Caution: Lots of 'inside joke' humor for Hitchhiker's Guide readers in this post. If you haven't read the books, consider moving on quietly while avoiding eye contact. Or, read it and see what you've been missing.
Vogon Poetry, described in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as “The third-worst poetry in the Universe”, is a fantastic look at writing done right.
In case you’ve never read The Hitchhiker’s Guide (shame on you), here’s a quick sample of Vogon verse:
Oh freddled gruntbuggly
thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee.
Groop I implore thee,
my foonting turlingdromes.
And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles,
Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon,
see if I don’t!
Caution: Do not, under any circumstances, read this poetry out loud. It’s sheer badness has caused psychotic breaks, hemorrhoids, sunburn on the tops of your feet and mange.
Douglas Adams was a literary genius—this godawful poetry is some of the best writing you’ll ever read. Here’s why:
I’ve come to realize that great writing—great storytelling—has to tap basic human impluses. Vogon poetry does that. Read the poem above (silently, for God’s sake!) again. Can you pick out the verbs? Nouns? Adjectives?
I have no idea what a bindlewurdle is (and I’m grateful), but I know it’s a noun. Drangle is clearly a verb that I don’t want to experience.
Great copy sets context so well that, even if you don’t understand the topic, you can get the gist. It taps the most basic ways that we process language—it is sub-verbal (don’t know if that’s the right use of the phrase but hopefully it makes sense).
Once you’ve heard the phrase ‘Freddled gruntbuggly’, you can’t let it go. What is it? Is it cute and cuddly? Is it a mode of transportation? Or a geological feature?
No idea, but man, it sticks in the mind. You can forget all about it, but if someone walks up to you on the street and says “Oh, freddled gruntbuggly”, you’ll snap your fingers and say “HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY”. The Vogons own that phrase.
This is a combination of #1 and #3, really, but it deserves its own mention: Great writing sticks in your mind. You may hate Shakespeare, but you still know “To be, or not to be.”
Lack of sleep, lack of exercise and helping my daughter with her homework have made me totally addled and more than a little silly. But there’s another great copywriting lesson to be had: Rhythm is as important in copywriting as it is in (truly) great poetry. Which sounds better?
Coke is it!
Coke really rocks!
The first. It’s not a happy accident. Look at great mottos/phrases and see how many have a rhythm that:
Vogons may have no literary taste, but ‘foonting turlingdromes’ still has a nice ring to it, yes?
Anwayyyyy.
You get the point: Rhythm makes all great writing—including marketing copywriting—work. It’s the icing on the cake. The yin to the yang. The Pippen for Jordan.
All great copywriting has these three characteristics:
…and Vogon poetry is no exception.
Douglas Adams would’ve been a great marketing copywriter.
I’m glad he stuck with fiction, though.
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Yawn. I said it was stupid last year. I’ll say it again this year.
Toolbar PageRank is 50% meaningless, 25% misleading, 20% useless and 5% worth tracking. It has slightly more impact than Google +1.
Here’s why I wouldn’t use it to measure page value if my life depended on it:
Don’t use PageRank to guide your strategy. It’s a huge mistake. If you’re a search nerd like me, have fun learning the formula. Use your knowledge to impress your friends.
Then learn to do real SEO, and real marketing: Look at the whole picture.
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Want a good example of Google's brand-bias stuff being a bunch of bs?
Niche expert value-add affiliate websites may now lack the brand signal to rank as the branded sites rise up above them, so what comes next?
Off-topic brands flex their brand & bolt on thin affiliate sections.
Overstock.com was penalized for having a spammy link profile (in spite of being a brand they were so spammy that they were actually penalized, counter to Google's cultural norm) but a few months later the penalty was dropped, even though some of the spam stuff is still in place.
Those who were hit by Panda are of course still penalized nearly a half-year later, but Overstock is back in the game after a shorter duration of pain & now they are an insurance affiliate.
prnewswire.com/news-releases/oco-launches-insurance-tab-125739128.html
And this "fold the weak & expand the brand" game is something the content farm owners are on to. Observe:
While most the content farms were decimated, that left a big hole in the search results that will allow the Huffington Post to double or triple the yield of their content through additional incremental reach.
And, yes, this is *the* same Huffington Post that is famous for aggregating 3rd party content (sans attribution), wrapping a Tweet in a page & ranking it, and gets mocked by other journalists for writing 90's-styled blocks of keyword spam:
Before I go on, let me stop and say a couple of more important things: Aol, Aol Acquires Huffington Post, Aol Buys Huffington Post, Aol Buys Huffpo, Aol Huffington Post, Huffington Post, Huffington Post Aol, Huffington Post Aol Merger, Huffington Post Media Group, Huffington Post Sold, Huffpo Aol, Huffpost Aol, Media News.
