Simple Steps for Conducting Creative Content Research

Posted by Hannah_Smith

Most frequently, the content we create at Distilled is designed to attract press coverage, social shares, and exposure (and links) on sites our clients' target audience reads. That's a tall order.

Over the years we've had our hits and misses, and through this we've recognised the value of learning about what makes a piece of content successful. Coming up with a great idea is difficult, and it can be tough to figure out where to begin. Today, rather than leaping headlong into brainstorming sessions, we start with creative content research.

What is creative content research?

Creative content research enables you to answer the questions:

"What are websites publishing, and what are people sharing?"

From this, you'll then have a clearer view on what might be successful for your client.

A few years ago this required quite an amount of work to figure out. Today, happily, it's much quicker and easier. In this post I'll share the process and tools we use.

Whoa there... Why do I need to do this?

I think that the value in this sort of activity lies in a couple of directions:

a) You can learn a lot by deconstructing the success of others...

I've been taking stuff apart to try to figure out how it works for about as long as I can remember, so applying this process to content research felt pretty natural to me. Perhaps more importantly though, I think that deconstructing content is actually easier when it isn't your own. You're not involved, invested, or in love with the piece so viewing it objectively and learning from it is much easier.

b) Your research will give you a clear overview of the competitive landscape...

As soon as a company elects to start creating content, they gain a whole raft of new competitors. In addition to their commercial competitors (i.e. those who offer similar products or services), the company also gains content competitors. For example, if you're a sports betting company and plan to create content related to the sports events that you're offering betting markets on; then you're competing not just with other betting companies, but every other publisher who creates content about these events. That means major news outlets, sports news site, fan sites, etc. To make matters even more complicated, it's likely that you'll actually be seeking coverage from those same content competitors. As such, you need to understand what's already being created in the space before creating content of your own.

c) You're giving yourself the data to create a more compelling pitch...

At some point you're going to need to pitch your ideas to your client (or your boss if you're working in-house). At Distilled, we've found that getting ideas signed off can be really tough. Ultimately, a great idea is worthless if we can't persuade our client to give us the green light. This research can be used to make a more compelling case to your client and get those ideas signed off. (Incidentally, if getting ideas signed off is proving to be an issue you might find this framework for pitching creative ideas useful).

Where to start

Good ideas start with a good brief, however it can be tough to pin clients down to get answers to a long list of questions.

As a minimum you'll need to know the following:

• Who are they looking to target?
  • Age, sex, demographic
  • What's their core focus? What do they care about? What problems are they looking to solve?
  • Who influences them?
  • What else are they interested in?
  • Where do they shop and which brands do they buy?
  • What do they read?
  • What do they watch on TV?
  • Where do they spend their time online?
• Where do they want to get coverage?
  • We typically ask our clients to give us a wishlist of 10 or so sites they'd love to get coverage on
• Which topics are they comfortable covering?
  • This question is often the toughest, particularly if a client hasn't created content specifically for links and shares before. Often clients are uncomfortable about drifting too far away from their core business—for example, if they sell insurance, they'll typically say that they really want to create a piece of content about insurance. Whilst this is understandable from the clients' perspective it can severely limit their chances of success. It's definitely worth offering up a gentle challenge at this stage—I'll often cite Red Bull, who are a great example of a company who create content based on what their consumers love, not what they sell (i.e. Red Bull sell soft drinks, but create content about extreme sports because that's the sort of content their audience love to consume). It's worth planting this idea early, but don't get dragged into a fierce debate at this stage—you'll be able to make a far more compelling argument once you've done your research and are pitching concrete ideas.

Processes, useful tools and sites

Now you have your brief, it's time to begin your research.

Given that we're looking to uncover "what websites are publishing and what's being shared," It won't surprise you to learn that I pay particular attention to pieces of content and the coverage they receive. For each piece that I think is interesting I'll note down the following:

• The title/headline
• A link to the coverage (and to the original piece if applicable)
• How many social shares the coverage earned (and the original piece earned)
• The number of linking root domains the original piece earned
• Some notes about the piece itself: why it's interesting, why I think it got shares/coverage
• Any gaps in the content, whether or not it's been executed well
• How we might do something similar (if applicable)

Whilst I'm doing this I'll also make a note of specific sites I see being frequently shared (I tend to check these out separately later on), any interesting bits of research (particularly if I think there might be an opportunity to do something different with the data), interesting threads on forums etc.

When it comes to kicking off your research, you can start wherever you like, but I'd recommend that you cover off each of the areas below:

What does your target audience share?

Whilst this activity might not uncover specific pieces of successful content, it's a great way of getting a clearer understanding of your target audience, and getting a handle on the sites they read and the topics which interest them.

• Review social profiles / feeds
  • If the company you're working for has a Facebook page, it shouldn't be too difficult to find some people who've liked the company page and have a public profile. It's even easier on Twitter where most profiles are public. Whilst this won't give you quantitative data, it does put a human face to your audience data and gives you a feel for what these people care about and share. In addition to uncovering specific pieces of content, this can also provide inspiration in terms of other sites you might want to investigate further and ideas for topics you might want to explore.
• Demographics Pro
  • This service infers demographic data from your clients' Twitter followers. I find it particularly useful if the client doesn't know too much about their audience. In addition to demographic data, you get a breakdown of professions, interests, brand affiliations, and the other Twitter accounts they follow and who they're most influenced by. This is a paid-for service, but there are pay-as-you-go options in addition to pay monthly plans.

Finding successful pieces of content on specific sites

If you've a list of sites you know your target audience read, and/or you know your client wants to get coverage on, there are a bunch of ways you can uncover interesting content:

• Using your link research tool of choice (e.g. Open Site Explorer, Majestic, ahrefs) you can run a domain level report to see which pages have attracted the most links. This can also be useful if you want to check out commercial competitors to see which pieces of content they've created have attracted the most links.
• There are also tools which enable you to uncover the most shared content on individual sites. You can use Buzzsumo to run content analysis reports on individual domains which provide data on average social shares per post, social shares by network, and social shares by content type.
• If you just want to see the most shared content for a given domain you can run a simple search on Buzzsumo using the domain; and there's also the option to refine by topic. For example a search like [guardian.com big data] will return the most shared content on the Guardian related to big data. You can also run similar reports using ahrefs' Content Explorer tool.

Both Buzzsumo and ahrefs are paid tools, but both offer free trials. If you need to explore the most shared content without using a paid tool, there are other alternatives. Check out Social Crawlytics which will crawl domains and return social share data, or alternatively, you can crawl a site (or section of a site) and then run the URLs through SharedCount's bulk upload feature.

Finding successful pieces of content by topic

When searching by topic, I find it best to begin with a broad search and then drill down into more specific areas. For example, if I had a client in the financial services space, I'd start out looking at a broad topic like "money" rather than shooting straight to topics like loans or credit cards.

As mentioned above, both Buzzsumo and ahrefs allow you to search for the most shared content by topic and both offer advanced search options.

