customer profile and your audience well, you know where they’re getting their information. Your syndicated content’s presence on a trustworthy platform organically visited by your ICP is a no-brainer win.

• Saved time. Putting the same piece of content on multiple channels saves time by increasing the viewership potential without having to churn out multiple pieces of content (and all the time and strategy associated with that).

• Low investment. You could spend less than 30 minutes tweaking content to syndicate and reap the extra traffic, brand awareness, and engagement without costly pay-per-click ads or the domain authority to rank easier. This is not to say there’s no investment involved in doing content syndication, building relationships with the right authoritative sources takes time, effort, and ultimately, great content. 

The Benefits of Optimizing Your Website's Content

What you may be after are the benefits that come from optimizing your own website. Though not exhaustive, here are a few:

• You don’t have to share. Unlike content syndication, your optimized content doesn’t have to split conversion, viewership, or ranking opportunities with other platforms. Your content on your website alone generates the contacts, the snippets, and the increased traffic. When you solely use content syndication as a tactic, you run the risk of getting increased views on your content that never translates to your own company’s gains.

• You own the contacts. Any and all conversions your content nudges toward will happen on your site and filter into your CRM for future nurturing and engagement. Also, you can use these contact records to deploy smart content and specialized workflows for activity and contact details in the future.

• Changes happen on your timeline with your team. You don’t have to rely on someone else’s priorities to make changes big and small. Your team and their combined expertise can modify and make adjustments as soon as you need them or as soon as the data demands.

• Tell the whole story. Your syndicated content may only show one piece of the puzzle in a full story. When you optimize your website’s content, you have the unique ability to interlink to related content to fully walk through a viewer’s problem without them having to leave the site. You can use this interrelated content in a conversion path that nudges them to the next stage in the buyer’s journey. Interlinking also helps your authority on Google by showing you have the expertise to consider the topic from multiple angles.

• Improve your website’s SERP rankings. Using other sites’ authority can help boost your own authority but it doesn’t replace SEO best practices (both on-page and technical)  to increase your website’s efforts to rank on Google.

How to Properly Repost Articles for Your Content Syndication Strategy

With any new tactic, you may have a knee-jerk reaction to what could go wrong. Here are 9 best practices to properly repost articles to reap the benefits without any potential consequences. 

1. Don’t repost the entire article.  Offer a piece of your content on the syndication source, such as a section of your blog or a portion of a video. At the end of the content, nudge them to learn more about the topic by linking to your original content that shows more layers. 

2. Wait to repost.  Give Google some time to crawl your original post and recognize it as the first source. We recommend waiting at least a week before syndicating your content on a third-party site.

3. Choose articles to repost thoughtfully.  It’s okay to be choosy. Wait until you produce content worth sharing - content backed up by research, strategic alignment to your buyer’s journey, or content that has proven successful with the audience you have through your own channels. 

4. Choose your syndication partner carefully.  Opt for syndication channels with integrity and similar values as you so your content reaches the right audience and the content remains trustworthy. 

5. Link back to the original article.  Google recommends that when you link to the article on your own site you link to the original article to alert the search engine which is the preferred content. 

6. Ask syndicators to add a no-index meta tag if ranking is an issue.  If you really want to ensure the article posted on a third-party site isn’t competing with your website on the SERPs, ensure it has the proper meta tag. Here are some tips from the search engine itself on doing this. Google knows content syndication is a marketing tactic and that third-party duplicates of content are mostly innocent— not malicious attempts to steal your information.

7. Spoon-feed Google the canonical.  Canonical refers to the page that the search engine deems the original and serves above other duplicate content. If you don’t specify the canonical URL, Google will choose for you, and it may not be the original content. 

8. Modify the post to address a similar topic. On Neil Patel’s blog, the famous SEO guru’s company recommends trying what they call the “Evil Twin” technique,  where you flip the purpose of the original post.  For example, in this post, we talked about “How to Properly Repost Articles.” If we republish this on Medium, perhaps we could discuss “The Top Content Syndication Mistakes.” Most of your research is already there, you’re just adding more value.

9. Track the impact of syndicated content. UTM codes or referral source reports if you use a tool like HubSpot can help you understand how syndicated content is (or isn’t) contributing to your overall goals. Use UTM codes to track link clicks back to your original content and conversion opportunities aligned to your syndicated content for better marketing attribution of your syndication efforts. You can use this data to improve your syndicated content and your choice of syndication partners. (Talk to your syndication partners to see what they allow for tracking links.)

Social Content Syndication

Syndication isn’t just limited to websites. Social media has become an investment-worthy platform for syndication because that’s where your audience is! 

