Posted by JayLeary
Update: The Landing Pages feature is only available to campaigns that track Google US rankings. We are currently building compatibility for other Google English-language domains. You can add Google US on the Campaign Settings page … Continue reading →
Posted by iPullRank
As someone who is fortunate enough to get invited to speak at numerous conferences I pride myself in not reusing presentations unless someone specifically requests it. However, for the SEO audience, there has always been a huge disconnect between the concepts of quality and scale when it comes to content. To some degree, this makes sense because until 2011 content quality didn’t really impact Organic Search performance.
Fortunately, we’re now in a post-Panda era where Google has effectively killed the “SEO” page through a combination of FUD and algorithm improvements. I, for one, love it, because it gives us the opportunity to step our game up and deliver higher quality web experiences. As a result I’ve made it a bit of a personal goal to share approaches to achieving quality at scale that drives measureable results with my Scaling Quality Content presentation. Let’s talk about how we can make things users actually want that help us hit our business goals.
Here’s the deck. Over the several times I’ve presented it, it has gone through many iterations where I’ve added things based on new tools that I’ve discovered in my own client work and things that have been highlighted within the industry; hence the version 1.4. I’m not going to highlight every single slide, just the ones where I’ve made key points.
The Content Marketing conversation has reached a deafening pitch within the past two years. Content Marketing software companies like Compendium and Eloqua have been acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars. Smaller tools like Contently have been effective at raising multiple rounds of funding and every single marketer you know, myself included, has uttered the phrase “Content is King.”
And why not? The statistics are staggering, with 92% of marketers reportedly doing content marketing and 58% of B2B marketers (60% of B2C marketers) planning to increase their content marketing spends this year! So what makes content marketing such a magic bullet? And why so much talk about an old practice that has just become new again?
It’s simply because the idea of Content Marketing has been sold very well. Some people are seeing great results.
Eloqua and Kapost partnered up to release a study on Content Marketing ROI wherein they compared Paid Search, which they call the most efficient digital marketing channel, with Content Marketing. The study concludes that over time the quantity and cost per lead (CPL), therefore your ROI, from Paid Search will remained fixed if your budget remains the same. However, your CPL for Content Marketing drops substantially over time since content is a brand asset that will continue to compound traffic from multiple channels if you continue to invest in it.
These are the types of expectations that have been set by the marketing of Content Marketing. Marketers expect the gobs of traffic, links and likes, but instead users effectively respond like this:
Your content launches. You get no shares, no likes, and your traffic looks like a half cycle of a sine wave. You think you’re playing the long game so you keep at it, but months turn into quarters and quarters turn into years, while the reaction remains the same. Why doesn’t it work like it does in the movies?! I’ll tell you why…
It’s pretty simple. You’re not making usable or useful content that anyone wants or cares about. It’s also pretty hideous. Someone would be ashamed to share or link to it especially when your awful piece of content is competing for attention with the hundreds of thousands of other great examples of content marketing every single day. Oh yeah, and Buzzfeed. You’re competing with Buzzfeed too.
As much as we, as SEOs, want to hold onto the glory days of content spinning and farming out product description copy to Mechanical Turk, that era is over. Luckily for us though, the post-Panda era comes at the same time that traditional journalism stands on its last legs, and there are more graphic designers than there are available creative roles.
We are now in the era of the marketplace where sites keep springing up that allow marketers to handpick the writers, graphic designers, developers and even data scientists they want to work on their project based on their portfolios and reviews. Marketplaces breed competition, so you can get high quality work at rates that are much lower than you would expect.
That said, a common question that I hear at every conference is “how do I make content for a boring niche?” or “how do I come up with content ideas?”
I find that one particularly perplexing because there is more data out there than ever before. According to an IBM study from 2011, we were creating 2.5 quintillion Bytes of Data every day.