Further inspiration

There are also several sites I like to look at for inspiration. Whilst these sites don't give you a great steer on whether or not a particular piece of content was actually successful, with a little digging you can quickly find the original source and pull link and social share data:

• Visually has a community area where users can upload creative content. You can search by topic to uncover examples.
• TrendHunter have a searchable archive of creative ideas, they feature products, creative campaigns, marketing campaigns, advertising and more. It's best to keep your searches broad if you're looking at this site.
• Check out Niice (a moodboard app) which also has a searchable archive of handpicked design inspiration.
• Searching Pinterest can allow you to unearth some interesting bits and pieces as can Google image searches and regular Google searches around particular topics.
• Reviewing relevant sections of discussion sites like Quora can provide insight into what people are asking about particular topics which may spark a creative idea.

Moving from data to insight

By this point you've (hopefully) got a long list of content examples. Whilst this is a great start, effectively what you've got here is just data, now you need to convert this to insight.

Remember, we're trying to answer the questions: "What are websites publishing, and what are people sharing?"

Ordinarily as I go through the creative content research process, I start to see patterns or themes emerge. For example, across a variety of topics areas you'll see that the most shared content tends to be news. Whilst this is good to know, it's not necessarily something that's going to be particularly actionable. You'll need to dig a little deeper—what else (aside from news) is given coverage? Can you split those things into categories or themes?

This is tough to explain in the abstract, so let me give you an example. We'd identified a set of music sites (e.g. Rolling Stone, NME, CoS, Stereogum, Pitchfork) as target publishers for a client.

Here's a summary of what I concluded following my research:

The most-shared content on these music publications is news: album launches, new singles, videos of performances etc. As such, if we can work a news hook into whatever we create, this could positively influence our chances of gaining coverage.

Aside from news, the content which gains traction tends to fall into one of the following categories:

• Proving or debunking myths: Smart people listen to Radiohead, dumb people listen to Beyonce & Mashup illustrates how country music sounds the same
• Creative stuff like this: Albums covers extended to reveal background action & Christopher Walken dancing - 50 films mashed up & 99 Red Balloons played only using red balloons
• Artist-centric stuff like this: Why Eminem is one of the most impressive lyricists ever
• Science! (Actually not science): Why we love the music we heard as teenagers & What the internet has done to your love of music

Earlier in this post I mentioned that it can be particularly tough to create content which attracts coverage and shares if clients feel strongly that they want to do something directly related to their product or service. The example I gave at the outset was a client who sold insurance and was really keen to create something about insurance. You're now in a great position to win an argument with data, as thanks to your research you'll be able to cite several pieces of insurance-related content which have struggled to gain traction. But it's not all bad news as you'll also be able to cite other topics which are relevant to the client's target audience and stand a better chance of gaining coverage and shares.

Avoiding the pitfalls

There are potential pitfalls when it comes to creative content research in that it's easy to leap to erroneous conclusions. Here's some things to watch out for:

Make sure you're identifying outliers...

When seeking out successful pieces of content you need to be certain that what you're looking at is actually an outlier. For example, the average post on BuzzFeed gets over 30k social shares. As such, that post you found with just 10k shares is not an outlier. It's done significantly worse than average. It's therefore not the best post to be holding up as a fabulous example of what to create to get shares.

Don't get distracted by formats...

Pay more attention to the idea than the format. For example, the folks at Mashable, kindly covered an infographic about Instagram which we created for a client. However, the takeaway here is not that Instagram infographics get coverage on Mashable. Mashable didn't cover this because we created an infographic. They covered the piece because it told a story in a compelling and unusual way.

You probably shouldn't create a listicle...

This point is related to the point above. In my experience, unless you're a publisher with a huge, engaged social following, that listicle of yours is unlikely to gain traction. Listicles on huge publisher sites get shares, listicles on client sites typically don't. This is doubly important if you're also seeking coverage, as listicles on clients sites don't typically get links or coverage on other sites.

How we use the research to inform our ideation process

At Distilled, we typically take a creative brief and complete creative content research and then move into the ideation process. A summary of the research is included within the creative brief, and this, along with a copy of the full creative content research is shared with the team.

The research acts as inspiration and direction and is particularly useful in terms of identifying potential topics to explore but doesn't mean team members don't still do further research of their own.

This process by no means acts as a silver bullet, but it definitely helps us come up with ideas.

---

Thanks for sticking with me to the end!

I'd love to hear more about your creative content research processes and any tips you have for finding inspirational content. Do let me know via the comments.

Image credits: Research, typing, audience, inspiration, kitteh.

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The Long Click and the Quality of Search Success

Posted by billslawski

"On the most basic level, Google could see how satisfied users were. To paraphrase Tolstoy, happy users were all the same. The best sign of their happiness was the "Long Click" — This occurred when someone went to a search result, ideally the top one, and did not return. That meant Google has successfully fulfilled the query."

~ Steven Levy. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes our Lives

I often explore and read patents and papers from the search engines to try to get a sense of how they may approach different issues, and learn about the assumptions they make about search, searchers, and the Web. Lately, I've been keeping an eye open for papers and patents from the search engines where they talk about a metric known as the "long click."

A recently granted Google patent uses the metric of a "Long Click" as the center of a process Google may use to track results for queries that were selected by searchers for long visits in a set of search results.

This concept isn't new. In 2011, I wrote about a Yahoo patent in How a Search Engine May Measure the Quality of Its Search Results, where they discussed a metric that they refer to as a "target page success metric." It included "dwell time" upon a result as a sign of search success (Yes, search engines have goals, too).

Another Google patent described assigning web pages "reachability scores" based upon the quality of pages linked to from those initially visited pages. In the post Does Google Use Reachability Scores in Ranking Resources? I described how a Google patent that might view a long click metric as a sign to see if visitors to that page are engaged by the links to content they find those links pointing to, including links to videos. Google tells us in that patent that it might consider a "long click" to have been made on a video if someone watches at least half the video or 30 seconds of it. The patent suggests that a high reachability score on a page may mean that page could be boosted in Google search results.

But the patent I'm writing about today is focused primarily upon looking at and tracking a search success metric like a long click or long dwell time. Here's the abstract:

Modifying ranking data based on document changes

Invented by Henele I. Adams, and Hyung-Jin Kim
Assigned to Google
US Patent 9,002,867
Granted April 7, 2015
Filed: December 30, 2010

Abstract

Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media for determining a weighted overall quality of result statistic for a document.

One method includes receiving quality of result data for a query and a plurality of versions of a document, determining a weighted overall quality of result statistic for the document with respect to the query including weighting each version specific quality of result statistic and combining the weighted version-specific quality of result statistics, wherein each quality of result statistic is weighted by a weight determined from at least a difference between content of a reference version of the document and content of the version of the document corresponding to the version specific quality of result statistic, and storing the weighted overall quality of result statistic and data associating the query and the document with the weighted overall quality of result statistic.

This patent tells us that search results may be be ranked in an order, according to scores assigned to the search results by a scoring function or process that would be based upon things such as:

• Where, and how often, query terms appear in the given document,
• How common the query terms are in the documents indexed by the search engine, or
• A query-independent measure of quality of the document itself.

