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The Death of Keyword Ranking Reports? 10 Superior SEO Stats – Whiteboard Friday

We all look at keyword rankings, but are they still a useful metric to report? In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus Shepard discusses how changes in search have made individual keyword rankings a shaky metric at best, and he presents 10 needle-moving numbers to measure and report instead.

Death of Keyword Ranking Reports – Whiteboard Friday

For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!

Video Transcription

The problem with keyword ranking reports

Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I’m Cyrus Shepard. Today we’re going to be talking about the death of keyword ranking reports.

Now, we all do keyword ranking reports. We’ve been doing them for several years. I do them. I still do them today. But I’m talking to a lot of agencies, a lot of big time agencies. They’re actually starting to turn the corner and stop delivering those keyword ranking reports to clients. There are a lot of reasons for that, and a lot of them have to do with recent changes with Google. But a lot go back to just the deficiencies that keyword ranking reports have always had.

So we’ve all got these emails in our inbox, every single one of us, that promise number one rankings for a number of really obscure keywords. That goes to the point that these keyword ranking reports may not be reflecting metrics that are important to either your SEO campaign or your business objectives.

The big problem is anytime you rank a keyword, you don’t know if that keyword is sending you traffic. Back in the days, when we actually had keyword data in Google Analytics, you could see that the keywords you were tracking only comprised a small portion of the keywords that you were actually ranking in your keyword ranking report. You were actually missing out on 50% to 80% of that data. So no matter how good your keyword ranking report is, it’s always going to be missing a lot of that essential traffic, and it completely misses the long tail, which is another problem, because generally when you do keyword ranking reports, you’re generally choosing those high traffic or you’re trying to choose those high traffic terms. Again, you’re missing out on a huge portion of that traffic that’s sending you those numbers.

Hummingbird, big changes this year in Google, where what you type in, the keyword that users type in may be actually sort of rewritten in certain ways by Google. We’re seeing more and more instances of Google returning results that don’t actually contain all of the keywords you type in. It will be pretty close. But if you’re tracking this keyword and it’s being sort of rewritten or triggering different results by Google, it makes it slightly less valuable to be reporting on every week.

Also, changes in SERPs. Google, if you look at Dr. Pete’s recent post, the Mega SERP, you can see all these different SERP features that Google is introducing that sort of make positions irrelevant in the traditional keyword ranking. If you’re ranking number one, that guaranteed like 18%,
19% of your traffic. But then if the SERP has a lot ads, it has a lot of photos in it, the ads on the side, a number one or two ranking might be less meaningful. Then, again, if you have something like an author photo, Google did a study, one of their own studies, showing how that can greatly impact click through, and a number four ranking, a number five, six, seven can have a higher click-through result than a number one ranking.

So, for this reason and a lot of other reasons, keyword ranking reports are just simply dying. Now, it’s still important to track those keywords, but what we do with that information is changing. So I’m going to talk about some different things that we should be reporting to our clients, reporting to our bosses, and reporting to ourselves for better SEO results.

Keywords

1. Rank Indexes

The first thing, this idea was introduced to me first by A.J. Kohn. I’ll link to his post in the transcription below. It’s the idea of a keyword index. You can do this with lots of different tools. You can do it with Moz. You can do it with Advanced Web Ranking. You can do this with most good keyword ranking tools.

That is you can create keyword groups. So let’s say these were my keywords here — iPhone case, iPhone speaker. I would create a group of keywords, checking all the boxes, where I’m tracking just the words with iPhone in them. Then I can get a metric. I can pull them out into a spreadsheet and just get one number that shows me if I’m moving up and down for keywords that contain iPhone.

Now the huge advantages of this system is it gets the long tail, because I know if my keyword index is going up for iPhone, that those long-tail keywords that I’m not tracking are likely going up and down too. It’s not going to be a one-to-one relationship. They’re not all going to go up and down at the same time. But I know, in general, that I’m capturing a much broader sense of where my keywords are performing.

It also simplifies it, because instead of tracking 50 keywords, I’m just tracking 1 index. That’s the number I’m reporting. My iPhone visibility in the SERPs is increasing or decreasing. Now, that’s something that the client is going to care about.