Three things. One, I don’t know how many zeroes that is. Two, that was in 2011. And most importantly, three, much of that data is people’s attitudes, interests and opinions on virtually every concept imaginable.
For the rare situations where you can’t find data that you want there are many platforms for creating custom data and discovering new and different content ideas.
Ultimately, it’s never a question of whether there are enough content ideas or producers to go around. It’s always a question of whether you, as a marketer, are creative enough to capitalize on them in a way that is useful, usable and/or entertaining for your audience and helps you meet your business goals.
But that’s just it! For many SEOs or performance marketers, creating quality content is undiscovered territory. Overnight, we went from data wranglers and tactical magicians to low-budget creative agencies. Our fail-fast attitude made the jump with us, and Content Marketing’s “make something, put it out, see what happens and improve” ethos is very much in alignment. As a result we skip a lot of useful steps.
Oftentimes I see the terms “Content Strategy” and “Content Marketing” used interchangeably. Even in “Epic Content Marketing,” a book written by Joe Pulizzi of Content Marketing Institute, he has a long list of terms that he believes are synonymous with “content marketing” where he mentions “content strategy.”
I could not disagree more. And many others feel the same.
A brief explanation of the difference between the two disciplines comes with two quotes from “Content Strategy for the Web” author Kristina Halvorson. She describes Content Strategy as “a shared set of goals, guiding principles and success metrics that guides the creation, delivery and governance of content across an organization” and Content Marketing as “multi-channel custom publishing.”
Let’s unpack that for a second. If you have an idea for an infographic, make it and release it, you have performed content marketing. If you, however, identify and understand your audience, business goals, metrics by which content will be measured, ensure that the content is both useful and usable for your target audience, plan out the metadata and CMS requirements, develop or adhere to a brand messaging architecture (voice and tone), develop a process and identify resources for creation, release, and maintenance of the infographic, well, then you’re doing content strategy.
I like to think of Content Strategy as the operating system of digital marketing campaigns. Similarly, I think of Social Media Strategy as just channel-specific Content Strategy. This content lifecycle image by Erin Scime of dopeData does a great job of illustrating how CS works operationally, but it’s better explained in the context of workflows that I’ll be discussing later on.
Additionally, there are a few other things that should be kept top of mind when creating quality content at scale.
Everything you see in the above image is content. Invest in big content types and repurpose them into the smaller more readily used content types. For
example, MozCon as an event is a giant piece of content that is repurposed in the form of blog posts, SlideShare decks, videos, data, memes, infographics,
user generated content, press, animations and in some cases products and tools as well.
Take a step back and think about what type of content your audience would love before just settling into blog posts, white papers, infographics and videos.
Think about how you can be a content
purple cow in your space.
The reality is we are marketers and our content isn’t all about altruism for users. We need to make strong business cases and build content based on models that perform. My MozCon deck from 2012 has a bunch of tools, tips and tactics for calling your shot and building strong content pitches. Later on in this post you’ll be introduced to some formulas for predicting content success as well.
Instead determine the most relevant KPIs for content by mapping them to the stage in the user journey that makes the most sense. For instance, it makes more sense to judge a buyer’s guide based on sales and the infographic on links and shares.
When developing your content strategy there are a number of tools that will help streamline the process. Some of these tools may be familiar, so I will just highlight the use case from the Content Strategy perspective.
If you look at my first post on Moz and then look at everything else I’ve written after that, you’ll see a marked difference in the layout and structure. That was because then-Moz CMO Jamie Steven encouraged me to read this post by the incomparable Cyrus Shepard. In the post Cyrus quantifies the performance difference between two posts of otherwise equal quality by the same author and proves that the post with better structure substantially outperforms the post that appears to be a wall of text. Establishing a style guide for content creation is a critical step to ensure that the structure of all content is homogeneous following the same best practices.
Earlier in the deck I make the point that there is no excuse to not come up with strong content ideas. Here are a few things you can do to help with the ideation process.