Last September, I wrote about how Google might identify a category associated with a query term base upon clicks, in the post Using Query User Data To Classify Queries. In a query for "Lincoln." the results that appear in response might be about the former US President, the town of Lincoln, Nebraska, and the model of automobile. When someone searches for [Lincoln], Google returning all three of those responses as a top result could be said to be reasonable. The patent I wrote about in that post told us that Google might collect information about "Lincoln" as a search entity, and track which category of results people clicked upon most when they performed that search, to determine what categories of pages to show other searchers. Again, that's another "search success" based upon a past search history.

There likely is some value in working to find ways to increase the amount of dwell time someone spends upon the pages of your site, if you are already having some success in crafting page titles and snippets that persuade people to click on your pages when they those appear in search results. These approaches can include such things as:

1. Making visiting your page a positive experience in terms of things like site speed, readability, and scannability.
2. Making visiting your page a positive experience in terms of things like the quality of the content published on your pages including spelling, grammar, writing style, interest, quality of images, and the links you share to other resources.
3. Providing a positive experience by offering ideas worth sharing with others, and offering opportunities for commenting and interacting with others, and by being responsive to people who do leave comments.

Here are some resources I found that discuss this long click metric in terms of "dwell time":

• Increasing Time-on-Page Through Aesthetics (Lessons Learned from PRWeb and BuildZoom - Two Large Content Sites)
• Dwell Time: The Most Important Metric You’re Not Measuring
• Four Branding Efforts that Can Increase User Dwell Time

Your ability to create pages that can end up in a "long click" from someone who has come to your site in response to a query, is also a "search success" metric on the search engine's part, and you both succeed. Just be warned that as the most recent patent from Google on Long Clicks shows us, Google will be watching to make sure that the content of your page doesn't change too much, and that people are continuing to click upon it in search results, and spend a fair amount to time upon it.

(Images for this post are from my Go Fish Digital Design Lead Devin Holmes @DevinGoFish. Thank you, Devin!)

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Has Google Gone Too Far with the Bias Toward Its Own Content?

Posted by ajfried

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.

Since the beginning of SEO time, practitioners have been trying to crack the Google algorithm. Every once in a while, the industry gets a glimpse into how the search giant works and we have opportunity to deconstruct it. We don’t get many of these opportunities, but when we do—assuming we spot them in time—we try to take advantage of them so we can “fix the Internet.”

On Feb. 16, 2015, news started to circulate that NBC would start removing images and references of Brian Williams from its website.

This was it!

A golden opportunity.

This was our chance to learn more about the Knowledge Graph.

Expectation vs. reality

Often it’s difficult to predict what Google is truly going to do. We expect something to happen, but in reality it’s nothing like we imagined.

Expectation

What we expected to see was that Google would change the source of the image. Typically, if you hover over the image in the Knowledge Graph, it reveals the location of the image.

This would mean that if the image disappeared from its original source, then the image displayed in the Knowledge Graph would likely change or even disappear entirely.

Reality (February 2015)

The only problem was, there was no official source (this changed, as you will soon see) and identifying where the image was coming from proved extremely challenging. In fact, when you clicked on the image, it took you to an image search result that didn't even include the image.

Could it be? Had Google started its own database of owned or licensed images and was giving it priority over any other sources?

In order to find the source, we tried taking the image from the Knowledge Graph and “search by image” in images.google.com to find others like it. For the NBC Nightly News image, Google failed to even locate a match to the image it was actually using anywhere on the Internet. For other television programs, it was successful. Here is an example of what happened for Morning Joe:

So we found the potential source. In fact, we found three potential sources. Seemed kind of strange, but this seemed to be the discovery we were looking for.

This looks like Google is using someone else’s content and not referencing it. These images have a source, but Google is choosing not to show it.

Then Google pulled the ol’ switcheroo.

New reality (March 2015)

Now things changed and Google decided to put a source to their images. Unfortunately, I mistakenly assumed that hovering over an image showed the same thing as the file path at the bottom, but I was wrong. The URL you see when you hover over an image in the Knowledge Graph is actually nothing more than the title. The source is different.

Luckily, I still had two screenshots I took when I first saw this saved on my desktop. Success. One screen capture was from NBC Nightly News, and the other from the news show Morning Joe (see above) showing that the source was changed.

(NBC Nightly News screenshot.)

The source is a Google-owned property: gstatic.com. You can clearly see the difference in the source change. What started as a hypothesis in now a fact. Google is certainly creating a database of images.

If this is the direction Google is moving, then it is creating all kinds of potential risks for brands and individuals. The implications are a loss of control for any brand that is looking to optimize its Knowledge Graph results. As well, it seems this poses a conflict of interest to Google, whose mission is to organize the world’s information, not license and prioritize it.

How do we think Google is supposed to work?

Google is an information-retrieval system tasked with sourcing information from across the web and supplying the most relevant results to users' searches. In recent months, the search giant has taken a more direct approach by answering questions and assumed questions in the Answer Box, some of which come from un-credited sources. Google has clearly demonstrated that it is building a knowledge base of facts that it uses as the basis for its Answer Boxes. When it sources information from that knowledge base, it doesn't necessarily reference or credit any source.

However, I would argue there is a difference between an un-credited Answer Box and an un-credited image. An un-credited Answer Box provides a fact that is indisputable, part of the public domain, unlikely to change (e.g., what year was Abraham Lincoln shot? How long is the George Washington Bridge?) Answer Boxes that offer more than just a basic fact (or an opinion, instructions, etc.) always credit their sources.

There are four possibilities when it comes to Google referencing content:

• Option 1: It credits the content because someone else owns the rights to it
• Option 2: It doesn't credit the content because it’s part of the public domain, as seen in some Answer Box results
• Option 3: It doesn't reference it because it owns or has licensed the content. If you search for “Chicken Pox” or other diseases, Google appears to be using images from licensed medical illustrators. The same goes for song lyrics, which Eric Enge discusses here: Google providing credit for content. This adds to the speculation that Google is giving preference to its own content by displaying it over everything else.
• Option 4: It doesn't credit the content, but neither does it necessarily own the rights to the content. This is a very gray area, and is where Google seemed to be back in February. If this were the case, it would imply that Google is “stealing” content—which I find hard to believe, but felt was necessary to include in this post for the sake of completeness.

Is this an isolated incident?

At Five Blocks, whenever we see these anomalies in search results, we try to compare the term in question against others like it. This is a categorization concept we use to bucket individuals or companies into similar groups. When we do this, we uncover some incredible trends that help us determine what a search result “should” look like for a given group. For example, when looking at searches for a group of people or companies in an industry, this grouping gives us a sense of how much social media presence the group has on average or how much media coverage it typically gets.

Upon further investigation of terms similar to NBC Nightly News (other news shows), we noticed the un-credited image scenario appeared to be a trend in February, but now all of the images are being hosted on gstatic.com. When we broadened the categories further to TV shows and movies, the trend persisted. Rather than show an image in the Knowledge Graph and from the actual source, Google tends to show an image and reference the source from Google's own database of stored images.

And just to ensure this wasn't a case of tunnel vision, we researched other categories, including sports teams, actors and video games, in addition to spot-checking other genres.

Unlike terms for specific TV shows and movies, terms in each of these other groups all link to the actual source in the Knowledge Graph.

