Sooner or later, all big public media companies go in search of a choke point, the place where they can find a leg up in terms of attention and monetization.
FACEBOOK said to you and to everyone else: Build your content here on our site, and we'll make it easy for you to effortlessly share it with your friends and their friends and their friends. Over time, of course, the clutter leads to less sharing, and now you can pay them to promote your work to the very people who used to bump into it for free. They have control of a scarce resource (attention) and they're building a business around it.
LINKEDIN approached many bloggers over the last year and asked them to contribute original posts on their site. In exchange, they'd direct lots of their readers to the content. Of course, it's not hard to see how soon it will become an isolated garden, a platform they own and can charge a toll on. They have control of a scarce resource (attention) and they're building a business around it.
GOOGLE cancelled their RSS reader because RSS is a free, unchokable service, one that's hard to put a toll on. On the other hand, when you build on their platform, you become part of their ecosystem, a click away from all sorts of revenue. They have control of a scarce resource (attention) and they're building a business around it.
Worth noting that GMAIL has figured out (acting, it seems, on behalf of users) how to use tabs to differentiate between "primary" emails and "promotions." If you're used to getting this blog by email, odds are you haven't seen it in awhile, because even though it's not a promotion, even though you signed up for it, by default, it's in your promotions tab (easy to fix, by the way, just drag one of the emails to the primary folder). While this tabbing default probably saves you from emails that are actually promotions, it also provides Gmail with a choke point for the future, because the person who controls which tab an email arrives in is powerful indeed.
I could go on about other companies and other platforms, but you get the idea.
Again and again, we see that if you're not the customer, you're the product. "Free" usually means, "you're not in charge." The race continues to be one for attention.
Tim Wu's book on the history of this process is a must-read for anyone who makes media.
However, the charts show stagnation since March. Let's take a look.
U.S. self-reported daily consumer spending was $89 in July, unchanged from the $90 of June and May. The relatively flat spending levels of the past five months are consistent with the weak GDP reports of the past three quarters and the lack of improvement Gallup finds in its Payroll to Population employment rate over the past couple of years.
Trend in Self-Reported Spending
Spending began the year at $80 in January and $83 in February. Consumers opened their wallets some more in March, spending an average of $89, reflecting the normally expected seasonal spring increase in sales.
However, consumer spending has remained basically at that level since -- in the face of what are normally positive seasonal factors such as warmer weather, home improvement projects, and spring and summer travel. Longer-term, Americans' self-reported spending is much stronger than it was from late 2008 to late 2011, but continues to trail early 2008, before the recession gained momentum.
Spending Across Income Levels Also Relatively Flat
Upper-income spending inched up to $158 in July, from $143 in June and $150 in May. But the upper-income spending data tend to be more volatile due to the smaller sample sizes involved, and the overall trend seems to be essentially flat over the past five months -- with a peak of $166 in March and a low of $140 in April.
Lower- and middle-income spending averaged $78 per day in July, similar to the $77 per day in June and May, and the $75 in March. Spending by this group in 2013 has been in a relatively narrow range, from a high of $78 last month to a low of $70 in January.
Survey Question
The survey question was "Not counting the purchase of a home or vehicle or your normal household bills, how much money did you spend or charge yesterday on all other types of purchases you may have made such as at a store, restaurant, online, or elsewhere?"
In simple terms, Gallup was checking up on self-reported consumer discretionary spending.
Conclusions
Even as Wall Street is reaching new record highs, questions remain about the strength of the Main Street economy. Gallup's self-reported spending results for July suggest the underlying economy remains fragile at best. This aligns with recent weak GDP reports, the lack of increase in full-time jobs with employers, the slight decline in economic confidence, and Friday's mixed, but also relatively weak, Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report.
The reason spending hasn't in fact declined over the past several months may be that the Federal Reserve's efforts to flood the economy with money have not only been supportive of Wall Street, but also bolstered durable goods values in general, including housing and autos.
Still, at this point, Gallup's economic data do not support the idea of a significantly improving U.S. economy in the second half of the year. In turn, this suggests retailers may be disappointed with the Back-to-School spending season.
I agree with the above conclusions, written by Dennis Jacobe, Chief Economist for Gallup.
With little or no bank lending growth, decelerating wage growth, and trend growth of real GDP per capita at 0% to negative implies the 3- and 5-year change rates of US M2+ will decelerate from 2-3% to 0-1% in the next 5-6 years as occurred during the early to late '00s in Japan.
We're not turning Japanese because we want to, and we have convinced ourselves that we won't, even though the too-big-to-fail banks and Fed are responding in precisely the manner one would expect as we, in fact, turn increasingly Japanese.
The S&P 500 is ~200% overvalued in this context in a classic "Minsky Bubble".
Japan M2
Japan M3
Japan GDP
Fed Balance Sheet vs. Stock Market
The above chart from reader Tim Wallace.
US in a Minsky Bubble?