Reach

2. Organic Traffic

3. Referral Traffic

4. Social Traffic

5. Total Traffic

A better metric to report to clients — reach. Now a lot of us already report organic search traffic. We do it in our weekly reports, and that’s traditionally been the SEO’s realm. Organic search traffic, we report it. But this is really a lot more important than this. Something I’m going to encourage you to start doing, that something a lot SEOs are uncomfortable with, is also reporting a lot of other traffic, such as referral traffic, because if you think about it, if your content is earning links, if it’s getting shares and mentions, that means it’s going to be coming through those referral links and not through Google, Bing, or that organic traffic. Not that you have to take credit for all that referral traffic, but you certainly influence it. It’s important to the client. It’s important to the boss. So you should be reporting it.

The same with social traffic. Even if you have a social department in your company or business or there are other social people that are responsible for those metrics, you should be reporting it too because everybody contributes together. If you’re doing your job as an SEO and your content becomes more popular, of course it’s going to be shared more, and it’s a synergistic relationship between all those departments working together. But it’s definitely something you want to report, because, again, it’s something that’s important to the client, and it’s something that you had a part in. In general, what everybody really cares about is that totality of traffic. If you can relate that to your efforts, then you’re going to be much more highly rewarded, and you’re going to have a better experience.

Endorsements

6. Classic Links

7. Mentions

8. Press

9. Social Endorsements

So after reach, endorsements, and endorsements is a broad word that we use for what Google is looking for. We say Google is looking for links, but that’s not really true if you think about Penguin and the way they discount links. What they’re really looking for is editorial endorsements, and this can take different ways of links, mentions, local citations, press mentions, social authority. If you can report these, it’s sort of like you’re reporting on your good marketing skills.

You can use a lot of different tools to do this. Every week we use Fresh Web Explorer. It’s a paid tool here at MOZ. But there are different other tools that you can use, such as Mention.net. We actually rank all the new links that we’ve seen during that week through Fresh Web Explorer. You can do it through Open Site Explorer, any of your favorite link building tools
— Majestic, Ahrefs.

The benefit of reporting endorsements is not only does your boss or client like it, but for you, it actually makes you a little better at your job because it creates an SEO feedback loop. When you see your new links and your new mentions coming in, through these various tools, that gives you an opportunity to either reach out to the people and form a relationship or leave a comment or find new link building opportunities, find new social authorities, and it strengthens the whole thing, and it actually improves you visibility overall.

KPIs

10. Business Objectives

Finally, the most important thing you can report are your KPIs, because this is what the boss, the client, and you care about the most, your business objectives. In Google Analytics, maybe it’s your goals, your conversions, and your assisted conversions. We’re often scared to report these, as SEOs, as inbound marketers, because we feel like we only had a small part to do with those metrics. There’s an entire sales team, there’s an entire website, there’s a development team.

But these are the most important things. This is what we are trying to achieve, and we shouldn’t be scared of reporting them. If you can show how your efforts resulted in achieving these KPIs, those are the SEOs, those are the inbound marketers that make more money and get raises. It’s not about claiming all the credit. It’s about sharing the credit and taking claim for your part in those actions and showing the client, showing your boss how you helped achieve those things.

So keep measuring those keywords, but let’s say goodbye to those individual keyword reports. That’s all everybody. Thank you very much.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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 →

The Demise of Keyword Ranking Reports? 10 Superior SEO Stats – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

We all look at keyword rankings, but are they still a useful metric to report? In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus Shepard discusses how changes in search have made individual keyword rankings a shaky metric at best, and he presents 10 needle-moving numbers to measure and report instead.

Death of Keyword Ranking Reports – Whiteboard Friday

For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!

Video Transcription

The problem with keyword ranking reports

Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I’m Cyrus Shepard. Today we’re going to be talking about the death of keyword ranking reports.

Now, we all do keyword ranking reports. We’ve been doing them for several years. I do them. I still do them today. But I’m talking to a lot of agencies, a lot of big time agencies. They’re actually starting to turn the corner and stop delivering those keyword ranking reports to clients. There are a lot of reasons for that, and a lot of them have to do with recent changes with Google. But a lot go back to just the deficiencies that keyword ranking reports have always had.

So we’ve all got these emails in our inbox, every single one of us, that promise number one rankings for a number of really obscure keywords. That goes to the point that these keyword ranking reports may not be reflecting metrics that are important to either your SEO campaign or your business objectives.

The big problem is anytime you rank a keyword, you don’t know if that keyword is sending you traffic. Back in the days, when we actually had keyword data in Google Analytics, you could see that the keywords you were tracking only comprised a small portion of the keywords that you were actually ranking in your keyword ranking report. You were actually missing out on 50% to 80% of that data. So no matter how good your keyword ranking report is, it’s always going to be missing a lot of that essential traffic, and it completely misses the long tail, which is another problem, because generally when you do keyword ranking reports, you’re generally choosing those high traffic or you’re trying to choose those high traffic terms. Again, you’re missing out on a huge portion of that traffic that’s sending you those numbers.