Based on this word cloud, followers of FTD are mostly interested in Social Media and also love music and sports. Therein lies an opportunity to create some
sort of fantasy sports game powered by social media. FTD could survey their follower base for ways to fine tune that idea further.
There’s one caveat that I’ve noticed with Followerwonk though. Sometimes the sample size of the followers it uses for the word cloud is quite low. If you
run into that problem you can use
SimplyMeasured’s free twitter follower report
and dump all of the twitter bios into TagCrowd and generate a word cloud for up to 10k followers.
Additionally, you could use Tribalytics to segment your followers into meaningful groups.
Similar to how you can use the word clouds in Followerwonk you can identify two or more co-relevant terms on the graph and come up with a content idea. The beauty of this tool is that you can see precisely who tweeted the two ideas together and reach out to them for buy-in, shares and links.
There is a lot that can be repurposed from Quora, but you can also pose questions to gauge the interest or reception of a content idea. Moreover, Quora
also gives you a list of people that are interested in the topic that you can use to help promote the content.
At this point you have your ideas, you know what you’re building and who you’re building it for, but you need data to build out the experience. There are many ways get existing data and build custom data. Here is a shortlist of data collection sources.
The biggest difficulty in committing to building quality content at scale is sourcing that content and assuring its quality. Naturally, there should be people whose job it is manage this process, but for the actual sourcing here are some platforms that make it much easier.
The 99Designs network can design apps, websites, branding, books and more. Obviously, the higher you set the prize on the project, the higher quality creative professional you’ll get. Also, if you don’t want to hold a design contest, 99Designs offers a 1-to-1 project model as well.
All of these platforms are viable content sources; it’s up to you to decide which one’s nuanced differentiation best supports your use case.
I totally understand that we don’t all work agencies or enterprise businesses with four or five figure content budgets. Fortunately, if you can write, make a spreadsheet and upload pictures then you can make remarkable content yourself. Many of the tools for this should already be familiar and I’ll specifically highlight the ones I hear the least about.
Every time a marketer asks for a “simple, clean design” or misuses the term “flat design” Steve Jobs shoots an angel with a plasma cannon controlled from an iPad. Ok, maybe that’s not as succinct as the bullets on slides-kittens thing, but you get the point.
The simple fact is that as marketers we don’t necessarily speak the same language as creatives and that often results in disconnects between what we expect and what we’ve communicated. In my post ” What it Takes to Get Remarkable Content Done” I had a discussion with a Creative Director that I used to work closely with and we developed a deliverable called the Data Viz Brief.
I discuss the brief in-depth within the post, but it contains the personas the piece of content is going after, the story/background for the piece of content, the data and copy, examples of the look and feel and a wireframe for how we’d like the content laid out.
The data section includes the specifically curated data points that we want to add to the experience as well as all of the raw data we’ve collected. This gives the designer more latitude to be creative beyond ideas we may have initially come up with. This is key because designers want to be able to contribute to the project in meaningful ways rather than just being told what to do and what to copy.
The wireframes are a key component in helping to manage your own expectations of what will be created. Not only does it give the designer a good framework to create within, but it also gives both sides the opportunity to hammer out the best idea for the content before any pixels are placed. Ultimately, the end result of the brief you’re seeing screenshots from became infographic you see here.
The good people at BuzzStream wrote the (e-)book on content promotion. Naturally, content promotion organic or otherwise requires money and/or effort and it is well worth the in-depth read as it outlines a fantastic process for doing so.
What I specifically highlight in the talk are the formulas BuzzStream presents for goal setting, knowing how much budget is required per Paid Media channel and how much effort is required for link building outreach.
These formulas inject some much needed predictability into the content marketing conversation and are ideal for developing quick business cases and projecting ROI.
Take a step back and look at your Content Marketing programs that have failed. Think about how your goals could have been better met by using higher quality content creation sources or determining clear ownership of tasks and quality assurance. Think about the times you “just shipped it” instead of spending a little more on making “it” something that was usable and useful. Those are all situations where content strategy would have given your work a boost.
