Posted by The_Tela

Hey everyone, I’m Tela. I head up data planning at SEOmoz, working on our indexes, our Mozscape API, and other really fun technical and data-focused products. This is actually my first post on the blog, and I get to announce a brand new feature – fun!

One of the challenges inbound marketers face is knowing when a new link has surfaced. Today, we’re thrilled to announce a new feature in Open Site Explorer that helps you discover new links within an hour of them going up on the web: the Just-Discovered Links report.

This report helps you capitalize on links while they’re still fresh, see how your content is resonating through social channels, gauge overall sentiment of the links being shared, give you a head start on instant outreach campaigns, and scope out which links your competitors are getting. Just-Discovered Links is in beta, and you can find it in Open Site Explorer as a new tab on the right. Ready to learn more? Let’s go!

What is the Just-Discovered Links report?

This report is driven by a new SEOmoz index that is independent from the Mozscape index, and is populated with URLs that are shared on Twitter. This means that if you would like to have a URL included in the index, just tweet it through any Twitter account.

One note: The cralwers respect robots.txt and politeness rules, which would prevent such URLs from being indexed. Also, we won’t index URLs that return a 500 status code.

Who is it for?

Our toolsets and data sources are expanding to support a wider set of inbound marketing activities, but we designed Just-Discovered Links with link builders in mind.

Getting started

You can search Just-Discovered Links through the main search box on Open Site Explorer. Enter a domain, subdomain, or specific URL just as you would when using the Inbound Links report. Then select the Just-Discovered Links beta tab. The report gives PRO members up to 10,000 links with anchor text and the destination URL, as well as Domain Authority and Page Authority metrics.

One important note on Page Authority: we will generally not have a Page Authority score available for new URLs, and will show [No data] in this case. So, when you see [No data], it generally indicates a link on a new page.

You can also filter the results using many of the same filter drop-downs you are used to using in other reports in Open Site Explorer. These include followed and no-followed links, and 301s; as well as internal or external links, and links to specific pages or subdomains. Note: We recommend you start searches using the default “pages on this root domain” query, and refine your search from there.

How does it work?

When a link is tweeted, we crawl that URL within minutes. We also crawl all of the links on the page that have been tweeted. These URLs, their anchor text, and their meta data (such as nofollow, redirect, and more) are stored and indexed. It may take up to an hour for links to be retrieved, crawled, and indexed.

We were able to build this feature rapidly by reusing much of the technology stack from Fresh Web Explorer. The indexes and implementation are a little different, but the underlying technology is the same. Dan Lecocq, the lead engineer on both projects, recently wrote an excellent post explaining the crawling and indexing infrastructure we use for Fresh Web explorer.

There are a few notable differences: we don’t use a crawl scheduler because we just index tweeted URLs as they come in. That’s how we are able to include URLs quickly. Also, unlike Fresh Web Explorer, the Just-Discovered Links report is focused exclusively on anchor text and URLs, so we don’t do any de-chroming as that would mean excluding some links that could be valuable.

How is it different?

Freshness

Freshness of data continues to be a top priority when we design new products. We have traditionally released indexes on the timeframe of weeks. With this report, we have a new link index that is updated in about an hour. From weeks to an hour – wow! We’ll be providing additional details in the future on what this means.

URL coverage

This index includes valuable links that may be high-quality and topically relevant to your site or specific URL but are new, and thus have a low Page Authority score. This means they may not be included in the Mozscape index until they have been established and earned their own links. With this new index, we expect to uncover high-quality links significantly faster than they would appear in Mozscape.

I want to clarify that we are not injecting URLs from the Just-Discovered Links report into our Mozscape index. We will be able to do this in the future, but we want to gather customer feedback and understand usage before connecting these two indexes. So for now, the indexes are completely separate.

How big is the index?

We have seeded the index and are adding new URLs as they are shared, but don’t yet have a full 30 days worth of data in the index. We are projecting that the index will include between 250 million and 300 million URLs when full. We keep adding data, and will be at full capacity in the next week. 

How long will URLs stay in the index?

We are keeping URLs in the index for 30 days. After that, URLs will fall out of the index and not appear in the Just-Discovered Links report. However, you can tweet the URL and it will be included again.

How long does it take to index a URL?

We are able to crawl and include URLs in the live index within an hour of being shared on Twitter. You may see URLs appear in the report more quickly, but generally you can expect it to take about an hour.

Why did you choose Twitter as a data source?

