seo

Posted by EricEnge

In my last column, I wrote about how to use term frequency analysis in evaluating your content vs. the competition’s. Term frequency (TF) is only one part of the TF-IDF approach to information retrieval. The other part is inverse document frequency (IDF), which is what I plan to discuss today.

Today’s post will use an explanation of how IDF works to show you the importance of creating content that has true uniqueness. There are reputation and visibility reasons for doing this, and it’s great for users, but there are also SEO benefits.

If you wonder why I am focusing on TF-IDF, consider these words from a Google article from August 2014: “This is the idea of the famous TF-IDF, long used to index web pages.” While the way that Google may apply these concepts is far more than the simple TF-IDF models I am discussing, we can still learn a lot from understanding the basics of how they work.

What is inverse document frequency?

In simple terms, it’s a measure of the rareness of a term. Conceptually, we start by measuring document frequency. It’s easiest to illustrate with an example, as follows:

In this example, we see that the word “a” appears in every document in the document set. What this tells us is that it provides no value in telling the documents apart. It’s in everything.

Now look at the word “mobilegeddon.” It appears in 1,000 of the documents, or one thousandth of one percent of them. Clearly, this phrase provides a great deal more differentiation for the documents that contain them.

Document frequency measures commonness, and we prefer to measure rareness. The classic way that this is done is with a formula that looks like this:

For each term we are looking at, we take the total number of documents in the document set and divide it by the number of documents containing our term. This gives us more of a measure of rareness. However, we don’t want the resulting calculation to say that the word “mobilegeddon” is 1,000 times more important in distinguishing a document than the word “boat,” as that is too big of a scaling factor.

This is the reason we take the Log Base 10 of the result, to dampen that calculation. For those of you who are not mathematicians, you can loosely think of the Log Base 10 of a number as being a count of the number of zeros – i.e., the Log Base 10 of 1,000,000 is 6, and the log base 10 of 1,000 is 3. So instead of saying that the word “mobilegeddon” is 1,000 times more important, this type of calculation suggests it’s three times more important, which is more in line with what makes sense from a search engine perspective.

With this in mind, here are the IDF values for the terms we looked at before:

Now you can see that we are providing the highest score to the term that is the rarest.

What does the concept of IDF teach us?

Think about IDF as a measure of uniqueness. It helps search engines identify what it is that makes a given document special. This needs to be much more sophisticated than how often you use a given search term (e.g. keyword density).

Think of it this way: If you are one of 6.78 million web sites that comes up for the search query “super bowl 2015,” you are dealing with a crowded playing field. Your chances of ranking for this term based on the quality of your content are pretty much zero.

Overall link authority and other signals will be the only way you can rank for a term that competitive. If you are a new site on the landscape, well, perhaps you should chase something else.

That leaves us with the question of what you should target. How about something unique? Even the addition of a simple word like “predictions”—changing our phrase to “super bowl 2015 predictions”—reduces this playing field to 17,800 results.

Clearly, this is dramatically less competitive already. Slicing into this further, the phrase “super bowl 2015 predictions and odds” returns only 26 pages in Google. See where this is going?

What IDF teaches us is the importance of uniqueness in the content we create. Yes, it will not pay nearly as much money to you as it would if you rank for the big head term, but if your business is a new entrant into a very crowded space, you are not going to rank for the big head term anyway

If you can pick out a smaller number of terms with much less competition and create content around those needs, you can start to rank for these terms and get money flowing into your business. This is because you are making your content more unique by using rarer combinations of terms (leveraging what IDF teaches us).

Summary

People who do keyword analysis are often wired to pursue the major head terms directly, simply based on the available keyword search volume. The result from this approach can, in fact, be pretty dismal.

Understanding how inverse document frequency works helps us understand the importance of standing out. Creating content that brings unique angles to the table is often a very potent way to get your SEO strategy kick-started.

Of course, the reasons for creating content that is highly differentiated and unique go far beyond SEO. This is good for your users, and it’s good for your reputation, visibility, AND also your SEO.

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Posted by Isla_McKetta

If you’ve ever achieved the holy grail of content marketing success—true virality—you know the rush of endorphins as you watch the share count climb. You’ve smiled the enormous grin when one of your friends shares that piece on Facebook without any idea that you helped create it. Maybe you’ve even felt the skin-chilling prickle when Buzzfeed picks up your content.

Then you’ve undoubtedly experienced the heart-stopping numbness when the traffic finally stalls. Where did all the people go? Was it real? Can you do it again?