Scaling quality content requires a large helping of Content Strategy added your Content Marketing. Quality at scale is more about process and resources rather than technical tricks and agility. Better marketing starts with better experiences and better experiences start with content strategy.
Content Strategy is something I help brands of all sizes do effectively every day. Before I go, I’d love to hear from you in the comments or privately about your experiences, why your content marketing campaigns have fallen short and/or how I can help out.
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Continue reading →
Posted by nicoleckohler
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.
A few years ago, while I was still on the client side of things, I received an email from a blogger I was working with. As part of our fledgling link building program, my company had been sending out free products in exchange for a review and link to our site. Oldest trick in the book, right? However, the blogger’s email threw me off: she told me her policy was to nofollow links, and asked if this would be all right.
“Uh, sure,” I eloquently responded, having absolutely no idea what she was talking about, “just as long as there’s a link!” I then scrambled to look up just what in the heck a nofollow link was, and roughly five minutes later started cursing at my monitor. We’d just invested thirty bucks in a completely useless link!
While that may have been my viewpoint back then, my opinion on nofollow links has changed. Obviously, for those of us who are trying to earn links for our clients, receiving a nofollow link can feel like a slap in the face. But these links have hidden powers that make them just as important as followed ones.
Here’s why nofollow links are more powerful than you might think.
A link has a few different connotations these days. It could mean, “this is an article that supports my viewpoint, and you might benefit by reading it, too.” It could mean, “I do a lot of shopping here, and I think you should look at their cute dresses.” Or it could simply mean, “I like cat videos!” But at its very core, a link is designed to create awareness of something on a different page.
When you’re out there trying to make people aware of your business, links are hugely important. SEO companies now offer link building services because businesses realize how important they are. So to that busy CEO who sees his or her website traffic dipping, and believes that links will give them a way to get back on top, a successful link building campaign is going to be really desirable.
That busy CEO is probably going to flip out if you say “well, we got 50 new links this month, and 40 of them were nofollow.” But it’s important that neither you nor the CEO (nor their marketing team) discredit the power of a nofollow link. Links still build awareness, as long as they are seen. They don’t have to be followed. They probably don’t even have to be clicked! They just have to be visible.
How many times a day do you see someone you follow tweet a link to an article with an interesting headline? Let’s say the article is really well written, and is on a site you don’t currently follow. So you add them to your feed reader. A week later, you think “oh, you know, that post I read is really relevant to this blog post I’m working on now!” So you link to it in your post. This accomplishes two things: one, it probably negates that original nofollow link from Twitter (more on that shortly), and two, it has made both you and your followers aware of that site.
A nofollow link can also directly lead to someone spending money on your company’s products or services. If you consistently create awareness and engage with people, those nofollow links may earn you way more than domain authority. Don’t believe me? Here’s the story of how I became a paying Buffer customer.
A few months ago, I saw a tweet with a link to this case study about how Buffer responded to being hacked. I had no idea what Buffer was, but it gave me an idea for a blog post. After I wrote my post, I followed Buffer on Twitter. I engaged with them a few times (for example, mentioning them after my post went up), and they engaged right back.
Over the next few weeks, I visited the Buffer blog when they tweeted links to new posts, learned about their company, and admired the heck out of their content marketing skills. I’d say it was at about the two month mark that I decided to actually give them a try. A month later, I upgraded to the Awesome plan and began using it daily to manage not only my accounts, but also our agency’s accounts.
To recap, this is how it all went down:
This was all because of a single nofollow link. Over the course of three months, my general awareness turned into lifetime value for Buffer. That one nofollow link directly led to profit.
You can make an equation out of this:
Awareness + engagement = profit. By becoming aware of Buffer, and having opportunities to engage regularly with them, I converted into a paying customer. This all happened because of social media, and all those links you see on social media are nofollow. (Who said there’s no ROI in Twitter?!)
