How to Write a Roundup & Why They’re Surprisingly Beneficial

Round up blog posts can be surprisingly beneficial. Here are a few reasons why to include them on your site.

People love a good round-up style post. It’s easy for readers to scroll through and click on what interests them or what’s relevant to the information they are looking for.

But, just like everything else in blogging, there’s a right way and a wrong way to creating round-ups.

Here I’ll help you figure out the right way to create an effective roundup, what to consider depending on your niche. We’ll also look at how to research your content, what sort of things to include and tips for making your roundup SEO friendly.

What Is a Roundup Post?

A roundup post is a type of blog post that compiles other posts in one place. The posts can be from other sites or a group of your own posts about one particular thing.

Readers love roundup posts. They can get updates about subjects they’re interested in, they can get inspiration and ideas for something they’re working on and many people just love scrolling through things that interest them.

Depending on your niche, it can have multiple benefits for your blog as well.

Round-ups are popular amongst food and craft bloggers because readers often aren’t quite sure what they are looking for and love scrolling through a list of ideas.

For information bloggers, they can show their readers that they are staying up to date with current trends and not just regurgitating what’s already been written about the topic.

If you create roundups of your own posts, they’re great for SEO by providing easy internal linking and increased traffic throughout your own site.

Plus they great for networking and building relationships with other bloggers in your nich. They get a backlink for featuring their content in your article. (Which you should make do-follow) They are also a good way to promote your own blog posts, especially if the roundup post is on topic and attractive to readers.

Ways a Round Up Can Benefit Your Blog

So the benefits of a round up post all depends on your niche and they type of round up your creating.

Here we’ll look at what some of the benefits are and how you can utilize them, no matter what niche your site is in.

Ranking in Google

Google and SERP ratings are all about user intent. Round ups are huge in the DIY, Craft and Food niches. Often when someone enters a specific google search, they’re not quite sure exactly what they are looking for.

Maybe they are hosting a Halloween party and want to make a themed cake. But they aren’t sure what kind of cake they want to make. So they search “Halloween Cakes.” Most likely the top ranking posts in Google aren’t going to be single Halloween cake recipes. It’ll be a round up of Halloween cake ideas.

So if you’re targeting the keyword “Halloween cake” you would want to create a round up of Halloween cakes to feature on your blog instead of a single Halloween cake style recipe. Often, the user intent of specific keywords are exactly when a roundup is necessary to rank.

The photo below shows what pulls up when I google Halloween cakes at the time of this post. While it does feature individual photos of some Halloween cakes, all the top ranking posts are roundups.

Networking

Networking is another great reason to do a round up. I have found this tends to be more beneficial in websites where you are trying to build authority.

Asking authority figures in your niche to provide informative quotes or answer questions that are useful to your audience can be a great way to initiate contact with bigger names.

When done tactfully, it helps build up your own authority and can be shared with their audience as well.

There’s a great article about expert roundup posts that demonstrates how several different niches have done exactly this.

Building Internal Links

On my crafting site, I use my own content often in roundups to build my internal link structure. It’s an easy and natural way to create internal links. I’ll talk more about the details of that below.

Promoting Affiliate Products

You can also create roundups based on affiliate products. A popular and common example of this is gift guides. But you don’t have to stick with traditional product round ups. You can get creative by creating a round up of your favorite affiliate products and doing a cross comparison of them all.

This is not only useful to your readers, but leads to higher conversion ratings for your affiliate marketing.

Here’s a great example of a comparison of birthing courses. I myself have a pregnancy blog and know that most of these courses have high rate affiliate programs. It’s a great way to create a roundup and increase your affiliate sales. You can even link out to individual reviews of each course.

Choosing the Type of Roundup Post

Roundup posts are easy to create, but there’s more than one way you can go about writing yours. Below we’ll outline three different approaches so that your post is not limited in its creativity and structure

A few ways you can approach a round up:

Based on Expertise: If your blog is information-based, creating a round-up focused on the great resources for your audience make for excellent posts that get bookmarked. For example, you can create a round-up of the top experts in your field to follow. Or the best articles for working with Oak wood if you have a woodworking blog.

Based on a Category: These types of posts are popular amongst food or craft bloggers. Categories can be based on a type of food like recipe roundups or a holiday event.

Based on Contributors: and how they are related to the niche’s subject matter.

How to Write an Engaging Roundup

When it comes to writing the roundup post, it is important to research before you start writing. If it’s not a subject that you specialize in or have experience with, spend time reading and researching on what goes into this type of task.