Hummingbird, big changes this year in Google, where what you type in, the keyword that users type in may be actually sort of rewritten in certain ways by Google. We’re seeing more and more instances of Google returning results that don’t actually contain all of the keywords you type in. It will be pretty close. But if you’re tracking this keyword and it’s being sort of rewritten or triggering different results by Google, it makes it slightly less valuable to be reporting on every week.

Also, changes in SERPs. Google, if you look at Dr. Pete’s recent post, the Mega SERP, you can see all these different SERP features that Google is introducing that sort of make positions irrelevant in the traditional keyword ranking. If you’re ranking number one, that guaranteed like 18%,
19% of your traffic. But then if the SERP has a lot ads, it has a lot of photos in it, the ads on the side, a number one or two ranking might be less meaningful. Then, again, if you have something like an author photo, Google did a study, one of their own studies, showing how that can greatly impact click through, and a number four ranking, a number five, six, seven can have a higher click-through result than a number one ranking.

So, for this reason and a lot of other reasons, keyword ranking reports are just simply dying. Now, it’s still important to track those keywords, but what we do with that information is changing. So I’m going to talk about some different things that we should be reporting to our clients, reporting to our bosses, and reporting to ourselves for better SEO results.

Keywords

1. Rank Indexes

The first thing, this idea was introduced to me first by A.J. Kohn. I’ll link to his post in the transcription below. It’s the idea of a keyword index. You can do this with lots of different tools. You can do it with Moz. You can do it with Advanced Web Ranking. You can do this with most good keyword ranking tools.

That is you can create keyword groups. So let’s say these were my keywords here — iPhone case, iPhone speaker. I would create a group of keywords, checking all the boxes, where I’m tracking just the words with iPhone in them. Then I can get a metric. I can pull them out into a spreadsheet and just get one number that shows me if I’m moving up and down for keywords that contain iPhone.

Now the huge advantages of this system is it gets the long tail, because I know if my keyword index is going up for iPhone, that those long-tail keywords that I’m not tracking are likely going up and down too. It’s not going to be a one-to-one relationship. They’re not all going to go up and down at the same time. But I know, in general, that I’m capturing a much broader sense of where my keywords are performing.

It also simplifies it, because instead of tracking 50 keywords, I’m just tracking 1 index. That’s the number I’m reporting. My iPhone visibility in the SERPs is increasing or decreasing. Now, that’s something that the client is going to care about.

Reach

2. Organic Traffic

3. Referral Traffic

4. Social Traffic

5. Total Traffic

A better metric to report to clients — reach. Now a lot of us already report organic search traffic. We do it in our weekly reports, and that’s traditionally been the SEO’s realm. Organic search traffic, we report it. But this is really a lot more important than this. Something I’m going to encourage you to start doing, that something a lot SEOs are uncomfortable with, is also reporting a lot of other traffic, such as referral traffic, because if you think about it, if your content is earning links, if it’s getting shares and mentions, that means it’s going to be coming through those referral links and not through Google, Bing, or that organic traffic. Not that you have to take credit for all that referral traffic, but you certainly influence it. It’s important to the client. It’s important to the boss. So you should be reporting it.

The same with social traffic. Even if you have a social department in your company or business or there are other social people that are responsible for those metrics, you should be reporting it too because everybody contributes together. If you’re doing your job as an SEO and your content becomes more popular, of course it’s going to be shared more, and it’s a synergistic relationship between all those departments working together. But it’s definitely something you want to report, because, again, it’s something that’s important to the client, and it’s something that you had a part in. In general, what everybody really cares about is that totality of traffic. If you can relate that to your efforts, then you’re going to be much more highly rewarded, and you’re going to have a better experience.

Endorsements

6. Classic Links

7. Mentions

8. Press

9. Social Endorsements

So after reach, endorsements, and endorsements is a broad word that we use for what Google is looking for. We say Google is looking for links, but that’s not really true if you think about Penguin and the way they discount links. What they’re really looking for is editorial endorsements, and this can take different ways of links, mentions, local citations, press mentions, social authority. If you can report these, it’s sort of like you’re reporting on your good marketing skills.

You can use a lot of different tools to do this. Every week we use Fresh Web Explorer. It’s a paid tool here at MOZ. But there are different other tools that you can use, such as Mentions.net. We actually rank all the new links that we’ve seen during that week through Fresh Web Explorer. You can do it through Open Site Explorer, any of your favorite link building tools
— Majestic, Ahrefs.

