How to Create Boring-Industry Content that Gets Shared

Posted by ronell-smith

If you think creating content for boring industries is tough, try creating content for an expensive product that'll be sold in a so-called boring industry. Such was the problem faced by Mike Jackson, head of sales for a large Denver-based company that was debuting a line of new high-end products for the fishing industry in 2009.

After years of pestering the executives of his traditional, non-flashy company to create a line of products that could be sold to anglers looking to buy premium items, he finally had his wish: a product so expensive only a small percentage of anglers could afford them.

What looked like being boxed into a corner was actually part of the plan.

When asked how he could ever put his neck on the line for a product he'd find tough to sell and even tougher to market, he revealed his brilliant plan.

"I don't need to sell one million of [these products] a year," he said. "All I need to do is sell a few hundred thousand, which won't be hard. And as far as marketing, that's easy: I'm ignoring the folks who'll buy the items. I'm targeting professional anglers, the folks the buyers are influenced by. If the pros, the influencers, talk about and use the products, people will buy them."

Such was my first introduction to how it's often wise to ignore who'll buy the product in favor of marketing to those who'll help you market and sell the product.

These influencers are a sweet spot in product marketing and they are largely ignored by many brands

Looking at content for boring industries all wrong

A few months back, I received a message in Google Plus that really piqued my interest: "What's the best way to create content for my boring business? Just kidding. No one will read it, nor share information from a painter anyway."

I went from being dismayed to disheartened. Dismayed because the business owner hadn't yet found a way to connect with his prospects through meaningful content. Disheartened because he seemed to have given up trying.

You can successfully create content for boring industries. Doing so requires nothing out of the ordinary from what you'd normally do to create content for any industry. That's the good news.

The bad news: Creating successful content for boring industries requires you think beyond content and SEO, focusing heavily on content strategy and outreach.

Successfully creating content for boring industries—or any industry, for that matter—comes down to who'll share it and who'll link to it, not who'll read it, a point nicely summed up in this tweet:

I just don't understand the mindset of 'build content --> build links to it'. Identify link opps FIRST, then create content to service them.
— Jon Cooper (@PointBlankSEO) April 7, 2015

So when businesses struggle with creating content for their respective industries, the culprits are typically easy to find:

• They lack clarity on who they are creating content for (e.g., content strategy, personas)
• There are no specific goals (e.g., traffic, links, conversions, etc.) assigned regarding the content, so measuring its effectiveness is impossible
• They're stuck in neutral thinking viral content is the only option, while ignoring the value of content amplification (e.g., PR/outreach)

Alone, these three elements are bad; taken together, though, they spell doom for your brand.

If you lack clarity on who you're creating content for, the best you can hope for is that sometimes you'll create and share information members of your audience find useful, but you likely won't be able to reach or engage them with the needed frequency to make content marketing successful.

Goals, or lack thereof, are the real bugaboo of content creation. The problem is even worse for boring industries, where the pressure is on to deliver a content vehicle that meets the threshold of interest to simply gain attention, much less, earn engagement.

For all the hype about viral content, it's dismaying that so few marketers aren't being honest on the topic: it's typically hard to create, impossible to predict and typically has very, very little connection to conversions for most businesses.

What I've found is that businesses, regardless of category, struggle to create worthwhile content, leading me to believe there is no boring industry content, only content that's boring.

"Whenever we label content as 'boring,' we're really admitting we have no idea how to approach marketing something," says Builtvisible's Richard Baxter.

Now that we know what the impediments are to producing content for any industry, including boring industries, it's time to tackle the solution.

Develop a link earning mindset

There are lots of article on the web regarding how to create content for boring industries, some of which have appeared on this very blog.

But, to my mind, the one issue they all suffer from is they all focus on what content should be created, not (a) what content is worthy of promotion, (b) how to identify those who could help with promotion, and (c) how to earn links from boring industry content. (Remember, much of the content that's read is never shared; much of what's shared is never read in its entirety; and some of the most linked-to content is neither heavily shared nor heavily read.)

This is why content creators in boring industries should scrap their notions of having the most-read and most-shared content, shifting their focus to creating content that can earn links in addition to generating traffic and social signals to the site.

After all, links and conversions are the main priorities for most businesses sharing content online, including so-called local businesses.

(Image courtesy of the 2014 Moz Local Search Ranking Factors Survey)

If you're ready to create link-earning, traffic-generating content for your boring-industry business follow the tips from the fictitious example of RZ's Auto Repair, a Dallas, Texas, automobile shop.

With the Dallas-Forth Worth market being large and competitive, RZ's has narrowed their speciality to storm repair, mainly hail damage, which is huge in the area. Even with the narrowed focus, however, they still have stiff competition from the major players in the vertical, including MAACO.

What the brand does have in its favor, however, is a solid website and a strong freelance copywriter to help produce content.

Remember, those three problems we mentioned above—lack of goals, lack of clarity and lack of focus on amplification—we'll now put them to good use to drive our main objectives of traffic, links and conversions.

Setting the right goals

For RZ, this is easy: He needs sales, business (e.g., qualified leads and conversions), but he knows he must be patient since using paid media is not in the cards.

Therefore, he sits down with his partner, and they come up with what seems like the top five workable, important goals:

1. Increased traffic on the website - He's noticed that when traffic increases, so does his business.
2. More phone calls - If they get a customer on the phone, the chances of closing the sale are around 75%.
3. One blog per week on the site - The more often he blogs, the more web traffic, visits and phone calls increase.
4. Links from some of the businesses in the area - He's no dummy. He knows the importance of links, which are that much better when they come from a large company that could send him business.
5. Develop relationships with small and midsize non-competing businesses in the area for cross promotions, events and the like.

Know the audience

(image source)

Too many businesses create cute blogs that might generate traffic but do nothing for sales. RZ isn't falling for this trap. He's all about identifying the audience who's likely to do business with him.

Luckily, his secretary is a meticulous record keeper, allowing him to build a reasonable profile of his target persona based on past clients.

• 21-35 years old
• Drives a truck that's less than fours years old
• Has an income of $45,000-$59,000
• Employed by a corporation with greater than 500 employees
• Active on social media, especially Facebook and Twitter
• Consumes most of their information online
• Typically referred by a friend or a co-worker

This information will prove invaluable as he goes about creating content. Most important, these nuggets create a clearer picture of how he should go about looking for people and/or businesses to amplify his content.

PR and outreach: Your amplification engines

Armed with his goals and the knowledge of his audience, RZ can now focus on outreach for amplification, thinking along the lines of...

• Who/what influences his core audience?
• What could he offer them by way of content to earn their help?
• What content would they find valuable enough to share and link to?
• What challenges do they face that he could help them with?
• How could his brand set itself apart from any other business looking for help from these potential outreach partners?

Putting it all together

Being the savvy businessperson he is, RZ pulls his small staff together and they put their thinking caps on.

Late spring through early fall is prime hail storm season in Dallas. The season accounts for 80 percent of his yearly business. (The other 20% is fender benders.) Also, they realize, many of the storms happen in the late afternoon/early evening, when people are on their way home from work and are stuck in traffic, or when they duck into the grocery store or hit the gym after work.

What's more, says one of the staffers, often a huge group of clients will come at once, owing to having been parked in the same lot when a storm hits.

Eureka!

