Tangential SEO is a unique approach to search engine optimisation that goes beyond traditional keyword targeting. 

Instead of focusing solely on your core product or service, tangential SEO explores topics that are not directly related to your core offering but still highly resonate with the interests and lifestyle of your target audience. 

In the search engine ecosystem, optimising for tangential SEO requires a well-structured and strategic plan. Therefore, in this article, we will discuss the definition and how to optimise tangential SEO in the explanation below.

What Is Tangential Content?

Before we talk about tangential SEO, you should know what is tangential content first. Tangential content  is information that is not directly about a company's main product or service but aligns with themes and interests relevant to its target audience. 

This strategy can strengthen a brand's appeal by connecting it to a broader range of topics that matter to consumers. Let's take a look at some examples below:

Apple: Instead of sticking to technology-focused content, Apple could explore interior design themes that complement its minimalist aesthetic. This content can resonate with people who appreciate Apple's design philosophy without directly marketing their products.

IKEA: IKEA, a furniture retailer, may create content related to urban gardening or share recipes for small spaces. These topics are indirectly related to home furnishings but engage a wider audience's interest in home improvement and lifestyle.

Michelin: Michelin, famous for tyres, created Michelin Guide, a prestigious culinary review platform. By offering a reason for early car users to travel and use their tyres, Michelin leveraged tangential content to achieve a unique competitive advantage.

What Is Tangential SEO?

To make your tangential content work better, you need to implement a well-planned strategy of tangential SEO. 

Tangential SEO is the practice of optimizing content for search engines by targeting related or tangentially relevant topics rather than focusing solely on the primary keyword or topic.

This strategy recognizes that search engines are becoming better at understanding the overall topic and context of content, not just specific keywords. 

Therefore, instead of strictly adhering to a single keyword focus, tangential SEO involves creating content that covers a broader range of related topics and provides comprehensive information on the subject matter.

Pros and Cons of Tangential SEO

After you understand the definition of tangential content and tangential SEO, then you must wonder why tangential content is crucial for the development of your business. Or is this strategy not worth trying? Here are some things you need to consider about tangential SEO:

Pros of Tangential SEO

Here are 5 advantages of using tangential SEO for your website:

Expand Wider Audience: By creating content that touches on related interests, you can connect with a broader audience, engaging people who might not have been reached through traditional SEO approaches.

Enhance Brand Authority: It helps a company's understanding of the broader context in which its products or services are used. This can position the company as a thought leader in its industry or niche.

Boost Engagement: Tangential content allows you to resonate more with users as it addresses their broader interests and needs. It will lead to higher engagement rates and foster a deeper connection with the brand.

Upgrade SEO Performances: By including a wider variety of keywords and topics, this can raise a website's search engine rankings. 

Additionally, search engines are increasingly recognising the value of content that addresses a variety of interconnected themes, and are rewarding websites that demonstrate this interconnectedness with higher visibility.

Improve Link Building: It helps in link building as it encourages content sharing across different domains, leading to more backlinks. These backlinks, like word-of-mouth recommendations, increase your website's authority, which ultimately improves search engine rankings and visibility.

Cons of Tangential SEO

The following are 3 cons of tangential content and SEO strategy for you to consider:

Diluted Focus: By covering a wide range of topics, you risk diluting your brand's core message, making it less clear what your business specialises in.

Long-term Impact: It may take longer to show significant results, as it relies on building a wider reputation and authority over time.

Resource-Intensive: Creating quality tangential content and managing diverse SEO strategies can be resource-intensive, requiring more time, effort, and expertise to be effective.

How to Optimise Tangential SEO

You already know some things to consider when you want to optimise this strategy, now it’s time for you to explore the step-by-step of how to optimise tangential SEO. Below is the following explanation about how to optimise this SEO strategy:

1. Develop Buyer Personas of Your Brand

Creating buyer personas involves creating detailed profiles of your ideal customers, drawn from real data and market research. 