Once you have decided on the topic of the roundup, you can start looking for other people in your niche to contribute to your post.

How to Find Contributors

Who should you include in your roundup?

The beauty of the roundup blog post is that you can literally include whoever you want. From bloggers you know, Youtubers or even celebrities, anyone who has their finger on the pulse of the topic you are writing about will make for great content.

Look for contributors with great content. If they have a lot of followers in your community, even better!

Check their follower count on Facebook or Twitter, or how many subscribers they have to their youtube channel. These numbers can help indicate if they are an authority in the niche and how much exposure your roundup could get.

Bloggers of smaller niche sites are great to include as well! If you want to provide a well-rounded article, don’t limit yourself to the ‘big’ names in the niche. Reach out to contributors with a small following, but who have expertise in the niche you are trying to target.

Create Roundups of Your Own Content?

You can definitely create a roundup of your own content. For example, if you’re a food blogger with lots of desserts, you could create a post titled “10 Best Chocolate Desserts” and create a list of all the Chocolate desserts on your site.

In fact, when creating and curating content for my food and craft site, I’ll often set out a plan that makes it easy to create a round up post based on the content I’m creating.

write a description of them and include information about the health benefits of the ingredient. Creativity is key.

For example, I’ll create several “grinch” themed snacks for the holidays. Green candy covered treats with great big red heart sprinkles. Then I can interlink them all, and link to a round up post featuring grinch treats. A whole bunch of internal links that let google know exactly what all that content is about. Grinch treats!

But rounds up aren’t just for food bloggers. For my pregnancy site I’ve done the same thing, just with a different type of content.

So lets say you create a post titled “the ultimate guide to breastfeeding” you could include a roundup of all the content you’ve already written about that includes breastfeeding. Summarise what each article is about and create an easy-to-follow, keyword-rich link to the longer piece. This is good for the reader and for SEO.

Formatting an SEO Friendly RoundUp

To see what’s working best for roundups in your chosen subject, do a quick google search to see what type of format are the top-ranking articles in? This will help give you an idea of what readers are actually looking for, for that topic.

When creating your post, an easy way to format a post that links to other blog posts is to use a free plugin from Mediavine called Create.

Create lets you add internal or external links, pulls information about the post, including a featured image. Then it creates a ‘card’ inside the list that includes a call to action button linking to the original article. And although a few of my blogs are with Mediavine and I love using their recipe plug in, my personal preference is to create roundups manually with the blocks in WordPress. 

You could also use a slide show plugin, but I personally don’t recommend them as they can slow down your site and aren’t a great user experience.

Using Photos in your Roundup

Users love photos in round-ups. They are visually appealing and help demonstrate what the other content is about.

Other tips for using photos in roundups:

Using a collage photo is a great way to display the projects or ideas on your site without using the same photo that they have on their blog. For example, here is a collage photo I’ve used (using my own content) that demonstrates the projects without using the individuals photo in your post.

You still need permission to use these photos, but they do well in ranking in google images and don’t steal others traffic on Pinterest.

If you do use someone’s photo in your round up individually, it’s best practice to use a no-pin code, so users can’t pin their content with a link to your site. This protects their direct traffic source and protects you from getting the image flagged on Pinterest as spam. (No Bueno!)

Top Tips to Keep Your Roundup SEO Friendly:

Include an intro-paragrah that summarizes what your round up is all about. That way readers will know right away what to expect.

1. Include a summary paragraph, so that people don’t need to read the entire article.
2. Always include links to each of the posts you are writing about or including. If it’s an interview type round up, include links to the persons homepage or social media of choice.
3. Add engaging images or videos for each section of the round up to help break up the post and add visual intrest.
4. Make sure to use your keywords where they feel natural to do so.
5. Make sure each of the links you include are relevant and on topic and if appopriate link to your own pages when possible.
6. When you finish your round up post, do a quick search of your site to see if you can naturally link to your new post from older posts for better internal linking.

What to Do After You Publish

Honestly, most of the promotion of a roundup blog post is similar to the other types of blog posts. The thing you’ll want to do differently is to make sure that anyone featured in your roundup is notified that it’s live.

You can reach out to the other contributors and thank them for adding to your article and share a link so they can share your roundup on their social media pages or share with their readers.

Roundups Are a Reader Favorite

Roundups are a great way to increase your internal linking, rank for long-tail keywords and get your content out there while showcasing other people’s work in the process.

It also allows you to network with others in your niche, be it other bloggers or brands that may want to work with you.

What niche are you in and how could you use a roundup post on your blog?