Posted by KelseyLibert

When emotionally-charged content is placed in front of the right audience, it can spread at an incredible rate. We recently had this happen with a Fractl client campaign called Perceptions of Perfection, which we executed for Superdrug Online Doctor.

Here’s a look at the results during the first few days of the campaign launch:

It was also endorsed by Sofia Vergara on Facebook, putting it in front of her 7.7 million followers:

And we were contacted by traditional media outlets to talk about the campaign:

While it may appear we just got lucky, we credit much of this campaign’s success to our method. In this post, I’m going to pull back the curtain on the process we use at Fractl to create content that hits the right emotional hot buttons and position it in front of people who will share it like crazy.

But first, let’s look at why some content takes off and other content does not. It’s crucial to understand the “why” in order to create your own highly-shareable content.

Some content is designed to “go viral,” while other times a piece of content intended to stay among friends takes the Internet by storm. But whether planned or unplanned, rapidly-shared content has several commonalities. One of the key factors is that the content creates a strong emotional response in viewers.

Through our research on viral emotions, we’ve found that certain emotions are better than others at driving people to view and share content. In other words, creating the right emotional response is extremely important to getting your content widely shared. We found three emotional components were prevalent in the viral images shown to participants in our study.

1. Positive emotions are crucial for attracting views.

It’s not surprising that people want to share content that makes them feel good in hopes of passing along the emotional experience to other people. Our study showed a strong correlation between positive emotions and the number of initial views a viral image received. We found these 10 positive emotions were evoked most frequently.

Example: Common Core math check

A dad recently won the Internet when he posted this image of a check on Facebook. Since Common Core math is a frustration for many parents, it had extremely broad appeal. You need to look no further than the comments on his post to understand why this image took off: People found it very amusing (hence the many “crying from laughter” emojis). Consider how many of the 10 positive emotions this image tapped.

2. Complex emotional experiences result in higher levels of arousal.

Our study found that most viral images evoke a range of emotions, rather than eliciting a one-dimensional emotional response. Contrasting emotions, such as fear and admiration or hope and despair, can help drive sharing.

Furthermore, some emotions help heighten other emotions. We call these “emotional multipliers.” Interest, surprise, and amusement behave as emotional multipliers for positive emotions, while empathy can heighten negative emotions.

Example: Old man singing to his dying wife

This video of a man singing to his wife on her deathbed hits you right in the feels. This easily illustrates the power of contrasting emotions, pairing feelings like sadness and affection. The video also evokes feelings of empathy, which helps heighten other emotions.

3. An element of surprise is the X-factor ingredient.

Highly shareable content tends to present something unexpected, unusual, counterintuitive, or novel. Why is this? Surprising the audience is incredibly effective for grabbing and holding their attention.

Example: Pizza Rat

It’s certainly surprising to see a rat carry a slice of pizza down subway stairs. Within 24 hours of being posted on YouTube, this video was picked up by major media and became the subject of a parody Twitter account. Consider the range of emotions this makes you feel, too – amusement and interest for sure, but also disgust.

Resources:

• The Science of Emotion in Marketing: How Our Brains Decide What to Share
• The Secret Recipe for Viral Success

Now I’ll take you through the step-by-step process of how we create share-worthy content like the Perceptions of Perfection campaign. I won’t sugarcoat it: This approach is hard work. Take shortcuts, and you will decrease your odds of hitting it big. The good news is this approach is also scalable and, to a certain extent, predictable.

It all starts with the right idea. To stress how much time and attention this step needs: Ideation is someone’s full-time job at Fractl, in addition to being a part of just about everyone’s job in our 40+-person company.

Coming up with ideas that tie together the following four traits is key.

1. Relevant to your brand

If you’re just trying to create a viral campaign for the sake of it, then you’ll have a lot more freedom with your ideas. But if your campaign has goals, such as increasing awareness around your brand or driving conversions, then the idea should relate back to what your brand does in some way. This doesn’t mean your ideas need to be overly promotional or directly about your company. Instead, you can think in terms of ideas that will attract the attention of your target audience, which will open you up to broader topics.

The Perceptions of Perfection campaign was for Superdrug Online Doctor, who are based in the UK. For this campaign, we were promoting their online doctor service, which lets people get treatment from doctors without visiting a doctor face to face. Since women ages 18 to 34 are a target market for this service, the body image issues presented in the campaign resonated with this core demographic.

So how do you come up with topics that are related to your brand, product, or service, yet will also appeal to both publishers and your target audience? First, you need to pinpoint the topics and themes to base your ideas around. Be broad and create a long list of topics and themes that are closely and tangentially tied back to your brand, industry, and audience interests. Once you figure out this topic list for your brand or a client, you can reuse it in future ideations.

After you compile your list, look up the topics on BuzzSumo, Topsy, and/or Reddit to gauge popularity. Answering these questions will help you narrow down your list, plus uncover new topics and themes:

• Which of these topics is the most talked about?
• What were the top-performing content pieces about these topics?
• Are there any topics that have been covered but still have a lot of unanswered questions?
• Is there new information about these topics that hasn’t been covered yet?
• Are there any topics that haven’t received much coverage?

Notice which sites these stories were published on, too. Add these to your target publishers list, since you know they run stories related to your topics.

2. Original or newsworthy (ideally both)

We know from experience and direct feedback from publishers that in order to get the high-authority placements that lead to massive exposure, your idea must present something new or novel. We learned in our publisher insights survey that publishers lean most toward exclusive research and breaking news.

Exclusivity

Offering new data and research that has never been published before is extremely attractive to publishers. This is how we run many of our content marketing campaigns at Fractl.

I’ll come back to this in the firsthand research section of this post, but here are three ways to provide exclusive research:

• Conduct your own surveys or polls.
• Use your company data.
• Combine several data sources to reveal interesting trends or findings.

Newsworthiness

You don’t need to create breaking news to appeal to publishers. Rather, focus on adding a newsworthy angle to your idea.

• Consider how your brand topics can be tied back to what’s happening in the news or socially trending.
• Use Google News to get an overview of recent stories publishers are covering around your brand industry.
• Use Google Scholar to find the latest research and studies related to your industry (you can set up alerts for new studies, too).

While our campaign was not breaking news, it was original in that we took a unique approach to uncover insights about beauty standards around the world. The global angle meant this idea could resonate with a huge audience, plus gain a lot of potential pickups from international publishers.

3. Proven success

Putting a new spin on an idea that has already proven to be popular can greatly increase your content’s odds.

Perceptions of Perfection was a spinoff of a concept that had achieved massive success. An artist named Esther Honig had a photo of her face Photoshopped by designers in more than 25 countries.

Since publishers knew how popular this piece had been, it made it easier for us to get their buy-in on our campaign. BuzzFeed gave Esther a shout-out when they ran our campaign, which provided the piece with further context and gave credit where it was due.

Take your potential themes and look for stories related to them that have done well in the past (again, BuzzSumo, Topsy, and Reddit are great for researching this). Consider the following:

• Can you improve upon the idea with newer or more comprehensive data?
• Can you create higher-quality visual assets or a different visual format that better communicates the idea?
• Does the content leave unanswered questions?

“This could have been really cool IF…”

Sometimes, poor execution or a lack of promotion kept a solid idea from getting traction. Also, keep an eye out for great ideas that fell flat.