These fictional representations help businesses gain a deeper understanding of their audience, thus allowing them to tailor products, services, and marketing strategies to better meet customer needs.

Additionally, buyer personas typically include some details such as demographics, behaviour patterns, motivations, goals, challenges, values and fears.

2. Make a Clear Mind Map

Creating a mind map is a visualisation technique that helps organise and explore complex information. 

It starts with a central idea in the centre of the page, with branches extending to represent major topics or themes. From these branches, additional sub-branches can grow, each depicting a related subtopic, concept, or idea.

In a business context, mind maps can be used to visualise customer insights or brainstorm ideas. For example, starting with the name of a buyer persona as the centre point, you can expand branches to represent key attributes such as values, aspirations, preferences, and hobbies. 

This structure helps visualise the interconnectedness of various elements, providing a clear and organised way to understand and analyse the relationships between them.

3. Collect Data to Support Your Ideas

To find data that supports your idea, a useful approach is to take a question from your mind map and search for it on Google to gather relevant information.

When analysing search results, it is helpful to collect keywords associated with each relevant result to understand what people are looking for and where their interests lie. 

This process reveals that even if a query appears to have a low search volume, it can still yield valuable insights, as there is likely to be content that interests people.

4. Discover Unique Keywords Your Competitors Don’t Have

Finding additional keywords that your competitors don't have involves finding unique sources of inspiration outside of conventional keyword database

Several tools may be handy for compiling keyword lists, but these keywords are often accessible to your competitors, indicating that they may be widely used.

To find unique tangential keywords, one effective approach is to turn to dynamic user-generated content (UGC) platforms such as Reddit and Quora. These forums contain many questions and discussions where users seek answers to problems that cannot be found elsewhere online. 

By exploring these forums, you can identify popular topics, questions and phrases with significant engagement (such as likes, upvotes and shares), even if conventional keyword tools show low or zero search volume.

5. Obtain the Search Volumes for All Your New Queries

When getting the search volume for your new keyword query, you first need to make sure the data you have is complete. 

If you've got your keywords from standard SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush, chances are they already include search volume information, so no additional work is required for that.

However, for new queries, you should enter them into the SEO tool to check their search volume. This set of keywords includes those collected from unique sources such as user-generated content (UGC) platforms, as well as related People Also Ask questions. 

In addition, you don’t need to be worried if some of these keywords show zero volume because; it's common for the same question to be asked in multiple ways, each of which may register as low volume in traditional tools.

Nonetheless, these ‘zero volume’ keywords can still have significant value. Most of the time, these keywords attract a lot of interaction on social platforms, which indicates that people are interested in the topic even though it doesn't fit the typical SEO metrics. 

To handle this variation, it is important to group similar search queries to identify repeating patterns and gain a clearer understanding of the true interest behind these keywords.

6. Group Your Keywords Into Clusters

Keyword clustering is the process of grouping related keywords to better organise your data and make it easier to identify common trends and themes. 

This method turns long lists of keywords into smaller, more manageable groups, so you can understand which pages to create and recognise recurring queries, even among keywords that seem to have low or zero search volume.

When clustering keywords, it is very important to use a tool that clusters them based on search engine results, not natural language processing, as the former reflects how search engines interpret the relationship between keywords. 

This approach ensures your keyword clusters are aligned with how search engines perceive content relevance.

Once you have your clustering report, you can start to see trends and patterns. This information will help you in developing and evaluating this SEO strategy.

Conclusion

That was the explanation of tangential SEO starting from the definition, pros and cons to how to optimise it. We hope that this explanation can provide a clear picture of this SEO strategy.

In its implementation, applying tangential SEO is quite challenging because there are many technical things that must be understood.

However, you can rely on SEO Services by cmlabs that can help you starting from conducting site audits, keyword research, and website content creation to implement tangential content and  SEO. 

cmlabs consists of experts in their fields who have experience in handling various client issues in various industries. Try SEO Services by cmlabs by contacting our Marketing Team to discuss your tangential content and SEO needs!