Immediate implications

It’s easy to ignore this and say “Well, it’s Google. They are always doing something.” However, there are some serious implications to these actions:

1. The TV shows/movies aren't receiving their due credit because, from within the Knowledge Graph, there is no actual reference to the show’s official site
2. The more Google moves toward licensing and then retrieving their own information, the more biased they become, preferring their own content over the equivalent—or possibly even superior—content from another source
3. If feels wrong and misleading to get a Google Image Search result rather than an actual site because:
   • The search doesn't include the original image
   • Considering how poor Image Search results are normally, it feels like a poor experience
4. If Google is moving toward licensing as much content as possible, then it could make the Knowledge Graph infinitely more complicated when there is a “mistake” or something unflattering. How could one go about changing what Google shows about them?

Google is objectively becoming subjective

It is clear that Google is attempting to create databases of information, including lyrics stored in Google Play, photos, and, previously, facts in Freebase (which is now Wikidata and not owned by Google).

I am not normally one to point my finger and accuse Google of wrongdoing. But this really strikes me as an odd move, one bordering on a clear bias to direct users to stay within the search engine. The fact is, we trust Google with a heck of a lot of information with our searches. In return, I believe we should expect Google to return an array of relevant information for searchers to decide what they like best. The example cited above seems harmless, but what about determining which is the right religion? Or even who the prettiest girl in the world is?

Questions such as these, which Google is returning credited answers for, could return results that are perceived as facts.

Should we next expect Google to decide who is objectively the best service provider (e.g., pizza chain, painter, or accountant), then feature them in an un-credited answer box? The direction Google is moving right now, it feels like we should be calling into question their objectivity.

But that’s only my (subjective) opinion.

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Keyword Research for the Modern Customer Journey

Posted by mattgratt

User behavior and customer purchase journeys are more complex today than they've ever been before.

Modern consumers – especially those purchasing high-consideration or B2B products – look across a variety of media and conduct a lot of searches. Google reports that the average B2B researcher does 12 searches before they engage on a specific brand's site. They are seeking reinforcement and comfort not just from the information about the product, but also from the opinions of other customers.

How SEOs and marketers approach keyword research has to evolve, along with this consumer behavior.

In many industries people simply search, click, and transact. In some verticals, though, user search patterns have grown more complex – they look for:

• Reviews
• Adjacent topics
• Comparisons
• And even after they've bought they look for ways to get the most out of their products

This is a model of SEO that is dramatically more complex than simply aiming to rank number one for a bunch of commercial keywords. It seeks to model a customer decision journey, optimize appropriately, give the right person the right message at the right time, and win the competitive battle before it even occurs.

This same model also allows for a modern search practitioner to create significantly more value for a client or organization. In place of simply "traffic plus conversion", the value of search becomes "awareness + branding + list building + traffic + conversion + competitive wins + reducing support costs + upsell, cross-sell, and customer success," justifying both more investment and a much larger organizational impact (and promotions or higher consulting fees for the practitioner).

In this post, we'll look at a SaaS companies as examples, as SaaS and software comprise the majority of my experience, clients, and knowledge.

However, this framework can be applied to many industries and verticals. One good example: Everette Sizemore recently wrote a great Moz post about using lead-gen tactics in ecommerce.

The considered purchase search journey (also known as a funnel)

No Problem Awareness

This is the very beginning of the process, when the prospect is fully 'at rest.' They don't know you, they don't your product, and they don't even know they have a problem.

So you might be wondering, can we even do SEO here?

I would say yes – in this case, the opportunity is audience development, and building an audience of people interested in your topic (that can subsequently convert after they've grown to know, like, and trust you).

When you think "audience development," focus on trying to get the right people to come to your website. That means building that audience and affinity with a mix of content marketing and SEO before it starts.

In this case, you'll want to target keywords that people would search for before or after they think about your product. This is one case where going for the high-volume, low-to-medium competition keywords with little purchase intent can be really helpful. (This is also the spot where that high-funnel, highly linkable content belongs.)

For example, for a website optimization software company, in this stage content might include interviews with web performance experts, general resource guides, and other content that, while it ranks for keywords with volume, doesn't yet address a specific customer pain point.

You see companies like Marketo doing this, creating guides around topics other than marketing automation but that are top of mind for their consumers, like international expansion and event marketing. Even though Marketo has some features here, they know that people interested in these topics may someday become loyal Marketo customers.

You'll want to get the right people to your site and then bring them into a permission marketing asset – be it an email list (the best), a social audience (good but less so), or a retargeting pool (generally the least preferred).

Vero is a company out in the market today that's doing a great job using email marketing teardowns, getting people who are interested in email marketing into their purchasing funnel while also building awareness and educating potential customers.

Awareness of the problem

This is the next step on the buying path. Your prospect knows they have a problem and looks for information, but doesn't really understand what you're doing yet – or even what to do to solve their problem.

This is an often-ignored opportunity. You can get ahead of people by creating landing pages and content about their problems and pain points.

Action Item: Take your target audience's pain points and try to turn them into keyword lists. What problems does your product solve? How might someone search for those?

Some of the best tools to do this are KeywordTool.io and Term Explorer, and I'll detail the process below.

For example, if you consider the website speed optimization tool again, some of the things we'd look for are:

• "Slow website"
• "Diagnosing a slow website"
• "Why is my website slow?"
• "How to speed up a website?"
• "Increase website speed"
• "Make my website fast"

And other similar phrases.

How to do it

Start by brainstorming a list of problems your product addresses, and begin by putting these keywords into something like Google suggest (or a tool like UberSuggest or KeywordTool.io):

Then, I like to pick the best ones, and bring them into Term Explorer's keyword discovery engine, for further expansion:

After that, I like to pick the ones I have a realistic chance of ranking for (based on SERP and PPC competition), and begin asking, "How can I address this question? What content – topics, ideas, and forms – will help this person, while potentially moving them a step down the funnel?"

Sometimes the answer is a landing page. Sometimes it's something like a blog post or a free tool. All of these strategies should be judged against organizational resources, keyword competitiveness, and ultimately ROI.

Solution awareness

At this stage in the funnel, prospects know what they need. Coming back to our running example, they're looking for a marketing automation solution, or a website optimization solution, or something else they can clearly define.

This is the land of the "3-letter acronyms," where people know what they're looking for and it's up to you to provide it.

For the tools used here, I would take your conventional ‘category' terms and put them into Keyword Tool and then Term Explorer to build out a larger collection of keywords, and then take a look at what has significant volume.

The other area you can work on here is "modifiers" – descriptive terms like "simple CRM system" or "secure web host."

While you can look at your original positioning documents (sometimes this will be obvious), the other approach is to use your Net Promoter Score (NPS) feedback. NPS feedback is a wonderful source for the "voice-of-the-customer" that you can incorporate into your keyword research process.

What traits do the promoters (NPS 9-10) like about your service? Those are the best modifiers to go after.

Additionally, there's another positioning exercise here in your NPS data. If you don't have a clear idea of what exactly you should be optimizing for (there are, after all, some great products that don't lend themselves to a simple description), consider asking your 9 and 10 NP scores:

"So, if a friend of yours at a conference said, 'What's (Brand Name),' how would you describe it in a sentence or two?"

This can result in great customer language to use on landing pages and in A/B tests, as well as in keyword targeting.

If your product does a lot – if you have more of a "solution" than a "tool" or simply have lot of good use cases for your tool – consider optimizing for each of those and doing additional keyword research around it.

This is where prioritization is crucial. There will be some extremely competitive categorical keywords that will never provide much value and will take tons of time and money. Ideally you can go after keywords where you can rank in a reasonable amount of time and have enough volume to move the needle for your business.

Solution comparison

If you're in an established market, you will have competition, be it direct or indirect. If you have no competition, that's generally a bad sign, and is generally a segment where SEO is not going to be the best marketing channel. Remember, SEO is a tactic to harvest demand, not to create it from scratch.

This is a part of people's search as well, and you can find these comparison terms and reach those people appropriately. These searches are often (for example) something like "marketo vs hubspot".

You can find these by simply throwing ["Your Brand" vs] into a keyword tool. For example, for our friends here at Moz, it looks like this:

These terms are interesting ones to optimize for – it generally means someone is towards the bottom of their purchase path. (It's also a great term set for affiliates to optimize for.)

Now that you understand the competitive set, how should you approach these?

Some companies are bold and make pages on their site for their comparison terms.

For example, HubSpot has a page about how they compare with Marketo:

If this isn't something you're comfortable with (many brands aren't, and in some countries with different commercial laws such comparisons are illegal – definitely a good idea to consult with your legal counsel before embarking on a strategy like this), you can think about how to enlist your community to help people make the right choice when they search for these terms.

Some of the tools in your toolbox here are:

• Affiliates and friendly bloggers who write posts about tools
• Comparison sites like G2Crowd and TrustRadius
• Q&A sites like Quora which often rank for things

As the chart below shows, B2B buyers really want independent reviews – making heavy use of the independent sites makes sense here.

ProTip: If you have NPS data, consider asking your high-NPS customers to contribute to these sites about your product, so potential users can understand what your customers that really like your product think about it.

It's also worth noting that you can step into competitor's funnels here (if you're comfortable with that.) "[brandname] alternative" is a structure that comes up in almost all SaaS searches – if you're a small, scrappy startup, you may want to create pages about being an alternative to the big goliath competitor.

Buying

Similar to the previous stage, here people are at the very bottom of the funnel, and often want to figure out a few things before they start with your product.

This is a great opportunity to deliver a great, frictionless buying experience. For example, if you sell web hosting, people might want to know if you have cpanel or an alternative system – having a page on the site that addresses this can be really important.

You can:

• Look at your brand searches in UberSuggest – I know I keep coming back to this, but this is an amazing technique. For every popular query, do you have a page or a piece of content that addresses this?
• Live chat logs – Live chat is a wonderful source of online marketing insight. If you have chat logs from a support department or wherever else, start looking through them. If you see the same questions coming up over and over again, you definitely want to have content somewhere that addresses them – it means other people have the question and aren't asking.
• Support requests and tickets – Similar to online chat logs, these support requests usually include specific language about what your customers are trying to accomplish and where they're confused. This language should not only be used to improve the use and experience of your product, but also as a keyword map for solution-focused content.

Implementation, customer success, and upselling

Now that you've gotten the customer to become, well, at least a trial customer, go get something to drink – you've had your first small victory.

But if you're in SaaS or another subscription business, it's time for coffee, not champagne, because the hard work is still in front of you. You have to earn that monthly recurring revenue.

I would look at searches around your brand – can you help someone before they ever file a ticket? Are there common issues that you can proactively address?

For example, the popular heatmap tool Crazy Egg has a frequently searched term around "Crazy Egg Behind Login". This means users are wondering if they can install Crazy Egg behind a log-in wall.

You can see that the team behind Crazy Egg have gone ahead and created a page optimized for this question – turning what would be a pre-sales question or frequent support ticket into something that can be handled effortlessly by their website.

And that's the SaaS customer life cycle.

But before I leave you, one last thought…

Thinking beyond the landing page

As SEOs we often think about marketing to keywords in a somewhat simplistic way: If a given keyword exists, our page on our website must rank for it, or it's like it never happened.

When we think that keyword searches represent one person on a mission to solve a problem and buy something – rather than "traffic" – we begin to see that strategy in a different light. And there are many terms that, frankly, we're just never going to rank for.

But just because we may not be able to rank for a given term, doesn't mean we can't influence it. Rand Fishkin talks about "Barnacle SEO," and I would suggest you take that mindset to other pages as well.

Can you:

• Make an affiliate partnership with the ranking site? This way you can still influence people, often on a pay-per-lead or acquisition basis, rather than investing in SEO. (Not the best choice, but still an arrow in your quiver.)
• Do PR and get on the site that way? This is a great way to quickly rank for things that you may never be able to rank for organically – especially if you're new.
• Contribute bylined content (occasionally known as a guest post) to the site? Very similar to the above concept – but with a branding bonus as well.
• Buy an ad placement (through GDN, a service like BuySellAds, or directly) to get you placement on that site and page, and thus the search term?

You have many options to reach searchers – too often SEOs fail to think beyond SEO and market to people rather than keywords.

In closing

As customer journeys get more complicated, we can adjust and take advantage fo the full customer cycle, from unaware to aware to solution comparison and more. And if we're creative, we can use these searche terms to not only deliver a great experience but to also capture customers early in the buying cycle, as well as lower support costs.

Good luck and good SEO'ing.

--

This post was co-authored by Matthew Gratt and Nick Eubanks.

Nick Eubanks manages digital strategy for W.L. Snook & Associates, Inc., a digital asset holding company with a focus on Ecommerce and Software. He is also a founding partner at I'm From The Future, and an active investor and advisor to online businesses including SchoolSupplies.com, YourListen, Sports Pick Predictions, and others.Nick is the owner of top-ranked SEO Blog, SEONick.net and the creator of Master Keyword Research in 7 Days.

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How to Combat 5 of the SEO World's Most Infuriating Problems - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

These days, most of us have learned that spammy techniques aren't the way to go, and we have a solid sense for the things we should be doing to rank higher, and ahead of our often spammier competitors. Sometimes, maddeningly, it just doesn't work. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand talks about five things that can infuriate SEOs with the best of intentions, why those problems exist, and what we can do about them.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard. Click on it to open a high resolution image in a new tab!

What SEO problems make you angry?

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about some of the most infuriating things in the SEO world, specifically five problems that I think plague a lot of folks and some of the ways that we can combat and address those.

I'm going to start with one of the things that really infuriates a lot of new folks to the field, especially folks who are building new and emerging sites and are doing SEO on them. You have all of these best practices list. You might look at a web developer's cheat sheet or sort of a guide to on-page and on-site SEO. You go, "Hey, I'm doing it. I've got my clean URLs, my good, unique content, my solid keyword targeting, schema markup, useful internal links, my XML sitemap, and my fast load speed. I'm mobile friendly, and I don't have manipulative links."

Great. "Where are my results? What benefit am I getting from doing all these things, because I don't see one?" I took a site that was not particularly SEO friendly, maybe it's a new site, one I just launched or an emerging site, one that's sort of slowly growing but not yet a power player. I do all this right stuff, and I don't get SEO results.

This makes a lot of people stop investing in SEO, stop believing in SEO, and stop wanting to do it. I can understand where you're coming from. The challenge is not one of you've done something wrong. It's that this stuff, all of these things that you do right, especially things that you do right on your own site or from a best practices perspective, they don't increase rankings. They don't. That's not what they're designed to do.

1) Following best practices often does nothing for new and emerging sites

This stuff, all of these best practices are designed to protect you from potential problems. They're designed to make sure that your site is properly optimized so that you can perform to the highest degree that you are able. But this is not actually rank boosting stuff unfortunately. That is very frustrating for many folks. So following a best practices list, the idea is not, "Hey, I'm going to grow my rankings by doing this."

On the flip side, many folks do these things on larger, more well-established sites, sites that have a lot of ranking signals already in place. They're bigger brands, they have lots of links to them, and they have lots of users and usage engagement signals. You fix this stuff. You fix stuff that's already broken, and boom, rankings pop up. Things are going well, and more of your pages are indexed. You're getting more search traffic, and it feels great. This is a challenge, on our part, of understanding what this stuff does, not a challenge on the search engine's part of not ranking us properly for having done all of these right things.

2) My competition seems to be ranking on the back of spammy or manipulative links

What's going on? I thought Google had introduced all these algorithms to kind of shut this stuff down. This seems very frustrating. How are they pulling this off? I look at their link profile, and I see a bunch of the directories, Web 2.0 sites -- I love that the spam world decided that that's Web 2.0 sites -- article sites, private blog networks, and do follow blogs.

You look at this stuff and you go, "What is this junk? It's terrible. Why isn't Google penalizing them for this?" The answer, the right way to think about this and to come at this is: Are these really the reason that they rank? I think we need to ask ourselves that question.

One thing that we don't know, that we can never know, is: Have these links been disavowed by our competitor here?

I've got my HulksIncredibleStore.com and their evil competitor Hulk-tastrophe.com. Hulk-tastrophe has got all of these terrible links, but maybe they disavowed those links and you would have no idea. Maybe they didn't build those links. Perhaps those links came in from some other place. They are not responsible. Google is not treating them as responsible for it. They're not actually what's helping them.

If they are helping, and it's possible they are, there are still instances where we've seen spam propping up sites. No doubt about it.

I think the next logical question is: Are you willing to loose your site or brand? What we don't see anymore is we almost never see sites like this, who are ranking on the back of these things and have generally less legitimate and good links, ranking for two or three or four years. You can see it for a few months, maybe even a year, but this stuff is getting hit hard and getting hit frequently. So unless you're willing to loose your site, pursuing their links is probably not a strategy.

Then what other signals, that you might not be considering potentially links, but also non-linking signals, could be helping them rank? I think a lot of us get blinded in the SEO world by link signals, and we forget to look at things like: Do they have a phenomenal user experience? Are they growing their brand? Are they doing offline kinds of things that are influencing online? Are they gaining engagement from other channels that's then influencing their SEO? Do they have things coming in that I can't see? If you don't ask those questions, you can't really learn from your competitors, and you just feel the frustration.

3) I have no visibility or understanding of why my rankings go up vs down

On my HulksIncredibleStore.com, I've got my infinite stretch shorts, which I don't know why he never wears -- he should really buy those -- my soothing herbal tea, and my anger management books. I look at my rankings and they kind of jump up all the time, jump all over the place all the time. Actually, this is pretty normal. I think we've done some analyses here, and the average page one search results shift is 1.5 or 2 position changes daily. That's sort of the MozCast dataset, if I'm recalling correctly. That means that, over the course of a week, it's not uncommon or unnatural for you to be bouncing around four, five, or six positions up, down, and those kind of things.

I think we should understand what can be behind these things. That's a very simple list. You made changes, Google made changes, your competitors made changes, or searcher behavior has changed in terms of volume, in terms of what they were engaging with, what they're clicking on, what their intent behind searches are. Maybe there was just a new movie that came out and in one of the scenes Hulk talks about soothing herbal tea. So now people are searching for very different things than they were before. They want to see the scene. They're looking for the YouTube video clip and those kind of things. Suddenly Hulk's soothing herbal tea is no longer directing as well to your site.

So changes like these things can happen. We can't understand all of them. I think what's up to us to determine is the degree of analysis and action that's actually going to provide a return on investment. Looking at these day over day or week over week and throwing up our hands and getting frustrated probably provides very little return on investment. Looking over the long term and saying, "Hey, over the last 6 months, we can observe 26 weeks of ranking change data, and we can see that in aggregate we are now ranking higher and for more keywords than we were previously, and so we're going to continue pursuing this strategy. This is the set of keywords that we've fallen most on, and here are the factors that we've identified that are consistent across that group." I think looking at rankings in aggregate can give us some real positive ROI. Looking at one or two, one week or the next week probably very little ROI.

4) I cannot influence or affect change in my organization because I cannot accurately quantify, predict, or control SEO

That's true, especially with things like keyword not provided and certainly with the inaccuracy of data that's provided to us through Google's Keyword Planner inside of AdWords, for example, and the fact that no one can really control SEO, not fully anyway.

You get up in front of your team, your board, your manager, your client and you say, "Hey, if we don't do these things, traffic will suffer," and they go, "Well, you can't be sure about that, and you can't perfectly predict it. Last time you told us something, something else happened. So because the data is imperfect, we'd rather spend money on channels that we can perfectly predict, that we can very effectively quantify, and that we can very effectively control." That is understandable. I think that businesses have a lot of risk aversion naturally, and so wanting to spend time and energy and effort in areas that you can control feels a lot safer.

Some ways to get around this are, first off, know your audience. If you know who you're talking to in the room, you can often determine the things that will move the needle for them. For example, I find that many managers, many boards, many executives are much more influenced by competitive pressures than they are by, "We won't do as well as we did before, or we're loosing out on this potential opportunity." Saying that is less powerful than saying, "This competitor, who I know we care about and we track ourselves against, is capturing this traffic and here's how they're doing it."

Show multiple scenarios. Many of the SEO presentations that I see and have seen and still see from consultants and from in-house folks come with kind of a single, "Hey, here's what we predict will happen if we do this or what we predict will happen if we don't do this." You've got to show multiple scenarios, especially when you know you have error bars because you can't accurately quantify and predict. You need to show ranges.

So instead of this, I want to see: What happens if we do it a little bit? What happens if we really overinvest? What happens if Google makes a much bigger change on this particular factor than we expect or our competitors do a much bigger investment than we expect? How might those change the numbers?

Then I really do like bringing case studies, especially if you're a consultant, but even in-house there are so many case studies in SEO on the Web today, you can almost always find someone who's analogous or nearly analogous and show some of their data, some of the results that they've seen. Places like SEMrush, a tool that offers competitive intelligence around rankings, can be great for that. You can show, hey, this media site in our sector made these changes. Look at the delta of keywords they were ranking for versus R over the next six months. Correlation is not causation, but that can be a powerful influencer showing those kind of things.

Then last, but not least, any time you're going to get up like this and present to a group around these topics, if you very possibly can, try to talk one-on-one with the participants before the meeting actually happens. I have found it almost universally the case that when you get into a group setting, if you haven't had the discussions beforehand about like, "What are your concerns? What do you think is not valid about this data? Hey, I want to run this by you and get your thoughts before we go to the meeting." If you don't do that ahead of time, people can gang up and pile on. One person says, "Hey, I don't think this is right," and everybody in the room kind of looks around and goes, "Yeah, I also don't think that's right." Then it just turns into warfare and conflict that you don't want or need. If you address those things beforehand, then you can include the data, the presentations, and the "I don't know the answer to this and I know this is important to so and so" in that presentation or in that discussion. It can be hugely helpful. Big difference between winning and losing with that.

5) Google is biasing to big brands. It feels hopeless to compete against them

A lot of people are feeling this hopelessness, hopelessness in SEO about competing against them. I get that pain. In fact, I've felt that very strongly for a long time in the SEO world, and I think the trend has only increased. This comes from all sorts of stuff. Brands now have the little dropdown next to their search result listing. There are these brand and entity connections. As Google is using answers and knowledge graph more and more, it's feeling like those entities are having a bigger influence on where things rank and where they're visible and where they're pulling from.

User and usage behavior signals on the rise means that big brands, who have more of those signals, tend to perform better. Brands in the knowledge graph, brands growing links without any effort, they're just growing links because they're brands and people point to them naturally. Well, that is all really tough and can be very frustrating.

I think you have a few choices on the table. First off, you can choose to compete with brands where they can't or won't. So this is areas like we're going after these keywords that we know these big brands are not chasing. We're going after social channels or people on social media that we know big brands aren't. We're going after user generated content because they have all these corporate requirements and they won't invest in that stuff. We're going after content that they refuse to pursue for one reason or another. That can be very effective.

You better be building, growing, and leveraging your competitive advantage. Whenever you build an organization, you've got to say, "Hey, here's who is out there. This is why we are uniquely better or a uniquely better choice for this set of customers than these other ones." If you can leverage that, you can generally find opportunities to compete and even to win against big brands. But those things have to become obvious, they have to become well-known, and you need to essentially build some of your brand around those advantages, or they're not going to give you help in search. That includes media, that includes content, that includes any sort of press and PR you're doing. That includes how you do your own messaging, all of these things.

(C) You can choose to serve a market or a customer that they don't or won't. That can be a powerful way to go about search, because usually search is bifurcated by the customer type. There will be slightly different forms of search queries that are entered by different kinds of customers, and you can pursue one of those that isn't pursued by the competition.

Last, but not least, I think for everyone in SEO we all realize we're going to have to become brands ourselves. That means building the signals that are typically associated with brands -- authority, recognition from an industry, recognition from a customer set, awareness of our brand even before a search has happened. I talked about this in a previous Whiteboard Friday, but I think because of these things, SEO is becoming a channel that you benefit from as you grow your brand rather than the channel you use to initially build your brand.

All right, everyone. Hope these have been helpful in combating some of these infuriating, frustrating problems and that we'll see some great comments from you guys. I hope to participate in those as well, and we'll catch you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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You Finally Achieved Content Virality! Now What?

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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Should I Rebrand and Redirect My Site? Should I Consolidate Multiple Sites/Brands? - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Making 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/redirect is right for them, and also those who are considering consolidating multiple sites under a single brand.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard. Click on it to open a high resolution image in a new tab!

To rebrand, or not to rebrand, that is the question

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're going to chat a little bit about whether you should rebrand and consider redirecting your existing website or websites and whether you should potentially consolidate multiple websites and brands that you may be running.

So we've talked before about redirection moves best practices. We've also talked about the splitting of link equity and domain authority and those kinds of things. But one of the questions that people have is, "Gosh, you know I have a website today and given the moves that Google has been making, that the social media world has been making, that content marketing has been making, I'm wondering whether I should potentially rebrand my site." Lots of people bought domains back in the day that were exact match domains or partial match domains or that they thought reflected a move of the web toward or away from less brand-centric stuff and toward more keyword matching, topic matching, intent matching kinds of things.

Maybe you're reconsidering those moves and you want to know, "Hey, should I be thinking about making a change now?" That's what I'm here to answer. So this question to rebrand or not to re, it is tough because you know that when you do that rebrand, you will almost certainly take a traffic hit, and SEO is one of the biggest places where people typically take that traffic hit.

Moz previously was at SEOmoz.org and moved to moz.com. We saw a dip in our traffic over about 3 to 4 months before it fully recovered, and I would say that dip was between 15% and 25% of our search traffic, depending on week to week. I'll link to a list of metrics that I put on my personal blog, Moz.com/rand, so that you can check those out if you'd like to see them. But it was a short recovery time for us.

One of the questions that people always have is, "Well wait, did you lose rankings for SEO since SEO used to be in your domain name?" The answer is no. In fact, six months after the move, we were ranking higher for SEO related terms and phrases.

Scenario A: Rebranding or redirecting scifitoysandgames.com

So let's imagine that today you are running SciFiToysAndGames.com, which is right on the borderline. In my opinion, that's right on the borderline of barely tolerable. Like it could be brandable, but it's not great. I don't love the "sci-fi" in here, partially because of how the Syfy channel, the entity that broadcasts stuff on television has chosen to delineate their spelling, sci-fi can be misinterpreted as to how it's spelled. I don't love having to have "and" in a domain name. This is long. All sorts of stuff.

Let's say you also own StarToys.com, but you haven't used it. Previously StarToys.com has been redirecting to SciFiToysAndGames.com, and you're thinking, "Well, man, is it the right time to make this move? Should I make this change now? Should I wait for the future?"

How memorable or amplifiable is your current brand?

Well, these are the questions that I would urge you to consider. How memorable and amplifiable is your current brand? That's something that if you are recognizing like, "Hey I think our brand name, in fact, is holding us back in search results and social media amplification, press, in blog mentions, in journalist links and these kinds of things," well, that's something serious to think about. Word of mouth too.

Will you maintain your current brand name long term?

So if you know that sometime in the next two, three, four, or five years you do want to move to StarToys, I would actually strongly urge you to do that right now, because the longer you wait, the longer it will take to build up the signals around the new domain and the more pain you'll potentially incur by having to keep branding this and working on this old brand name. So I would strongly urge you, if you know you're going to make the move eventually, make it today. Take the pain now, rather than more pain later.

Can or have you tested brand preference with your target audience?

I would urge you to find two different groups, one who are loyal customers today, people who know SciFiToysAndGames.com and have used it, and two, people who are potential customers, but aren't yet familiar with it.

You don't need to do big sample-sizes. If you can get 5, 10, or 15 people either in a room or talk to them in person, you can try some web surveys, you can try using some social media ads like things on Facebook. I've seen some companies do some testing around this. Even buying potential PPC ads and seeing how click-through rates perform and sentiment and those kinds of things, that is a great way to help validate your ideas, especially if you're forced to bring data to a table by executives or other stakeholders.

How much traffic would you need in one year to justify a URL move?

