#I mean if it's publicly findable information that's not bad right
Text
tfw you discover your former best friend’s tumblr and stay up until 5 am being sad about it and writing a letter to them you know you’ll never send :(
#breaks my heart to think about#we haven't talked in like eight years#and things ended pretty rough#but I've never stopped missing him#I wish I could contact him but I know he wouldn't want to hear from me#if he did he would've reached out#I just don't know how to let people go I guess#I know he'll never come across this post bc we have literally n o t h i n g in common anymore lmao#he's still a massive weeb and I... was never really one to begin with#so like there's zero percent chance of him finding me#bc I don't really make it super easy to find my tumblr#and I mean don't get me wrong his wasn't easy to find eitehr#I found it through his twitter which I found through the empty twitter for a business he tried to start that never got off the ground#so like I was being way too much of a snoop and shouldn't have been able to find it in the first place#does that make me a bad person#I mean if it's publicly findable information that's not bad right?#UGH I hate emotions#I just miss him broooo#and I'll never know why he ghosted me#that's what sucks the most#I can't ask him why#I'm too chicken to reach out bc I know my heart would get hurt again#my poor lil baby heart can't handle any more rejection yknow?#had enough of that as a kid#anyyyyway if you read this far you're a baller and sexy as hell and I love you lmao#goodnight tumblr i love you
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Tech and ad giants sign up to Europe’s first weak bite at ‘fake news’
The European Union’s executive body has signed up tech platforms and ad industry players to a voluntary Code of Practice aimed at trying to do something about the spread of disinformation online.
Something, just not anything too specifically quantifiable.
According to the Commission, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Mozilla, some additional members of the EDIMA trade association, plus unnamed advertising groups are among those that have signed up to the self-regulatory code, which will apply in a month’s time.
Signatories have committed to taking not exactly prescribed actions in the following five areas:
Disrupting advertising revenues of certain accounts and websites that spread disinformation;
Making political advertising and issue based advertising more transparent;
Addressing the issue of fake accounts and online bots;
Empowering consumers to report disinformation and access different news sources, while improving the visibility and findability of authoritative content;
Empowering the research community to monitor online disinformation through privacy-compliant access to the platforms’ data.
Mariya Gabriel, the European commissioner for digital economy and society, described the Code as a first “important” step in tackling disinformation. And one she said will be reviewed by the end of the year to see how (or, well, whether) it’s functioning, with the door left open for additional steps to be taken if not. So in theory legislation remains a future possibility.
“This is the first time that the industry has agreed on a set of self-regulatory standards to fight disinformation worldwide, on a voluntary basis,” she said in a statement. “The industry is committing to a wide range of actions, from transparency in political advertising to the closure of fake accounts and demonetisation of purveyors of disinformation, and we welcome this.
“These actions should contribute to a fast and measurable reduction of online disinformation. To this end, the Commission will pay particular attention to its effective implementation.”
“I urge online platforms and the advertising industry to immediately start implementing the actions agreed in the Code of Practice to achieve significant progress and measurable results in the coming months,” she added. “I also expect more and more online platforms, advertising companies and advertisers to adhere to the Code of Practice, and I encourage everyone to make their utmost to put their commitments into practice to fight disinformation.”
Earlier this year a report by an expert group established by the Commission to help shape its response to the so-called ‘fake news’ crisis, called for more transparency from online platform, as well as urgent investment in media and information literacy education to empower journalists and foster a diverse and sustainable news media ecosystem.
Safe to say, no one has suggested there’s any kind of quick fix for the Internet enabling the accelerated spread of nonsense and lies.
Including the Commission’s own expert group, which offered an assorted pick’n’mix of ideas — set over various and some not-at-all-instant-fix timeframes.
Though the group was called out for failing to interrogate evidence around the role of behavioral advertising in the dissemination of fake news — which has arguably been piling up. (Certainly its potential to act as a disinformation nexus has been amply illustrated by the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal, to name one recent example.)
The Commission is not doing any better on that front, either.
The executive has been working on formulating its response to what its expert group suggested should be referred to as ‘disinformation’ (i.e. rather than the politicized ‘fake news’ moniker) for more than a year now — after the European parliament adopted a Resolution, in June 2017, calling on it to examine the issue and look at existing laws and possible legislative interventions.
Elections for the European parliament are due next spring and MEPs are clearly concerned about the risk of interference. So the unelected Commission is feeling the elected parliament’s push here.
Disinformation — aka “verifiably false or misleading information” created and spread for economic gain and/or to deceive the public, and which “may cause public harm” such as “threats to democratic political and policymaking processes as well as public goods such as the protection of EU citizens’ health, the environment or security”, as the Commission’s new Code of Practice defines it — is clearly a slippery policy target.
And online multiple players are implicated and involved in its spread.
But so too are multiple, powerful, well resourced adtech players incentivized to push to avoid any political disruption to their lucrative people-targeting business models.
In the Commission’s voluntary Code of Practice signatories merely commit to recognizing their role in “contributing to solutions to the challenge posed by disinformation”.
“The Signatories recognise and agree with the Commission’s conclusions that “the exposure of citizens to large scale Disinformation, including misleading or outright false information, is a major challenge for Europe. Our open democratic societies depend on public debates that allow well-informed citizens to express their will through free and fair political processes,” runs the preamble.
“[T]he Signatories are mindful of the fundamental right to freedom of expression and to an open Internet, and the delicate balance which any efforts to limit the spread and impact of otherwise lawful content must strike.
“In recognition that the dissemination of Disinformation has many facets and is facilitated by and impacts a very broad segment of actors in the ecosystem, all stakeholders have roles to play in countering the spread of Disinformation.”
“Misleading advertising” is explicitly excluded from the scope of the code — which also presumably helped the Commission convince the ad industry to sign up to it.
Though that further risks muddying the waters of the effort, given that social media advertising has been the high-powered vehicle of choice for malicious misinformation muck-spreaders (such as Kremlin-backed agents of societal division).
The Commission is presumably trying to split the hairs of maliciously misleading fake ads (still bad because they’re not actually ads but malicious pretenders) and good old fashioned ‘misleading advertising’, though — which will continue to be dealt with under existing ad codes and standards.
Also excluded from the Code: “Clearly identified partisan news and commentary”. So purveyors of hyper biased political commentary are not intended to get scooped up here, either.
Though again, plenty of Kremlin-generated disinformation agents have masqueraded as partisan news and commentary pundits, and from all sides of the political spectrum.
Hence, we must again assume, the Commission including the requirement to exclude this type of content where it’s “clearly identified”. Whatever that means.
Among the various ‘commitments’ tech giants and ad firms are agreeing to here are plenty of firmly fudgey sounding statements that call for a degree of effort from the undersigned. But without ever setting out explicitly how such effort will be measured or quantified.
For e.g.
The Signatories recognise that all parties involved in the buying and selling of online advertising and the provision of advertising-related services need to work together to improve transparency across the online advertising ecosystem and thereby to effectively scrutinise, control and limit the placement of advertising on accounts and websites belonging to purveyors of Disinformation.
Or
Relevant Signatories commit to use reasonable efforts towards devising approaches to publicly disclose “issue-based advertising”. Such efforts will include the development of a working definition of “issue-based advertising” which does not limit reporting on political discussion and the publishing of political opinion and excludes commercial
And
Relevant Signatories commit to invest in features and tools that make it easier for people to find diverse perspectives about topics of public interest.
Nor does the code exactly nail down the terms it’s using to set goals — raising tricky and even existential questions like who defines what’s “relevant, authentic, and authoritative” where information is concerned?
Which is really the core of the disinformation problem.
And also not an easy question for tech giants — which have sold their vast content distribution farms as neutral ‘platforms’ — to start to approach, let alone tackle. Hence their leaning so heavily on third party fact-checkers to try to outsource their lack of any editorial values. Because without editorial values there’s no compass; and without a compass how can you judge the direction of tonal travel?
And so we end up with very vague suggestions in the code like:
Relevant Signatories should invest in technological means to prioritize relevant, authentic, and authoritative information where appropriate in search, feeds, or other automatically ranked distribution channels
Only slightly less vague and woolly is a commitment that signatories will “put in place clear policies regarding identity and the misuse of automated bots” on the signatories’ services, and “enforce these policies within the EU”. (So presumably not globally, despite disinformation being able to wreak havoc everywhere.)
Though here the code only points to some suggestive measures that could be used to do that — and which are set out in a separate annex. This boils down to a list of some very, very broad-brush “best practice principles” (such as “follow the money”; develop “solutions to increase transparency”; and “encourage research into disinformation”… ).
And set alongside that uninspiringly obvious list is another — of some current policy steps being undertaken by the undersigned to combat fake accounts and content — as if they’re already meeting the code’s expectations… so, er…
Unsurprisingly, the Commission’s first bite at ‘fake news’ has attracted some biting criticism for being unmeasurably weak sauce.
A group of media advisors — including the Association of Commercial Television in Europe, the European Broadcasting Union, the European Federation of Journalists and International Fact-Checking Network, and several academics — are among the first critics.
Reuters reports them complaining that signatories have not offered measurable objectives to monitor the implementation. “The platforms, despite their best efforts, have not been able to deliver a code of practice within the accepted meaning of effective and accountable self-regulation,” it quotes the group as saying.
Disinformation may be a tough, multi-pronged, multi-dimensional problem but few would try to argue that an overly dilute solution will deliver anything at all — well, unless it’s kicking the can down the road that you’re really after.
The Commission doesn’t even seem to know exactly what the undersigned have agreed to do as a first step, with the commissioner saying she’ll meet signatories “in the coming weeks to discuss the specific procedures and policies that they are adopting to make the Code a reality”. So double er… !
The code also only envisages signatories meeting annually to discuss how things are going. So no pressure for regular collaborative moots vis-a-vis tackling things like botnets spreading malicious disinformation then. Not unless the undersigned really, really want to.
Which seems unlikely, given how their business models tend to benefit from engagement — and disinformation-fuelled outrage has shown itself to be a very potent fuel on that front.
As part of the code, these adtech giants have at least technically agreed to make information available to the Commission on request — and generally to co-operate with its efforts to assess how/whether the code is working.
So, if public pressure on the issue continues to ramp up, the Commission does at least have a route to ask for relevant data from platforms that could, in theory, be used to feed a regulation that’s worth the paper it’s written on.
Until then, there’s nothing much to see here.
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Tech and ad giants sign up to Europe’s first weak bite at ‘fake news’
The European Union’s executive body has signed up tech platforms and ad industry players to a voluntary Code of Practice aimed at trying to do something about the spread of disinformation online.
Something, just not anything too specifically quantifiable.
According to the Commission, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Mozilla, some additional members of the EDIMA trade association, plus unnamed advertising groups are among those that have signed up to the self-regulatory code, which will apply in a month’s time.
Signatories have committed to taking not exactly prescribed actions in the following five areas:
Disrupting advertising revenues of certain accounts and websites that spread disinformation;
Making political advertising and issue based advertising more transparent;
Addressing the issue of fake accounts and online bots;
Empowering consumers to report disinformation and access different news sources, while improving the visibility and findability of authoritative content;
Empowering the research community to monitor online disinformation through privacy-compliant access to the platforms’ data.
Mariya Gabriel, the European commissioner for digital economy and society, described the Code as a first “important” step in tackling disinformation. And one she said will be reviewed by the end of the year to see how (or, well, whether) it’s functioning, with the door left open for additional steps to be taken if not. So in theory legislation remains a future possibility.
“This is the first time that the industry has agreed on a set of self-regulatory standards to fight disinformation worldwide, on a voluntary basis,” she said in a statement. “The industry is committing to a wide range of actions, from transparency in political advertising to the closure of fake accounts and demonetisation of purveyors of disinformation, and we welcome this.
“These actions should contribute to a fast and measurable reduction of online disinformation. To this end, the Commission will pay particular attention to its effective implementation.”
“I urge online platforms and the advertising industry to immediately start implementing the actions agreed in the Code of Practice to achieve significant progress and measurable results in the coming months,” she added. “I also expect more and more online platforms, advertising companies and advertisers to adhere to the Code of Practice, and I encourage everyone to make their utmost to put their commitments into practice to fight disinformation.”
Earlier this year a report by an expert group established by the Commission to help shape its response to the so-called ‘fake news’ crisis, called for more transparency from online platform, as well as urgent investment in media and information literacy education to empower journalists and foster a diverse and sustainable news media ecosystem.
Safe to say, no one has suggested there’s any kind of quick fix for the Internet enabling the accelerated spread of nonsense and lies.
Including the Commission’s own expert group, which offered an assorted pick’n’mix of ideas — set over various and some not-at-all-instant-fix timeframes.
Though the group was called out for failing to interrogate evidence around the role of behavioral advertising in the dissemination of fake news — which has arguably been piling up. (Certainly its potential to act as a disinformation nexus has been amply illustrated by the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal, to name one recent example.)
The Commission is not doing any better on that front, either.
The executive has been working on formulating its response to what its expert group suggested should be referred to as ‘disinformation’ (i.e. rather than the politicized ‘fake news’ moniker) for more than a year now — after the European parliament adopted a Resolution, in June 2017, calling on it to examine the issue and look at existing laws and possible legislative interventions.
Elections for the European parliament are due next spring and MEPs are clearly concerned about the risk of interference. So the unelected Commission is feeling the elected parliament’s push here.
Disinformation — aka “verifiably false or misleading information” created and spread for economic gain and/or to deceive the public, and which “may cause public harm” such as “threats to democratic political and policymaking processes as well as public goods such as the protection of EU citizens’ health, the environment or security”, as the Commission’s new Code of Practice defines it — is clearly a slippery policy target.
And online multiple players are implicated and involved in its spread.
But so too are multiple, powerful, well resourced adtech players incentivized to push to avoid any political disruption to their lucrative people-targeting business models.
In the Commission’s voluntary Code of Practice signatories merely commit to recognizing their role in “contributing to solutions to the challenge posed by disinformation”.
“The Signatories recognise and agree with the Commission’s conclusions that “the exposure of citizens to large scale Disinformation, including misleading or outright false information, is a major challenge for Europe. Our open democratic societies depend on public debates that allow well-informed citizens to express their will through free and fair political processes,” runs the preamble.
“[T]he Signatories are mindful of the fundamental right to freedom of expression and to an open Internet, and the delicate balance which any efforts to limit the spread and impact of otherwise lawful content must strike.
“In recognition that the dissemination of Disinformation has many facets and is facilitated by and impacts a very broad segment of actors in the ecosystem, all stakeholders have roles to play in countering the spread of Disinformation.”
“Misleading advertising” is explicitly excluded from the scope of the code — which also presumably helped the Commission convince the ad industry to sign up to it.
Though that further risks muddying the waters of the effort, given that social media advertising has been the high-powered vehicle of choice for malicious misinformation muck-spreaders (such as Kremlin-backed agents of societal division).
The Commission is presumably trying to split the hairs of maliciously misleading fake ads (still bad because they’re not actually ads but malicious pretenders) and good old fashioned ‘misleading advertising’, though — which will continue to be dealt with under existing ad codes and standards.
Also excluded from the Code: “Clearly identified partisan news and commentary”. So purveyors of hyper biased political commentary are not intended to get scooped up here, either.
Though again, plenty of Kremlin-generated disinformation agents have masqueraded as partisan news and commentary pundits, and from all sides of the political spectrum.
Hence, we must again assume, the Commission including the requirement to exclude this type of content where it’s “clearly identified”. Whatever that means.
Among the various ‘commitments’ tech giants and ad firms are agreeing to here are plenty of firmly fudgey sounding statements that call for a degree of effort from the undersigned. But without ever setting out explicitly how such effort will be measured or quantified.
For e.g.
The Signatories recognise that all parties involved in the buying and selling of online advertising and the provision of advertising-related services need to work together to improve transparency across the online advertising ecosystem and thereby to effectively scrutinise, control and limit the placement of advertising on accounts and websites belonging to purveyors of Disinformation.
Or
Relevant Signatories commit to use reasonable efforts towards devising approaches to publicly disclose “issue-based advertising”. Such efforts will include the development of a working definition of “issue-based advertising” which does not limit reporting on political discussion and the publishing of political opinion and excludes commercial
And
Relevant Signatories commit to invest in features and tools that make it easier for people to find diverse perspectives about topics of public interest.
Nor does the code exactly nail down the terms it’s using to set goals — raising tricky and even existential questions like who defines what’s “relevant, authentic, and authoritative” where information is concerned?
Which is really the core of the disinformation problem.
