Content Strategy is the New SEO
Happy New Year! I have been taking a nice long holiday break and am now ready to get back into blogging. I haven’t been idle over the break. I’ve mostly been writing for other projects, such as my InformIT page and a video lecture series I am getting close to releasing.
In the course of the research for these two projects, I made a startling discovery: The Google Panda algorithm is a radical attempt to equate content quality with SEO, as much as an automated system can do so. I knew that Google said this about content quality when it released Panda, and I even wrote about it on this blog. But I didn’t understand the inner workings of how Google makes this happen. Plus, I didn’t really believe that you could develop an algorithm that truly favored content quality until I started researching the way Panda is built.
Savvy readers will notice I used the present tense in the previous paragraph–it was intentional. Google has developed Panda to be continually improved. Panda’s on version 2.6 since it’s initial release in March of 2011. It issued 30 new improvements in December alone. It’s called machine learning,–a method borrowed from artificial intelligence–which describes how to train a system for continual improvement. It’s similar to the method that IBM used to hone Watson’s Jeopardy!-playing skills.
Automation is necessary because of the sheer volume of content on the web. But the real key lies in the inputs Google gave to the algorithm–and the way it analyzed those inputs– before honing it through machine learning. The inputs were derived from perhaps hundreds of quality testers, who ranked thousands of pages for content quality. Google took this data and crunched the numbers to derive some rules. Then the machine-learning program honed the rules, and continues to hone them over time, getting ever more accurate. The end result is an algorithm that places a premium on content quality over the simplistic checklists and other tools common to traditional SEO.
SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin does the best job of explaining what this means for SEOs in the future.
Note: Content Quality is as much a function of the whole collection of pages and other assets as it is of a particular page. It won’t do to focus all your attention on the top-level portal and let the lower-level pages go. The quality of your whole corporate site stands or falls as a collection. Though individual pages can do better than others, poor-quality pages, duplicates, and other features common to poor content strategy pull the whole collection down. The antidote to poor content quality is good content strategy.
Book Review: The IBM Style Guide
In my chat with Kristina Halvorson in her 5by5 series, I mentioned that my role in IBM prior to becoming the global search strategy lead was as editor in chief of ibm.com. In that role, I was in charge of improving content quality across marketing pages on ibm.com. The first job was to develop a corporate marketing style guide and link it to our enterprise corporate style guide. I also mentioned that the enterprise style guide was about to be printed.
Since that talk, I am pleased to announce that The IBM Style Guide is in print and available from most online book sellers. The book is chock full of content quality advice, especially for technical and computing-related content. For those in marketing, please see “Appendix A. Exceptions for Marketing Content,” which I wrote with the help of a committee of editors.
I’m pleased that my small contribution to this book reflects the overall effort by dozens of brilliant editors to unify style guidance across an enterprise of millions of assets serving every business and user goal. The authors and their colleagues in the IBM Style and Usage Council–which created and maintains the online version of the guide–have hundreds of years of corporate writing and editing experience between them. My relatively brief time on that council was some of the most rewarding work I’ve done, primarily because of how smart everyone on the council is.
This book is not just for IBM content producers. It is a model for similar large-enterprise content quality efforts. It is a must-have desk reference for anyone publishing technical subject matter.
3 Reasons to Integrate Organic and Paid Search
I recently found myself explaining something that I thought was common knowledge: The imperative of coordinating your paid and organic search efforts. The notion that this is not common knowledge convinced me to write about it. When a company coordinates paid and organic search, it makes sure that the links in paid ads point to the same URLs that rank well organically. The tactic also uses similar phrasing in the paid ad as the organic snippet. It seems like such a simple thing to tune your paid program to ranking pages and snippets. But you’d be surprised at how seldom it is done.
Large companies tend to have a lot of pages about the same topics, which serve slightly different purposes (or not). So it is not uncommon for them to have paid search driving to one page with another page ranking highly in Google’s organic search engine results pages (SERPs). For example, a lot of advertising organizations build their own advertising landing pages as distinct entities from other digital marketing activities within companies. They do this to make sure the messaging and branding on the page matches the ads. For them, paid and organic are often distinct experiences.
Why is this a bad thing? Well, for branded terms, it’s not necessarily bad. You should own multiple slots on page 1 in Google for your brand pages. Obviously, your paid campaign will need to pick one of them if it doesn’t build its own. Excluding branded SEM, though, you should build experiences that drive both paid and organic efforts to the same pages for the following reasons:
- Multiple links and divergent creatives can be confusing to the user, and to Google
- Pages that rank higher in organic search tend to have higher Google quality scores, which elevate paid listings
- If paid and organic links point to the same pages, b2b tech users are much more likely to click them
Rather than merely telling you these reasons, allow me to show you. Along the way, you can learn how to align paid and organic tactics into one effective strategy.