When we came up with our Twitter Reading Levels campaign, we had seen a similar concept executed twice before but with minimal success. By taking the extra step to make a more detailed map and include an interactive feature, we had a big win with an idea that had been previously unsuccessful.

4. Emotionally appealing

Last but definitely not least, the idea needs to have a strong emotional hook. Aim to incorporate at least one of these emotional multipliers:

• Interest: Is the idea engaging and clever?
• Amusement: Is the idea entertaining and fun?
• Surprise: Is the idea unexpected or novel?

Perceptions of Perfection hit a range of emotions in viewers:

• Surprise: The photos defied expectations due to their extreme differences in some cases.
• Interest and curiosity: People wanted to see what the designer from their country created.
• Anticipation: People wanted to keep scrolling through the images to see the next one.
• Controversial: Some people found the images unrepresentative of their country’s beauty standards.

Test the strength of your idea

We run our ideas through a grading rubric to evaluate share-worthiness. Consider the following when evaluating your idea:

• Which emotions does this idea evoke?
  • Does it evoke any of the top 10 positive viral emotions?
  • Is it emotionally complex? Can you tweak the idea to include contrasting or multiplier emotions (interest, amusement, surprise, empathy, etc)?
• Does the idea offer something new? Is it surprising?

• Has the idea already been covered?
  • If so, can you create an improved version with fresh or more comprehensive data and/or a stronger visualization?
• Does the idea have broad audience appeal?
• Is the idea relevant to the top three to five publishers you want to target?
  • Check if they have covered similar stories before and how they performed.
• Will the idea appeal to multiple publisher verticals?
  • If not, can you adjust it to be less vertical-specific? Having wider appeal can increase your placement rate.
• Does this idea lend itself to a visual format?

Perceptions of Perception passed our grading rubric due to these factors:

• Emotional complexity (stimulates a range of emotions, including surprise and interest)
• Strong but simple visual component
• Extremely wide audience and publisher appeal (international angle)
• Past success with similar concepts

Pro Tip: Pitch your idea before creating the content. Seventy percent of publishers told us they want to be pitched a set of ideas rather than receive finished content. If you’re particular about where you want your content published, pitch your idea to your top three to five publishers and then move forward with their chosen idea or use their feedback to tweak your idea.

Ideation is best treated as an ongoing activity; don’t wait until you need a list of ideas to start this process. You should constantly be soaking up information that will help you create better ideas. One of the best ways to keep coming up with strong ideas is to stay on top of what’s performing well online. You’ll find that in most cases the content contains one or more of the three factors above.

Keep an eye on popular content using these tools:

• BuzzSumo
• Reddit
• Buzzfeed Trending Content
• What’s Trending
• Facebook Trending (right column in your News Feed)
• Twitter Trends (left column of your stream)

Resources:

• Here Is an Inside Look at Our Ideation Process
• How to Generate Content Ideas Using BuzzSumo (and APIs)

Gather research

Once you’ve settled on an idea with strong potential, you need to gather supporting information to bring your idea to life.

You have a few options here. As I covered earlier, publishers love exclusive research. But since that’s not always feasible and doesn’t always make the most sense for an idea, compiling the right secondhand research can be just as impactful and appealing to publishers.

Keep in mind that research is often the most time-intensive part of our production process, so give this step the time it deserves.

Note: Sometimes at this stage, you’ll discover your idea isn’t viable because there simply isn’t enough available information or you can’t come up with a sound research methodology. Or sometimes you do an abundance of research only to discover your findings aren’t compelling enough to create meaningful content.

Company data

You don’t need to look far for your research if you can find interesting stories within your company or customer data. Would your company data be interesting to people outside your company? Will your target audience find it valuable or compelling?

Here are a few examples of companies doing this well:

• OkCupid has long been doing cool stuff with their user data (in a somewhat controversial fashion).
• Along a similar vein, Match.com releases a yearly Singles in America report based on their user data.
• Kickstarter does a year-in-review using the data surrounding their crowdsourced projects.
• Buffer received tons of press coverage by releasing their staff salary information, in addition to other company information that would typically remain closely guarded.

Consider how appealing all of the above is to publishers and audiences – it’s interesting information you can’t find anywhere else.

A nice perk of using company data is it most likely can be updated on an ongoing basis, so you can potentially have success with the same topic over and over again.

You can also partner with a company that has access to data you want. We did this when we partnered with Relevance for the content marketing versus native advertising study.

Resource: 5 Companies Creating Dynamic Content With Their Own Data

Surveys

First, decide if a survey makes sense – conducting a survey is best when there is little or no existing data for the questions you want answered.

Some things to consider:

• Sample size. Use this sample size calculator from the National Statistical Service. One thousand participants is generally considered an authoritative sample size.
• Whom to survey. Can you use the general population (e.g., a survey about TV-watching habits) or does your survey need a specific demographic (e.g., a survey about planning a wedding)?
• How to get participants. Use crowdsourcing sites like Crowdflower and Amazon Mechanical Turk. In addition to utilizing it as a survey platform, you can also get participants through SurveyMonkey. These sites are inexpensive, but best for surveying the general population. If you are targeting a specific market and have a larger budget, try using Ask Your Target Market and Google Consumer Surveys.

Pro Tip: Organize your raw survey data so it’s easy to digest. Some publishers will want to review this and extract their own insights from the survey.

Resource: How to Get Better Results From a Survey

Secondhand research

There is a considerable amount of data available to the public from a wide variety of sources. The problem? It’s buried in research papers, databases, and jargon-filled governmental and industry publications. To produce content marketing gold, extract the interesting trends or most compelling information from this unwieldy data and then package those findings in an interesting, easy-to-digest format that appeals to the masses.

In addition to making your content credible and authoritative, using high-quality sources can make it easier to get through a publisher’s editorial process. Use these searchable databases to find authoritative sources:

• Google Scholar
• Microsoft Academic Search
• WorldCat Libraries

What makes a good source?

• High-authority .com sites
• .gov sites
• .edu sites (exception: student projects or personal sites)
• Sites for notable publications (online version of a newspaper or magazine)
• Reputable business/organization sites
• Peer-reviewed journals
• Interviews
• Surveys

Pro Tip: Always record your research methodology. Whether this is published alongside the content or just provided to publishers, it gives context to how your data were collected.

Synthesize research

Once you’ve compiled all your research, it’s time to find the most interesting takeaways. At this stage, you will combine your research findings to make connections and draw conclusions around your content idea.

Data analysis

A huge dataset in a spreadsheet can be intimidating, but you don’t need a background in statistics or data journalism to conduct a thorough data analysis. First, decide on the questions you’re trying to answer. You will inevitably find some unanticipated points in the data, but go into your analysis with a list of what information you’re seeking.

Popping your data into Tableau Public or Google Charts can help you quickly spot interesting insights. Play around with displaying the data in charts, line plots, pivot tables, and so on to uncover patterns and outliers.

We pulled tens of thousands of job descriptions for The Inbound Economy study. Using Tableau Public, we could analyze and sort a huge amount of data to uncover meaningful insights:

Adding supplemental information

Depending on your idea, sometimes this step will not require much work. For example, with our Perceptions of Perfection campaign, there wasn’t any research to synthesize once we collected the Photoshopped images from the freelance designers. We mainly just needed to organize the photos in the best way for telling the story.