The benefit of reporting endorsements is not only does your boss or client like it, but for you, it actually makes you a little better at your job because it creates an SEO feedback loop. When you see your new links and your new mentions coming in, through these various tools, that gives you an opportunity to either reach out to the people and form a relationship or leave a comment or find new link building opportunities, find new social authorities, and it strengthens the whole thing, and it actually improves you visibility overall.

KPIs

10. Business Objectives

Finally, the most important thing you can report are your KPIs, because this is what the boss, the client, and you care about the most, your business objectives. In Google Analytics, maybe it’s your goals, your conversions, and your assisted conversions. We’re often scared to report these, as SEOs, as inbound marketers, because we feel like we only had a small part to do with those metrics. There’s an entire sales team, there’s an entire website, there’s a development team.

But these are the most important things. This is what we are trying to achieve, and we shouldn’t be scared of reporting them. If you can show how your efforts resulted in achieving these KPIs, those are the SEOs, those are the inbound marketers that make more money and get raises. It’s not about claiming all the credit. It’s about sharing the credit and taking claim for your part in those actions and showing the client, showing your boss how you helped achieve those things.

So keep measuring those keywords, but let’s say goodbye to those individual keyword reports. That’s all everybody. Thank you very much.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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 →

The Demise of Individual Keyword Ranking Reports: 10 Superior SEO Stats – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

We all look at keyword rankings, but are they still a useful metric to report? In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus Shepard discusses how changes in search have made individual keyword rankings a shaky metric at best, and he presents 10 needle-moving numbers to measure and report instead.

Death of Keyword Ranking Reports – Whiteboard Friday

For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!

Video Transcription

The problem with keyword ranking reports

Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I’m Cyrus Shepard. Today we’re going to be talking about the death of keyword ranking reports.

Now, we all do keyword ranking reports. We’ve been doing them for several years. I do them. I still do them today. But I’m talking to a lot of agencies, a lot of big time agencies. They’re actually starting to turn the corner and stop delivering those keyword ranking reports to clients. There are a lot of reasons for that, and a lot of them have to do with recent changes with Google. But a lot go back to just the deficiencies that keyword ranking reports have always had.

So we’ve all got these emails in our inbox, every single one of us, that promise number one rankings for a number of really obscure keywords. That goes to the point that these keyword ranking reports may not be reflecting metrics that are important to either your SEO campaign or your business objectives.

The big problem is anytime you rank a keyword, you don’t know if that keyword is sending you traffic. Back in the days, when we actually had keyword data in Google Analytics, you could see that the keywords you were tracking only comprised a small portion of the keywords that you were actually ranking in your keyword ranking report. You were actually missing out on 50% to 80% of that data. So no matter how good your keyword ranking report is, it’s always going to be missing a lot of that essential traffic, and it completely misses the long tail, which is another problem, because generally when you do keyword ranking reports, you’re generally choosing those high traffic or you’re trying to choose those high traffic terms. Again, you’re missing out on a huge portion of that traffic that’s sending you those numbers.

Hummingbird, big changes this year in Google, where what you type in, the keyword that users type in may be actually sort of rewritten in certain ways by Google. We’re seeing more and more instances of Google returning results that don’t actually contain all of the keywords you type in. It will be pretty close. But if you’re tracking this keyword and it’s being sort of rewritten or triggering different results by Google, it makes it slightly less valuable to be reporting on every week.

Also, changes in SERPs. Google, if you look at Dr. Pete’s recent post, the Mega SERP, you can see all these different SERP features that Google is introducing that sort of make positions irrelevant in the traditional keyword ranking. If you’re ranking number one, that guaranteed like 18%,
19% of your traffic. But then if the SERP has a lot ads, it has a lot of photos in it, the ads on the side, a number one or two ranking might be less meaningful. Then, again, if you have something like an author photo, Google did a study, one of their own studies, showing how that can greatly impact click through, and a number four ranking, a number five, six, seven can have a higher click-through result than a number one ranking.

So, for this reason and a lot of other reasons, keyword ranking reports are just simply dying. Now, it’s still important to track those keywords, but what we do with that information is changing. So I’m going to talk about some different things that we should be reporting to our clients, reporting to our bosses, and reporting to ourselves for better SEO results.

Keywords

1. Rank Indexes

The first thing, this idea was introduced to me first by A.J. Kohn. I’ll link to his post in the transcription below. It’s the idea of a keyword index. You can do this with lots of different tools. You can do it with Moz. You can do it with Advanced Web Ranking. You can do this with most good keyword ranking tools.