(image source)

That's when RZ bolts out of his chair with the idea that could put his business on the map: Let's create content for businesses getting a high volume of after-work traffic—sit-down restaurants, gyms, grocery stores, etc.

The businesses would be offering something of value to their customers, who'll learn about precautions to take in the event of a hail storm, and RZ would have willing amplifiers for his content.

Content is only as boring as your outlook

First—and this is a fatal mistake too many content creators make—RZ visits the handful of local businesses he'd like to partner with. The key here, however, is he smartly makes them aware that he's done his homework and is eager to help their patrons while making them aware of his service.

This is an integral part of outreach: there must be a clear benefit to the would-be benefactor.

After RZ learns that several of the businesses are amenable to sharing his business's helpful information, he takes the next step and asks what form the content should take. For now, all he can get them to promote is a glossy one-sheeter, "How To Protect Your Vehicle Against Extensive Hail Damage," that the biggest gym in the area will promote via a small display at the check-in in return for a 10% coupon for customers.

Three of the five others he talked to also agreed to promote the one-sheeter, though each said they'd be willing to promote other content investments provided they added value for their customers.

The untold truth about creating content for boring industries

When business owners reach out to me about putting together a content strategy for their boring brand, I make two things clear from the start:

1. There are no boring brands. Those two words are a cop out. No matter what industry you serve, there are hoards of people who use the products or services who are quite smitten.
2. What they see as boring, I see as an opportunity.

In almost every case, they want to discuss some of another big content piece that's sure to draw eyes, engagement, and that maybe even leads to a few links. Sure, I say, if you have tons of money to spend.

(Amazing piece of interactive content created by BuiltVisible)

Assuming you don't have money to burn, and you want a plan you can replicate easily over time, try what I call the 1-2-1 approach for monthly blog content:

1: A strong piece of local content (goal: organic reach, topical relevance, local SEO)
2: Two pieces of evergreen content (goal: traffic)
1: A link-worthy asset (goal: links)

This plan is not very hard at all to pull off, provided you have your ear to the street in the local market; have done your keyword research, identifying several long-tail keywords you have the ability to rank for; and you're willing to continue with outreach.

What it does is allow the brand to create content with enough frequency to attain significance with the search engines, while also developing the habit of sharing, promoting and amplifying content as well. For example, all of the posts would be shared on Twitter, Google Plus, and Facebook. (Don't sleep on paid promotion via Facebook.)

Also, for the link-worthy asset, there would be outreach in advance of its creation, then amplification, and continued promotion from the company and those who've agreed to support the content.

Create a winning trifecta: Outreach, promotion and amplification

To RZ's credit, he didn't dawdle, getting right to work creating worthwhile content via the 1-2-1 method:

1: "The Worst Places in Dallas to be When a Hail Storm Hits"
2: "Can Hail Damage Cause Structural Damage to Your Car?" and "Should You Buy a Car Damaged by Hail?"
1: "Big as Hail!" contest

This contest idea came from the owner of a large local gym. RZ's will give $500 to the local homeowner who sends in the largest piece of hail, as judged by Facebook fans, during the season. In return, the gym will promote the contest at its multiple locations, link to the content promotion page on RZ's website, and share images of its fans holding large pieces of hail via social media.

What does the gym get in return: A catchy slogan (e.g., it's similar to "big as hell," popular gym parlance) to market around during the hail season.

It's a win-win for everyone involved, especially RZ.

He gets a link, but most important he realizes how to create content to nail each one of his goals. You can do the same. All it takes is a change in mindset. Away from content creation. Toward outreach, promote and amplify.

Summary

While the story of RZ's entirely fictional, it is based on techniques I've used with other small and midsize businesses. The keys, I've found, are to get away from thinking about your industry/brand as being boring, even if it is, and marshal the resources to find the audience who'll benefit from from your content and, most important, identify the influencers who'll promote and amplify it.

What are your thoughts?

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The Mobile Change Nobody Is Talking About

Besides "Mobilegeddon," there's another mobile change from Google that no one is paying much attention to.

​The 3 Most Common SEO Problems on Listings Sites

Posted by Dom-Woodman

Listings sites have a very specific set of search problems that you don't run into everywhere else. In the day I'm one of Distilled's analysts, but by night I run a job listings site, teflSearch. So, for my first Moz Blog post I thought I'd cover the three search problems with listings sites that I spent far too long agonising about.

Quick clarification time: What is a listings site (i.e. will this post be useful for you)?

The classic listings site is Craigslist, but plenty of other sites act like listing sites:

• Job sites like Monster
• E-commerce sites like Amazon
• Matching sites like Spareroom

1. Generating quality landing pages

The landing pages on listings sites are incredibly important. These pages are usually the primary drivers of converting traffic, and they're usually generated automatically (or are occasionally custom category pages) .

For example, if I search "Jobs in Manchester", you can see nearly every result is an automatically generated landing page or category page.

There are three common ways to generate these pages (occasionally a combination of more than one is used):

• Faceted pages: These are generated by facets—groups of preset filters that let you filter the current search results. They usually sit on the left-hand side of the page.
• Category pages: These pages are listings which have already had a filter applied and can't be changed. They're usually custom pages.
• Free-text search pages: These pages are generated by a free-text search box.

Those definitions are still bit general; let's clear them up with some examples:

Amazon uses a combination of categories and facets. If you click on browse by department you can see all the category pages. Then on each category page you can see a faceted search. Amazon is so large that it needs both.

Indeed generates its landing pages through free text search, for example if we search for "IT jobs in manchester" it will generate: IT jobs in manchester.

teflSearch generates landing pages using just facets. The jobs in China landing page is simply a facet of the main search page.

Each method has its own search problems when used for generating landing pages, so lets tackle them one by one.

---

Aside

Facets and free text search will typically generate pages with parameters e.g. a search for "dogs" would produce:

www.mysite.com?search=dogs

But to make the URL user friendly sites will often alter the URLs to display them as folders

www.mysite.com/results/dogs/

These are still just ordinary free text search and facets, the URLs are just user friendly. (They're a lot easier to work with in robots.txt too!)

---

Free search (& category) problems

If you've decided the base of your search will be a free text search, then we'll have two major goals:

• Goal 1: Helping search engines find your landing pages
• Goal 2: Giving them link equity.

Solution

Search engines won't use search boxes and so the solution to both problems is to provide links to the valuable landing pages so search engines can find them.

There are plenty of ways to do this, but two of the most common are:

• Category links alongside a search
  
  Photobucket uses a free text search to generate pages, but if we look at example search for photos of dogs, we can see the categories which define the landing pages along the right-hand side. (This is also an example of URL friendly searches!)

• Putting the main landing pages in a top-level menu
  
  Indeed also uses free text to generate landing pages, and they have a browse jobs section which contains the URL structure to allow search engines to find all the valuable landing pages.

Breadcrumbs are also often used in addition to the two above and in both the examples above, you'll find breadcrumbs that reinforce that hierarchy.

Category (& facet) problems

Categories, because they tend to be custom pages, don't actually have many search disadvantages. Instead it's the other attributes that make them more or less desirable. You can create them for the purposes you want and so you typically won't have too many problems.

However, if you also use a faceted search in each category (like Amazon) to generate additional landing pages, then you'll run into all the problems described in the next section.

At first facets seem great, an easy way to generate multiple strong relevant landing pages without doing much at all. The problems appear because people don't put limits on facets.