And also not an easy question for tech giants — which have sold their vast content distribution farms as neutral ‘platforms’ — to start to approach, let alone tackle. Hence their leaning so heavily on third party fact-checkers to try to outsource their lack of any editorial values. Because without editorial values there’s no compass; and without a compass how can you judge the direction of tonal travel?
And so we end up with very vague suggestions in the code like:
Relevant Signatories should invest in technological means to prioritize relevant, authentic, and authoritative information where appropriate in search, feeds, or other automatically ranked distribution channels
Only slightly less vague and woolly is a commitment that signatories will “put in place clear policies regarding identity and the misuse of automated bots” on the signatories’ services, and “enforce these policies within the EU”. (So presumably not globally, despite disinformation being able to wreak havoc everywhere.)
Though here the code only points to some suggestive measures that could be used to do that — and which are set out in a separate annex. This boils down to a list of some very, very broad-brush “best practice principles” (such as “follow the money”; develop “solutions to increase transparency”; and “encourage research into disinformation”… ).
And set alongside that uninspiringly obvious list is another — of some current policy steps being undertaken by the undersigned to combat fake accounts and content — as if they’re already meeting the code’s expectations… so, er…
Unsurprisingly, the Commission’s first bite at ‘fake news’ has attracted some biting criticism for being unmeasurably weak sauce.
A group of media advisors — including the Association of Commercial Television in Europe, the European Broadcasting Union, the European Federation of Journalists and International Fact-Checking Network, and several academics — are among the first critics.
Reuters reports them complaining that signatories have not offered measurable objectives to monitor the implementation. “The platforms, despite their best efforts, have not been able to deliver a code of practice within the accepted meaning of effective and accountable self-regulation,” it quotes the group as saying.
Disinformation may be a tough, multi-pronged, multi-dimensional problem but few would try to argue that an overly dilute solution will deliver anything at all — well, unless it’s kicking the can down the road that you’re really after.
The Commission doesn’t even seem to know exactly what the undersigned have agreed to do as a first step, with the commissioner saying she’ll meet signatories “in the coming weeks to discuss the specific procedures and policies that they are adopting to make the Code a reality”. So double er… !
The code also only envisages signatories meeting annually to discuss how things are going. So no pressure for regular collaborative moots vis-a-vis tackling things like botnets spreading malicious disinformation then. Not unless the undersigned really, really want to.
Which seems unlikely, given how their business models tend to benefit from engagement — and disinformation-fuelled outrage has shown itself to be a very potent fuel on that front.
As part of the code, these adtech giants have at least technically agreed to make information available to the Commission on request — and generally to co-operate with its efforts to assess how/whether the code is working.
So, if public pressure on the issue continues to ramp up, the Commission does at least have a route to ask for relevant data from platforms that could, in theory, be used to feed a regulation that’s worth the paper it’s written on.
Until then, there’s nothing much to see here.
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via IFTTT
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Link
The European Union’s executive body has signed up tech platforms and ad industry players to a voluntary Code of Practice aimed at trying to do something about the spread of disinformation online.
Something, just not anything too specifically quantifiable.
According to the Commission, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Mozilla, some additional members of the EDIMA trade association, plus unnamed advertising groups are among those that have signed up to the self-regulatory code, which will apply in a month’s time.
Signatories have committed to taking not exactly prescribed actions in the following five areas:
Disrupting advertising revenues of certain accounts and websites that spread disinformation;
Making political advertising and issue based advertising more transparent;
Addressing the issue of fake accounts and online bots;
Empowering consumers to report disinformation and access different news sources, while improving the visibility and findability of authoritative content;
Empowering the research community to monitor online disinformation through privacy-compliant access to the platforms’ data.
Mariya Gabriel, the European commissioner for digital economy and society, described the Code as a first “important” step in tackling disinformation. And one she said will be reviewed by the end of the year to see how (or, well, whether) it’s functioning, with the door left open for additional steps to be taken if not. So in theory legislation remains a future possibility.
“This is the first time that the industry has agreed on a set of self-regulatory standards to fight disinformation worldwide, on a voluntary basis,” she said in a statement. “The industry is committing to a wide range of actions, from transparency in political advertising to the closure of fake accounts and demonetisation of purveyors of disinformation, and we welcome this.
“These actions should contribute to a fast and measurable reduction of online disinformation. To this end, the Commission will pay particular attention to its effective implementation.”
“I urge online platforms and the advertising industry to immediately start implementing the actions agreed in the Code of Practice to achieve significant progress and measurable results in the coming months,” she added. “I also expect more and more online platforms, advertising companies and advertisers to adhere to the Code of Practice, and I encourage everyone to make their utmost to put their commitments into practice to fight disinformation.”
Earlier this year a report by an expert group established by the Commission to help shape its response to the so-called ‘fake news’ crisis, called for more transparency from online platform, as well as urgent investment in media and information literacy education to empower journalists and foster a diverse and sustainable news media ecosystem.
Safe to say, no one has suggested there’s any kind of quick fix for the Internet enabling the accelerated spread of nonsense and lies.
Including the Commission’s own expert group, which offered an assorted pick’n’mix of ideas — set over various and some not-at-all-instant-fix timeframes.
Though the group was called out for failing to interrogate evidence around the role of behavioral advertising in the dissemination of fake news — which has arguably been piling up. (Certainly its potential to act as a disinformation nexus has been amply illustrated by the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal, to name one recent example.)
The Commission is not doing any better on that front, either.
The executive has been working on formulating its response to what its expert group suggested should be referred to as ‘disinformation’ (i.e. rather than the politicized ‘fake news’ moniker) for more than a year now — after the European parliament adopted a Resolution, in June 2017, calling on it to examine the issue and look at existing laws and possible legislative interventions.
Elections for the European parliament are due next spring and MEPs are clearly concerned about the risk of interference. So the unelected Commission is feeling the elected parliament’s push here.
Disinformation — aka “verifiably false or misleading information” created and spread for economic gain and/or to deceive the public, and which “may cause public harm” such as “threats to democratic political and policymaking processes as well as public goods such as the protection of EU citizens’ health, the environment or security”, as the Commission’s new Code of Practice defines it — is clearly a slippery policy target.
And online multiple players are implicated and involved in its spread.
But so too are multiple, powerful, well resourced adtech players incentivized to push to avoid any political disruption to their lucrative people-targeting business models.
In the Commission’s voluntary Code of Practice signatories merely commit to recognizing their role in “contributing to solutions to the challenge posed by disinformation”.
“The Signatories recognise and agree with the Commission’s conclusions that “the exposure of citizens to large scale Disinformation, including misleading or outright false information, is a major challenge for Europe. Our open democratic societies depend on public debates that allow well-informed citizens to express their will through free and fair political processes,” runs the preamble.
“[T]he Signatories are mindful of the fundamental right to freedom of expression and to an open Internet, and the delicate balance which any efforts to limit the spread and impact of otherwise lawful content must strike.
“In recognition that the dissemination of Disinformation has many facets and is facilitated by and impacts a very broad segment of actors in the ecosystem, all stakeholders have roles to play in countering the spread of Disinformation.”
“Misleading advertising” is explicitly excluded from the scope of the code — which also presumably helped the Commission convince the ad industry to sign up to it.
Though that further risks muddying the waters of the effort, given that social media advertising has been the high-powered vehicle of choice for malicious misinformation muck-spreaders (such as Kremlin-backed agents of societal division).
The Commission is presumably trying to split the hairs of maliciously misleading fake ads (still bad because they’re not actually ads but malicious pretenders) and good old fashioned ‘misleading advertising’, though — which will continue to be dealt with under existing ad codes and standards.
Also excluded from the Code: “Clearly identified partisan news and commentary”. So purveyors of hyper biased political commentary are not intended to get scooped up here, either.
Though again, plenty of Kremlin-generated disinformation agents have masqueraded as partisan news and commentary pundits, and from all sides of the political spectrum.
Hence, we must again assume, the Commission including the requirement to exclude this type of content where it’s “clearly identified”. Whatever that means.
Among the various ‘commitments’ tech giants and ad firms are agreeing to here are plenty of firmly fudgey sounding statements that call for a degree of effort from the undersigned. But without ever setting out explicitly how such effort will be measured or quantified.
For e.g.
The Signatories recognise that all parties involved in the buying and selling of online advertising and the provision of advertising-related services need to work together to improve transparency across the online advertising ecosystem and thereby to effectively scrutinise, control and limit the placement of advertising on accounts and websites belonging to purveyors of Disinformation.
Or
Relevant Signatories commit to use reasonable efforts towards devising approaches to publicly disclose “issue-based advertising”. Such efforts will include the development of a working definition of “issue-based advertising” which does not limit reporting on political discussion and the publishing of political opinion and excludes commercial
And
Relevant Signatories commit to invest in features and tools that make it easier for people to find diverse perspectives about topics of public interest.
Nor does the code exactly nail down the terms it’s using to set goals — raising tricky and even existential questions like who defines what’s “relevant, authentic, and authoritative” where information is concerned?
Which is really the core of the disinformation problem.
And also not an easy question for tech giants — which have sold their vast content distribution farms as neutral ‘platforms’ — to start to approach, let alone tackle. Hence their leaning so heavily on third party fact-checkers to try to outsource their lack of any editorial values. Because without editorial values there’s no compass; and without a compass how can you judge the direction of tonal travel?
And so we end up with very vague suggestions in the code like:
Relevant Signatories should invest in technological means to prioritize relevant, authentic, and authoritative information where appropriate in search, feeds, or other automatically ranked distribution channels
Only slightly less vague and woolly is a commitment that signatories will “put in place clear policies regarding identity and the misuse of automated bots” on the signatories’ services, and “enforce these policies within the EU”. (So presumably not globally, despite disinformation being able to wreak havoc everywhere.)
Though here the code only points to some suggestive measures that could be used to do that — and which are set out in a separate annex. This boils down to a list of some very, very broad-brush “best practice principles” (such as “follow the money”; develop “solutions to increase transparency”; and “encourage research into disinformation”… ).
And set alongside that uninspiringly obvious list is another — of some current policy steps being undertaken by the undersigned to combat fake accounts and content — as if they’re already meeting the code’s expectations… so, er…
Unsurprisingly, the Commission’s first bite at ‘fake news’ has attracted some biting criticism for being unmeasurably weak sauce.
A group of media advisors — including the Association of Commercial Television in Europe, the European Broadcasting Union, the European Federation of Journalists and International Fact-Checking Network, and several academics — are among the first critics.
Reuters reports them complaining that signatories have not offered measurable objectives to monitor the implementation. “The platforms, despite their best efforts, have not been able to deliver a code of practice within the accepted meaning of effective and accountable self-regulation,” it quotes the group as saying.
Disinformation may be a tough, multi-pronged, multi-dimensional problem but few would try to argue that an overly dilute solution will deliver anything at all — well, unless it’s kicking the can down the road that you’re really after.
The Commission doesn’t even seem to know exactly what the undersigned have agreed to do as a first step, with the commissioner saying she’ll meet signatories “in the coming weeks to discuss the specific procedures and policies that they are adopting to make the Code a reality”. So double er… !
The code also only envisages signatories meeting annually to discuss how things are going. So no pressure for regular collaborative moots vis-a-vis tackling things like botnets spreading malicious disinformation then. Not unless the undersigned really, really want to.
Which seems unlikely, given how their business models tend to benefit from engagement — and disinformation-fuelled outrage has shown itself to be a very potent fuel on that front.
As part of the code, these adtech giants have at least technically agreed to make information available to the Commission on request — and generally to co-operate with its efforts to assess how/whether the code is working.
So, if public pressure on the issue continues to ramp up, the Commission does at least have a route to ask for relevant data from platforms that could, in theory, be used to feed a regulation that’s worth the paper it’s written on.
Until then, there’s nothing much to see here.
via TechCrunch
0 notes
Text
Tech and ad giants sign up to Europe’s first weak bite at ‘fake news’
The European Union’s executive body has signed up tech platforms and ad industry players to a voluntary Code of Practice aimed at trying to do something about the spread of disinformation online.
Something, just not anything too specifically quantifiable.
According to the Commission, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Mozilla, some additional members of the EDIMA trade association, plus unnamed advertising groups are among those that have signed up to the self-regulatory code, which will apply in a month’s time.
Signatories have committed to taking not exactly prescribed actions in the following five areas:
Disrupting advertising revenues of certain accounts and websites that spread disinformation;
Making political advertising and issue based advertising more transparent;
Addressing the issue of fake accounts and online bots;
Empowering consumers to report disinformation and access different news sources, while improving the visibility and findability of authoritative content;
Empowering the research community to monitor online disinformation through privacy-compliant access to the platforms’ data.
Mariya Gabriel, the European commissioner for digital economy and society, described the Code as a first “important” step in tackling disinformation. And one she said will be reviewed by the end of the year to see how (or, well, whether) it’s functioning, with the door left open for additional steps to be taken if not. So in theory legislation remains a future possibility.
“This is the first time that the industry has agreed on a set of self-regulatory standards to fight disinformation worldwide, on a voluntary basis,” she said in a statement. “The industry is committing to a wide range of actions, from transparency in political advertising to the closure of fake accounts and demonetisation of purveyors of disinformation, and we welcome this.
“These actions should contribute to a fast and measurable reduction of online disinformation. To this end, the Commission will pay particular attention to its effective implementation.”
“I urge online platforms and the advertising industry to immediately start implementing the actions agreed in the Code of Practice to achieve significant progress and measurable results in the coming months,” she added. “I also expect more and more online platforms, advertising companies and advertisers to adhere to the Code of Practice, and I encourage everyone to make their utmost to put their commitments into practice to fight disinformation.”
Earlier this year a report by an expert group established by the Commission to help shape its response to the so-called ‘fake news’ crisis, called for more transparency from online platform, as well as urgent investment in media and information literacy education to empower journalists and foster a diverse and sustainable news media ecosystem.
Safe to say, no one has suggested there’s any kind of quick fix for the Internet enabling the accelerated spread of nonsense and lies.
Including the Commission’s own expert group, which offered an assorted pick’n’mix of ideas — set over various and some not-at-all-instant-fix timeframes.
Though the group was called out for failing to interrogate evidence around the role of behavioral advertising in the dissemination of fake news — which has arguably been piling up. (Certainly its potential to act as a disinformation nexus has been amply illustrated by the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal, to name one recent example.)
The Commission is not doing any better on that front, either.
The executive has been working on formulating its response to what its expert group suggested should be referred to as ‘disinformation’ (i.e. rather than the politicized ‘fake news’ moniker) for more than a year now — after the European parliament adopted a Resolution, in June 2017, calling on it to examine the issue and look at existing laws and possible legislative interventions.
Elections for the European parliament are due next spring and MEPs are clearly concerned about the risk of interference. So the unelected Commission is feeling the elected parliament’s push here.
Disinformation — aka “verifiably false or misleading information” created and spread for economic gain and/or to deceive the public, and which “may cause public harm” such as “threats to democratic political and policymaking processes as well as public goods such as the protection of EU citizens’ health, the environment or security”, as the Commission’s new Code of Practice defines it — is clearly a slippery policy target.
And online multiple players are implicated and involved in its spread.
But so too are multiple, powerful, well resourced adtech players incentivized to push to avoid any political disruption to their lucrative people-targeting business models.
In the Commission’s voluntary Code of Practice signatories merely commit to recognizing their role in “contributing to solutions to the challenge posed by disinformation”.
“The Signatories recognise and agree with the Commission’s conclusions that “the exposure of citizens to large scale Disinformation, including misleading or outright false information, is a major challenge for Europe. Our open democratic societies depend on public debates that allow well-informed citizens to express their will through free and fair political processes,” runs the preamble.
“[T]he Signatories are mindful of the fundamental right to freedom of expression and to an open Internet, and the delicate balance which any efforts to limit the spread and impact of otherwise lawful content must strike.
“In recognition that the dissemination of Disinformation has many facets and is facilitated by and impacts a very broad segment of actors in the ecosystem, all stakeholders have roles to play in countering the spread of Disinformation.”
“Misleading advertising” is explicitly excluded from the scope of the code — which also presumably helped the Commission convince the ad industry to sign up to it.
Though that further risks muddying the waters of the effort, given that social media advertising has been the high-powered vehicle of choice for malicious misinformation muck-spreaders (such as Kremlin-backed agents of societal division).
The Commission is presumably trying to split the hairs of maliciously misleading fake ads (still bad because they’re not actually ads but malicious pretenders) and good old fashioned ‘misleading advertising’, though — which will continue to be dealt with under existing ad codes and standards.
Also excluded from the Code: “Clearly identified partisan news and commentary”. So purveyors of hyper biased political commentary are not intended to get scooped up here, either.