That is you can create keyword groups. So let’s say these were my keywords here — iPhone case, iPhone speaker. I would create a group of keywords, checking all the boxes, where I’m tracking just the words with iPhone in them. Then I can get a metric. I can pull them out into a spreadsheet and just get one number that shows me if I’m moving up and down for keywords that contain iPhone.

Now the huge advantages of this system is it gets the long tail, because I know if my keyword index is going up for iPhone, that those long-tail keywords that I’m not tracking are likely going up and down too. It’s not going to be a one-to-one relationship. They’re not all going to go up and down at the same time. But I know, in general, that I’m capturing a much broader sense of where my keywords are performing.

It also simplifies it, because instead of tracking 50 keywords, I’m just tracking 1 index. That’s the number I’m reporting. My iPhone visibility in the SERPs is increasing or decreasing. Now, that’s something that the client is going to care about.

Reach

2. Organic Traffic

3. Referral Traffic

4. Social Traffic

5. Total Traffic

A better metric to report to clients — reach. Now a lot of us already report organic search traffic. We do it in our weekly reports, and that’s traditionally been the SEO’s realm. Organic search traffic, we report it. But this is really a lot more important than this. Something I’m going to encourage you to start doing, that something a lot SEOs are uncomfortable with, is also reporting a lot of other traffic, such as referral traffic, because if you think about it, if your content is earning links, if it’s getting shares and mentions, that means it’s going to be coming through those referral links and not through Google, Bing, or that organic traffic. Not that you have to take credit for all that referral traffic, but you certainly influence it. It’s important to the client. It’s important to the boss. So you should be reporting it.

The same with social traffic. Even if you have a social department in your company or business or there are other social people that are responsible for those metrics, you should be reporting it too because everybody contributes together. If you’re doing your job as an SEO and your content becomes more popular, of course it’s going to be shared more, and it’s a synergistic relationship between all those departments working together. But it’s definitely something you want to report, because, again, it’s something that’s important to the client, and it’s something that you had a part in. In general, what everybody really cares about is that totality of traffic. If you can relate that to your efforts, then you’re going to be much more highly rewarded, and you’re going to have a better experience.

Endorsements

6. Classic Links

7. Mentions

8. Press

9. Social Endorsements

So after reach, endorsements, and endorsements is a broad word that we use for what Google is looking for. We say Google is looking for links, but that’s not really true if you think about Penguin and the way they discount links. What they’re really looking for is editorial endorsements, and this can take different ways of links, mentions, local citations, press mentions, social authority. If you can report these, it’s sort of like you’re reporting on your good marketing skills.

You can use a lot of different tools to do this. Every week we use Fresh Web Explorer. It’s a paid tool here at MOZ. But there are different other tools that you can use, such as Mention.net. We actually rank all the new links that we’ve seen during that week through Fresh Web Explorer. You can do it through Open Site Explorer, any of your favorite link building tools
— Majestic, Ahrefs.

The benefit of reporting endorsements is not only does your boss or client like it, but for you, it actually makes you a little better at your job because it creates an SEO feedback loop. When you see your new links and your new mentions coming in, through these various tools, that gives you an opportunity to either reach out to the people and form a relationship or leave a comment or find new link building opportunities, find new social authorities, and it strengthens the whole thing, and it actually improves you visibility overall.

KPIs

10. Business Objectives

Finally, the most important thing you can report are your KPIs, because this is what the boss, the client, and you care about the most, your business objectives. In Google Analytics, maybe it’s your goals, your conversions, and your assisted conversions. We’re often scared to report these, as SEOs, as inbound marketers, because we feel like we only had a small part to do with those metrics. There’s an entire sales team, there’s an entire website, there’s a development team.

But these are the most important things. This is what we are trying to achieve, and we shouldn’t be scared of reporting them. If you can show how your efforts resulted in achieving these KPIs, those are the SEOs, those are the inbound marketers that make more money and get raises. It’s not about claiming all the credit. It’s about sharing the credit and taking claim for your part in those actions and showing the client, showing your boss how you helped achieve those things.

So keep measuring those keywords, but let’s say goodbye to those individual keyword reports. That’s all everybody. Thank you very much.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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 →

75 Content Starters for Any Industry

Posted by Amanda_Gallucci

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.

Suffering from blank-page anxiety? Before you go on the hunt for inspiration all over the Internet and elsewhere, turn to the resources around you and realize that you can create exceptional content with what you already have at hand.