See what I did there? That's what you call search-engine optimization, or SEO. If I worked at the Huffington Post, I'd likely be commended for the subtle way in which I inserted all those search keywords into the lede of my article.
And, of course, AOL is a company with the highest journalistic standards:
I was given eight to ten article assignments a night, writing about television shows that I had never seen before. AOL would send me short video clips, ranging from one-to-two minutes in length ? clips from ?Law & Order,? ?Family Guy,? ?Dancing With the Stars,? the Grammys, and so on and so forth? My job was then to write about them. But really, my job was to lie. My job was to write about random, out-of-context video clips, while pretending to the reader that I had watched the actual show in question. AOL knew I hadn?t watched the show. The rate at which they would send me clips and then expect articles about them made it impossible to watch all the shows ? or to watch any of them, really.
Doing fake reviews? Scraping content? Putting off-topic crap on a site to monetize it?
Those are the sorts of things Google claims the spammy affiliates & SEOs do, but the truth is they have never been able to do them to the scale the big brands have. And from here out it is only going to get worse.
We highlighted how Google was responsible for creating the content farm business model. Whatever comes next is going to be bigger, more pervasive, and spammier, but coated in a layer of "brand" that magically turns spam into not-spam.
Imagine where this crap leads in say 2 or 3 years?
It won't be long before Google is forced to see the error of their ways.
What Google rewards they encourage. What they encourage becomes a profitable trend. If that trend is scalable then it becomes a problem shortly after investors get involved. When that trend spirals out of control and blows up they have to try something else, often without admitting that they were responsible for causing the trend. Once again, it will be the SEO who takes the blame for bad algorithms that were designed divorced from human behaviors.
I am surprised Google hasn't hired someone like a Greg Boser or David Naylor as staff to explain how people will react to the new algorithms. It would save them a lot of work in the long run.
Disclosure: I hold no position in AOL's stock, but I am seriously considering buying some. When you see me personally writing articles on Huffington Post you will know it's "game on" for GoogleBot & I indeed am a shareholder. And if I am writing 30 or 40 articles a day over there that means I bought some call options as well. :D
Source: http://www.seobook.com/google-brand-spam
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How the hell do I teach my team internet marketing? Why do we all suck at it?
I spend a lot of time on this puzzle. My company’s survival depends on it. I have to find ways to teach, and to teach teachers, while working it around everyone’s busy schedule. And I have to find ways to teach clients, too, or their investment in us burns up the moment we’re gone.I’ve studied the success/failure of:
Here’s my random collection of theories. I have a favor to ask: Read this. Then tell me what you think:
Training in person sucks. I love doing it, but the truth is, it’s of limited value. Here’s why:
Yes, ‘real life’ training has advantages, but they’re all related to accountability, not educational value. You pile your employees into a break room for a 4-hour lecture on customer service because you know they’re physically present. As a manager, you can check off that budget line item with pride: Training Complete.
That is a godawful justification.
On the other hand, teaching via recorded material—writing, video or audio—works well.
This is the core of Khan Academy’s program for classrooms: Students listen to the ‘lectures’ at home. Then they go to school and do the exercises with a teacher present to help them out.
The UCSD writing center worked in a similar way when I worked there. Writers would come in. We’d facilitate as they worked on their writing. Then, they’d go home to complete that work. No lectures at all, actually.
It makes even more sense in on-the-job, internet marketing training: The stuff you’re learning is the stuff you’re doing, every day. Don’t do ‘homework’ or ‘exercises’ during slow times. Instead, study the lecture-style stuff during quiet time. Then apply it again and again while others are around to help out.
This is going to sound harsh. But with self-paced training, the people who don’t want to learn slack off. If they have training and support, then “I went to the class!” is no longer a free pass. They have to learn.
The enthusiastic students can bolt ahead, and I as an employer can reward that behavior. Internet marketing requires constant learning. I want to encourage that in my team.
You can’t just throw your staff a bunch of books and say ‘go learn’, though. You have to set time aside, one way or another, for them to do it.
That’s really hard. It’s why I still succumb to the periodic ‘training day’. Work has a nasty way of scheduling itself. If I go to everyone and say “OK, Wednesday from 9-10 AM is learning time,” it’ll fail. Clients will call. Stuff will break. Etc.
Somehow, though, you have to create time for your employees to learn. And it can’t be in a single, marathon 4-hour session. They have to be able to learn in little bites.
Let me know if you figure that one out, OK?
