The Great British Bake Off (GBBO) has once again managed to take over our screens, social channels and search results for another year running. With trending news around Channel 4 taking ownership of the show from the BBC, the volume of content has substantially risen over recent days. But how do you separate the star bakers from the top of the content pack? Let us introduce you to Buzzsumo!

Why is an SEO agency talking about GBBO?

Good question! The beauty of SEO is that it taps into so many areas of the marketing mix. As a specialist SEO agency we are most interested in driving quality traffic to your website and ensuring a visitor finds fantastic content and a great user experience once they get there. This should reduce bounce rate, increase time spent on the site and assist in conversions of your product or service.

We regularly monitor trending search topics and social media channels to find opportunities where our clients can benefit from the peaks in conversations and generate traffic.

The Great British Bake Off has seen a huge spike in conversation over recent days, with #GBBO and Mary Berry trending on Twitter. So we thought we’d use this as an example into how we use another one of our fantastic tools that helps form our content strategy, production and recommendations, as well as how we find the nuggets of quality content within the vast volumes.

A quick introduction to Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is a tool to assist in tracking down those engaging content opportunities. Everyone wants their content to be shared and “go viral”, but we firstly need to be able to take a step back and see what is getting the traction within each topic area in the first place.

Alongside that, Buzzsumo helps you to understand which influencers will want to engage with the content you produce, in order to amplify overall and tap into the right, relevant audiences to ensure your content gets seen.

With so much content being produced by brands, publishers and individuals, it is more important than ever to ensure your content is the best it possibly can be. So how do you do that?

• Always Add Value
  Ensure that your content has a clear purpose and is relevant to your target audience.
  
  
• Create In-Demand Content
  You want to produce content that is actively being searched for by your audience. The key is to find their pain points and start answering them with content.

For more information on creating the right content for your audience, read our content marketing strategy blog.

Here are some of the ways we’d use Buzzsumo to understand more about the Great British Bake Off content trends and how we’d go about creating content and amplifying it…

1. Which GBBO topics are most popular?

The most shared content shows you what the audience are engaging with the most, per social channel. You can filter on the left hand side by country, date ranges and content types depending on what you are searching for.

For this particular search term we can see the primary news sites are all over this about Mary Berry quitting GBBO (we’ve got tears in our eyes as we write this…!) However, further down we see the likes of Cosmopolitan magazine jumping on this topic quickly to get a high portion of these shares.

Taking a look through the search results we can see the most popular content type here is ‘article’, whereas there has been nothing as of yet created in terms of ‘infographic’. This is a potential opportunity.

Delving into this further, we can see that only one infographic has been created around GBBO over the past year, which didn’t get a lot of traction. Perhaps this was due to it being quite a niche audience about British TV show filming locations around the UK, or it may not have been amplified enough.

Even so, there is an opportunity here to create a GBBO focused infographic around topics that are being highly shared and combining data sets that could provide an interesting read for many. Wouldn’t you like to know the number of dropped bakes, the number of soggy bottoms in the whole series of GBBO so far or perhaps the most popular bakers from the recent series?

Similarly, here is a good opportunity to team this with some keyword research to find out what content people are actively searching for in order to hit some of the peaks in search volume.

2. Which platforms are the GBBO audience on?

There’s no point going to all the effort of creating content if it is then going to be shared on the wrong platforms. The important thing is to know your audience, what content they like and where they are most active.

Over the past week there have been over 30k shares of GBBO content and interestingly this has occurred primarily on Facebook. So, here is where your most engaged audience are and where you should focus your efforts if writing about this topic.

3. On which day should I post my GBBO content?

Although GBBO is on a Wednesday evening, we find it is Thursday when the uplift in content occurs. So, your opportunity could be to have a copywriter on the day of the event to get in-the-moment, quality content out straight after the program has ended. This way, you’ll be beating the mass volume content and have more chance of getting your content seen.

Remember: If doing this more reactive nature, keep in mind you don’t want to anger anyone by spilling the beans on what has happened in the program. Be tactful about what your content will consist of and who your audience is.

4. How do I amplify my GBBO content?

Collaborating with the right influencers for your brand and target audience is key. Use Buzzsumo to filter out the country and type of influencer you’re after. After which, pop in your topic and you’ll get a list of influencers who you can go through and find the ones relevant to your brand – these are the influencers more likely to get involved in your content as they have a vested interest in your topic.

Conclusion

There is so much more you can do with Buzzsumo, but for content building these are the main tools we would use. Team this tool with keyword research, social listening and data insights to form strong strategies and content ideas. Now go out there and produce your showstopper. Ready, steady… BAKE!