Posted by 5le
The decision to focus your site on an international audience is a big step and one fraught with complexities. There are, of course, issues to deal with around language and user experience, but in addition there are some big technical cho… Continue reading → Posted by randfish
It wasn’t too long ago that there was significant tension between information architects and SEOs; one group wanted to make things easier for humans, the other for search engines. That line is largely disappearing, and there are sev… Continue reading →
Posted by Amanda_Gallucci
The past year, major publishers have run the full gamut from listicles with clickbait headlines to well-researched, in-depth storytelling. Each format worked for different audiences and contexts, and as publishers repeatedly tested new types of content, they found several winning combinations.
By taking a look at the strategy behind why some of the most popular content styles of 2014 performed so well, brands can learn to leverage and utilize these formats for their own content.
Whether taking the form of a list, interactive map, or article, content that focused in on a certain segment of the population, or compares and contrasts diverse segments, made up some of the most widely shared and discussed content.
The New York Times created a map that represented America’s palate by showing the most searched for Thanksgiving recipe in every state: Thanksgiving Recipes Googled in Every State.
The more closely content is personally tied to the reader, the more they are invested in it, so content that is focused on a particular area or demographic has a high appeal to the people in that group. People feel one of two ways about this type of content: either they find it to be a spot-on representation of their community, or they starkly disagree with how they were perceived. In both cases, the opinion is strong and people want to share with others about either the content’s accuracy or their reasons why the author didn’t get it right. Moreover, content that pits different places or groups against each other further increases a person’s desire to defend their loyalty to their group, as well as strikes up curiosity and conversations when people are genuinely surprised to find out how different they are from others.
Dig into your sales data and see if you can find any interesting trends as far as different groups of people favoring different products or services. You can also use social engagement tools and social listening to find interesting patterns in online behavior. Depending on the type of insights you discover, you can decide if a map or another type of graphic makes the most sense to present your findings.
Investing a great deal of resources into producing a piece of content aimed at only one group can seem to be less of an opportunity than something all encompassing, however sometimes when you try to cover your whole audience at once, you end up reaching no one on a deep enough level. Try out both hyperlocal content and content that compares different local segments to see which performs best.
Whether giving tips from specific celebrities or business leaders, or rounding up the commonalities between “every great leader” or “all accomplished entrepreneurs,” content that claimed to give the secret steps to success was quite popular. Just a step up from a listicle, these articles paired first-person accounts and statistics with helpful tips.
Forbes turned research about how people deal with stress into tips on how to avoid it: How Successful People Squash Stress.
People want to be successful and turn to informational and self-help content in order to better themselves. Pairing tips with people’s real stories or data largely increases the credibility of the advice, giving the readers more reason to believe that the content can help them achieve their own success.
Make the success formula specific to your niche. Go beyond interviewing thought leaders about their backgrounds and general advice. Q&As with bright individuals don’t always produce high traffic and social shares because while the person answering questions is successful, the questions and answers don’t produce any concrete takeaways from which others can learn. Compile actual schedules and to-do lists that show how effective workers spend their time, describe what tools a professional in your space uses to accomplish certain tasks, or explain the story behind the numbers that show a group or company’s growth. Peel away any generic and clichéd recommendations to reveal the details that make up a repeatable method other people in the field can use.
Sometimes the “steps” in posts like these are overly simplistic and not completely fleshed out. For instance, “start by setting goals,” on its own has very little value and it’s something that people have heard before. Giving more specific examples about the types of goals to set, tips and tricks of how to set obtainable goals or keep track of goals, or a behind-the-scenes look at a successful individual or brand’s goals with the details of how they were achieved can turn advice into useful content.
While micro content may have excelled in 2014, there were also many notable long-form pieces of strong journalism. Publishers sought to put names and faces to cold facts about poverty, crime, and other important issues that are sometimes glazed over as mere statistics. The combination of detailed accounts and telling photography or data visualizations alongside careful research brought previously hidden subjects to light.