Finally, you have to verify that learning’s going on. I hate standardized tests. They’ve ruined American education, probably forever. But somehow you have to know how folks are doing. That’s the only way you can provide extra help where needed, or reward those who are truly kicking butt.
I haven’t figured this one out, either. By the time the employee is applying what they learned to a client, it’s too late.
This is a work in progress. I’ll post more about it as time passes. If you have ideas, or think something I’ve said is horrible, feel free to comment.
I still love conferences. I’ll always go. But here’s the thing: A well-run conference has lots of short sessions where you pick up one or two great tidbits. Then you can immediately try ’em out on your laptop. Plus, you get to drink until the wee hours. Whole different ball game, really.
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Yesterday I wrote about the Wall Street Journal, bad SEO advice and subdomains.
There’s a deeper lesson, though: When you blog, report or speak, you have an audience. It might be 1 person or 1,000. Doesn’t matter. You might be a professional journalist, a doctor, or a single marketer with an audience of 3. That'd doesn't matter either. You have a responsibility to your audience.
Follow one rule:
Your audience assumes you’re right. Speak carefully.
Have a good weekend everyone.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/conversationmarketing/MRJI/~3/L9F9uTgn7ig/speak-carefully.htm
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Earlier this month Google referenced a "study" they did which showed that 89% of AdWords ad clicks were incremental (meaning that they were clicks that the website would not have received if they relied on organic search results alone).
As part of that "study" they stated that "indirect navigation to the advertiser site is not considered." Why did they chose to exclude that segment of traffic? Because they advertiser would have got almost all of it anyway. They never really defined what indirect navigation is though, so you are left to guess as to what qualifies as being part of that segment.
The "study" also stated:
A low value of incremental ad clicks may occur when the paid and organic results are both similar and in close proximity to each other on the search results page. This increases the likelihood of a user clicking on an organic result as opposed to a paid result. Close proximity occurs when the ranking of the organic result is high, placing it near the paid results. Organic results triggered by branded search terms tend to have a higher ranking on average and this may lead to a low IAC value.
So which keywords should you advertise on? And which keywords are buying the milk when you already have the cow for free? According to Google:
A low IAC value does not necessarily suggest a pause in search advertising is in order. In fact, for many advertisers with a low IAC, it is still profitable to invest in search advertising. To evaluate the economic benefits of search advertising, an advertiser must run a calculation incorporating their individual IAC, conversion rates, and conversion revenue. The below equation can help determine whether search advertising is worthwhile on a case by case basis.
Google later suggests that a more rigorous test would include a split test experiment that compares a control group against an ad group with paid search ads held back. They then suggest that "many advertisers are adverse to conducting such experiments due to the setup costs involved and the potential revenue impact from having a hold-out group."
What I don't buy *at all* is the suggestion that such studies need to be rigorous & expensive. On the organic search front, Google Webmaster Tools already offers organic search CTR stats by ranking position & ranked page:
And since Google is heavily promoting adoption of the +1 button, they also offer A/B split data for how that button impacts search performance.
If Google provides this data for free for organic search then why (other than protecting their own revenues) do they suggest this data is hard to attain for paid search? If Google respected their advertisers & wanted the advertisers to advertise based on complete data they would make this data available automatically, like they do with the +1 button data.
Here is my big problem I have with Google suggesting that I need a quantitative study to know if I should buy my own branded keywords:
Google recently expanded sitelinks in the organic search results to make them take up a huge portion of the above-the-fold screen real estate, driving down attempted organic search brand arbitrage & negative reputation issues.
Using features like Google Instant, a Google+ promotional bar & longer AdWords ad copy, Google has been aggressively pushing down the search result set so fewer listings appear above the fold.
Each month there is another test of some new feature that pushes the organic search results downward.
However, with enhanced organic sitelinks, the brand owns so much of the search real estate that it will lose limited traffic to competitors if it doesn't buy AdWords on its branded keywords. Further, given the ability to block certain sitelinks & edit the page title & meta description you should be able to control the copy on your branded organic listing to make it look and feel like the ad copy you would use in AdWords.
There are some nuanced exceptions though, as brands are not always well aligned with how people search...
If you have an event coming up that you need to promote for a short duration of time then running AdWords ads is a great way to instantly get exposure for that campaign.
In the past if you misspelled keywords Google would put the spell correction right at the top of the page. More recently they have decided to put it below the AdWords ads. So on this type of ad (where Amazon already ranks #1, but has the organic search results pushed down by the ad & then a spell suggestion) I think that ad is burning money.
In other cases, like where you don't rank high in the organic search results, buying AdWords ads on common misspellings is a much smarter idea. For instance, I think this is a smart ad buy by Agoda.
