How to Provide Unique Value in Your Content – Whiteboard Friday

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat a little about providing unique value in your content. Now I’ve been known to talk a lot about what you need to do to get to the kind of uniqueness in content that Google wants to index, that searchers want to find, that is likely to earn you amplification and links and all the signals that you’ll need to perform well in the rankings, and to perform well on social media and in content marketing of all kinds.

The challenge has been that I’ve seen a lot of people adopt this attitude around, yes, unique content, unique value, but merge those two and not view them as two different things and really not understand what I mean when I say unique value at all, and it’s not just me. A lot of the content marketing and SEO industries are talking about the need for unique value, and they may say other words to describe that. But unfortunately, as an industry, we’ve not yet coalesced around what that idea means, and so this Whiteboard Friday is to try and explain exactly what a lot of these best practices and experts are talking about when they say “unique value.”

Modern criteria for content

So let’s start by talking about our modern criteria for content, and I have a slide that I like to show a lot that kind of displays this, and many other folks in the field have as well. So if I’m going to be producing content, I need to meet these five criteria.

One of a kind

One of a kind is basically what we meant when we said old unique content, meaning that the engines have never seen those words and phrases and numbers and visuals and whatever in that order on a page on the web previously. It’s been written for the first time, produced and published for the first time. Therefore, it is one of a kind, doesn’t appear elsewhere.

Relevant

Relevant meaning it contains content that both searchers and engines interpret as on topic to that searcher’s query or their intent. Sometimes you can be on topic to the query, meaning you’ve used the words and the phrases that the searcher used, and not be on topic to their intent. What did they actually want to get out of the search? What question are they trying to answer? What information are you trying to get?

Helpful

This one’s pretty obvious. You should resolve the searcher’s query in a useful, efficient manner. That should be a page that does the job that they’re hoping that that content is going to do.

Uniquely valuable

This is the one we’re going to be talking about today, and what we mean here is provides information that’s unavailable or hard to get elsewhere — I’m going to dive into that a little bit more — 

Great user experience

This means it’s easy and pleasurable to consume anywhere on any device.

You meet these criteria with your content and you’ve really got something when it comes to a content marketing strategy or when it comes to content you’re producing for SEO. This is a pretty solid checklist that I think you can rely on.

Unique value and you (and your website)

The challenge is this one. Uniquely valuable has been a really hard concept for people to wrap their heads around, and so let’s dig in a little more on what we mean when we say “unique value.”

So these are kind of the three common criteria that we mean when we say “unique value,” and I’m actually going to show some examples as well.

1) Massive upgrade in aggregation, accessibility and design

The first one is a massive upgrade versus what’s already available on the web in aggregation, accessibility, and/or design. Meaning you should have someone who views that content say, “Wow. You know, I’ve seen this material presented before, but never presented so well, never so understandable and accessible. I really like this resource because of how well aggregated, how accessible, how well designed this resource is.”

Good examples, there’s a blog post from the website Wait But Why on the Fermi Paradox, which is sort of a scientific astrophysics, “why are we alone in the universe” paradox concept, and they do a brilliant job of visualizing and explaining the paradox and all of the potential scenarios behind it. It’s so much fun to read. It’s so enjoyable. I’ve read about the Fermi Paradox many times and never been as entranced as I was as when I read this piece from Wait But Why. It really was that experience that says, “Wow, I’ve seen this before, but never like this.”

Another great site that does pure aggregation, but they provide incredible value is actually a search engine, a visual search engine that I love called Niice.co. Not particularly easy to spell, but you do searches for things like letter press or for emotional ideas, like anger, and you just find phenomenal visual content. It’s an aggregation of a bunch of different websites that show design and visual content in a search interface that’s accessible, that shows all the images in there, and you can scroll through them and it’s very nicely collected. It’s aggregated in the best way I’ve ever seen that information aggregated, therefore, providing unique value. Unfortunately, since it’s a search engine, it’s not actually going to be indexed by Google, but still tremendously good content marketing.