Once you synthesize your research, you may discover you need to include additional information to tell a better story or add context to your insights. This could include another round of research at this step, or creating additional visual assets to enhance the data.

We chose to supplement the Perceptions of Perfection photos with maps of the countries we collected images from and charts estimating the weight and BMI of the woman in each submission. This added an additional level of detail and context to the campaign.

Resources:

• Visual Analysis Best Practices: A Guidebook
• 6 Data-Analysis Tools Anyone Can Use

Writing

By now you should have a clear idea of the points you want to make and which information to include in your content. Depending on the content format you’ve chosen, you may need a little or a lot of accompanying written text. Since this step will vary so much, I’ll share a few across-the-board pointers for some of the most important words in your content: the headline.

Any content marketer knows the importance of a good headline. The best ones pull in the audience by creating anticipation. Whether it will be at the top of your visual asset or the title of a published article, spend ample time brainstorming your headline.

Follow these guidelines for writing share-worthy headlines:

• Create a “knowledge gap” that piques the audience’s curiosity and makes them want to know more (not too vague, but not too specific)
• Don’t overhype it – people won’t share content they feel was oversold by the title
• Use knowledge words such as know, think, prove, and understand
• Use positive adjectives such as greatest, hilarious, and smartest
• Use the second-person voice to capitalize on the audience’s self-interest

To see these tips in action, here are examples of headlines that received millions of social shares:

• The Real Number of Hours Teachers Work in One Eye-Opening Graphic (Upworthy)
• This Is Why Your Baby Doesn’t Sleep Through the Night (BuzzFeed)
• 11 Things You Never Thanked Your Best Friend For, But Meant To (Elite Daily)
• This Is What School Lunches Look Like Around the World (Distractify)
• The Only 12 Exercises You Need to Get in Shape (BuzzFeed)

Resources:

• 5 Data Insights Into Headlines Readers Click
• 8 Winning Headline Strategies and the Psychology Behind Them
• 22 Headlines That Went Viral

Design

There is a reason the most widely shared content is highly visual; images and videos in particular perform extremely well on the web because they can rapidly create an emotional response and convey an idea very quickly.

Choose a visual format

Sometimes the best visual format for your content will be obvious. Other times, you may have a range of options that could work. Consider the following when vetting visual formats:

• Can this format easily convey the idea?
• Is this format overused for this topic?
• Which formats do your target audience like?

Having target publishers in mind can also guide which visual format to use. Look at the top-performing visual content on your target publishers:

• What are the popular formats?
• Do they just link to the visual asset, publish part of it, or embed the whole thing?
• Are there any formats they don’t publish? (For example, some publishers won’t run infographics.)

Resource: How to Choose the Right Visualization for Your Data

Create multiple assets

Consider turning your content into several visual formats in order to meet publisher preferences. This can often be done without much extra effort, yet it greatly increases your placement rate by appealing to different publishers.

For example, an infographic can be chopped into several smaller visual assets for publishers who don’t like using full infographics. For interactive pieces, always include a static visualization as an option for publishers who don’t want to embed an interactive feature.

Pro Tip: If you are hosting the content assets on your own site, make sure they are optimized for social sharing with proper Open Graph tags and Twitter cards. Getting this right can greatly increase clickthroughs and drive more shares.

Evaluating design

Your design may be beautiful, but does it communicate your idea well? Some criteria for evaluating your design’s effectiveness:

• Is the design set up in the “inverted pyramid” format, with the most compelling information at the beginning and less important information toward the bottom?
• Does the design highlight the most important information?
• Does the size of the visual asset meet the standard for the exclusive publisher you’re pitching?
• Are graphs and charts accurately displaying the information?
• Are the fonts legible?
• Does the emotional experience build as you scroll through the visual?
• Do the colors, shapes, and fonts convey the correct mood for the topic?

Quality assurance

Imagine getting interest from a top-tier publisher only to have your content rejected at the last minute due to weak sourcing. Or picture your published content torn apart by a sea of trolls pointing out a silly typo.

Creating a QA checklist can ensure all your content passes muster. At the very least, your checklist should include multiple points related to proofreading and editing. You also want to evaluate content quality and credibility with certain questions:

• Are all facts that aren’t common knowledge clearly attributed to a source?
• Are authoritative sources used?
• Do any of the subjective points sound dubious? Should they include a supporting source?

Your content is finished, but now you need to find it a home. If you haven’t already been collaborating with publishers up to this point, the first step is deciding who to pitch.

Choosing target publishers

Keep in mind you should begin building your target publishers list while the content is still in production so you can hit the ground running once it’s time to pitch.

To get your content widely shared, you need a high number of views, but you also need to get it in front of audiences that are likely to share it. Because of this, your goal should be getting published on a site with high engagement and not just a lot of traffic.

Let’s consider two extremely popular sites: BuzzFeed and CNN. While both sites receive a lot of traffic, BuzzFeed’s most-shared post within the last year got 2.6 million shares compared with CNN’s most-shared article getting just over 460K shares.

So, you want to zero in on a publisher that 1) has high engagement and 2) has published content related to your content topic in the past. During ideation, you should be creating a list of publishers who regularly run stories around your content topic. Look at which of those sites has the highest engagement, and pitch those as your first choice.

Pro Tip: You don’t want to send a general pitch email to editors@publication.com. Zero in on which writers at your target publisher have the highest engagement on their articles plus a sizable social following – that’s who you want to pitch.

Pitching

Your pitch needs to sell the value of your content while also being original and enticing enough to get noticed in a writer’s overflowing inbox.

Subject line

Getting your pitch email opened is half the battle. You need to grab the publisher’s attention with a personalized or compelling subject line. If you’ve really done your homework, you have already been engaging them on social media, so your name will look familiar when they see it in their inbox.

Try one of these tried-and-true subject line formulas:

• Statistics: Pull an eye-catching stat from your content.
  • 88% of marketers lack this skill [Exclusive Research]
• Headline: Use your content’s headline as the subject line (you did write an attention-grabbing headline, right?).
  • New Study Reveals Marketers’ Biggest Weakness
• Knowledge Gap: Pique their curiosity with an enticing statement or question.
  • Why No One Opens Your Emails

It’s also extremely important that your subject line makes it clear your pitch is related to what the writer covers. Our subject line study with BuzzStream found that the majority of publishers want subject lines tailored to their beat. Specific, descriptive, and brief subject lines are also desirable.

Pro Tip: Avoid using the word “infographic” in your subject line or email body, even if you’ve created the world’s best infographic. A lot of publishers have emails containing “infographic” filtered out of their inbox due to the deluge of junky infographic spam.

Personalization

Your pitch intro needs to make it clear that it’s not a mass pitch. Show that you’ve done your homework on what they cover. Mention a recent story of theirs that you enjoyed (be specific, don’t say, “I loved your story on XYZ.”)

You can also mention any common ground you may have based on your social media sleuthing, but keep it surface-level or you risk coming off as creepy. Bringing up personal interests they share publicly is fine, such as a favorite sports team or band.

