Content Resilience Is Business Resilience: A Lesson From 1600+ Articles

Table of contents:

1. Content resilience…what does that even mean?
2. Processes, frameworks, mindsets and knowledge graphs as content resilience enablers
3. Resilience in your SEO content strategy

Covid-19. Inflations. Remote work. New competitors in the market or more competitive business offerings from others in your niche. We have all been there, at least in recent years. One lesson we should have learned by now is how to make ourselves and our businesses more resilient and adaptable to change.

Business resilience is complex and it cannot be built overnight. It requires careful organizational structuring which equally values efficiency and innovation, while ensuring quality supply chain resilience at the same time. You should be able to deliver your products and services to the market in a way that is constant and suffers little change even when the times are uncertain and the market is fluctuating across industries. 

This is where your content and marketing strategy come into play. They should be your most important tools for resilience because they allow you to discover your customers and bring them into your business. They are the tools that guide your online visitors between the awareness and purchase stages, giving you the ultimate data to learn how to improve your offerings and unique selling proposition:

1. Where did your visitors come from?
2. What devices are they using to find you?
3. What makes them stick on the website or leave it immediately?
4. What does their customer journey on your website look like?
5. Do you have a mature branding strategy (brand queries dominate) or do you have a pure, established organic growth marketing channel in place?
6. So much more.

This is why your business teams need to embrace the power of content and learn how to keep going further even when the going becomes tougher.

Content Resilience…What Does That Even Mean?

It all comes down to the mindset.

First things first: your content comes from many places or ideally multiple departments should be able to inform your content strategy. By gathering and unifying data from there, you should be able to answer questions like:

1. Who are your searchers?
2. Who are your customers and how did they convert? Which search queries are the most impactful when it comes to converting online and why?
3. What increases the desirability of your product/service?
4. What helps to reduce the friction in closing deals?
5. How do prospects behave when they use the product/service?
6. What established processes and conventions are established at your company, so that you can make a constant user discovery process?
7. How can you present your information so that you have a clear and well articulated way to change your prospects minds, making them switch to your business solutions?

In the content world, the ability to find a new way to understand and profile your audience, and at the same time the ability to present a new talking point and a new type of content, is called content resilience. This comes with time and practice, but it’s important to start and plan for it.

You must be able to find inspiration by taking data from multiple data sources: it’s all about being data-driven but also imaginative, innovative and deeply, deeply interested to understand the customers in the first phases of the buying journey in order to guide them properly later.

Processes, Frameworks, Mindsets And Knowledge Graphs As Content Resilience Enablers

Analyze what you have on your side. Start documenting your work and then try to find the minimum denomination which applies to all of your content templates. Being able to put structure where there’s none and even more, giving granularity and interoperability to your data is an ultimate content resilience skill:

1. We build knowledge graphs (KG) to provide structure to content;
2. Structure is what is needed to build resilience;
3. AI (still) depends on vast amount of training data – structure helps us scale this training data to “teach” search engines new things and help them find the audience we need;
4. The return of investment (ROI) of a content KG depends on the value of the semantic annotations over time;
5. The value of semantic annotations is to bridge gaps with the right searchers’ personas;
6. A content that is semantically annotated gets stronger over time. Why? Because it enforces interconnectedness among concepts across the web and it becomes semantically understandable what your website is about.

And yes…it takes domain expertise but also great business acumen with an innovative mind to start connecting the dots that were thrown away without any framework behind. Build your foundations just like you would build with LEGO blocks and utilize the power of content knowledge graphs: a blog post on social media lasts for a few hours while an entity-based content strategy (entity mapping) lasts forever. 

Here is an analysis above on 1650+ articles of a client of ours and this is the click through rate (CTR) when we stopped adding new entities. As you can observe, the result goes down once we stop the entity tagging process. 

Know the advantages and disadvantages of different content approaches. It is an ultimate superpower.

Resilience In Your SEO Content Strategy

We won’t make a mistake if we say that content strategy is your first phase of your supply chain process – you’re distributing information to online searchers so that they can make a proper decision on what to buy online. It can get hard if you don’t strategize around your content strategy and understand your unique value proposition inside out.

Your numbers are not adding up at the moment or the executives are not satisfied with the results that they see? Period. If your content is set up to succeed, those are just temporary turbulent periods that you need to overcome and be sure, the sun is there afterwards! They come from time to time, it is a learned skill that helps manage everyone’s expectations. How? Well, here’s the deal:

1.Working with backlinks

If you work with backlinks and you are not a seasoned SEO marketer, you will have tough times articulating your strategic decisions to upper management. It is very likely that you might think that investing time in building high domain authority links to your website is beneficial. 

The problem with links is that they expire and become old or completely obsolete over time. Completely unresilient. They don’t hold value for long, especially if you are not updating them up at scale. It’s not that you do not need them or that you should ditch them, it is more about being more strategic: investing in classic links but also investing in linked-data links, enabling global shared understanding about concepts across the globe. That’s content resilience. That’s link resilience.

2. Being evergreen

Are your content ideas up-to-date? Do you truly, deeply understand your customers? What are some problems that keep popping up all the time or from time to time? What do knowledge graphs across the web teach you about content gaps? Can you fill them to address these issues? Are they evergreen and will this content be reusable when winning new audiences on the Internet over and over again? Be specific and brutally honest to yourself about being evergreen – it is the only way to go forward. 

3. Flexible mindset

Are you a flexible person? Are you able to construct and deconstruct content pieces from ground up and vice versa? Are you able to put new perspectives and fresh, indie thinking into how you keep elements in your core content processes? Are you learning and experimenting with new stuff? One potential idea is working with product knowledge graphs. Have you considered these approaches before? Resilience is adapting to change and if you do not have a flexible mind, you will face difficulties along the way.

4. Third-party SEO vendors

These tools support your keyword research process and link profiling between your website and competitors’ websites, however, they are not reliable in the long run. 

Being dependent on SEO software vendors that do not even work with first-party data and slowly increase the prices of their products is not a resilient-oriented way of thinking. You should build your safety net around the data that you own in the first place, like Google Search console data source and unstructured data in your CMS. Your tech stack should be picked in a way that enables you to grow from there and not be strategically dependent on third-party SEO data vendors.

To sum up, it is important to build your foundations right. Put your data in context. Build around what you already have and then expand from there. You’ll thank us later.

Ready to experiment? Give us a go! Book a Demo with one of our SEO Expert 🤩