John Hussman had a thought-provoking article this week on the The Minsky Bubble
What's fascinating about QE is that it has no transmission mechanism to the real economy except as a weak can-kicking exercise - and even then only by creating enormous distortions in pursuit of minute "wealth effects." The risk premiums of risky securities have become unsustainably compressed in the process, and the Fed's balance sheet has metastasized to $3.5 trillion - a level that would currently require a nearly $800 billion contraction just to normalize short-term interest rates by a quarter of one percent.
The central effect of QE is not on the real economy, but on financial speculation. The Fed purchases Treasury and mortgage securities, and creates new base money (currency and bank reserves) as payment. This results in a huge pool of zero-interest assets that someone in the economy has to hold at any given point in time. This zero-interest money is a "hot potato" that creates discomfort and encourages a tendency to "reach for yield" in more speculative assets. Undoubtedly, the universal attention to Fed actions has already created a mob psychology where, to use Kindleberger's words, "virtually each of the participants in the market changes his or her views at the same time and moves as a herd."
It's worth observing that the 10-year Treasury yield is also well above the weighted average interest rate since 2010 (weighting by the quantity of Fed purchases), which means that the Fed is underwater on its holdings. Bernanke himself noted at his recent Humphrey-Hawkins testimony that the recent rise in interest rates had wiped out all of the Fed's unrealized gains, though he feigned ignorance about how much the Fed would lose if interest rates increased by 100 basis points. The math is easy enough, so let's do it for him. At $3.5 trillion in assets having an estimated duration of about 8 years, against only $55 billion in capital, a 100 point increase in interest rates would wipe out the Fed's capital five times over. The Fed would probably show an insolvent balance sheet today if its holdings were actually marked-to-market.
The boom of the Minsky model is fueled by the expansion of credit. Minsky noted that 'euphoria' might develop at this stage. Investors buy goods and securities to profit from the capital gains associated with the anticipated increases in their prices. The authorities recognize that something exceptional is happening and while they are mindful of earlier manias, 'this time it's different,' and they have extensive explanations for the difference.
"The continuation of the process leads to what Adam Smith and his contemporaries called 'overtrading.' This term is not precise and includes speculation about increase in the prices of assets or commodities, an overestimate of prospective returns, and 'excessive leverage.' Speculation involves buying assets for resale at higher prices rather than for their investment income. The euphoria leads to an increase in optimism about economic growth and about the increase in corporate profits.
"A follow-the-leader process develops as firms and households see that speculators are making a lot of money. 'There is nothing as disturbing to one's well-being and judgment as to see a friend get rich.' Unless it is to see a non-friend get rich.
"Investors rush to get on the train even as it accelerates. As long as the outsiders are more eager to buy than the insiders are to sell the prices of the assets or securities increase. As the buyers become less eager and the sellers become more eager, an uneasy period of 'financial distress' follows. Other words used to describe the interval between the end of euphoria and the onset of what classic writers called revulsion and discredit (or crash and panic) are uneasiness, apprehension, tension, stringency, pressure, uncertainty, ominous conditions, fragility.
We've learned all too well that each round of QE has at least enough impact to kick the can down the road for a couple of quarters at a time, at the cost of greater distortions. As thoughtful economists like Lakshman Achuthan and value investors like Jeremy Grantham and Seth Klarman know, this has temporarily made fools out of geniuses and geniuses out of fools. So refraining from any forecast of what will happen in the near term, it's sufficient to observe that the economic data is not nearly as strong as widely perceived, and the impact of QE on stock prices does nothing to improve the underlying cash flows. The advance of recent months has only made the prospect for dismal long-term equity returns even worse. QE has no ability to improve that situation. At this point, it can only elevate the distortion and thereby worsen the outcome. It's doubtful that investors who are enjoying the thrill of recent highs will actually realize the benefit of these prices.
With respect to monetary policy, the Fed has now pushed the size of the monetary base to over 20 cents per dollar of nominal GDP. We know from a century of data that short-term interest rates are tightly linked to the monetary base.
Essentially, as the Fed creates more zero-interest money (relative to nominal GDP), cash becomes a "hot potato" and holders of cash seek alternatives, which drives down competing yields, particularly on "near-money" like Treasury bills. At present, the Fed is pushing on a string, and the entire force of Fed policy is based on the attempt to drive investors to hold securities of greater and greater risk in return for lower and lower prospective returns. All this despite decades of data that reject the notion of a material "wealth effect" from stock values to economic activity. People consume from their view of "permanent income" and do not respond to changes in the value of volatile assets - this is well established in both theory and evidence.
Note how far we have pushed the string. The Fed would have to reduce its portfolio by well over half to raise interest rates to 2%. So even if the Fed was to completely terminate new purchases of Treasury securities, that action would not be expected to raise short-term interest rates. This underscores the fact that reducing the pace of quantitative easing is not the same thing as raising the Fed's policy rates. But it should also underscore how far the Fed's policy has already gone, and how difficult it will be to normalize over time.