Relevance

Why will your content matter to their audience? Why should they publish it? Point to any related news stories in the last month, or mention related topics they’ve covered in the past that have performed well.

However, make sure you don’t come across as a know-it-all. This person knows their audience better than you do. You are only assuming their audience will find your content interesting, so don’t say you “know” their audience will like it. Use phrases like “I think” or “I feel.” Better yet, ask them: “Think your audience would be interested in this story?”

Reviewing your pitch

Before you hit send, evaluate your pitch.

• Did you spell their name correctly? It seems obvious to get this right, but it’s an instant turnoff if you don’t.
• Did you format the name of their publication correctly? (Example: BuzzFeed, not Buzzfeed).
• If you want to give them first publishing rights, is it clear that they can have the exclusive?
• Is your pitch free from silly typos and grammar errors? When you’re pitching a writer or editor, you can bet they will notice these issues.
• Did you use AP Style? Again, you’re pitching writers and editors – speak their language!
• Is your pitch concise? Aim for less than 200 words.

Resources:

• The Psychology Behind Writing a Great Pitch
• Publisher Feedback on Pitching [Flipbook]
• Media Relations Guide on Etiquette

Syndication

Once your content is published on a high-authority site, it will naturally be picked up by other sites. You need to capitalize on this snowball effect by continuing to reach out to other publishers and influencers you want to cover your content.

While you should still follow the pitching best practices I shared above, your syndication pitch should also include these:

• A link to the exclusive post. Seeing that a high-authority publisher covered your story gives it credibility.
• Social proof. Share social metrics and which sites have featured the piece.

Resource:

• How to Get Content Into the Hands of Influencers Who Can Amplify It

Highly shareable content is not a silver bullet that satisfies every marketing goal. This type of content works best for getting high levels of awareness, attracting customers who are in the top of the sales cycle, and, sometimes, for generating interest in a product or service. But for a relatively low cost, the method I’ve shared can greatly increase your chances of achieving massive exposure.

Want to see more examples of this process in action? Download our collection of viral content case studies.

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Posted by Anna_of_PSD2HTML

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

When I joined the PSD2HTML team in November 2014, the site had been suffering from a manual penalty related to spammy backlinks for over a year. They’d tried everything to promote a recovery, but nothing worked.

They were ready to admit defeat.

The penalty resulted in the loss of over 80% of their organic traffic.

The story of how this happened is very interesting. PSD2HTML was one of the first companies to market PSD to HTML conversions in 2005. At the peak of their success, they transitioned to an SEO company. In 2013, our relationship with a well-known agency resulted in a manual spam penalty.

The following is a screenshot of what this looked like:

Recovering from the penalty was a very painful process. There were two in-house marketing departments that hired several agencies to analyze over 2,500 linking domains. They spent a year and a half trying to remove the penalty, which included submitting numerous reconsideration requests that failed.

Since we finally had the penalty revoked, we wanted to share our experience with other companies, website owners, and SEOs that might be suffering from the same problem, and include some useful tactics for removing penalties.

It is also important to give credit to our outstanding consultant who helped us overcome the disaster.

Step 1: Create a master penalty removal sheet

The first thing we did was to collect all incoming links pointing to PSD2HTML.com. We then created a master spreadsheet that we could work through to identify possible artificial links. This process involves the following steps:

• Download all links from Google Search Console, using the process described here
• Supplement with links from Majestic.com
• Sort them by root domain using a simple Excel process from Distilled that can be found here

This may sound simple, but it’s not. It’s important to start with the right data. While it is helpful to have multiple link sources, Google Search Console data is key.

Step 2: Identify links that Google sees as artificial

Typical unnatural links can include articles, link directories, bookmarks, blog comments, malware, guest posts, and scrapers. They include anything where the content exists primarily to influence rankings more than offering genuine content. PSD2HTML.com had very few of these types of links. This is possibly one reason why the penalty had been around for so long. There were some possible unreliable link directories in their link profile. However, there were very few keyword-stuffed submissions or guest posts with links for rankings. It was important to identify the artificial links.

The theory of primary intention

Penalty write-ups typically list types of links that need to be removed. However, as link building methods continue to evolve, the potential types of unnatural links are unlimited. It is very helpful to identify the common denominator for all artificial links, which is the primary intention. If the primary intention of a link is to influence rankings, then it is artificial.

We went through all linking domains in order to develop a list of some interesting link types that fit this description. Despite our previous attempts, we could not access previous responses to reconsideration requests. As a result, no sample links from Google were available. Therefore, we had to start from scratch.

Giveaways

PSD2HTML had a number of links from giveaway promotions, where users could leave comments in return for a chance to win paid services. Paid reviews of services have a long history of being seen as unnatural by the Google Webspam Team. However, it is not necessarily artificial if a company wants to run a giveaway. Since these giveaways didn’t have the primary intention of gaining links to influence Google, we decided to keep them.

Again, it wasn’t that simple.

In the case of at least one giveaway, the page had a genuine intention and also contained specific links with artificial elements. For example, here are two links to PSD2HTML.com that appeared on the same page:

– “The world’s first and finest PSD to HTML conversion company, PSD2HTML®, is giving away $400, $300 and $200 worth of services!”
– The leading PSD to HTML slicing service has made outstanding changes to the way they do business and provide services.

These two links are bolded here, but not linked, as one of them was artificial. I’m sure that you can guess which one. The first one was a genuine reference to the company name. The second one was a keyword phrase. Therefore, the giveaway was not artificial, but the keyword link was.

In order to deal with this situation, we kept all of the giveaway links and the domains they were featured on. We drilled down to any pages that also had artificial keyword links and disavowed them individually. When Google denied our first request, none of the sample links were giveaways. We therefore inferred that we’d gotten this one right.

Keyword footer links

PSD2HTML had some sites where they’d done conversion work and gained a keyword link at the footer of the site. This brought up the question as to what degree design firms can legitimately place footer links on client sites. John Mueller talks about this here. The intention idea proved useful here.

In one instance we noticed, the actual brand wasn’t linked, but the keywords were linked, so they were assumed to be artificial.

Sponsor and advertisement links

Sponsor links were absolutely fine. We thought sponsor links (not quite sponsored links) could be artificial and wondered if they’d be identified as artificial. However, these were genuine sponsors, so we left them and it worked out fine.

We also found that image ads were fine. However, they usually only showed up in Majestic data and not in Search Console. Therefore, there wasn’t a problem.

Keyword articles, link directories, bookmarks, malware, and scrapers

There were some submission sites with keyword links and the sludge of scrapers that were added to the disavow file. However, the rest of their profile looked clean, so it was submitted.

Step 3: Submission to and response from Google

Our penalty removal consultant had a proven record of eight penalties getting revoked on the first try.

Unfortunately for us, after our submission the Webspam Team returned the following three sample links:

• http://www.tuicool.com/articles/UV3QZf
• https://www.campaignmonitor.com/forums/topic/5542/html-dev-required/
• http://ibartolome.blogspot.com/2012_01_01_archive.html

Interpreting Google sample links

The sample links that Google provides in response to reconsideration requests aren’t just samples. The Webspam Team shows you specific link types that still need to be removed. If you can identify the underlying link types provided by Google, it is possible to look through the link data again and find those link types.