2) Information that is available nowhere else

Number two is information that’s available nowhere else. When I say “information,” I don’t mean content. I don’t mean words and phrases. I don’t mean it’s one-of-a-kind in that if I were to go copy and paste a sentence fragment or a paragraph and plug it into Google, that I wouldn’t find that sentence or that paragraph elsewhere. I mean unique information, information that, even if it were written about thousands of different ways, I couldn’t find it anywhere else on the web. You want your visitor to have experience of, “Wow, without this site I never would have found the answers I sought.” It’s not that, “Oh, this sentence is unique to all the other sentences that have been written about this topic.” It’s, “Ah-ha this information was never available until now.”

Some of my favorite examples of that — Walk Score. Walk Score is a site that took data that was out there and they basically put it together into a scoring function. So they said, “Hey, in this ocean beach neighborhood in San Diego, there are this many bars and restaurants, grocery stores, banks, pharmacies. The walkability of that neighborhood, therefore, based on the businesses and on the sidewalks and on the traffic and all these other things, the Walk Score out of 100 is therefore 74.” I don’t know what it actually is. Then you can compare and contrast that to, say, the Hillcrest neighborhood in San Diego, where the Walk Score is 88 because it has a far greater density of all those things that people, who are looking for walkability of neighborhoods, are seeking. If you’re moving somewhere or you’re considering staying somewhere downtown, in area to visit for vacation, this is amazing. What an incredible resource, and because of that Walk Score has become hugely popular and is part of many, many real estate websites and visitor and tourism focused websites and all that kind of stuff.

Another good example, blog posts that provide information that was previously unavailable anywhere else. In our industry I actually really like this example from Conductor. Conductor, as you might know, is an enterprise SEO software company, and they put together a phenomenal blog post comparing which portions of direct traffic are almost certainly actually organic, and they collected a bunch of anonymized data from their platform and assembled that so that we could all see, “Oh, yeah, look at that. Sixty percent of what’s getting counted as direct in a lot of these websites, at least on average, is probably coming from organic search or dark social and those kinds of things, and that credit should go to the marketers who acquire that traffic.” Fascinating stuff. Unique information, couldn’t find that elsewhere.

3) Content presented with a massively differentiated voice or style

The third and final one that I’ll talk about is content that’s presented with a massively differentiated voice or style. So this is not necessarily you’ve aggregated information that was previously unavailable or you’ve made it more accessible or you’ve designed it in a way to make it remarkable. It’s not necessarily information available nowhere else. It’s really more about the writer or the artist behind the content creation, and content creators, the great ones, have some artistry to their work. You’re trying to create in your visitors this impression of like, “I’ve seen stuff about this before, but never in a way that emotionally resonated with me like this does.” Think about the experience that you have of reading a phenomenal book about a topic versus just reading the Wikipedia entry. The information might be the same, but there are miles of difference in the artistry behind it and the emotional resonance it can create.

In the content marketing world, I really like a lot of stuff that Beardbrand does. Eric from Beardbrand just puts together these great videos. He has this gigantic beard. I feel like I’ve really captured him here actually. Eric, tell me what you think of this portrait? You’re free to use it as your Twitter background, if you’d like. Eric’s videos are not just useful. They do contain useful information and stuff that sometimes is hard to find elsewhere, but they have a style to them, a personality to them that I just love.

Likewise, for many of you, you’re watching Whiteboard Friday or consuming content from us that you likely could find many other places. Unlike when Moz started, there are many, many great blogs and resources on SEO and inbound marketing and social media marketing, and all these things, but Moz often has a great voice, a great style, at least one that resonates with me, that I love.

Another example, one from my personal life, my wife’s blog — the Everywhereist. There are lots of places you can read, for example, a history of Ireland. But when Geraldine wrote about her not-so-brief history of Ireland, it had a very different kind of emotional resonance for many other people who read and consumed that and, as a result, earned lots of nice traffic and shares and links and all of these kinds of things.

This, one of these three, is what you’re aiming for with uniquely valuable, and there are likely some others that fit into these or maybe that cross over between them. But if you’re making content for the web and you’re trying to figure out how can I be uniquely valuable, see what it is that you’re fitting into, which of these themes, hopefully maybe even some combination of them, and is that defensible enough to make you differentiated from your competition, from what else is in the search results, and does it give you the potential to have truly remarkable content and SEO going forward. If not, I’m not sure that it’s worth the investment. There’s no prize in content for hitting Publish. No prize for hitting Publish. The only prize comes when you produce something that meets these criteria and thus achieves the reach and the marketing goals that you’re seeking.

All right, everyone, we’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.