Related Content can go a long way toward user retention and conversion, so don't underestimate it.
- Helps to reduce bounce rate – engages visitors by displaying the most related or "complementary" content.
- Increases pageviews/visit
- Improves internal link signals – a related posts section is the glue that binds pages together.
- Increase average time/user – by providing visitors what they are looking for.
- Increases social sharing
There are both direct and indirect benefits to Related Posts. Directly, well designed Related Posts are generally SEO neutral to positive if the surfaced content is actually related (they need to make sense), as it will boost your internal link signals. Indirectly, because they reduce bounce rate, increase social sharing, etc, these are very valuable to signal to Google that your content is valuable and hence should rank higher.
In summary, there is no downside and only upside to look forward to.
An Innovative Approach
Most Related Content solutions are "heavy" as they typically come in the form of plugins that do all their lookups and processing on your servers. That is the "old way" and not a great approach as they slow down your website. Shareaholic has taken an alternative, next-generation and speed first, approach to Related Content by offloading all the processing that typically makes Related Content plugins "heavy" to our cloud servers that are super specialized and optimized for this purpose. This makes Shareaholic one of the fastest and most performant Related Content solutions available today.