However, in the longrun, if I ran Agoda, I would point a few misspelled links at my website to boost my rankings for common misspellings.
One way to reach misspellings and longertailed searches for your brand is to use an embedded match, where you bid on agoda and then use -[agoda] as a negative keyword.
Mercedes Benz is burning a bit of their ad budget by advertising where they are irrelevant.
Certainly it makes sense for them to buy exposure for the branded keywords, but in the above examples they should put -kingston as a negative keyword.
In some cases Google ads promote negative messaging. For instance, while using Gmail I saw an ad suggesting that I should "uninstall McAfee" in a computer that did not even have it.
Buying branded ads in those cases would likely make sense, if for no other reason to compete with & block out risky negative ads that could go viral. Whether Google should even allow such ads is another question for debate.
Google was recently clipped by the DOJ for a half-BILLION Dollars for running illicit ads promoting Canadian pharmacies. The DOJ went so far as highlighting that Larry Page knew what was going on & intentionally allowed these ads to run:
Mr. Neronha said those efforts amounted to "window-dressing," allowing Google to continue earning revenues from the allegedly illicit ad sales even as it professed to be taking action against them. Google employees helped undercover Justice Department agents in the sting operation evade controls designed to stop companies from advertising illegally, he said.
"Suffice it to say that this is not two or three rogue employees at the customer service level doing this on their own," Mr. Neronha said in an interview. "This was a corporate decision to engage in this conduct."
After the above instance, Google is perhaps going to be "guilty until proven innocent" where they are running sketchy ads.
In the short run it is likely appropriate to still run branded keyword ads while the issue is getting sorted out, but if you see anything like the following on your branded search results it probably makes sense to fight it on the public relations front in the background while opening the wallet to protect the brand publicly.
And since most major pharmaceutical corporations are routinely fined for running illegal ads, I don't understand why these pharma corps don't have a black hat SEO (or 3) on staff to help manage the search results.
If Google wants brand then give it to them in spades. ;)
Source: http://www.seobook.com/adwords-brand-kewords
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This past February, Google filed for a number of patents that describe aspects of how it might share information from one data center to another, and some of the challenges that entails. Google’s Yonatan Zunber, who revealed on his blog that over the past few months that he was the chief architect for Google’s [...]
Source: http://www.seobythesea.com/2011/08/googles-planet-scale-distributed-storage-patents/
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In his book, Origin of Species, Charles Darwin says that:
"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."
This is typically used by proponents of Intelligent Design to state their case against evolution by invoking the principle of Irreducible Complexity, which is to say that:
This applies to any system of interacting parts in which the removal of any one part destroys the function of the entire system. An irreducibly complex system, then, requires each and every component to be in place before it will function
Essentially the idea is that something that is irreducibly complex does not evolve to its state in a gradual manner (like evolution) and so the scientific research process of how X came into being is mostly irrelevant versus something that has evolved over time (like an algorithm). A man made algorithm fits into both categories.
What creature could be more complex than a creature which not only was part of natural evolution but also has elements of intelligent design within its core?
How does this apply to SEO? Google's algorithm evolves and it certainly fits precisely with how Darwin laid out the basis of his theory of evolution (numerous, successive, slight modifications in general) but by human hand and captured data.
Of course, sometimes Google makes a big update but generally speaking they make lots of minor updates per year.
Consider that a couple years back in 2009 they claim to have made just south of 500 updates in that year alone.
So the point I'm making is that SEO is both irreducibly complex (remove the hand of man and it would no longer evolve or even work as intended) and a product of a natural evolutionary process (the constantly adjusted algorithm) with layers and layers of thousands of changes over time, full of small and large complexities. These two characteristics make the process of trying to break it down to a stagnant formula with assigned percentages you can attribute to a majority of examples (with confidence) cumbersome and inaccurate.
If you read a bunch of SEO blogs you might feel a bit overwhelmed with where to start and what to do. Some blogs tend to be information-heavy, some heavy in theory and (attempted) science, some straight news oriented, and some that are of the good old fashioned boot in your rear end "get something done now" genre.
I think it's important to pick blogs to read from those aforementioned areas of the industry to help get a well-rounded view of the SEO space. However, sometimes I think the more simple you try to make something, say like trying to whittle SEO down to a push button solution, the more complex you make things because then you need to have sound, reliable data to back up those kinds of claims and solutions.
