Syndicated Content: 3 Things to Do Right Now

Today’s guest post is authored by Kristina Corbitt. Kristina is LexBlog‘s Training & Community Manager​. She focuses on​ engaging our clients on and offline and provides a litany of resources for clients in LexBlog’s Reach community. Kristina’s blog post below exemplifies the immense value and support she delivers each and every day to our clients and the entire LexBlog team. Her post below is a tutorial on the right way to syndicate your blog content. In Kristina’s words:

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Over the last year, we’ve observed a trend online that impacts legal bloggers, resulting in limited blog search engine visibility and decreased readership directly to their blogs: content syndication.

Before I go further, let me clarify that content syndication is a phenomenal way to grow the reach of your blog and make sure your content is seen by as many people as possible. Some services tailor syndicated content to specific audiences, like in-house counsel. As a result your thought leadership (through blog content) can be discovered through these sites.

However, I believe in working to get the best of both worlds – content exposure across all channels without sacrificing traffic to your branded blog. This requires a little bit more up front work, but a bigger payoff for you in the end.

Here are the three things I recommend if you syndicate your content:

1 – Ask Your Syndication Provider to Use Canonical Tags

Your blog authors worked hard to write each blog post. To give them proper credit in the eyes of search engines and other internet crawlers, each content should be accompanied with canonical tags.

Canonical tags are hidden in site code and tell search engines where original content came from. It’s also how Google recommends approaching syndicated (“duplicate”) content. From Google:

Allow search engines to crawl these [duplicate content] URLs, but mark them as duplicates by using the rel=”canonical” link element.

Without canonical tags:

• Your individual blog posts will not appear in web search results, and other blog pages will appear in lower search results page positions
• Your site’s traffic will drop (far less people will see your site’s branding, and will instead see the branding of the syndicated site)
• You will yield your publication’s previously established online and search engine reputation to the content syndication site

Syndication sites are so large (by volume and frequency of content), a search engine will consider them an “authority” instead of actually crediting your blog, your firm, and your authors (unless, of course, the syndication site uses canonical tags with your content). While it’s great to be visible and discovered, my personal preference is to call attention to my blog.

To test if you might need to request this of the syndication service, do a Google search of a few blog post titles in quotation marks. What results show up? Here’s an example of a recent blog post from our network:

Notice anything?

The original blog does not show up as it’s own search result; instead three other sites occupy the search results space. In some cases, like the above example, Google gives the option to “repeat the search with the omitted results included,” but that’s not always the case.

Here’s the bottom line: if your blog post URLs are missing from search results, contact your syndication provider(s) to request the publisher use the rel=”canonical” tag so search engines know from where the content originated.

2 – Give Readers the Opportunity to Actually Reach Your Blog

After implementing canonical tags, there’s a second step we recommend: don’t display your entire blog posts on the syndication site. Instead, show only an excerpt of the content, with a “read more” link to the original post on your blog. That way, even if someone found your post via the syndication service, they will ultimately find you when they click to read more.

There’s a few perks this gives you:

1. Your blog looks awesome (and probably fits your brand) – and this way, everyone gets to see it.
2. People will come back to your team/publication as a trusted niche source, and might even subscribe directly to you by email or RSS.
3. Data, data, data. The best way to measure effectiveness of content syndication (to see whether or not it’s working, i.e. people are truly reading your content), is if you can track referrals in your analytics software. Depending on your software (we prefer Google Analytics), you can drill down to the number of clicks specific to the “read more” links, and even see additional demographic data about your visitors (like, where they are located).

Related, consider other link-back opportunities and propose them to your syndicator. For example, ask to have your post titles have an embedded link back to the original blog post. The easier you can make it for a syndicated content reader to find your site, the more likely they will ultimately reach you.

3 – Measure the Effectiveness of Syndication Against Your Team’s Goals

As shared by our own Kevin O’Keefe in “14 ways to gain attention for your law blog,” number 11 rings true: “Always be measuring.”

#2 (using excerpts) will make this much easier, as it will help you get all your blog data in one place.

In the meantime, though, take a moment to consider whether or not your target audience subscribes to the syndication service(s) to which you submit content. From what I can tell, this audience includes some direct buyers for you (e.g. in-house counsel folks), but has fewer influencers (the people your buyers already trust) or amplifiers (the individual people, not companies, who are likely to share your content within their circles). Good to check with the syndication service directly to get the information about readership so you are reaching the right audiences.

Lastly, as Kevin O’Keefe previously noted, content syndication sites are not social in nature. This might be okay in terms of getting your blog post content seen and consumed by a broad audience, but remember to at least balance it with engaging readers (potential buyers) and build relationships wherever possible. As O’Keefe writes:

Remember . . . you are blogging to drive the bottom line – revenue. More eyeballs through mass distribution may have some impact on revenue, but relationships and reputation drive business development in the law.

That means continuing to cite influencers, engage with niche media reporters, and find creative ways to be seen as the “go to” or “leading source” in your area(s) of expertise.

Getting the best of both worlds does require a bit of work up front, but I think you’ll find it’s ultimately worth it and leads to greater legal blogging riches. To recap:

1. Ask Your Syndication Provider to Use Canonical Tags
2. Give Readers the Opportunity to Actually Reach Your Blog (through excerpts instead of full content)
3. Measure the Effectiveness of Syndication Against Your Team’s Goals

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LexBlog clients: what are your thoughts, questions, concerns or ideas regarding content syndication for your blog? Share now in the LexBlog Reach Community (blog user credentials required for access). Other thoughts on this subject are already posted, so join the conversation!

Opening image cropped. Original by Flickr Creative Commons user Tama Leaver.