About 10% of tweets include URLs, and many Twitter users share links as a primary activity. However, we would like to include other data sources that are of value. I’d love to hear from folks in the comments below on data sources they would like to see us consider for inclusion in this report.

How much data can I get?

The Just-Discovered Links report has the same usage limits as the Inbound Links report in Open Site Explorer. PRO customers can retrieve 10,000 results per day, community members can get 20 results, and guests can see the first five results.

What is “UTC” in the Date Crawled column?

We report time in UTC, or Coordinated Universal Time format. This time format will be familiar for our European customers, but might not be as familiar for customers in the states. The time zones for UTC are ahead of Eastern Standard Time, so US customers will see links where the time-stamp appears to be in the future, but this is really just a time zone issue. We can discover links quickly, but can’t predict links before they happen. Yet, anyways 🙂

CSV export

You can export a CSV with the results from your Just-Discovered Links report search. The CSV export will be limited to 5,000 links for now. We plan to increase this to 10,000 rows of data in the near future. We need to re-tool some of Open Site Explorer’s data storage infrastructure before we can offer a larger exports, and don’t have an exact ETA for this addition quite yet.

This is a beta release

We wanted to roll this out quickly so we can gather feedback from our customers on how they use this data, and on overall features. We have a survey where you can make suggestions for improving the feature and leave feedback. However, please keep in mind the fact that this is a beta when deciding how to use this data as part of your workflow. We may make changes based on feedback we get that result in changes to the reports.

Top four ways to use Just-Discovered Links

Quick outreach is critical for link building. The Just-Discovered Links report helps you find link opportunities within a short time of being shared, increasing the likelihood that you’ll be able to earn short-term link-building wins and build a relationship with long-term value. Here are four ways to use the recency of these links to help your SEO efforts:

1. Link building: Download the CSV and sort based on anchor text to focus on keywords you are interested in. Are there any no-followed links you could get switched to followed? Sort by Domain Authority for new links to prioritize your efforts.
2. Competitor research: See links to your competitor as they stream-in. Filter out internal links to understand their link building strategy. See where they are getting followed links and no-followed links. You can also identify low-quality link sources that you may want to avoid. Filter by internal links for your competitors to identify issues with their information architecture. Are lots of their shared links 301s? Are they no-following internal links on a regular basis?
3. Your broken links: The CSV export shows the http status code for links. Use this to find 404 links to your site and reach-out to get the links changed to a working URL.
4. Competitor broken links: Find broken links going to your competitors’ sites. Reach out and have them link to your site instead.

Ready to find some links?

We’ve been releasing new versions of our Mozscape index about every two weeks. An index that is continuously updated within an hour is new for us, too, and we’re still learning how this can make a positive impact on your workflow. Just as with the release of Fresh Web Explorer, we would love to get feedback from you on how you use this report, as well as any issues that you uncover so we can address them quickly.

The report is live and ready to use now. Head on over to Open Site Explorer’s new Just-Discovered Links tab and get started!

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Posted by Dr. Pete

Since the Wild West days of the late 1990s, SEOs have been grouped into two camps – the “black hats” and the “white hats”. Over time, these distinctions have become little more than caricatures, cartoon villains and heroes that only exist in our individual imaginations, usually embellished to suit our marketing agendas. Even when grounded in specific tactics, “black” vs. “white” is a lot like “conservative” vs. “liberal” – the definition changes with the year and every person you ask, and that definition almost always comes loaded with assumptions and judgments.

Unfortunately, too many business owners still choose their SEOs based on the hat they wear, even when that hat only comes out on sales calls. So, I’d like to ask some better questions. There are real strategic and tactical differences behind what we often think of as “white” and “black” hat SEO, and those differences are what you need to understand to make the right choices for your own business.

This Isn’t About Ethics

While we generally think of ourselves as “white hat” here at SEOmoz, I’m going to put ethics aside temporarily for this post. I will assume that, when we say “black hat”, we’re not talking about outright illegal behavior (like hacking into someone’s site). We’re talking about willfully violating Google’s rules to improve your ranking. While I do believe there are ethical implications to cheating the system and harming search quality, this post is intended to be an honest look at the real choices you face when choosing an SEO path.

(1) High-Value or Low-Value?

The first question is – are you going to pursue “high-value” or “low-value” tactics? I don’t want to replace one hopelessly vague duality with another one, so let me define my terms. By “value”, I mean the value that these tactics provide to site and search visitors. We sometimes call low-value tactics “spam”. It’s not usually illegal and it’s not always even unethical (depending on your point of view), but it’s always done specifically for SEO purposes.