Step 4: Identify links that Google sees as artificial from sample links

We thought the three sample links from Google were unusual. This penalty was interesting because the Webspam Team seemed to be highlighting possible new variations of artificial links. These link types appeared regularly and it looked like they were here to stay.

Sample link type #1: Chinese duplicate translation links

The first such link was a Chinese news site. In the past, it had been possible to clear penalties without similar foreign sites causing problems. These sites were posting verbatim articles from SmashingHub. While the URL included the source (http://smashinghub.com/10-best-online-resources-to-convert-psd-to-xhtmlcss.htm?utm_source=tuicool), Google had identified it as an artificial link. We again went through the links looking for duplicate Chinese pages. This was easy to do with the English ones. However, most of them were not duplicate translations.

This article was a duplicate of http://creativeoverflow.net/top-15-psd-to-html-services-to-use/ that was translated into Chinese. This made it more difficult to identify. Although it is tempting to judge a link only based on a language, countries with non-Western scripts form a massive part of the web, and can also offer genuine links to a site. We wanted to keep any genuine links using the primary intention idea, regardless of country or language. This is an example of a genuine link with no duplicate issues: http://www.rysos.com/bbs/redirect.php?fid=49&tid=7586&goto=nextoldset.

I identified duplicate Chinese links by searching for English keyword phrases. For example, most of the duplicates featured English website names. Therefore, by Googling “PSD2HTML” “CSS Chopper” “Direct Basing,” it was possible to identify the original English post.

Sample link type #2: Brand name used as keywords with genuine intention

Seeing https://www.campaignmonitor.com/forums/topic/5542/html-dev-required/ marked as artificial was frustrating. This is a forum post link that was given completely genuinely.

However, the link text was “PSD to HTML.” It was used legitimately as a brand name that was rewritten with the number 2 in PSD2HTML converted to the word “to.” There were some giveaway links above with some artificial links using “PSD to HTML” as a keyword phrase to influence Google. Those links were artificial. However, the use of “PSD to HTML” was not artificial since the underlying primary intention was completely genuine.

How do you deal with a genuine link that is marked as artificial due to brands listed as keywords? In order to solve this problem, we called Google out on artificial links. In our second reconsideration request message, we argued that while the link text consisted of keywords, they were used as a completely genuine reference to a brand. Therefore, the act of identifying the link as artificial was in itself artificial, since the link itself was entirely genuine.

The frustration of having a genuine link marked as artificial became a tool to add weight to our argument and conversation with the Webspam Team. They regularly respond with sample links that can be argued to be genuine, or are already in the disavow file. These sample links are very important. They can be used in your next presentation to the Webspam Team.

Sample link type #3: Financial offer to influence links

This link was very obscure. However, it could be seen as artificial. It was impressive how the Webspam Team isolated this one link type.

This link was in Spanish: http://ibartolome.blogspot.kr/2012_01_01_archive.html

The writer reported receiving an email offering a Christmas promotion. They would receive $50 off of their next order from “our friends P2H” (P2H.com redirects to PSD2HTM.com).

There was a subtle, but important, difference between this link and the giveaways. Although the giveaways were promotional, they did not appear to be directly created with the intention of gaining a link. In the email, PSD2HTML offered $50 on their next order to bloggers with whom they had no previous relationship, which raised questions about their motivation. The “influenced-recommendation-tone” became clearer as the post continued. This indicated that the emails were sent in order to gain links.

We searched for similar links and found one more. This type of task can be difficult when there are many easy-to-spot, low-quality links. The standard artificial link types were largely irrelevant. The process of searching for the links that matched the exact link types implied by the Webspam Team’s three sample links took real precision.

Step 5: Second submission and response from Google

We submitted this work with our explanation to Google and received a very quick response.

Image credit: Comics Alliance

Euphoria. Penalty revoked.

A note on emails and outreach

We didn’t send any emails to get the penalties removed.

There are a number of differences between only using the disavow tool and also using manual outreach. We had the following findings about the use of email outreach: Email outreach is not required to revoke a penalty. Clients and providers often feel they must use outreach to revoke a penalty. This can significantly add to the costs and timeframe.

It is possible to commit resources to email outreach. However, it is not true that both outreach and manual action removal are needed. Once you realize this, you can have more control and save time and money. Google penalties are a psychological phenomenon. Therefore, getting the “No manual webspam actions found” message showing quickly is very important.

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Posted by KaneJamison

I’ve been obsessed with Facebook Ads for the past few years. It probably didn’t hurt that the first test campaign we ran earned an excellent $0.04 cost-per-engagement from a $10 budget.

I’m obsessed because I’m convinced Facebook Ads are one of the most powerful tools we currently have as digital marketers. Whether you’re looking to spend $200 a month advertising to a single zip code or $20,000 a day reaching sports fans, you can reach the ideal target audience for your organization with targeting criteria that no other ad network, search engine, or social network can match.

With that in mind, I’m going to share the 10 biggest quirks that have caught me off guard since I started learning Facebook Ads to help you avoid some of the same mistakes.

I’d really love for this to become a go-to resource for people learning Facebook Ads, so if you have tips of your own, please leave a comment!

Quick Guide:

#1 – Your ad image must contain less than 20% text.
#2 – Split test your bid models between CPC, CPM, & Engagement.
#3 – Targeting options utilize both AND operators and OR operators.
#4 – Selecting Location doesn’t necessarily mean people who live there.
#5 – Facebook’s third party data goes far beyond the things you think Facebook knows about you.
#6 – There are 4 ways to access Facebook ad management, with varying levels of difficulty.
#7 – It’s tempting to prefer desktop over mobile, but do your research first.
#8 – Get your pixels straight before you start running ads.
#9 – Segment your creative!
#10 – Start using good naming conventions now.

Add your tips for learning Facebook Ads in the comments

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#1 – Your ad image must contain less than 20% text.

If there’s a single most-common reason that my ads get denied, it’s because I forget to check text coverage on images for my sponsored organic posts.

Whether you’re promoting organic Facebook posts on your page’s feed or running pure ads, Facebook is very picky about how much text you can display inside of your ad creative.

This is Facebook’s way of making sure that your ad images aren’t covered in obnoxious calls-to-action, over-sized logos, and other excessively commercial elements.

Official 20% Rule Page: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/468870969814641

Facebook provides a tool for checking how much of your image is covered in text, which you can test for yourself at https://www.facebook.com/ads/tools/text_overlay. When you click the grid cells that contain text after uploading your image, you can see the percentage of the image that contains text.

Here’s an example of two image variations you might test, but only the option on the right would be usable in a campaign:

The fastest way to avoid the 20% rule is to automatically produce all of your social media imagery with the 20% rule in mind — or produce a separate set of images just for Facebook.

When we create social media graphics, we have a transparent grid saved as a PNG file that we paste into a layer of the image we’re working on. You can copy & paste the image below, or download templates for Illustrator, InDesign, Powerpoint, and Photoshop from our blog: Facebook Ads 20% Text Grid Templates.

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#2 – Split test your bid models between CPC, CPM, & Engagement.

Facebook offers a few different ways to structure your bid model, which is the basis for how you’re billed. For example, here are the bid models available for a sponsored organic post:

Each one may offer a better pricing structure depending on the audience you’re targeting, the goal of your campaign, and the ad content that you’re using.

