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How to Provide Unique Value in Your Content - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 08 Jan 2015 04:15 PM PST

Posted by randfish

Marketers of all stripes are hearing more about providing unique content and value to their audiences, and how that's what Google wants to show searchers. Unique content is straightforward enough, but what exactly does everyone mean by "unique value?" What does that actually look like? In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand illustrates the answer.

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

Video transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat a little about providing unique value in your content. Now I've been known to talk a lot about what you need to do to get to the kind of uniqueness in content that Google wants to index, that searchers want to find, that is likely to earn you amplification and links and all the signals that you'll need to perform well in the rankings, and to perform well on social media and in content marketing of all kinds.

The challenge has been that I've seen a lot of people adopt this attitude around, yes, unique content, unique value, but merge those two and not view them as two different things and really not understand what I mean when I say unique value at all, and it's not just me. A lot of the content marketing and SEO industries are talking about the need for unique value, and they may say other words to describe that. But unfortunately, as an industry, we've not yet coalesced around what that idea means, and so this Whiteboard Friday is to try and explain exactly what a lot of these best practices and experts are talking about when they say "unique value."

Modern criteria for content

So let's start by talking about our modern criteria for content, and I have a slide that I like to show a lot that kind of displays this, and many other folks in the field have as well. So if I'm going to be producing content, I need to meet these five criteria.

One of a kind

One of a kind is basically what we meant when we said old unique content, meaning that the engines have never seen those words and phrases and numbers and visuals and whatever in that order on a page on the web previously. It's been written for the first time, produced and published for the first time. Therefore, it is one of a kind, doesn't appear elsewhere.

Relevant

Relevant meaning it contains content that both searchers and engines interpret as on topic to that searcher's query or their intent. Sometimes you can be on topic to the query, meaning you've used the words and the phrases that the searcher used, and not be on topic to their intent. What did they actually want to get out of the search? What question are they trying to answer? What information are you trying to get?

Helpful

This one's pretty obvious. You should resolve the searcher's query in a useful, efficient manner. That should be a page that does the job that they're hoping that that content is going to do.

Uniquely valuable

This is the one we're going to be talking about today, and what we mean here is provides information that's unavailable or hard to get elsewhere -- I'm going to dive into that a little bit more --

Great user experience

This means it's easy and pleasurable to consume anywhere on any device.

You meet these criteria with your content and you've really got something when it comes to a content marketing strategy or when it comes to content you're producing for SEO. This is a pretty solid checklist that I think you can rely on.

Unique value and you (and your website)

The challenge is this one. Uniquely valuable has been a really hard concept for people to wrap their heads around, and so let's dig in a little more on what we mean when we say "unique value."

So these are kind of the three common criteria that we mean when we say "unique value," and I'm actually going to show some examples as well.

1) Massive upgrade in aggregation, accessibility and design

The first one is a massive upgrade versus what's already available on the web in aggregation, accessibility, and/or design. Meaning you should have someone who views that content say, "Wow. You know, I've seen this material presented before, but never presented so well, never so understandable and accessible. I really like this resource because of how well aggregated, how accessible, how well designed this resource is."

Good examples, there's a blog post from the website Wait But Why on the Fermi Paradox, which is sort of a scientific astrophysics, "why are we alone in the universe" paradox concept, and they do a brilliant job of visualizing and explaining the paradox and all of the potential scenarios behind it. It's so much fun to read. It's so enjoyable. I've read about the Fermi Paradox many times and never been as entranced as I was as when I read this piece from Wait But Why. It really was that experience that says, "Wow, I've seen this before, but never like this."

Another great site that does pure aggregation, but they provide incredible value is actually a search engine, a visual search engine that I love called Niice.co. Not particularly easy to spell, but you do searches for things like letter press or for emotional ideas, like anger, and you just find phenomenal visual content. It's an aggregation of a bunch of different websites that show design and visual content in a search interface that's accessible, that shows all the images in there, and you can scroll through them and it's very nicely collected. It's aggregated in the best way I've ever seen that information aggregated, therefore, providing unique value. Unfortunately, since it's a search engine, it's not actually going to be indexed by Google, but still tremendously good content marketing.

2) Information that is available nowhere else

Number two is information that's available nowhere else. When I say "information," I don't mean content. I don't mean words and phrases. I don't mean it's one-of-a-kind in that if I were to go copy and paste a sentence fragment or a paragraph and plug it into Google, that I wouldn't find that sentence or that paragraph elsewhere. I mean unique information, information that, even if it were written about thousands of different ways, I couldn't find it anywhere else on the web. You want your visitor to have experience of, "Wow, without this site I never would have found the answers I sought." It's not that, "Oh, this sentence is unique to all the other sentences that have been written about this topic." It's, "Ah-ha this information was never available until now."

Some of my favorite examples of that -- Walk Score. Walk Score is a site that took data that was out there and they basically put it together into a scoring function. So they said, "Hey, in this ocean beach neighborhood in San Diego, there are this many bars and restaurants, grocery stores, banks, pharmacies. The walkability of that neighborhood, therefore, based on the businesses and on the sidewalks and on the traffic and all these other things, the Walk Score out of 100 is therefore 74." I don't know what it actually is. Then you can compare and contrast that to, say, the Hillcrest neighborhood in San Diego, where the Walk Score is 88 because it has a far greater density of all those things that people, who are looking for walkability of neighborhoods, are seeking. If you're moving somewhere or you're considering staying somewhere downtown, in area to visit for vacation, this is amazing. What an incredible resource, and because of that Walk Score has become hugely popular and is part of many, many real estate websites and visitor and tourism focused websites and all that kind of stuff.

Another good example, blog posts that provide information that was previously unavailable anywhere else. In our industry I actually really like this example from Conductor. Conductor, as you might know, is an enterprise SEO software company, and they put together a phenomenal blog post comparing which portions of direct traffic are almost certainly actually organic, and they collected a bunch of anonymized data from their platform and assembled that so that we could all see, "Oh, yeah, look at that. Sixty percent of what's getting counted as direct in a lot of these websites, at least on average, is probably coming from organic search or dark social and those kinds of things, and that credit should go to the marketers who acquire that traffic." Fascinating stuff. Unique information, couldn't find that elsewhere.

3) Content presented with a massively differentiated voice or style

The third and final one that I'll talk about is content that's presented with a massively differentiated voice or style. So this is not necessarily you've aggregated information that was previously unavailable or you've made it more accessible or you've designed it in a way to make it remarkable. It's not necessarily information available nowhere else. It's really more about the writer or the artist behind the content creation, and content creators, the great ones, have some artistry to their work. You're trying to create in your visitors this impression of like, "I've seen stuff about this before, but never in a way that emotionally resonated with me like this does." Think about the experience that you have of reading a phenomenal book about a topic versus just reading the Wikipedia entry. The information might be the same, but there are miles of difference in the artistry behind it and the emotional resonance it can create.

In the content marketing world, I really like a lot of stuff that Beardbrand does. Eric from Beardbrand just puts together these great videos. He has this gigantic beard. I feel like I've really captured him here actually. Eric, tell me what you think of this portrait? You're free to use it as your Twitter background, if you'd like. Eric's videos are not just useful. They do contain useful information and stuff that sometimes is hard to find elsewhere, but they have a style to them, a personality to them that I just love.

Likewise, for many of you, you're watching Whiteboard Friday or consuming content from us that you likely could find many other places. Unlike when Moz started, there are many, many great blogs and resources on SEO and inbound marketing and social media marketing, and all these things, but Moz often has a great voice, a great style, at least one that resonates with me, that I love.

Another example, one from my personal life, my wife's blog -- the Everywhereist. There are lots of places you can read, for example, a history of Ireland. But when Geraldine wrote about her not-so-brief history of Ireland, it had a very different kind of emotional resonance for many other people who read and consumed that and, as a result, earned lots of nice traffic and shares and links and all of these kinds of things.

This, one of these three, is what you're aiming for with uniquely valuable, and there are likely some others that fit into these or maybe that cross over between them. But if you're making content for the web and you're trying to figure out how can I be uniquely valuable, see what it is that you're fitting into, which of these themes, hopefully maybe even some combination of them, and is that defensible enough to make you differentiated from your competition, from what else is in the search results, and does it give you the potential to have truly remarkable content and SEO going forward. If not, I'm not sure that it's worth the investment. There's no prize in content for hitting Publish. No prize for hitting Publish. The only prize comes when you produce something that meets these criteria and thus achieves the reach and the marketing goals that you're seeking.

All right, everyone, we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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PPC in 2014 – The Year in Paid Search

Posted: 23 Dec 2014 12:00 AM PST

Paid search is always changing: platforms are always bringing out new features or changing old ones. So here's a reminder of all that's happened in PPC in 2014, the year in paid search.

AdWords

Flexible Conversion Counting came in February. The most obvious change was in naming: Conversions (one-per-click) and Conversions (many-per-click) columns turned into Converted clicks and Conversions. But it also means you can count only the unique conversions for one conversion action and all the conversions for another – for example, count only one conversion if someone signs up to a newsletter twice, but count every time they buy a product.

On April the 9th Google announced that search queries weren't going to be passed onto websites in the referrer data from secured searches. This is a bit awkward for third party tools, who generally coped by focusing on keywords rather than search queries (which can easily be sent to a website by tagging URLs with {keyword}). Search query data is still available in AdWords, so the impact of this change wasn't too major – especially compared to the woes of (not provided) for organic traffic – but it's still a reminder that you should try and get as much of your traffic as possible covered by exact keywords, for more accurate reporting.

On April the 22nd Google made a mass of announcements on live webcast:

Targeting people based on what types of app they have installed, and to have ads take people directly to an already-installed app – these became available on the Display Network in June, and on the Search Network and YouTube in August.
Tracking conversions from apps, like install, re-engagement and in-app purchases.
More bulk actions directly inside AdWords – came in October
Advanced reporting and a 'lab' in which you can draft changes to your campaigns and test them. (According the livestream in December, these are coming in 2015.)

In June Google brought out a white paper, 'Settling the (Quality) Score'. This reignited the old PPC argument about whether to optimise specifically for QS. Larry Kim felt Google weren't telling the whole story.

Website Call Conversions came in August for the U.S., Australia, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the UK. This means rather than putting your number on your website, you use a Google forwarding number: then if someone clicks an ad and then calls you, it counts as a conversion.

Google did another live webcast on the 10th of December, mostly recapping the announcements of the year. But it did have something new: the release of AdWords Editor 11.0: now you can have multiple views of the same account, or view multiple accounts at once (and drag and drop between them!). As Kirk Williams points out, CTRL-Z now actually undoes the last action (rather than reverting whatever you have selected). But there's still no support for labels or shopping campaigns. Also CTR is shown wrongly, although hopefully that will be fixed quickly…

Search Network

Consumer Ratings Annotations were announced in March, but only for the US, UK and Canada and later Australia. This is an extension that shows ratings based on Google Consumer Surveys.

Dynamic Sitelinks were announced in July. These are like sitelinks, except they're made automatically – you have to opt out rather than set them up. If you have set up your own sitelinks, the manual ones should show rather than the dynamic ones.

'Close variant' matching has been around for two years, but previously you could turn it off at campaign level. In September you couldn't turn it off – all exact and phrase match keywords will show ads on searches which are similar. This is one of the bigger changes in the year – now you need to worry about negative keywords even in exact match only ad groups.

Another major event in September was the launch of Callout Extensions. Like sitelinks without the links, callouts give you extra characters to show off your selling points. (Note you need to make at least two for them to work.)

Ad Customizers also came in September: you enter a CSV full of attributes and Google spits out ads that use them. This means you can create ads at scale, and that you can update details without creating entirely new ads. So you can expect everyone and their dog to be making countdown ads.

Since October, mobile ads may skip the second description line in favour of showing ad extensions. This means you'll just see the first line with an ellipsis – you should write your mobile ads so they make sense in this format!

Display Network

+Post ads became available to all in April: If your Google+ page has at least 1,000 followers you can turn any publically shared post into an engagement ad on the Display network.

In September campaigns that were showing on both the Search and Display networks were automatically changed to 'Search and Display Select' campaigns. This means AdWords is more selective on which Display sites your ads appear on. Note that it still isn't best practise to combine Search and Display in one campaign, and if you have a 'Search and Display Select' campaign you won't be able to use features like demographic targeting.

Estimated cross-device conversions are now available for display campaigns: this gives an estimate of the conversions made on one device after clicking an ad on another device, based on people logged into Google accounts on multiple devices.

Dynamic remarketing was available for retailers, but rolled out to all verticals in October. This lets you show remarketing ads related to the specific pages visited (using an item feed rather than having to set up lots of audiences manually).

Custom Affinity Audiences came in October: this means you can target people on the Display Network by listing keywords they are interested in, or listing URLs of sites featuring subjects they find interesting. On the flip side, this means 'other interests' targeting is being taken away in January.

Shopping Ads

Google Shopping

The main change was the upgrade of all Google PLA (Product Listing Ads) campaigns into Google Shopping campaigns in August. Previously PLA ad groups were based on attributes or labels from the data feed, limiting users who couldn’t set up unique labels, and data feed was in the Google Merchant Centre rather than AdWords itself. In Google Shopping campaigns, ad groups are based on product groups, which are set up in AdWords by specifying combinations of product attributes. There is also better reporting by product attributes and impression share data.

Other changes:

Shopping campaigns became available worldwide on the 18th of February, and the Google Shopping API came out in March.
Changes were made to the feeds: unique product identifiers were required in March, and updates the feed specification in June
In July, Google Shopping campaigns could be uploaded in bulk in the web interface. Bids could be edited in AdWords Editor (but nothing can be created).
Product ratings were added in July, but only in the USA – like seller ratings in text ads, these appear if you have enough positive reviews in an approved aggregator, and fill in the application form.
Shopping campaigns could opt into the Search Partner Network in September, and local inventory ads became available in more countries.
Automatic item updates also came in September – this updates your PLAs using data from your site, if you have the right schema set up. This means your ads will be corrected rather than disapproved if they become out-of-date.
Merchant Promotions, previously only available in the USA, were launched in more countries in November
In November PLAs got a few features previously only available to text ads: an Auctions Insight report, search impression data, device and time segmentation and a bid simulator.
Also in November there was a new Diagnostics tab, for finding problems with your product feed.

Facebook

The biggest change was the new campaign structure in March – previously there were just campaigns containing ads, but now there are campaigns containing ad sets containing ads. Then in September things were changed again – targeting and bidding, previously at ad level, are now at ad set level. Note that unlike AdWords and Bing, budgets are at ad set level rather than campaign level.

In April changes to the right hand column ads were announced: rather than a square image, there is now a 254 by 133 pixel rectangle (the same aspect ratio as News Feed ad images). This gives a bit of extra space, and is "more visually consistent" with News Feed ads.

Facebook's Audience Network was announced in April and made available worldwide in October. This lets your ads be shown on mobile apps outside of Facebook, but still using the same targeting as you would for advertising within Facebook.

In November Facebook deployed its ‘Edgerank’ algorithmic update. Early observations highlight a drop in reach for Organic and drop in Likes for Organic and Paid.

The main reasons for this are:

Organically, thousands and thousands of posts are posted by companies everyday to their followers, now as more followers like and follow more and more companies it became impossible for Facebook to show posts to users that it felt would drive engagement. Driving the need for an algorithm update.
In both paid & organic, we have for a long-time been faced with ‘click farms’. These are offices based mainly in India and Egypt who sit all day ‘liking’ ads and pages in order to get paid roughly $1 per 100 likes. This is the primary reason we do not recommend ‘like’ campaigns as the ‘real’ return on these ‘likes’ is effectively non-existent. Click farms hid themselves from Facebook’s eye for a while by hitting ‘like’ on an organic post once in a while. But the new algorithm update has targeted click farms by using their own Facebook presence. You would typically see that offending pages ‘like’ thousands of other pages but never post anything themselves. The algorithm update was designed to target and shutdown these pages, in essence wiping out the click farms.

So, the question that we have been asked by our clients is “how do I regain my reach?”

Well, to put it simply (and in-line with Facebook’ algo update):

Post better content
Buy ads

By better content the following should be used as a daily guideline:

2 text updates (either asking a question or fill-in-the-blank)
1 photo (lighthearted to make people laugh, share & comment)
3 blog posts (1 newly published post, if possible, and 2 evergreen posts — which are older posts that are still valuable & relevant)

Bing Ads

There have been numerous changes to the web interface and Bing Ads Editor (although still no Mac version).

In January sitelinks came out in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia.

In March Bing announced 'universal event tracking': you put the same code up on all pages of your site, then define goals or remarketing audiences within Bing's interface (like you do with Google Analytics).

A great time saver for those of us using Google Analytics: auto-tagging came out in June. This can be set to replace all tags or just to add missing ones (making it compatible if you have custom or non-GA tagging in place).

In July, Bing Ads online insertion orders were made easier – you can create and manage your orders yourself, online.

Bing Ads Express was discontinued in July – it had been created (like AdWords Express) to be a simpler alternative to Bing Ads, but Bing have decided instead to concentrate on better campaign management tools and reporting rather than have a separate product.

In August Bing Ads followed Google's enhanced campaigns; tablets and desktops cannot be targeted separately. Unlike Google you can still have a bid adjustment for tablets, but it can only reduce bids by 20% (also unlike Google, you can still choose to only target mobile).

As of September, you can schedule ad bids down to every 15 minutes. (To compare, in AdWords you can only schedule by the hour.) There were also improvements to location targeting, and the option to target people solely by the location they are searching for (rather than people searching for or located in the location).

Also in September you could share negative keyword lists between campaigns (and unlike AdWords, the feature was included in Bing Ads Editor from launch), and dynamic sitelinks were announced.

Copying Google, Bing Ads also have close variants, but only in the US (since September), UK and Ireland (in December) – and you can still opt-out using the campaign advanced settings. Note that Bing Ads has always had keyword normalisation, which already meant its exact match wasn't precisely exact.

In the US only:

Product Ads came out in March
A Top Movers report came out in August
Enhanced sitelinks came out in September
Auction Insights came out in October

What's Next for 2015?

In some ways 2014 was a continuation of 2013 for AdWords and Bing; Google gives us extra features, but takes away a bit more of our control (in 2013 it was tablet targeting; in 2014 exact match keywords). Bing continues to follow Google, although it has its own spin on some of the features – bids can be modified for tablets, ad schedules are more precise, and AdWords does not have an equivalent of universal event tracking.

From an advertiser's point of view the biggest change was Facebook's ad sets, but that's a change that's entirely invisible to Facebook users (unlike the changes to the right hand column). Hopefully better account structure will lead to better ads in the long run, as management and testing become simpler.

What did you think was the biggest change in 2014? And what do you think will happen in 2015? Let us know in the comments below.

The post PPC in 2014 – The Year in Paid Search appeared first on White.net.