Newsweek told the story of what really happens in one of the most dangerous cities of America in Murder Town USA (aka Wilmington, Delaware).
Powerful storytelling will always be compelling. Humanizing facts makes people take interest because it allows them to relate and moves them to feel a certain way.
Start by asking questions about data patterns and doing research to see if you can determine the source of unique trends. This doesn’t have to involve extensive reporting; one interview with a person who has a unique point of view can be all you need to tell a remarkable story.
In-depth stories are only worth the reader’s time investment if the author has something interesting to share, so this format is not easy to produce consistently in every subject. It can be a risk to take the time needed to produce something on such a grand scale only for it to not to gain traction. A big piece of content like this should not be attempted unless the idea is vetted among people in your circle of influence and there is a large enough promotional strategy around it to help it take off.
The latest trend with publishers like BuzzFeed and Huffington Post is listicle posts that round up the funniest/saddest/most absurd stories from different threads on Reddit or other forums. Editors read through a thread and select what they deem to be the 10+ best posts under that topic, and publish the list either as is or including new images and light commentary. BuzzFeed has also taken this a step further and created posts that are simply open-ended questions people can answer for the chance to be featured in a follow-up post that includes the top answers.
BuzzFeed turned the Ask Reddit question “What is the most George Constanza-esque reason you broke up with someone?” into this post: The 32 Most Ridiculous Reasons Real Couples Have Broken Up.
Like any listicle, this content is bite-sized, organized, and easy to digest. It also saves people time from reading through mediocre stories if they were to read through the entire forum thread themselves, or helps them discover this type of content in the first place if they aren’t a regular Redditor or forum user. If the editor accurately picks the most interesting posts to include, the content is quite informative and/or entertaining, making it highly shareable.
Create your own version of the crowdsourced listicle by collecting user generated questions, testimonials, or relevant experiential stories. These tidbits can be used for a blog post or combined with visuals to make an interesting SlideShare. Whether openly asking questions on social media to increase engagement and start conversations, or sending out a survey, there are plenty of ways to get shareable information from your audience.
While creating a list of other people’s responses might appear lazy, having an eye for what people will enjoy reading and taking the time to sift through endless threads and posts is still work. No, not every brand should be emulating the BuzzFeed and Huffington Post “quick content” listicle style, however disregarding it as low quality can also be a mistake. A look at any of BuzzFeed‘s sponsored content case studies shows that the publisher can create tremendous brand lift, especially in the millennial segment. Quality should be viewed in the eyes of the reader, and so when listicles like these are getting many thousands of views and social shares, they should be seen as inherently valuable to at least a certain group of people.
While format is important in each of the above cases, none of these pieces would have succeeded had they not been backed with substance. Each example includes elements that make up strong content:
As you begin to slate content for 2015, keep an open mind for trying out new formats and experimenting with these styles that have proved effective. With the right combination of short and long-form content, you can reach all parts of your audience while balancing your resources.
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Continue reading → Posted by MatthewBrown
Today we are thrilled to launch
local rankings as a feature in Moz Analytics, which gives our customers the ability to assign geo-locations to their tracked keywords. If you’re a Moz Analytics customer and are ready … Continue reading →
Posted by Dr-Pete
It’s that time of year – time for all of us to promise to be better people starting January 1st: people who always drink eight 8-oz. glasses of water, floss every night, and never watch 12-hour marathons of Real Housewives when we should be working. Even at work, we’re busily crafting our Q1 and 2015 plans for world domination, or at least for not-getting-fired, and trying to ignore how painfully short we fell in Q4 and 2014. This time, it will be different.
This is a post about marketing goals, and the insanity of failing the same way over and over. I think it might help to start with a more personal example, though. Let’s say that you make a typical New Year’s resolution – you resolve to lose 10 lbs. in Q1 of 2015. What will happen when April 1, 2015 arrives? You’ll step on the scale and look back at your progress (or, just as likely, lack thereof):
At this point, you’ve either succeeded or failed, but when you step on the scale, your fate is no longer in your hands. You’re looking back at the past, measuring lag metrics – put simply, the event has already happened, and you’re just waiting for your grade.