In my experience, there is not a single best model for everyone. For example, if I put out a really interesting post and my goal is clicks, I might get the best results by using CPM bidding that gives me a much lower CPC than actually using CPC bidding. However, if I put out a somewhat boring post and my goal is clicks, I might be better off just paying for the clicks with CPC bidding, since it will require a lot more impressions to generate the same amount of clicks. Every situation is different, so like everything else in PPC, you have to test test test for yourself.

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#3 – Targeting options utilize both AND & OR operators — and those targeting options are changing.

There are a ton of Facebook Ad targeting options available — that’s where the power in Facebook Ads comes from. We put together an enormous Facebook targeting guide if you want to see all of the options available.

But, sometimes the targeting options don’t act the way you think they’d act, and they’re changing as I write this post.

The most common targeting mistake I see when someone runs their first Facebook Ad is thinking that when you target 2 interests, you’ll only reach people who like both of those topics.

Historically, that type of interest overlap is difficult to target, and Facebook’s functionality only allowed you to target users who like Topic 1 OR Topic 2, but not Topic 1 AND Topic 2.

Here’s how Facebook targeting has worked for the past few years:

BUT — that targeting model is changing.

As of October 2015, Facebook has been testing a new feature called Detailed Targeting that does allow us to target 2 sets of interests.

Here’s a screenshot of how the existing ad targeting is laid out:

Here’s a screenshot of the new targeting structure from Power Editor:

I’ve edited in Photoshop slightly to show you all features in a single screenshot. The color-coded dots show you where the old targeting options show up in the new Detailed Targeting section, and the yellow highlighting shows you the two new detailed targeting options to Narrow Audience or Exclude Audience.

While this is currently only an option in Facebook’s Power Editor, I’m willing to bet this new targeting structure will be rolled out to the normal ad manager in the near future, because of how granular it will allow us to get with our audiences.

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#4 – Selecting Location doesn’t necessarily mean people who live there.

Let’s say you want to target people who live in New York City. You might type “New York City” into the Locations box, leave it at the default 25-mile radius, and keep moving.

But, if you did that, you might miss the small drop down menu at the end of the screenshot that says “Everyone in this location.”

See it now? Well, if you click on that drop down, you’ll find out that Facebook’s Locations targeting gets way more granular:

That’s right — not only can you target actual residents whose home is in the selected area, but you can target people currently visiting New York City who live more than 100 miles away, and people recently in New York City.

As an example, a 25-mile radius for New York City shows 10,000,000 audience members for “Everyone in this location,” but only 9,500,000 audience members for “People who live in this location.” That’s 5% of the default audience that is irrelevant if you’re only trying to reach residents — which means you could have been wasting 5% of your ad budget.

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#5 – Facebook’s third party data goes far beyond the things you think Facebook knows about you.

Shopping for a new car? Ever input your household income during a survey? Have a tendency to buy expensive stuff online?

Companies like Acxiom collect this data on you from tons of websites and resell it to companies like Facebook as “Data Enhancement” so that Facebook can offer better targeting options to us, the advertisers. If I wasn’t so excited about the cool things this allows me to do as an advertiser, it might worry me as a consumer.

Most of what you’ll find under the Behaviors targeting category is actually third party data from Acxiom, Datalogix, and Epsilon. You can either search for a Behavior by typing, or click the box to start browsing. Hovering on categories will give you a more in-depth description, as well as the data source:

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#6 – There are four main ways to access Facebook ad management, with varying levels of difficulty.

A – Boost Post

(Found on posts and your business page)

The first is what most small business owners see — the Boost Post button. In the past, using the Boost Post button was generally overpriced and much like Adwords Express, you traded simplicity for limited control and a higher price. I haven’t used the Boost Post button in a couple years, so that may no longer be the case, but regardless, I would suggest you spend 30 more minutes learning the next option instead.

B – Facebook Ad Manager

Find it at: https://www.facebook.com/ads/manager/

The second is the normal ad editor. This interface is fairly straightforward to begin using and offers a lot of control over ads that you might run once in awhile. If you’re just a casual Facebook advertiser, this offers the best combination of price, functionality, and ease-of-use.

C – Facebook Power Editor

Find it at: https://www.facebook.com/ads/manage/powereditor/

The third, and most advanced, is the Power Editor. Facebook Power Editor is not a good choice for beginner-level Facebook Advertisers and requires some training to get started with it.

However, for those willing to learn how to use it, there are a number of Power Editor features that are not available in the normal editor (like Import/Export so you can edit campaigns in a spreadsheet), and Power Editor users typically see new ad features months before the normal Ad Manager, like Instagram Ads & Product Ads.

D – Facebook Advertising API & Facebook Ad Management Tools

The fourth level of accessing Facebook Ads would be through their advertising API. I haven’t labeled this as advanced since I believe most advertisers using the API will be using third-party tools, like those found in the Facebook Partner Directory, rather than connecting to the API themselves. Like with Power Editor, API users often get advanced functionality earlier than normal ad editor users. There may be other benefits that I’m not aware of, so please feel free to mention those in the comments.

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#7 – It’s tempting to prefer desktop over mobile, but do your research first.

Even in the mobile-first marketing era that we live in, you might be surprised that 44% of Facebook users under age 35 only access Facebook from mobile devices. That’s right — zero desktops or laptops in the past 30 days.

Regardless of the age or demographics of the audience you’re targeting, don’t assume that they’re scanning through a laptop Facebook feed just because you’re on a laptop all day while editing ads.

The vast majority of Facebook users are on mobile apps, and many of your ad sets may never get a click from desktop users.

To get a better idea of your audience’s device habits, take a look at the Audience Insights tool to gather market research, and use the ad builder tool to get a better estimate size of a more defined audience.

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#8 – Get your pixels straight before you start running ads.

Facebook offers a variety of functions that require tracking pixels to be added to your website. The most common examples include building Custom Audiences to retarget users who have visited your website, tracking conversions from users who have seen your Facebook ads, and even using conversion pixels to stop showing ads to users who have already converted.

Recently, Facebook has released “one pixel to rule them all” simply called the Facebook Pixel, but we weren’t always so lucky, and there are still some single-purpose pixels in the editor that you’ll find marked as “(Old).” Make sure you install the new one, which is multipurpose and loads faster, and go through the process of upgrading any old pixels you currently have installed on your site.

An example of the Facebook Pixel code, found in Facebook’s documentation. The red section 2 is the Facebook Pixel code, and the green section 3 is event code that needs to be customized, similar to Google Analytics’ event and e-commerce tracking features.

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#9 – Segment your creative!

Make sure the creative imagery and copy is tightly targeted to your audience. Instead of targeting an audience of 2,000,000 people, find a way to break them into smaller, more specific groups, and show them customized copy and graphics that will appeal to them.

For example, let’s say you’re advertising in the sporting goods market and your biggest audiences are runners and cyclists. One approach would be to show generic outdoorsy sports photography to both groups. But, in my experience, you’ll probably have better luck by running separate ads with product photography highlighting each group individually.

A cyclist won’t care about a photo of a runner, and the skateboarder wouldn’t care about photos of a rock climber, so why would you show them the same ad?

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#10 – Start using good naming conventions now.