Here’s an example – linking all of your client’s sites back to your own site with keyword-loaded footer links. I wouldn’t call this unethical, but it doesn’t add value and, frankly, it’s just too easy. Google knows this, and they naturally devalue those links now (in extreme cases, they might even penalize the target site).

Ironically, “low-value” tactics are often considered to be a value to people who are trying to gain ground as cheaply as possible. Practically, people often underestimate the time these tactics take and overestimate the return on investment. Low-value tactics tend to fade quickly. As Google gets more aggressive, low-value tactics are also getting riskier (see Question #2).

There’s a more fundamental problem, though, in my opinion – low-value tactics don’t build anything toward the future. Once they fail, and they usually do, you have to start over and chase some new low-value tactic. Here’s an example – let’s say you get links back from all of your clients in low-value footer text, and your one-way link network looks something like this:

Link “juice” is flowing, and all signs are green. Then, one day, Google pulls the plug on this particular low-value tactic. What are you left with?

You’re not left with much, because these links never had real value beyond SEO. Imagine, though, that those links carried not only authority (in green), but traffic (in blue):

Now, let’s say Google changes the rules, and you lose the ranking power of those links. The links still have value, because they’re still carrying visitors to your site:

The picture may not look exactly the same, and the traffic quantity and quality have changed, but you’re not dead in the water. I know I’m oversimplifying this, but I just want to make the point perfectly clear.  If you play the game purely for SEO, and you lose, you lose everything. If you build something of value that actually attracts visitors and then the rules change, you’ve still built something.

(2) High-Risk or Low-Risk?

The second question you need to ask yourself is: How much risk are you willing to accept? Don’t just smile and nod and tell me about how you’re a “risk-taker” – I’ve heard plenty of people tell their SEO companies to “Go for it!” only to be reduced to sobbing in the corner when their strategy crashed and burned months later. This is a time for brutal honesty. Can you live with the risk of a severe penalty, including being totally removed from the Google index?

High-risk SEO is like high-risk investing – yes, there can be high reward, if you know what you’re doing, but for every 1 winner at this game there are 99 companies that close their eyes, cover their ears, and whistle their way into disaster. If what you’re hearing from your SEO company sounds too good to be true, ask more questions.  As Paddy Moogan’s recent post pointed out, your risk is not someone else’s to take.

To make matters worse, I think that many so-called “black-hat” tactics, and even some gray-hat tactics, are much riskier than they used to be. There was a time when, if you played the game too hard, you got a slap on the wrist and had to start over. You’d be set back a few weeks, but you’d also have made a lot of money in the months leading up to that. I’m not saying it’s right, but let’s at least be honest about the past.

Fast-forward to 2013, and look at an update like Penguin – almost a year after the original Penguin, we’ve still heard very few public recovery stories. The ones I’ve heard in private have almost always involved a massive culling of links (the good with the bad, in many cases) and took months. That’s months with major revenue loss, and this is from big agencies who have resources and connections that many business don’t have access to.

Even semi-innocent tactics have been hit hard. Fairly recently, you could spin out a bunch of city/state pages with a few long-tail keywords and do pretty well. Was it a high-quality tactic? No, but it’s hardly the essence of evil. Worst case, Google would start ignoring those pages, and you’d be out a few days of work. Then, along came Panda, and now your entire site can suffer for quality issues. The price of mistakes is getting higher, and Google is getting more punitive.

I’m not here to tell you what to do, but this is not just a “white-hat” sermon. I’ve studied Google’s movements a lot in the past year, and I sincerely believe that the risk of manipulative tactics has increased dramatically. I also believe that it’s only the beginning. So, if you’re going to play the game, make sure you can afford to lose.

It’s almost important to understand that every tactic carries risk, especially if you fail to diversify. When I hear a company say “Our clients are never affected by updates, because we only use Google-approved methods!”, then I know that company has only been in business for six months. Sooner or later, white-hat or black-hat, the rules will change. You could be sparkling white and still get hit by things like paid inclusion, SERP layout changes, SERP feature changes, etc. The time for SEO hubris is over.

(3) Short-Term or Long-Term?

Finally, I think you have to consider whether you’re in this for the long haul or just trying to make a short-term play. For example, let’s say you’re building an affiliate site to sell accessories for the Samsung Galaxy S4 (which was just announced while I was writing this post). The smartphone market moves fast, and as an affiliate in this space, you’re facing a few realities:

• You probably don’t have a lot of money to invest up-front
• You need to get your traffic rolling quickly
• Your peak opportunity may only last 6-12 months

Again, I’m not making a moral judgment, but this is a very different kind of business situation, practically speaking. You may not have time to build epic content or spend six months building up a social following, and the consequences of getting burned a year from now may be fairly small. So, if you know your business is short-term, you can take risks that other people can’t.