If data starts reading out 50/50 or 60/40 probabilities then that's not really sound science at all. In fact, if anything, it just shows that some things cannot be broken down into a push button forumla or a statistic with any reliability whatsoever. It probably makes for good salesmanship when you want to wow a client with your superior knowledge but it also makes for laughable science, kind of like this kind of science:
The real problem is that Google claims to have more than 200 parts to its algorithm (which we obviously don't have available for studying :) ). Even if you call it an even 200 what about the different weight each factor has? Surely each does not represent 0.5% of the algorithm.
When you dive into trying to mathematically and scientifically break down a formula, of which you know an average (at best) amount of the variables + their direct effects, you actually create more confusion because you have to go out and find examples proving a specific theory while ignoring ones that point in the other direction.
I think the annual SeoMoz Search Engine Ranking Factors is a worthy read as they pull data from lots and lots of respected folks in the industry and the presentation is top notch. I think overall it's a good representation of the factors you will need to face when conducting an SEO campaign.
Another good page to bookmark is this page from Search Engine Journal which has guesstimates of what they feel these elusive variables might be.
It can be hard to isolate really specific types of variables because of the constant Google updates, the other factors that are involved with your site and its ranking, and anything being done by the competition. You can test elements for sure, things like:
The issues are still there though, even with "testing". It is still really, really hard to sell off a scientific breakdown of a consistent path to success beyond high-level ideas like:
I think that for someone looking to move forward in their SEO career it is important to try and remove the idea that you can break down the factors into exact numbers, as far as value of each individual variable goes. Anyone who practices SEO will likely tell you that you simply want to win more than you lose and even if you are on top of your game you still will have site failures here and there.
The issue of failing might not even be because of some current practice. You could be sailing right along and all of a sudden a Google update cleans your clock (another good reason to be involved with multiple projects).
You might spend more time agonizing over some magic formula or avoiding a project because some tool told you it was too competitive (rather than your knowledge) than building out multiple web properties to weather the expected storms and the ebbs and flows of the web.
When faced with the prospect of working within a system where the variables that hold the key to your success are unknown, it can seem daunting. It can also make you want to run out and buy a shiny new tool to solve all your problems and get you that elusive Google ranking you've been waiting for.
The sad truth is if there was such a tool the person(s) who created it wouldn't be selling it to you for less than $100 or slightly higher (or even way higher!). They would be building sites in many verticals and making an absolute killing in the SERPS. By selling it to you they would just be creating more work for themselves and competition.
Not all tools are bad of course. I use the tools here at SeoBook as well as tools from Majestic, Raven, SeoMoz, and Caphyon (Advanced Web Ranking). The tools give you data and data points to work with as well as to cross reference. They do not provide answers for you at the push of a button.
The best thing to do is to start launching some sites and play around with different strategies. Over time you'll find that even strategies that worked in A, B, and C markets didn't work in D or E.
Things like algorithm's changing and competitor's stepping up their game can be factors as to why test results aren't always that accurate (at the real granular level) and why certain strategies worked here but not there.
It makes sense to keep some kind of running journal on a site (why I did this, when I did that, etc) so you can go back and evaluate real (not theorized) data.
Running weekly rank checks isn't a bad idea and tools like Advanced Web Ranking and Raven have built in ways of you keeping notes (events for Raven) on a specific campaign or date-based events (added X links this day).
I happen to like Evernote for these kinds of things but most project management applications and information organizer tools have this kind of capability built in (as does having separate Word and Excel docs for your campaigns).
So if you are involved with a handful or four of projects, in addition to keeping track of strategies used, you can really get a solid handle on what is likely to work in the short to mid term and what really is working now.
A good example of this would be folks poo-pooing the idea of exact match domains being a golden egg of sorts over the years. If you were or are running any SEO campaigns you'll notice that the exact match benefit was quite real. So while pontificators were decrying their effectiveness, practitioners were laughing all the way to the bank.
There is no substitute for real experience and real data. Which group do you want to be in?
As we discussed above, the algorithm has a lot of components to it. There is generally no 1 correct universal right answer to each and every SERP. The gold usually lies in trying to understand where algorithms are heading and how they have changed.
As an example, in his recent post about exact match domains losing weight, Aaron used highlights to visually segment the search results in regards to "why is XYZ ranking". I'll include the image here:
This is a good example of the fact that when you build your own sites and you collect your data it helps you form and solidify your mental models.
The tricky part is how do you know who's advice is garbage vs who you should trust? You should take your independently arrived upon conclusions that you have repeatedly tested and see who is offering similar advice. Those are the folks who you can trust to tell you "what actually works" rather than "how to buy the number they are selling as a solution".
For another example of a mental model in action, you should check out Charlie Munger's piece on mental models and investing.