In the beginning, it’s easy to start using the generic names that Facebook autogenerates for campaigns, audiences, and other groupings. But, fast forward a couple years (and a couple of new ad managers or agency staffers), and things can get a little confusing.

Best practices are to start a naming convention now. Here’s an example of how I might set up naming conventions for an auto dealership covering campaigns, ad sets, and audiences:

Campaign Menu Showing Multiple Clients:

Syntax:

• “Client Name – Year-Month – Campaign Name”

Campaign Examples:

• “Acme Auto Sales – 2015-10 – Fall Football Test Drive Promos”
• “Acme Auto Sales – 2015-11 – November Charity/Giving Back Awareness”

Ad Set Within a Campaign:

Syntax:

(Note: This will vary a lot between campaigns — what’s important is to customize and standardize it for your team and clients.)

• “Campaign Title – Modifier 1 (eg Ad variation) – Modifier 2 (eg Location)”

Ad Set Examples:

• “Fall Football Test Drive – Toyota Prius Kids Ad – Seattle”
• “Fall Football Test Drive – Toyota Prius Pets Ad – Seattle”
• “Fall Football Test Drive – Toyota Prius Kids Ad – Portland”
• “Fall Football Test Drive – Toyota Prius Pets Ad – Portland”

Custom / Saved / Lookalike Audiences:

Syntax:

(Note: This will vary a lot between campaigns — what’s important is to customize and standardize it for your team and clients.)

• “Client Name – Custom/Lookalike/Saved – Primary Description – Modifiers”

Audience Examples:

• “Acme Auto Sales – Custom – Moms – Yoga Fans”
• “Acme Auto Sales – Custom – Moms – Dog & Kids”
• “Acme Auto Sales – Custom – Sports Fans – Seahawks Fans”
• “Acme Auto Sales – Custom – Sports Fans – Sounders Fans”
• “Acme Auto Sales – Lookalike – Test Drive Conversions – Hybrids”
• “Acme Auto Sales – Lookalike – Test Drive Conversions – Pickups”

When you take the time to set these up and maintain them, it makes life easier — especially when you’re running ads for 20 clients or juggling dozens of customer segments.

Add your Facebook Ads tips to the comments!

Are You a Facebook Ads Veteran?

Please take the time to share a tip in the comments for anyone else still learning Facebook Ads.

Still Learning Facebook Advertising?

Let us know in the comments what questions you have!

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Posted by JoyHawkins

Local SEO can be confusing for those businesses that don’t have a physical store for customers to walk into.

Unlike businesses with a brick-and-mortar storefront, service-area businesses (or SABs) go out to meet with their customers, as opposed to their customers coming to see them. This often results in them servicing multiple cities, which can be problematic—the #1 ranking factor in local SEO is the physical address of the business. In addition, business owners are also usually concerned about privacy, as many of them use their home address and can’t utilize some of the features that Google offers small businesses (like Indoor Street View).

This guide will show you how you can maximize your presence on Google and reach more people in your local market.

1. Figure out which address you’re going to use.

As a service-area business, you only have a couple options. Here are some best practices:

• If you have an office, use that for your business address everywhere online.
• If you have no office but you have a business partner(s), use the home address for the person who lives closest to the major area that you service.
• Use the address you registered with for your business everywhere. Think of the address you put on your bank business loan, the address you used for registering for your business telephone line/cell phone, the address you provided when you bought a business vehicle or equipment. These are the addresses that are going to populate online via data providers later in the future, and they’ll give you a possible headache if they don’t match what you used as your address in Google My Business (GMB).

2. Decide if you need to hide your address or not.

Hiding your address means that Google will know where you are (for verification), but users will not see your address publicly on Google.

You should always hide your address if you’re using your home address (unless customers actually show up there). If your customers do visit your home address, it needs to be blatantly obvious on your website. You should:

• List driving directions,
• Invite people to come visit, and
• Include photos of your home office.

You should hide your address if you have an office, but no one is actively staffing it during the day. If a person walked in at 2pm during a work day, would your door be locked with no one there? If so, hide your address.

If you have an office that is actually staffed, you should leave it unhidden.

Flash from the MapMaker Top Contributor team wrote up a great guide that shows you how to hide your address and the rules that Google has about this.

3. Decide if a public address is okay elsewhere online.

If you fall into the majority of SABs that need to hide their address, decide if you’re okay publicly listing your address on other websites.

My advice is to always list your full address everywhere else online (other than Google My Business), including your website, Facebook page, Yellowpages listing, and so on. If you insist on not listing your home address anywhere, that’s okay, but know that you will run into some missed opportunities. There are still many local directories that require an address to be listed. Phil Rozek wrote a great summary of places you can list your business with a hidden address.

4. Think about how you should list the area you service.

In Google My Business, you can select which areas you service. You can do this by adding either zip codes or the names of the cities you service. It’s good to note that what you select here will determine how your business radius and marker will show up on Google Maps. If you choose a ton of cities and zip codes, Google will attempt to find the center of them and put your marker there. The result isn’t always ideal.

Keep in mind that the service areas you select have no impact on your ranking there. It’s extremely unlikely that you will rank in the local pack outside the town your address is in.

5. Do a thorough check for duplicate listings on Google.

• The best option for a service-area business is to head to Google and type in this query (with the quotations). Replace the dummy phone number with your actual one:

“plus.google.com” “999-999-9999” “about” “review”

• Go to the end of the URL string in your browser (it starts with “google.com…”) and add &filter=0
• Record a list of all the listings you find (they will all start with “plus.google.com” and repeat those 2 steps for every phone number that might be associated with your business. Make sure you check your home phone & cell phone.
• Once you have your list of existing listings, make sure you deal with all the duplicates appropriately.
• If your duplicate listings had inconsistencies and used different phone numbers, websites, or addresses than the one you have provided to Google, make sure you search Google for other online references to that information and update it there, as well.

6. Do a local search on Google for a few keywords in the town your address is in and see who your competitors are.

Look for competitors that either have multiple listings (which is not allowed) or that are using keyword stuffing in their business name. Typically, more spam exists for service-area businesses than for businesses with storefronts. Locksmiths are known in the local SEO world as being the most-spammed business category.

Submit an edit for these listings through Google Maps to remove the keyword stuffing.

If the competitor is a service-area business with multiple listings, you can report the duplicates through Google Maps. As per the guidelines, a service-area business is not allowed to have multiple listings. The only exception would be if they had multiple offices where customers could actually show up.

7. Consider expanding your open hours.

Service-area businesses with hidden addresses have the advantage of listing the hours that they’re available to answer the phone. Businesses with storefronts are supposed to list the actual hours that customers can show up at their front door and get service. If they have a 24-hour call center, they are still not allowed to list themselves that way unless they’re someone like McDonald’s, with a 24-hour drive-through.

Service-area businesses avoid this rule because they have no physical storefront, so their open hours are the equivalent of the hours that they answer the phone. With Google’s new hours display in the search results, having longer open hours could result in a lot more calls.

8. Come up with a really great content strategy for the areas you target outside of the city your address is in.

Generally, you will only rank in the local pack for the city that your address is in. If your home address isn’t in the city that your primary book of business is in, this can be concerning. Other than setting up offices in different cities (real ones, not virtual ones), your best option is to target long-tail keywords & the organic section of Google using really great content.