The problem, I think, is that too many long-term businesses think this way: “I can’t afford to spend money”, “I don’t have time to get moving”, “I need results now!” So, you dive into low-value tactics to get moving quickly and cheaply. Even if you never get smacked down by Google, the reality is that these tactics tend to be short-lived – they fade or burn out, and you’ve got to start again. So, you’re constantly in a cycle of chasing the next low-value trend.

This may be attractive at first, to get out the gate, but over time I think it’s a losing proposition. If you never build anything that lasts, you’re always stuck making repairs. If you invest early, those investments tend to pay out, and you can build on them. I’ve seen this so many times with content over the past few years – I invest in a piece that doesn’t quite live up to my immediate expectations (traffic-wise, social-wise, etc.), and I’m about to throw in the towel, when weeks or months later, it takes off and just keeps running. Once it’s running, you get to go along for the ride. Without that investment, you’re always pushing.

So, What’s Right for You?

I can’t tell you how to run your business. I just want you to ask yourself (and your vendors) the hard questions. Are “low-value” tactics actually saving you money? How much risk are you really willing to take? Is your #1 priority to get up and running quickly and cheaply, or are you trying to build a real, long-term business? If the best your provider can do is show you their hat, and they can’t help you answer these questions, then move on – it doesn’t matter what color that hat is.

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Posted by Aleyda Solis

One of the major advantages of having a web-based business presence is the opportunity to reach a global audience, eliminating many of the restrictions and costs that a “physical” international presence might have. Nonetheless, from my day to day experience I’ve found that there is still a lack of vision of opportunity to target international markets.

Ask yourself: when was the last time you checked how many visitors were coming to your site from other countries? Even if you have a small or mid-sized business, do you frequently check what’s the percentage of your current conversions coming from other countries and languages than yours?

Besides being an International SEO, I consider myself a cultural broker: I’m a Nicaraguan living in Madrid. I speak English and French in addition to my native language, which is Spanish. I love to travel and I’ve had the opportunity to do it because of work (and also for pleasure) to places like Argentina, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Turkey, Tunisia, Montenegro, and Russia (on top of other, more common destinations such as the UK, US, France, Italy, Ireland, The Netherlands, Switzerland, etc.). I’ve had Nicaraguan, Argentinian, Dutch, Spanish, and German bosses in the past, and now I have an American one.

I’ve also worked in the past as an SEO for:

• A Dutch owned online marketing agency in Spain with clients from all over Europe
• A Spanish owned Vertical Web portal targeting eight Latin American and European countries
• An online marketing provider for Spanish small businesses owned by a French group
• A Russian company targeting the European market

Currently, I work for an American online marketing agency targeting international clients. As you can see, the “international” component has been a common characteristic in my personal and professional life, and I cannot imagine how there’s still a lack of vision and openness towards international activities, which at the end means lost opportunities for businesses and a less rich and competitive market that will end up also hurting the audience.

Unfortunately, this frequently happens because of misconceptions about expanding internationally. I want to share and clarify here three of the most common misconceptions I find in my every day work. 

I’m not telling you to leave your current market (and lose your current profits), but to take others into consideration. At the beginning, it will be only to assess the opportunities there, so really, you don’t have anything to lose. I also know that we all tend to feel like we’re already in the “center of everything,” and a couple of World Maps from different countries are the best proof of it:

According to a recent eMarketer study, B2C E-commerce sales will grow 18.3% to $1.298 trillion worldwide and Asia-Pacific will surpass North America to become the world’s No. 1 market:

Additionally, in the same study we can see how Asia-Pacific and Western Europe as regions have both more digital buyers (Internet users who buy goods online) than North America:

As you can see, nowadays no one is really in the “center.” There’s enough globally “distributed” potential out there, and the highest growing ones are in countries like China. Wake up! This means more exciting possibilities for your business internationally.

You don’t need to be a large international corporation, an E-commerce business, or a completely online based business to benefit from a website version in other languages, or targeting to other countries.