There’s nothing wrong with accountability, and some of our lag metrics are necessary. If your company plans to spend $5M in 2015 and doesn’t want to borrow money, you’d better make more than $5M – that’s just math.
The problem is simple – when it comes time to step on the scale, our fates are already sealed. We’ve set an objective, but we’ve given ourselves no clear path to influencing that objective. We’re trapped always looking backward.
What if, instead, you resolved to exercise 20 minutes a day, 3 days a week?
Congratulations, you’ve just set a lead goal. While both goals are measurable, only one is really actionable. Resolving to exercise 3 times a week is forward-looking – you can measure as you go and check off the boxes every day (or nearly every day). If you get into trouble, you’ll know early.
Of course, we set lag goals in business all of the time. We want our content to generate 5M pageviews in Q1, or Post X to deliver 3,000 re-tweets, or our ranking to go from #3 to #2, or conversion to go up to 3.5%.
It’s fine to have objectives, but I’m going to say something controversial – I believe we are suffering from a mass-delusion. We are confusing saying big numbers out loud with actually achieving something, as if simply giving the number a name has conjured a benign spirit of profitability.
Let me pick on myself for a minute. In late 2013, I set a goal of writing three blogs posts that collectively earned 100,000 views (any three, it didn’t matter). I failed to achieve that goal, which like all failure, didn’t feel very good. The truth is, I set myself up to fail – I had no plan of action, no definable progress, just a number painted on a bulls-eye.
It’s worse than that, though. Think about what I implied when I said out loud “I want 100,000 views!” (I beseech thee, oh ancient gods of analytics!). Can you spot the problem? I implied that, prior to making my wish, I didn’t want 100,000 views. It’s as if I just woke up that morning and realized more was better.
Of course, I always wanted more traffic – that’s painfully obvious. The problem is that the vast majority of marketing goals boil down to “Give me more!” It’s fine to be ambitious, and it’s necessary to refine your ambitions into achievable numbers. What’s not fine is to confuse that most basic step 1 with actually accomplishing something. We sit in boardrooms, shout big numbers to the wind, and pat each other on the backs, as if shouting was a virtue.
At the end of last year I tried an experiment – at the time, I didn’t know I was replacing lag goals with lead goals, but that ended up being exactly what I did. Long story short, I decided to try something new on Moz’s Google+ account. As part of my research, I have a lot of screenshots of features Google seems to be testing. They often aren’t enough to justify a blog post, but it occurred to me that they might be a good fit for Google+.
So, I set out in typical fashion – setting a lag goal to post these screenshots “regularly” (failing to define what that actually meant) and then achieve 1,000 total +1s and 500 total shares over a 6-month period (each post would only take me about 5 minutes, so it was a minimal investment).
Then I had that sinking feeling – how exactly was I going to achieve this, and how often should I post? I looked at my recent data and decided that 2 posts per week was realistic. So, I changed my goal to posting 2 interesting screenshots per week for 6 months (52 total). My goal had changed from lag to lead.
Ultimately, because my path was clear and I could hold myself accountable every week, I published 59 updates to Google+ based on this project. What’s interesting is what happened when I stepped on the scale:
Those 59 updates ended up getting 1,711 +1s and 799 shares. By creating an actionable lead goal, I actually eclipsed my original lag goals (beating them by +71% and +60%, respectively). Even better, I had a repeatable process that I could continue to use to achieve future success.
That last point is important, and I don’t want it to be lost at the end of one sentence you probably skimmed. We’re all aware of the feeling when we step on the metaphorical scale and realize we failed to achieve our goals. I could never describe it to you as vividly as you can probably picture it yourself.
