In the rapidly evolving world of SEO, staying ahead of the curve is critical.
Traditional SEO focuses on optimizing for keywords and topics directly related to your business.
However, as markets become increasingly saturated, new strategies are needed to stand out and reach a broader audience. That’s where tangential SEO comes in.
Tangential SEO involves creating and optimizing content for topics that are tangentially related to your core business. This allows you to engage with audiences who may not be actively looking for your products or services but who could still find them relevant or useful.
It is a strategy designed to build brand visibility, establish authority, attract a wider audience, and ultimately drive more traffic to your site.
Whether you’re a content marketer seeking to diversify your strategy, a business owner aiming to extend your online reach, or a newcomer to the field eager to learn, this guide is for you.
Not only will I explain what tangential content is at a broader level, but I’ll also show you how we find alternative keywords using untraditional methods.
You’ll have a methodology for finding keywords none of your competitors have even thought about.
Excited?
Let’s begin.
What Is “Tangential Content”?
Quite simply, tangential content is content that is not directly related to your product or service offering.
For example, instead of only focusing on sportswear, Nike might generate content around topics like music playlists for different moods or workout routines, exploring various global music trends.
It could even discuss urban design and its impact on outdoor physical activities. These are topics not directly related to Nike’s products but themes that would likely resonate with its audience.
Let’s give some more examples for context:
Starbucks: Beyond coffee, Starbucks could create content discussing books and literature, considering that many people enjoy reading while sipping its coffee. The brand could start a book club, share reviews, and host author interviews.
Apple: Apple might deviate from its technology-centered content to explore topics like interior design, highlighting aesthetic and minimalistic arrangements that complement its devices or discussing how different spaces foster productivity and creativity.
IKEA: While primarily focused on furniture, IKEA could develop content around topics like urban gardening, offering tips for creating green spaces in small city apartments, or sharing recipes to create using limited kitchen tools.
Why Create Tangential Content?
Creating tangential content can have numerous benefits, particularly when it comes to reaching a wider audience, building brand authority, and improving SEO performance.
As a food lover, I wanted to try and squeeze a food analogy in, so I’m going to do it here. Let’s consider the benefits of creating tangential content as a master chef in the culinary world.
Broader audience reach: Just like a versatile chef caters to various palates, tangential content allows your brand to cater to a wider audience – which is especially important for weirder or more abstract niches.
Increased engagement: Changing up the menu keeps diners interested, just like a variety of content can keep your audience engaged. By showing that your brand can whip up more than just the standard fare, you’re demonstrating a deeper understanding of your audience’s diverse tastes.
Building brand authority: When you create a variety of dishes, you prove your culinary skills beyond your signature dish. Similarly, creating content on a range of topics positions your brand as an authority in your field, enhancing your reputation and influence.
Creating more emotional content and aligning with customer lifestyle: Tangential content is akin to designing a themed dining experience that aligns with your customer’s lifestyles and preferences. For instance, if you know your customers are environmentally conscious, you might focus on farm-to-table ingredients or share stories of local farmers. This not only provides content that resonates emotionally but also aligns your brand more closely with your customer’s values and lifestyles.
Link building: Just as a unique fusion dish might get rave reviews and recommendations, tangential content often has a higher potential to be shared, earning you backlinks from various domains. These backlinks boost your site’s authority, much like word-of-mouth boosts a restaurant’s reputation.
SEO performance: By offering a variety of dishes, you’re catering to more tastes and attracting more diners. Similarly, by covering a range of topics, you’re likely to rank for more keywords, attracting more organic traffic to your website.
While the benefits of publishing tangential content are clear, don’t overlook the value in the research process itself.
The analogy continues like so: consider researching tangential content ideas similar to the time a chef spends experimenting in the kitchen and interacting with their customers.
It’s during this phase that the chef discovers which dishes their customers can’t get enough of, which ones they’re not too fond of, and what cuisine they’re yearning to try next.
In the same way, when you research diverse topics for your tangential content, you’re not only gathering material for your next post – you’re also gaining a broader understanding of your customers’ unmet needs or interests.
This insight is just as valuable, if not more so, as it can guide the development of new products, services, or post-purchase support articles.
So, even before you’ve served up your tangential content to your audience, the research phase itself can help you refine your ‘menu,’ making your brand more attuned to your customers’ tastes and more valuable in their eyes.
Hopefully, the hokey simile made sense, hasn’t made you hungry, and you’re sold on the concept of tangential content.
I’ll now show you how we generate tangential content ideas.
How To Generate Tangential Content Ideas?
To walk through the following process, I’m going to use an example as if I was doing this research for a fictional hair removal company.
Step 1: Establish Buyer Personas
Buyer personas are essentially fictional representations of your ideal customers, often based on real data and market research about your existing customers. They help us understand our customers (and potential customers) better and make it easier for us to “get into their minds.”
These personas can include information such as demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, goals, challenges, values, and fears.
