Posted by SamuelScott
It’s ten o’clock. Do you know where your logs are?
I’m introducing this guide with a pun on a common public-service announcement that has run on late-night TV news broadcasts in the United States because log analysis is something … Continue reading →
Posted by Hannah_Smith
Most frequently, the content we create at Distilled is designed to attract press coverage, social shares, and exposure (and links) on sites our clients’ target audience reads. That’s a tall order.
Over the years we’ve had our hits and misses, and through this we’ve recognised the value of learning about what makes a piece of content successful. Coming up with a great idea is difficult, and it can be tough to figure out where to begin. Today, rather than leaping headlong into brainstorming sessions, we start with creative content research.
Creative content research enables you to answer the questions:
“What are websites publishing, and what are people sharing?”
From this, you’ll then have a clearer view on what might be successful for your client.
A few years ago this required quite an amount of work to figure out. Today, happily, it’s much quicker and easier. In this post I’ll share the process and tools we use.
I think that the value in this sort of activity lies in a couple of directions:
a) You can learn a lot by deconstructing the success of others…
I’ve been taking stuff apart to try to figure out how it works for about as long as I can remember, so applying this process to content research felt pretty natural to me. Perhaps more importantly though, I think that deconstructing content is actually easier when it isn’t your own. You’re not involved, invested, or in love with the piece so viewing it objectively and learning from it is much easier.
b) Your research will give you a clear overview of the competitive landscape…
As soon as a company elects to start creating content, they gain a whole raft of new competitors. In addition to their commercial competitors (i.e. those who offer similar products or services), the company also gains content competitors. For example, if you’re a sports betting company and plan to create content related to the sports events that you’re offering betting markets on; then you’re competing not just with other betting companies, but every other publisher who creates content about these events. That means major news outlets, sports news site, fan sites, etc. To make matters even more complicated, it’s likely that you’ll actually be seeking coverage from those same content competitors. As such, you need to understand what’s already being created in the space before creating content of your own.
c) You’re giving yourself the data to create a more compelling pitch…
At some point you’re going to need to pitch your ideas to your client (or your boss if you’re working in-house). At Distilled, we’ve found that getting ideas signed off can be really tough. Ultimately, a great idea is worthless if we can’t persuade our client to give us the green light. This research can be used to make a more compelling case to your client and get those ideas signed off. (Incidentally, if getting ideas signed off is proving to be an issue you might find this framework for pitching creative ideas useful).
Good ideas start with a good brief, however it can be tough to pin clients down to get answers to a long list of questions.
As a minimum you’ll need to know the following:
Now you have your brief, it’s time to begin your research.
Given that we’re looking to uncover “what websites are publishing and what’s being shared,” It won’t surprise you to learn that I pay particular attention to pieces of content and the coverage they receive. For each piece that I think is interesting I’ll note down the following:
Whilst I’m doing this I’ll also make a note of specific sites I see being frequently shared (I tend to check these out separately later on), any interesting bits of research (particularly if I think there might be an opportunity to do something different with the data), interesting threads on forums etc.
When it comes to kicking off your research, you can start wherever you like, but I’d recommend that you cover off each of the areas below:
Whilst this activity might not uncover specific pieces of successful content, it’s a great way of getting a clearer understanding of your target audience, and getting a handle on the sites they read and the topics which interest them.
If you’ve a list of sites you know your target audience read, and/or you know your client wants to get coverage on, there are a bunch of ways you can uncover interesting content:
Both Buzzsumo and ahrefs are paid tools, but both offer free trials. If you need to explore the most shared content without using a paid tool, there are other alternatives. Check out Social Crawlytics which will crawl domains and return social share data, or alternatively, you can crawl a site (or section of a site) and then run the URLs through SharedCount‘s bulk upload feature.
When searching by topic, I find it best to begin with a broad search and then drill down into more specific areas. For example, if I had a client in the financial services space, I’d start out looking at a broad topic like “money” rather than shooting straight to topics like loans or credit cards.
As mentioned above, both Buzzsumo and ahrefs allow you to search for the most shared content by topic and both offer advanced search options.
There are also several sites I like to look at for inspiration. Whilst these sites don’t give you a great steer on whether or not a particular piece of content was actually successful, with a little digging you can quickly find the original source and pull link and social share data:
By this point you’ve (hopefully) got a long list of content examples. Whilst this is a great start, effectively what you’ve got here is just data, now you need to convert this to insight.