Ultimately, though, it wasn’t failure that convinced me of the need for lead goals in my own marketing plans – it was success. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been fortunate enough to have a couple of major content marketing successes. Chief among them is the Google Algorithm History, which has topped 1.5M views in its lifetime and is actually getting more traffic as time goes by (it’s already topped 600K views and half a million uniques in 2014).
You’re probably thinking that this is a real tragedy for me. Here’s the problem – when we succeed, it obviously feels good, we celebrate, and we have our moment. When that moment passes, though, we’re left with what can be a terrible, sinking feeling, that I can only summarize as: “Now what?”
Success raises expectations, but so often we don’t understand why we succeeded. Even when we do understand why, the people around us often just think we can “do more of that!”, even if “that” (whatever that is) can’t really be repeated. I can’t just build another Google Algorithm History.
The Content Team at Moz has faced a similar struggle with the Beginner’s Guide to SEO. The Beginner’s Guide has topped 2.3M unique visitors in 2014, by far the most successful piece of content we’ve ever created. Naturally, we want to repeat that success, but what does that mean? We can’t just take something completely unique and do it again. Maybe our success wasn’t an accident, but it wasn’t exactly a formula, either, and success can leave us feeling just as helpless as failure.
So, why are lead goals different? They’re different because they outline specific, measurable actions. If those actions succeed, you’ll automatically have a path forward. That’s not to say that every successful action will continue to work forever or that you’ll be exponentially successful, but when the moment comes that you think “Now what?”, you’ll at least have a piece of the answer.
I’m not pretending that these ideas are completely original. Over the past few years, we’ve all seen an evolution in goal setting. Here at Moz, like a growing number of companies, we use the OKR process. Even Google has championed OKRs recently.
If you’re not familiar with it, OKR stands for “Objectives and Key Results”. The idea is fairly simple – instead of just creating a broad, ill-defined goal, you have to break that goal down into specific, measurable results. As this process has evolved, many people have added a critical action layer, breaking down the steps necessary to achieve those key results (which, in turn, will signal that the objective has been achieved).
Sound familiar? Key results are essentially lag goals, and actions are lead goals, working together in what theoretically is perfect harmony. Here’s the problem – most of us continue to carry all of our bad habits into this process. So, ultimately it looks something like this:
We focus a ton of time creating an important-sounding objective, agonize over turning that into a few key results (to make the boss happy), and then slap together a list of actions 5 minutes before our review. Most of our time is spent at the top of the process, which is completely backward. This is what the process should look like.
Yes, well-thought-out objectives are important, but actions don’t just magically trickle down from them. Ultimately, those objectives have to be built on a foundation of concrete actions and well-defined key results. We’re outcome focused, because outcomes sound impressive, but we’re so obsessed with perfecting the outcome statement that we put little or no thought into how to make it happen.
I’m not suggesting any of you abandon lag goals and metrics. We have to evaluate outcomes. If nothing else, other people are going to judge us based on traditional outcomes, like traffic and rankings and social mentions. The trick is to take those outcomes and chart a path to them, using goals we can measure along that journey (and not just looking back when it’s over).
If it helps, think of lead goals as hypothesis testing. For example, I’ve been studying Moz content this year and have determined that my engagement on Twitter and Facebook is falling while our engagement on Google+ is increasing. In other words, Google+ success seems more highly correlated to broader success metrics than other social networks. Unfortunately, Google+ is also where I spend the least amount of my time. So, I’ve set myself a challenge in Q1 to spend a specific amount of time each day on Google+ and actively share other people’s content.
I can’t guarantee that will work, no more than I can guarantee Moz will meet its financial goals. However, I can measure my progress along the way, course-correct as needed, and, if that experiment works, I can continue my actions into Q2 to generate more successful outcomes.
So, I’d challenge you to experiment for yourself. You don’t need to sell your entire organization on lead goals. You don’t have to dump your lag goals (in fact, please don’t). Just take 50% of the time you’d normally put into crafting that perfect objective statement and use it to map out a path of specific, measurable actions you can take every day. If they work, keep doing them. By the end of the year, you may be amazed by the results.
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