Sometimes your marketing department will already have one of these, but if they don’t, you could ask our new friend, ChatGPT, to produce one.
Step 2: Create A Mind Map
A mind map typically starts with a central idea, placed in the middle of your page. From this central idea, you’ll draw lines that branch out into main topics.
It’s like a tree sprouting branches.
These main branches can further sprout smaller branches, each representing related subtopics or ideas.
In our scenario, we’ll plant the name of the buyer persona as the seed of our mind map. From there, we’ll let branches grow out, each representing key values, aspirations, preferences, and hobbies that we’ve identified for this persona.
Remember, this isn’t the stage for keyword research; there’s no need to think about keyword volume data. This is more about emptying out your mind and exploring potential questions this persona might have.
This process is about trying to see the world through their eyes.
If you find that you’re not the best match for this persona – for example, if the persona is a 28-year-old woman and you’re not a 28-year-old woman (as I am not) – then it could be beneficial to bring in someone who aligns more closely with the persona.
This way, you can ensure you’re covering all bases and not missing any important insights.
In any case, here’s one I started doing for a persona I called “Sarah Thompson.”
Also, it’s wise to create several mind maps to cater to different segments of your target audience.
For instance, when I analyzed a renowned hair removal company’s website data using Similarweb, I discovered a substantial interest from males in hair removal.
As a bald male, I had to confront my own biases that initially made me overlook a significant demographic. To make the most of this exercise, it’s crucial that you don’t let your personal biases cloud your judgment.
In light of my realization, I did create a mind map for the male audience, following the same steps. However, to avoid repetition, I won’t detail that process again.
Always remember: diversity in perspectives can enrich your content strategy!
Step 3: Find The Data To Support Ideas
This is where the fun begins! I simply take all the questions I’ve brainstormed in my mind map and pop them into Google to see what surfaces.
If you take a look at the screenshot below, you’ll see that my initial search query doesn’t have any search volume (highlighted in the red box).
Despite this, Google still fetches a bunch of relevant results. Interestingly, each of these results does rank for a certain number of keywords, as indicated by the green boxes.
So, even without search volume for the initial query, there’s still relevant content out there capturing people’s interest.
Screenshot for search for [are wax strips vegan], Google, May 2023
You’re going to want to gather all these keywords. Honestly, this is where I find the Ahrefs toolbar to be a gem.
It allows me to click on each search result and conveniently export the keywords associated with each one. This makes the whole process much more streamlined and efficient.
Of course, you don’t need Ahrefs for this; there are other great tools to get the keywords for each URL. I just find the toolbar incredibly useful here.
Step 4: Rinse And Repeat With Each Of Your Content Ideas
You’ll want to enter each of your ideas into Google and get all the keywords for the articles that rank – even if your original query had no search volume.
Step 5: Find Additional Keywords None Of Your Competitors Will Have
At this point, you should have a list of keywords that are tangentially related to your target brand.
These keywords correspond to the questions and pain points of your buyer persona, providing a strong foundation for content that’s relevant and engaging for your target audience.
But because you’ve downloaded these keywords from an SEO tools database, your competitors have them, too.
They may not be your direct competitors, but someone has them (otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to get them from the SEO tool).
So how do we get the keywords no one has? We need to seek additional sources of inspiration.
I generally turn to forums or late UGC sites. Why? Dynamic forums like Reddit and Quora have a huge user base, all of whom are asking questions that many of them can’t find the answers to elsewhere online.
On forums like Reddit, we can zero in on specific topics and subreddits to surface popular questions that get a lot of engagement.
Screenshot from Reddit, May 2023
Keep in mind that many individuals resort to forums to seek answers to questions that the internet doesn’t readily provide.
On user-generated content (UGC) sites, the same question can be phrased in countless ways, which means conventional keyword tools might not capture this diversity.
Now, if you find a slew of keywords phrased differently but asking the same question, all registering as “zero volume” yet showing substantial engagement (in the form of likes, upvotes, shares, etc.), can we truly label them as zero volume?
I’d argue most certainly not. There’s clearly an active interest and engagement there, and that’s what truly matters.
Back to our hair removal example. There were also thousands of unanswered questions and ideas on Quora.
Screenshot from Reddit May 2023
Anyway, we want all these “keywords” too.
The easiest and quickest way is to make a little scraper that searches for keywords and pulls all these. There are plenty of Python libraries for the more “well-known” forums, like this one for Quora and this guide for Reddit.
If you’re not inclined towards coding, don’t have the skills, or perhaps the niche you’re exploring doesn’t readily present good ideas on major forums, there’s a solution for you.
Chrome extensions like Scraper are excellent tools for this. You can simply right-click and use it to scrape all the relevant questions.
Screenshot from Quora May 2023
Step 6 (Optional): Use AI To Make The Questions Less “Chatty”
Of course, when people ask questions on forums, they word them in weird, colloquial ways with misspellings and local abbreviations. We can use ChatGPT here again to make all of our scraped questions “less chatty.”