What happens next depends on which camp you fall into. Most people either

1. Squander that success in a haze of denial, or
2. Rush back to their desks to copy the thing that just went viral so they can replicate the success (only to find that the Internet is already over it).

But there is a third, better way—you can learn everything possible from this moment of greatness and turn it around to create something even more shareable next time. This third path is not easy, but it is the surest way to get you back on the road to virality. Here’s how.

Celebrate your success

Duh. You were going to do this anyway, but take a moment (or a day) to fully enjoy all the tweets, traffic, and accolades. This will give you energy for the next step and you’ll be all the more focused for the long road ahead.

Analyze what went right

Sometimes content marketing feels like throwing Velcro darts at the wall—you just don’t know what’s going to stick. But when something finally does stick, there are a lot of lessons to be learned about your audience and what might work in the future.

For example, take this post from Organic Gardening, “7 Secrets for a High-Yield Vegetable Garden.” According to BuzzSumo, it has six times as many shares as the next most successful article from the same site.

In fact, when looking at content that contained the word “garden,” the post had more than twice as many shares as the top post from Country Living, a magazine with about five times the circulation.

I think we can safely call this piece a runaway success. Now let’s look at what made this article so much more viral than its top three friends.

Title

It’s not too much of a stretch to say that “7 Secrets for a High-Yield Vegetable Garden” is a lot sexier title than “Gardener’s April To-Do List,” “Going with the Flow,” and “Cauliflower with Peas.”

Not only does the highly successful article contain one of those emotion words that get us all excited to click, the title actually fully describes what the article is about—passing what Ian Lurie calls the “blank sheet of paper” test. You’ll note that the titles listed in BuzzSumo are actually more descriptive than those on the page—next time they might want to use the more descriptive titles on the page.

Format

The format of these four articles is pretty basic: text with at least one related image. In fact, the to-do list article could have gone a bit farther if someone had turned it into a downloadable checklist (or at least a checklist).

Sometimes, like when you’ve invested heavily in a flashy parallax scrolling piece, it’s easy to surmise that form contributed heavily to the success of the content. But in this case, it’s unlikely that the form of this article gave it a viral advantage.

Length

These four articles vary widely in length, but they conform to what you might expect from the types of articles that they are. “Go with the Flow” is more of an essay and should be longer, whereas to-do lists and recipes get less useful the longer they are.

7 Secrets	April To-Do	Going w/Flow	Cauliflower
1100+ words	800+ words	1700+ words	200+ words

I’d argue that “7 Secrets” is an exception here, in that it’s more in-depth than it needs to be—in a good way. This could be one contributor to its success.

Topic

Not only is the “7 Secrets” title much more clickable, the viral article also hits on high-yield gardening—a high-interest topic. Having not seen the personas for this site, I’m not sure if Organic Gardening has identified gardeners with limited space or gardeners who are trying to sustain themselves entirely from their yards as targets, but this article would be interesting to both groups (which means more excited readers to share the content).

The to-do list article is practical and “Going with the Flow” (about water conservation) is newsworthy (although it would do a lot better if it mentioned the California drought in the intro). If you love cauliflower, perhaps you can tell me why that recipe is popular. But it’s easy to see why none of these other three articles broke through the viral barrier.

Timeliness

From what I can tell, the original article is actually a couple of years old. It’s just been hanging out waiting for the right moment. So goes content marketing. But the week that it went nuts on BuzzSumo was in late March—the very week I was mapping my own garden.

That said, it isn’t the most timely of these four articles. The April to-do list is very timely (and this kind of evergreen content has the chance to get picked up again year after year) and, as mentioned, the article about water (despite being written in 2011) is on-trend with current events in California.

Again, you’ll have to tell me if cauliflower is timeless, because I’m still not understanding the success of that recipe.

One caveat: There’s some weirdness around the dating on this site (especially since the site re-branded in the middle of me writing this draft). If you dig into the publication date, it’s April 1, 2015, a few days after March 29, 2015 (the date BuzzSumo called its publication date). And when I first started writing this article I think I found that the page was created about two years ago (though I can no longer verify that information).

Your lesson here is that if you do a site rebrand in the middle of assessing your content, your data will likely contain weirdness too.

Overall quality

This is where your spidey sense comes in, because overall quality is in many ways a combination of all the factors we just looked at along with the strength of the writing. But there’s also that je ne sais quoi factor where you have to trust your gut (don’t worry, spotting great content is easier than you think).

“7 Secrets” really is a better article for the Internet than the other three. It’s easy to share, seems high-impact, and is a fast read. “Going with the Flow” is also a good article, especially with the storytelling angle, but the anecdotal lead-in followed by the intercontinental comparison of water management styles smacks of classic print journalism (requiring thoughtful rumination), which means it might be more appropriate or successful offline.