Although from a business perspective it can be more straight-forward for these type of sites to identify an international potential, there are also different types of local businesses that have an international audience, or that can additionally benefit from having an international online presence since their target market can be also abroad or from abroad. For example:

• Language schools: such as Spanish language schools in Spain or Latin America targeting US, German, or UK students
• Summer camps: like international summer camps in Switzerland targeting children from abroad
• Centric hostels and apartments rentals: located in touristic or centric areas that can be attractive for tourists
• Traditional restaurants and bars: that usually have tourists as clients 
• Volunteering organizations: looking to attract volunteers from abroad
• Gift and flower shops: which might also suitable to send from audience abroad
• Traditional art and crafts shops: that look to sell typical local goods to foreigners 
• Traditional food and drinks shops: like cured ham factories or wineries in Spain looking to sell their products abroad  

You need additional incentive? Check-out a mobile search engine result page for a local query in Google.es for “restaurantes en brooklyn” (restaurants in Brooklyn), that in English would be usually taken by Google maps results:

There’s a huge opportunity, indeed. You can definitely achieve additional benefit targeting an International audience even if you are not a big company or based internationally!

It’s true that expanding your site presence internationally might have higher costs than your local language version. From deploying the web platform in a new ccTLD (or subdirectory if it’s not a country but a language targeted version) to localizing (not only translating) the content, having native language support to expand your content and social media marketing strategies (that also need to take into consideration the local audience behavior, using the criteria I’ve previously shared in this post), as well as to support your outreach and community management efforts in this other language. 

Nonetheless, this doesn’t mean that expanding your site internationally should be non-beneficial for you. When you implement complete research to identify the potential organic traffic and conversion from each language and country and on the other that you validate from the start, this potential revenue will surpass the costs related to your international web presence:

With this information, you will be able to calculate the expected international presence (as well as international SEO process) return on investment:

I’ve seen too many situations where this type of initial assessment hasn’t been done, and because of this, there are businesses that have ended up with many languages or country site versions that have been developed without any clear strategy. They don’t  answer to a business related goal and are simply the “literal translation” of the main site version. Of course they’re not profitable! But it’s because the international web project hasn’t been correctly developed.

Another common signal when an international site presence hasn’t been effectively planned or executed is when the site owner tells you that they have their UK site version with the exact same content than the US one but they cannot afford to update it to make it unique, specifically targeting the UK audience.

If they cannot afford it, this means that they’re at the moment not getting any or enough benefit from it; whether because they likely don’t have any strategy behind and this presence is potentially not optimized, or because there’s not enough potential in this market and they haven’t been able to identify this since they didn’t do any research previously. It’s also our work to advise our clients effectively from the start, validate the potential benefit from any international development or SEO project, and warn them if, for some reason, there’s no potential.

Additionally, we can run pilot projects to test the market, just with the most important product or services categories with targeted landing pages, so as you can see there’s no excuse for a non-successful international web presence that has been effectively planned, well developed, and optimized.

With a couple of very simple analysis steps that shouldn’t take much of your time you can have an overview of the potential your business might have internationally:

Check your International traffic status

Go to the Audience > Demographics > Location & Language reports in Google Analytics to check the percentage of your website visitors coming from other countries and using browsers in other languages.

Verify the volume and trends from the last couple of years for all of your traffic as well for only organic and compare them:

• Is there a high or growing percentage of visitors coming from other countries? 
• What’s the volume and trend of conversions and the conversion rate of visitors coming from other countries?
• What’s the traffic source of visitors coming from other countries? Direct, organic, referrals?
• Which are the keywords and pages attracting this international traffic?

You have a bit more of time? If so, go to Google Webmaster Tools to validate the visibility you’re getting already in Google search result pages from other countries, along with the queries and pages impressions and clicks.

This is just your starting point that will help you to prioritize the international markets where you have already have activity and might be initially easier to start with.

Nonetheless, if numbers are not high it doesn’t mean you don’t have potential, but that maybe your efforts have been highly targeted to your current audience and haven’t had a high international impact until now, so you will likely need to work harder at the beginning.

Identify your International Organic potential

Prioritize the countries that you have already identified with higher traffic activity in your Website before and do a quick keyword research for each one of them by selecting the desired location and language from the Google’s Keyword Tool Advanced Options and Filters.

You can use the keywords that you have identified in the previous analysis that are already giving visibility and traffic from these countries and languages. If you didn’t identify any keyword information in the previous analysis and the country you need to research is non-English speaking (or in other language than yours), then the best option at this level is to take the keywords in your current language, use Google Translate to quickly translate them to the desired one and use them for this initial and quick validation and overview (It’s important to note that this is ok just for this initial, quick analysis, since these keywords will likely have errors and missing opportunities. You can do a complete international SEO research and process without speaking the language but with the right process and local language support, as I’ve described in this post).