Thinking of content topics doesn’t have to be such a long and grueling undertaking. Use the following starting points the next time you need an idea.

Individual achievement

Talk about a transition to a new role and how you had to adapt your skills to succeed.
Think of lessons you learned the hard way and share with those who are just starting out.
Describe your thought process for approaching different tasks in a way that will help others be better organized or prepared.
Write about a mentor figure or a brand you admire. Explain why this person or company has excelled, and how others may be able to follow a similar path.
Share your action plan for the future. Give people a sneak peak of what’s to come and talk through the steps you’ll take to accomplish your goals.

Shining example: Rand’s announcement of his changing role at Moz

Tools

Create a video tutorial that walks people through how to use a tool for a specific task.
Review a new or lesser-known tool that you believe more people should use.
Present creative, alternate ways of using a tool, including plugins and combinations that make using multiple tools together advantageous.
If there’s an in-house tool that you use, put together a case study of why it’s better than some of the commercial tools that other brands use.
Perform the same task with a few different tools. Note which one is most cost effective, easiest to use, saved you the most time, etc.

Shining example: KISSmetrics’ Google Analytics Dashboard Secrets

Lists

Compile resources for different subjects and skill levels.
Gather content that shows the best examples of what people should be striving for.
Rank your favorite tools, blogs, ads, etc.
Give reasons why someone should or should not follow a certain tactic or strategy.
Curate useful content and put together “best of” lists.

Shining example: Point Blank SEO’s Complete List of Link Building Strategies

Internal resources

Ask the sales team what their most common roadblocks are. What content can you put together that will aid them in illustrating the solution?
Sit in on meetings in different departments. Take what you’ve observed about their communication styles and workflow and turn it into content about processes such as effective ways to brainstorm or overcoming internal objections.
Find out what questions your account managers get asked most frequently. Put together a blog post or other resource that lays out the answers.
Request that every department share their biggest accomplishments on a monthly or quarterly basis. Select at least one to develop a case study.
Get to know your coworkers. Find out more about their backgrounds, their daily routines, and future aspirations. You can highlight employees in a video or blog series introducing your team, or better yet, you can learn a new way of thinking or working that you can write about.

Shining example: Fi’s interactive Sony Case Study

Industry

Find an opinion piece that people in your space are discussing. Back it up with new research or make a case for the other side of the argument.
Explain the steps that your company is taking in response to a new policy affecting your industry.
Introduce a new technique or strategy you’re using. Detail why this could work better than industry techniques that are becoming stale.
Comment on a trend you see emerging and why or why not it should continue.
Share tips and best practices.

Shining example: Copyblogger’s How to Write the In-Depth Articles that Google Loves

How-to

Have each person on your team write down a five step process that takes them through a daily task start to finish. This can be used for an email campaign or a blog or video series.
Ask your leadership team for pointers on how they’ve developed the business and how they keep it running smoothly.
What skills would be helpful for your customers to have so that they could better understand your product/service or use it more easily? Teach them.
Write down the steps you took in a successful campaign. Layout this process so that it can be repeated.
Interview several experts on the same topic, asking each how he or she accomplishes a certain goal.

Shining example: Wistia’s Intro to Video SEO

Company culture

Get involved in your community and volunteer. Talk about what you’re doing and why it’s important to you.
Ask coworkers to each share one benefit of working at the company that they’ve never experienced at another job.
Have someone from the leadership team discuss the company’s core values and why they are integral to the brand.
Congratulate new hires and talk about why they’re great fits for the team.
Let interns shadow an employee for a day and write about what a day in the life of someone in this role entails.

Shining example: Buffer’s transparent look at their salary formula

Educational series

Teach a skill or illustrate how to use a tool or software.
Put together a set of lessons that will take someone through an entire plan or strategy.
Summarize long articles or eBooks into short snippets, highlighting the actionable takeaways.
Create quizzes and interactive lessons and then post a walkthrough of how to arrive at the correct answer.
Host a workshop or lunch and learn for your team internally, and film it or have someone create a summary.

Shining example: Field Museum’s The Brain Scoop

Events

As soon as the list of speakers comes out for a big event in your industry, select a few who are covering topics in which your audience is interested and reach out to see if they will do an interview or guest post for your site.
Scan the live tweets and recaps of conferences you weren’t able to attend. Find common themes and determine the hot button issues that emerged. Contribute your unique perspective on these subjects on your blog.
If someone from your company speaks at an event, have him write a bonus blog post that expands on something in his presentation. Make sure he posts his slide deck on SlideShare and links to the blog post in it.
Put together a list of all the conferences, meetups, and networking nights in your area. Rank them, talk about why people should attend, compile basic information like cost and datesâ€¦ make this a robust, go-to resource.
Go above and beyond the traditional recap of what you learned. After a set time period of putting those lessons into practice, demonstrate the use of your new skill set with a mini case study of your results.