3 Studies Show Critical Mass for Outside-In Marketing
Erin Kissane said something recently that shocked me:
“I don’t understand your research.”
This came during a talk at the October Minneapolis Content Strategy Meetup. Now, Erin is one of the smartest people I know in the content strategy field, and author of a great little book: The Elements of Content Strategy. So when she doesn’t get it, we have a problem. Obviously, I have not done a good job of explaining my research. I thought I’d take this opportunity to explain it, not only in terms of what I’ve written both here and in our book, but in terms of what other people are writing about it.
This week I was pleased to come across three good resources that explain the basic principles of my research from different points of view. They don’t all refer to my work specifically, but they are essentially about the same thing: what I call outside-in marketing. Before getting into them, let me take another crack at explaining what I do.
Outside-in marketing is the method of learning the language of clients and prospects and using thier language to develop content that they can relate to on their own terms.
We learn the language of clients and prospects through keyword research and social media listening. We analyze the research to develop content strategies that will tend to attract and captivate that audience with digital experiences. We publish and iterate on those experiences to develop healthy relationships with that audience–relationships based on trust that will ultimately lead to stronger business results.
Outside-in marketing is a radical concept for some marketers, perhaps because they learned more traditional inside-out marketing. In inside-out marketing, we develop products to differentiate our brand from competitors. We build that brand by persistently pushing our messages into the market, primarily with advertising. Then we try to reuse the same messaging in our digital experiences.
When you try to reuse inside-out messages in digital, lots of undesirable things can happen. Typically, the only people who find and use these digital experiences are existing customers who are thoroughly entrenched in your branded nomenclature. It might rank well in search, but the words don’t have much demand outside of those who already know what you offer. If you want to attract new people who might not know what you offer, you need to use their language. If you try to slap their language on inside-out pages, it’s even worse. Either you rank well with very high bounce rates or you don’t rank at all. Since Google released Panda, the latter is more often the case.
Outside-in marketing is a tacit acknowledgement that most people use search to find content. Content helps them learn about product categories; use those product categories to solve their problems; compare and contrast products; and ultimately purchase products. Your goal is to create the content they’re looking for to do each of these activities on their terms. My research is about matching the grammar of search queries to the activities audiences want to participate in, and developing content strategies that will help them do those activities.
As I said, I was pleased to see some independent support for this approach. After the jump, I will give short descriptions of and links to that research.
As you may know, I work for IBM, primarily as a content strategist specializing in search. My first assignment in this role was the Smarter Planet website. In its purest form, the site is a celebration of all the great work people are doing to prepare our planet for the emerging challenges (some might say crises) it faces: Population growth, limited food and water supplies, global warming, ever more virulent diseases, financial instability etc. All these challenges require infrastructure modernization around the world–transportation, energy, health care, government, finance, education, agriculture, water management, etc.
Information is the core of this modernization. When we systematically monitor our infrastructure, connect these systems together, and gather and analyze the data they produce, we can make more intelligent decisions, and ultimately overcome the world’s challenges. This is the optimism that Smarter Planet inspires in governments, NGOs and corporations around the world. The systems can be as small as an embedded sensor or as large as a mainframe. This is often called the Internet of Things.
As I helped develop the content around this concept for IBM, it often occurred to me that the very process we use to make better digital experiences for our audiences needs to become more instrumented, interconnected and intelligent. We need to use the data we gather about our audience to better address their needs. We need to learn more about how these sites and their assets relate to one another so that our audience can make better sense of the whole collection of content–not just the individual pages in isolation. We need to develop systems that use this information to help us craft more relevant content with our limited resources.
Are we there yet? No. We have a lot of work to do to make our content smarter. Even though Smarter Planet content is smarter story by story and sprint by sprint, the rest of IBM content needs work. That is a long process. But we at least have a strategy or a set of directions for getting there. Let me share them with you.
Review of “Clout: The Art and Science of Influential Web Content”
Through her book Clout: The Art and Science of Influential Web Content (New Riders, 2011), Colleen Jones has added an important volume to the growing content strategy literature. Much of the content strategy literature focuses on how to create, curate and aggregate quality, informative, and useful content. But it often misses an important point: The purpose of websites is more often to persuade or influence than merely to inform. Thus the literature needed a book that helps content strategists build influential websites. This book goes a long way to fill that void. I especially liked her use of timing as a critical success factor in content. This is often overlooked in the literature.
The book shelf at Confab 2011, showing four books featured on this site.
In a refreshing way, Jones doesn’t merely tell the reader how to use content to influence the web visitor. She shows the reader why it’s important by grounding the discussion in rhetoric and psychology. But in case you might be intimidated by the theoretical parts of the book, she uses plain language to explain concepts that have challenged scholars for centuries. For my taste, she is a bit too shy on “heavy” topics. But it is clear that she wants to make the book accessible to novice content strategists while contributing to the literature for experienced content strategists.