Use the exact match type (to get more “realistic” data that you can expect for each specific keywords) and check:

• What’s the local monthly search volume for the relevant keywords in each of the countries and languages?
• Are there more suggested keyword ideas with a high level of search volume?

Refine and expand the research according to the suggestions you get for them.

You have a bit more of time? If so, go to SEMRush or Search Metrics Essentials (that support many countries) to identify more keywords opportunities:

Is there a high search volume potential for the verified countries and languages? If so, congratulations! This are great news.

It’s time then for you to develop a full International SEO research to understand, validate and plan your strategy, and verify your potential costs, revenue, and ROI, taking into consideration all of the necessary aspects, from a business abd language to technical capacity, restrictions, and requirements.

To do this, take a look and follow the step-by-step guide I published some weeks ago about it: 

How to start your international web presence

Images under Creative Commons taken from Flickr.

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Posted by carinoverturf

It’s that time again – the latest Mozscape index is now live! Data is now refreshed across all the SEOmoz applications – Open Site Explorer, the Mozbar, PRO campaigns, and the Mozscape API.

This index finished up in just 13 days, thanks again to all the improvements our Big Data Processing team has been implementing to make our Mozscape processing pipeline more efficient. The team continues to dial out our virtual private cloud in Virginia as well as tweak, tune, and improve the time it takes to process 82 billion URLs.

We’ve been saying we’re close to releasing our first index created on our own hardware – and now we really are! Stay tuned for a deep dive blog post into why and how we built our own private cloud.

This index was kicked off the first week of March, so data in this index will span from late January through February, with a large percentage of crawl data from the last half of February.

Here are the metrics for this latest index:

• 83,122,215,182 (83 billion) URLs
• 12,140,091,376 (12.1 billion) Subdomains
• 141,967,157 (142 million) Root Domains
• 801,586,268,337 (802 billion) Links
• Followed vs. Nofollowed
  • 2.21% of all links found were nofollowed
  • 55.23% of nofollowed links are internal
  • 44.77% are external
• Rel Canonical – 15.70% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
• The average page has 74 links on it
  • 63.56 internal links on average
  • 10.65 external links on average

And the following correlations with Google’s US search results:

• Page Authority – 0.35
• Domain Authority – 0.19
• MozRank – 0.24
• Linking Root Domains – 0.30
• Total Links – 0.25
• External Links – 0.29

We always love to hear your thoughts! And remember, if you’re ever curious about when Mozscape next updates, you can check the calendar here. We also maintain a list of previous index updates with metrics here.

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!

Posted by Mackenzie Fogelson

Everybody’s talking about content. And everybody’s writing content. SEOs, social media specialists, agencies, marketing departments, probably even your mom. And a lot of it isn’t pretty.

Hopefully, by now, you got the memo that if you want your content to grow your business, it can’t be crap.

And hopefully you’re ready to do something about it.

There is a very tiny (yet very significant) theme — a shift in perspective — that is important to embody when you’re generating content for your website, blog, and social media outlets (oh, and offline, too):

It’s not about you.

It’s just not.

Even though you may be one of your company’s biggest fans, you are not your target audience. If you want to attract customers to your brand and your community, your content needs to reflect the fact that you understand your customer. That you’ve actually thought about and considered the challenges they face which make your product or service a necessity in their lives.

And you need to do all that without making it about you.

Try using foundational and community building content

In general, there are two types of content that you need on your website; we call them foundational content and community building content.

Foundational content is the important stuff that permanently lives on your website. It’s the inherently self-promotional stuff that explains who you are and what you do. It’s your about page, your sales pages (products or services), and it tends to be (but isn’t always) pretty static. Foundational content is the stuff that’s pretty much impossible not to make about you because it is, in fact, about you. As a result, in order to attract customers to your community with your foundational content, you’ve got to pack it full of value.

Community building content is less about what you do and more about what you know. It usually lives on your blog, is dynamic, and indirectly promotes your brand (and earns links). It’s what bolsters your online reputation as an expert. It builds trust, establishes credibility, and naturally attracts people to you. Community building content is most effective when it’s not self-promotional. It doesn’t need to say your company name. Instead, it needs to be completely focused on your customer and the value that you can provide or point them towards.

Patagonia is a really great example of providing value in both types of content. Whether it’s foundational or community building, they focus on the customer, their needs, and the experience. Let’s take a look at some examples.