Lets take the job page on teflSearch. We can see it has 18 facets each with many options. Some of these options will generate useful landing pages:

The China facet in countries will generate "Jobs in China" that's a useful landing page.

On the other hand, the "Conditional Bonus" facet will generate "Jobs with a conditional bonus," and that's not so great.

We can also see that the options within a single facet aren't always useful. As of writing, I have a single job available in Serbia. That's not a useful search result, and the poor user engagement combined with the tiny amount of content will be a strong signal to Google that it's thin content. Depending on the scale of your site it's very easy to generate a mass of poor-quality landing pages.

Facets generate other problems too. The primary one being they can create a huge amount of duplicate content and pages for search engines to get lost in. This is caused by two things: The first is the sheer number of possibilities they generate, and the second is because selecting facets in different orders creates identical pages with different URLs.

We end up with four goals for our facet-generated landing pages:

• Goal 1: Make sure our searchable landing pages are actually worth landing on, and that we're not handing a mass of low-value pages to the search engines.
• Goal 2: Make sure we don't generate multiple copies of our automatically generated landing pages.
• Goal 3: Make sure search engines don't get caught in the metaphorical plastic six-pack rings of our facets.
• Goal 4: Make sure our landing pages have strong internal linking.

The first goal needs to be set internally; you're always going to be the best judge of the number of results that need to present on a page in order for it to be useful to a user. I'd argue you can rarely ever go below three, but it depends both on your business and on how much content fluctuates on your site, as the useful landing pages might also change over time.

We can solve the next three problems as group. There are several possible solutions depending on what skills and resources you have access to; here are two possible solutions:

Category/facet solution 1: Blocking the majority of facets and providing external links

• Easiest method
• Good if your valuable category pages rarely change and you don't have too many of them.
• Can be problematic if your valuable facet pages change a lot

Nofollow all your facet links, and noindex and block category pages which aren't valuable or are deeper than x facet/folder levels into your search using robots.txt.

You set x by looking at where your useful facet pages exist that have search volume. So, for example, if you have three facets for televisions: manufacturer, size, and resolution, and even combinations of all three have multiple results and search volume, then you could set you index everything up to three levels.

On the other hand, if people are searching for three levels (e.g. "Samsung 42" Full HD TV") but you only have one or two results for three-level facets, then you'd be better off indexing two levels and letting the product pages themselves pick up long-tail traffic for the third level.

If you have valuable facet pages that exist deeper than 1 facet or folder into your search, then this creates some duplicate content problems dealt with in the aside "Indexing more than 1 level of facets" below.)

The immediate problem with this set-up, however, is that in one stroke we've removed most of the internal links to our category pages, and by no-following all the facet links, search engines won't be able to find your valuable category pages.

In order re-create the linking, you can add a top level drop down menu to your site containing the most valuable category pages, add category links elsewhere on the page, or create a separate part of the site with links to the valuable category pages.

The top level drop down menu you can see on teflSearch (it's the search jobs menu), the other two examples are demonstrated in Photobucket and Indeed respectively in the previous section.

The big advantage for this method is how quick it is to implement, it doesn't require any fiddly internal logic and adding an extra menu option is usually minimal effort.

Category/facet solution 2: Creating internal logic to work with the facets

• Requires new internal logic
• Works for large numbers of category pages with value that can change rapidly

There are four parts to the second solution:

1. Select valuable facet categories and allow those links to be followed. No-follow the rest.
2. No-index all pages that return a number of items below the threshold for a useful landing page
3. No-follow all facets on pages with a search depth greater than 1.
4. Block all facet pages deeper than x level in robots.txt

As with the last solution, x is set by looking at where your useful facet pages exist that have search volume (full explanation in the first solution), and if you're indexing more than one level you'll need to check out the aside below to see how to deal with the duplicate content it generates.

This will generate landing pages for the facets you've decided are valuable and noindex the landing pages which are low-quality. It will only create pages for a single level of facets, which prevents duplicate content.

---

Aside: Indexing more than one level of facets

If you want a second level of facets to be indexable, e.g. Televisions - Facet 1 (46"), Facet 2 (Samsung), then the easiest option is to remove the fourth rule from above and either add links to them using one of the methods in Solution 1, or add the pages to your sitemap.

The alternative is to set robots.txt to allow category pages up to 2 levels to be indexed and all facets to be followed up to two levels.

This will, however, create duplicate content, because now search engines will be able to create:

• Televisions - 46" - Samsung
• Televisions - Samsung - 46"

You'll have to either rel canonical your duplicate pages with another rule or set-up your facets so they create a single unique URL.

You'll also need to be aware that unless you set-up more complicated logic, all of your followable facets will multiply. Depending on your setup you might need to block more paths in robots.txt or set-up more logic.

Letting search engines index more than one level of facets adds a lot of possible problems; make sure you're keeping track of them.

---

2. User-generated content cannibalization

This is a common problem for listings sites (assuming they allow user generated content). If you're reading this as an e-commerce site who only lists their own products, you can skip this one.

As we covered in the first area, category pages on listings sites are usually the landing pages aiming for the valuable search terms, but as your users start generating pages they can often create titles and content that cannibalise your landing pages.

Suppose you're a job site with a category page for PHP Jobs in Greater Manchester. If a recruiter then creates a job advert for PHP Jobs in Greater Manchester for the 4 positions they currently have, you've got a duplicate content problem.

This is less of a problem when your site is large and your categories mature, it will be obvious to any search engine which are your high value category pages, but at the start where you're lacking authority and individual listings might contain more relevant content than your own search pages this can be a problem.

Solution 1: Create structured titles

Set the <title> differently than the on-page title. Depending on variables you have available to you can set the title tag programmatically without changing the page title using other information given by the user.

For example, on our imaginary job site, suppose the recruiter also provided the following information in other fields:

• The no. of positions: 4
• The primary area: PHP Developer
• The name of the recruiting company: ABC Recruitment
• Location: Manchester

We could set the <title> pattern to be: *No of positions* *The primary area* with *recruiter name* in *Location* which would give us:

4 PHP Developers with ABC Recruitment in Manchester

Setting a <title> tag allows you to target long-tail traffic by constructing detailed descriptive titles. In our above example, imagine the recruiter had specified "Castlefield, Manchester" as the location.

All of a sudden, you've got a perfect opportunity to pick up long-tail traffic for people searching in Castlefield in Manchester.

On the downside, you lose the ability to pick up long-tail traffic where your users have chosen keywords you wouldn't have used.

For example, suppose Manchester has a jobs program called "Green Highway." A job advert title containing "Green Highway" might pick up valuable long-tail traffic. Being able to discover this, however, and find a way to fit it into a dynamic title is very hard.

Solution 2: Use regex to noindex the offending pages

Perform a regex (or string contains) search on your listings titles and no-index the ones which cannabalise your main category pages.

If it's not possible to construct titles with variables or your users provide a lot of additional long-tail traffic with their own titles, then is a great option. On the downside, you miss out on possible structured long-tail traffic that you might've been able to aim for.

Solution 3: De-index all your listings

It may seem rash, but if you're a large site with a huge number of very similar or low-content listings, you might want to consider this, but there is no common standard. Some sites like Indeed choose to no-index all their job adverts, whereas some other sites like Craigslist index all their individual listings because they'll drive long tail traffic.