Influencer name dropping

Ego bait is a tried and true content marketing tactic. It’s not used in this article, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good tool to keep on hand. If I wanted this article to go even more viral, I would have put names to the two experts they cite (and then reached out to tell those experts that I was quoting them).

The social angle

Looking at “7 Secrets” against the April to-do list, we can immediately spot a few reasons it was roughly three times more popular on the social network. It has an active and enticing image, the accompanying text is both inspirational and asks for engagement, and the article description is, well, descriptive.

Now, I don’t have access to the internal Facebook analytics of this site, but if I did, I’d be looking hard at trends in what times of day and days of week they find the most engagement as well as whether there was any paid promotion to see what else can be learned.

High-profile sharers

As you can see, except for the magazine itself, very few people who shared this article on Twitter even have more than 1,000 followers. That might not be bad for you and me, but it’s not going to cause a viral stampede.

If you find that more recognizable folks (or even those with a lot more followers) were part of your success, it might be time to build some relationships there. You can do that either by involving them in your content creation process in the future or by reaching out when you have something new to promote.

You don’t have to wait until something goes viral to analyze what content is succeeding and why. Get some practice now (and help yourself on the road to virality):

Download this checklist as a template

Now that you understand what contributes to content virality, you’re ready to try to capture that magic all over again.

Resist the urge to imitate

This sounds counter-intuitive, but the last thing you want to do after achieving content success is to run out and do exactly what you did last time. Why? Because the Internet craves novelty, and just like it’s completely adorable when your friend’s toddler sticks his tongue out at you for the first time, the second, third, and thirty-seventh times are increasingly less adorable (and notable).

Instead, use all that analysis you just did of what made the piece successful to remix those elements and try something new. In the case of the garden efficiency article we’ve been looking at, I’d follow up with a profile of three influential organic gardeners who have different ways of achieving efficiency in their gardens.

Enough about gardening already, what about some other topics like windows, water, and dessert.

• If “DIY Craft Projects using Old Vintage Windows Doors” earned you 428k shares, avoid writing “DIY Craft Projects Using Old Vintage Bannisters” and instead think more broadly with something like “10 Best Stores in the US to Find Vintage Windows for Your Project” or “Last Minute Summer Patio Projects for Upscale Freecyclers.” The first plays with influencer marketing and the second explores a niche readership that has the potential to be very passionate about sharing your content.
• If you’ve recently had success with “Gray Whale Dies Bringing Us a Message – With Stomach Full of Plastic Trash” (226k+ shares), skip starting a series on dead animals that are portending the end of the earth. Instead try something like an infographic that shows how much the average American contributes to the gyre of plastic in the ocean that includes tips on how we can reduce our impact. That type of content would capitalize a little on the scare tactics of the first post plus the spirit that we’re all responsible for the fate of the planet. It would also be a chance to test if posts that end with positive impacts are as shareable.
• Or if everyone loved your recipe for a ginormous Reese’s Cup (21k+ shares), don’t be tempted to write about chocolate peanut butter pie. Rather, consider creating a series on revamped recipes for childhood favorites like an upscale Nanaimo Bar or incorporating Jello into a trifle.

The exception

There are times when a piece of content you’ve created goes viral even though you feel like you only took the idea halfway. Playbuzz got some really good traction (1.6 million shares) with this post:

About a month later they followed up with this one which garnered 3.3 million shares:

They could have taken the idea even farther with “What Sci-Fi Novel…” and “What Horror Novel…” but those get weird fast and it’s safe to say they found their peak audience the second time around by getting more general. So they stopped while they were ahead.

Build relationships

Viral success means that a whole lot of people just shared your content. It also means that you have a huge opportunity to connect with people who might remember who you are for the next five seconds.

Help them remember you for the foreseeable future by reaching out now and thanking them for sharing your stuff or engaging them in conversation. Ask what they’d like to see next time or respond to their questions. Be playful and friendly (if it suits your corporate voice) and get the writer to help you with the follow-up.

Use your success as brand leverage

There’s no better time for PR outreach than immediately following a big viral content win. Who doesn’t want to drop a line in an outreach email like “Our latest infographic has earned 452,000 shares on Pinterest (so far).” That number might feel like a fluke, but if you can get someone from a major media outlet interested in your next piece, your future looks bright.

Keep trying

Capturing the zeitgeist well enough to give a post viral success is not an easy thing. But have confidence that if you’ve done it before, you have what it takes to do it again. Keep making awesome stuff. And when you’re tempted to get bummed because something doesn’t quite find its audience, instead milk that learning experience for all it’s worth.

