What is sustainability content?
Search intent for sustainability in business has reached over 33k per month, although with a keyword difficulty of 89 suggesting you need high-quality, unique content to rank. So, what can brands do to create a content strategy that showcases their sustainability credentials? Today Account Director Indy Deo and SEO manager Avit Virdee explore sustainability content, why it is needed and how you can successfully deliver it to your audience. Although we use the term sustainability to indicate the initiatives and actions businesses take to preserve planetary resources, it refers to the four pillars of sustainability, including the business’s impact on human, social, economic and environmental.
Why brands need sustainability content.
By incorporating your sustainability messaging into your digital marketing, you can provide engaging, helpful content to align your brand and sell your service or product. First, however, you must be mindful of the challenges of creating this type of content. While your message may speak to your human, social, economic, and environmental practices, savvy audiences will quickly address any inconsistencies in your messaging, and the fallout can be brutal. Think about Kourtney Kardashian becoming the sustainable face of Boohoo.
This kind of content can be particularly tricky for brands and is industry-dependent. For example, travel and fast fashion brands may find communication more complex; however, it is not impossible.
One of the critical points of sustainability in business is to nurture the longevity of the resources. Therefore, incorporating sustainable practices into your business strategy should be celebrated; this is where your content plan can come in.
Fundamentally, your content strategy should align with the reason your business exists. This reason for existence includes your mission, vision and values. Beyond these reasons, it is more than just sustainable packaging. It would be best if you considered a more comprehensive plan including your impact on people, the economy and the planet.
Therefore, before you kick off your sustainability content plan, rigorously check your practices to ensure you’re not going to be called out further down the line. This inspection could mean considering the wording you use in your communication.
Sustainable vs Ethical
Once you understand your sustainability strategy, you can consider the type of content you want to produce. Brands must be transparent, which could involve showcasing the steps they are taking instead of making claims that are not true or are misaligned.
In addition, you must understand the “why” behind the content you are producing. Sustainability content is no longer a box-ticking exercise but is an essential subject matter for eco-conscious consumers.
Therefore, it might be better to exclude “sustainable” from your wording and replace it with words like ethical, honest, or moral.
Not all brands can be sustainable. For example, some manufacturing practices prioritise the product, like those in the pharmaceutical or medical device sectors. Therefore, making unrealistic claims in content is unlikely to yield results. So, if you can’t say you are sustainable, what can you say?
How to create sustainability content
The content produced must serve a purpose. Our recent Google Helpful Content update article the Google Helpful Content update explains why the current algorithm change favours meaningful content. Although what type of content to produce can seem complex, the best strategies cut a clear path. Often, strong sustainability content does not have a broad reach across all topics but individualisation of subjects. Whilst many companies worry that if this content doesn’t cut through, then critics will likely accuse the company of failing. Although, this is often not the case.
It is much better to plan a list of priorities and explore each individually from start to finish instead of jumping back and forth across sustainability topics and not allowing your audience to explore the preferences fully.
Suppose you’re a business looking to get more out of your sustainability credentials or explore away. In that case, you can create a series of transparent content to help showcase your ethical vision and values. Get in touch with our team today. Get in touch if you want to learn more about SEO with The PHA Group.