Don't de-index them all lightly!

3. Constantly expiring content

Our third and final problem is that user-generated content doesn't last forever. Particularly on listings sites, it's constantly expiring and changing.

For most use cases I'd recommend 301'ing expired content to a relevant category page, with a message triggered by the redirect notifying the user of why they've been redirected. It typically comes out as the best combination of search and UX.

For more information or advice on how to deal with the edge cases, there's a previous Moz blog post on how to deal with expired content which I think does an excellent job of covering this area.

Summary

In summary, if you're working with listings sites, all three of the following need to be kept in mind:

• How are the landing pages generated? If they're generated using free text or facets have the potential problems been solved?
• Is user generated content cannibalising the main landing pages?
• How has constantly expiring content been dealt with?

Good luck listing, and if you've had any other tricky problems or solutions you've come across working on listings sites lets chat about them in the comments below!

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Google Told Me I'm Pregnant: From Strings to Diagnosis

Posted by CraigBradford

In the near future, I think Google Now could tell you are pregnant or diagnose you with a medical condition before your doctor ever could. Humans are great at recognising patterns but only if we know we are creating them or where to look. Remember the Target story of how they knew a young girl was pregnant before she or her father did? Increases in technology like smart watches and the trend of "the quantified self" mean messages like being told you are pregnant aren't impossible in the near future. So how do we go from weather reports and traffic updates to a medical diagnosis?

Strings-to-things, things-to-actions

When Google, Yahoo and Bing announced Schema.org in 2011, search engines were still in the strings-to-things phase. In my opinion, Google, in particular, are already moving on from that goal. The most recent addition to the Schema.org vocabulary is actions. See, the Schema site for more details or my SMX Munich deck for more details.

In my presentation, I made the point that the future of structured data isn't about understanding what a thing is, it's about understanding what a thing can do. If search engines can understand what your website, app or other interfaces can do, and they can understand user intent, they can match queries to the best place to do that action. How does Google know what we want to do?

Actions-to-anticipation

Many people have said that Google wants to become the ultimate personal assistant. Things like Google Now and conversational search reinforce this standpoint. However, a prerequisite for that position is the concept of time. For a computerised personal assistant to be truly as useful as the real thing, they need to be aware of the past, the present and more importantly the future.

Historically, Google and other search engines have dealt with things from the past. Webpages by their nature are in the past, or at best, live. This makes the anticipation and initiative that you would expect from great personal assistant difficult for Google. They have very little data to predict what you might want to do or are going to do in the future. Gmail and Google calendar are the two most obvious ones that come to mind (if you use them).

Forgetting privacy or intellectual property for a second, imagine Google had access to every app on your phone and the data within it. What might they be able to know about you?

Just the apps above could give Google access to:

• What music I've listened to in the past
• What movies I've watched
• What I've been eating and drinking recently
• How much exercise I do
• What articles I might read in the near future
• Flights I have booked
• Houses I might want to buy

Google Now - An IFTTT for your life

While I was in Munich, I saw an announcement that Google had opened the Google Now API to a selection of hand-picked, third-party apps.

This got me thinking. I do not know what the relationship will be or what data Google would have access to but one of the apps that have been accepted to work with Google Now is Lyft. The example Google gave in the article was a generic prompt to order a cab. For example, you arrive at an airport and Google Now might push you a notification to get a cab:

Some more examples

See more examples here.

While the Lyft example above is interesting, it made me realise that allowing apps to talk to each other via Google Now would essentially turn your smartphone into an IFTTT for your life. So rather than a generic Lyft alert, what if they combined a few apps? They could use my British Airways app to see I have an upcoming flight, Google maps to know when I've arrived in Munich, and my Gmail account to see where I am staying. There are probably specific hotel apps they could use too. Using this, rather than getting a generic get a car card, I get one that's already personalised the quote to where I'm going.

Anticipation to diagnosis

The ultimate personal assistant would not only tell us what we expect, they would tell us things we never thought to consider. This would only be made possible by advanced pattern recognition, anticipation, and initiative beyond the possibility of a human.

What patterns do you already create but don't currently correlate? If you feel sluggish or tired on a Thursday, we do not necessarily correlate that to something that you may be allergic to that you ate on Monday. Many people spend years with conditions such as gluten or lactose intolerance but never make the connection between what they eat and how they feel. Humans cannot easily track and analyse lots of data like that, computers can.

So how can Google tell you are pregnant? I am not a doctor but I suspect like the Target example, there may be early signs of pregnancy that we do not think about at the moment (biological or otherwise). For a start, there could be a process of first increasing the priority that a particular pattern receives. For example, there may be lots of small things that people change before trying to get pregnant. If you're using a lot of different apps combined with hardware like heart rate monitors and blood pressure monitors, it wouldn't be too difficult for Google to take an educated guess. Just using the information in the Target article we know people do things like:

• Change their diet - This would be easy to see through apps like MyFitnessPal
• Change their buying habits - Amazon app or other store apps
• They may do more exercise - Several places they could get this

After all of the above, let's not forget Google knows everything you've searched for online and your browsing history if you use Chrome. I do not think it would take much to guess someone is thinking about having a family based on his or her search history alone.

Let's assume that based on the above, Google lowers the "pregnancy card" trigger threshold. This means they look closer at changes that might suggest your pregnant. I am not a doctor, so bear with me while I think out loud. Other than urine or blood samples, what other quantitative data is there that you might be pregnant?

For context, I recently learned that eating something that you have an intolerance to can show an elevated heart rate for two hours after eating. One test to check for allergies is to track your heart rate throughout the day. This was where this idea came from in the first place. Using a smartwatch with a heart rate monitor, plus My Fitness Pal, Google could make suggestions that you are allergic to foods you never thought of due to recognising patterns in elevated heart rate after your meals. This made me wonder what else could be possible. There's a ton of tech for tracking:

• Heart rate (smartwatch)
• Your weight (Withings)
• Your blood pressure (Withings)
• Sleep (Jawbone)

Could Google make a guess from this data alone? I cannot stress enough about my lack of medical qualifications, but I wonder if pregnancy impacts things like REM and deep sleep changes, significant blood pressure or heart rate changes at certain times of the day. Who knows, and maybe one of these things alone wouldn't be enough to know for sure, but combined, I think it will not be long before pregnancy prediction or similar could be done.

Enough about pregnancy, (Google probably thinks I am looking to start a family) what else? What things using heart rate alone could Google diagnose or push to us in Google Now? Could they push notifications to people who are diabetic to remember to take insulin? Could they diagnose diabetes? Could they flag heart problems before it is too late? I have no idea, but I'm excited to see where things go in the next few years.

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How Google's Evolution is Forcing Marketers to Invest in Loyal Audiences - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Given Google's recent changes to SERPs and their April 21 mobile deadline, does SEO still come first? In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand walks you through tactics you can use to build a loyal audience before you need to do SEO.

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

Click on it to open a high resolution image in a new tab!

Video transcription

Howdy Moz fans and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting on some of the changes that Google has made that are forcing marketers to invest more and more in building loyal audiences before they do SEO. This is kind of a reverse of years past where we could use SEO as that initial channel where we attracted visits who would become our customers, our email subscribers, our social media fans and followers. All of these things have kind of switched direction.

Why move SEO later in the process?

