Your Best Content Is Probably Doing Nothing

Well, not nothing.

But there's a decent chance it's sitting on page 14 of your website having a lovely time by itself.

Then... Crickets.

Organisations spend a lot of time creating good content and surprisingly little time helping people actually find it over the longer term.

Your website shouldn't feel like an overstuffed storage cupboard

Articles over here.

Case studies somewhere else.

Service pages tucked away in the menu.

A very good piece of research from 2024 that nobody has looked at since February.

The problem isn't necessarily that you need more content.

You might just need to connect the content you've already got.

This is where internal linking comes in.

It sounds like one of those slightly boring SEO jobs somebody puts on a spreadsheet as a to do, then nobody picks it up.

Done properly, it can be magic, it's essentially saying:

If you found this useful, here's the next thing you should know.

Quite sensible, really.

Let's say you know quite a lot about trust

Perhaps you've written about:

• communicating organisational change

• hard-to-reach audiences

• media relations

• crisis communications

• stakeholder engagement

• AI and misinformation

Individually, they're useful articles.

Together, they tell a much more important story:

That these people actually know this subject.

But that only works if your website helps people join the dots.

If someone reaches your article about trust during organisational change, they should naturally be able to find the piece you wrote about crisis communications.

And the relevant case study.

And the service behind it.

And the article explaining how AI is changing audience trust.

It is not aggressive selling.

It's being useful.

Think in subjects, not blog posts

Instead of asking:

What are we writing this month?

Try:

What do we want to be known for?

Very different question.

For JAM, for example, that might be:

Trust and reputation

Hard-to-reach audiences

Public sector communications

Media relations

Crisis communications

Stakeholder engagement

AI and communications

Then everything you publish builds depth around those areas.

One big article leads into another.

Case studies prove the theory.

Service pages explain how you help.

Expert commentary adds a point of view.

Suddenly your website stops looking like a list of things you've published.

It starts looking like expertise.

This matters for Google

Search engines need to understand how pages relate to one another.

Internal links help with that.

If lots of relevant pages naturally point towards a major guide on stakeholder communications, that's a fairly strong clue that the guide matters.

It also gives search engines context.

A page isn't floating around in isolation.

It belongs to a wider subject.

Useful.

But there's another reason we're paying much more attention to this now.

AI also needs to work out what you know

People aren't only Googling things anymore.

They're asking questions.

Long ones.

Very specific ones.

Questions like:

"How should a housing association communicate with residents who don't trust them?"

Or:

"Which UK communications agencies work with membership organisations?"

Or:

"How can a public sector organisation communicate controversial change?"

AI systems then have to find and interpret useful sources.

There is no magic "get ChatGPT to recommend me" switch.

Sorry.

If there were, somebody would already be selling it for £4,999 a month.

But there are sensible things you can do.

And one of them is making it incredibly easy for search engines, AI systems and humans to understand what your organisation genuinely knows about.

Good content helps.

Clear structure helps.

Related pages help.

Evidence helps.

Expertise helps.

Connections between all of those things help.

Your old articles might be more useful than your new ones

Here's another one.

Every time organisations publish something new, they dutifully add links to older content.

Very good.

But they forget to go backwards.

Some of your older pages may have been online for years.

They might have strong search visibility.

External links.

Regular traffic.

So if you've just published something brilliant, go back and find the old articles that should point towards it.

Content shouldn't move in one direction.

Think less "archive."

More "network." Hive mind kind of thing.

Answer the next question

There is one very easy test for a good internal link.

Ask:

What would this person reasonably want to know next?

If you're talking about communications during a crisis, perhaps they'd benefit from a guide to managing media enquiries.

If you're discussing difficult-to-reach audiences, perhaps a public sector case study makes sense.

If you're talking about stakeholder engagement, perhaps there's another article about rebuilding trust.

Useful link.

Add it.

If you're only adding the link because the words "communications strategy" happened to appear in the paragraph?

Maybe leave it.

We are still writing for people.

Please stop writing "click here"

Small request.

Instead of:

Click here

Try:

Read our guide to communicating with hard-to-reach audiences.

Or:

See how we approached stakeholder engagement for X.

One tells somebody precisely what they'll get.

The other feels like the internet in 2007.

Tiny change.

Much better.

Good content shouldn't expire after LinkedIn gets bored

This is perhaps the bigger point.

Organisations treat content as incredibly disposable.

Publish.

Promote.

Forget.

Repeat.

But if an article contains genuinely useful thinking, why should it stop being useful because it isn't new anymore?

A good piece of content should keep appearing naturally through your website.

New articles should point towards it.

Old articles should be updated.

Relevant service pages should reference it.

Case studies should reinforce it.

One strong idea should keep earning its keep.

Build the community, not just the conversation

There's a temptation to think of thought leadership as individual moments.

But reputation rarely works like that.

People build a view of what you know over time.

They read something.

See your name somewhere else.

Come across a useful case study.

Hear one of your people speaking.

Read another article.

Eventually, the association forms.

They're good at this.

That's what you're trying to build.

Not just traffic to an article.

Recognition around an area of expertise.

The bottom line

Internal linking sounds like SEO.

And yes, technically, it is.

But it's also just good communications.

You're helping people understand what else you know.

You're helping them find useful information.

You're giving your best thinking a longer life.

And you're making it easier for search engines and AI systems to understand where your expertise sits.

So before you commission another six articles, have a look at the fifty you've already got.

There may be considerably more value sitting there than you think.

It might just need re-introducing to the rest of the website.