Posted by randfish
A single fantastic (or "10x") piece of content can lift a site's traffic curves long beyond the popularity of that one piece. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand talks about why those curves settle into a "new normal," and how you can go about creating the content that drives that change.
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard. Click on it to open a high resolution image in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about the linkbait bump, classic phrase in the SEO world and almost a little dated. I think today we're talking a little bit more about viral content and how high-quality content, content that really is the cornerstone of a brand or a website's content can be an incredible and powerful driver of traffic, not just when it initially launches but over time.
So let's take a look.
This is a classic linkbait bump, viral content bump analytics chart. I'm seeing over here my traffic and over here the different months of the year. You know, January, February, March, like I'm under a thousand. Maybe I'm at 500 visits or something, and then I have this big piece of viral content. It performs outstandingly well from a relative standpoint for my site. It gets 10,000 or more visits, drives a ton more people to my site, and then what happens is that that traffic falls back down. But the new normal down here, new normal is higher than the old normal was. So the new normal might be at 1,000, 1,500 or 2,000 visits whereas before I was at 500.
Why does this happen?
A lot of folks see an analytics chart like this, see examples of content that's done this for websites, and they want to know: Why does this happen and how can I replicate that effect? The reasons why are it sort of feeds back into that viral loop or the flywheel, which we've talked about in previous Whiteboard Fridays, where essentially you start with a piece of content. That content does well, and then you have things like more social followers on your brand's accounts. So now next time you go to amplify content or share content socially, you're reaching more potential people. You have a bigger audience. You have more people who share your content because they've seen that that content performs well for them in social. So they want to find other content from you that might help their social accounts perform well.
You see more RSS and email subscribers because people see your interesting content and go, "Hey, I want to see when these guys produce something else." You see more branded search traffic because people are looking specifically for content from you, not necessarily just around this viral piece, although that's often a big part of it, but around other pieces as well, especially if you do a good job of exposing them to that additional content. You get more bookmark and type in traffic, more searchers biased by personalization because they've already visited your site. So now when they search and they're logged into their accounts, they're going to see your site ranking higher than they normally would otherwise, and you get an organic SEO lift from all the links and shares and engagement.
So there's a ton of different factors that feed into this, and you kind of want to hit all of these things. If you have a piece of content that gets a lot of shares, a lot of links, but then doesn't promote engagement, doesn't get more people signing up, doesn't get more people searching for your brand or searching for that content specifically, then it's not going to have the same impact. Your traffic might fall further and more quickly.
How do you achieve this?
How do we get content that's going to do this? Well, we're going to talk through a number of things that we've talked about previously on Whiteboard Friday. But there are some additional ones as well. This isn't just creating good content or creating high quality content, it's creating a particular kind of content. So for this what you want is a deep understanding, not necessarily of what your standard users or standard customers are interested in, but a deep understanding of what influencers in your niche will share and promote and why they do that.
This often means that you follow a lot of sharers and influencers in your field, and you understand, hey, they're all sharing X piece of content. Why? Oh, because it does this, because it makes them look good, because it helps their authority in the field, because it provides a lot of value to their followers, because they know it's going to get a lot of retweets and shares and traffic. Whatever that because is, you have to have a deep understanding of it in order to have success with viral kinds of content.
Next, you want to have empathy for users and what will give them the best possible experience. So if you know, for example, that a lot of people are coming on mobile and are going to be sharing on mobile, which is true of almost all viral content today, FYI, you need to be providing a great mobile and desktop experience. Oftentimes that mobile experience has to be different, not just responsive design, but actually a different format, a different way of being able to scroll through or watch or see or experience that content.
There are some good examples out there of content that does that. It makes a very different user experience based on the browser or the device you're using.
You also need to be aware of what will turn them off. So promotional messages, pop-ups, trying to sell to them, oftentimes that diminishes user experience. It means that content that could have been more viral, that could have gotten more shares won't.
Unique value and attributes that separate your content from everything else in the field. So if there's like ABCD and whoa, what's that? That's very unique. That stands out from the crowd. That provides a different form of value in a different way than what everyone else is doing. That uniqueness is often a big reason why content spreads virally, why it gets more shared than just the normal stuff.
I've talk about this a number of times, but content that's 10X better than what the competition provides. So unique value from the competition, but also quality that is not just a step up, but 10X better, massively, massively better than what else you can get out there. That makes it unique enough. That makes it stand out from the crowd, and that's a very hard thing to do, but that's why this is so rare and so valuable.
This is a critical one, and I think one that, I'll just say, many organizations fail at. That is the freedom and support to fail many times, to try to create these types of effects, to have this impact many times before you hit on a success. A lot of managers and clients and teams and execs just don't give marketing teams and content teams the freedom to say, "Yeah, you know what? You spent a month and developer resources and designer resources and spent some money to go do some research and contracted with this third party, and it wasn't a hit. It didn't work. We didn't get the viral content bump. It just kind of did okay. You know what? We believe in you. You've got a lot of chances. You should try this another 9 or 10 times before we throw it out. We really want to have a success here."
That is something that very few teams invest in. The powerful thing is because so few people are willing to invest that way, the ones that do, the ones that believe in this, the ones that invest long term, the ones that are willing to take those failures are going to have a much better shot at success, and they can stand out from the crowd. They can get these bumps. It's powerful.
Not a requirement, but it really, really helps to have a strong engaged community, either on your site and around your brand, or at least in your niche and your topic area that will help, that wants to see you, your brand, your content succeed. If you're in a space that has no community, I would work on building one, even if it's very small. We're not talking about building a community of thousands or tens of thousands. A community of 100 people, a community of 50 people even can be powerful enough to help content get that catalyst, that first bump that'll boost it into viral potential.
Then finally, for this type of content, you need to have a logical and not overly promotional match between your brand and the content itself. You can see many sites in what I call sketchy niches. So like a criminal law site or a casino site or a pharmaceutical site that's offering like an interactive musical experience widget, and you're like, "Why in the world is this brand promoting this content? Why did they even make it? How does that match up with what they do? Oh, it's clearly just intentionally promotional."
Look, many of these brands go out there and they say, "Hey, the average web user doesn't know and doesn't care." I agree. But the average web user is not an influencer. Influencers know. Well, they're very, very suspicious of why content is being produced and promoted, and they're very skeptical of promoting content that they don't think is altruistic. So this kills a lot of content for brands that try and invest in it when there's no match. So I think you really need that.
Now, when you do these linkbait bump kinds of things, I would strongly recommend that you follow up, that you consider the quality of the content that you're producing. Thereafter, that you invest in reproducing these resources, keeping those resources updated, and that you don't simply give up on content production after this. However, if you're a small business site, a small or medium business, you might think about only doing one or two of these a year. If you are a heavy content player, you're doing a lot of content marketing, content marketing is how you're investing in web traffic, I'd probably be considering these weekly or monthly at the least.
All right, everyone. Look forward to your experiences with the linkbait bump, and I will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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Posted by jon.white
We have launched a couple of new things in Moz Pro that we are excited to share with you all: Mobile Rankings and a Search Visibility score. If you want, you can jump right in by heading to a campaign and adding a mobile engine, or keep reading for more details!
Track your mobile vs. desktop rankings in Moz Analytics
Mobilegeddon came and went with slightly less fanfare than expected, somewhat due to the vast 'Mobile Friendly' updates we all did at super short notice (nice work everyone!). Nevertheless, mobile rankings visibility is now firmly on everyone's radar, and will only become more important over time.
Now you can track your campaigns' mobile rankings for all of the same keywords and locations you are tracking on desktop.
For this campaign my mobile visibility is almost 20% lower than my desktop visibility and falling;
I can drill down to find out why
Clicking on this will take you into a new Engines tab within your Keyword Rankings page where you can find a more detailed version of this chart as well as a tabular view by keyword for both desktop and mobile. Here you can also filter by label and location.
Here I can see Search Visibility across engines including mobile;
in this case, for my branded keywords.
We have given an extra engine to all campaigns
We've given customers an extra engine for each campaign, increasing the number from 3 to 4. Use the extra slot to add the mobile engine and unlock your mobile data!
We will begin to track mobile rankings within 24 hours of adding to a campaign. Once you are set up, you will notice a new chart on your dashboard showing visibility for Desktop vs. Mobile Search Visibility.
Measure your Search Visibility score vs. competitors
The overall Search Visibility for my campaign
Along with this change we have also added a Search Visibility score to your rankings data. Use your visibility score to track and report on your overall campaign ranking performance, compare to your competitors, and look for any large shifts that might indicate penalties or algorithm changes. For a deeper drill-down into your data you can also segment your visibility score by keyword labels or locations. Visit the rankings summary page on any campaign to get started.
How is Search Visibility calculated?
Good question!
The Search Visibility score is the percentage of clicks we estimate you receive based on your rankings positions, across all of your keywords.
We take each ranking position for each keyword, multiply by an estimated click-thru-rate, and then take the average of all of your keywords. You can think of it as the percentage of your SERPs that you own. The score is expressed as a percentage, though scores of 100% would be almost impossible unless you are tracking keywords using the "site:" modifier. It is probably more useful to measure yourself vs. your competitors rather than focus on the actual score, but, as a rule of thumb, mid-40s is probably the realistic maximum for non-branded keywords.
Jeremy, our Moz Analytics TPM, came up with this metaphor:
Think of the SERPs for your keywords as villages. Each position on the SERP is a plot of land in SERP-village. The Search Visibility score is the average amount of plots you own in each SERP-village. Prime real estate plots (i.e., better ranking positions, like #1) are worth more. A complete monopoly of real estate in SERP-village would equate to a score of 100%. The Search Visibility score equates to how much total land you own in all SERP-villages.
Some neat ways to use this feature
- Label and group your keywords, particularly when you add them – As visibility score is an average of all of your keywords, when you add or remove keywords from your campaign you will likely see fluctuations in the score that are unrelated to performance. Solve this by getting in the habit of labeling keywords when you add them. Then segment your data by these labels to track performance of specific keyword groups over time.
- See how location affects your mobile rankings – Using the Engines tab in Keyword Rankings, use the filters to select just local keywords. Look for big differences between Mobile and Desktop where Google might be assuming local intent for mobile searches but not for desktop. Check out how your competitors perform for these keywords. Can you use this data?
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Posted by Isla_McKetta
Quick note: This article is meant to apply to teams of all sizes, from the sole proprietor who spends all night writing their copy (because they're doing business during the day) to the copy team who occupies an entire floor and produces thousands of pieces of content per week. So if you run into a section that you feel requires more resources than you can devote just now, that's okay. Bookmark it and revisit when you can, or scale the step down to a more appropriate size for your team. We believe all the information here is important, but that does not mean you have to do everything right now.
If you thought ideation was fun, get ready for content creation. Sure, we've all written some things before, but the creation phase of content marketing is where you get to watch that beloved idea start to take shape.
Before you start creating, though, you want to get (at least a little) organized, and an editorial calendar is the perfect first step.
Editorial calendars
Creativity and organization are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they can feed each other. A solid schedule gives you and your writers the time and space to be wild and creative. If you're just starting out, this document may be sparse, but it's no less important. Starting early with your editorial calendar also saves you from creating content willy-nilly and then finding out months later that no one ever finished that pesky (but crucial) "About" page.
There's no wrong way to set up your editorial calendar, as long as it's meeting your needs. Remember that an editorial calendar is a living document, and it will need to change as a hot topic comes up or an author drops out.
There are a lot of different types of documents that pass for editorial calendars. You get to pick the one that's right for your team. The simplest version is a straight-up calendar with post titles written out on each day. You could even use a wall calendar and a Sharpie.
| | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday |
| Title | The Five Colors of Oscar Fashion | 12 Fabrics We're Watching for Fall | Is Charmeuse the New Corduroy? | Hot Right Now: Matching Your Handbag to Your Hatpin | Tea-length and Other Fab Vocab You Need to Know |
| Author | Ellie | James | Marta | Laila | Alex |
Teams who are balancing content for different brands at agencies or other more complex content environments will want to add categories, author information, content type, social promo, and more to their calendars.
Truly complex editorial calendars are more like hybrid content creation/editorial calendars, where each of the steps to create and publish the content are indicated and someone has planned for how long all of that takes. These can be very helpful if the content you're responsible for crosses a lot of teams and can take a long time to complete. It doesn't matter if you're using Excel or a Google Doc, as long as the people who need the calendar can easily access it. Gantt charts can be excellent for this. Here's a favorite template for creating a Gantt chart in Google Docs (and they only get more sophisticated).
Complex calendars can encompass everything from ideation through writing, legal review, and publishing. You might even add content localization if your empire spans more than one continent to make sure you have the currency, date formatting, and even slang right.
Content governance
Governance outlines who is taking responsibility for your content. Who evaluates your content performance? What about freshness? Who decides to update (or kill) an older post? Who designs and optimizes workflows for your team or chooses and manages your CMS?
All these individual concerns fall into two overarching components to governance: daily maintenance and overall strategy. In the long run it helps if one person has oversight of the whole process, but the smaller steps can easily be split among many team members. Read this to take your governance to the next level.
Finding authors
The scale of your writing enterprise doesn't have to be limited to the number of authors you have on your team. It's also important to consider the possibility of working with freelancers and guest authors. Here's a look at the pros and cons of outsourced versus in-house talent.
| In-house authors | Guest authors and freelancers |
| Responsible to | You | Themselves |
| Paid by | You (as part of their salary) | You (on a per-piece basis) |
| Subject matter expertise | Broad but shallow | Deep but narrow |
| Capacity for extra work | As you wish | Show me the Benjamins |
| Turnaround time | On a dime | Varies |
| Communication investment | Less | More |
| Devoted audience | Smaller | Potentially huge |
From that table, it might look like in-house authors have a lot more advantages. That's somewhat true, but do not underestimate the value of occasionally working with a true industry expert who has name recognition and a huge following. Whichever route you take (and there are plenty of hybrid options), it's always okay to ask that the writers you are working with be professional about communication, payment, and deadlines. In some industries, guest writers will write for links. Consider yourself lucky if that's true. Remember, though, that the final paycheck can be great leverage for getting a writer to do exactly what you need them to (such as making their deadlines).
Tools to help with content creation
So those are some things you need to have in place before you create content. Now's the fun part: getting started. One of the beautiful things about the Internet is that new and exciting tools crop up every day to help make our jobs easier and more efficient. Here are a few of our favorites.
Calendars
You can always use Excel or a Google Doc to set up your editorial calendar, but we really like Trello for the ability to gather a lot of information in one card and then drag and drop it into place. Once there are actual dates attached to your content, you might be happier with something like a Google Calendar.
Ideation and research
If you need a quick fix for ideation, turn your keywords into wacky ideas with Portent's Title Maker. You probably won't want to write to the exact title you're given (although "True Facts about Justin Bieber's Love of Pickles" does sound pretty fascinating…), but it's a good way to get loose and look at your topic from a new angle.
Once you've got that idea solidified, find out what your audience thinks about it by gathering information with Survey Monkey or your favorite survey tool. Or, use Storify to listen to what people are saying about your topic across a wide variety of platforms. You can also use Storify to save those references and turn them into a piece of content or an illustration for one. Don't forget that a simple social ask can also do wonders.
Format
Content doesn't have to be all about the words. Screencasts, Google+ Hangouts, and presentations are all interesting ways to approach content. Remember that not everyone's a reader. Some of your audience will be more interested in visual or interactive content. Make something for everyone.
Illustration
Don't forget to make your content pretty. It's not that hard to find free stock images online (just make sure you aren't violating someone's copyright). We like Morgue File, Free Images, and Flickr's Creative Commons. If you aren't into stock images and don't have access to in-house graphic design, it's still relatively easy to add images to your content. Pull a screenshot with Skitch or dress up an existing image with Pixlr. You can also use something like Canva to create custom graphics.
Don't stop with static graphics, though. There are so many tools out there to help you create gifs, quizzes and polls, maps, and even interactive timelines. Dream it, then search for it. Chances are whatever you're thinking of is doable.
Quality, not quantity
Mediocre content will hurt your cause
Less is more. That's not an excuse to pare your blog down to one post per month (check out our publishing cadence experiment), but it is an important reminder that if you're writing "How to Properly Install a Toilet Seat" two days after publishing "Toilet Seat Installation for Dummies," you might want to rethink your strategy.
The thing is, and I'm going to use another cliché here to drive home the point, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Potential customers are roving the Internet right now looking for exactly what you're selling. And if what they find is an only somewhat informative article stuffed with keywords and awful spelling and grammar mistakes… well, you don't want that. Oh, and search engines think it's spammy too...
A word about copyright
We're not copyright lawyers, so we can't give you the ins and outs on all the technicalities. What we can tell you (and you already know this) is that it's not okay to steal someone else's work. You wouldn't want them to do it to you. This includes images. So whenever you can, make your own images or find images that you can either purchase the rights to (stock imagery) or license under Creative Commons.
It's usually okay to quote short portions of text, as long as you attribute the original source (and a link is nice). In general, titles and ideas can't be copyrighted (though they might be trademarked or patented). When in doubt, asking for permission is smart.
That said, part of the fun of the Internet is the remixing culture which includes using things like memes and gifs. Just know that if you go that route, there is a certain amount of risk involved.
Editing
Your content needs to go through at least one editing cycle by someone other than the original author. There are two types of editing, developmental (which looks at the underlying structure of a piece that happens earlier in the writing cycle) and copy editing (which makes sure all the words are there and spelled right in the final draft).
If you have a very small team or are in a rush (and are working with writers that have some skill), you can often skip the developmental editing phase. But know that an investment in that close read of an early draft is often beneficial to the piece and to the writer's overall growth.
Many content teams peer-edit work, which can be great. Other organizations prefer to run their work by a dedicated editor. There's no wrong answer, as long as the work gets edited.
Ensuring proper basic SEO
The good news is that search engines are doing their best to get closer and closer to understanding and processing natural language. So good writing (including the natural use of synonyms rather than repeating those keywords over and over and...) will take you a long way towards SEO mastery.
For that reason (and because it's easy to get trapped in keyword thinking and veer into keyword stuffing), it's often nice to think of your SEO check as a further edit of the post rather than something you should think about as you're writing.
But there are still a few things you can do to help cover those SEO bets. Once you have that draft, do a pass for SEO to make sure you've covered the following:
- Use your keyword in your title
- Use your keyword (or long-tail keyword phrase) in an H2
- Make sure the keyword appears at least once (though not more than four times, especially if it's a phrase) in the body of the post
- Use image alt text (including the keyword when appropriate)
Finding time to write when you don't have any
Writing (assuming you're the one doing the writing) can require a lot of energy—especially if you want to do it well. The best way to find time to write is to break each project down into little tasks. For example, writing a blog post actually breaks down into these steps (though not always in this order):
- Research
- Outline
- Fill in outline
- Rewrite and finish post
- Write headline
- SEO check
- Final edit
- Select hero image (optional)
So if you only have random chunks of time, set aside 15-30 minutes one day (when your research is complete) to write a really great outline. Then find an hour the next to fill that outline in. After an additional hour the following day, (unless you're dealing with a research-heavy post) you should have a solid draft by the end of day three.
The magic of working this way is that you engage your brain and then give it time to work in the background while you accomplish other tasks. Hemingway used to stop mid-sentence at the end of his writing days for the same reason.
Once you have that draft nailed, the rest of the steps are relatively easy (even the headline, which often takes longer to write than any other sentence, is easier after you've immersed yourself in the post over a few days).
Working with design/development
Every designer and developer is a little different, so we can't give you any blanket cure-alls for inter-departmental workarounds (aka "smashing silos"). But here are some suggestions to help you convey your vision while capitalizing on the expertise of your coworkers to make your content truly excellent.
Ask for feedback
From the initial brainstorm to general questions about how to work together, asking your team members what they think and prefer can go a long way. Communicate all the details you have (especially the unspoken expectations) and then listen.
If your designer tells you up front that your color scheme is years out of date, you're saving time. And if your developer tells you that the interactive version of that timeline will require four times the resources, you have the info you need to fight for more budget (or reassess the project).
Check in
Things change in the design and development process. If you have interim check-ins already set up with everyone who's working on the project, you'll avoid the potential for nasty surprises at the end. Like finding out that no one has experience working with that hot new coding language you just read about and they're trying to do a workaround that isn't working.
Proofread
Your job isn't done when you hand over the copy to your designer or developer. Not only might they need help rewriting some of your text so that it fits in certain areas, they will also need you to proofread the final version. Accidents happen in the copy-and-paste process and there's nothing sadder than a really beautiful (and expensive) piece of content that wraps up with a typo:
Know when to fight for an idea
Conflict isn't fun, but sometimes it's necessary. The more people involved in your content, the more watered down the original idea can get and the more roadblocks and conflicting ideas you'll run into. Some of that is very useful. But sometimes you'll get pulled off track. Always remember who owns the final product (this may not be you) and be ready to stand up for the idea if it's starting to get off track.
We're confident this list will set you on the right path to creating some really awesome content, but is there more you'd like to know? Ask us your questions in the comments.
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