You likely aim to create the best content possible for your site’s visitors, but you may not always be sure it’s as far-reaching as you’d like. You may also want to offer a wider variety of content to your visitors. Fortunately, content aggregation is a perfect way to ensure the growth of your website’s popularity, while also providing lots of value to readers or customers.
Content aggregation is the act of collecting various content (such as blog posts and news articles) from around the internet. That content is then organized and made viewable in one easy location, such as a newsfeed or web page. This concept is closely related to (and often confused with) content curation. However, that process goes one step further. With curation, you not only collect content from other sites, but also add your own annotations and commentaries on it.
There are many types of content that you can aggregate on your website. This includes blog posts articles, and news releases.
However, you can aggregate just about anything you’d like, such as products and services that are complementary to yours. For example, you could use this strategy to create an “Other Products You May Like” section on your eCommerce site.
There are many benefits to content aggregation and curation, which include providing extra value to your visitors and improving the User Experience (UX) on your website. What’s more, an automated aggregation process is even more advantageous. For example, automated aggregation:
- Is easy to customize by using filters, keywords, etc.
- Enables you to offer more value to your readers by offering up more of your own content, as well as content from across the web.
- Can boost your site’s rankings on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Best of all, there are plenty of automated content aggregator tools to choose from. These include Curata and BuzzSumo, just to name two. If you’re going to use this technique, however, you’ll want to do so strategically.
The following three strategies are excellent ways to offer more to your visitors, without significantly increasing your own workload.
Improve UX Through Personalized Suggestions
UX is a term used to describe the interactions that your audience members have with your website, services, and/or products. This is a crucial aspect of any site’s design, as it determines how much people enjoy using your site and the impressions they’ll take away from it.
Aggregated content can offer more personalized suggestions to your visitors, based on their search histories, actions, and more. This is why using automated content aggregation is so important to your site’s UX. To maximize the potential benefits, we recommend that you:
- Make use of profiling. This is the collection of user data (social media biographies, demographics, etc.) that will tell you who your audience is and what they are looking for. Curata and PublishThis offer this as an automated feature, but you can also collect such information on your own using Google Analytics.
- Include “underground” content in the rotation. Underground content is your less popular or viewed content. By adding it to your rotation, you can further enhance their experience, by showing readers things you can almost guarantee they haven’t seen before.
It certainly doesn’t hurt to include off-site content in your feed as well. However, be sure to put the focus mostly on your own content, as long as it offers relevance and value to your readers.
Increase Customer Engagement by Making Content Easily Searchable
Perhaps even more important than UX is customer engagement (i.e., the way your customers and website visitors interact with your brand). As a website owner, it’s your job to make engagement easy, but also enjoyable.
One way to do so is through content aggregation. An automated process can improve the chances that the content being offered is what your customers are looking for. As such, they will be more likely to interact with it by reading and sharing.
To improve the chance for a high level of engagement, you can:
- Use only the best sources. With most automated content aggregation tools, you can pick and choose the sources you display on your website, to ensure that your audience will be more likely to engage with them. For example, BuzzSumo and ContentGems both make it easy to focus on specific sites.
- Incorporate a content search function. While filters are common in website aggregation, a search function is not. To stand out, you can choose a tool such as Curated WP RSS Aggregator that enables visitors to search through aggregated content using keywords.
If you’d like to further improve the quality of visitor interactions, be sure to include content that focuses on keywords your visitors are interested in. To find this information, you can once again take advantage of Google Analytics.
Offer Real-Time Content to Keep Your Visitors Informed
As a creator and aggregator, one of the most important things you can offer is up-to-date, relevant content. While this can be difficult to keep up with manually, the vast majority of aggregator tools will update your website’s feeds with real-time content (whether your own or from across the web).
This ensures your visitors are receiving only the latest information. Of course, even with automated aggregation, there are still a few steps you’ll need to take to ensure that everything is working efficiently. For example, you can:
- Set your filters accordingly. You’ll want to be sure to set your aggregation filters – and more specifically, its time settings – to display the latest content. How you do this will vary by tool, but the majority should enable you to choose a time frame for displayed content.
- Cross-post on social media. If you’re in an industry where real-time news is important (technology, health and wellness, news, etc.) then be sure to set your curator to also automatically post to your social media accounts for certain key topics.
Finally, there are some automated tools that will enable your visitors to filter aggregated content by date. This gives them more control over the types of content they read, which will reflect well on your site.
It’s important that you deliver the latest and most valuable content to your website’s visitors. However, doing this manually can be time consuming and even overwhelming. By automating the process to offer both your own and offsite content in an aggregated format, you can improve the value that visitors derive from your site.
Do you have any questions about content aggregation, or how to implement it on your website? Let us know in the comments section below!