Tangential content. Your SEO secret weapon 

It’s tough coming up with attention-grabbing blog ideas. Especially when your business blog is a well-loved, well-maintained part of your content marketing strategy

Publishing regularly means you’ve probably covered all the obvious topics. And now inspiration is as hard to come by as an ice cream store in Antarctica. 

But don’t give up. You have a couple of options.

Your first option is to turn your attention to all those really hard-to-rank-for short-tail keywords. While ranking for ‘shoes’ or ‘photographer’ would be epic, from an SEO perspective it would be a huge challenge. And it would probably delay (if not completely derail) all the other tasks on your long-assed marketing to-do list. 

Your second option is to start exploring the power of tangential content. Never heard of this content marketing tactic before? Then it’s time you did. 

Businesses are re-energizing their blogs with tangential content

One study into companies and tangential content found that 60% of award-worthy businesses are using it to boost their blog power. And 31% are getting more PR coverage and backlinks.

Now it’s your turn to find out how tangential content can revolutionize, reinvigorate, and re-awesomize your blog content. 

Understanding tangential content

Tangential content is the blogs, videos, podcasts, social posts, etc. that discuss topics not directly related to your product or service offering. But it still:

  • fits with your brand aesthetic and business values 
  • relates to your industry and has a connection to your products and services, and so is likely to interest your ideal audience.  

Discussing topics other than your products or services can help build your brand and strengthen your SEO efforts. 

Tangential content doesn’t directly discuss or promote your products or services. But it still relates to your industry, fits with your brand aesthetic, and interests your ideal audience.

Andy Chadwick from Search Engine Journal has identified 6 great reasons why businesses should create tangential content. Here they are, along with some examples from my own experiences.

1. To reach more of your ideal audience.

A business’s audience is made up of different subsets. 

Let’s take my wedding coordinator client as an example. 

Couples who want to elope book with her. But so do couples who want a small wedding with a few guests. And then there are couples approaching a milestone anniversary who want to renew their vows. They’re all her audience, but want slightly different information when it comes to planning their wedding ceremony. Tangential content satisfies the needs of each audience subset. 

2. To hold your audience’s interest and increase engagement.

Publishing only photos of products or posts about services will start to look and feel stale. And your audience will notice. Having a ream of tangential content lets you break up messages about your products and services with entertaining, easy-to-engage-with content. And by mixing it up, the audience is tempted to keep coming back. They’ll want to see what you’ll show them next.   

3. To build your brand’s authority.

People buy on emotion, and one of those emotions is trust. By talking about and commenting on topics relevant to your industry, you’re showing your expertise. And as consumers, we tend to trust the experts. 

4. To write about content that fits with the customer’s lifestyle and beliefs.

Consumers click with brands that ‘get them’ and align with their personal values. Acknowledging these using content shows your audience you have shared interests. You’re the right brand for them. 

Let’s look at a simple, hypothetical example. 

Fashion company A talks about eco-friendly clothing production, and offers tips on how to repair clothes rather than throw them away. Fashion company B discusses hot trends at low prices. 

For the environmentally conscious shopper, fashion company A is going to win their business because it has values aligned with their own beliefs. 

Publishing content on a wider variety of subjects increases the chance of being quoted, referenced, and linked to by other online publications. This gets your brand name in front of more people. It may also result in backlinks. And backlinks tell the search engine algorithms your site is trustworthy.   

6. To boost your SEO performance.

Tangential content ideas allow you to target more keywords and in turn, increases your visibility. This makes it easier to get in front of your ideal customer. As long as your content is optimized correctly, you’ll start showing up for these keywords and attract more organic traffic to your site. 

Now you know what tangential content is. But what does it actually look like when put into practice? 

Examples of businesses using tangential content

Death Wish Coffee

Death Wish Coffee is the coffee brand for rebels (and me). Everything about them screams ‘alternative’. Along with the content you’d expect to see from a coffee brand (why coffee is great, how to make the perfect coffee yadda, yadda, yadda), they’ve got a bag of tangential content that rockers, goths, and rebels will love such as:

  • interviews with famous heavy metal and rock musicians (e.g. Zakk Wylde)
  • recipes from cult classic films such as The Big Lebowski
  • a series of articles on tattoo culture. 
Screenshot of the Death Wish Coffee blog page.

Intrepid Travel

Travel and tourism contribute to environmental damage, the loss of wildlife habitats, and the climate crisis. Australian-based tour operator Intrepid tries to strike a balance between helping people see and enjoy the wonders of the world and minimizing their impact on the environment. So along with the usual travel guides and destination ideas, this company writes about things such as:

  • animal welfare
  • diversity and inclusion
  • environmentally friendly travel. 
Screenshot of Intrepid Travel's Instagram page showing their tangential content.