Remember, we’re trying to answer the questions: “What are websites publishing, and what are people sharing?”
Ordinarily as I go through the creative content research process, I start to see patterns or themes emerge. For example, across a variety of topics areas you’ll see that the most shared content tends to be news. Whilst this is good to know, it’s not necessarily something that’s going to be particularly actionable. You’ll need to dig a little deeper—what else (aside from news) is given coverage? Can you split those things into categories or themes?
This is tough to explain in the abstract, so let me give you an example. We’d identified a set of music sites (e.g. Rolling Stone, NME, CoS, Stereogum, Pitchfork) as target publishers for a client.
Here’s a summary of what I concluded following my research:
The most-shared content on these music publications is news: album launches, new singles, videos of performances etc. As such, if we can work a news hook into whatever we create, this could positively influence our chances of gaining coverage.
Aside from news, the content which gains traction tends to fall into one of the following categories:
Earlier in this post I mentioned that it can be particularly tough to create content which attracts coverage and shares if clients feel strongly that they want to do something directly related to their product or service. The example I gave at the outset was a client who sold insurance and was really keen to create something about insurance. You’re now in a great position to win an argument with data, as thanks to your research you’ll be able to cite several pieces of insurance-related content which have struggled to gain traction. But it’s not all bad news as you’ll also be able to cite other topics which are relevant to the client’s target audience and stand a better chance of gaining coverage and shares.
There are potential pitfalls when it comes to creative content research in that it’s easy to leap to erroneous conclusions. Here’s some things to watch out for:
Make sure you’re identifying outliers…
When seeking out successful pieces of content you need to be certain that what you’re looking at is actually an outlier. For example, the average post on BuzzFeed gets over 30k social shares. As such, that post you found with just 10k shares is not an outlier. It’s done significantly worse than average. It’s therefore not the best post to be holding up as a fabulous example of what to create to get shares.
Don’t get distracted by formats…
Pay more attention to the idea than the format. For example, the folks at Mashable, kindly covered an infographic about Instagram which we created for a client. However, the takeaway here is not that Instagram infographics get coverage on Mashable. Mashable didn’t cover this because we created an infographic. They covered the piece because it told a story in a compelling and unusual way.
You probably shouldn’t create a listicle…
This point is related to the point above. In my experience, unless you’re a publisher with a huge, engaged social following, that listicle of yours is unlikely to gain traction. Listicles on huge publisher sites get shares, listicles on client sites typically don’t. This is doubly important if you’re also seeking coverage, as listicles on clients sites don’t typically get links or coverage on other sites.
At Distilled, we typically take a creative brief and complete creative content research and then move into the ideation process. A summary of the research is included within the creative brief, and this, along with a copy of the full creative content research is shared with the team.
The research acts as inspiration and direction and is particularly useful in terms of identifying potential topics to explore but doesn’t mean team members don’t still do further research of their own.
This process by no means acts as a silver bullet, but it definitely helps us come up with ideas.
Thanks for sticking with me to the end!
I’d love to hear more about your creative content research processes and any tips you have for finding inspirational content. Do let me know via the comments.
Image credits: Research, typing, audience, inspiration, kitteh.
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Continue reading → Posted by randfishWe all know by now that not just any old content is going to help us rank in competitive SERPs. We often hear people talking about how it takes “good, unique content.” That’s the wrong bar. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand talks abo… Continue reading →
Posted by Trevor-Klein
We at the Mozplex have noticed a recurring event. Somewhat regularly, one of our community members—sometimes even a Pro subscriber—will ask us if we know of any tools that’ll do a good job solving for a particular use case. They’ve got a need and are looking for a solution. That solution, it turns out, is available in our own tools—they just never made the connection.
This week, we began a series of video tutorials we’re calling the Moz Daily SEO Fix. The videos are shorter than two minutes each and are designed to offer you solutions to some of the most common problems faced by SEOs and online marketers of all stripes. A new video will be released every weekday for a month, and we’ll post a weekly roundup on Thursday afternoons.
Whether you’re a seasoned veteran of the old SEOmoz days or have never once used a Moz tool, we hope these videos will show you a way to make your marketing life a little easier. =)
In today’s Daily SEO Fix, David explains how to use the Open Site Explorer’s top pages tab plus the filter for 4xx and 5xx errors to find the pages on your site with the most potential link equity that are broken and can be redirected. 301’ing these URLs to relevant pages on your site can give your rankings a serious boost.