There are some reasons why. First off, Google has for a lot of broad, head of the demand curve queries, they've taken some of the value and equity away from those with things like instant answers and Knowledge Graph, along with lots and lots of other verticals.

Knowledge Graph

I do a search for "plaid shirts" and I get this instant answer showing me what a plaid shirt looks like and a Knowledge Graph. This is a fake example. I don't think they actually do this for plaid shirts yet, but they will.

Personalization

Personalization by history, we're seeing a ton of personalization. I think history is one of the biggest influencers on personalization. Google+ still is a little bit, but your search history and what you've clicked on in the past tends to be big predictors of this. You can see this in two areas, not just in the results that Google shows, but also in what they're suggesting to you in your Search Suggest as you type.

Now, where Google is trying to predictively say, "Hey, we think you're going to want coffee right now because we see that you stepped out of your office and you live in Seattle, and you are a human being. So you must want coffee." They have these ranking signals, that are relatively new over the past few years and certainly much stronger than in years past around user and usage data, around search volume and what you searched for using quality raters and human and manual controls. Signals that are heavily correlated with brand, even if brand itself isn't necessarily a ranking factor.

Fewer results

Of course, there are fewer results now. I don't know if you guys caught this, but I thought one of the most fascinating things that Dr. Pete showed off recently in his MozCast data set was that it used to be the case that Google would show 10 results even if they had a set of images, a news result, and a local pack. Now basically these count as individual results. So you're not getting 10 results on a page. If you've got images and a couple of news things, you're getting seven results that are web results. Ten domains appear, ten big domains, powerful domains, places like Amazon and Yelp and those kinds of things, at least for U.S. search results, appear on 17% of all page one queries. There are a little fewer results to work with and more results biased to these bigger, better-known sites.

All of these things are contributing to this world in which doing SEO first and then earning loyalty through two other channels through SEO is really, really hard. It's making the value of having a loyal audience before you need to do SEO that much more valuable, which is why I figured we'd run through some of the tactics that you can use to build a loyal audience.

This is actually a question from one of our Whiteboard Friday loyal audience members. Thank you very much. Much appreciated.

How to build a loyal audience

Some tactics to build loyalty, we talked about a few of these, but creating an expectation that you can consistently deliver upon is a huge part of how loyalty is created. Humans love to form habits. Thankfully for marketers, we're terrible at breaking those habits.

Consistency

If you can form a habit, you can create a loyal member of your audience, but this is very challenging unless you deliver consistency. That consistency needs to be created through an expectation. That could be when you publish. That could be what you're going to do. That could be the format of the content that you're providing. That could be how your solution or problem or product is delivered. But it needs to create those things in order to build that loyal audience.

Reach your audience where they are

Secondly, provide your content through the channels, the apps, the accounts, the formats that your audience is already using. If I say, "Hey, in order to get Whiteboard Friday, you need to sign up for a Moz account first," the viewability of Whiteboard Friday is going to go down. If on the other hand, which we don't have this but we really should have it, there was a subscribe on iTunes and you could get each Whiteboard Friday as a podcast, gosh, that is something that many Whiteboard Friday viewers, in fact, many people in the technology and marketing worlds already have access to. Therefore it reduces the friction of subscribing to Whiteboard Friday. We might build more people into our loyal audience.

This is definitely something to think about. You need to be able to identify those channels and then be there.

Where SEO fits

I'm saying don't start with SEO as your primary web marketing tactic anymore. I think we have to build into it. These challenges are too great. Not only are they too great, I think they could be overcome today, but they are growing. All of them are growing so substantially, instant answers and Knowledge Graph are becoming a bigger and bigger part of search results. Google Now is something that Google is pushing on so incredibly hard. I think they're going to be pushing it with new devices. They're clearly pushing it with app results inside of search results. I think these ranking signals are only going to get stronger. I think there's going to be more personalization. I think every one of these you can see an up and to the right trend.

Therefore, when we do SEO, we have to think about it as, "How do I earn a loyal audience and then use their amplification to help me perform in search?" Rather than, "How do I do SEO for my website to earn visitors that I can convert into a loyal audience?" That's a new a challenge, a new paradigm for us.

Be unique and memorable

Craft a stylistically unique and memorable approach to solving your audience's problem. One of the things that I find is challenging in a lot of businesses that we talk to, that I get to interact with is that they think, "Hey, we're the best player in this field. We're the best at doing this. Therefore, we should be able to earn a great customer audience." I think this ignores why marketing exists and ignores the power that marketing has and the power of influencing human beings overall.

The best really is not necessarily enough. We are not perfectly logical creatures where we go, "Hey, I am thinking about a new social media monitoring solution. I need to watch Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Instagram for my business. Therefore I'm going to create my criteria. I'm going to evaluate all 716 providers that are in the market today that fit my price range and those criteria. Then I'm going to choose effectively the best one. No, we're biased by the ones we've heard of, the ones our friends recommend, the ones we stumble across versus don't stumble across, the ones that have a loud voice, the ones that have a credible voice. These things bias us. Therefore, being stylistically unique and memorable have outsized power to determine whether people will become part of your loyal audience.

More isn't necessarily better

I've talked about this a few times, but I'm strongly of the opinion, especially when it comes to loyalty, that more content may actually be worse than better content. Moz publishes between 7 and 10 blog posts a week. That's a lot of content. I think there are weeks where we published 12 blog posts. For me to say this is a little odd. But the challenge here is prior to building a loyal audience. Once you have a loyal audience, you can start to expand that audience by reaching out and broadening the spectrum of content that you create, and you can afford to be a little more risk taking in that. When you are trying to build loyalty early on, you need to have that consistency of quality.

People are going to return because you keep delivering great stuff again and again. When that suffers, your audience will suffer as well. If I watch my first three Whiteboard Fridays and then the fourth one is not great, I expect to lose a ton of those viewers. But if I have tens of thousands of people who are watching Whiteboard Friday and I deliver one bad one out of twenty, maybe I have a little more room to play there.

Focus your efforts

Focus. This is a big challenge because I think a lot of us think very broadly about who we want to appeal to, the types of content we want to create, the types of marketing we want to do. This is very challenging from a loyalty perspective because passionate fans tend to congregate around very, very focused causes and very focused creators of content or focused brands or focused organizations. Its much tougher to build that passion into a group of users if you're trying to appeal to a very broad set. That's just how it is.

Don't forget engagement

Lastly, but not least, this is very tactical, but I found it extremely powerful when a brand is starting out, when a project is starting out, to engage and respond as much as possible with your customers. That could be over social channels, that could be in comments, that could be in emails, that could be directly in outreach, whatever it is. But if you see someone who you can reach out to engaging with you, replying to them, talking to them, conversing with them in some way, forming a connection is extremely powerful. It especially is important for first interactions.

I'm not going to say, "You need to respond to everything all the time, always." If you can identify, "This is the first interaction that we've had with this person," if you interact and if that interaction is positive, it can create loyalty just on its own. That's a lovely way to start scaling up from a small starting point.

All right everyone, hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We'll see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Who Does It Better: Yahoo Japan or Google Japan?

A comparison between the search results for Yahoo Japan and Google Japan reinforces the keyword targeting opportunities for SEO.

Elements of Personalization & How to Perform Better in Personalized Search - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

From information about your location and device to searches you've performed in the past, Google now has a great deal of information it can use to personalize your search results. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains to what extent they're likely using that information and offers five ways in which you can improve your performance in personalized search.