Four reasons why syndicating content on your social media is worth your time and effort:

• It’s free. 
• You’re in control of what, when, and why you post. 
• You own your channels and the performance. 
• It’s concise; you have a limited number of characters, which makes you communicate benefits quickly and efficiently.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn’s platform allows you to publish longer-form content without any character limitations with its “Write article” feature.

Writing an article is fundamentally different in style and purpose than a typical LinkedIn post. Use the article tools to: 

• Share longer content (about 120,000 characters compared to 3,000 in a standard post) with multiple images, text formatting, and more

• Keep readers in the platform they love and still give them access to your educational content

• Optimize content to show in native LinkedIn searches

To maximize your content’s reach on the platform, here are some tips:

• Attach an eye-catching image to make the user stop their scroll. Consider a pull quote from the article instead of just a stock image. 

• Use all the options to make a LinkedIn article organized: header image, title, hashtags, and a short description. 

• Publish regularly. 

• Encourage engagement on your post in the newsfeed by responding to comments and shares of the article.

• Engage with other regular authors and build your network. 

• Add links to your other content located on your site that segues into logical next steps or questions. You can place this at the end of the article or in the comments. This will remind viewers of the original source of your content!

• Include a CTA in your article for users to “follow” your profile so they never miss a new article.

Twitter

The Twitter Notes feature is a great tool like LinkedIn Articles for content syndication and for similar reasons. It brings your available character count for in-platform content up from 280 to 2,500. 

Here’s an example of what Twitter Notes look like in users’ feeds:

Inside the Note, similar to LinkedIn’s layout, the article populates in the news feed instead of going to a separate web page. You can tag users, embed tweets and images, bold and italicize text, and create headers. 

This opens the door to making your content interactive within the Twitter platform by tagging other users and their tweets.

Instagram

The popular image-sharing app also has a little-known feature called Instagram Guides that can be useful for content syndication. With a guide on Instagram, you can bundle multiple posts together (even those that you didn’t originally post) and build a story with more copy, build discoverability with hashtags, and engage partners, customers, employees, and other friends by tagging them. 

Rather than direct your users to read the piece through a link in your bio, you can actually give out more content in the guide. That being said, Instagram is still not allowing links, so be intentional about the copy you syndicate here!

Tips on how to create a successful Instagram guide:

• With a guide, you can aggregate posts on a similar topic and write more about what’s actually inside the article such as key takeaways.

• Keep it succinct. This is not a long-form platform and the attention span of the typical Instagram user is brief (Microsoft says our attention span is 8 seconds).

Reoptimizing Blogs on Your Website for SEO

While content syndication can increase your authority and overall awareness, blog optimization is still the go-to method for increasing the original blog’s SERP ranking. 

Here are 5 ideas for optimizing blogs on your website for SEO

1. Analyze your competitors.  See what the top results and snippets are for the keywords you are hoping to rank for. Use trends of the top results such as title and content organization to deepen your content and show readers (and Google) your authority and helpfulness on the topic. Your competitors can also help you understand the experience readers are looking for with their search intent such as load time, follow-through (how quickly and how well you answer their question), and options to continue learning more (as expressed through anchor links and CTAs). 

2. Prioritize power content.  Repetitive content that attempts to rank for the same keyword(s) ends up competing against each other for rankings, therefore, cannibalizing your efforts. Google, and your readers, love content that tells a complete story. Zero in on one page and strengthen the content to show your authority! Longer form, deeper content provides plenty of opportunities for featured snippets and the “People Also Ask” section.

3. Create structure for scannability.  Titles, headings, bullets, shorter paragraphs, and bolded words provide a guide for the reader and Google to understand the key takeaways without having to read every single word. 

4. Place keywords thoughtfully.  Secondary and semantic keywords should be used throughout the content and used in header tags. Your primary keyword should be used in each of these places: URL, title tag, first 100 words of your page, H1 tag, one H2 tag, and last 100-200 words of text.

5. Link to provide additional value and website traffic.  Internal links to relevant pages on your website help search engines index your site and structure. External links to relevant and authoritative sites can improve your search engine ranking.

Want more tips? Check out our blog on six ways to optimize older posts to increase traffic.

Other ways to get more intentional with your marketing strategy 

Content syndication and optimization are just two of many tactics of a holistic marketing strategy. 

Here are a few other components you can layer in to really meet your audience where they’re at with the content that solves their problems. 

• Understand your buyer’s journey and customer journey. How will you solve their problems if you don’t know who your audience is?

• Craft or re-evaluate your brand promise. Are your customers and employees aligned on what customers should expect to experience? 

• You should have content that touches each stage of the buyer’s journey. Struggling with ideas? We compiled more than 75.

When you create goals, get to know your buyers, and audit your past efforts, you can start to build an actionable strategy for getting more people to your product or service. 

To find out more about our data-driven growth strategy for marketing, read more about our approach.