SaaS Content Republishing

This data was originally featured in the April 21, 2021 newsletter found here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/blog/2021/04/inbox-insights-april-21-2021-data-impartiality-tech-change-management-saas-content-republishing/

In the past, we’ve focused on content republishing broadly, for all industries. This week, we wanted to dig into one specific niche for content republishing, SaaS software. After all, we would expect for any given niche in a market that content republishing would work differently, be less or more effective. We know from past experience that news sites and publications tend to republish frequently and see good benefit from. What about content around SaaS?

In an examination of 24,207 unique articles about SaaS in the last 21 days, we found the following. First, of those articles, a full 75.6% had been republished at least once, which is a startling statistic on its own. When we do matching to compare apples-to-apples republished versus original content performance, we see something stunning:

What we see is that in the specific subtopic of SaaS, content republishing does substantially WORSE than original content. It attracts less traffic, has lower traffic values, and earns fewer shares and linking domains. That’s… rough. We also see that republished content seems to be following the advice of many SEO folks, that you should constantly be revising and updating your republished content, making it richer; the length of republished content is more than 5x longer than original content.

What’s happening here? There’s no easy explanation; in the original dataset, there’s a rich mix of differnt publishers and companies. There are even distributions for things like domain rating, so it’s not a case of one cohort of sites doing well and another cohort dragging things down, at least not obviously.

For now, the key takeaways are twofold. First, check your own niche or vertical to see how content republishing performs in your specific industry. Don’t accept generic advice that may draw data from sites that are nothing like yours.

Second, if you’re in the software business, check the performance of your own republished content. See if the above results are also typical for you, or if you’re an anomaly (in a good way) compared to the norm.

Methodology: Trust Insights used AHREFS SEO software to export 24,207 pieces of content about the keyword SaaS from its index. Content was restricted to the English language, filtering out any adult material, filtering out broken links, and excluding homepages. The timeframe of the data is April 1-21, 2021. The date of study is April 21, 2021. Trust Insights is the sole sponsor of the study and neither gave nor received compensation for data used, beyond applicable service fees to software vendors, and declares no competing interests.