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

Click on it to open a high resolution image in a new tab!

Video transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat personalization, talking about the elements that can influence personalization as well as some of the tactical things that web marketers and SEOs specifically can do to help make their sites and their content more personalized friendly.

How personalization works

So, what are we talking about when we're talking about personalization? Well, Google is actually personalizing by a large number of things and probably even a few things I have not listed here that they have not been totally transparent or forthcoming about.

Logged-in visitors

The things that we know about include things like:

• Location. Where is the searcher?
• Device. What type of device and operating system is the searcher using?
• Browser. We have seen some browser specific and operating specific forms of searches. Search history, things that you have searched for before and potentially what you've clicked on in the results.
• Your email calendar. So if you're using Gmail and you're using Google Calendar, Google will pull in things that they find on your calendar and data from your email and potentially show that to you inside of search results when you search for very particular things. For example, if you have an upcoming plane flight and you search for that flight number or search around that airline, they may show you, you have an upcoming flight tomorrow at 2:07 p.m. with Delta airlines.
• Google+. A lot of folks are thinking of it as dead, but it's not particularly dead, in fact no more so than the last year and a half or so. Google+ results will still appear at the bottom of your search results very frequently if you're logged in and anyone in your Google+ stream that you follow has shared any link or any post in Google+ with the keywords that you've searched for. That's a very broad matching still. Those results can appear higher if Google determines that there's more relevancy behind that. You'll also see Google+ data for people you're connected to when you search for them, that kind of thing.
• Visit history. If you have visited a domain while logged into an account many times in the past, I'm not exactly sure how many times or what sort of engagement they look at precisely, but they may bias those results higher. So they might say, "Gosh, you know, you really seem to like eBay when you do shopping. We're going to show eBay's results for you higher than we would normally show them in an incognito window or for someone who's not logged in or someone who isn't as big an eBay fan as you are."
• Bookmarks. It's unclear whether they're using just the bookmarks from Google Chrome or the personalization that carries over from Chrome instances or the fact that bookmarks are also things that people visit frequency. There's some discussion about what the overlap is there. Not too important for our purposes.

Logged-out visitors

If you are logged out, they still have a number of ways of personalizing, and you can still observe plenty of personalization. Your results may be very different from what you see in a totally new browser with no location applied to it, on a different device with different search and visit history.

Now, remember when I say "Logged out," I'm not talking about an incognito window. An incognito window would bias against showing anything based on search history or visit history. However, location and device appear to still remain intact. So a mobile device is going to get sometimes different results than a desktop device. Different locations will get different results than other locations. All that kind of stuff.

Now you might ask, "Quantify this for me, Rand." Like let's say we took a sample set of 500 keywords and we ran them through personalized versus non-personalized kinds of searches. What's the real delta in the results ordering and the difference of the results that we see?

Well, we actually did this. It's almost 18 months old at this point, but Doctor Pete did this in late 2013. Using the MozCast data set, he checked crawlers, Google Webmaster Tools, personalized logged in and incognito. You know what? The delta was very small for personalized versus incognito. I suspect that number's probably gone up, which means this correlation number -- 1.0 would be perfect correlation -- 0.977 very, very high correlation. So we're seeing really similar results for personalized versus incognito at least 18 months ago.

I suspect that's probably changed. It'll probably continue to change a little bit. However, I would also say that it probably won't drop that low. I would not expect that you would ever find that it'll be lower than 0.8, maybe even 0.9, just because so much of search is intentional navigation and so much of it is also not fully capable to be personalized in truly intelligent ways. The results are the best results already. There's not a whole lot of personalization that might be added in besides potentially showing your Google+ follows or something at the bottom and things based on your visit history.

Performing better in personalized search

So let's say you want to perform better in personalized search. You have a belief that, hey, a lot of people are getting personalized bias in my particular SERP sets. We're very local focused, or we're very biased by social kinds of data, or we're seeing a lot of people are getting biased in their results to our competitors because of their search history and visit history. What are things that I need to think about?

Get potential searchers to know and love your brand before the query

The answer is you can perform better in personalized search in general, overall by thinking about things like getting potential searchers to know and love your brand and your domain before they ever make the query. It turns out that if you've gotten people to your site previously through other forms of navigation and through searches, you may very well find yourself higher up in people's personalized results as a consequence of the fact that they visited you in the past. We don't know all the metrics that go into that or what precisely Google uses, but we could surmise that there are probably some bars around engagement, visit history, how many times, how frequently in a certain time frame, all that kind of stuff that goes into that search and visit history.

Likewise, if you can bias people here and rank higher, you may be getting more and more benefit. It can be a snowball effect. So if you keep showing up higher in their rankings, they keep clicking you, they keep finding information that's useful, they don't need to go back to the search results and click somebody else. You're just going to keep ranking in more and more of their queries as they investigate things. For those of you who are full funnel types of content servers, you're thinking about people as they're doing research and educating themselves all the way down to the transaction level with their searches, this is a very exciting opportunity.

Be visible in all the relevant locations for your business

For location bias, you want to make sure that you are relevant in all the locations for your business or your service. A lot of times that means getting registered with Google Maps and Google+ local business for maps -- I can't remember what it's called exactly. I think it's Google+ Local for Business -- and making sure that you are not only registered with those places but then also that your content is helping to serve the areas that you serve. Sometimes that can even mean a larger radius than what Google Maps might give you. You can rank well outside of your specific geographies with content that serves those regions, even if Google is not perfectly location connecting you via your address or your Maps registration, those kinds of things.

Get those keyword targets dialed in

Getting keyword targeting dialed in, this is important all the time. Where a lot of people fall down in this is they think, "Hey, I only need to worry about keyword targeting on the pages that are specifically intended to be search landing pages. I'm trying to get search traffic to these pages." But personalization bias means that if you can get keyword targeting dialed in even on pages that are not necessarily search landing pages, Google might say, "Hey, this wouldn't normally rank for someone, but because you've already earned that traffic, because that person is already biased to your brand, your domain, we're going to surface that higher than we ordinarily would." That is a powerful potential tool in your arsenal, hence it's useful to think about keyword targeting on a page specific level even for pages that you might not think would earn search traffic normally.

Share content on Google+ and connect with your potential customers

Google+ still, in my opinion, a very valuable place to earn personalized traffic for two reasons. One, of course you can get people actually over to your site. You may be able to get potential traffic through Google+. You can appear in those search results right at the bottom for anyone who follows you or anyone who's connected to you via email and other kinds of Google apps. You may have also noticed that when you email with someone, if they're using Gmail and their Google+ account is connected, you see in the little right-hand corner there that they'll show their last post or their last few posts sometimes on Google+. Again, also a powerful way to connect with folks and to share the content as you're emailing back and forth with them.

For brands, that also shows up in search results sometimes. There's the brand box on the right-hand side, kind of like Knowledge Graph, and it'll show your last few posts from Google+. So again, more and more opportunities to be visible if you're doing Google+.

I am also going to surmise that, in the future, Google might do stuff with this around Twitter. They just finished re-inking that deal where Twitter gives their full fire hose access to Google and Google starts displaying more and more of that stuff in search results. So I think probably still valuable to think about how that connection might form. Definitely still valuable directly to do it in Google+ even if you're not getting any traffic from Google+.