A few years ago, Joshua Unseth wrote a post for YouMoz explaining how a single nofollow link earned him a second link that was followed, increased his traffic, and boosted his article to the top of the SERPs for a specific phrase. His post, titled “The Importance of nofollow Links,” has a really great conclusion that stresses the importance of even a single link:
To put it into context, of the people that came to the article as a direct or indirect result of the nofollow, ~1% made a comment on the article itself, and ~2% blogged about it – actually, if you count this article, then the results were blogged about by 3% of the visitors.
While I don’t think that these numbers would hold on a site with more viewers, I think that they represent the way in which content ends up going viral. In the end, ALL IT TAKES IS ONE LINK, and its follow status doesn’t seem to make a difference.
I couldn’t say it any better! What Joshua wrote still holds true today – and in fact may be even truer, considering how many of us use Twitter to amplify messages and blog posts we enjoy, or rely on a feed reader to provide us with interesting content that we want to share on our websites.
Here’s a real-life example of the potential power of a single nofollow link. Back in March, we published two maps showing the ISP landscape in the United States, and how the potential Comcast buyout of Time-Warner would affect it. The post was picked up by the Amazing_Maps Twitter account, which has more than 160,000 followers.
This was a nofollow link, obviously, as were the retweets that followed.
Two days later, we made it to the front page of the Huffington Post.
After HuffPo picked up the story, the maps spread to several other websites, most of which had followed links back to our blog post or homepage. But even if those links hadn’t been followed, we still would have created new awareness of WebpageFX, our blog, and the work we do.
Like Joshua said: it only takes one. One link can lead to many.
“Okay, Nicole,” I can hear you skeptics saying, “I’m on board. nofollow links are powerful. Magical, even. But you don’t see any of my tweets getting picked up by HuffPo.”
Well, food for thought: we’ve published hundreds of blog posts, and only one of them led to a Twitter link (not ours) that led to HuffPo. Success on the Internet is all about being at the right place with the right content at the right time, and with all of the blogs, websites, and companies vying for attention, your chance at getting noticed is lower than low.
Here are some ways that you can make the most of your nofollow links, whether they’re on social media, someone’s blog, or elsewhere.
Motivate viewers to click your link. This might mean testing headlines, trying different tweets, or coming right out and saying, “look, if you click this, this cool thing will happen.” For example, Buffer found that one tweet earned a blog post 100% more clicks than another, just because they changed the language surrounding the link.
Increase your audience. Want more people to see, click, and act on your nofollow link? Get a bigger audience. This may be as simple as following industry figureheads who are likely to follow you back, directly asking for shares, or sharing your post multiple times. Try emailing people of authority and asking (nicely) for them to check out your content. If it’s really good, it may earn you a share.
Another trick: if you write blog posts or product content that references someone else, make sure they know about it. It may seem like you’re just trying to stroke their ego, but it works. If someone wrote a blog post about me, heck yeah I’d tweet the link out to everybody I knew! (Unless it was bad. Then I’d just cry.)
Ensure your link is relevant. This, in my opinion, is one of the most important aspects of a nofollow link. So many links on social media go unclicked simply because the content isn’t relevant to them. This one is hard to control, because it’s pretty difficult to know when your audience is going to be in the mood for your blog posts vs. photos of puppies, but you can still get ahead by thinking very carefully about what you share, when, and why.
Make sure your content is relevant, too. Okay, so your link got clicked. Great! But your bounce rate is at 99%. Not great. You can write the best headline in the world, but if the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is empty, nobody’s going to stick around. Avoid misleading headlines, unfulfilling content, or just plain marketing to the wrong people.