One more piece of advice here. Recently we wrote about the the importance of rank checking with a tie-in to analytics. It's vital to have both installed as you can get concrete before and after data. Without hard data relative to ongoing algorithm changes, you are kind of flying blind to the actual changes being made.
The reason this community and many paid communities are successful is because there isn't a lot of noise or high pressure sales (like there are on free chat forums or message boards) and because experienced people are able to freely share ideas, thoughts, and data with like-minded people.
The more information and thoughts you get from people who are in the trenches on a daily basis can only help your efforts, knowledge, and experience because theories will only get you so far.
I think there is a scientific element to some factors like links, domain age, social signals, brand signals, anchor text (but at a high level, nothing overly exact) but overall I think it's too complex to break down into a reliable scientific formula.
It's important to pay attention to trends but your own experience and data is invaluable to your ongoing success. I believe that search is going to continue to get more complex but that's necessarily a bad thing if you have access to good information.
A friend gave me a great quote from Michael Lewis's book, Liar's Poker:
You spend a lot of time asking yourself questions: Are munis (municipal bonds) right for me? Are govys (government bonds) right for me? Are corporates (corporate bonds) right for me?
You spend a lot of time thinking about that. And you should.
But think about this: might be more important to choose a jungle guide than to choose your product.
When it comes to SEO, it's pretty important to choose your jungle guides correctly.
Yawn. I said it was stupid last year. I’ll say it again this year.
Toolbar PageRank is 50% meaningless, 25% misleading, 20% useless and 5% worth tracking. It has slightly more impact than Google +1.
Here’s why I wouldn’t use it to measure page value if my life depended on it:
Don’t use PageRank to guide your strategy. It’s a huge mistake. If you’re a search nerd like me, have fun learning the formula. Use your knowledge to impress your friends.
Then learn to do real SEO, and real marketing: Look at the whole picture.
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This blog post is based on yesterday’s content strategies session at MozCon. If you missed it, or wanted a refresher, give this a read:
This post is huge. So, here’s a quick preview:
The problem. In content creation, you can’t do the minimum required work any more. There is no ‘minimum’. Changes in Google’s algorithm and in competitor behavior mean you gotta write and produce great content.The other problem. At your company, you have no budget and no status whatsoever.
The process. Start with opportunity gap analysis. Then mine content for subject matter. Plan out your headline list, source your writers. Score those writers. Measure, and repeat. I’ll go over steps and tools for each of these parts of the process.
The outcome. You connect the stuff the boss/client cares about—sales and site performance—with your content. Do it with a methodical approach to content research, sourcing and promotion.
Also, you can download the slides from my presentation from SEOMOZ, here.
Interested? OK, read on. On to the post.
Why is it that, in internet marketing, content is treated like a dried turd? People in the room don’t notice it—they don’t even smell it—until they step on it. Then they brush it away, dealing with it as quickly and quietly as possible.
How many times have you been in a conversation like this?
Note, I’m not afraid to make fun of myself in this. In case you think I’m being nasty to other CEOs, etc., I’ve been each of these jackasses far too many times.
Why are content budgets so small they collapse in on themselves, becoming super-dense bodies from which even common sense cannot escape?
Why? Because the boss/client is so far away from content creation that they see no connection between that content and the stuff they care about: Sales, conversions. All they see is cost. So it becomes a sunk cost.
So everyone just ignored content for years. Once every 2-3 years, someone would rewrite some of the marketing copy.
Then along came search. Suddenly, writing content could get you rankings. The focus became content juuust good enough to pass search engine inspection. Write, publish, grab your traffic and hope for the best. The potential traffic volume blew away concerns about writing quality.
Scale was more important: Just keep churning out crap, throw it at the search engines and wait for something to stick.
And there was very little downside, at least as far as rankings. The real harm done was subtle: A sale lost here, an extra customer service call there. It didn’t matter. The upside was far larger. Write content that’s just good enough and you could get huge wins.
But the wet-noodle approach has worked less and less over the last couple of years. Now it's a total failure. Content that's "Good enough" isn't actually good enough, for 2 big reasons.
So no, good enough isn't any more. You have to produce super stuff. But everyone at work still thinks you’re a chimpanzee that can type. What to do?
If learn nothing else reading this post, remember this: If you want to grow content, establish your value and get more wins for the SEO team, connect the stuff the boss/client cares about with your content. Do it with a methodical approach to content research, sourcing and promotion. You’ll get better content, you’ll get better results, and your value will increase.
If you’re going to connect the dots, you’ll need a process that:
For the rest of this post I'm going to describe the process we use – well, the process I wish we used (reality sometimes intrudes) – at Portent to target, brainstorm and produce content.