In this Daily SEO Fix, Michael shows you how to set up an alert in Fresh Web Explorer for anyone who mentions (or links to) your two biggest competitors but not to you. Monitor your inbox for these alerts and you’ll find new link building opportunities, ripe for the picking.
Finding the best time to tweet is unique for everyone and figuring out what times work best for you is key to maximizing your presence on Twitter. In this Daily SEO Fix, Ellie shows you how to use Followerwonk to find the best times to tweet so your followers don’t miss out on your updates.
Don’t have a Pro subscription? No problem. Everything we cover in these Daily SEO Fix videos is available with a free 30-day trial.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!
Continue reading →
Posted by billslawski
“On the most basic level, Google could see how satisfied users were. To paraphrase Tolstoy, happy users were all the same. The best sign of their happiness was the “Long Click” — This occurred when someone went to a search result, ideally the top one, and did not return. That meant Google has successfully fulfilled the query.”
~ Steven Levy. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes our Lives
I often explore and read patents and papers from the search engines to try to get a sense of how they may approach different issues, and learn about the assumptions they make about search, searchers, and the Web. Lately, I’ve been keeping an eye open for papers and patents from the search engines where they talk about a metric known as the “long click.”
A recently granted Google patent uses the metric of a “Long Click” as the center of a process Google may use to track results for queries that were selected by searchers for long visits in a set of search results.
This concept isn’t new. In 2011, I wrote about a Yahoo patent in How a Search Engine May Measure the Quality of Its Search Results, where they discussed a metric that they refer to as a “target page success metric.” It included “dwell time” upon a result as a sign of search success (Yes, search engines have goals, too).
Another Google patent described assigning web pages “reachability scores” based upon the quality of pages linked to from those initially visited pages. In the post Does Google Use Reachability Scores in Ranking Resources? I described how a Google patent that might view a long click metric as a sign to see if visitors to that page are engaged by the links to content they find those links pointing to, including links to videos. Google tells us in that patent that it might consider a “long click” to have been made on a video if someone watches at least half the video or 30 seconds of it. The patent suggests that a high reachability score on a page may mean that page could be boosted in Google search results.
But the patent I’m writing about today is focused primarily upon looking at and tracking a search success metric like a long click or long dwell time. Here’s the abstract:
Invented by Henele I. Adams, and Hyung-Jin Kim
Assigned to Google
US Patent 9,002,867
Granted April 7, 2015
Filed: December 30, 2010
Abstract
Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media for determining a weighted overall quality of result statistic for a document.
One method includes receiving quality of result data for a query and a plurality of versions of a document, determining a weighted overall quality of result statistic for the document with respect to the query including weighting each version specific quality of result statistic and combining the weighted version-specific quality of result statistics, wherein each quality of result statistic is weighted by a weight determined from at least a difference between content of a reference version of the document and content of the version of the document corresponding to the version specific quality of result statistic, and storing the weighted overall quality of result statistic and data associating the query and the document with the weighted overall quality of result statistic.
This patent tells us that search results may be be ranked in an order, according to scores assigned to the search results by a scoring function or process that would be based upon things such as:
Last September, I wrote about how Google might identify a category associated with a query term base upon clicks, in the post Using Query User Data To Classify Queries. In a query for “Lincoln.” the results that appear in response might be about the former US President, the town of Lincoln, Nebraska, and the model of automobile. When someone searches for [Lincoln], Google returning all three of those responses as a top result could be said to be reasonable. The patent I wrote about in that post told us that Google might collect information about “Lincoln” as a search entity, and track which category of results people clicked upon most when they performed that search, to determine what categories of pages to show other searchers. Again, that’s another “search success” based upon a past search history.
There likely is some value in working to find ways to increase the amount of dwell time someone spends upon the pages of your site, if you are already having some success in crafting page titles and snippets that persuade people to click on your pages when they those appear in search results. These approaches can include such things as:
Here are some resources I found that discuss this long click metric in terms of “dwell time”:
Your ability to create pages that can end up in a “long click” from someone who has come to your site in response to a query, is also a “search success” metric on the search engine’s part, and you both succeed. Just be warned that as the most recent patent from Google on Long Clicks shows us, Google will be watching to make sure that the content of your page doesn’t change too much, and that people are continuing to click upon it in search results, and spend a fair amount to time upon it.
(Images for this post are from my Go Fish Digital Design Lead Devin Holmes @DevinGoFish. Thank you, Devin!)
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!
Continue reading →