Be multi-device friendly and usable

Then the last one, of course, being multi-device friendly and usable. This is something where Moz has historically fallen down, and obviously we're going to be fixing that in the months ahead. I actually hope we fix it after April 21st so we can see whether we really take a hit when they do that mobile thing. I think that would be a noble sacrifice, and then we can see how we perform thereafter and then fix it and see if we can get back in Google's good graces after that.

So given these tactics and some of this knowledge about how personalized search works, hopefully you can take advantage of personalized search and help inform your teams, your bosses, your clients about personalization and the potential impacts. Hopefully we'll be redoing some of those studies, too, to be able to tell you, hey, how much more is personalization affecting SEO over the last 18 months and in the years ahead.

All right, everyone. Thanks again for joining us, and we'll see you again next time for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Off with Your Head Terms: Leveraging Long-Tail Opportunity with Content

Posted by SimonPenson

Running an agency comes with many privileges, including a first-hand look at large amounts of data on how clients' sites behave in search, and especially how that behavior changes day-to-day and month-to-month.

While every niche is different and can have subtle nuances that frustrate even the most hardened SEOs or data analysts, there are undoubtedly trends that stick out every so often which are worthy of further investigation.

In the past year, the Zazzle Media team has been monitoring one in particular, and today's post is designed to shed some light on it in hopes of creating a wider debate.

What is this trend, you ask? In simple terms, it's what we see as a major shift in the way results are presented, and it's resulting in more traffic for the long tail.

2014 growth

It's a conclusion supported by a number of client growth stories throughout the last 12 months, all of whom have seen significant growth coming not from head terms, but from an increasing number of URLs gaining search traffic from organic.

The Searchmetrics visibility chart below is just one example of a brand in the finance space seeing digital growth year-over-year as a direct result of this phenomenon. They've even seen some head terms drop backwards by a couple of places while still seeing this overall.

To understand why this may be happening we need to take a very quick crash course into how Google has evolved over the past two years.

Keyword matching

Google built its empire on a smart system; one which was able to match "documents" (webpages) to keywords by scanning and organizing those documents based upon keyword mentions.

It's an approach that has been getting increasingly too simplistic in a "big data" world.

The answer, it seems, is to focus more on the user intent behind that query and get at exactly what it is the searcher is actually looking for.

Hummingbird

The solution to that challenge is Hummingbird, Google's new "engine" for sorting the results we see when we search.

In the same way that Caffeine, the former search architecture, allowed the company to produce fresher results and roll worldwide algorithm changes (such as Panda and Penguin) out faster, Hummingbird is designed to do the same for personalized results.

And while we are only at the very beginning of that journey, from the data we have seen over the past year it seems to be crystallizing into more traffic for deeper pages.

Why is this happening? The answer lies in further analysis of what Google is trying to achieve.

Implicit vs. explicit

To better explain this change let's look at how it is affecting a search for something obvious, like "coffee shop."

Go back two or so years and a search for this may well have presented 10 blue links of the obvious chains and their location pages.

For the user, however, this isn't useful—and the search giant knows it. Instead, they want to understand the user intent behind the query, or the "implicit query," as previously explained by Tom Anthony on this blog.

What that means, in practice, is that a search for "coffee shop" will actually have context, and one of the reasons for wanting you signed in is to allow the search engine to collect further signals from you to help understand that query in detail. That means things like your location, perhaps even your brand preferences, etc.

Knowing these things allows the search to be personalized to your exact needs, throwing up the details of the closest Starbucks to your current location (if that is your favourite coffee).

If you then expand this trend out into billions of other searches you can see how deeper-level pages, or even articles, present a better, more refined option for Google.

Here we see how a result for something like "Hotels" may change if Google knows where you are, what you do for a living and therefore what kind of disposable income you have. The result may look completely different, for instance, if Google knows you are a company CEO who stays in nice hotels and has a big meeting the following day, thus requiring a quiet room so you can get some sleep.

Instead of the usual "best hotels in London" result we get something much more personalised and, critically, something more useful.

The new long-tail curve

What this appears to be doing is reshaping the traditional long-tail curve we all know so well. It is beginning to change shape along the lines of the chart below:

That's a noteworthy shift. With another client of ours, we have seen a 135% increase in the number of pages receiving traffic from search, delivering a 98% increase in overall organic traffic because of it.

The primary factor behind this rise is the creation of the "right" content to take advantage of this changing marketplace. Getting that right requires an approach reminiscent of the way traditional marketing has worked for decades—before the web even existed.

In practice, that means understanding the audience you are attempting to capture and, in doing so, outlining the key questions they are asking every day.

This audience-centric marketing approach is something I have written about previously on this blog and others, as it is critical to understanding that "context" and what your customers or clients are actually looking for.

The way to do that? Dive into data, and also speak to those who may already be buying from or working with you.

Digging into available data

The first step of any marketing process is to collect and process any and all available information about your existing audience and those you may want to attract in the future.

This is a huge subject area—one I could easily spend the next 10,000 words writing about—but it has been covered brilliantly on the more traditional research side by sites like this and this.

The latter of those two links breaks this side of the research process into the two key critical elements you will need to master to ensure you have a thorough understanding of who you are "talking" to in search.

Quantitative concentrates on the numbers. Focus is on larger data sets and statistical information, as opposed to painting a rich picture of the likes and dislikes of your audience.

Qualitative focuses on the words and on painting in the "richness." The way your customers speak and explain problems, likes and dislikes. It's more of a study on human behavior than stats.

This information can be combined with a plethora of other data sources from CRMs, email lists, and other customer insight pots, but where we are increasingly seeing more opportunity is in the social data arena.

Platforms such as Facebook can give all brands access to hugely valuable big-data insight about almost any audience you could possibly imagine.

What I'd like to do here is explain how to go about extracting that data to form rich pictures of those we are either already speaking to or the very people we want to attract.

There is also little doubt that the amount of insight you have into your audience is directly proportional to the success of your content, hence the importance of this research cycle.

Persona creation

Your data comes to life through the creation of personas, which are designed to put a human face on that data and group it into a small number of shared interest sets.

Again, the point of this post is not to explain how to best manage this process. Posts like this one and this one go over that in great detail—the point here is to go over what having them in place allows you to do.

We've also created a free persona template, which can help make the process of pulling them together much easier.

When you've got them created, you will soon realize that your personas each have very different needs from a content perspective.

To give you an example of that let's look at these example profiles below:

Here we can see three very distinct segments of the audience, and immediately it is easy to see how each of them is looking for a different experience from your brand.

Take the "Maturing Spender" for example. In this fictional example for a banking brand we can see he not only has very different content needs but is actually "activated" by a different approach to the buying cycle too.

While the traditional buyer will follow a process of awareness, research, evaluation and purchase, a new kind of purchase behaviour is materializing that's driven by social.

In this new world we are seeing consumers driven to more impulsive purchases that are often driven by social sharing. They'll see something in their social feeds and are more likely to purchase there and then (or at least within a few days), especially if there is a limited offer on.

Much of this is driven by our increasingly "disposable" culture that creates an accelerated buying process.

You can learn this and other data-driven insights from the personas, and we recommend using a good persona template, then adding further descriptive detail and "colour" to each one so that everyone understands whom it is they are writing for.