The process ties together four basic steps:
I’ve done a lot of writing about this, but here’s the quick version: You want to find the easy wins. Don't beat yourself bloody ramming your head against a brick wall, chasing after phrases and concepts where you've got no ranking and no chance if you've got some easy opportunities for improvement.
Instead, find the stuff that’s an easy win: Phrases where you rank but could rank better. Content that drives a lot of traffic, but you know you could drive more.
I'm going to use my blog as an example here, but this works even better on lead-driven, B2B sites and e-commerce, where you've got a clear conversion goal.
Get a feel for what content is really working."Working" doesn't just mean "Getting pageviews". You want to look at any engagement data you can: Time on page, bounce rate, exit rate, and sales/conversions for visitors who viewed the page, too, if you have that data. I usually use Google Analytics to do this:
But I’ll also look at tools like PostRank. These tools are a little iffy, in my opinion—it’s hard for a computer to measure audience response. But Google just bought ‘em, so they’re on to something.
And, of course, take a look at your top traffic-driving terms:
Then check the ranking of your top traffic-driving pages. Are they #1? No? Time to work on moving them up by turning them into hubs and writing more stuff.
My smart-assed piece about social media experts is #4 for ‘social media expert’. It drives decent traffic. It shows better-than-average engagement. If I can move up, I can get a bit more.
So we have the gap part of ‘opportunity gap’. But is there an opportunity?
Do I stand a chance of moving up? To check, take a quick look at on- and offsite metrics:
I use my trusty allintitle: search to see how many pages have this exact phrase in their title tags. This isn't the only way to judge phrase competition – I'm going to look at the average bid, total competing pages, and if this is really a hot phrase, on-page SEO for each of the top 20 sites. But allintitle is a good, fast indicator of how many sites are intentionally optimizing for a given phrase. Only 35,700 competitors that have that phrase in their title. I’ll take those odds.
Then, I’ll hop on OpenSiteExplorer and look at my site’s authority versus the site just above mine. Whoa:
I flex my online muscles!
I’ll expand on that phrase, researching related searches for ‘social media expert’. I’m not going to bother with any details here. You know how to do it. WordTracker, Adwords Keywords Tool, etc.
Regardless, you’ve established an opportunity gap for this phrase.
The last step: Document. Record opportunity gap phrases, the ranking pages, competition, and whether you’re going to create new pages or not. That creates your keyword map:
Now you’ve drawn a line from the big glob of data and content you’ve already got to the steps you need to take. If your boss asks, you can show her why one particular phrase and page offered a fantastic opportunity.
More important, you now know the subject matter area you need to research. On to the next step.
Now, it’s all about subject matter. What do your readers/customers want to read? What are other people writing about? Are there any general trends, themes, conversations going on to which you can contribute?
In other words: What are people saying related to your opportunity gap phrases and topics?
You could take the old route, do 5 minutes of research and then start writing.
Yeah. No.
Instead, you’re going to record conversations over time (not in a bad way), analyze the content of those conversations, and then brainstorm headlines and strategy.
First, create and access your collection:
You’ll start collecting all of the articles and posts into that folder. When you’re ready to harvest
The stuff I always include in a collection:
Quick tip: Twitter no longer shows a nice RSS link on their search results page. But you can still set up a feed of a Twitter search result by using the URL search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=KW – replace ‘KW’ with your phrase.
With this process, you just took a bunch of feeds from alerts, web sites, etc. and assembled it into a single, unified feed of content. You can now mine that content for data.
I wrote an entire e-book about this process, if you want to go into more depth.
Now, analyze the collection. I like to grab a count of top words, plus the top bigrams and trigrams—two- and three-word phrases—from the collected content. I built a tool (in proto-new-not-finished-alpha phase) you can use to do it:
Looking at this, I can tell fairly quickly who’s important in this debate, the fact that folks were focused on the stock market (24 hours ago – this is an old screen capture), and that we’re facing an August 2nd deadline. May seem obvious if you live in the US, but if it’s a topic with which you’re unfamiliar, this is gold.
If you don’t get a good result, you may need to deliver more items. By default, Google Reader only supplies 20 items in the atom feed. You can increase that by adding ‘?n=75’ to the end of the feed URL. Please don’t go higher than 75. This app is on a very basic Google App Engine setup, and it’s just a baby.
Now, take all that data and draw conclusions. I don’t have any great tool for that. Use your brain. It’s still the most powerful computer you’ve got.
Finally, brainstorm headlines. Again, document everything. In another tab of the opportunity gap spreadsheet, list headlines. Include space to record the writers who take on each one, the date, and whether the content is complete.
