You Ask, I Answer: Help Articles vs. Blog Posts for SEO?

In today's episode, Liana asks, what are your thoughts on reusing blog posts for help articles? Are there pros and cons to posting the same content twice? Where is it better to host content to improve SEO? For example, if I want to share content on how to lose weight and we're a fitness tech company, would that benefit as a blog post, a help article or both? The help articles are on Intercom and the blog is on a WordPress site.

So help articles like the ones that are hosted in systems like Intercom or Zendesk or whatever are typically not on your uh company's domain name, right? They're not on your company.com. They are typically hosted on either like some purely internal weird name like you know vx72.intercom.com. Um or with some customization on a subdomain like your company.intercom.com. In either case, um the content is not hosted on your domain name, and your domain name is essentially what uh tells search engines, hey, this is content that is about us.

If it's not hosted on your domain, it doesn't benefit you. So from a purely where should the our best content live, it should be on your domain name. Period. End of story. Uh for that.

Now I would presume that your WordPress site is your company.com, and that's where your original content should live. When it comes to uh reposting content, repost content only if it allows you to use wherever you're reposting it to, allows you to use the rel canonical tag. Uh this is a tag that goes in the header of your HTML that says, hey, actually, the original content is over here at your company.com. This is just a repost. This is especially important for sites like Medium.com.

Again, not your website, not your domain. Um, and it is better to you can repost content on Medium, but make sure it has that canonical tag that says, actually, the real thing is over here at your company.com. In terms of where what content should be where, a big part is gonna be determined by customer experience, right? So if your product is is fitness technology, the intercom site would be best suited for very specific tactical questions, the ones you get the most often about the product that are that are part of that customer experience. Like, hey, I bought my new fitness tracker and it won't turn on, what am I doing wrong?

Stuff like that. And those pieces of content absolutely can be reposted to your WordPress site or posted on your WordPress site and then copied and pasted into intercom. But you also want to have higher level pieces of content. Or what why how either one is fine. When you're writing articles, what is the thing?

Why is the thing important? How does the thing work? So if you're talking about losing weight, what is it? Why is it important? How how does it work?

Or why is it important? What what are the the things you need and how do you do it? Generally speaking, if you're selling fitness technology, you're probably selling uh some form of activity tracking or uh measurement or a recommendation engine that says, hey, time to stand up again, you know. In a case like that, you're gonna want to take each of the individual features and benefits of your product and turn into one of those why what how or what why how frameworks so that you can say to somebody, this is why this thing is important. Pharmaceutical and med tech companies do this a lot because in many cases they're not even allowed to advertise their products, like they can't advertise their newest drug.

Um so they have to do what's called disease state awareness, where like, hey, this is a thing. What's your specific take on, say, weight loss? What is it that you do better than the million and a half other uh solutions that are out there? That's where you would start your content marketing program with lots of blog posts in videos and podcasts and all the stuff that you would normally do to build awareness of the problem, uh, a impact if the problem's not solved, and then the solution, right? That's the old uh Dan Kennedy uh direct mail marketing formula.

They call it pigs, problem impact, general solution, specific solution, and a specific solution, of course, is always your product or service. So though that's how to tackle that. Make things that are impacting the customer experience go in the help system, make everything else go into the content marketing system, and cross post if you like, but make sure that the content marketing system hosted on your company's domain is the single source of truth and is the database of record for all your marketing, so that you get credit for it uh in search engines and so on and so forth. So uh good question. Important one because it's it is very tactical stuff, but success in SEO, especially is all about correct reg rigorous implementation of tactics.

Strategy is pretty straightforward. Rank for terms that are relevant to your audience that will give you business. It's the implementation that's the hard part. As always, leave your comments in the comments box below. Please subscribe to the YouTube channel and to the newsletter.

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