Writing from an SEO-friendly perspective is a great way to be easily identified by search engines and to obtain good conversion results, but to increase the perceived value of your web project you need to do everything possible to entice visitors to consult other materials in line with your needs.
A good editorial plan for blogs and websites involves the creation of content that is different from each other but designed to respond to relevant research interests: in this way a site can become very relevant for a certain category of topics.
Our visitors need to be encouraged to explore the site in search of interesting content for their needs, and showing related articles together with those currently visited is a good technique to lower the bounce rate and increase the time spent and the pages visited.
The problem, however, is that in many cases the articles are chosen automatically by the plugins and are not effective choices for visitors. What we can do then is to identify a way to select each time the articles most relevant to those of the case and highlight them for their visitors.
Content index
- The advantages of related articles
- How to find related articles to link
- How to insert related articles
The advantages of related articles
The links to related articles enable us to offer a broader view of the topic in content, improve your position, and make navigation more intuitive for bots and users.
Highlighting related articles allows you to reduce the bounce rate, increase the time spent on the site, increase the number of pages visited, and increase the probability that the visitor will find the answers suitable for their needs.
Related articles allow you to improve the structure of internal links by enriching the path of links that refer a page to others that deal with related topics.
In this way, it is possible to favor the influx of link juice to relevant pages, such as pillar articles, product and service pages.
Even Google has realized the need to make it easier for people to find other content related to their information needs, so now the SERPs are populated both by boxes “People have also searched” that show searches on similar topics, and links to contents of the same site that appear associated with the one identified at the time.
The most important content should therefore be brought to the attention of people as much as possible, for example by linking landing articles with similar ones with clearly visible links.
How to find related articles to link
The identification of the related articles appropriate for the content in question is an objective that can be pursued by means of the keyword research at the base of the editorial plan of the blog.
For example, if I make a detailed article on ” SEO copywriting “, I may have an interest in linking articles that consist of many shades of this theme.
From the analysis of long-tail keywords, we can find related terms such as:
- freelance SEO copywriting
- SEO copywriting course
- SEO copywriting work
and therefore link to other related pages in our themed blog concerning the topics:
- How to start working as a freelance copywriter
- The best SEO copywriting courses
- The sites where to find work as an SEO copywriter
Note that the first and third alternatives could lead to very similar articles. To avoid cannibalization of the contents, therefore, it is necessary to treat different shades of the same meanings on each page to avoid disadvantageous redundancies.
How to insert related articles
Related posts can be highlighted in various ways:
- Automatically at the bottom of the post, by means of a plugin that shows related articles in special boxes next to or at the bottom of the contents, generally going to draw on other contents marked with the same tags;
- Manually , adding links within the text within the actual text (… related articles allow you to lower the bounce rate [LINK: “How to lower the bounce rate”]) or as icons in evidence by interrupting the text with a special box (… to learn more read here: “How to lower the bounce rate”);
- Through a sidebar i n the margin in which to highlight related articles, the most recent or those with more votes or comments. It is not always an advantageous situation, as it does not ensure that articles similar to the one treated are highlighted.
Entering related articles by hand is a more time-consuming activity but obviously, it is rewarded by the greater accuracy of the results offered.
The plugins to add related articles can be customized as regards the number of pages to appear (eg 4 or 6) or by customizing the visual form (only the title, an image with title, title, and excerpt, etc.). They make it possible to exclude the appearance of articles only on the basis of the date of publication, which only rarely has a bearing on the subject dealt with.
Among the most suitable plugins to insert related posts we have:
- Related Post WordPress : analyzes the article and proposes other materials in line with the one consulted as soon as the article is published. To be appreciated is the fact that it uses its own cache and does not affect the speed of the site.
- Contextual Related Post : allows you to introduce small thumbnails to make related articles appear at various points of the page. This plugin has an excellent administration panel with which you can create manual correlations between articles, between pages, and between pages and articles. This also allows suggestions to appear without affecting the site cache.
- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin : one of the most famous plugins to propose related contents
- Jetpack by Automattic: allows you to enhance related posts without burdening the server. You can decide which functions to enable. From the Traffic section of the settings, you have to activate the option “Show related content after posts”
- Related Posts Thumbnails has easy configuration and a good number of customizable settings. You can define how many related posts to show, categories, starting date, text style, and colors
- AddThis Related Post is one of the lightest plugins to show related articles. It also allows you to view statistics from a specific account.
What are your thoughts on related articles for the success of your blog?