As an effective way to bridge that gap, the book uses fresh examples, some of which come from Jones’ storied career, to add flesh to the theoretical bones. These I found the most engaging aspects of the book and well worth the price on their own. But as much as I like and respect Jones, I can’t give her a free pass on everything. Not that I disagree with much of what she writes. But in the course of reading the book, I found several missed opportunities to add depth to the topics she focused on. By teasing these out, my hope for this review is to spark some discussion around these topics and build on the foundational work in her book. If you’re interested, please read on.
The social side of search – ranking factors and tactics
It’s becoming apparent that getting a web page to rank highly in search engines also requires focusing on optimizing social media to support SEO efforts. In SEOmoz’s 2011 search ranking factors biennial survey of 132 SEO experts social metrics made up over 7% of all factors analyzed, amounting to an increase of over 2% since the last survey in 2009. Even though some may argue these findings saying that social site data plays more of a factor or even less the observation we can make is that it does play a role.
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#predictions
In December of 2010 Danny Sullivan wrote an interesting post for Search Engine Land titled “What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count? In his article both Bing and Google admit that Twitter references play a part in their algorithms.
Question: If an article is retweeted or referenced much in Twitter, do you count that as a signal outside of finding any non-nofollowed links that may naturally result from it?
Bing: We do look at the social authority of a user. We look at how many people you follow, how many follow you, and this can add a little weight to a listing in regular search results. It carries much more weight in Bing Social Search, where tweets from more authoritative people will flow to the top when best match relevancy is used.
Google: Yes, we do use it as a signal. It is used as a signal in our organic and news rankings. We also use it to enhance our news universal by marking how many people shared an article.
3 Ways Panda Rewards the Strategies in ARS
At my recent family reunion, my cousin Scott made the following claim:
Google nearly killed our business
Scott’s in the publishing business. His company publishes resources for diabetics and pre-diabetics. It makes its living selling ads from primarily pharmaceutical and medical device companies. Whether the company can sell ads and what it can charge for them is dependent on traffic. As you can imagine, where its content ranks in Google is no small matter. The difference between, say, ranking in the top three and ranking 9th for a keyword like blood sugar levels might make or break his company.
When he made the above claim, he was of course referring to Google’s Panda Update, which caused many of his most valuable pages to slide down the rankings. Why would that be? The company is in the content business. The main variable that determines whether the company makes money or not is content quality. Panda is supposed to reward companies that publish high quality content and send content farms and other low-quality sites down the rankings.
Well, like most Web publishing companies, his company has hired an SEO consultant or two over the years. These folks advised them to focus on volume when developing linking relationships. Many of the sites that linked to Scott’s pages got seriously dinged by Panda because they were content farms. Through Panda, Google stripped the link equity from those sites. Lacking their former link equity, Scott’s pages moved down the ranking.
Towards the end of the reunion, I gave Scott a copy of our book and told him to pass it around his office. He asked if any of the information was out of date since the Panda update. Without bragging, this was my response:
Our book was ahead of its time because it focused on creating quality, relevant content for the target audience and using social media to naturally attract links to it. These are the strategies and tactics that Panda rewards. It is one of a very few books on search that doesn’t promote the activities for which Panda penalizes companies.
He didn’t say anything to this, but by the look on his face, I knew he was skeptical. If my cousin is skeptical about a statement like this, chances are our readers might be as well. So I thought I’d write up three ways our book helps companies improve search effectiveness post Panda. If you’re interested, please read on.
Book Review: Content Rules
It’s been six weeks since I came down from my Confab cake high and I’m still trying to process all the new information–well, new for me anyway. One of my favorite talks was given by Ann Handley, chief content officer at MarketingProfs. The keynote excited me so much, I had to buy the book that the talk was promoting, Content Rules, which she co-wrote with C.C. Chapman. I was so impressed with Ann’s talk, I bought the book at the conference bookstore and asked her to sign it at the author table.
I must confess I haven’t read the whole book yet. Not that it isn’t a good read. It’s just not an easy read. Not for me anyway. You see, I have one of those brains that questions everything. So I typically take a long time to read stuff, especially if it contains a lot of information relevant to my areas of interest. The better the book, the longer I take to read it.
I spent the better part of five years reading Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. I nearly destroyed my paperback copy with dog ears, underlines and notations before I was able to find a hard-back copy. During that time, I didn’t read anything else except commentaries of the book. And I read constantly, at least when I wasn’t eating, teaching, writing or sleeping. The content of that book so consumed me, I could barely think of anything else. I still consider it the greatest book on language ever written (thought certainly not the most clear).
