In a highly competitive doman of SEO you have to really stand out to stay afloat. Creating unique, useful, engaging content that your audience will want to reblog and reference is one of the best ways to attract traffic and to add organic and diverse backlinks to your profile. Producing such content on a regular basis is a tough task that demands indefinite creativity, great visual and media experience and staying up to date with ever changing media trends. In this article, we will speak about how to streamline this process and about best practices of creating linkable assets.
Linkable Assets: What are they?
In SEO, linkable assets are the type of resources SEO marketers create with the aim of attracting natural backlinks. This means the resources provide enough incentive for your audience to share them with their audiences. The incentive in this case is not monetary. It is the content itself, its utility or entertaining value, information it contains or discussion it spikes, or everything at once. Creating this type of content amidst the ocean of existing quality content is not an easy matter and requires skill and close monitoring of trends. Linkable asset is usually a piece of content belonging to a certain type. For example:
Informative Blog Posts: Detailed how-tos, tutorials bearing utility for the readers, descriptions of hands-on experience. For example, a travel notes post with tried out advice on various low cost options of travel, entertainment and dining. Or a tutorial of a hand-made Christmas toy published close to the holiday season.
Research and Original Data: Original research, audience surveys, studies, or data analyses that offer new information or insights, something you carried out yourself and that others can use as reference points. Your research must be transparent and reliable source-wise, shine a new light on the researched issue. Also, as is the case with any text-based content, do not forget to optimize your research for SEO.
Infographics: Visually appealing graphical representation which helps comprehend a complex idea. Used instead of a wall of text, it helps the audience to quickly grasp the gist of the issue without having to wade through multiple paragraphs of complicated explanations.
Interactive Tools: Tools that provide utility or solve specific problems for users, such as mortgage calculators, fitness and calorie trackers, simple home design tools or quick analyses. These tools should go in line with your business domain and can also be used to gather important information about your audience, with their consent, of course.
Videos and Multimedia Content: Engaging video content, including tutorials, interviews, webinars, or behind-the-scenes looks, that users find useful or entertaining. This content is universal topic-wise and can also act as support for other types of linkable assets listed here thus increasing their entertainment value or utility.
E-books and Whitepapers: In-depth content on particular subjects that provide significant value and insights to the reader. Openly published whitepapers are very useful when you need to promote a product merely on the back of its business plan.
Resource Lists and How-to Guides: Comprehensive lists of resources or step-by-step guides that help users achieve a particular task or learn something new. This type of content is particularly successful when it is niche-oriented and marketed in the niche community. For instance, a guide on how to create an elaborate birthday cake for people with no particular baking skills.
Case Studies and Success Stories: Detailed accounts of how a problem was solved or a goal was achieved, offering valuable insights and best practices. This type of content should feature actual true cases with particularities and specifically benefits from visual support, such as step-by-step picture guides and videos.
Webinars and online courses: Aside from the benefit of generating a large number of potential leads for your paid services, free webinars and online courses can be used for link building, especially if they carry real utility.
Video and Multimedia Content: many studies suggest that a video is more likely to become viral, and as a consequence, gain a wide spread and prolonged circulation and garner a lot of natural backlinks.
How to Understand that Your Linkable Assets are a Success?
Linkable assets are something that a vast majority of SEO marketers already use. For instance, take a look at this graph:
If you want to stand out in this type of competition, you need to closely monitor your linkables performance and adjust your content strategy accordingly.
Since linkable assets generally act like other pieces of content in terms of SEO, you can use regular SEO tools and practices to understand whether you’re doing it right or not. Below are the ways to understand how your linkable assets perform:
- Use SEO Monitoring and Analysis tools
Tools like Semrush and Ahrefs, Moz and others will provide you with a complete picture about any piece of content, including linkables. You can use them for the backlink analysis of your assets as well as comparison with similar linkables made by your competitors.
- Use Specific Tools for various Metrics
For example, if you want to measure trust flow and citation flow, you can use Majectis or similar tools to understand who, when and where cites your particular asset and what is its trust flow.
- User Tools to measure other SEO rankings
Usually, linkable assets tend to bring about not just backlinks, but have other important perks, for example, generating traffic, increasing the conversion rate, increasing audience engagement in social media, increasing the volume of social signals. Use respective tools to measure these metrics to get a wholesome picture about your linkables performance.
- Feedback loop
Apply the data that you have gathered from the initial round of analysis and review into your content creation process and see what works best. Refining the content creation process will help you to create masterful linkable assets.
- Benchmarking
Before launching a new linkable asset, make sure to benchmark your current performance based on your regular monitoring and metrics to be able to later draw a comparison. You can also benchmark against our competitors, thus getting an even more multifaceted picture of how you’re doing.
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The Importance of Linkable Assets in your SEO Campaign and Strategy
We have already mentioned that linkable assets are not only backlink generators, but have a number of other benefits that affect your overall SEO performance. That is why they are always a good SEO investment. Here are some additional perks you get when you create and promote linkable assets.
- Prolonged content performance
We all know how a piece of content can become irrelevant even before you publish it. This is definitely not the case with linkable assets. For instance, people would use something like a free meal planner long after you publish it and you may even notice that with time its performance increases as it spreads through your audience. This goes to say that the performance output of a successful linkable can be times greater than that of a regular piece of content, thus making it more profitable to create as well.
- Increased Expertise and Authority in your Community
Not to be mixed up with domain authority, although linkable assets tend to positively affect that as well. But when you regularly publish content that people find useful, when the content is original and engaging, when people actually manage to achieve results following your guides or when they can use your research, you inevitably improve where you stand with your audience. And this always helps people to choose you among all the competition.
- Diverse Traffic Sources and Increased Organic Reach
When people start to spread your linkables naturally, it can reach the corners of the Internet you haven’t even thought of and garner traffic from there. This is the most favorably-viewed-by-Google way to get backlinks and traffic and will lead to a generous increase in your SERP performance.
- Overall increase in SEO state, domain authority and SERP results
Since the traffic from linkable assets is natural, it is usually also very safe. This results in overall increase in your SEO and traffic metrics, in your domain authority, since you attract organic links, and ultimately, it positively affects your SERP performance.
- Feedback and Audience Engagement
Linkable assets generally tend to generate a lot of feedback and be reused again and again by your audience. Thus they have the added value of working for your audience loyalty and retention and give you a great chance to communicate with your followers and users and gather valuable feedback.
With the value of naturally generated traffic and backlinks only increasing, linkable assets have become a must if you want to make your SEO campaign successful. Although they are time and effort consuming to make, the output generally outweighs the resources spent.