Frankly, I view the present course of monetary policy as reckless - not because it threatens inflation (which I don't think it will for several years), but because it diverts scarce capital away from productive investment and toward speculative activities; because it fails to act on any economic constraint that is actually binding here, so has little hope of providing the economic "support" that it purports to offer; because decades of historical evidence provide no basis to expect a material "wealth effect" from stock values to the economy; because the policy lowers hurdle rates and encourages borrowing for unproductive purposes - including stock buybacks at record highs (and there is no evidence that buybacks are a good indication of value); because it punishes the elderly on fixed incomes; because it perpetuates a bubble-bust cycle created by Fed intervention, which is not the medicine but the very poison itself; and because moving to the left on the liquidity preference curve will likely be as painful as moving to the right has been pleasant. Meanwhile, we'll continue along a studied, disciplined course over the remainder of this market cycle, considering a broad ensemble of evidence that has been validated across market cycles throughout history. Our views will change as that evidence does.
Thanks to an over-flowing cup of Fed liquidity, corporate debt maturities have not only been pushed out in time but have risen in their nominal outstandings as cheap financing was too good to ignore (especially for those firms on the bubble of failure). The problem these firms face now is, with the Fed set to Taper (and indeed tighten on rates in the next few years); the outlook of much higher bond yields will have a major impact on firms that levered up and used this period to 'survive'.
As is clear from the chart above, debt maturities [rollovers and refinancing needs] will once again surge in 2-3 years. The message once again appears to be - there's no free lunch as the Fed has merely dragged forward exuberance at the expense of dystopia in the not so distant future.
Four Questions Four Answers
Here is a short recap of all the questions asked and answered above
US in a Minsky Bubble? Yes - And one of huge magnitude as well
About to Go Japanese? Yes - Fed policies ensure that outcome
Will QE Cause Inflation? No - Not any time soon
Another Looming Credit Crunch? Yes - Corporations will not be able to roll over debts at such low rates again
Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Those of you who attended MozCon a couple weeks ago got a sneak preview of these results, but I'm guessing that few of you had a chance to fully digest them in the 14.2 seconds I spent on the slides in which I presented them. Let's dive in!
If this is the first time you've heard of the Local Search Ranking Factors, most of the background can be found on the results page itself. I'll highlight a couple of changes for this year:
As I was putting the survey together this year, I thought to myself, "You know, there's really no single 'local algorithm' at Google anymore" â€" if, indeed, there ever was one. This year is our group's first effort to help readers distinguish between the thematic signals that have more or less prevalence depending on the result type Google is showing (localized organic, pack/carousel, or maps).
Given that a large chunk of the audience for this survey over the years has been agency owners and agency representatives â€" at least judging by the emails I've received â€" I decided to try to cater to this audience a bit more this year. Guessing that most of you have already read previous surveys and understand the basics, I also asked the 35 experts to score the same factors according to what they felt made the most difference in competitive markets. So for those of you who already have the basics covered, pay attention to that second column of results.
I added personalization as a thematic signal to ask about this year. Frankly, I was surprised it wasn't considered a larger factor on mobile results. Of all the factors on the list, I think this one will be the most interesting to revisit in 2014, as searchers and experts alike become more and more familiar with the new Google Maps.
By and large, the primary factors seem to have stayed largely the same for the past couple of years:
Proper category associations
A physical address in the city being searched
Consistent, high-quality citations from sources that are:
Authoritative
Trustworthy
Industry-relevant
Your NAP information featured clearly on your website
Your location as a keyword in title tags and headlines
A smattering of reviews on both Google and third-party sites
A handful of high-quality inbound links
Though I wanted to give the other 34 experts "the floor" on the survey page itself, I do want to comment about a couple of responses I found particularly interesting:
Despite Google's massively-hyped integration of its Google Plus and Google Places platforms just over a year ago (a process that is far from complete, by the way), social signals still seem to play a relatively small role in rankings â€" just 6.3% overall. But the consensus seems to be that the place to begin would be rel=author tag implementation. This was suggested as the #22 priority in competitive markets, versus #34 as a foundational priority, and several experts mentioned it in their comments.
Perhaps the most surprising factor was that reviews from authority reviewers were rated the #3 competitive difference-maker. If you're in a competitive market, I'd encourage you to pay special attention to Google'sCityExpertsprogram, and think about checking out this Twitter/Followerwonk strategy I detailed in January.
As we move into a world where maps are becoming the local search paradigm, it's remarkable to me just how little effect (less than 25%) the primary factors in traditional SEO â€" on-page optimization and inbound links â€" are judged to have on rankings.
Meanwhile, Google continues to emphasize these factors in its localized organic results (judged by the experts to be right around 50%), which should give businesses without a physical location some measure of consolation.
As far as negative factors go, call-tracking numbers and business name keyword-stuffing continue to be some of the most egregious offenses you can make in local search.
And, if you want to know more about this year's survey, I would encourage you to sign up for Local University Advanced at SMX East coming up in just a few weeks. I'll be speaking much more about tactics you can use to win on these factors in New York!
OK, that's enough out of me for this year's survey, anyway. As I do every year, I'm eagerly anticipating the discussion of the results in the comments!
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Commerce is our goal here at Tyrell. More human than human is our motto. -Blade Runner
Those who had not heard of storytelling cast the first stone.
And those who are not thinking of it, or maybe have already begun to speak in-house or with their customers that it is necessary to give a voice to their brands, cast the second.
The question is, do we really know what "brand storytelling" means?
Do we really know why it is important for increasing brand recognition, optimizing customer retention, and (hopefully) attain that status of thought leaders in our niche that we all aspire to achieve?
Do we really understand why it is also important from an SEO point of view?
Finally, do we really know the rhetoric of storytelling â€" the laws behind a good narrative?
The truth is that everyone can tell a story, but only a few know how to tell it well and naturally. Fortunately, it is an art that can be learned.
Storytelling
Stories and irrational impulses are what change behavior. Not facts or bullet points. -Seth Godin
One of the things that surprises me most when it comes to us, the internet marketers, is that we still often tend to think analogically:
Having A, doing B, performing C, I will obtain D.
I have a product, I write some "great content," I promote it, and people will come like bees attracted to a field of flowers.
Unfortunately, things are not so anymore. To tell the truth, they were never so.
Our mistake, paraphrasing Seth Godin, is that we tend to create nothing but bullet points and present nothing but facts. We forget that our audience reacts to everything specifically because of its emotions, so we don’t really work on those emotions, which are rationalized in just a moment.
The secret of storytelling is not in its final expressions (so many in a digital era) but in the act itself of telling a story.
Telling stories is what helps human beings rationalize and understand emotions, and thus accept or refuse a statement.
For this reason, humankind has told stories since it was living in the caves of Altamira or Lascaux. Culture was transmitted though stories, legends, and myths; religions and states have been founded on stories.
The 300 Spartans fought against the immense Persian army at Thermopylae not just because Leonidas guided them or because they were the bravest warriors of ancient Greece, but especially because a mythology composed by hundreds of stories assured them they were the descendants of Heracles.
Citing the Big Fish character of Wil Bloom, "a man tells so many stories that he becomes the stories. They live on after him, and in that way he becomes immortal."
For this reason we love family stories, and for this reason we relate to brands with stories we lived while using and enjoying them.
Think for a moment about your youth, and you will notice how you can write down a never-ending list of brands you remember because of the emotions they helped you feel. Personally, if I think to when I was a teenager in the '80s, I cannot help but remember brands like Commodore, Atari, Saba (the first color television my family bought) and many others.
Neuroscience explains quite well how evolution has wired us for storytelling, as Leo Widrich of Buffer explained so well on LifeHacker.
But the most interesting conclusion neuroscience offers to us is that the brain of the storyteller and the brain of their listeners start acting in synchronization when a story is told, as the same areas of their brain start being used.
Storytelling, then, is possibly the best way to convince a person of something, whether it be voting for a candidate for president, choosing one religion over another, adhering to certain moral conduct, or buying one product rather than another.
I can already hear the distant murmur of a thousand voices saying, "But the product that I have to sell is a bolt!"
Once again, that's the shortsighted mistake of seeing only the end result and forgetting everything that led to its creation. We stop ourselves at the what and forget the why and the how.
What do you think of when I mention Red Bull? I am sure that you think about adventure, extreme sport, and a crazy guy who skydived from the stratosphere. And what if I mention Lucozade? Maybe if you are into energy drinks you know of it, but I am quite sure that many of you, as was my case, have just now heard its name for the first time.
The products are practically the same: bottles and cans of energy drinks. Red Bull, though, has been able to create stories around its brand while Lucozade has not. And people love stories that respond to their needs, desires, and dreams.
As reported by Ty Montague on Medium, Dietrich Mateschitz, the founder of Red Bull, explained the reasoning behind the tagline Red Bull gives you wings: "[it] means that it provides skills, abilities, power, etc., to achieve whatever you want to. It is an invitation as well as a request to be active, performance-oriented, alert and to take challenges. When you work or study, do your very best. When you do sports, go for your limits. When you have fun or just relax, be aware of it and appreciate it."
Red Bull, hence, proposes itself as a lifestyle and not just an energy drink. For that reason, its Brand is far more memorable than Lucozade.
Where to start
There is a world of stories hidden in the About Us and Mission pages (it's a shame that those are usually hidden in the footer menu).
The biggest mistake a marketer can make is not understanding that brands are the final expression of a company, and that a company is just something real people created in order to achieve something (which usually isn't "making money").
Let's check out a few examples:
Moz was founded because Rand Fishkin and Gillian Muessig had the vision of helping people doing better marketing.
People, who were convinced there are ideas worth spreading, have created TED Talks.
Patagonia has as its mission to "build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, and use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis."
Betabrand's mission is to "design, manufacture, and sell a stylish array of anti-nudity equipment known as "clothing."
REI's mission is to "inspire, educate, and outfit for a lifetime of outdoor adventure and stewardship."
ZenDesk's is to "help you deliver exceptional customer service."
Fitbit's mission is "to empower and inspire you to live a healthier, more active life."
Nike wants "to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world." And, one of its mottos is, "If you have a body, you are an athlete."
Missions are an expression of the values that guide a company and are the ethical basis of its stories (the how). The protagonists of those stories are not only the company's products, but also (and especially) the people who use, live with, and make those products their own.
The Blues Brothers had a mission. What about you?
The schema of brand storytelling
Even the simplest story has very sophisticated mechanisms working behind the scenes. The listeners don't always see them, but they know them and expect them to be present. If they aren't present, they won’t laugh when they are meant to laugh or cry when they are meant to cry.
In his essay Ars Poetica, the Greek philosopher Aristotle described the six elements of every story:
Plot
Character
Thought
Diction
Song
Spectacle
In more modern terms, we can translate "thought" as "theme," and "song" as "rhythm."
Plot
It is thanks to Aristotle that we usually say a plot must have a beginning, middle, and an end, and that events of the plot must causally relate to one another as being either necessary or probable. Most importantly, a plot must arouse emotion in the psyche of the audience.
In this simple scheme, the middle is especially important, because after the status quo is introduced in the beginning, during this phase we have:
The accident, which is what imperils or upsets the status quo;
The anticlimax, which is the lowest point of the story, when everything seems as if it won't be solved;
The climax, when someone or something happens that turns things around, helping the hero find a solution
After those events, the end usually represents the establishment of a new, better status quo.
From a brand storytelling point of view, the plot is the how, as in how the values of the brand (its why) responds to the needs of its audience.
For instance, using Moz as an example, the mission of helping people do better marketing is fulfilled by the creation of tools built under the spirit of the mission tenets (the TAGFEE principles), which respond to the needs of every kind of internet marketer. The community, whose knowledge encompasses every discipline of inbound marketing, responds by using those tools. This is the main plot line of Moz.
Characters and theme
Intrinsically related to the plot are the characters and the theme.
The main characters are the heroes of the stories, whose actions determine the plot of the story. The secondary ones are those who provide the main characters with information, materials, goods, services, or whatever is needed to advance the plot.
Using Moz as an example again, the main character is the user â€" maybe someone who has just started her adventure in internet marketing â€" while the secondary characters are the products and (this being the characteristic of every business with a strong, active community) the Mozzers.
Users and brands, therefore, are the characters of every brand story, with the users being the main characters.
With the users as the main characters, it is then easy to understand how important is to know them as well as possible before, during, and after the release of a product. Hence the strategic importance of personas, audience targeting, the continuous feedback from the users, and the post-sale follow-ups and growth hacking.
The theme is the universe where the plot takes place, and the laws governing that universe in brand storytelling are the tenets (for instance, the TAGFEE tenets), which make the rules with which the mission will be achieved explicit.
This universe is usually an ideal world the users would love to live in, because it offers the answers to their needs, and it is a universe that only the brand can offer them.
The brand universe can be totally mythical â€" a representation of reality as we want it.
Diction, rhythm, and spectacle
Once the plot, the characters, and the theme are set up, we can start thinking about the diction, rhythm, and spectacle.
Diction is the expression of meaning in words, and it is a consequence of the tone and style.
In brand storytelling, and here SEOs may play a great role, diction is not just how the brand talks to the users, but also the creation of brand language where the language spoken by users is enriched by those that Dan Shure brilliantly defined as Propwords.
MozCon, MozBot, Roger, Whiteboard Friday, Mozinar, Mozzers, and many others are the propwords of Moz, which are immediately understood and appropriated by the users.
Diction is what helps create a indissoluble relationship between keywords and the brand, creating the so-called branded keywords.
Rhythm is usability. When we narrate a story we always use an underlying rhythm, which helps the story flow so the listeners won't notice the rhetorical mechanisms behind the story itself.
Finally, spectacle is the organization of appearances that are simultaneously enticing, deceptive, and superficial.
The web expression of spectacle is graphic design.
Examples of brand storytelling
Dumb Ways to Die
The Metro Trains public company of Melbourne (Australia) had one thing clear: people don't pay attention to signs and recorded messages.
So, in order to ensure its message about how we all must pay attention when in the metro station was heard, and thereby diminish the cases of accidents due to distraction, Metro Trains decided to produce a song â€" Dumb Ways to Die â€" and launch it on YouTube.
What happened after is the story of maybe the best case of transmedia brand storytelling ever created until now.
Spread the TEDx, Buenos Aires
We all know about TED Talks, and maybe many of you have attended one of the community-generated events called TEDx.
Well, TED Talks had a problem in Buenos Aires: Not many people there knew what the heck a TEDx was, simply because no one had the ability to explain it to them.
So, consistent with its mission that there are ideas worth spreading, TEDx decided to use what could have been its best brand ambassadors, the taxi drivers:
NIKE â€" Find Your Greatness
NIKE has done brand storytelling since before the existence of the internet, but its "Find Your Greatness" campaign was the first held entirely without buying classic television ad spaces. Instead, it used all the possible digital channels could to make its story, based on its "if you have a body, you are an athlete" principle, touch its audience.
Oreo Daily Twist
Oreo is the classic brand that we tend to associate with little memorable moments of our daily lives. It reminds us of when we were kids and having breakfast, and the simple emotions attached to those memories is able â€" because of the way our brain works â€" to make us remember other unrelated events.
Based on this simple idea, Oreo created the Daily Twist campaign.
Conclusions
When doing brand storytelling, if we follow the principle of narrative described above, we will be able to design an ongoing conversation with our users, who â€" and this is the great difference between analogical brand storytelling and digital one â€" will start creating new stories related to the brand.
Here is where inbound marketing, in its core meaning of creating brand stories and presenting them to the right audience in the right place and at the right time, gains a bigger meaning.
And here is where branding and SEO collide, because all the stories we tell will compose our story, and all the stories we tell will help us create our unavoidable existence as an online entity (and you should already know what that means in the eyes of Google, both right now and in the future).
As Tracey Halvorsen put very well: "Today, more than ever before in the history of modern civilization, individuals [and brands â€" my annotation] are empowered with the tools to be storytellers and the technology to see their stories spread far and wide in the blink of an eye."
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This is a challenging question for many in the SEO and web marketing fields. There are hundreds of "best practices" lists for where to place keywords and how to do "on-page optimization," but as search engines have evolved and as other sources of traffic â€" social networks, referring links, email, blogs, etc. â€" have become more important and interconnected, the very nature of what's "optimal" is up for debate.
My perspective is certainly not gospel, but it's informed by years of experience, testing, failure, and learning alongside a lot of metrics from Moz's phenomenal data science team. I don't think there's one absolute right way to optimize a page, but I do think I can share a lot about the architecture of how to target content and increase the likelihood that it will:
A) Have the best opportunity to rank highly in Google and Bing
B) Earn traffic from social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, etc.
C) Be worthy of links and shares from across the web
D) Build your brand's perception, trust, and potential to convert visitors
With the help of some graphics from CreativeMarket (which I highly recommend), I created a number of visualizations to explain how I think about modern on-page optimization and keyword targeting. Let's start with a graphical overview of what makes a page optimized:
In the old days of SEO, "on-page optimization" referred merely to keyword placement. Search engines liked to see keywords in certain locations of the HTML code to help indicate a page's relevance for that query. But today, this simple approach won't cut it for two key reasons:
The relevancy and keyword-based algorithms that Google and Bing use to evaluate and rank pages are massively more complex.
Gaining a slight benefit in a keyword placement-based algorithmic element may harm overall rankings because of how it impacts people's experience with your site (and thus, their propensity to stay on your pages, link to you, or share your content socially â€" all of which are also directly or indirectly considered in ranking algorithms).
Below is a pie-chart breakdown of how the 128 SEO professionals surveyed for Moz's annual ranking factors project rated broad algorithmic elements' impact in Google:
If <15% of the rankings equation is wrapped up in keyword targeting, no wonder smart SEOs in the modern era have evolved to think more holistically. Personally, I'm happy to sacrifice "perfect" keyword placement in the title element or a URL for better user experience, a higher chance of having my content shared on social networks, or a better click-through rate in the search results.
But, for the purposes of this post, let's put some of those caveats aside and dive into the best practices for each element of a page. It may be unwise to optimize all of these purely towards search engine-based best practices, but we can temper the advice with notes on usability and user experience for visitors, too. Below, I've attempted to go tag by tag, and element by element through the keyword targeting and on-page optimization canon to expand on the more basic advice in the "Elements of an Optimized Page" graphic above.
Uniquely valuable
An optimized page doesn't just provide unique content, but unique value. What's the difference?
Unique content simply means that those words, in that order, don't appear anywhere else on the web.
Unique value refers to the usefulness and takeaways derived by visitors to the page. Many pages can be "valuable," but few provide a truly unique kind of value â€" one that can't be discovered on other pages targeting that keyword phrase.
Whenever I advise marketers on crafting pages, I ask them to put themselves in the minds of their potential visitors, and imagine a page that provides something so different and functional that it rises above everything else in its field. Here are a few of my favorite examples:
The Baby Name Wizard â€" a terrific page that provides clear value above and beyond its competition for searches around baby names.
How Much Does a Website Cost â€" Folyo surveyed their designers to create a distribution of prices that accurate, credible, and massively valuable to those seeking data on pricing.
Scale of the Universe â€" this interactive feature will take you from the tiniest parts of an atom all the way to universe-scale. No wonder it ranks for such abstract queries as "the size of things."