It can also work well to align those characters to famous people, if possible, as doing so makes it much easier to scale understanding across whole organizations.

Having them in place and universally adopted allows you to do many things, including:

• Create focus on the customer
• Allow teams to make and defend decisions
• Create empathy with the audience

Ultimately, however, all of this is designed to ensure you have a better understanding of those you want to converse with, and in doing so you can map out the key questions they ask and understand their individual needs.

If you want to dig into this area more then I highly recommend Mike King's post from 2014 here on Moz for further background.

New keyword research – personas

Understanding the specific questions your audience is asking is where the real win can be found, and the next stage is to utilize the info gleaned from the persona process in the next phase: keyword research.

To do that, let's walk through an example for our Happy Couple persona (the first from the above graphic), and see how things plays out for this fictional banking brand.

The first step is to gather a list of tools to help unearth related keywords. Here are the ones we use:

• 1. SEMRush
• 2. Soovle
• 3. Keyword Tool IO
• 4. Google Autocomplete
• 5. Forum searches

There are many more that can help, but it is very easy to complicate the process with data, so we like to limit that as much as possible and focus on where we can get the most benefit quickly.

Before we get into the data mining process, however, we begin with a group brainstorm to surface as many initial questions as possible.

To do this, we will gather four people for a quick 15-minute stand-up conversation around each persona. The aim is to gather five questions from which the main research phase can be constructed.

Some possibilities for our Happy Couple example may include:

• How much can I borrow for a mortgage?
• How do I buy a house?
• How large a deposit do I need to buy a house?
• What is the best regular savings account?

From here we can use this framework as a starting point for the keyword research and there is no better place to start than with our first tool.

SEMRush

For those unfamiliar with this tool it is designed to make it easier to accurately assess competitor and market opportunity by plugging into search data. In this example we will use it to highlight longer-tail keyword opportunity based upon the example questions we have just unearthed.

To uncover related keyword opportunity around the first question we type in something similar to the below:

This will highlight a number of phrases related to our question:

As you can see, this gives us a lot of ammunition from a content perspective to enable us to write about this critical subject consistently without repeating the same titles.

Each of those long-tail terms can be analyzed ever deeper by clicking on them individually. That will generate a further list of even more specifically related terms.

Soovle

The next stage is to use this vastly underrated tool to further mine user search data. It allows you to gather regular search phrases from sites such as YouTube, Yahoo, Bing, Answers.com and Wikipedia in one place.

The result is something a little like the below. It may not be the prettiest but it can save a lot of time and effort as you can download the results in a single CSV.

Google Autocomplete / KeywordTool.io

There are several ways you can tap into Google's Autocomplete data and with an API in existence there are a number of tools making good use of it. My current favourite is KeywordTool.io, which actually has its own API, mashing data from Google, YouTube, Bing, and the Apple App Store.

The real value is in how it spits out that data, as you are able to see suggestions by letter or number, creating hundreds of potential areas for content development. The App Store data is particularly useful, as you will often see greater refinement in search behavior here and as a result very specific 'questions' to answer.

A great example for this would be "how to prequalify yourself for a mortgage," a phrase which would be very hard to surface using Google Autocomplete tools alone.

Forum searches

Another fantastic area worthy of research focus is forums. We use these to ask our peers and topic experts questions, so spending some time understanding what is being asked within the key ones for your market can be very helpful.

One of the best ways of doing this is to perform a simple advanced Google search as outlined below:

"keyword" + "forum"

For our example we might type:

This then presents us with more than 85,000 results, many of which will be questions that have been asked on this subject.

Examples include:

• First-time buyer's mortgage guide
• Getting a Mortgage: Boost your Mortgage Chances
• Mortgage Arrears: What help is available?
• Are Fixed Rate Mortgages best?

As you can see, this also opens up a myriad of content opportunities.

Competitive research

Another way of laterally expanding your reach is to look at the content your best competitors are producing.

In this example we will look at two ways of doing that, firstly by analyzing top content and then by looking at what those competitors rank for that you don't.

Most shared content

There are several tools that can give you a view on the most-shared content, but my personal favourites are Buzzsumo or the awesome new ahrefs Content Explorer.

Below, we see a search for "mortgages" using the tool, and we are presented with a list of content on that subject sorted by "most shared." The result can be filtered by time frame, language, or even by specific domain inclusions or exclusions.

This data can be exported and titles extracted to be used as the basis of further keyword research around that specific topic area, or within a brainstorm.

For example, I might want to look at where the volume is from an organic search perspective for something like "mortgage paperwork."

I can type this term into SEMRush and search through related phrases for long-tail opportunity on that specific area.

Competitor terms opportunity

A smart way of working out where you can gain further market share is to dive a little deeper into your key competitors and understand what they rank for and, critically, what you don't.

To do this, we return to SEMRush and make use of a little-publicized but hugely useful tool within the suite called Domain Comparison Tool.

It allows you to compare two domains and visualize the overlap they have from a keyword ranking perspective. For this example, we will choose to compare two UK banks – Lloyds and HSBC.

To do that simply type both domains into the tool as below:

Next, click on the chart button and you will be presented with two overlapping circles, representing the keywords that each domain ranks for. As we can see, both rank for a similar number of keywords (the overall number affects the size of the circles) with some overlap but there are keywords from both sides that could be exploited.

If we were working for HSBC, for instance, it would be the blue portion of the chart we would be most interested in in this scenario. We can download a full list of keywords that both banks rank for, and then sort by those that HSBC don't rank for.

You can see in the snapshot below that the data includes columns on where each site ranks for each keyword, so sorting is easy.

Once you have the raw data in spreadsheet format, we would sort by the "HSBC" column so the terms at the top are those we don't rank for, and then strip away the rest. This leaves you with the opportunity terms that you can create content to cover, and this can be prioritized by search volume or topic area if there are specific sub-topics that are more important than others within your wider plan.

Create the calendar

By this point in the process you should have hundreds, if not thousands of title ideas, and the next job is to ensure that you organise them in a way that makes sense for your audience and also for your brand.

Content flow

To do this properly requires not just a knowledge of your audience via extensive research, but also content strategy.

One of the biggest rules is something we call content flow. In a nutshell, it is the discipline of creating a content calendar that delivers variation over time in a way that keeps the audience engaged.

If you create the same content all of the time it can quickly become a turn-off, and so varying the type (video, image-led piece, infographics, etc.) and read time, or the amount of time you put into creating the piece, will produce that "flow."

This handy tool can help you sense check it as you go.

Clearly your "other" content requirements as part of your wider strategy will need to fit into this strategy, too. The vast majority of the output here will be article-focused, and it is critical to ensure that other elements of your strategy are also covered to round out your content output.

This free content strategy toolkit download gives you everything you need to ensure you get the rest of it right.

The result

This is a strategy we have followed for many of our search-focused clients over the last 18 months, and we have some great real-world case studies to prove that it works.

Below you can see how just one of those has played out in search visibility improvement terms over that period as proof of its effectiveness.

All of that growth directly correlates with a huge growth in the number of URLs receiving traffic from search and that is a key metric in measuring the effectiveness of this strategy.

In this example we saw a 15% monthly increase in the number of URLs receiving traffic from search, with organic traffic up 98% year-on-year despite head terms staying relatively static.

Give it a go for yourself as part of your wider strategy and see what it can do for your brand.

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