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Posted by BenjaminEstes

The Agile movement has done a world of good for digital marketers. The term “Agile marketing” started being thrown around in about 2010. In 2011-2012 there was a proliferation of content around it. Among many others, Jonathon Colman did a Whiteboard Friday, and Mack Fogelson put her two cents in with a Moz article. At Distilled we’ve incorporated these ideas into our everyday behaviors. We’re better for it.

And yet, I don’t think we’ve captured the full potential the Agile Manifesto offers.

Much “Agile marketing” content is actually about Agile project management methodologies like Scrum. These frameworks are earth-shattering when you first find them. But in the end, they’re helping you get the same things done—just better, or faster, or with a greater rate of success. What happens when you want to dramatically level up your marketing game? or make better strategic decisions? or integrate more closely with other departments? Or make your team vastly more effective?

To answer these questions we must think bigger than project management. We need to address the business culture that shapes the choices we make. That’s what the Agile Manifesto is about. This is the real inspiration behind the Agile movement.

The Agile Manifesto

The Agile Manifesto was written in 2001 by developers who wanted to improve their trade. It’s short. Give it a read:

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Notice anything strange? This isn’t about project management. It’s about culture. In fact, “Agile” development teams use many different project management styles—like Scrum or Kanban.

Instead, the manifesto promotes four cultural biases. Being “Agile” means allowing these biases to be major influences in decision making. In everyday life “bias” is often a negative word. It suggests a lack of objectivity. However, being opinionated about the choices you make is the essence of company culture. And it turns out that some cultures are more effective than others.

Changing project management styles isn’t enough. Organizations that try to “be Agile” through changing project management styles, without considering culture, may be dissatisfied with the results.

Smart development teams have made cultural changes with this manifesto for over a decade. If marketing managers are to learn from the Agile Manifesto, what would that mean? Let’s look at each of the 4 main points the manifesto presents and find out.

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Digital marketing requires good processes and tools. Moving beyond the basics means dealing with human beings.

Some channels, like organic and paid search, require investment in processes and tools. That’s the nature of the work. Anyone trying to understand a SERP without the Moz Keyword Difficulty tool is fighting with one hand tied behind their back.

But let’s not give the tools too much credit. The effectiveness of our tools and processes isn’t the biggest influencer of success. What else impacts search marketing? A few things that come to mind:

• Marketing budget owners
• Willingness of brand owners to test new types of content
• Onerous content sign-off requirements from legal or management teams
• Limited bandwidth of teams responsible for site updates
• Team knowledge of best practices

Notice a theme? It turns out there are a lot of people that influence your search marketing. Great tools and processes help us become the best version of our current selves. To take marketing performance to the next level it’s people that you need to invest in.

2. Working software over comprehensive documentation

Spend less time creating reports. Spend more time marketing.

The Agile Manifesto reflects on software development. But it’s mostly generic enough to apply to marketing. However, for this particular line we need to make some tweaks. I propose:

Working campaigns over comprehensive reporting.

Data analysis helps us feel confident about our marketing. It’s enticing to point to numbers because they let us say we’re doing things that are ‘reasonable’. When analysis helps us make a specific decision, that’s helpful and healthy.

But often reports are pulled without any analysis. Anyone who works at a large organization has seen this. And sometimes, analysis is demanded in situations where it isn’t appropriate—a way to add a hurdle in front of an initiative someone wants blocked.

The numbers are there to help us make good choices. If pulling un-analyzed numbers is taking enough time to prevent things from getting done, reporting is getting in the way. A good rule of thumb: the more frequently a report is pulled, the more it must be automated and the fewer metrics it should have. Prefer forward progress in marketing over time spent reporting.

3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Your customer isn’t an enemy to be conquered, or a black box with a variable conversion rate. She is a human being. Do whatever you can to spend more time engaging her and less time selling to her.

Modern startup culture favors the long play—get people using your product and worry about profit later. This attitude is great from a marketer’s perspective. The more people engage with your product, the more people you have invested in your brand. More word-of-mouth, more opinions, more data. It’s a positive feedback loop.

It’s easy to forget that this attitude wasn’t always prevalent. Once upon a time getting the new version of Adobe’s Creative Suite set you back a big chunk of change. The barrier to entry for a customer was high. These days Creative Cloud available for a low monthly fee. This makes it much more accessible to more people.

It’s more important to have the customer engaged and in your ecosystem than to extract maximum short term value from them. Get your product in the hands of customers. Understand how they use it, and how it satisfies their needs. Leverage your customer relationships to improve your marketing.