The Best Instant Noodles of All Time â€" The Ramen Rater has tried literally thousands of packets of instant noodles and determined these ten to be the outstanding few. I'm actually excited to try them :-)
Top Social Networks by Users â€" Craig Smith puts together an update to this list every month or two, and has compiled this invaluable resource to help those of us wondering just how big all the networks are these days. I've personally used this for numerous posts and presentations â€" it's an excellent example of creating unique value by aggregating data from varied sources (and it, deservedly, outranks stalwarts like Nielsen as a result).
Unique value is much more than unique content, and when you have a page that rises to the level that these do, social shares, links, and all the other positive associations, branding, and ranking signals are apt to follow.
Provides phenomenal UX
A user's experience is made up of a vast array of elements, not unlike the search engines' ranking algorithms. Satisfying all of these perfectly may not be possible, but reaching for a high level will not only provide value in rankings, but through second-order impacts like shares, links, and word-of-mouth.
At the most basic level, a great UX means the page/site is:
Easy to understand
Providing intuitive navigation and content consumption
Loading quickly, even on slower connections (like mobile)
Rendering properly in any browser size and on any device
Designed to be visually attractive/pleasing/compelling
Search engines still crawl the web using automated bots, and probably will for at least the next decade or more. While there have been plenty of leaps in the sophistication level of these crawlers, the best practice is not to take chances and follow some important guidelines when building pages you want engines to crawl, index, and rank reliably:
Make sure the page is the only URL on which the content appears, and if it's not, all other URLs canonicalize back to the original (using redirects or the rel=canonical protocol)
URLs should follow best practices around length, being static vs. dynamic, and being included in any appropriate RSS feeds or XML Sitemaps files
Don't block bots! Robots.txt and meta robots can be used to intelligently limit what engines see, but be cautious not to make errors that prevent them from crawling and indexing your content.
Geoff Kenyon's Technical Site Audit Checklist is still one of the best resources for those seeking more in-depth information about crawler-based accessibility.
Keyword-targeted
As I mentioned in the opening of this post, it may be the case that perfectly optimized keyword targeting conflicts with goals around usability, user experience, or the natural flow of how you write. That's OK, and frequently, I'd suggest leaning in those more user-centric directions. However, when it's possible to optimize keyword usage, you'll need some ammunition. Here's a look at the most important elements as we've observed them through time, testing, correlation, and listening to the engine's recommendations, too.
7 important keyword targeting elements (and 1 not-so-important element)
#1: Page title
Using the primary keyword phrase at least once in the page's title, and preferably as close to the start of the title tag/element as possible is highly recommended. Not only are titles key to how engines weigh relevance, they also dramatically impact a searcher's propensity to click.
Above is an example comparing some title elements for the search query "lip balm." The tag for allure.com is more compelling from the perspective of fulfilling the searcher's intent (which is likely to compare multiple blams vs. find a specific one), but it also puts the keyword in prime, eye-catching real estate on the results page. We have seen evidence and heard the engines themselves discuss the value/importance of earning clicks and preventing "pogo-sticking" (the bouncing of a visitor back to a search page after clicking a result). Optimizing for both keyword prominence AND user intent/visibility is an excellent idea.
#2: Headline
While we've seen mixed results over the years with using the H1 tag specifically for keyword placement, it's almost certainly the case that a searcher who's just clicked on a results expects to see a matching headline on the page they visit. Failure to do so may increase the odds of pogo-sticking, and our most recent rank correlations suggest that a topically relevant H1 is associated with higher rankings.
I wouldn't always require a match between the title and the H1 precisely, but they shouldn't be so dissimilar as to drive anyone who's clicked away from the result.
#3: Body text
It should come as no surprise that using your primary (and secondary, if relevant) keyword phrase(s) in the content of the page are important. Our research suggests that it's not just about raw keyword use or repetition, though. Search engines are almost certainly using advanced topic modeling algorithms to assess relevance and perhaps quality, too.
This means it's wise to make your content comprehensive, useful, and relevant as possible, not just filled with instance of a keyword. In fact, we've observed plenty of cases where the overuse of keywords resulted in a negative impact on rankings, so be judicious. If you asked a non-marketing friend to read the page, would they get the sense that a term or phrase was suspiciously prominent, sometimes needlessly so? If that's the case, you're probably overdoing it.
#4: URL
A good URL has a few key aspects, but one of those is keyword use. Not only does it help with search engine relevancy directly, but URLs often get used as anchor text around the web (mostly through copying and pasting). For example, if I link to this post using its URL, e.g. http://moz.com/blog/visual-guide-to-keyword-targeting-onpage-optimization, the phrases "keyword targeting" and "onpage optimization" appear right in the text.
Having images on a keyword-targeted page is wise for many, many reasons, not least among them is that these can help directly and indirectly with rankings. Most directly, your image has an opportunity to show up in an image search result. Granted, Google's new interface has dramatically lowered the traffic from image search, but I still find great value in having your brand name/site associated with production of useful graphics, photos, and visual elements.
For search engines, the image's title, filename, surrounding text, and alt attribute all matter from a ranking perspective. In particular, those doing SEO should know that when an image is linked, the alt attribute is treated similarly to anchor text in a text link.