Shining example: aimClear’s measurement of #NMX speakers

Research

A/B test everything you do for your internal marketing. Write up the results and draw conclusions that can lead to best practices.
Create a survey about the tools and tactics people in your industry are using and which they find most effective.
Analyze market research about consumer behavior relative to your audience and present a study.
Find a popular study done in the past few years and update it with new research and fresh insights.
Walk your audience through the research and measurement process at your company.

Shining example: ESPN teaming up with Medium to ask people about the World Cup

Theories

Write about why you believe a certain trend has emerged and what this means for the future.
Give advice for a hypothetical client or user.
Relay the possible causes for results that you’ve seen in your analytics data.
Make a prediction about how a new policy or technology will impact how you do business in the future.
If there was one aspect of your role you could add or takeaway to make your job easier, what would it be and how would it make you more productive? Make a case for it.

Shining example: Distilled’s Don’t Silo Me, Bro: Integrating Content Strategy Across Disciplines

Higher-level overviews

Create a resource with the definitions of basic industry terms.
Give a periodic update on the state of your industry.
Take content filled with technical terminology and industry jargon and simplify it to a beginner’s version.
Use an analogy to clarify and simplify a subject that would be otherwise difficult to explain to someone outside of your field.
Illustrate how the different teams and departments in your company work together cohesively in a basic framework.

Shining example: Edelman’s Sponsored Content: An Ethical Framework

Promotional

Host a contest and give away a new product, tickets to an event, or a free consultation.
Highlight employees who have been nominated for or received awards and let people know why they deserved that honor.
Share customer testimonials.
Remind your audience about the details of your Twitter chat and prompt them to help generate questions for the discussion.
Enumerate new features of your product or service.

Shining example: SMX’s “Biggest Search Geek” Contest

Seasonal

On Valentine’s Day, reveal yourself as a not-so-secret admirer of one or more brands. Let them know why you enjoy their content and how you strive to emulate a certain aspect of their business.
Give a shout out to some of your best employees for Labor Day.
For Thanksgiving, personally thank some of your biggest brand fans.
During the holidays, send small physical gifts to people in your audience or even industry peers and then write a blog post or make a video saying what you’re sending and why.
Discuss your New Year goals and how the changes you plan on making will a better experience for your audience.

Shining example: Shopify’s 8 New Year’s Resolutions Every Ecommerce Entrepreneur Should Make

Out of the box

Respond to email feedback (positive or negative) through a blog post or video.
Write a satire piece about a recurring problem in your industry.
Dig through old posts and republish with updates. Explain why your thoughts and recommendations have changed over time.
Do some pro bono work and turn it into content about your capabilities.
Make over your “About Us” section, spruce up your 404 page, or whatever else seems lackluster on your site, and then feature it in a special before and after content unveiling.

Shining example: Business Casual Copywriting’s “Dead Page”

Your turn

Whether or not you decide to use these exact ideas, I hope I’ve given you some directions to explore. Think hard, collaborate with smart team members, and make these your own.

Brainstorming should start broad before the content manager or editor-in-chief narrows down ideas based on marketing goals, target personas, and availability of resources. For a more in-depth look at that process, check out the eBook I created for iAcquire, Content Strategy for Digital Marketers: A Six Week Guide to Creating, Promoting, & Measuring Great Content. You want to make sure you have the right structure in place because as we all know probably too well, good ideas don’t always pan out the way we hope for when they’re not part of a well-crafted strategy.

No matter which post topics you choose, remember to infuse these ideas with personality, data, and insights that only you and your brand can offer. Publishing content that provides value no one else can is what truly leads to the traffic, social shares, and links you crave.

If you’ve had success with ideas like this in the past or if you have plans to try out something new, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

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Getting Link Removals Wrong

Posted by dohertyjf

Ever since Penguin launched in 2012, SEOs who for years had built less than savory links, or companies who for years had ridden off the coat tails of these links, started to ask for links to be removed. I’ve heard many of my friends, like Wil Reynolds, repeatedly poo-poo it from the stage (Wil did it during his now famous “Real Company Shit” talk at Mozcon in 2012).