Now you’ve drawn a nice, clean line from opportunity gap to headlines. Time to get that stuff written.
Sourcing isn’t so much a process as a set of rules:
You will need freelancers, no matter what. We have a full-time, in-house copywriting team at Portent. But we write about everything from colon-cleansing regimens to cloud-based business integration apps. Sometimes, we need a specialist, or someone with a particular touch for infographics, etc.
Pay well. If you pay like crap, you’ll get crap. Great content requires great skill. Pay for it. Expect to pay at least $.50/word for a 300-word article, and a lot more for longer, specialized pieces or infographics. I bet it’s still a fraction of what you spent getting your site built. Just pay it.
Always be recruiting. We have a form up on the Portent site and frequently invite writers to send us samples. We’re constantly recruiting, hiring, tracking and grading results for each writer, too. We always have a decent idea of a writer’s strengths and weaknesses, so we can match them to the right gig.
Keep score. We keep a basic history for each writer, as well as a simple score for their writing ability, professionalism and audience response to their content. That way, we can steer work to the writers best suited for it.
That’s it. Follow those rules, pay attention to who you’re hiring, and yes, document it all.
Sourcing lets you connect the work you’ve done on opportunity gap and subject matter directly to the right writers. You’ve connected the dots. On to the last step: Stacking the deck.
This is more a list of tricks than anything else, but it's part of our process. It's a lot easier to get attention if you already have an audience. We build audience through niche curation on social media. If a client's audience is mostly on Twitter, we'll make sure we're providing a steady stream of super-useful links to other peoples' content, day in, day out. That will build listeners.
This isn't about spamming! The stream should be so good that no one cares about your motive. Again: Quality. You have to blow your audience away with the stuff you provide. They have to think "Wow, Ian just made his entire existence worthwhile by Tweeting that link."
The heart of this lives in scheduling. You need to be able to schedule Tweets, Facebook posts and posts to other networks throughout the day, without sending your audience a huge blob of information all at once.
I use Timely.is to do this. It only works on Twitter, but it makes life very easy. Here’s what I do, every morning. It takes about 10-15 minutes:
So, 10 times/day, I’m tweeting out great, third-party content. I post other stuff, of course. But every day, my readers get something interesting.
There are fancier tools, too: You can use Hootsuite’s built-in scheduling feature to ‘pre-post’ to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, all at once. If you want to really get ridiculous, you can set up a Google spreadsheet that grabs feed items you tag and automatically creates a bulk scheduler file. Then you can upload that file to HootSuite, and it does the scheduling for you:
I’ve found this to be more work than it’s worth, but it’s up to you. I can even share the Google doc with you, if you like.
This is audience building, plain and simple. Then, when you publish something new on your own site, you can shout it out to all the folks who already know you're a great source of information. They're predisposed to click, and to spread the word.
And surprise! Document everything! Pay for Bit.ly pro so you get the full analytics, custom URLs, etc. Watch which times of day, tweet styles, etc. work the best. Check out some of the research done by Dan Zarella. He's done a lot of stuff on this subject.
So, go back through this entire process:
It all fits together. You’ve now drawn a nice line, traceable by anyone who looks, from all that mushy content creation stuff to publishing and promotion. You can show the decisions that made it all click.
It can also blow up in your face, if you don’t follow a few simple lessons:
Brain required. I can’t say this enough times. You are not automating content production. That’s a terrible idea. People always tell me they want to crank out content ‘like a printing press’. They’ve got it wrong. The printing press doesn’t create—it replicates. Think of what you’re doing in this process as the steps before you go to press.
Marketing = work. A lot of people will tell me they don’t have time for this, don’t have the budget, etc. I know. You're not entitled to an easy success. Is it fair that you have to labor away at this while companies like Target kick your ass up and down the rankings? Who said this would be fair? You've got your own advantages – use 'em.
Don’t be a jackass. It’s often tempting to try to surf on trending issues. If you do, do it carefully:
I don’t think I have to say anything else about that.
I’m not an analytics fanatic. I don’t think you can measure every facet of marketing. I do, however, know that our bosses and clients disagree. They won’t pay for stuff unless you can establish that it’s working.
Measure a lot. First things clients will ask is "how many people viewed the page?!!!" But be sure to point out social media interaction:
And other forms of citation: Links, etc. And record the results for each article and writer! That’s your reference point for later on, so you can figure out how to keep improving.
Clients may see that a specific article only acquired 10 links, or that a video only got 1,000 views. But that content may still bring huge value, delivering citations of all kinds and boosting rankings and brand.
That’s a lot of stuff. But the most important things to understand are:
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