Gaia Flowers

My favorite flower shop (and former client) in downtown Las Vegas, Gaia Flowers has been acing their tangential content from the get-go. Identifying that many in their audience are pet owners, eco-conscious, and interested in flower symbolism has given them lots to talk about. 

Screenshot of the Gaia Flowers blog page.

Finding tangential content ideas

All content creation starts with knowing your audience. If you don’t know much about who you’re writing for, what interests them, or what makes them feel happy and sad, you’re going to produce weak content.  

Whether it’s a 3,000-word article or 30 second IG reel, good content speaks directly to the wants and needs of your ideal audience. So if you don’t know who your target audience is, the first step in your tangential content creation journey is to write up your audience personas

Once you have these people clear in your mind, finding relevant topics is a quicker job. But where can you find these ideas? 

There are 5 fail-safe places to look. Using this combination of sources will deliver a range of subjects you can discuss in your posts, podcast, and newsletters. They’ll also allow you to vary your content style by helping you find ideas that will work well as guides, news pieces, and even opinion pieces. 

1. Listen to your audience

Find out what online forums, groups, Reddit and Quora threads your target audience are using. And then spend some time each week (or month) listening to what they’re asking and discussing. 

I realize that Reddit and Quora can feel like overwhelming, swampy time-sucks. So to make your life easier I suggest using FAQ Fox. This simple but clever tool scrapes the two sites for threads relating to whatever keyword you put in. It’s a great way to find relevant ideas quickly. 

2. Strip the news 

To strip or tear the news is a journalism term that means looking at current event stories and molding the subject into ideas relevant to your audience. 

For example, let’s imagine you own a coffee company. News breaks that scientists have engineered a species of coffee plant that thrives at really low altitudes but delivers coffee that tastes as good as that high-altitude stuff. Knowing you have an eco-conscious audience makes this news relevant because it could mean coffee with a lower carbon footprint is just around the corner. (For the record I’m not a coffee aficionado, and so this hypothetical example may already exist.) 

Stripping media outlets is a great way to find topical, on-trend subjects. To find ideas:

  • look at major local and national news outlets
  • sign up for B2B publications for your industry.

3. Use AI to generate ideas

While I have strong opinions on using AI to write copy, I appreciate its usefulness in generating ideas. Telling the AI software what your business is, who your audience is, and that you’re looking for tangential content should return some suggestions. Admittedly, an important part of this is getting the prompt right. If you don’t, the AI software may return complete garbage. Doing this for the first time? This article on using Google Bard to identify content ideas fast may help. 

4. Interview your audience

If you have the means and resources to do so, conduct interviews with your audience. It’s especially useful if you’re still in the process of creating your audience personas. Speaking with them directly lets you hear firsthand what’s important to them and what interests them. 

During the interview, ask:

  • what they do for work
  • how they spend their downtime 
  • what a typical weekend looks like 
  • what some of their last purchases were
  • what motivates them to find products and services such as yours. 

5. Hashtags and question suggestions

Social media and search engines want to make it easy to find the content they think will interest us. It’s how they keep us hooked on their platforms. 

Make the most of their legwork by looking at the hashtags your audience use on social media. You’ll get insights from both the hashtags and the posts that show up for them. The same is true with the ‘People also ask’ and ‘Related searches’ functions on Google.  

Check your keywords

Effective tangential content gets results by satisfying the needs of both your human audience and the search engine algorithms. There’s no point in attracting anyone and everyone. It’s about attracting the right audience and traffic to your site. To get that balance you need to:

  • take your audience’s search intent into consideration
  • make sure the search terms you’re trying to rank for have good keyword volume.

Keep a regular flow of tangential content ideas coming by dedicating a few hours each month to creating content ideas. Soon you’ll have a bank of ideas you can either work with yourself or hand over to your copywriter, designer, or social media manager. 

Getting started is always the hardest step. So if you’re feeling fed up with your blog topics, and want a hand coming up with tangential content ideas that fit your content marketing plan, I can help. Book a strategy session with me where we can tackle your tangential content struggles and any other SEO woes you’re facing.

Reach out to get started.

*I am a tool geek. I love me a useful tool. I personally use, have used or review every tool recommended in my articles. I am an affiliate of some and earn a small commission at no additional cost to you.

Barb Davids - SEO Consultant

Barb Davids is an SEO consultant and owner of Compass Digital Strategies. Driven by data and analytics, she works hard to get business-changing results for her clients, such as 256% more website traffic and 22% more leads. Connect with her: Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube