Wondering how video can support your sales process? Looking for tips on how to use video in your marketing funnel? To explore how video can turn leads into customers, I interview Marcus Sheridan. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Posted by randfish
"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat its mistakes" — it's a quote that's actually quite applicable when it comes to writing for SEO. Much of the advice given to copywriters, journalists, editors, and other content creators for SEO writing is dangerously out of date, leaning on practices that were once tried and true but that could now get your site penalized.
In this edition of Whiteboard Friday, we hope you enjoy a brief history lesson on what should be avoided, what used to work and no longer does, and a brief 5-step process you should start using today for writing content that'll get you to the front of the SERPs.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video TranscriptionHowdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about writing for SEO and what that means in 2018.
So writing for SEO has had a long history, and it meant something many years ago that it does not mean today. Unfortunately, I see a lot of bad advice, terrible advice out there for journalists and editors and authors of all kinds about what you need to do in terms of writing for SEO, meaning writing to get you to the top of search engines.
Now, let's be clear, some of this stuff is mired in pure mythology. But some of it is mired in historical fact that just hasn't been updated. So let's talk about what writing for SEO used to be back in 2001, how it evolved in sort of the middle era of 2008, let's say, and then what it means today in 2018.
So, back in the day, writing for SEO did mean things like...
I. Keyword stuffing
If you wanted to rank highly in early search engines, especially the late '90s into the early 2000s, keyword stuffing was a real tactic that really did have effectiveness. So SEOs would cram keywords into all sorts of tags and locations.
II. They would use and reuse a bunch of different variants, slight keyword variants
So if I'm targeting the word blue watches, I would have blue watch, blue watches, blue watch accessory, blue watch accessories, blue watches accessory, blue watches accessories, ridiculous little variants on plurals because the search engines were not great at figuring out that all these things sort of had the same intent and meant the same thing. So raw, rough keyword matching, exact keyword matching was part of SEO.
III. Keyword use in every tag possible
If there was a tag, you'd cram keywords into it.
IV. Domain name and subdomain keyword use
So this is why you saw that brands would be outranked by, to use our example, blue-watch-accessories.bluewatchaccessories.info, that kind of silly stuff would be ranking. Some of it even maintained for a while.
V. SEO writing was writing for engines and then trying not to annoy or piss off users
So, a lot of the time, people would want to cloak. They'd want to show one set of content to the search engines and another set to searchers, to actual users, because they knew that if they showed this dense, keyword-stuffed content to users, they'd be turned off and they wouldn't find it credible and they'd go somewhere else.
"Writing for SEO" in 20082008, we evolve on a bunch of these fronts, but not all of them and certainly not perfectly.
I. Keywords are still important in important locations
II. Exact matching still matters in a lot of places. So people were crafting unique pages even for keywords that shared the same intent.
Blue watches and blue timepieces might have two different pages. Blue watch and blue watches could even have two separate pages and do effectively well in 2008. 2018, that's not the case anymore.
III. Domain names were definitely less powerful, subdomains more so, but still influential
They still had some play in the engines. You still saw a lot of debates back in '08 about whether to create a keyword-rich domain.
IV. Since links in 2008 were overwhelmingly powerful rather than on-page signals, writing in order to get links is incredibly prized
In fact, it still is, but we'll talk about the evolution of that a little bit.
"Writing for SEO" in 2018So now let's jump another decade forward. We're in 2018. This year, what does writing for SEO mean? Well, a bunch of things.
I. Solving the searcher's query matter most -- writing that doesn't do this tends not to rank well (for long)
Because engines have gotten so much better, Google in particular, but Bing as well, have gotten so much better at essentially optimizing for solving the searcher's task, helping them accomplish the thing that they wanted to accomplish, the writing that does the best job of solving the searcher's task tends to be the most highly prized. Stuff that doesn't, writing that doesn't do that, doesn't tend to rank well, doesn't tend to rank for long. You can sometimes get to the top of the search results, but you will almost certainly invariably be taken out by someone who does a great job of solving the searcher's query.
II. Intent matching matters a lot more in 2018 than exact keyword matching.
Today, no credible SEO would tell you to create a page for blue watch and blue watches or blue watch accessories and blue watch accessory or even blue timepieces and blue watches, maybe if you're targeting clocks too. In this case, it's really about figuring out what is the searcher's intent. If many keywords share the same intent, you know what? We're going to go ahead and create a single page that serves that intent and all of the keywords or at least many of the keywords that that intent is represented by.
III. Only a few tags are still absolutely crucial to doing SEO correctly.
So SEO writing today, there are really only two that are not very fungible. Those are the title element and the body content. That's not to say that you can't rank without using the keyword in these two places, just that it would be inadvisable to do so. This is both because of search engines and also because of searchers. When you see the keyword that you search for in the title element of the page in the search results, you are more inclined to click on it than if you don't see it. So it's possible that some click-baity headline could outrank a keyword-rich headline. But the best SEO writers are mixing both of those. We have a Whiteboard Friday about headline writing on just that topic.
A few other ones, however, a few other tags are nice to have in 2018 still. Those include:
Headline tags (the H1, the H2),
URL field, so if you can make your URL include the words and phrases that people are searching for, that is mildly helpful. It's both helpful for searchers who see the URL and would think, "Oh, okay, that is referring to the thing that I want," as well as for people who copy and paste the URL and share it with each other, or people who link with the URL and, thus, the anchor text is carried across by that URL and those keywords in there.
The meta description, not used for rankings, but it is read by searchers. When they see a meta description that includes the words and phrases that they've queried, they are more likely to think this will be a relevant result and more likely to click it. More clicks, as long as the engagement is high, tends to mean better rankings.
The image alt attribute, which is helpful both for regular search results, but particularly helpful for Google Images, which, as you may know from watching Whiteboard Friday, Google Images gets a tremendous amount of search traffic even on its own.
IV. Employing words, phrases, and concepts that Google's identified as sort of commonly associated with the query
This can provide a significant boost. We've seen some really interesting experimentation on this front, where folks will essentially take a piece of content, add in missing words and phrases that other pages that are highly ranking in Google have associated with those correct words and phrases.
In our example, I frequently use "New York neighborhoods," and a page that's missing words like Brooklyn, Harlem, Manhattan, Staten Island, that's weird, right? Google is going to be much more likely to rank the page that includes these borough names than one that doesn't for that particular query, because they've learned to associate that text with relevance for the query "New York neighborhoods."
What I do want to make clear here is this does not mean LSI or some other particular tactic. LSI is an old-school, I think late '80s, early '90s computer tactic, software tactic for identifying words that are semantically connected to each other. There's no reason you have to use this old-school junk methodology that became like pseudoscience in the SEO world and had a recent revival. But you should be using words and phrases that Google has related to a particular keyword. Related topics is a great thing to do. You can find some via the Moz Bar. We did a Whiteboard Friday on related topics, so you can check that out.
V. The user experience of the writing and content matters more than ever, and that is due to engagement metrics
Essentially, Google is able to see that people who click on a particular result are less likely to click the back button and choose a different result or more likely to stay on that page or site and engage further with that content and solve their whole task. That is a good sign to Google, and they want to rank more of those.
A brief "SEO writing" process for 2018So, pragmatically, what does this history and evolution mean? Well, I think we can craft a brief sort of SEO writing process for 2018 from this. This is what I recommend. If you can do nothing else, do these five steps when you are writing for SEO, and you will tend to have more success than most of your competition.
Step 1: Assemble all the keywords that a page is targeting
So there should be a list of them. They should all share the same intent. You get all those keywords listed out.
Step 2: You list what the searchers are actually trying to accomplish when they search those queries
So someone searched for blue watches. What do they want? Information about them, they want to see different models, they want to know who makes them, they want to buy them, they want to see what the costs are like, they want to see where they can get them online, probably all of those things. Those are the intents behind those queries.
Step 3: Create a visual layout
Here's going to be our headline. Here's our subheadline. We're going to put this important key concept up at the top in a callout box. We're going to have this crucial visual next up. This is how we're going to address all of those searcher intents on the page visually with content, written or otherwise.
Step 4: Write first and then go add the keywords and the crucial, related terms, phrases, top concepts, topics that you want into the page
The ones that will hopefully help boost your SEO, rather than writing first with the keywords and topics in mind. You can have a little bit of that, but this would be what I suggest.
Step 5: Craft the hook, the hook that will make influential people and publications in this space likely to amplify, likely to link
Because, in 2018, links still do matter, still are an important part of SEO.
If you follow this and learn from this history, I think you'll do a much better job, generally speaking, of writing for SEO than a lot of the common wisdom out there. All right, everyone. Look forward to your thoughts in the comments. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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Beginning February ninth, the neglected cable boxes that occupy our living rooms will get some much-needed attention. All month, Americans will switch on the tube to ignite dormant dreams of snow-dusted Olympic fame.
Or, if you’re like me, with no cable to speak of, you’ll frantically search the world wide web for Olympic coverage. Thankfully, sports networks are leaders in the global adaptation to digital.
With the rise of social media, coverage of the Winter Olympics has become a complicated, all-hands-on-deck kind of effort. Athletes, sponsors, reporters, publishers, and schools duke it out to earn a rare piece of the highly topical, keyword-specific pie. Therefore, Olympic content is everywhere, nearly impossible to avoid.
Thanks to my time at Indiana University, I got a peek into this media frenzy. The 2016 Summer Olympic Games presented an amazing opportunity for the school; we had over 15 student athletes competing. For weeks, everyone wanted a piece of the fame our students garnered.
One such athlete, Lilly King, became a particularly exciting target. King won two Olympic Gold Medals after wagging her finger at “Russian drug cheat Yulia Efimova,” confirming her title as an Olympic celebrity.
Consequently (and predictably), every one of IU’s social media posts about Lilly King saw exceptional engagement, such as the post below:
Congratulations to Lilly King. The IU Olympian won the gold medal for Team USA in the 100 breaststroke with an Olympic record time of 1:04.93!
Posted by Indiana University on Tuesday, August 9, 2016
While IU, a public university, could not comment about King’s famous finger wag, we undoubtedly benefited from the spunk, talent, and dignity of this record-holding athlete. In short, King helped Indiana University to a healthy slice of the Olympic pie. That’s a lot of responsibility for a 19-year-old student, right?
With insider access into the inner workings of NCAA-regulated collegiate sports coverage, I’m happy to report that King received social media training—to protect her privacy, her reputation, and the reputation of the university she represents.
Social media training is imperative in situations like these. Social platforms enable athletes to share their unfiltered thoughts, publically, independent of traditional media coverage restrictions. During the 2016 Olympic Games, I watched as Lilly King’s Twitter following grow from a few hundred to tens of thousands. Now, any athlete can build their own fame, reputation, and influence through their social media platforms. Articles like the one below are widespread.
As the 2018 Olympic Games quickly approach, I am nearly as excited for the Twitter arguments as the competitions. Tweets will fly; reputations will be built and broken; influencers will be born.
While sports networks are predicting athletes’ positions on the podium, I’d like to provide you with a forecast tailored to those of the digital marketing persuasion.
1. TV Viewership Will Be at an All-Time LowThe majority of young adults (under 30) are live-streamers. The funny thing about young people is that we get older, start families, and pass on media habits to said families. For sports coverage, millennials will turn to the web. How networks will adapt continues to baffle me.
2. Sponsors Will Get WiseAs I’ve said, athletes are now responsible for building their own following and reputations. No longer will sponsors look to simply the most talented athletes; they will look to socially engaging athletes.
Since the 2016 Olympic Games, I’ve kept a close eye on track athlete and social media influencer Sage Watson. Watson has grown and maintained an engaged audience through her strong voice and consistent storytelling. Through her Instagram account, fans can know her, trust her, and vicariously live through her. It is no wonder Nike was quick to sponsor her following her graduation from University of Arizona.
A post shared by Sage Watson (@sagewatson) on Jan 10, 2018 at 2:47pm PST
Sponsors no longer want simply the most talented Olympic athletes. They want socially engaging athletes.
Click To Tweet
3. Terrible Advertising Will Happen
The U.S. Olympic Committee is incredible at identifying and crushing any advertisements that unlawfully allude to the Olympic Games. That said, many businesses will make attempts to piggyback on the hoopla surrounding the Olympics, no matter how completely unrelated their products or offerings. Bad advertisers just can’t resist the potential rewards, whether the message is true to their brand identity or not.
4. Political Discourse Will DominateThese Games will undoubtedly be highly political. Russia is banned. The Koreas . Will Americans athletes kneel during the anthem? Online conversation will surround many heated topics. Unfortunately, I predict this will be a rocky year, but hopefully an enlightening one.
5. Heart Will Be Ever-AppreciatedIn my opinion, the most extraordinary outcome of athletes’ access to social media fame is the widespread sharing of gratitude, inspiration, and pride. Feel-good moments will be just a Tweet away. I personally can’t wait to see the outpouring of support and love the world will feel, and now voice, to athletes of all nations.
Let the games begin!
Although the field of SEO is in a state of constant change, keyword research nevertheless remains a crucial part of the process of optimization of your blog content for search engines. When thinking about the proper keywords, the best way to find them is to figure out what your clients would search for in order to find the services you are offering.
Of course, different people might use different keywords when they are researching or trying to find some content. Because of this finding, ideal keywords that are guaranteed to be used by clients might seem like a daunting and maybe even impossible task.
Luckily, there are some simple steps that you can follow to take your research to the next level. So, let’s focus on how you can achieve that with the goal to target more clients and get better results starting with your next blog post!
The Journey, a Social Media Examiner production, is an episodic video documentary that shows you what really happens inside a growing business. //http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_ZLFF_v_y8 Watch The Journey: Episode 15 Episode 15 of The Journey follows Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner, as he continues to pursue what many will see as an impossible goal: to
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Do you want more business from your blog posts? Looking for tips to qualify leads more effectively? In this article, you’ll discover how to warm up and convert prospects by turning blog posts into a three-part video funnel. Building Awareness, Engagement, and Conversion Simon Sinek famously stated, “People do business with people.” Trust is built
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Posted by kerryjones
Is there a formula for wildly successful content marketing campaigns? It’s a question we ponder a lot at the Fractl office.
We do have our own tried-and-true formula that we continually tweak based on our observations of what does and doesn’t succeed. To help us spot trends that shape this formula, we collect data about every content marketing campaign we create for our clients. But we don’t keep this data to ourselves – sharing our internal data with the marketing community helps others create better content based on what’s worked for us.
We did this a few years ago using a set of 345 campaigns, and now that we have double the number of our campaigns under our belt, we dug into our data again. This time, the sample size was 759 campaigns that launched between 2013 and 2017.
As part of our analysis, we looked at the relationship between campaign performance, measured by the number of placements and social shares a campaign earned, and the campaign’s attributes, including emotionality, the target audience size, and timeliness. "Placement" or “pickup” refers to any time a campaign received media coverage. In link building lingo, a placement may refer to a link that is dofollow, cocitation or nofollow; we also count client mentions without links as placements.
Campaign performance was grouped into three buckets:
Our campaigns that were either emotionally resonant or surprising were significantly more likely to yield a high volume of media placements and social shares than content that does not include these elements.
The chart below shows the prevalence of three factors across the different campaign performance groups.
As you can see, emotions and an element of surprise were far more common in campaigns that performed extremely well.
There wasn’t as great of a difference when it came to whether or not campaigns were broadly appealing. We believe on its own this isn’t enough to hit a home run, but it’s telling that this trait was nearly ubiquitous among the top performers:
Let’s take a closer look at how each of these three factors correlated to campaign performance.
An emotional hookCampaigns with an emotional hook earned 70% more media pickups and 127% more social shares on average than campaigns that lacked emotional resonance.
Creating an emotional response in viewers is crucial for driving sharing and engagement. This is clearly demonstrated by our campaign data, with emotional resonance being a key factor in our top campaigns and emotional campaigns performing far better on average than non-emotional campaigns.
In our research on viral emotions, we found certain emotional reactions are best for getting content to spread:
Surprising campaigns earned 39% more media pickups and 108% more social shares than campaigns that weren’t surprising.
Surprise doesn’t necessarily mean shocking. Novelty, or newness, can also elicit feelings of surprise; incorporating information that isn’t widely known or new data are effective ways to play into this because it triggers a feeling of “I didn’t already know this,” which draws interest and encourages sharing the new information with others.
Furthermore, surprise or novelty can greatly improve your outreach efforts. Since newness is a pillar of newsworthiness, publishers are eager to get their hands on exclusive stories. This is why offering the media something never published before is essential for effective PR outreach.
Broad appealAs I mentioned previously, broad appeal on its own isn’t going to have a huge impact on campaign success. However, universal appeal still plays a role in getting a campaign in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Campaigns that appealed to a wide audience earned 38% more media pickups and 96% more social shares on average than campaigns created for a niche demographic.
Creating broadly appealing versus niche-focused content is a choice of fishing in a big pond or a little pond. You’ll have a larger volume of outreach targets and greater potential audience reach with a broadly appealing campaign. On the other hand, niche campaigns have limited reach because they’re much harder to get picked up by widely-read general news sites that want stories with mass appeal. Instead, you can only pitch the handful of publishers that cover the niche topic.
For this reason, we often create tangential content, or content about a popular topic related to a client’s vertical, for many of our clients whose goals include a high volume of links and media mentions. This being said, it’s possible to get a ton of media attention and engagement with niche-focused campaigns, which I explore later in this post.
When a combination of emotions, surprise, and broad appeal was present in a campaign, it supercharged the results.So we know emotions and surprise work well on their own. However, when these factors were paired together with a broadly appealing topic, we saw even greater success.
Campaigns that were both emotional and surprising earned 199 pickups and 23,730 social shares on average. Incorporating all three made the biggest impact on the average results; campaigns that were emotional, surprising, and broadly appealing earned 207 pickups and 25,017 social shares on average.
We know audiences are drawn to emotionally resonant, universally appealing, and surprising content, but these traits play a big role in campaign success before the public even sees the content – they’re crucial for getting your outreach pitch read and acted upon.
Content with these three traits has strong headline potential, which publishers immediately pick up on when they read a pitch. In other words, it’s going to be easy for publishers to write an irresistible headline if they publish your campaign. Without a great headline, it’s much harder to draw clicks and views to a story, which are required initial steps for getting others to link to and share the content.
Can’t picture how a single headline can be emotional, surprising, and have mass appeal? Here are examples of headlines from our campaigns that hit all of these factors:
If you were browsing your social feeds and came across any of those headlines, they’d be hard to resist clicking, right? Here’s a look at the campaign behind that last headline.
Campaign example: The surprising reason why most men cheatClient vertical: Online pharmacy
The campaign
We went straight to the source to conduct a survey of people who have cheated on a significant other. This was clearly an emotionally charged subject that would intrigue a large segment of the population. Furthermore, the campaign offered a fresh take on a topic commonly discussed to the point of oversaturation by big publishers that cover relationships. By coming at it from from the angle of “from the mouth of a cheater,” which isn’t often covered and definitely not in a data-centered way, the campaign had a strong surprise and novelty factor that went over well with both publishers and audiences.
The results? 175 placements, including features on Fox News, The New York Post, Cosmopolitan, and Men’s Health, and nearly 40,000 social shares.
Pro Tip: When you pitch an idea to a publisher, they picture potential headlines. It shouldn’t be overly complicated to communicate that your idea is emotional, surprising, and broadly appealing. Try the headline test: Consider how all three factors would fit into a headline by writing a few mock headlines that concisely capture the selling points of the campaign. Does it make for the perfect eye-catching headline?
How you can still score big without emotions and surpriseOf course, there are exceptions to the rules. Here’s how you can still earn a lot of media pickups and social shares with content that’s neither emotional nor surprising.
Exception #1: Target one or more niche groupsOur high performing campaigns that appealed to a certain demographic or fan base were less likely to be emotionally resonant or surprising than those that appealed to a wide audience.
Successful niche campaigns were mostly educational and informative rather than purely entertaining, and many of these campaigns were data heavy. It’s no surprise that passionate niche groups are eager to learn more about the topics they care about.
Campaign example: The rise of the freelance workerClient vertical: HR and payroll services
The campaign
We analyzed 400,000 freelancer resumes to uncover new insights about the freelancing economy. While this topic isn’t universally appealing, it did have overlapping appeal within several niche audiences, such as HR and recruitment, freelance employees, and the general business community, which led to 269 placements including Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Fox News, plus more than 20,000 social shares.
Pro Tip: If your campaign topic appeals to several niche groups, you can increase your chances for media coverage on a variety of niche publishers, thus expanding your potential reach.
Exception #2: Incorporate "geo-bait"Based on our data, we found that campaigns that were absent of an emotional hook or element of surprise but did have a strong geographic angle still performed quite well.
Since our identities are closely tied to where we come from and where we live, campaigns based on geographical areas (countries, cities, states, regions) play into the audiences’ egos. In Fractl terms, we call this “geo-bait.”
Campaign example: Which states use the most solar power?Client vertical: Home improvement
The campaign
Using data from the US Department of Energy, we looked at which states were producing the most solar energy and installing the most solar panels. There wasn’t much surprising data here, as environmentally progressive states topped the rankings (hello, California), but incorporating fresh data and featuring a ranking of solar-friendly states helped this campaign earn more than 200 placements. In addition to the geo-bait angle, this topic had strong appeal to the environmental niche, which helped it get picked up by green publishers.
Pro Tip: Geo-bait campaigns are especially appealing when they compare or rank multiple places.
Other key factors that affect campaign performanceAdding three magical elements into your content won’t automatically lead to success. A handful of other variables can make or break your campaign, some of which will be out of your control. So which variables in your control can increase your chances for success?
Exceptional outreachEven the best content will fail to get any coverage if your outreach game is weak. This means absolutely no mass pitching your campaign to a long list of publishers. Not only do you need to choose the right targets for outreach (a.k.a. publishers that actually publish stories about your campaign topic), you need to choose the right person at that publication (a.k.a. the person who regularly writes about the topic). That way, you're not alienating writers with irrelevant pitches. You also need to send compelling, personalized outreach pitches to each target (don’t worry, we have a checklist for that). By sending solid pitches, they're more likely to open your emails in the future.
CredibilityYou’ll quickly lose trust with publishers (and audiences) if your campaign includes questionable data and inaccuracies. Make credibility a top priority for your work and you’ll have an easier time becoming a trustworthy content creator and maintaining your trustworthiness in the long term.
First, you need to only use authoritative sources and data in your campaign.
What’s a good source?
What’s not a good source?
Second, your campaign won’t be trusted if it’s riddled with errors. Our editorial team ensures campaigns don’t get released into the wild with glaring grammatical and factual mistakes. Include editorial guidelines and a quality assurance check within your production process to keep campaigns error-free.
One final word of advice: evaluate whether a campaign concept will be emotionally resonant, surprising, and broadly appealing before you move it into production. Our ideation guide sheds light on how we do this by scoring our ideas based on a 5-point grading rubric.
What trends have you noticed about your most successful content marketing campaigns? I’d love to hear how your observations confirm or differ from what I’ve shared.
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