This is honestly the biggest flaw of the ISP map I linked above. Lots of people checked out the maps, and even visited our blog to see the rest of the study, but then they left. Probably 99% of our visitors to that post have no idea who WebpageFX is and what we do. That doesn’t mean the content was bad, but it just wasn’t relevant to the kind of audience we want to attract (that is, potential clients).
Optimize your landing pages. What do you want someone to do after they visit your link? What’s the next step for this visitor? Keep them around a little longer. Use a related posts plugin to provide some additional reading, or try a service like snip.ly to suggest relevant content or links.
Don’t complain. If someone gives you a link and it’s nofollow, please don’t storm into their inbox with guns blazing. Maybe they just don’t know you well enough to follow your links yet. If you’re cool about it, the second link they give you may be a followed one. And even if it isn’t, you’re still getting exposure out of it, right?
As SEO professionals, I know we’re all aiming for followed links that pass a lot of “juice” to the websites of our clients. If we all had our way, earning links would be easy, every link would be followed, and Google would never, ever penalize websites for having too many links, or too many links of a certain type. We would all have millions of dollars, and would spend our days on the beach drinking fancy cocktails. Unfortunately… that’s just not the way things are.
Honestly, a nofollow link isn’t the end of the world, either for you or for a client. These links are valuable, and important for anyone trying to build their brand online. As I’ve shown, they hold significant power, and more than you might expect.
Instead of focusing on whether or not a link is followed, we should do our best to get those links in front of the right people at the right time, crafting content beyond the link that motivates conversions. As it is for everything in SEO, obtaining links is all about balance: the balance between followed and not followed, “juicy” links and dry ones.
In my case, that nofollow link I talked about at the beginning of this post went live, the blogger was happy with her product, and the review she wrote was fantastic. It led to a fairly high amount of clicks through to our site… and what do you know, even a few purchases. Seeing was believing for me, and now I’m an advocate of earning links in general – not just the followed ones.
Image Credit: Public domain images from Pixabay (links, beach); cat screencap from Maru’s YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/mugumogu); Twitter & snip.ly screencaps I took; Buffer blog (source linked in post)
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Continue reading → Posted by randfish
Bigger audiences and less competition aren’t actually that hard to find; we just have to reach a bit farther up the funnel. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains the benefits of this largely unexplored place, showing you how t… Continue reading →
Posted by EricaMcGillivray
The countdown to MozCon—July 14-16 in Seattle—is on! We’ve finalized the agenda and our speaker selection, put in our swag orders, and choreographed happy dances for Roger. We’re also counting down as ticket sales speed up and are getting closer to selling out. That means:
For the best MozCon deal, make sure you take a 30-day free trial and register as a Moz Subscriber. If our software’s not for you, cancel at anytime, and we’ll still look forward to seeing you at MozCon.
To get you a little more excited, we’re sharing these seven future-forward videos from talks from our past two MozCons. This is the first time that these videos have been available for free! That’s right, all-new content just for you because we love you.
If each of these videos doesn’t make you a little more happy to be part of this industry, thrilled to dive into your work, and overly-eager to attend MozCon yourself, then I suggest some cat video therapy. 😉
Want more Phil? He’ll be back on stage with “YouTube: The Most Important Search Engine You Haven’t Optimized For” this year. He also rocked it on the blog last year with a strategy for the kind of videos you should create for your business.
You can never spend too much time thinking about your design and how to make it better.
Noted as the scariest presentation from last year, Dr. Pete takes you on a journey through the SERPs. Don’t miss his “How to Never Run Out of Great Ideas” this year.
And pencils down… Paddy will be bringing his great ideas and beer challenge back this year with “Beyond SEO – Tactics for Delivering an Integrated Marketing Campaign.”
“Wow.” That’s pretty much what I thought after seeing this presentation live. Dana will be give a talk titled “Prove Your Value” this year.
You’ll never look at conversion rate optimization the same way again.
Yep, Matthew basically predicted Hummingbird before it hit Google’s Algo.
Now are you ready for MozCon?
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 →