As someone who has overseen link removal campaigns for clients when I was at Distilled, I am not down on link removals. They have a place, and I’ve seen positive effects from cutting out large chunks of really bad links (porn, pills, poker, you name it). But, I also believe there are good and bad ways to remove links, and I want to make an example here.

In the aftermath of Matt Cutts coming out and warning people off from manipulative guest posting (something all of us have seen and grown more and more tired of in the past few years), I think a voice of reason is needed to stop companies from doing more harm than good to themselves. Youâ€™ll see an example of an email I received a few weeks ago, the day after Matt came out with his proclamation, but letâ€™s cover some basics first before we get into conjecture.

Why remove links?

I’m not going to give a full diatribe on why you might want to remove links pointing into your website, as that is not the point of this article. But, here are some reasons why you may want to remove links –

You aggressively obtained exact match anchor text back on 2008/2009/2010;
Your organic traffic dropped for specific keywords (or rankings plummeted and did not recover) on or around the days we know Penguin rolled out (Algo History here)
You’re being proactive because you see that Google is increasingly lowering the barrier to classifying something as spam and you do not want to be caught out in the cold when the hammer drops

That’s a quick overview of link removal, and by no means complete. This one is.

The guest posting fiasco

For years now, as old tactics have quit being as effective (though many still work when done as part of a full and balanced campaign), many “SEO” companies turned to guest posting as a way of getting links.

Many have done it well. They’ve built great relationships with sites that have a relevant audience to them, have driven traffic back to their site, and yes, built a link or two. But notice the order – first comes the business purpose (customers, traffic) and tertiary is links.

Many other companies have tried to “scale” link building via guest posting, yet as we all know when you begin to scale something the first to go out the window is quality. And when you have your boss or client breathing down your neck to lower the cost per link (which is not the metric to base quality on, but money is important to keep an eye on), the temptation to outsource outreach or writing becomes very appealing. Thatâ€™s why weâ€™ve ended up with this:

When Matt dropped the hammer a few weeks ago, many companies freaked out and started getting their guest post links removed, exact anchors and all. To me, this is stupid on many many levels, such as –

If you wrote the content on a quality site, you should want credit in the form of a link, Google be damned;
If you are requesting removal and the person is nice enough to remove the anchor text link, thank them instead of also asking that the branded link be removed too.
Only manipulative posts are being targeted, and in my opinion if you been accepting bad poets just to get content on your site, you deserve to have your site disavowed.

Removal Automation

I’m in favor of automating what you can when it makes sense. Collecting data, smart algorithms to surface content via internal links, and the like are all examples of something that can and should be automated.

When we talk about link removal, I’m all in favor of automating the initial data gathering of sites linking to your page(s) that have been affected. This is where the automation stops though, because a machine will never be as good as a human pair of eyes. We’re not just removing links from low authority (from a strictly SEO domain or page authority perspective) sites, but from irrelevant sites where you placed a link just to get a link.

Outreach should be personal. When you automate the gathering of pages to request your link be removed from, any SEO worth their salt will immediately see this. Here is a list of pages on HotPads that a site (redacted) asked that I remove links from (with an admission that they believe themselves to be negatively affected by a manipulative links penalty, which SEMrush seems to indicate as well):

The problem here is that, as you can see, many of these are archive and category pages. They only have links on the actual guest post (and I was nice enough to remove the exact anchor. I left the branded link), but sent me this laundry list because they got it straight from OpenSiteExplorer or MajesticSeo, I’m sure.

The other area you can automate is checking to see if links are still live, then manually qualifying if they should be or not. Many of the removal tools do this, or you can upload a list of pages to Scrapebox and see if the links are still there.

I know link qualification is a tedious process (Iâ€™ve looked at tens of thousands of links to qualify them as good/bad in my career), but putting a human touch onto your work will long-term benefit you, I believe.

What if my site is disavowed?

Here’s a question I’ve heard posed a few times:

“But won’t my site get disavowed if I don’t remove the link? Will my site suffer if I am disavowed?”

No one has studied this yet, mostly because you cannot know if your site has been disavowed or not. I have to believe that Google can tell semi-algorithmically if a site is being used for manipulative linking or not. With how long it takes for a disavow file to seem to take effect, I believe that disavow lists are manually looked at, and a site may be whitelisted if it is disavowed, but judged to not be manipulative.

So no, I don’t worry about my site being disavowed. If shady work was done in the past, then clean it up. If your site is clean, carry on.

Conclusion

I hope this has given you some food for thought before removing links or starting the process. It’s a tricky business and can be quite effective when done well, but can cause more harm if done poorly. Proceed with caution.

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