#6: Internal and external links
A good page should be accessible through no more than four clicks from any other page on a site (three for smaller sites), and it should, likewise, provide useful links to relevant information on any topics that are discussed.
Some SEOs have, in the past, questioned whether linking externally, especially to sites/pages that might compete for a visitor's time/attention or a search engine's rankings is wise. I believe the nail in that coffin was delivered by Marshall Simmonds in his Whiteboard Friday Interview noting the value the NYTimes saw from their implementation of external links. Since then, search engine representatives have subtly hinted on multiple occasions that there are elements in the algorithm which reward external links to quality sites/pages.
#7: Meta description
A page's meta description isn't used directly in search engine ranking algorithms (according to representatives from Google and Bing), but that doesn't mean they're not critical. The meta description tag, if it employs the keyword query, usually shows up in the search results, and is part of what searchers consider when deciding whether to click.
As you can see from the snippet above, when keywords appear in the meta description, they also get bolded, which can help with visibility. The primary goal of a meta description should be to earn the searcher's click. Think of them like ad copy, and work to make searchers care about your page.
As you can see, while on-page features like keyword use in titles, keywords, and body text (even when measured via a more sophisticated and higher correlating model than just raw usage like our data science team did in the ranking factors) have reasonable correlations given the complexity of Google's rankings, other elements are found much more often in higher- vs. lower-ranking pages.
If social shares, brand mentions, links, and domain authority all potentially trump keyword-based factors as differentiators, marketers need to make sure we're hitting the basics of on-page, but never extending in such a way that interferes with our ability to succeed in these other avenues.
Built to be shared through social networks
Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, and dozens more social networks that are niche-focused can help earn signals that help rankings directly and/or indirectly (often through exposure to folks who might link to them).
A well-optimized page should help to make social sharing as easy and seamless as possible, including:
Using obvious social sharing buttons that are targeted to the page's audience. Don't just list every network on the web â€" be empathetic and predictive of what your visitors are likely to employ.
Craft URLs that are short and descriptive so that copying/pasting (for those who prefer) is painless, and whenever/wherever those links appear they provide a good UX for those seeing them. This is particularly important across more niche social sites, forums, and Facebook/Google+ (which use full URLs if the length is short rather than the condensed versions that Twitter uses).
Make content that has inherent viral value. Think about a social influencer and ask yourself, "would I share this page if I came across it?" Find ways to make that answer yes. One of the best is to build pages that will make social sharers themselves look good to their audiences (either because the page helps promote them directly/indirectly or because the unique value is so compelling, their followers/fans will be indebted to them for finding it).
If possible and relevant, employ features like Twitter Cards and Facebook's OpenGraph markup to get the additional benefits on those networks.
Given how the reach of social networks have grown, how well social shares correlate positively to higher search rankings, and how those correlations have risen over time, there's a lot of value in making sure your pages have an opportunity to perform socially.
Multi-device ready
Although it was called out in the UX section, this principle is worthy of its own headline due to the increasing diversity of devices, browsers, and screen sizes. Mobile use isn't just critical for users "on the go." Many are using mobile or tablets to browse at home, at work, and as a replacement for laptop/desktop. And they're not just consuming â€" they're sharing! Social sharing in particular is a huge part of mobile & tablet functions, which means that if you're not optimized for all devices, you're missing critical opportunities for amplification to a broader audience.
Inclusive of authorship, metadata, schema, and rich snippets
There are a vast array of options that provide additional markup that engines may employ in their listings. Rather than try to list all of them, I'll link to resources with more information on each:
Google offers the rel=author and rel=publisher options to display a profile/brand image and details alongside results.
Bing has a similar service called "linked pages" to show profiles with results.
My recommendation is to apply those that both match the opportunities provided by the engines and the techniques that will give value to your potential visitors. Be cautious of going overboard â€" there's a bit of rich snippet spam that serves only to leave a bad taste in searchers' mouths and may hurt your reputation or rankings with the engines themselves, too.
Choosing how to optimize
One important takeaway from this post should be that modern on-page SEO is about juggling competing priorities. In general, my recommended ordering of those priorities is as follows:
Create a page that is uniquely valuable to your targeted searchers.
If at all possible, make the page likely to earn links and shares naturally (without needing to build links or prod people).
Balance keyword targeting with usability and user experience, but never ignore the critical elements like page titles, headlines, and body content at the least.
There's no such thing as a "perfectly optimized" page, but I took a stab at drawing up the mythical beast anyway:
Over time, what's "perfect" might change, and new services, platforms, and areas of optimizational opportunity could arise. But for the past few years (notwithstanding some newer tactics like Google's rel=author), the model described in this post has held relatively stable. The "O" in SEO is getting broader, and I think that's a wonderful thing for marketers of all stripes. Targeting an algorithm instead of people is far worse than hitting both birds with the same handful of optimization stones.
p.s.: If you have feedback or suggestions on items to include, please feel free to suggest them in the comments.
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