The last thing I think about is imagine, and I want you to either imagine or even model this out, mathematically model it out. If your traffic growth rate -- so let's say you're growing at 10% year-over-year right now -- if that improved 1%, 5%, or 10% annually with a new brand name, would you make the move? So knowing that you might take a short-term hit, but then that your growth rate would be incrementally higher in years to come, how big would that growth rate need to be?

I would say that, in general, if I were thinking about these two domains, granted this is a hard case because you don't know exactly how much more brandable or word-of-mouth-able or amplifiable your new one might be compared to your existing one. Well, gosh, my general thing here is if you think that's going to be a substantive percentage, say 5% plus, almost always it's worth it, because compound growth rate over a number of years will mean that you're winning big time. Remember that that growth rate is different that raw growth. If you can incrementally increase your growth rate, you get tremendously more traffic when you look back two, three, four, or five years later.

Where does your current and future URL live on the domain/brand name spectrum?

I also made this domain name, brand name spectrum, because I wanted to try and visualize crappiness of domain name, brand name to really good domain name, brand name. I wanted to give some examples and then extract out some elements so that maybe you can start to build on these things thematically as you're considering your own domains.

So from awful, we go to tolerable, good, and great. So Science-Fi-Toys.net is obviously terrible. I've taken a contraction of the name and the actual one. It's got a .net. It's using hyphens. It's infinitely unmemorable up to what I think is tolerable -- SciFiToysAndGames.com. It's long. There are some questions about how type-in-able it is, how easy it is to type in. SciFiToys.com, which that's pretty good. SciFiToys, relatively short, concise. It still has the "sci-fi" in there, but it's a .com. We're getting better. All the way up to, I really love the name, StarToys. I think it's very brandable, very memorable. It's concise. It's easy to remember and type in. It has positive associations probably with most science fiction toy buyers who are familiar with at least "Star Wars" or "Star Trek." It's cool. It has some astronomy connotations too. Just a lot of good stuff going on with that domain name.

Then, another one, Region-Data-API.com. That sucks. NeighborhoodInfo.com. Okay, at least I know what it is. Neighborhood is a really hard name to type because it is very hard for many people to spell and remember. It's long. I don't totally love it. I don't love the "info" connotation, which is generic-y.

DistrictData.com has a nice, alliterative ring to it. But maybe we could do even better and actually there is a company, WalkScore.com, which I think is wonderfully brandable and memorable and really describes what it is without being too in your face about the generic brand of we have regional data about places.

What if you're doing mobile apps? BestAndroidApps.com. You might say, "Why is that in awful?" The answer is two things. One, it's the length of the domain name and then the fact that you're actually using someone else's trademark in your name, which can be really risky. Especially if you start blowing up, getting big, Google might go and say, "Oh, do you have Android in your domain name? We'll take that please. Thank you very much."

BestApps.io, in the tech world, it's very popular to use domains like .io or .ly. Unfortunately, I think once you venture outside of the high tech world, it's really tough to get people to remember that that is a domain name. If you put up a billboard that says "BestApps.com," a majority of people will go, "Oh, that's a website." But if you use .io, .ly, or one of the new domain names, .ninja, a lot of people won't even know to connect that up with, "Oh, they mean an Internet website that I can type into my browser or look for."

So we have to remember that we sometimes live in a bubble. Outside of that bubble are a lot of people who, if it's not .com, questionable as to whether they're even going to know what it is. Remember outside of the U.S., country code domain names work equally well -- .co.uk, .ca, .co.za, wherever you are.

InstallThis.com. Now we're getting better. Memorable, clear. Then all the way up to, I really like the name AppCritic.com. I have positive associations with like, "Oh year, restaurant critics, food critics, and movie critics, and this is an app critic. Great, that's very cool."

What are the things that are in here? Well, stuff at this end of the spectrum tends to be generic, forgettable, hard to type in. It's long, brand-infringing, danger, danger, and sketchy sounding. It's hard to quantify what sketchy sounding is, but you know it when you see it. When you're reviewing domain names, you're looking for links, you're looking at things in the SERPs, you're like, "Hmm, I don't know about this one." Having that sixth sense is something that we all develop over time, so sketchy sounding not quite as scientific as I might want for a description, but powerful.

On this end of the spectrum though, domain names and brand names tend to be unique, memorable, short. They use .com. Unfortunately, still the gold standard. Easy to type in, pronounceable. That's a powerful thing too, especially because of word of mouth. We suffered with that for a long time with SEOmoz because many people saw it and thought, "Oh, ShowMoz, COMoz, SeeMoz." It sucked. Have positive associations, like StarToys or WalkScore or AppCritic. They have these positive, pre-built-in associations psychologically that suggest something brandable.

Scenario B: Consolidating two sites

Scenario B, and then we'll get to the end, but scenario B is the question like, "Should I consolidate?" Let's say I'm running both of these today. Or more realistic and many times I see people like this, you're running AppCritic.com and StarToys.com, and you think, "Boy, these are pretty separate." But then you keep finding overlap between them. Your content tends to overlap, the audience tends to overlap. I find this with many, many folks who run multiple domains.

How much audience and content overlap is there?

So we've got to consider a few things. First off, that audience and content overlap. If you've got StarToys and AppCritic and the overlap is very thin, just that little, tiny piece in the middle there. The content doesn't overlap much, the audience doesn't overlap much. It probably doesn't make that much sense.

But what if you're finding like, "Gosh, man, we're writing more and more about apps and tech and mobile and web stuff on StarToys, and we're writing more and more about other kinds of geeky, fun things on AppCritic. Slowly it feels like these audiences are merging." Well, now you might want to consider that consolidation.

Is there potential for separate sales or exits?

Second point of consideration, the potential for separate exits or sales. So if you know that you're going to sell AppCritic.com to someone in the future and you want to make sure that's separate from StarToys, you should keep them separate. If you think to yourself, "Gosh, I'd never sell one without the other. They're really part of the same company, brand, effort," well, I'd really consider that consolidation.

Will you dilute marketing or branding efforts?

Last point of positive consideration is dilution of marketing and branding efforts. Remember that you're going to be working on marketing. You're going to be working on branding. You're going to be working on growing traffic to these. When you split your efforts, unless you have two relatively large, separate teams, this is very, very hard to do at the same rate that it could be done if you combined those efforts. So another big point of consideration. That compound growth rate that we talked about, that's another big consideration with this.

Is the topical focus out of context?

What I don't recommend you consider and what has been unfortunately considered, by a lot of folks in the SEO-centric world in the past, is topical focus of the content. I actually am crossing this out. Not a big consideration. You might say to yourself, "But Rand, we talked about previously on Whiteboard Friday how I can have topical authority around toys and games that are related to science fiction stuff, and I can have topical authority related to mobile apps."

My answer is if the content overlap is strong and the audience overlap is strong, you can do both on one domain. You can see many, many examples of this across the web, Moz being a great example where we talk about startups and technology and sometimes venture capital and team building and broad marketing and paid search marketing and organic search marketing and just a ton of topics, but all serving the same audience and content. Because that overlap is strong, we can be an authority in all of these realms. Same goes for any time you're considering these things.

All right everyone, hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I look forward to some great comments, and we'll see you again next week. take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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