Blog Content Strategy: Balancing Viral and SEO Content

I've been writing blog articles alongside my work for several years now. I didn't pay particular attention to SEO for a long time, which explains relatively modest traffic.

I had a negative view of "corporate" blogs that tend to produce content in quantity to establish themselves as specialists on a topic, but at the expense of either quality or form, making the content indigestible.

My goal with my "personal" blog was to produce quality content while accepting by default that SEO would be less optimal.

However, I've become increasingly interested in it recently and I realize that you can produce interesting content while being performant in terms of SEO.

Obviously, you first need to choose blogging tools (CMS) that are naturally technically performant for SEO. The CMS in question must be performant, handle metadata addition for you, prevent dead internal links, etc.

I've already written about CMS and personally use a static blog generator: Bloggrify. One of the advantages of static blogs is performance. And Bloggrify is also optimized for managing titles, meta, opengraphs, etc.

The second point is knowing how to mix ephemeral and permanent content.

The separation between the two can often be spotted just from the title.

Ephemeral content is content that reacts to news, addresses an opinion, content that is valid at time T and can resonate strongly when it comes out.

For example:

• Bye Twitter, or Whatever
• I've been forced to give up on my project

The titles are catchy, optimized to make people react. These are titles that are probably easier to share on social networks.

Conversely, no one specifically searches for these topics and there's little chance it will come up in a Google search result. Yet, for example on the second topic, it talks about company pivots and how to bounce back. That could interest people on this theme.

Permanent content is content that will be constantly relevant and will attract readers consistently over time.

For example:

• Salary comparison between France and the US

Should you favor one type of content over another?

Well, not necessarily.
Writing a tutorial, which will be permanent content by nature, is good, but it doesn't necessarily create engagement with your blog because it remains very neutral in form.
Writing an opinion article, conversely, can create an emotional bridge with people interested in your topics and wanting to discuss a theme. But it's content that ages poorly and may be forgotten in a year.

I tend to think you need both: opinion articles, in-depth pieces, to create a connection with an audience, and more neutral articles, more search engine-oriented for more stable and durable traffic.

And for my case, it has to please me. I write primarily for myself and don't want to force myself to write articles I wouldn't read myself. I take as much pleasure in ephemeral articles as in permanent ones.

However, I also know I must treat these articles differently.

Detecting and Acting on Content Nature

To detect if content is ephemeral or permanent, I use the following heuristic:

• if the content did most of its reading in the first few days, it's ephemeral (viral)
• if the content has consistent traffic over time, it's permanent

For this, you can of course use your analytics tool. I personally use Hakanai Pulse which offers this report by default:

If I look at the first "ephemeral" article, the view spike is obvious:

From there, on this content, I have a choice to try to turn things around and prevent it from being condemned to oblivion: play with the title and content.

Would it be possible to modify the title to make it more attractive in the long term?

I could for example try:

• Is it worth building YouTube analytics tools in 2024?
• Why are YouTube API quotas so restrictive?
• What YouTube data can't you get from the API?
• How much does it cost to build a YouTube analytics tool?
• When should you pivot your startup?

All these titles are relevant to the article content and could better match an internet user's search on Google.

And for Permanent Content?

Just because content has good SEO performance doesn't mean it should be neglected and left in a corner.

Certainly, content can be relevant at one point but become obsolete a year later.

It's therefore necessary to regularly return to "permanent" content that already generates regular traffic to update it.

If I take for example what I saw above thanks to Hakanai:

"US and FR salary comparison", it was written in 2023.
There's a strong chance it needs updating to have more current figures. And it's possible to reuse it, once updated, to recreate some engagement on social networks. In short, this content is also cultivated.

Conclusion

After several years of blogging, this hybrid approach seems most sustainable to me. It allows me to keep the pleasure of writing while gradually building a stable audience.

My opinion articles create discussions and retain my readers. My more "permanent" articles regularly bring new visitors via search engines.

The balance between viral content and SEO content isn't just a matter of strategy, it's also a matter of writing pleasure.

The secret is not to force yourself. If you only want to write opinion articles, do it. But keep in mind that a few adjustments (title, structure) can transform ephemeral content into a durable resource.