So it’s a compliment of a book that I’m still reading it after six weeks. It means there’s enough content in the book to occupy my mind in the intervening time since Confab, and then some. Also, as an author, I don’t just read books related to Audience, Relevance and Search. I study them for conflict and convergence.
This is at best a first pass at a critique of Content Rules. It won’t be the last time I refer to it in this blog. Here I will only focus on a few of the insights that struck me as particularly relevant to our book. In brief, I love their emphasis on content marketing. But I think they don’t go far enough to use content marketing not just as a way to promote publishing efforts, but as a rich source of audience information. If you’re interested, please click to read more.
SOPA and PIPA are Dead, What’s Next?
On blackout Wednesday (1/18/2012), I participated in Wikipedia’s protest by contacting one of my federal legislators–Senator Amy Klobochar (D-MN). I could have chosen Congressman John Kline or Senator Al Franken, but at that point SOPA–the House antipiracy bill–was effectively dead, and Franken is the junior senator from my state. Besides, I’m particularly fond of Senator Klobochar–allow me to call her Amy–for reasons I will make clear.
Amy is one of the most beloved and competent politicians in recent memory. She writes thoughtful legislation protecting families from lead in toys and unsafe imported foods. She’s taken on big lobby interests for the sake of middle class families, such as her recent battle with drug makers over the availability of low-cost generics. She’s very responsive to her constituents. As an example, when former Senator Coleman challenged Senator Al Franken’s 2008 recount victory, and it dragged on for months into 2009, Senator Klobochar was the lone senator from my state. Twice the normal volume did not deter her from responding to every citizen concern. I’m such a fan of her, she’s my pick for the first woman president of the United States.
Her responsiveness was evident yesterday, when she sent me the following email:
So how do we secure the Internet from piracy without affecting the free flow of information? Surely not with unenforceable laws that restrict free speech. There are dozens of applications on the Internet that protect IP without legislating it. How does iTunes manage data? How does Getty Images do this? Every major company that relies on IP knows how to protect IP while enabling the free and open sharing of enough data to enable sales. Amazon’s Look Inside feature is another example. If the current state of technology is not strong enough to protect the IP of every media type, we’ll make more technology.
Every day, I find bootleg copies of our book. I’m sure those exist for every piece of IP on the Internet. That’s a cost of doing business on the Internet. On the other hand, 99 percent of our sales have come through Internet channels. If we create laws to ban the 1 percent of Internet users who post and share bootleg and gray-market IP, we restrict commerce and free speech for the 99 percent of Internet users who pay for the content and use it fairly. It seems to me that isn’t the intent of these laws. Rather, the major holders of media IP (Hollywood, the recording industry, and major book publishers) want to restrict fair use beyond the common usage on the Internet so that they can reduce piracy and increase margins.
If restricting fair use is the intent of the bills, it is self defeating. Like it or not, the Internet is a try-before-you-buy culture. It also relies heavily on the Internet’s version of word of mouth–social sharing and rating. You can’t put that genie back in the bottle. With all due respect to Amy, I highly doubt piracy prevents many people from finding work. I’m sure it limits sales to some degree, but the proposed laws would limit sales far more than the current state of piracy on the Internet. In short, I think the proposed laws would cost many more jobs than they would save.
By way of example, consider my Facebook page. Every Friday, I try to post a You Tube video of music that I’m particularly fond of. As a Bob Dylan fan, I have often tried to post a You Tube video of one of his songs. When I tried this for one of the tracks on his brilliant album Blood on the Tracks (which I own), it plays the Pachelbel Canon in D.
Sony, the owner of that IP, is restricting the use of the music online, as is its right. But it is missing an opportunity in the process. If they allowed me to post a song to Facebook, it would be good word of mouth to my friends, which would lead to sales of the disks. If they restrict this kind of sharing, they actually lose free advertising in the form of social sharing. What SOPA and PIPA are proposing is much more draconian. They would make it illegal for me to post a sample of an album that I own on my Facebook page. Multiply the hundreds of Facebook friends who did not see the video by the millions of Facebook users, and you get a sense of the lost free advertising PIPA and SOPA would entail.
If you make it illegal for Internet users to share samples of their favorite IP, you will severely limit sales of that IP. Internet commerce depends on healthy fair use. The world economy would suffer greatly by the self-inflicted wound of restricted use. With crises in Europe and struggling economy in the US, the last thing we need is a self-inflicted wound to such a large and growing sector of the economy. On the other hand, if we focus on creating technology to prevent piracy, we can help to create a market for IP protection software, while enabling Internet commerce to take it’s natural course.
This post is solely the responsibility of James Mathewson. It does not reflect the views or opinions of the IBM Corporation.
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