Here are some tips for ways to generate good content:

• Create pages/articles about the different jobs you do. If you are a home remodeler in the Denver, CO area but do jobs in the entire metro area, you could create a page for different jobs you did in Parker, CO. On that page, you could put before & after pictures of the job, a description of the job, details about the neighborhood you did it in, a testimonial from the customer, and so on and so forth.
• Create how-to videos for your industry. If you’re a tree service business, you could create a video on how to prune a maple tree (think long-tail and get specific). Post the video on YouTube and use their transcription service to transcribe the entire thing as well. In the description, include the full name, address & phone number of your business along with a link back to your website.
• Use a service like Nearby Now to help automate this process.
• If you’re a contractor, create a useful page on your site for each town with safety information, emergency contacts or places to get permits.

Technically, I could continue to add a hundred more items to this list—for now, I wanted to focus on the major starting points that will help a service-area business start out on the right track. If you have questions, please let me know in the comments!

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Posted by Dan-Petrovic

We tend to put a lot of effort into writing great content these days. But what’s the point of all that hard work if hardly anybody actually reads it through to the end?

In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Dan Petrovic illustrates a new approach to writing for the web to increase reader engagement, and offers some tools and tips to help along the way.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

G’day, Moz fans, Dan Petrovic from DEJAN here. Today we’re talking about how to write for the web.

How much of an article will people actually read?

This year we did an interesting study involving 500 people. We asked them how do they read online. We found that the amount of people who actually read everything word-for-word is 16%. Amazingly, this is exactly the same statistic, the same percentage that Nielsen came up with in 1997. It’s been nearly two decades, and we still haven’t learned how to write for the Web.

I don’t know about you guys, but I find this to be a huge opportunity, something we can do with our blogs and with our content to change and improve how we write in order to provide better user experience and better performance for our content. Essentially, what happens is four out of five people that visit your page will not actually read everything you wrote. The question you have to ask yourself is: Why am I even writing if people are not reading?

I went a little bit further with my study, and I asked those same people: Why is it that you don’t read? How is it that there are such low numbers for the people who actually read? The answer was, “Well, I just skip stuff.” “I don’t have time for reading.” “I mainly scan,” or, “I read everything.” That was 80 out of 500 people. The rest said, “I just read the headline and move on,” which was amazing to hear.

Further study showed that people are after quick answers. They don’t want to be on a page too long. They sometimes lose interest halfway through reading the piece of content. They find the bad design to be a deterrent. They find the subject matter to be too complex or poorly written. Sometimes they feel that the writing lacks credibility and trust.

I thought, okay, there’s a bunch of people who don’t like to read a lot, and there’s a bunch of people who do like to read a lot. How do I write for the web to satisfy both ends?

Here was my dilemma. If I write less, the effort for reading my content is very low. It satisfies a lot of people, but it doesn’t provide the depth of content that some people expect and it doesn’t allow me to go into storytelling. Storytelling is very powerful, often. If I write more, the effort will be very high. Some people will be very satisfied, but a lot of people will just bounce off. It’ll provide the depth of content and enable storytelling.

Actually, I ended up finding out something I didn’t know about, which was how journalists write. This is a very old practice called “inverted pyramid.”

The rules are, you start off with a primary piece of information. You give answers straight up. Right after that you go into the secondary, supporting information that elaborates on any claims made in the first two paragraphs. Right after that we go into the deep content.

I thought about this, and I realized why this was written in such a way: because people used to read printed stuff, newspapers. They would go read the most important thing, and if they drop off at this point, it’s not so bad because they know actually what happened in the first paragraph. The deep content is for those who have time.

But guess what? We write for the web now. So what happens is we have all this technology to change things and to embed things. We don’t really have to wait for our users to go all the way to the bottom to read deep information. I thought, “How can I take this deep information and make it available right here and right there to give those interested extra elaboration on a concept while they’re reading something?”

This is when I decided I’ll dive deeper into the whole thing. Here’s my list. This is what I promised myself to do. I will minimize interruption for my readers. I will give them quick answers straight in the first paragraph. I will support easy scanning of my content. I will support trust by providing citations and references. I will provide in-depth content to those who want to see it. I will enable interactivity, personalization, and contextual relevance to the piece of content people want to retrieve in that particular time.

I took one of my big articles and I did a scroll test on it. This was the cutoff point where people read everything. At this point it drops to 95, 80, 85. You keep losing audience as your article grows in size. Eventually you end up at about 20% of people who visit your page towards the bottom of your article.

My first step was to jump on the Hemingway app—a very good online app where you can put in your content and it tells you basically all the unnecessary things you’ve actually put in your words—to actually take them out because they don’t really need to be there. I did that. I sized down my article, but it still wasn’t going to do the trick.

Enter the hypotext!

This is where I came up with an idea of hypotext. What I did, I created a little plugin for WordPress that enables people to go through my article, click on a particular piece, kind of like a link.

Instead of going to a new website, which does interrupt their reading experience, a block of text opens within the paragraph of text they’re reading and gives them that information. They can click if they like, or if they don’t want to look up this information, they don’t have to. It’s kind of like links, but injected right in the context of what they’re currently reading.

This was a nerve-wracking exercise for me. I did 500 revisions of this article until I got it right. What used to be a 5,000-word article turned into a 400-word article, which can then be expanded to its original 5,000-word form. People said, “That’s great. You have a nice hypothesis, nice theory, but does this really work?”

So I decided to put everything I did to a test. An old article, which takes about 29 minutes to read, was attracting people to the page, but they were spending 6 minutes on average—which is great, but not enough. I wanted people to spend way more time. If I put the effort into writing, I wanted them to digest that content properly. The bounce rate was quite high, meaning they were quite tired with my content, and they just wanted to move on and not explore anything else on my website.

Test Results

After implementing the compressed version of my original article, giving them a choice of what they will read and when, I expanded the average time on page to 12 minutes, which is extraordinary. My bounce rate was reduced to 60%, which meant that people kept browsing for more of my content.

We did a test with a content page, and the results were like this:

Basically, the engagement metrics on the new page were significantly higher than on the old when implemented in this way.

On a commercial landing page, we had a situation like this:

We only had a small increase in engagement. It was about 6%. Still very happy with the results. But what really, really surprised me was on my commercial landing page—where I want people to actually convert and submit an inquiry—the difference was huge.

It was about a 120% increase in the inquiries in comparison to the control group when I implemented this type of information. I removed the clutter and I enabled people to focus on making the inquiry.

I want you all to think about how you write for the web, what is a good web reading experience, and how content on the web should be, because I think it’s time to align how we write and how we read on the web. Thank you.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

A few notes:

There are a few things to note here. First, for an example of an implementation of hypotext, take a look at this post on user behavior data.

Next, keep in mind that Google does devalue the hidden content, disagreeing with its usability. You can read more about this on the DEJAN blog—there are further tips on the dangers of hidden content and how you can combat them there.

One solution is to reverse how hypotext works in an article. Rather than defaulting to the shorter piece, you can start by showing the full text and offer a “5-minute-read” link (example here) for those inclined to skim or not interested in the deep content.

Share your thoughts in the comments below, and thanks for listening!

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