Though again, plenty of Kremlin-generated disinformation agents have masqueraded as partisan news and commentary pundits, and from all sides of the political spectrum.
Hence, we must again assume, the Commission including the requirement to exclude this type of content where it’s “clearly identified”. Whatever that means.
Among the various ‘commitments’ tech giants and ad firms are agreeing to here are plenty of firmly fudgey sounding statements that call for a degree of effort from the undersigned. But without ever setting out explicitly how such effort will be measured or quantified.
For e.g.
The Signatories recognise that all parties involved in the buying and selling of online advertising and the provision of advertising-related services need to work together to improve transparency across the online advertising ecosystem and thereby to effectively scrutinise, control and limit the placement of advertising on accounts and websites belonging to purveyors of Disinformation.
Or
Relevant Signatories commit to use reasonable efforts towards devising approaches to publicly disclose “issue-based advertising”. Such efforts will include the development of a working definition of “issue-based advertising” which does not limit reporting on political discussion and the publishing of political opinion and excludes commercial
And
Relevant Signatories commit to invest in features and tools that make it easier for people to find diverse perspectives about topics of public interest.
Nor does the code exactly nail down the terms it’s using to set goals — raising tricky and even existential questions like who defines what’s “relevant, authentic, and authoritative” where information is concerned?
Which is really the core of the disinformation problem.
And also not an easy question for tech giants — which have sold their vast content distribution farms as neutral ‘platforms’ — to start to approach, let alone tackle. Hence their leaning so heavily on third party fact-checkers to try to outsource their lack of any editorial values. Because without editorial values there’s no compass; and without a compass how can you judge the direction of tonal travel?
And so we end up with very vague suggestions in the code like:
Relevant Signatories should invest in technological means to prioritize relevant, authentic, and authoritative information where appropriate in search, feeds, or other automatically ranked distribution channels
Only slightly less vague and woolly is a commitment that signatories will “put in place clear policies regarding identity and the misuse of automated bots” on the signatories’ services, and “enforce these policies within the EU”. (So presumably not globally, despite disinformation being able to wreak havoc everywhere.)
Though here the code only points to some suggestive measures that could be used to do that — and which are set out in a separate annex. This boils down to a list of some very, very broad-brush “best practice principles” (such as “follow the money”; develop “solutions to increase transparency”; and “encourage research into disinformation”… ).
And set alongside that uninspiringly obvious list is another — of some current policy steps being undertaken by the undersigned to combat fake accounts and content — as if they’re already meeting the code’s expectations… so, er…
Unsurprisingly, the Commission’s first bite at ‘fake news’ has attracted some biting criticism for being unmeasurably weak sauce.
A group of media advisors — including the Association of Commercial Television in Europe, the European Broadcasting Union, the European Federation of Journalists and International Fact-Checking Network, and several academics — are among the first critics.
Reuters reports them complaining that signatories have not offered measurable objectives to monitor the implementation. “The platforms, despite their best efforts, have not been able to deliver a code of practice within the accepted meaning of effective and accountable self-regulation,” it quotes the group as saying.
Disinformation may be a tough, multi-pronged, multi-dimensional problem but few would try to argue that an overly dilute solution will deliver anything at all — well, unless it’s kicking the can down the road that you’re really after.
The Commission doesn’t even seem to know exactly what the undersigned have agreed to do as a first step, with the commissioner saying she’ll meet signatories “in the coming weeks to discuss the specific procedures and policies that they are adopting to make the Code a reality”. So double er… !
The code also only envisages signatories meeting annually to discuss how things are going. So no pressure for regular collaborative moots vis-a-vis tackling things like botnets spreading malicious disinformation then. Not unless the undersigned really, really want to.
Which seems unlikely, given how their business models tend to benefit from engagement — and disinformation-fuelled outrage has shown itself to be a very potent fuel on that front.
As part of the code, these adtech giants have at least technically agreed to make information available to the Commission on request — and generally to co-operate with its efforts to assess how/whether the code is working.
So, if public pressure on the issue continues to ramp up, the Commission does at least have a route to ask for relevant data from platforms that could, in theory, be used to feed a regulation that’s worth the paper it’s written on.
Until then, there’s nothing much to see here.
Source: https://bloghyped.com/tech-and-ad-giants-sign-up-to-europes-first-weak-bite-at-fake-news/
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Tech and ad giants sign up to Europe’s first weak bite at ‘fake news’
The European Union’s executive body has signed up tech platforms and ad industry players to a voluntary Code of Practice aimed at trying to do something about the spread of disinformation online.
Something, just not anything too specifically quantifiable.
Facebook, Google, Twitter, Mozilla, the IAB advertising group are among those that have signed up to the self-regulatory code, which will apply in a month’s time.
Signatories have committed to taking not exactly prescribed actions in the following five areas:
Disrupting advertising revenues of certain accounts and websites that spread disinformation;
Making political advertising and issue based advertising more transparent;
Addressing the issue of fake accounts and online bots;
Empowering consumers to report disinformation and access different news sources, while improving the visibility and findability of authoritative content;
Empowering the research community to monitor online disinformation through privacy-compliant access to the platforms’ data.
Mariya Gabriel, the European commissioner for digital economy and society, described the Code as a first “important” step in tackling disinformation. And one she said will be reviewed by the end of the year to see how (or, well, whether) it’s functioning, with the door left open for additional steps to be taken if not. So in theory legislation remains a future possibility.
“This is the first time that the industry has agreed on a set of self-regulatory standards to fight disinformation worldwide, on a voluntary basis,” she said in a statement. “The industry is committing to a wide range of actions, from transparency in political advertising to the closure of fake accounts and demonetisation of purveyors of disinformation, and we welcome this.
“These actions should contribute to a fast and measurable reduction of online disinformation. To this end, the Commission will pay particular attention to its effective implementation.”
“I urge online platforms and the advertising industry to immediately start implementing the actions agreed in the Code of Practice to achieve significant progress and measurable results in the coming months,” she added. “I also expect more and more online platforms, advertising companies and advertisers to adhere to the Code of Practice, and I encourage everyone to make their utmost to put their commitments into practice to fight disinformation.”
Earlier this year a report by an expert group established by the Commission to help shape its response to the so-called ‘fake news’ crisis, called for more transparency from online platform, as well as urgent investment in media and information literacy education to empower journalists and foster a diverse and sustainable news media ecosystem.
Safe to say, no one has suggested there’s any kind of quick fix for the Internet enabling the accelerated spread of nonsense and lies.
Including the Commission’s own expert group, which offered an assorted pick’n’mix of ideas — set over various and some not-at-all-instant-fix timeframes.
Though the group was called out for failing to interrogate evidence around the role of behavioral advertising in the dissemination of fake news — which has arguably been piling up. (Certainly its potential to act as a disinformation nexus has been amply illustrated by the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal, to name one recent example.)
The Commission is not doing any better on that front, either.
The executive has been working on formulating its response to what its expert group suggested should be referred to as ‘disinformation’ (i.e. rather than the politicized ‘fake news’ moniker) for more than a year now — after the European parliament adopted a Resolution, in June 2017, calling on it to examine the issue and look at existing laws and possible legislative interventions.
Elections for the European parliament are due next spring and MEPs are clearly concerned about the risk of interference. So the unelected Commission is feeling the elected parliament’s push here.
Disinformation — aka “verifiably false or misleading information” created and spread for economic gain and/or to deceive the public, and which “may cause public harm” such as “threats to democratic political and policymaking processes as well as public goods such as the protection of EU citizens’ health, the environment or security”, as the Commission’s new Code of Practice defines it — is clearly a slippery policy target.
And online multiple players are implicated and involved in its spread.
But so too are multiple, powerful, well resourced adtech players incentivized to push to avoid any political disruption to their lucrative people-targeting business models.
In the Commission’s voluntary Code of Practice signatories merely commit to recognizing their role in “contributing to solutions to the challenge posed by disinformation”.
“The Signatories recognise and agree with the Commission’s conclusions that “the exposure of citizens to large scale Disinformation, including misleading or outright false information, is a major challenge for Europe. Our open democratic societies depend on public debates that allow well-informed citizens to express their will through free and fair political processes,” runs the preamble.
“[T]he Signatories are mindful of the fundamental right to freedom of expression and to an open Internet, and the delicate balance which any efforts to limit the spread and impact of otherwise lawful content must strike.
“In recognition that the dissemination of Disinformation has many facets and is facilitated by and impacts a very broad segment of actors in the ecosystem, all stakeholders have roles to play in countering the spread of Disinformation.”
“Misleading advertising” is explicitly excluded from the scope of the code — which also presumably helped the Commission convince the ad industry to sign up to it.
Though that further risks muddying the waters of the effort, given that social media advertising has been the high-powered vehicle of choice for malicious misinformation muck-spreaders (such as Kremlin-backed agents of societal division).
The Commission is presumably trying to split the hairs of maliciously misleading fake ads (still bad because they’re not actually ads but malicious pretenders) and good old fashioned ‘misleading advertising’, though — which will continue to be dealt with under existing ad codes and standards.
Also excluded from the Code: “Clearly identified partisan news and commentary”. So purveyors of hyper biased political commentary are not intended to get scooped up here, either.
Though again, plenty of Kremlin-generated disinformation agents have masqueraded as partisan news and commentary pundits, and from all sides of the political spectrum.
Hence, we must again assume, the Commission including the requirement to exclude this type of content where it’s “clearly identified”. Whatever that means.
Among the various ‘commitments’ tech giants and ad firms are agreeing to here are plenty of firmly fudgey sounding statements that call for a degree of effort from the undersigned. But without ever setting out explicitly how such effort will be measured or quantified.
For e.g.
The Signatories recognise that all parties involved in the buying and selling of online advertising and the provision of advertising-related services need to work together to improve transparency across the online advertising ecosystem and thereby to effectively scrutinise, control and limit the placement of advertising on accounts and websites belonging to purveyors of Disinformation.
Or
Relevant Signatories commit to use reasonable efforts towards devising approaches to publicly disclose “issue-based advertising”. Such efforts will include the development of a working definition of “issue-based advertising” which does not limit reporting on political discussion and the publishing of political opinion and excludes commercial
And
Relevant Signatories commit to invest in features and tools that make it easier for people to find diverse perspectives about topics of public interest.
Nor does the code exactly nail down the terms it’s using to set goals — raising tricky and even existential questions like who defines what’s “relevant, authentic, and authoritative” where information is concerned?
Which is really the core of the disinformation problem.
And also not an easy question for tech giants — which have sold their vast content distribution farms as neutral ‘platforms’ — to start to approach, let alone tackle. Hence their leaning so heavily on third party fact-checkers to try to outsource their lack of any editorial values. Because without editorial values there’s no compass; and without a compass how can you judge the direction of tonal travel?
And so we end up with very vague suggestions in the code like:
Relevant Signatories should invest in technological means to prioritize relevant, authentic, and authoritative information where appropriate in search, feeds, or other automatically ranked distribution channels
Only slightly less vague and woolly is a commitment that signatories will “put in place clear policies regarding identity and the misuse of automated bots” on the signatories’ services, and “enforce these policies within the EU”. (So presumably not globally, despite disinformation wreaked havoc everywhere.)
Though here the code only points to some suggestive measures that could be used to do that — and which are set out in a separate annex.
Which boils down to a list of some very, very broad-brush “best practice principles” (such as “follow the money”; develop “solutions to increase transparency”; and “encourage research into disinformation”… ).
And set alongside that uninspiringly obvious list is another list — of some current policy steps being undertaken by the undersigned to combat fake accounts and content — as if they’re already meeting the code’s expectations…
Unsurprisingly, the Commission’s first bite at ‘fake news’ has attracted some biting criticism for being unmeasurably weak sauce.
A group of media advisors — including the Association of Commercial Television in Europe, the European Broadcasting Union, the European Federation of Journalists and International Fact-Checking Network, and several academics — are among the first critics.
Reuters reports them complaining that signatories have not offered measurable objectives to monitor the implementation. “The platforms, despite their best efforts, have not been able to deliver a code of practice within the accepted meaning of effective and accountable self-regulation,” it quotes the group as saying.
Disinformation may be a tough, multi-pronged, multi-dimensional problem but few would try to argue that an overly dilute solution will deliver anything at all — well, unless it’s kicking the can down the road that you’re really after.
The Commission doesn’t even seem to know exactly what the undersigned have agreed to do as a first step, with the commissioner saying she’ll meet signatories “in the coming weeks to discuss the specific procedures and policies that they are adopting to make the Code a reality”. So, er… !
The code also only envisages signatories meeting annually to discuss how things are going. So no pressure for regular collaborative moots vis-a-vis tackling things like botnets spreading malicious disinformation then. Not unless the undersigned really, really want to. Which seems unlikely.
As part of the code, these adtech giants have at least technically agreed to make information available to the Commission on request — and generally to co-operate with its efforts to assess how/whether the code is working.
So, if public pressure on the issue continues to ramp up, the Commission does at least have a route to ask for relevant data from platforms that could, in theory, be used to feed a regulation that’s worth the paper it’s written on.
Until then, there’s nothing much to see here.
Via Natasha Lomas https://techcrunch.com
0 notes
Text
Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018
Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018
Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018 was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
It’ll be 10 years ago this January that I first walked through the doors at Bruce Clay, Inc. and entered digital marketing.
I was fresh out of journalism school, which I’d studied because I wanted to write truth to the world. By making information publicly available, I thought I could contribute to the greater good. I saw myself educating readers by sharing the stories of the world. Pretty altruistic, right?
I never thought I would work in marketing. Who plans on a career in marketing? What 10-year-old says, “I want to be a marketer when I grow up, Mommy!”
Well, I’ve learned that marketers play a similar role as journalists but in the private business sector. We’re in the business of communications — crafting messaging and figuring out how to get those messages in front of as many people as possible.
We use our storytelling talents and distribution know-how for our companies and our clients. Our job is to get the right story in front of the right audience.
I’ve learned that SEO wins happen at the intersection of identifying storytelling opportunities and maximizing the visibility of those stories through search.
And yet I think it can be easy for an SEO to forget a critical role they play for clients and for organizations: that of the content evangelist.
SEOs can fall into a trap of focusing on the technical requirements for making content findable by search engines. And while crawlability and accessibility issues are key SEO responsibilities, big brands today are demonstrating that the competitive advantage lies in crafting 10x content and investing in SEO content strategy.
The Job of an SEO
Here’s an infographic you’ve probably seen before. It’s Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. It does a really good job of hitting on every component of an SEO’s domain.
Click to visit SearchEngineLand.com where you can download the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors.
It’s neatly divided into on-page and off-page factors. Of course, nothing in real life is ever so neat. There’s always overlap and grey. There are no links without content. But if we accept this diagram at face value, we can still interpret a lot about an SEO’s top priorities.
For instance, look at the on-page factors. You’ll see content and you’ll see technical SEO. We know that Google has said that the two most important ranking signals are content and links. From that we can infer that technical SEO does not provide as big of a competitive advantage.
Technical SEO is more like the barrier to entry for ranking. Is your site crawlable, is all the HTML in the right place, are duplicate pages consolidated with canonicals and parameters excluded in Search Console? These technical SEO issues are critical to search visibility. Still, I’d argue they represent the lowest common denominator. You’re rarely going to climb to the first page or the top 3 rankings on the basis of clean, crawlable code. Not having these things will hurt you, but having them won’t give you a competitive edge.
Remember what Google said — the most important ranking factors are links and content. And if you have to prioritize one of those things, it has to be content, because content is what generates links.
Why Content Should Be Your Top SEO Priority
Here are concrete ways that you can empower your role in SEO by evangelizing content to your company or your clients.
1. Content is in your control.
When it comes to generating links and content, don’t put the cart before the horse. As long as you’re not buying links (and you’d better not), you’re going to need link-worthy content on your site that attracts links.
Who links to you is an X factor. It’s not as squarely in your control. What is in your control? Content.
Who links to you is an X factor not in your control. What is in your control? Content.
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2. Content has trackable metrics.
What gets measured gets done. While bottom-line KPIs are traffic and conversions, those results are the outcome of the effort you put in to make your site an authority with a satisfactory user experience.
Leading metrics you can focus on improving are:
The number of thin pages that you make better.
The number of new ranking pages you add to the site.
The number of pages on the site and pages indexed.
What’s awesome about focusing SEO campaigns on content is that you can truly track your progress while you’re creating more great content.
3. Bigger sites make more money.
When your boss asks you, “What’s the ROI of this content initiative?” you can say that big sites make more money.
When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, he brought a new growth strategy to the paper. WaPo grew WaPo traffic 28% from 2015 to 2016. The effort resulted in WaPo surpassing The New York Times’s traffic in 2015. How did they do it? By adopting a content strategy around producing a high volume of content aimed at long-tail and niche interests.
How can a small website compete with a larger one? Who are the major competitors in your space? How many pages do they have on a topic? More pages mean more opportunities to rank. More pages demonstrate depth of expertise, making you more likely to rank on a topic.
Just like a company needs to grow to make a profit, so does a website.
How to Set Content Apart as 10x
At this point, you might agree that an SEO has to prioritize content strategy. You may be thinking to yourself, “OK, I get it. I can make the push for my clients or in my group to add good, quality content to the site to see ranking gains.”
That is certainly a worthy goal. But the truth is that good, quality content isn’t good enough. Today’s bar for Page 1 rankings is 10x content.
The skyscraper technique popularized by Brian Dean is the process of looking at the top result for a query you’re targeting and then outdoing that top-ranking page with your own page. Dean calls this content marketing for link builders. See what ranks the best and then shoot even higher with your own answer to the query. Sounds like a lot of work, right? It is. Of course, smart SEO minds have refined the process.
So what is the process for creating 10x content? For a succinct answer we turn to Rand Fishkin’s classic Whiteboard Friday “Why ‘Good, Unique Content’ Needs to Die (And What Should Replace It).”
Research the pages that are ranking. Use Google to see the top-ranked pages and use BuzzSumo to see the most shared content on a topic.
Then ask these questions as you’re taking it all in:
What are the questions that are asked and answered in these pages?
How thorough is the information? What’s missing? HubSpot shared word-count analysis of its blog posts compared to organic traffic and found that a word count of 2,250–2,500 words gets the most traffic. So you definitely want content to be thorough and comprehensive.
What’s the format and delivery mechanism of these pages? You might also call this the user experience. Is it visual? Is it video? Is it rendered well for the device? Is the info I’m looking for on the page, or do you have to click to another page? Is it easy to find an answer?
What are the sources of the information and are they credible?
What’s the quality of the writing?
Once you collect all these answers and identify what search engines are rewarding and what people are sharing, you’ll know what you at least have to do to compete. And you can figure out how to better it.
My 3 Best Tips for Capturing 10x Content Magic
Here’s the sucky thing. Generating 10x content requires sweat and grind. But there are some likely sources of 10x content magic that you can mine.
Data-driven content: This is the Pricenomics model. Pricenomics is a content agency that turns company data into content and then tracks the distribution and performance of the content.
If you read the Pricenomics blog, they’re always posting this in action. It’s a really fun blog, so I recommend you check it out. Here’s an example:
Venngage, an infographics company, used the Pricenomics content marketing model to sift through all of their client data and come up with the most popular font types in America. What data can you bring to light that will make people think, “Huh, I’ve always wondered!” or “Hey, I never would have thought.”
There’s story in data and people just eat that stuff up.
Expert voice content: This is just journalism 101. You go to the expert source and you name your sources.
Honestly, if you can find a good expert, maybe someone on your staff or maybe the biggest name in your industry, and they agree to an interview, this is one of the fastest ways to 10x your content.
You get that credibility factor. You get the network effect of the expert and their followers sharing and reading.
What you want to steer clear of here is the trap of the expert round-up. I think we’ve all seen that. And those aren’t all bad, but they are kind of cheap.
We’re not going for cheap. What you’re looking for in talking to your expert is to raise your page to the next level. Bring something to the forefront that the normal person misses, but that will create that light-bulb moment in those reading it for the first time.
Start your practice of nurturing relationships with experts with this Bruce Clay guide.
Voice of Customer content: Writers start by thinking about their audience. You get into the target audience’s head to find out what they want, what they need, what they know, what they don’t know they need. And then you write to solve a problem in that audience’s – or persona’s – life.
In marketing, we’re matching the pain point with our solution. And what really resonates with your target audience is hearing or reading the thoughts that are actually going on in their head, or close to it.
There are many possible ways to gather the information used to synthesize VOC: focus groups, individual interviews, and contextual inquiries (like on-site surveys) are a few. But you’re basically using structured in-depth interviews, focusing on the customers’ experiences with current products or services. Need statements are extracted, organized into useful categories, and then prioritized and used by the business all the way from product development to marketing.
I learned about the methodology around Voice of Customer data from Copy Hackers. User-generated content, product reviews and testimonials are essentially forms of VOC content.
And maybe this is where the altruist in me comes out, because when we turn our focus on SEO content, we’re doing something special. We’re not trying to find a loophole to exploit and win on a technicality. We’re sharing stories that will enrich people’s experience. We’re teaching people about solutions that will make their lives better. And we’re making connections with people like us.
SEO has to encompass those 30-or-so factors on the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. But the forensic-style technical SEO is not the bar you’re holding your work up to — it’s the minimum viable SEO. Today, getting the technical stuff right is just the ticket to entry.
If you’re actually trying to reach the top, you’re going to prioritize content as the top SEO issue for you to solve.
If you like this post, please share it with your friends or colleagues. For more like this, be sure to subscribe to our blog.
This post is based on my presentation “Thin Content Is THE Top SEO Issue” which I shared at Pubcon Las Vegas last week. Check out the full deck below.
Thin Content is THE Top SEO Issue from Virginia Nussey
[Read More …]
Source: SEO News
The post Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018 appeared first on WeRank Digital Marketing Agency.
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Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018
Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018 was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
It’ll be 10 years ago this January that I first walked through the doors at Bruce Clay, Inc. and entered digital marketing.
I was fresh out of journalism school, which I’d studied because I wanted to write truth to the world. By making information publicly available, I thought I could contribute to the greater good. I saw myself educating readers by sharing the stories of the world. Pretty altruistic, right?
I never thought I would work in marketing. Who plans on a career in marketing? What 10-year-old says, “I want to be a marketer when I grow up, Mommy!”
Well, I’ve learned that marketers play a similar role as journalists but in the private business sector. We’re in the business of communications — crafting messaging and figuring out how to get those messages in front of as many people as possible.
We use our storytelling talents and distribution know-how for our companies and our clients. Our job is to get the right story in front of the right audience.
I’ve learned that SEO wins happen at the intersection of identifying storytelling opportunities and maximizing the visibility of those stories through search.
And yet I think it can be easy for an SEO to forget a critical role they play for clients and for organizations: that of the content evangelist.
SEOs can fall into a trap of focusing on the technical requirements for making content findable by search engines. And while crawlability and accessibility issues are key SEO responsibilities, big brands today are demonstrating that the competitive advantage lies in crafting 10x content and investing in SEO content strategy.
The Job of an SEO
Here’s an infographic you’ve probably seen before. It’s Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. It does a really good job of hitting on every component of an SEO’s domain.
Click to visit SearchEngineLand.com where you can download the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors.
It’s neatly divided into on-page and off-page factors. Of course, nothing in real life is ever so neat. There’s always overlap and grey. There are no links without content. But if we accept this diagram at face value, we can still interpret a lot about an SEO’s top priorities.
For instance, look at the on-page factors. You’ll see content and you’ll see technical SEO. We know that Google has said that the two most important ranking signals are content and links. From that we can infer that technical SEO does not provide as big of a competitive advantage.
Technical SEO is more like the barrier to entry for ranking. Is your site crawlable, is all the HTML in the right place, are duplicate pages consolidated with canonicals and parameters excluded in Search Console? These technical SEO issues are critical to search visibility. Still, I’d argue they represent the lowest common denominator. You’re rarely going to climb to the first page or the top 3 rankings on the basis of clean, crawlable code. Not having these things will hurt you, but they won’t give you a competitive edge.
Remember what Google said — the most important ranking factors are links and content. And if you have to prioritize one of those things, it has to be content, because content is what generates links.
Why Content Should Be Your Top SEO Priority
Here are concrete ways that you can empower your role in SEO by evangelizing content to your company or your clients.
1. Content is in your control.
When it comes to generating links and content, don’t put the cart before the horse. As long as you’re not buying links (and you’d better not), you’re going to need link-worthy content on your site that attracts links.
Who links to you is an X factor. It’s not as squarely in your control. What is in your control? Content.
2. Content has trackable metrics.
What gets measured gets done. While bottom-line KPIs are traffic and conversions, those results are the outcome of the effort you put in to make your site an authority with a satisfactory user experience.
Leading metrics you can focus on improving are:
The number of thin pages that you make better.
The number of new ranking pages you add to the site.
The number of pages on the site and pages indexed.
What’s awesome about focusing SEO campaigns on content is that you can truly track your progress while you’re creating more great content.
3. Bigger sites make more money.
When your boss asks you, “What’s the ROI of this content initiative?” you can say that big sites make more money.
When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, he brought a new growth strategy to the paper. WaPo grew WaPo traffic 28% from 2015 to 2016. The effort resulted in WaPo surpassing The New York Times’s traffic in 2015. How did they do it? By adopting a content strategy around producing a high volume of content aimed at long-tail and niche interests.
How can a small website compete with a larger one? Who are the major competitors in your space? How many pages do they have on a topic? More pages mean more opportunities to rank. More pages demonstrate depth of expertise, making you more likely to rank on a topic.
Just like a company needs to grow to make a profit, so does a website.
How to Set Content Apart as 10x
At this point, you might agree that an SEO has to prioritize content strategy. You may be thinking to yourself, “OK, I get it. I can make the push for my clients or in my group to add good, quality content to the site to see ranking gains.”
That is certainly a worthy goal. But the truth is that good, quality content isn’t good enough. Today’s bar for Page 1 rankings is 10x content.
The skyscraper technique popularized by Brian Dean is the process of looking at the top result for a query you’re targeting and then outdoing that top-ranking page with your own page. Dean calls this content marketing for link builders. See what ranks the best and then shoot even higher with your own answer to the query. Sounds like a lot of work, right? It is. Of course, smart SEO minds have refined the process.
So what is the process for creating 10x content? For a succinct answer we turn to Rand Fishkin’s classic Whiteboard Friday “Why ‘Good, Unique Content’ Needs to Die (And What Should Replace It).”
Research the pages that are ranking. Use Google to see the top-ranked pages and use BuzzSumo to see the most shared content on a topic.
Then ask these questions as you’re taking it all in:
What are the questions that are asked and answered in these pages?
How thorough is the information? What’s missing? HubSpot shared word-count analysis of its blog posts compared to organic traffic and found that a word count of 2,250–2,500 words gets the most traffic. So you definitely want content to be thorough and comprehensive.
What’s the format and delivery mechanism of these pages? You might also call this the user experience. Is it visual? Is it video? Is it rendered well for the device? Is the info I’m looking for on the page, or do you have to click to another page? Is it easy to find an answer?
What are the sources of the information and are they credible?
What’s the quality of the writing?
Once you collect all these answers and identify what search engines are rewarding and what people are sharing, now you know what you at least have to do to compete. And you can figure out how to better it.
My 3 Best Tips for Capturing 10x Content Magic
Here’s the sucky thing. Generating 10x content requires sweat and grind. But there are some likely sources of 10x content magic that you can mine.
Data-driven content: This is the Pricenomics model. Pricenomics is a content agency that turns company data into content and then tracks the distribution and performance of the content.
If you read the Pricenomics blog, they’re always posting this in action. It’s a really fun blog, so I recommend you check it out. Here’s an example:
Venngage, an infographics company, used the Pricenomics content marketing model to sift through their all their client data and come up with the most popular font types in America. What data can you bring light to that will make people think, “Huh, I’ve always wondered!” or “Hey, I never would have thought.”
There’s story in data and people just eat that stuff up.
Expert voice content: This is just journalism 101. You go to the expert source and you name your sources.
Honestly, if you can find a good expert, maybe someone on your staff or maybe the biggest name in your industry, and they agree to an interview, this is one of the fastest ways to 10x your content.
You get that credibility factor. You get the network effect of the expert and their followers sharing and reading.
What you want to steer clear of here is the trap of the expert round-up. I think we’ve all seen that. And those aren’t all bad, but they are kind of cheap.
We’re not going for cheap. What you’re looking for in talking to your expert is to raise your page to the next level. Bring something to the forefront that the normal person misses, but that will create that light-bulb moment in those reading it for the first time.
Start your practice of nurturing relationships with experts with this Bruce Clay guide.
Voice of customer content: Writers start by thinking about their audience. You get into the target audience’s head to find out what they want, what they need, what they know, what they don’t know they need. And then you write to solve a problem in that audience’s – or persona’s – life.
In marketing, we’re matching the pain point with our solution. And what really resonates with your target audience is hearing or reading the thoughts that are actually going on in their head, or close to it.
There are many possible ways to gather the information used to synthesize VOC: focus groups, individual interviews, and contextual inquiries (like on-site surveys) are a few. But you’re basically using structured in-depth interviews, focusing on the customers’ experiences with current products or services. Need statements are extracted, organized into useful categories, and then prioritized and used by the business all the way from product development to marketing.
I learned about the methodology around Voice of Customer data from Copy Hackers. User-generated content, product reviews and testimonials are essentially forms of VOC content.
And maybe this is where the altruist in me comes out, because when we turn our focus on SEO content, we’re doing something special. We’re not trying to find a loophole to exploit and win on a technicality. We’re sharing stories that will enrich people’s experience. We’re teaching people about solutions that will make their lives better. And we’re making connections with people like us.
SEO has to encompass those 30-or-so factors on the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. But the forensic-style technical SEO is not the bar you’re holding your work up to — it’s the minimum viable SEO. Today, getting the technical stuff right is just the ticket to entry.
If you’re actually trying to reach the top, you’re going to prioritize content as the top SEO issue for you to solve.
If you like this post, please share it with your friends or colleagues. For more like this, be sure to subscribe to our blog.
This post is based on my presentation “Thin Content Is THE Top SEO Issue” which I shared at Pubcon Las Vegas last week. Check out the full deck below.
Thin Content is THE Top SEO Issue from Virginia Nussey
http://ift.tt/2hBVHOq
0 notes
Text
Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018
Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018
Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018 was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
It’ll be 10 years ago this January that I first walked through the doors at Bruce Clay, Inc. and entered digital marketing.
I was fresh out of journalism school, which I’d studied because I wanted to write truth to the world. By making information publicly available, I thought I could contribute to the greater good. I saw myself educating readers by sharing the stories of the world. Pretty altruistic, right?
I never thought I would work in marketing. Who plans on a career in marketing? What 10-year-old says, “I want to be a marketer when I grow up, Mommy!”
Well, I’ve learned that marketers play a similar role as journalists but in the private business sector. We’re in the business of communications — crafting messaging and figuring out how to get those messages in front of as many people as possible.
We use our storytelling talents and distribution know-how for our companies and our clients. Our job is to get the right story in front of the right audience.
I’ve learned that SEO wins happen at the intersection of identifying storytelling opportunities and maximizing the visibility of those stories through search.
And yet I think it can be easy for an SEO to forget a critical role they play for clients and for organizations: that of the content evangelist.
SEOs can fall into a trap of focusing on the technical requirements for making content findable by search engines. And while crawlability and accessibility issues are key SEO responsibilities, big brands today are demonstrating that the competitive advantage lies in crafting 10x content and investing in SEO content strategy.
The Job of an SEO
Here’s an infographic you’ve probably seen before. It’s Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. It does a really good job of hitting on every component of an SEO’s domain.
Click to visit SearchEngineLand.com where you can download the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors.
It’s neatly divided into on-page and off-page factors. Of course, nothing in real life is ever so neat. There’s always overlap and grey. There are no links without content. But if we accept this diagram at face value, we can still interpret a lot about an SEO’s top priorities.
For instance, look at the on-page factors. You’ll see content and you’ll see technical SEO. We know that Google has said that the two most important ranking signals are content and links. From that we can infer that technical SEO does not provide as big of a competitive advantage.
Technical SEO is more like the barrier to entry for ranking. Is your site crawlable, is all the HTML in the right place, are duplicate pages consolidated with canonicals and parameters excluded in Search Console? These technical SEO issues are critical to search visibility. Still, I’d argue they represent the lowest common denominator. You’re rarely going to climb to the first page or the top 3 rankings on the basis of clean, crawlable code. Not having these things will hurt you, but they won’t give you a competitive edge.
Remember what Google said — the most important ranking factors are links and content. And if you have to prioritize one of those things, it has to be content, because content is what generates links.
Why Content Should Be Your Top SEO Priority
Here are concrete ways that you can empower your role in SEO by evangelizing content to your company or your clients.
1. Content is in your control.
When it comes to generating links and content, don’t put the cart before the horse. As long as you’re not buying links (and you’d better not), you’re going to need link-worthy content on your site that attracts links.
Who links to you is an X factor. It’s not as squarely in your control. What is in your control? Content.
2. Content has trackable metrics.
What gets measured gets done. While bottom-line KPIs are traffic and conversions, those results are the outcome of the effort you put in to make your site an authority with a satisfactory user experience.
Leading metrics you can focus on improving are:
The number of thin pages that you make better.
The number of new ranking pages you add to the site.
The number of pages on the site and pages indexed.
What’s awesome about focusing SEO campaigns on content is that you can truly track your progress while you’re creating more great content.
3. Bigger sites make more money.
When your boss asks you, “What’s the ROI of this content initiative?” you can say that big sites make more money.
When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, he brought a new growth strategy to the paper. WaPo grew WaPo traffic 28% from 2015 to 2016. The effort resulted in WaPo surpassing The New York Times’s traffic in 2015. How did they do it? By adopting a content strategy around producing a high volume of content aimed at long-tail and niche interests.
How can a small website compete with a larger one? Who are the major competitors in your space? How many pages do they have on a topic? More pages mean more opportunities to rank. More pages demonstrate depth of expertise, making you more likely to rank on a topic.
Just like a company needs to grow to make a profit, so does a website.
How to Set Content Apart as 10x
At this point, you might agree that an SEO has to prioritize content strategy. You may be thinking to yourself, “OK, I get it. I can make the push for my clients or in my group to add good, quality content to the site to see ranking gains.”
That is certainly a worthy goal. But the truth is that good, quality content isn’t good enough. Today’s bar for Page 1 rankings is 10x content.
The skyscraper technique popularized by Brian Dean is the process of looking at the top result for a query you’re targeting and then outdoing that top-ranking page with your own page. Dean calls this content marketing for link builders. See what ranks the best and then shoot even higher with your own answer to the query. Sounds like a lot of work, right? It is. Of course, smart SEO minds have refined the process.
So what is the process for creating 10x content? For a succinct answer we turn to Rand Fishkin’s classic Whiteboard Friday “Why ‘Good, Unique Content’ Needs to Die (And What Should Replace It).”
Research the pages that are ranking. Use Google to see the top-ranked pages and use BuzzSumo to see the most shared content on a topic.
Then ask these questions as you’re taking it all in:
What are the questions that are asked and answered in these pages?
How thorough is the information? What’s missing? HubSpot shared word-count analysis of its blog posts compared to organic traffic and found that a word count of 2,250–2,500 words gets the most traffic. So you definitely want content to be thorough and comprehensive.
What’s the format and delivery mechanism of these pages? You might also call this the user experience. Is it visual? Is it video? Is it rendered well for the device? Is the info I’m looking for on the page, or do you have to click to another page? Is it easy to find an answer?
What are the sources of the information and are they credible?
What’s the quality of the writing?
Once you collect all these answers and identify what search engines are rewarding and what people are sharing, now you know what you at least have to do to compete. And you can figure out how to better it.
My 3 Best Tips for Capturing 10x Content Magic
Here’s the sucky thing. Generating 10x content requires sweat and grind. But there are some likely sources of 10x content magic that you can mine.
Data-driven content: This is the Pricenomics model. Pricenomics is a content agency that turns company data into content and then tracks the distribution and performance of the content.
If you read the Pricenomics blog, they’re always posting this in action. It’s a really fun blog, so I recommend you check it out. Here’s an example:
Venngage, an infographics company, used the Pricenomics content marketing model to sift through their all their client data and come up with the most popular font types in America. What data can you bring light to that will make people think, “Huh, I’ve always wondered!” or “Hey, I never would have thought.”
There’s story in data and people just eat that stuff up.
Expert voice content: This is just journalism 101. You go to the expert source and you name your sources.
Honestly, if you can find a good expert, maybe someone on your staff or maybe the biggest name in your industry, and they agree to an interview, this is one of the fastest ways to 10x your content.
You get that credibility factor. You get the network effect of the expert and their followers sharing and reading.
What you want to steer clear of here is the trap of the expert round-up. I think we’ve all seen that. And those aren’t all bad, but they are kind of cheap.
We’re not going for cheap. What you’re looking for in talking to your expert is to raise your page to the next level. Bring something to the forefront that the normal person misses, but that will create that light-bulb moment in those reading it for the first time.
Start your practice of nurturing relationships with experts with this Bruce Clay guide.
Voice of customer content: Writers start by thinking about their audience. You get into the target audience’s head to find out what they want, what they need, what they know, what they don’t know they need. And then you write to solve a problem in that audience’s – or persona’s – life.
In marketing, we’re matching the pain point with our solution. And what really resonates with your target audience is hearing or reading the thoughts that are actually going on in their head, or close to it.
There are many possible ways to gather the information used to synthesize VOC: focus groups, individual interviews, and contextual inquiries (like on-site surveys) are a few. But you’re basically using structured in-depth interviews, focusing on the customers’ experiences with current products or services. Need statements are extracted, organized into useful categories, and then prioritized and used by the business all the way from product development to marketing.
I learned about the methodology around Voice of Customer data from Copy Hackers. User-generated content, product reviews and testimonials are essentially forms of VOC content.
And maybe this is where the altruist in me comes out, because when we turn our focus on SEO content, we’re doing something special. We’re not trying to find a loophole to exploit and win on a technicality. We’re sharing stories that will enrich people’s experience. We’re teaching people about solutions that will make their lives better. And we’re making connections with people like us.
SEO has to encompass those 30-or-so factors on the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. But the forensic-style technical SEO is not the bar you’re holding your work up to — it’s the minimum viable SEO. Today, getting the technical stuff right is just the ticket to entry.
If you’re actually trying to reach the top, you’re going to prioritize content as the top SEO issue for you to solve.
If you like this post, please share it with your friends or colleagues. For more like this, be sure to subscribe to our blog.
This post is based on my presentation “Thin Content Is THE Top SEO Issue” which I shared at Pubcon Las Vegas last week. Check out the full deck below.
Thin Content is THE Top SEO Issue from Virginia Nussey
http://ift.tt/2hBVHOq
0 notes
Text
Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018
Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018 was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
It’ll be 10 years ago this January that I first walked through the doors at Bruce Clay, Inc. and entered digital marketing.
I was fresh out of journalism school, which I’d studied because I wanted to write truth to the world. By making information publicly available, I thought I could contribute to the greater good. I saw myself educating readers by sharing the stories of the world. Pretty altruistic, right?
I never thought I would work in marketing. Who plans on a career in marketing? What 10-year-old says, “I want to be a marketer when I grow up, Mommy!”
Well, I’ve learned that marketers play a similar role as journalists but in the private business sector. We’re in the business of communications — crafting messaging and figuring out how to get those messages in front of as many people as possible.
We use our storytelling talents and distribution know-how for our companies and our clients. Our job is to get the right story in front of the right audience.
I’ve learned that SEO wins happen at the intersection of identifying storytelling opportunities and maximizing the visibility of those stories through search.
And yet I think it can be easy for an SEO to forget a critical role they play for clients and for organizations: that of the content evangelist.
SEOs can fall into a trap of focusing on the technical requirements for making content findable by search engines. And while crawlability and accessibility issues are key SEO responsibilities, big brands today are demonstrating that the competitive advantage lies in crafting 10x content and investing in SEO content strategy.
The Job of an SEO
Here’s an infographic you’ve probably seen before. It’s Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. It does a really good job of hitting on every component of an SEO’s domain.
Click to visit SearchEngineLand.com where you can download the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors.
It’s neatly divided into on-page and off-page factors. Of course, nothing in real life is ever so neat. There’s always overlap and grey. There are no links without content. But if we accept this diagram at face value, we can still interpret a lot about an SEO’s top priorities.
For instance, look at the on-page factors. You’ll see content and you’ll see technical SEO. We know that Google has said that the two most important ranking signals are content and links. From that we can infer that technical SEO does not provide as big of a competitive advantage.
Technical SEO is more like the barrier to entry for ranking. Is your site crawlable, is all the HTML in the right place, are duplicate pages consolidated with canonicals and parameters excluded in Search Console? These technical SEO issues are critical to search visibility. Still, I’d argue they represent the lowest common denominator. You’re rarely going to climb to the first page or the top 3 rankings on the basis of clean, crawlable code. Not having these things will hurt you, but they won’t give you a competitive edge.
Remember what Google said — the most important ranking factors are links and content. And if you have to prioritize one of those things, it has to be content, because content is what generates links.
Why Content Should Be Your Top SEO Priority
Here are concrete ways that you can empower your role in SEO by evangelizing content to your company or your clients.
1. Content is in your control.
When it comes to generating links and content, don’t put the cart before the horse. As long as you’re not buying links (and you’d better not), you’re going to need link-worthy content on your site that attracts links.
Who links to you is an X factor. It’s not as squarely in your control. What is in your control? Content.
2. Content has trackable metrics.
What gets measured gets done. While bottom-line KPIs are traffic and conversions, those results are the outcome of the effort you put in to make your site an authority with a satisfactory user experience.
Leading metrics you can focus on improving are:
The number of thin pages that you make better.
The number of new ranking pages you add to the site.
The number of pages on the site and pages indexed.
What’s awesome about focusing SEO campaigns on content is that you can truly track your progress while you’re creating more great content.
3. Bigger sites make more money.
When your boss asks you, “What’s the ROI of this content initiative?” you can say that big sites make more money.
When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, he brought a new growth strategy to the paper. WaPo grew WaPo traffic 28% from 2015 to 2016. The effort resulted in WaPo surpassing The New York Times’s traffic in 2015. How did they do it? By adopting a content strategy around producing a high volume of content aimed at long-tail and niche interests.
How can a small website compete with a larger one? Who are the major competitors in your space? How many pages do they have on a topic? More pages mean more opportunities to rank. More pages demonstrate depth of expertise, making you more likely to rank on a topic.
Just like a company needs to grow to make a profit, so does a website.
How to Set Content Apart as 10x
At this point, you might agree that an SEO has to prioritize content strategy. You may be thinking to yourself, “OK, I get it. I can make the push for my clients or in my group to add good, quality content to the site to see ranking gains.”
That is certainly a worthy goal. But the truth is that good, quality content isn’t good enough. Today’s bar for Page 1 rankings is 10x content.
The skyscraper technique popularized by Brian Dean is the process of looking at the top result for a query you’re targeting and then outdoing that top-ranking page with your own page. Dean calls this content marketing for link builders. See what ranks the best and then shoot even higher with your own answer to the query. Sounds like a lot of work, right? It is. Of course, smart SEO minds have refined the process.
So what is the process for creating 10x content? For a succinct answer we turn to Rand Fishkin’s classic Whiteboard Friday “Why ‘Good, Unique Content’ Needs to Die (And What Should Replace It).”
Research the pages that are ranking. Use Google to see the top-ranked pages and use BuzzSumo to see the most shared content on a topic.
Then ask these questions as you’re taking it all in:
What are the questions that are asked and answered in these pages?
How thorough is the information? What’s missing? HubSpot shared word-count analysis of its blog posts compared to organic traffic and found that a word count of 2,250–2,500 words gets the most traffic. So you definitely want content to be thorough and comprehensive.
What’s the format and delivery mechanism of these pages? You might also call this the user experience. Is it visual? Is it video? Is it rendered well for the device? Is the info I’m looking for on the page, or do you have to click to another page? Is it easy to find an answer?
What are the sources of the information and are they credible?
What’s the quality of the writing?
Once you collect all these answers and identify what search engines are rewarding and what people are sharing, now you know what you at least have to do to compete. And you can figure out how to better it.
My 3 Best Tips for Capturing 10x Content Magic
Here’s the sucky thing. Generating 10x content requires sweat and grind. But there are some likely sources of 10x content magic that you can mine.
Data-driven content: This is the Pricenomics model. Pricenomics is a content agency that turns company data into content and then tracks the distribution and performance of the content.
If you read the Pricenomics blog, they’re always posting this in action. It’s a really fun blog, so I recommend you check it out. Here’s an example:
Venngage, an infographics company, used the Pricenomics content marketing model to sift through their all their client data and come up with the most popular font types in America. What data can you bring light to that will make people think, “Huh, I’ve always wondered!” or “Hey, I never would have thought.”
There’s story in data and people just eat that stuff up.
Expert voice content: This is just journalism 101. You go to the expert source and you name your sources.
Honestly, if you can find a good expert, maybe someone on your staff or maybe the biggest name in your industry, and they agree to an interview, this is one of the fastest ways to 10x your content.
You get that credibility factor. You get the network effect of the expert and their followers sharing and reading.
What you want to steer clear of here is the trap of the expert round-up. I think we’ve all seen that. And those aren’t all bad, but they are kind of cheap.
We’re not going for cheap. What you’re looking for in talking to your expert is to raise your page to the next level. Bring something to the forefront that the normal person misses, but that will create that light-bulb moment in those reading it for the first time.
Start your practice of nurturing relationships with experts with this Bruce Clay guide.
Voice of customer content: Writers start by thinking about their audience. You get into the target audience’s head to find out what they want, what they need, what they know, what they don’t know they need. And then you write to solve a problem in that audience’s – or persona’s – life.
In marketing, we’re matching the pain point with our solution. And what really resonates with your target audience is hearing or reading the thoughts that are actually going on in their head, or close to it.
There are many possible ways to gather the information used to synthesize VOC: focus groups, individual interviews, and contextual inquiries (like on-site surveys) are a few. But you’re basically using structured in-depth interviews, focusing on the customers’ experiences with current products or services. Need statements are extracted, organized into useful categories, and then prioritized and used by the business all the way from product development to marketing.
I learned about the methodology around Voice of Customer data from Copy Hackers. User-generated content, product reviews and testimonials are essentially forms of VOC content.
And maybe this is where the altruist in me comes out, because when we turn our focus on SEO content, we’re doing something special. We’re not trying to find a loophole to exploit and win on a technicality. We’re sharing stories that will enrich people’s experience. We’re teaching people about solutions that will make their lives better. And we’re making connections with people like us.
SEO has to encompass those 30-or-so factors on the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. But the forensic-style technical SEO is not the bar you’re holding your work up to — it’s the minimum viable SEO. Today, getting the technical stuff right is just the ticket to entry.
If you’re actually trying to reach the top, you’re going to prioritize content as the top SEO issue for you to solve.
If you like this post, please share it with your friends or colleagues. For more like this, be sure to subscribe to our blog.
This post is based on my presentation “Thin Content Is THE Top SEO Issue” which I shared at Pubcon Las Vegas last week. Check out the full deck below.
Thin Content is THE Top SEO Issue from Virginia Nussey
http://ift.tt/2hBVHOq
0 notes
Text
Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018
Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018 was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
It’ll be 10 years ago this January that I first walked through the doors at Bruce Clay, Inc. and entered digital marketing.
I was fresh out of journalism school, which I’d studied because I wanted to write truth to the world. By making information publicly available, I thought I could contribute to the greater good. I saw myself educating readers by sharing the stories of the world. Pretty altruistic, right?
I never thought I would work in marketing. Who plans on a career in marketing? What 10-year-old says, “I want to be a marketer when I grow up, Mommy!”
Well, I’ve learned that marketers play a similar role as journalists but in the private business sector. We’re in the business of communications — crafting messaging and figuring out how to get those messages in front of as many people as possible.
We use our storytelling talents and distribution know-how for our companies and our clients. Our job is to get the right story in front of the right audience.
I’ve learned that SEO wins happen at the intersection of identifying storytelling opportunities and maximizing the visibility of those stories through search.
And yet I think it can be easy for an SEO to forget a critical role they play for clients and for organizations: that of the content evangelist.
SEOs can fall into a trap of focusing on the technical requirements for making content findable by search engines. And while crawlability and accessibility issues are key SEO responsibilities, big brands today are demonstrating that the competitive advantage lies in crafting 10x content and investing in SEO content strategy.
The Job of an SEO
Here’s an infographic you’ve probably seen before. It’s Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. It does a really good job of hitting on every component of an SEO’s domain.
Click to visit SearchEngineLand.com where you can download the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors.
It’s neatly divided into on-page and off-page factors. Of course, nothing in real life is ever so neat. There’s always overlap and grey. There are no links without content. But if we accept this diagram at face value, we can still interpret a lot about an SEO’s top priorities.
For instance, look at the on-page factors. You’ll see content and you’ll see technical SEO. We know that Google has said that the two most important ranking signals are content and links. From that we can infer that technical SEO does not provide as big of a competitive advantage.
Technical SEO is more like the barrier to entry for ranking. Is your site crawlable, is all the HTML in the right place, are duplicate pages consolidated with canonicals and parameters excluded in Search Console? These technical SEO issues are critical to search visibility. Still, I’d argue they represent the lowest common denominator. You’re rarely going to climb to the first page or the top 3 rankings on the basis of clean, crawlable code. Not having these things will hurt you, but they won’t give you a competitive edge.
Remember what Google said — the most important ranking factors are links and content. And if you have to prioritize one of those things, it has to be content, because content is what generates links.
Why Content Should Be Your Top SEO Priority
Here are concrete ways that you can empower your role in SEO by evangelizing content to your company or your clients.
1. Content is in your control.
When it comes to generating links and content, don’t put the cart before the horse. As long as you’re not buying links (and you’d better not), you’re going to need link-worthy content on your site that attracts links.
Who links to you is an X factor. It’s not as squarely in your control. What is in your control? Content.
2. Content has trackable metrics.
What gets measured gets done. While bottom-line KPIs are traffic and conversions, those results are the outcome of the effort you put in to make your site an authority with a satisfactory user experience.
Leading metrics you can focus on improving are:
The number of thin pages that you make better.
The number of new ranking pages you add to the site.
The number of pages on the site and pages indexed.
What’s awesome about focusing SEO campaigns on content is that you can truly track your progress while you’re creating more great content.
3. Bigger sites make more money.
When your boss asks you, “What’s the ROI of this content initiative?” you can say that big sites make more money.
When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, he brought a new growth strategy to the paper. WaPo grew WaPo traffic 28% from 2015 to 2016. The effort resulted in WaPo surpassing The New York Times’s traffic in 2015. How did they do it? By adopting a content strategy around producing a high volume of content aimed at long-tail and niche interests.
How can a small website compete with a larger one? Who are the major competitors in your space? How many pages do they have on a topic? More pages mean more opportunities to rank. More pages demonstrate depth of expertise, making you more likely to rank on a topic.
Just like a company needs to grow to make a profit, so does a website.
How to Set Content Apart as 10x
At this point, you might agree that an SEO has to prioritize content strategy. You may be thinking to yourself, “OK, I get it. I can make the push for my clients or in my group to add good, quality content to the site to see ranking gains.”
That is certainly a worthy goal. But the truth is that good, quality content isn’t good enough. Today’s bar for Page 1 rankings is 10x content.
The skyscraper technique popularized by Brian Dean is the process of looking at the top result for a query you’re targeting and then outdoing that top-ranking page with your own page. Dean calls this content marketing for link builders. See what ranks the best and then shoot even higher with your own answer to the query. Sounds like a lot of work, right? It is. Of course, smart SEO minds have refined the process.
So what is the process for creating 10x content? For a succinct answer we turn to Rand Fishkin’s classic Whiteboard Friday “Why ‘Good, Unique Content’ Needs to Die (And What Should Replace It).”
Research the pages that are ranking. Use Google to see the top-ranked pages and use BuzzSumo to see the most shared content on a topic.
Then ask these questions as you’re taking it all in:
What are the questions that are asked and answered in these pages?
How thorough is the information? What’s missing? HubSpot shared word-count analysis of its blog posts compared to organic traffic and found that a word count of 2,250–2,500 words gets the most traffic. So you definitely want content to be thorough and comprehensive.
What’s the format and delivery mechanism of these pages? You might also call this the user experience. Is it visual? Is it video? Is it rendered well for the device? Is the info I’m looking for on the page, or do you have to click to another page? Is it easy to find an answer?
What are the sources of the information and are they credible?
What’s the quality of the writing?
Once you collect all these answers and identify what search engines are rewarding and what people are sharing, now you know what you at least have to do to compete. And you can figure out how to better it.
My 3 Best Tips for Capturing 10x Content Magic
Here’s the sucky thing. Generating 10x content requires sweat and grind. But there are some likely sources of 10x content magic that you can mine.
Data-driven content: This is the Pricenomics model. Pricenomics is a content agency that turns company data into content and then tracks the distribution and performance of the content.
If you read the Pricenomics blog, they’re always posting this in action. It’s a really fun blog, so I recommend you check it out. Here’s an example:
Venngage, an infographics company, used the Pricenomics content marketing model to sift through their all their client data and come up with the most popular font types in America. What data can you bring light to that will make people think, “Huh, I’ve always wondered!” or “Hey, I never would have thought.”
There’s story in data and people just eat that stuff up.
Expert voice content: This is just journalism 101. You go to the expert source and you name your sources.
Honestly, if you can find a good expert, maybe someone on your staff or maybe the biggest name in your industry, and they agree to an interview, this is one of the fastest ways to 10x your content.
You get that credibility factor. You get the network effect of the expert and their followers sharing and reading.
What you want to steer clear of here is the trap of the expert round-up. I think we’ve all seen that. And those aren’t all bad, but they are kind of cheap.
We’re not going for cheap. What you’re looking for in talking to your expert is to raise your page to the next level. Bring something to the forefront that the normal person misses, but that will create that light-bulb moment in those reading it for the first time.
Start your practice of nurturing relationships with experts with this Bruce Clay guide.
Voice of customer content: Writers start by thinking about their audience. You get into the target audience’s head to find out what they want, what they need, what they know, what they don’t know they need. And then you write to solve a problem in that audience’s – or persona’s – life.
In marketing, we’re matching the pain point with our solution. And what really resonates with your target audience is hearing or reading the thoughts that are actually going on in their head, or close to it.
There are many possible ways to gather the information used to synthesize VOC: focus groups, individual interviews, and contextual inquiries (like on-site surveys) are a few. But you’re basically using structured in-depth interviews, focusing on the customers’ experiences with current products or services. Need statements are extracted, organized into useful categories, and then prioritized and used by the business all the way from product development to marketing.
I learned about the methodology around Voice of Customer data from Copy Hackers. User-generated content, product reviews and testimonials are essentially forms of VOC content.
And maybe this is where the altruist in me comes out, because when we turn our focus on SEO content, we’re doing something special. We’re not trying to find a loophole to exploit and win on a technicality. We’re sharing stories that will enrich people’s experience. We’re teaching people about solutions that will make their lives better. And we’re making connections with people like us.
SEO has to encompass those 30-or-so factors on the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. But the forensic-style technical SEO is not the bar you’re holding your work up to — it’s the minimum viable SEO. Today, getting the technical stuff right is just the ticket to entry.
If you’re actually trying to reach the top, you’re going to prioritize content as the top SEO issue for you to solve.
If you like this post, please share it with your friends or colleagues. For more like this, be sure to subscribe to our blog.
This post is based on my presentation “Thin Content Is THE Top SEO Issue” which I shared at Pubcon Las Vegas last week. Check out the full deck below.
Thin Content is THE Top SEO Issue from Virginia Nussey
http://ift.tt/2hBVHOq
0 notes
Text
Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018
Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018 was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
It’ll be 10 years ago this January that I first walked through the doors at Bruce Clay, Inc. and entered digital marketing.
I was fresh out of journalism school, which I’d studied because I wanted to write truth to the world. By making information publicly available, I thought I could contribute to the greater good. I saw myself educating readers by sharing the stories of the world. Pretty altruistic, right?
I never thought I would work in marketing. Who plans on a career in marketing? What 10-year-old says, “I want to be a marketer when I grow up, Mommy!”
Well, I’ve learned that marketers play a similar role as journalists but in the private business sector. We’re in the business of communications — crafting messaging and figuring out how to get those messages in front of as many people as possible.
We use our storytelling talents and distribution know-how for our companies and our clients. Our job is to get the right story in front of the right audience.
I’ve learned that SEO wins happen at the intersection of identifying storytelling opportunities and maximizing the visibility of those stories through search.
And yet I think it can be easy for an SEO to forget a critical role they play for clients and for organizations: that of the content evangelist.
SEOs can fall into a trap of focusing on the technical requirements for making content findable by search engines. And while crawlability and accessibility issues are key SEO responsibilities, big brands today are demonstrating that the competitive advantage lies in crafting 10x content and investing in SEO content strategy.
The Job of an SEO
Here’s an infographic you’ve probably seen before. It’s Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. It does a really good job of hitting on every component of an SEO’s domain.
Click to visit SearchEngineLand.com where you can download the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors.
It’s neatly divided into on-page and off-page factors. Of course, nothing in real life is ever so neat. There’s always overlap and grey. There are no links without content. But if we accept this diagram at face value, we can still interpret a lot about an SEO’s top priorities.
For instance, look at the on-page factors. You’ll see content and you’ll see technical SEO. We know that Google has said that the two most important ranking signals are content and links. From that we can infer that technical SEO does not provide as big of a competitive advantage.
Technical SEO is more like the barrier to entry for ranking. Is your site crawlable, is all the HTML in the right place, are duplicate pages consolidated with canonicals and parameters excluded in Search Console? These technical SEO issues are critical to search visibility. Still, I’d argue they represent the lowest common denominator. You’re rarely going to climb to the first page or the top 3 rankings on the basis of clean, crawlable code. Not having these things will hurt you, but they won’t give you a competitive edge.
Remember what Google said — the most important ranking factors are links and content. And if you have to prioritize one of those things, it has to be content, because content is what generates links.
Why Content Should Be Your Top SEO Priority
Here are concrete ways that you can empower your role in SEO by evangelizing content to your company or your clients.
1. Content is in your control.
When it comes to generating links and content, don’t put the cart before the horse. As long as you’re not buying links (and you’d better not), you’re going to need link-worthy content on your site that attracts links.
Who links to you is an X factor. It’s not as squarely in your control. What is in your control? Content.
2. Content has trackable metrics.
What gets measured gets done. While bottom-line KPIs are traffic and conversions, those results are the outcome of the effort you put in to make your site an authority with a satisfactory user experience.
Leading metrics you can focus on improving are:
The number of thin pages that you make better.
The number of new ranking pages you add to the site.
The number of pages on the site and pages indexed.
What’s awesome about focusing SEO campaigns on content is that you can truly track your progress while you’re creating more great content.
3. Bigger sites make more money.
When your boss asks you, “What’s the ROI of this content initiative?” you can say that big sites make more money.
When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, he brought a new growth strategy to the paper. WaPo grew WaPo traffic 28% from 2015 to 2016. The effort resulted in WaPo surpassing The New York Times’s traffic in 2015. How did they do it? By adopting a content strategy around producing a high volume of content aimed at long-tail and niche interests.
How can a small website compete with a larger one? Who are the major competitors in your space? How many pages do they have on a topic? More pages mean more opportunities to rank. More pages demonstrate depth of expertise, making you more likely to rank on a topic.
Just like a company needs to grow to make a profit, so does a website.
How to Set Content Apart as 10x
At this point, you might agree that an SEO has to prioritize content strategy. You may be thinking to yourself, “OK, I get it. I can make the push for my clients or in my group to add good, quality content to the site to see ranking gains.”
That is certainly a worthy goal. But the truth is that good, quality content isn’t good enough. Today’s bar for Page 1 rankings is 10x content.
The skyscraper technique popularized by Brian Dean is the process of looking at the top result for a query you’re targeting and then outdoing that top-ranking page with your own page. Dean calls this content marketing for link builders. See what ranks the best and then shoot even higher with your own answer to the query. Sounds like a lot of work, right? It is. Of course, smart SEO minds have refined the process.
So what is the process for creating 10x content? For a succinct answer we turn to Rand Fishkin’s classic Whiteboard Friday “Why ‘Good, Unique Content’ Needs to Die (And What Should Replace It).”
Research the pages that are ranking. Use Google to see the top-ranked pages and use BuzzSumo to see the most shared content on a topic.
Then ask these questions as you’re taking it all in:
What are the questions that are asked and answered in these pages?
How thorough is the information? What’s missing? HubSpot shared word-count analysis of its blog posts compared to organic traffic and found that a word count of 2,250–2,500 words gets the most traffic. So you definitely want content to be thorough and comprehensive.
What’s the format and delivery mechanism of these pages? You might also call this the user experience. Is it visual? Is it video? Is it rendered well for the device? Is the info I’m looking for on the page, or do you have to click to another page? Is it easy to find an answer?
What are the sources of the information and are they credible?
What’s the quality of the writing?
Once you collect all these answers and identify what search engines are rewarding and what people are sharing, now you know what you at least have to do to compete. And you can figure out how to better it.
My 3 Best Tips for Capturing 10x Content Magic
Here’s the sucky thing. Generating 10x content requires sweat and grind. But there are some likely sources of 10x content magic that you can mine.
Data-driven content: This is the Pricenomics model. Pricenomics is a content agency that turns company data into content and then tracks the distribution and performance of the content.
If you read the Pricenomics blog, they’re always posting this in action. It’s a really fun blog, so I recommend you check it out. Here’s an example:
Venngage, an infographics company, used the Pricenomics content marketing model to sift through their all their client data and come up with the most popular font types in America. What data can you bring light to that will make people think, “Huh, I’ve always wondered!” or “Hey, I never would have thought.”
There’s story in data and people just eat that stuff up.
Expert voice content: This is just journalism 101. You go to the expert source and you name your sources.
Honestly, if you can find a good expert, maybe someone on your staff or maybe the biggest name in your industry, and they agree to an interview, this is one of the fastest ways to 10x your content.
You get that credibility factor. You get the network effect of the expert and their followers sharing and reading.
What you want to steer clear of here is the trap of the expert round-up. I think we’ve all seen that. And those aren’t all bad, but they are kind of cheap.
We’re not going for cheap. What you’re looking for in talking to your expert is to raise your page to the next level. Bring something to the forefront that the normal person misses, but that will create that light-bulb moment in those reading it for the first time.
Start your practice of nurturing relationships with experts with this Bruce Clay guide.
Voice of customer content: Writers start by thinking about their audience. You get into the target audience’s head to find out what they want, what they need, what they know, what they don’t know they need. And then you write to solve a problem in that audience’s – or persona’s – life.
In marketing, we’re matching the pain point with our solution. And what really resonates with your target audience is hearing or reading the thoughts that are actually going on in their head, or close to it.
There are many possible ways to gather the information used to synthesize VOC: focus groups, individual interviews, and contextual inquiries (like on-site surveys) are a few. But you’re basically using structured in-depth interviews, focusing on the customers’ experiences with current products or services. Need statements are extracted, organized into useful categories, and then prioritized and used by the business all the way from product development to marketing.
I learned about the methodology around Voice of Customer data from Copy Hackers. User-generated content, product reviews and testimonials are essentially forms of VOC content.
And maybe this is where the altruist in me comes out, because when we turn our focus on SEO content, we’re doing something special. We’re not trying to find a loophole to exploit and win on a technicality. We’re sharing stories that will enrich people’s experience. We’re teaching people about solutions that will make their lives better. And we’re making connections with people like us.
SEO has to encompass those 30-or-so factors on the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. But the forensic-style technical SEO is not the bar you’re holding your work up to — it’s the minimum viable SEO. Today, getting the technical stuff right is just the ticket to entry.
If you’re actually trying to reach the top, you’re going to prioritize content as the top SEO issue for you to solve.
If you like this post, please share it with your friends or colleagues. For more like this, be sure to subscribe to our blog.
This post is based on my presentation “Thin Content Is THE Top SEO Issue” which I shared at Pubcon Las Vegas last week. Check out the full deck below.
Thin Content is THE Top SEO Issue from Virginia Nussey
http://ift.tt/2hBVHOq
0 notes
Text
Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018
Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018 was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
It’ll be 10 years ago this January that I first walked through the doors at Bruce Clay, Inc. and entered digital marketing.
I was fresh out of journalism school, which I’d studied because I wanted to write truth to the world. By making information publicly available, I thought I could contribute to the greater good. I saw myself educating readers by sharing the stories of the world. Pretty altruistic, right?
I never thought I would work in marketing. Who plans on a career in marketing? What 10-year-old says, “I want to be a marketer when I grow up, Mommy!”
Well, I’ve learned that marketers play a similar role as journalists but in the private business sector. We’re in the business of communications — crafting messaging and figuring out how to get those messages in front of as many people as possible.
We use our storytelling talents and distribution know-how for our companies and our clients. Our job is to get the right story in front of the right audience.
I’ve learned that SEO wins happen at the intersection of identifying storytelling opportunities and maximizing the visibility of those stories through search.
And yet I think it can be easy for an SEO to forget a critical role they play for clients and for organizations: that of the content evangelist.
SEOs can fall into a trap of focusing on the technical requirements for making content findable by search engines. And while crawlability and accessibility issues are key SEO responsibilities, big brands today are demonstrating that the competitive advantage lies in crafting 10x content and investing in SEO content strategy.
The Job of an SEO
Here’s an infographic you’ve probably seen before. It’s Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. It does a really good job of hitting on every component of an SEO’s domain.
Click to visit SearchEngineLand.com where you can download the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors.
It’s neatly divided into on-page and off-page factors. Of course, nothing in real life is ever so neat. There’s always overlap and grey. There are no links without content. But if we accept this diagram at face value, we can still interpret a lot about an SEO’s top priorities.
For instance, look at the on-page factors. You’ll see content and you’ll see technical SEO. We know that Google has said that the two most important ranking signals are content and links. From that we can infer that technical SEO does not provide as big of a competitive advantage.
Technical SEO is more like the barrier to entry for ranking. Is your site crawlable, is all the HTML in the right place, are duplicate pages consolidated with canonicals and parameters excluded in Search Console? These technical SEO issues are critical to search visibility. Still, I’d argue they represent the lowest common denominator. You’re rarely going to climb to the first page or the top 3 rankings on the basis of clean, crawlable code. Not having these things will hurt you, but they won’t give you a competitive edge.
Remember what Google said — the most important ranking factors are links and content. And if you have to prioritize one of those things, it has to be content, because content is what generates links.
Why Content Should Be Your Top SEO Priority
Here are concrete ways that you can empower your role in SEO by evangelizing content to your company or your clients.
1. Content is in your control.
When it comes to generating links and content, don’t put the cart before the horse. As long as you’re not buying links (and you’d better not), you’re going to need link-worthy content on your site that attracts links.
Who links to you is an X factor. It’s not as squarely in your control. What is in your control? Content.
2. Content has trackable metrics.
What gets measured gets done. While bottom-line KPIs are traffic and conversions, those results are the outcome of the effort you put in to make your site an authority with a satisfactory user experience.
Leading metrics you can focus on improving are:
The number of thin pages that you make better.
The number of new ranking pages you add to the site.
The number of pages on the site and pages indexed.
What’s awesome about focusing SEO campaigns on content is that you can truly track your progress while you’re creating more great content.
3. Bigger sites make more money.
When your boss asks you, “What’s the ROI of this content initiative?” you can say that big sites make more money.
When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, he brought a new growth strategy to the paper. WaPo grew WaPo traffic 28% from 2015 to 2016. The effort resulted in WaPo surpassing The New York Times’s traffic in 2015. How did they do it? By adopting a content strategy around producing a high volume of content aimed at long-tail and niche interests.
How can a small website compete with a larger one? Who are the major competitors in your space? How many pages do they have on a topic? More pages mean more opportunities to rank. More pages demonstrate depth of expertise, making you more likely to rank on a topic.
Just like a company needs to grow to make a profit, so does a website.
How to Set Content Apart as 10x
At this point, you might agree that an SEO has to prioritize content strategy. You may be thinking to yourself, “OK, I get it. I can make the push for my clients or in my group to add good, quality content to the site to see ranking gains.”
That is certainly a worthy goal. But the truth is that good, quality content isn’t good enough. Today’s bar for Page 1 rankings is 10x content.
The skyscraper technique popularized by Brian Dean is the process of looking at the top result for a query you’re targeting and then outdoing that top-ranking page with your own page. Dean calls this content marketing for link builders. See what ranks the best and then shoot even higher with your own answer to the query. Sounds like a lot of work, right? It is. Of course, smart SEO minds have refined the process.
So what is the process for creating 10x content? For a succinct answer we turn to Rand Fishkin’s classic Whiteboard Friday “Why ‘Good, Unique Content’ Needs to Die (And What Should Replace It).”
Research the pages that are ranking. Use Google to see the top-ranked pages and use BuzzSumo to see the most shared content on a topic.
Then ask these questions as you’re taking it all in:
What are the questions that are asked and answered in these pages?
How thorough is the information? What’s missing? HubSpot shared word-count analysis of its blog posts compared to organic traffic and found that a word count of 2,250–2,500 words gets the most traffic. So you definitely want content to be thorough and comprehensive.
What’s the format and delivery mechanism of these pages? You might also call this the user experience. Is it visual? Is it video? Is it rendered well for the device? Is the info I’m looking for on the page, or do you have to click to another page? Is it easy to find an answer?
What are the sources of the information and are they credible?
What’s the quality of the writing?
Once you collect all these answers and identify what search engines are rewarding and what people are sharing, now you know what you at least have to do to compete. And you can figure out how to better it.
My 3 Best Tips for Capturing 10x Content Magic
Here’s the sucky thing. Generating 10x content requires sweat and grind. But there are some likely sources of 10x content magic that you can mine.
Data-driven content: This is the Pricenomics model. Pricenomics is a content agency that turns company data into content and then tracks the distribution and performance of the content.
If you read the Pricenomics blog, they’re always posting this in action. It’s a really fun blog, so I recommend you check it out. Here’s an example:
Venngage, an infographics company, used the Pricenomics content marketing model to sift through their all their client data and come up with the most popular font types in America. What data can you bring light to that will make people think, “Huh, I’ve always wondered!” or “Hey, I never would have thought.”
There’s story in data and people just eat that stuff up.
Expert voice content: This is just journalism 101. You go to the expert source and you name your sources.
Honestly, if you can find a good expert, maybe someone on your staff or maybe the biggest name in your industry, and they agree to an interview, this is one of the fastest ways to 10x your content.
You get that credibility factor. You get the network effect of the expert and their followers sharing and reading.
What you want to steer clear of here is the trap of the expert round-up. I think we’ve all seen that. And those aren’t all bad, but they are kind of cheap.
We’re not going for cheap. What you’re looking for in talking to your expert is to raise your page to the next level. Bring something to the forefront that the normal person misses, but that will create that light-bulb moment in those reading it for the first time.
Start your practice of nurturing relationships with experts with this Bruce Clay guide.
Voice of customer content: Writers start by thinking about their audience. You get into the target audience’s head to find out what they want, what they need, what they know, what they don’t know they need. And then you write to solve a problem in that audience’s – or persona’s – life.
In marketing, we’re matching the pain point with our solution. And what really resonates with your target audience is hearing or reading the thoughts that are actually going on in their head, or close to it.
There are many possible ways to gather the information used to synthesize VOC: focus groups, individual interviews, and contextual inquiries (like on-site surveys) are a few. But you’re basically using structured in-depth interviews, focusing on the customers’ experiences with current products or services. Need statements are extracted, organized into useful categories, and then prioritized and used by the business all the way from product development to marketing.
I learned about the methodology around Voice of Customer data from Copy Hackers. User-generated content, product reviews and testimonials are essentially forms of VOC content.
And maybe this is where the altruist in me comes out, because when we turn our focus on SEO content, we’re doing something special. We’re not trying to find a loophole to exploit and win on a technicality. We’re sharing stories that will enrich people’s experience. We’re teaching people about solutions that will make their lives better. And we’re making connections with people like us.
SEO has to encompass those 30-or-so factors on the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. But the forensic-style technical SEO is not the bar you’re holding your work up to — it’s the minimum viable SEO. Today, getting the technical stuff right is just the ticket to entry.
If you’re actually trying to reach the top, you’re going to prioritize content as the top SEO issue for you to solve.
If you like this post, please share it with your friends or colleagues. For more like this, be sure to subscribe to our blog.
This post is based on my presentation “Thin Content Is THE Top SEO Issue” which I shared at Pubcon Las Vegas last week. Check out the full deck below.
Thin Content is THE Top SEO Issue from Virginia Nussey
http://ift.tt/2hBVHOq
0 notes
Text
Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018
Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018 was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
It’ll be 10 years ago this January that I first walked through the doors at Bruce Clay, Inc. and entered digital marketing.
I was fresh out of journalism school, which I’d studied because I wanted to write truth to the world. By making information publicly available, I thought I could contribute to the greater good. I saw myself educating readers by sharing the stories of the world. Pretty altruistic, right?
I never thought I would work in marketing. Who plans on a career in marketing? What 10-year-old says, “I want to be a marketer when I grow up, Mommy!”
Well, I’ve learned that marketers play a similar role as journalists but in the private business sector. We’re in the business of communications — crafting messaging and figuring out how to get those messages in front of as many people as possible.
We use our storytelling talents and distribution know-how for our companies and our clients. Our job is to get the right story in front of the right audience.
I’ve learned that SEO wins happen at the intersection of identifying storytelling opportunities and maximizing the visibility of those stories through search.
And yet I think it can be easy for an SEO to forget a critical role they play for clients and for organizations: that of the content evangelist.
SEOs can fall into a trap of focusing on the technical requirements for making content findable by search engines. And while crawlability and accessibility issues are key SEO responsibilities, big brands today are demonstrating that the competitive advantage lies in crafting 10x content and investing in SEO content strategy.
The Job of an SEO
Here’s an infographic you’ve probably seen before. It’s Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. It does a really good job of hitting on every component of an SEO’s domain.
Click to visit SearchEngineLand.com where you can download the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors.
It’s neatly divided into on-page and off-page factors. Of course, nothing in real life is ever so neat. There’s always overlap and grey. There are no links without content. But if we accept this diagram at face value, we can still interpret a lot about an SEO’s top priorities.
For instance, look at the on-page factors. You’ll see content and you’ll see technical SEO. We know that Google has said that the two most important ranking signals are content and links. From that we can infer that technical SEO does not provide as big of a competitive advantage.
Technical SEO is more like the barrier to entry for ranking. Is your site crawlable, is all the HTML in the right place, are duplicate pages consolidated with canonicals and parameters excluded in Search Console? These technical SEO issues are critical to search visibility. Still, I’d argue they represent the lowest common denominator. You’re rarely going to climb to the first page or the top 3 rankings on the basis of clean, crawlable code. Not having these things will hurt you, but they won’t give you a competitive edge.
Remember what Google said — the most important ranking factors are links and content. And if you have to prioritize one of those things, it has to be content, because content is what generates links.
Why Content Should Be Your Top SEO Priority
Here are concrete ways that you can empower your role in SEO by evangelizing content to your company or your clients.
1. Content is in your control.
When it comes to generating links and content, don’t put the cart before the horse. As long as you’re not buying links (and you’d better not), you’re going to need link-worthy content on your site that attracts links.
Who links to you is an X factor. It’s not as squarely in your control. What is in your control? Content.
2. Content has trackable metrics.
What gets measured gets done. While bottom-line KPIs are traffic and conversions, those results are the outcome of the effort you put in to make your site an authority with a satisfactory user experience.
Leading metrics you can focus on improving are:
The number of thin pages that you make better.
The number of new ranking pages you add to the site.
The number of pages on the site and pages indexed.
What’s awesome about focusing SEO campaigns on content is that you can truly track your progress while you’re creating more great content.
3. Bigger sites make more money.
When your boss asks you, “What’s the ROI of this content initiative?” you can say that big sites make more money.
When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, he brought a new growth strategy to the paper. WaPo grew WaPo traffic 28% from 2015 to 2016. The effort resulted in WaPo surpassing The New York Times’s traffic in 2015. How did they do it? By adopting a content strategy around producing a high volume of content aimed at long-tail and niche interests.
How can a small website compete with a larger one? Who are the major competitors in your space? How many pages do they have on a topic? More pages mean more opportunities to rank. More pages demonstrate depth of expertise, making you more likely to rank on a topic.
Just like a company needs to grow to make a profit, so does a website.
How to Set Content Apart as 10x
At this point, you might agree that an SEO has to prioritize content strategy. You may be thinking to yourself, “OK, I get it. I can make the push for my clients or in my group to add good, quality content to the site to see ranking gains.”
That is certainly a worthy goal. But the truth is that good, quality content isn’t good enough. Today’s bar for Page 1 rankings is 10x content.
The skyscraper technique popularized by Brian Dean is the process of looking at the top result for a query you’re targeting and then outdoing that top-ranking page with your own page. Dean calls this content marketing for link builders. See what ranks the best and then shoot even higher with your own answer to the query. Sounds like a lot of work, right? It is. Of course, smart SEO minds have refined the process.
So what is the process for creating 10x content? For a succinct answer we turn to Rand Fishkin’s classic Whiteboard Friday “Why ‘Good, Unique Content’ Needs to Die (And What Should Replace It).”
Research the pages that are ranking. Use Google to see the top-ranked pages and use BuzzSumo to see the most shared content on a topic.
Then ask these questions as you’re taking it all in:
What are the questions that are asked and answered in these pages?
How thorough is the information? What’s missing? HubSpot shared word-count analysis of its blog posts compared to organic traffic and found that a word count of 2,250–2,500 words gets the most traffic. So you definitely want content to be thorough and comprehensive.
What’s the format and delivery mechanism of these pages? You might also call this the user experience. Is it visual? Is it video? Is it rendered well for the device? Is the info I’m looking for on the page, or do you have to click to another page? Is it easy to find an answer?
What are the sources of the information and are they credible?
What’s the quality of the writing?
Once you collect all these answers and identify what search engines are rewarding and what people are sharing, now you know what you at least have to do to compete. And you can figure out how to better it.
My 3 Best Tips for Capturing 10x Content Magic
Here’s the sucky thing. Generating 10x content requires sweat and grind. But there are some likely sources of 10x content magic that you can mine.
Data-driven content: This is the Pricenomics model. Pricenomics is a content agency that turns company data into content and then tracks the distribution and performance of the content.
If you read the Pricenomics blog, they’re always posting this in action. It’s a really fun blog, so I recommend you check it out. Here’s an example:
Venngage, an infographics company, used the Pricenomics content marketing model to sift through their all their client data and come up with the most popular font types in America. What data can you bring light to that will make people think, “Huh, I’ve always wondered!” or “Hey, I never would have thought.”
There’s story in data and people just eat that stuff up.
Expert voice content: This is just journalism 101. You go to the expert source and you name your sources.
Honestly, if you can find a good expert, maybe someone on your staff or maybe the biggest name in your industry, and they agree to an interview, this is one of the fastest ways to 10x your content.
You get that credibility factor. You get the network effect of the expert and their followers sharing and reading.
What you want to steer clear of here is the trap of the expert round-up. I think we’ve all seen that. And those aren’t all bad, but they are kind of cheap.
We’re not going for cheap. What you’re looking for in talking to your expert is to raise your page to the next level. Bring something to the forefront that the normal person misses, but that will create that light-bulb moment in those reading it for the first time.
Start your practice of nurturing relationships with experts with this Bruce Clay guide.
Voice of customer content: Writers start by thinking about their audience. You get into the target audience’s head to find out what they want, what they need, what they know, what they don’t know they need. And then you write to solve a problem in that audience’s – or persona’s – life.
In marketing, we’re matching the pain point with our solution. And what really resonates with your target audience is hearing or reading the thoughts that are actually going on in their head, or close to it.
There are many possible ways to gather the information used to synthesize VOC: focus groups, individual interviews, and contextual inquiries (like on-site surveys) are a few. But you’re basically using structured in-depth interviews, focusing on the customers’ experiences with current products or services. Need statements are extracted, organized into useful categories, and then prioritized and used by the business all the way from product development to marketing.
I learned about the methodology around Voice of Customer data from Copy Hackers. User-generated content, product reviews and testimonials are essentially forms of VOC content.
And maybe this is where the altruist in me comes out, because when we turn our focus on SEO content, we’re doing something special. We’re not trying to find a loophole to exploit and win on a technicality. We’re sharing stories that will enrich people’s experience. We’re teaching people about solutions that will make their lives better. And we’re making connections with people like us.
SEO has to encompass those 30-or-so factors on the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. But the forensic-style technical SEO is not the bar you’re holding your work up to — it’s the minimum viable SEO. Today, getting the technical stuff right is just the ticket to entry.
If you’re actually trying to reach the top, you’re going to prioritize content as the top SEO issue for you to solve.
If you like this post, please share it with your friends or colleagues. For more like this, be sure to subscribe to our blog.
This post is based on my presentation “Thin Content Is THE Top SEO Issue” which I shared at Pubcon Las Vegas last week. Check out the full deck below.
Thin Content is THE Top SEO Issue from Virginia Nussey
http://ift.tt/2hBVHOq
0 notes
Text
Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018
Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018 was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
It’ll be 10 years ago this January that I first walked through the doors at Bruce Clay, Inc. and entered digital marketing.
I was fresh out of journalism school, which I’d studied because I wanted to write truth to the world. By making information publicly available, I thought I could contribute to the greater good. I saw myself educating readers by sharing the stories of the world. Pretty altruistic, right?
I never thought I would work in marketing. Who plans on a career in marketing? What 10-year-old says, “I want to be a marketer when I grow up, Mommy!”
Well, I’ve learned that marketers play a similar role as journalists but in the private business sector. We’re in the business of communications — crafting messaging and figuring out how to get those messages in front of as many people as possible.
We use our storytelling talents and distribution know-how for our companies and our clients. Our job is to get the right story in front of the right audience.
I’ve learned that SEO wins happen at the intersection of identifying storytelling opportunities and maximizing the visibility of those stories through search.
And yet I think it can be easy for an SEO to forget a critical role they play for clients and for organizations: that of the content evangelist.
SEOs can fall into a trap of focusing on the technical requirements for making content findable by search engines. And while crawlability and accessibility issues are key SEO responsibilities, big brands today are demonstrating that the competitive advantage lies in crafting 10x content and investing in SEO content strategy.
The Job of an SEO
Here’s an infographic you’ve probably seen before. It’s Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. It does a really good job of hitting on every component of an SEO’s domain.
Click to visit SearchEngineLand.com where you can download the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors.
It’s neatly divided into on-page and off-page factors. Of course, nothing in real life is ever so neat. There’s always overlap and grey. There are no links without content. But if we accept this diagram at face value, we can still interpret a lot about an SEO’s top priorities.
For instance, look at the on-page factors. You’ll see content and you’ll see technical SEO. We know that Google has said that the two most important ranking signals are content and links. From that we can infer that technical SEO does not provide as big of a competitive advantage.
Technical SEO is more like the barrier to entry for ranking. Is your site crawlable, is all the HTML in the right place, are duplicate pages consolidated with canonicals and parameters excluded in Search Console? These technical SEO issues are critical to search visibility. Still, I’d argue they represent the lowest common denominator. You’re rarely going to climb to the first page or the top 3 rankings on the basis of clean, crawlable code. Not having these things will hurt you, but they won’t give you a competitive edge.
Remember what Google said — the most important ranking factors are links and content. And if you have to prioritize one of those things, it has to be content, because content is what generates links.
Why Content Should Be Your Top SEO Priority
Here are concrete ways that you can empower your role in SEO by evangelizing content to your company or your clients.
1. Content is in your control.
When it comes to generating links and content, don’t put the cart before the horse. As long as you’re not buying links (and you’d better not), you’re going to need link-worthy content on your site that attracts links.
Who links to you is an X factor. It’s not as squarely in your control. What is in your control? Content.
2. Content has trackable metrics.
What gets measured gets done. While bottom-line KPIs are traffic and conversions, those results are the outcome of the effort you put in to make your site an authority with a satisfactory user experience.
Leading metrics you can focus on improving are:
The number of thin pages that you make better.
The number of new ranking pages you add to the site.
The number of pages on the site and pages indexed.
What’s awesome about focusing SEO campaigns on content is that you can truly track your progress while you’re creating more great content.
3. Bigger sites make more money.
When your boss asks you, “What’s the ROI of this content initiative?” you can say that big sites make more money.
When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, he brought a new growth strategy to the paper. WaPo grew WaPo traffic 28% from 2015 to 2016. The effort resulted in WaPo surpassing The New York Times’s traffic in 2015. How did they do it? By adopting a content strategy around producing a high volume of content aimed at long-tail and niche interests.
How can a small website compete with a larger one? Who are the major competitors in your space? How many pages do they have on a topic? More pages mean more opportunities to rank. More pages demonstrate depth of expertise, making you more likely to rank on a topic.
Just like a company needs to grow to make a profit, so does a website.
How to Set Content Apart as 10x
At this point, you might agree that an SEO has to prioritize content strategy. You may be thinking to yourself, “OK, I get it. I can make the push for my clients or in my group to add good, quality content to the site to see ranking gains.”
That is certainly a worthy goal. But the truth is that good, quality content isn’t good enough. Today’s bar for Page 1 rankings is 10x content.
The skyscraper technique popularized by Brian Dean is the process of looking at the top result for a query you’re targeting and then outdoing that top-ranking page with your own page. Dean calls this content marketing for link builders. See what ranks the best and then shoot even higher with your own answer to the query. Sounds like a lot of work, right? It is. Of course, smart SEO minds have refined the process.
So what is the process for creating 10x content? For a succinct answer we turn to Rand Fishkin’s classic Whiteboard Friday “Why ‘Good, Unique Content’ Needs to Die (And What Should Replace It).”
Research the pages that are ranking. Use Google to see the top-ranked pages and use BuzzSumo to see the most shared content on a topic.
Then ask these questions as you’re taking it all in:
What are the questions that are asked and answered in these pages?
How thorough is the information? What’s missing? HubSpot shared word-count analysis of its blog posts compared to organic traffic and found that a word count of 2,250–2,500 words gets the most traffic. So you definitely want content to be thorough and comprehensive.
What’s the format and delivery mechanism of these pages? You might also call this the user experience. Is it visual? Is it video? Is it rendered well for the device? Is the info I’m looking for on the page, or do you have to click to another page? Is it easy to find an answer?
What are the sources of the information and are they credible?
What’s the quality of the writing?
Once you collect all these answers and identify what search engines are rewarding and what people are sharing, now you know what you at least have to do to compete. And you can figure out how to better it.
My 3 Best Tips for Capturing 10x Content Magic
Here’s the sucky thing. Generating 10x content requires sweat and grind. But there are some likely sources of 10x content magic that you can mine.
Data-driven content: This is the Pricenomics model. Pricenomics is a content agency that turns company data into content and then tracks the distribution and performance of the content.
If you read the Pricenomics blog, they’re always posting this in action. It’s a really fun blog, so I recommend you check it out. Here’s an example:
Venngage, an infographics company, used the Pricenomics content marketing model to sift through their all their client data and come up with the most popular font types in America. What data can you bring light to that will make people think, “Huh, I’ve always wondered!” or “Hey, I never would have thought.”
There’s story in data and people just eat that stuff up.
Expert voice content: This is just journalism 101. You go to the expert source and you name your sources.
Honestly, if you can find a good expert, maybe someone on your staff or maybe the biggest name in your industry, and they agree to an interview, this is one of the fastest ways to 10x your content.
You get that credibility factor. You get the network effect of the expert and their followers sharing and reading.
What you want to steer clear of here is the trap of the expert round-up. I think we’ve all seen that. And those aren’t all bad, but they are kind of cheap.
We’re not going for cheap. What you’re looking for in talking to your expert is to raise your page to the next level. Bring something to the forefront that the normal person misses, but that will create that light-bulb moment in those reading it for the first time.
Start your practice of nurturing relationships with experts with this Bruce Clay guide.
Voice of customer content: Writers start by thinking about their audience. You get into the target audience’s head to find out what they want, what they need, what they know, what they don’t know they need. And then you write to solve a problem in that audience’s – or persona’s – life.
In marketing, we’re matching the pain point with our solution. And what really resonates with your target audience is hearing or reading the thoughts that are actually going on in their head, or close to it.
There are many possible ways to gather the information used to synthesize VOC: focus groups, individual interviews, and contextual inquiries (like on-site surveys) are a few. But you’re basically using structured in-depth interviews, focusing on the customers’ experiences with current products or services. Need statements are extracted, organized into useful categories, and then prioritized and used by the business all the way from product development to marketing.
I learned about the methodology around Voice of Customer data from Copy Hackers. User-generated content, product reviews and testimonials are essentially forms of VOC content.
And maybe this is where the altruist in me comes out, because when we turn our focus on SEO content, we’re doing something special. We’re not trying to find a loophole to exploit and win on a technicality. We’re sharing stories that will enrich people’s experience. We’re teaching people about solutions that will make their lives better. And we’re making connections with people like us.
SEO has to encompass those 30-or-so factors on the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. But the forensic-style technical SEO is not the bar you’re holding your work up to — it’s the minimum viable SEO. Today, getting the technical stuff right is just the ticket to entry.
If you’re actually trying to reach the top, you’re going to prioritize content as the top SEO issue for you to solve.
If you like this post, please share it with your friends or colleagues. For more like this, be sure to subscribe to our blog.
This post is based on my presentation “Thin Content Is THE Top SEO Issue” which I shared at Pubcon Las Vegas last week. Check out the full deck below.
Thin Content is THE Top SEO Issue from Virginia Nussey
http://ift.tt/2hBVHOq
0 notes
Text
Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018
Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative in 2018 was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
It’ll be 10 years ago this January that I first walked through the doors at Bruce Clay, Inc. and entered digital marketing.
I was fresh out of journalism school, which I’d studied because I wanted to write truth to the world. By making information publicly available, I thought I could contribute to the greater good. I saw myself educating readers by sharing the stories of the world. Pretty altruistic, right?
I never thought I would work in marketing. Who plans on a career in marketing? What 10-year-old says, “I want to be a marketer when I grow up, Mommy!”
Well, I’ve learned that marketers play a similar role as journalists but in the private business sector. We’re in the business of communications — crafting messaging and figuring out how to get those messages in front of as many people as possible.
We use our storytelling talents and distribution know-how for our companies and our clients. Our job is to get the right story in front of the right audience.
I’ve learned that SEO wins happen at the intersection of identifying storytelling opportunities and maximizing the visibility of those stories through search.
And yet I think it can be easy for an SEO to forget a critical role they play for clients and for organizations: that of the content evangelist.
SEOs can fall into a trap of focusing on the technical requirements for making content findable by search engines. And while crawlability and accessibility issues are key SEO responsibilities, big brands today are demonstrating that the competitive advantage lies in crafting 10x content and investing in SEO content strategy.
The Job of an SEO
Here’s an infographic you’ve probably seen before. It’s Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. It does a really good job of hitting on every component of an SEO’s domain.
Click to visit SearchEngineLand.com where you can download the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors.
It’s neatly divided into on-page and off-page factors. Of course, nothing in real life is ever so neat. There’s always overlap and grey. There are no links without content. But if we accept this diagram at face value, we can still interpret a lot about an SEO’s top priorities.
For instance, look at the on-page factors. You’ll see content and you’ll see technical SEO. We know that Google has said that the two most important ranking signals are content and links. From that we can infer that technical SEO does not provide as big of a competitive advantage.
Technical SEO is more like the barrier to entry for ranking. Is your site crawlable, is all the HTML in the right place, are duplicate pages consolidated with canonicals and parameters excluded in Search Console? These technical SEO issues are critical to search visibility. Still, I’d argue they represent the lowest common denominator. You’re rarely going to climb to the first page or the top 3 rankings on the basis of clean, crawlable code. Not having these things will hurt you, but they won’t give you a competitive edge.
Remember what Google said — the most important ranking factors are links and content. And if you have to prioritize one of those things, it has to be content, because content is what generates links.
Why Content Should Be Your Top SEO Priority
Here are concrete ways that you can empower your role in SEO by evangelizing content to your company or your clients.
1. Content is in your control.
When it comes to generating links and content, don’t put the cart before the horse. As long as you’re not buying links (and you’d better not), you’re going to need link-worthy content on your site that attracts links.
Who links to you is an X factor. It’s not as squarely in your control. What is in your control? Content.
2. Content has trackable metrics.
What gets measured gets done. While bottom-line KPIs are traffic and conversions, those results are the outcome of the effort you put in to make your site an authority with a satisfactory user experience.
Leading metrics you can focus on improving are:
The number of thin pages that you make better.
The number of new ranking pages you add to the site.
The number of pages on the site and pages indexed.
What’s awesome about focusing SEO campaigns on content is that you can truly track your progress while you’re creating more great content.
3. Bigger sites make more money.
When your boss asks you, “What’s the ROI of this content initiative?” you can say that big sites make more money.
When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, he brought a new growth strategy to the paper. WaPo grew WaPo traffic 28% from 2015 to 2016. The effort resulted in WaPo surpassing The New York Times’s traffic in 2015. How did they do it? By adopting a content strategy around producing a high volume of content aimed at long-tail and niche interests.
How can a small website compete with a larger one? Who are the major competitors in your space? How many pages do they have on a topic? More pages mean more opportunities to rank. More pages demonstrate depth of expertise, making you more likely to rank on a topic.
Just like a company needs to grow to make a profit, so does a website.
How to Set Content Apart as 10x
At this point, you might agree that an SEO has to prioritize content strategy. You may be thinking to yourself, “OK, I get it. I can make the push for my clients or in my group to add good, quality content to the site to see ranking gains.”
That is certainly a worthy goal. But the truth is that good, quality content isn’t good enough. Today’s bar for Page 1 rankings is 10x content.
The skyscraper technique popularized by Brian Dean is the process of looking at the top result for a query you’re targeting and then outdoing that top-ranking page with your own page. Dean calls this content marketing for link builders. See what ranks the best and then shoot even higher with your own answer to the query. Sounds like a lot of work, right? It is. Of course, smart SEO minds have refined the process.
So what is the process for creating 10x content? For a succinct answer we turn to Rand Fishkin’s classic Whiteboard Friday “Why ‘Good, Unique Content’ Needs to Die (And What Should Replace It).”
Research the pages that are ranking. Use Google to see the top-ranked pages and use BuzzSumo to see the most shared content on a topic.
Then ask these questions as you’re taking it all in:
What are the questions that are asked and answered in these pages?
How thorough is the information? What’s missing? HubSpot shared word-count analysis of its blog posts compared to organic traffic and found that a word count of 2,250–2,500 words gets the most traffic. So you definitely want content to be thorough and comprehensive.
What’s the format and delivery mechanism of these pages? You might also call this the user experience. Is it visual? Is it video? Is it rendered well for the device? Is the info I’m looking for on the page, or do you have to click to another page? Is it easy to find an answer?
What are the sources of the information and are they credible?
What’s the quality of the writing?
Once you collect all these answers and identify what search engines are rewarding and what people are sharing, now you know what you at least have to do to compete. And you can figure out how to better it.
My 3 Best Tips for Capturing 10x Content Magic
Here’s the sucky thing. Generating 10x content requires sweat and grind. But there are some likely sources of 10x content magic that you can mine.
Data-driven content: This is the Pricenomics model. Pricenomics is a content agency that turns company data into content and then tracks the distribution and performance of the content.
If you read the Pricenomics blog, they’re always posting this in action. It’s a really fun blog, so I recommend you check it out. Here’s an example:
Venngage, an infographics company, used the Pricenomics content marketing model to sift through their all their client data and come up with the most popular font types in America. What data can you bring light to that will make people think, “Huh, I’ve always wondered!” or “Hey, I never would have thought.”
There’s story in data and people just eat that stuff up.
Expert voice content: This is just journalism 101. You go to the expert source and you name your sources.
Honestly, if you can find a good expert, maybe someone on your staff or maybe the biggest name in your industry, and they agree to an interview, this is one of the fastest ways to 10x your content.
You get that credibility factor. You get the network effect of the expert and their followers sharing and reading.
What you want to steer clear of here is the trap of the expert round-up. I think we’ve all seen that. And those aren’t all bad, but they are kind of cheap.
We’re not going for cheap. What you’re looking for in talking to your expert is to raise your page to the next level. Bring something to the forefront that the normal person misses, but that will create that light-bulb moment in those reading it for the first time.
Start your practice of nurturing relationships with experts with this Bruce Clay guide.
Voice of customer content: Writers start by thinking about their audience. You get into the target audience’s head to find out what they want, what they need, what they know, what they don’t know they need. And then you write to solve a problem in that audience’s – or persona’s – life.
In marketing, we’re matching the pain point with our solution. And what really resonates with your target audience is hearing or reading the thoughts that are actually going on in their head, or close to it.
There are many possible ways to gather the information used to synthesize VOC: focus groups, individual interviews, and contextual inquiries (like on-site surveys) are a few. But you’re basically using structured in-depth interviews, focusing on the customers’ experiences with current products or services. Need statements are extracted, organized into useful categories, and then prioritized and used by the business all the way from product development to marketing.
I learned about the methodology around Voice of Customer data from Copy Hackers. User-generated content, product reviews and testimonials are essentially forms of VOC content.
And maybe this is where the altruist in me comes out, because when we turn our focus on SEO content, we’re doing something special. We’re not trying to find a loophole to exploit and win on a technicality. We’re sharing stories that will enrich people’s experience. We’re teaching people about solutions that will make their lives better. And we’re making connections with people like us.
SEO has to encompass those 30-or-so factors on the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. But the forensic-style technical SEO is not the bar you’re holding your work up to — it’s the minimum viable SEO. Today, getting the technical stuff right is just the ticket to entry.
If you’re actually trying to reach the top, you’re going to prioritize content as the top SEO issue for you to solve.
If you like this post, please share it with your friends or colleagues. For more like this, be sure to subscribe to our blog.
This post is based on my presentation “Thin Content Is THE Top SEO Issue” which I shared at Pubcon Las Vegas last week. Check out the full deck below.
Thin Content is THE Top SEO Issue from Virginia Nussey
http://ift.tt/2hBVHOq
0 notes
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