Packing value into foundational content

In Patagonia’s foundational content, they focus their message not just on how cool their product looks or even how functional it is (though they don’t hide those things), but also on the broader concerns of their target audience.

This is an email marketing promotion that my husband just recently received about the Encapsil Parka:

Notice how instead of just bragging about the fact that this is the best down parka ever made (all about them), Patagonia is also going to show you what they mean by providing value through video (all about the customer).

If you click through to the video, the content boasts “how little is used” to make the jacket, something that is important to consumers who respect (and are drawn to) the Patagonia brand. Patagonia is balancing self-promotion with something that is useful and enhances the experience.

Even though Patagonia’s intention is to sell this product, they are committed to integrating value into their foundational content so that they are serving their customer. The page is also packed with additional videos, details, social proof, customer testimonials, and the opportunity to live chat. All. Kinds. Of. Value.

What community building content looks like

About a week later, my husband also received this email from Patagonia:

This is Tommy. He climbs rocks for a living. He’s a Patagonia Ambassador (that’s code for bad-ass-rock-climber).

This email marketing promotion clicks through to a post on the Patagonia blog about Tommy. Even though it lives on the Patagonia blog, it doesn’t plug Patagonia products, it doesn’t even link to any associated Patagonia rock climbing gear. It’s all about Tommy, his (kind of scary) adventures, and his drive to be a standup guy.

This is community building content (and it probably attracts a lot of links, too). It’s indirectly self-promotional. It speaks to the kind of people that Patagonia wants to attract to their community. My guess (and presumably Patagonia’s guess, too) is that people who like guys like Tommy resonate with what Patagonia stands for as a company and they want to be a part of what they’re doing (which means buy their products and join their community).

You can do this with a content strategy

You don’t have to be a ginormous brand like Patagonia to generate the kinds of content that will attract customers to your community. You just need to have a content strategy that will get you from where you are to where you’d like to be.

An ideal content strategy aligns the goals of your business with the expectations of your target audience. If you want to build a thriving community around your company, you’ve got to have a strategy that considers the people who are going to be reading your content and the experience that you want them to have.

The best place to start is with a content audit of your existing content. If you want to attract people to your community with your content, you’ve got to make it worth reading. That means over the first several months (and possibly beyond) you’re going to need to spend some time transforming what exists: improve what’s worth revising and ditch the rest.

Re-working your foundational content

When you’re auditing your foundational content, pay attention to whether it has any value or if it’s all about you. Certainly your content is going to be self-promotional (it is, after all, your website), but you can communicate what you do or sell and still be focused on the customer and their experience.

Even with your ‘about’ or ‘policy’ pages, you can use creative ways to improve the experience and add more value. You should also put some thought into the following:

• Your why

  Have you figured out your why yet? Focus on your passion and what makes you unique in your space. Why are you different from your competition? What is it that you like to do? Get very clear about what you do well and why and then make that what you’re all about.
   
• Your customer

  Who exactly are you targeting (remember, the whole world is not your customer)? Develop a persona around them. Get to know your semi-fictional audience members and keep them in mind as you manipulate your content.
   
• Their challenges

  What challenges does your audience have? Define their pain points and then make sure your content addresses them.
   
• Where they’re coming from

  At what level in the conversion funnel might your customer be visiting this page? In order to provide the best experience possible, your content should reflect this.

Balance the ‘all about me’ in your foundational content with the value that better serves your customer. Instead of having a page with a couple paragraphs of text and some bullets like this:

Supplement the textual information with things like video, blog posts, case studies, infographics, and testimonials:

Making these simple changes can make a big difference in your lift:

Integrating value into your foundational content is really about two things:

1. Satisfying user intent

   The purpose of your foundational content is to convert. If you don’t provide anything but a couple paragraphs that give your 30 second elevator speech, you’ve just lost the opportunity for a sale. 

    
2. User experience
   
Making sure that you’re providing the best user experience and that it’s consistent across your website, blog, and social media outlets, as well as your offline efforts.

The more value you provide with your foundational content, the more desirable you become, the more trust you build, the more you appeal to the person who is on the other side of that search. Again, anything that is going to make it less about you and more about them.

The key is to balance all of your foundational content with some community building content and then you’ve won the internet.

The angle on community building content

First things first. Just because you have a blog, doesn’t mean you always have to write about the stuff you sell (remember the 80/20 rule?). Same goes for your social media outlets. That gets old quick and can be pretty limiting in terms of the audience you can engage. It’s ok to promote your products or services on your blog, but work to keep that to 20% of the time.