4. Responding to change over following a plan

The state of reality is constant flux. Embracing that change and investing in harnessing gives you a competitive advantage.

One of the promises of agile project management methodologies is that they allow work to be broken into small chunks and reprioritized. This kind of prioritization, though, is only one part of the story. When a big change comes along, anyone can drop everything they are doing and focus on it.

The question isn’t whether you can focus on a new initiative. The question is how effectively you can capture a new opportunity. What have you done to make sure that when you want to make a change you can make that change as easily as possible?

For instance, front-end developer bandwidth might be a bottleneck for you. Being able to effectively prioritize new tasks for their constrained bandwidth is good. But recognizing opportunities to prioritize investing in removing that roadblock is better. It allows you to be more flexible in the future when something bigger comes up. If you go to the dev team any time you need copy updated on your website, what can you do to avoid going to them entirely?

Closing thoughts

The cultural biases of the Agile Manifesto are much more important than project management style.

Implementing the tactics you read on blogs like Moz’s will help you make incremental improvements in your marketing program. But by reflecting on how to work more effectively within your organization you take your marketing performance to places you didn’t think it could go. And you may even enjoy your job more!

What do you think? What are the roadblocks you come up against within your organization? What cultural changes would solve them?

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Posted by randfishMaking changes to your brand is a huge step, and while it’s sometimes the best path forward, it isn’t one to be taken lightly. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand offers some guidance to marketers who are wondering whether a rebrand/re… Continue reading →

Posted by EricaMcGillivray

We’re thrilled to announce the addition of a networking and Ignite-style event for attendees on Tuesday night at MozCon. For years, you’ve asked us for more networking and relaxing times, and this is what we’ve dreamed up. But we need your help!

We want you to share your stories, passions, and experiences. There are 16—yes, 16—speaking slots. Ignite-style talks are 5 minutes in length and slides auto-advance. That’s right, there’s no going back, and once it’s done, it’s done! Learn more about the format and why you should do it.

In order to encourage relaxation, none of these talks will be about online marketing. Instead, we want to use this opportunity to get to know our fellow community members better. We want to hear about your passion projects, interests, and the things that fascinate you outside marketing. Tell us about how you spend weekends making support banners for your favorite soccer team or why you mentor high school students, for example.

The basic details

• To submit, just fill out the form below.
• Please only submit one talk! We want the one you’re most excited about.
• Talks cannot be about online marketing.
• They are only 5 minutes in length, so plan accordingly.
• If you are already speaking on the MozCon stage, you cannot pitch for this event.
• Submissions close on Sunday, May 17 at 5pm PDT.
• Selection decisions are final and will be made in late May / early June.
• All presentations must adhere to the MozCon Code of Conduct.
• You must attend MozCon, July 13-15, and the Tuesday night event in person, in Seattle.

If selected, you will get the following

• 5 minutes on the Tuesday night stage to share with our audience. The event lasts from 7-10pm and will be at Benaroya Hall (where the Seattle Symphony plays).
• $300 off a regular priced ticket to MozCon. (If you already purchased yours, we’ll issue a $300 refund for regular priced ticket or $100 for an early bird ticket. Discount not available for super early bird special.)
• We will work with you to hone your talk!

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As we want to ensure every single speaker feels both comfortable and gives their best talk possible, myself and Matt Roney are here to help you. We’ll review your topic, settle on the title, walk through your presentation with you, and give you a tour of the stage earlier in the evening. While you do the great work, we’re here to help in anyway possible.

Unfortunately, we cannot provide travel coverage for these MozCon Ignite speaking slots.

What makes a great pitch

• Focus on the five minute length.
• Be passionate about what you’re speaking about. Tell us what’s great about it.
• For extra credit, include links to videos of you doing public speaking.
• Follow the guidelines. Yes, the word counts are limited on purpose. Do not submit links to Google Docs, etc. for more information. Tricky and multiple submissions will be disqualified.

We’re all super-excited about these talks, and we can’t wait to hear what you might talk about. Whether you want to tell us about how Frenchies are really English dogs or which coffee shop is the best in Seattle, this is going to be blast! The amazing Geraldine DeRuiter, known for her travel blogging and witty ways, will be emceeing this event.

If you’re still needing inspiration or a little confused about an Ignite talk, watch Geraldine’s talk from a few years ago about sharing personal news online:

Like our other speaker selections, we have a small committee at Moz running through these topics to get the best variety and fun possible. While we cannot vet your topic, feel free to ask questions in the comments.

Everyone who submits an Ignite pitch will be informed either way. Best of luck!

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