Focus on developing community building content on your blog. It’s the powerhouse that can help you reach the objectives you have for your business, and also attract (the right) customers to your community. But again, same thing applies: lay off the self-promotion.

Community building content can be blog posts like this one from SimpliSafe or infographics like this one that SEOgadget lovingly created for one of their clients:

Community building content can also be video like these tech product updates from Grovo:

…or even more in-depth resources like this simple and free e-book from Portent or these guides from Pippen’s Plugins.

The bottom line with your community building content is that the focus needs to be on your customer. It’s not meant to directly promote your company. You want to generate content that indirectly communicates your strengths and illustrates your expertise and knowledge. If your customers can find alignment with what they’re searching for and the content you’re providing, chances are, they will be more inclined to not only be part of your community, but also purchase your products and services.

Before you write your community building content, consider things like:

• The goals of your (potential) customer
  You know what your goals are for your business, but what about the goals of your target audience? What are their intentions with your content?
   
• Depth in your content
  What can you help them learn or better understand? Can you change their mind about an industry misconception or challenge their beliefs on a particular subject?
   
• Satisfying a need
  How can you serve their needs? Can you provide advice, ideas, instructions, suggestions, a guide? Your goal is to focus on providing quality content that that people really want (and are searching for).

As you’re creating community building content, consider following the 70/20/10 principle like Ian Lurie, Tom Cruise, and the dude from Coke do.

The basic gist is within your content strategy should look like this: 70% of your content should be a mix of mainstream stuff (knowledge, advice, and how-to type content); 20% goes along the same lines as the 70%, but with a little risk taking (controversial or attempting to attract a new audience); and 10% is the super cool stuff that may completely bomb but showcases your innovative side.

The thing about this approach is that it will help you to challenge the direction of your community building content so that you avoid just creating the same kind of stuff over and over (which will provide a more exciting experience for your users). It will both satisfy your existing customers and community members and attract new people who resonate with what you’re putting out there.

Even more importantly, the 70/20/10 principle will push who you are as a company which is really important when you’re growing a community. Your community building content needs to make a statement about your brand, showing your community what you’re capable of and what you believe in. All stuff that will attract them to you (and keep them there).

Some final pointers

A couple (ok, three) more things to keep in mind:

1. There is no magic formula
   
It’s really important to have a content strategy that will assist you in working toward goals for your business. And it’s also really important that you create an execution plan that will help translate all of the stuff you want to accomplish into actionable, chewable pieces. But keep in mind that there is no magic number of posts that will attract customers to your business and your community. It’s the quality of your business, your content, and you.
   
   

As you work to develop strong content, keep in mind that this is an ongoing process that involves constant iteration. Don’t plan an execution calendar for any longer than a few months. Let your strategy drive, but listen to your content. Allow the freedom to be agile and change course based on what happens when your content is actually released. 

    
2. Bring it back to your goals

   Allow your content to take you on unexpected journeys. Be open to new ideas, consider the feedback you’re getting in blog comments and from people who provide input in real life. If a topic in your strategy suddenly becomes urgent, move it up in your execution plan. Be flexible. Just always make sure that you bring it back to your goals. 

When you ensure that your content is always in alignment with your business objectives and what your customers need, you’re clearing the noise. You’re staying focused on producing what’s important which helps to reduce anxiety, workload, and keeps you on track.

    
3. Good content is an investment in your business
   
Quality content is an asset that builds value in your business. Whether it’s a blog post, guide, whitepaper, case study, infographic, or video, your content is going to attract people to your business and your community (ongoing).


   
   Creating content that’s valuable is not always a quick and easy task. Whether you’re committing to this for your own business or you’re an agency assisting a client with content, it’s going to take some time.


   
   Start small. We’ve found with our clients that committing to two small (quality) posts a month is a realistic frequency (but it really depends on your goals and your strategy). If you’re developing content that’s more extensive like an in-depth guide or an infographic, reduce the frequency that month. Instead of spreading yourself thin on two, put all of your energy into one heavy hitter and give it the attention it deserves. After all, it’s an investment in your business.

Your content is meant to serve a purpose

Building and growing a community around your business can be done with an investment in a good strategy, content, outreach, and a lot of hard work. But keep in mind that your content isn’t just meant to rank, it’s intended to serve a purpose. Draw people in with your community building content, and then pack your foundational content so full of value that making the sale is the natural next step.

What interesting ways are you integrating value into your content, or have you seen other companies doing? I’d love for you to share your experiences in the comments below.

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