SEO News

Posted by John-Henry

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

I entered SEO as a link builder. In 2010, my job was easy and my toolset mainly consisted of article marketing software, directory submissions, comment posting and link networks. Fast forward four years >> I now solely create visually engaging content in an effort to scale link building. I didn’t make this career shift because “link building is no longer effective;” quite the opposite: I changed focus from manual to scalable link building because I now work in more competitive industries and my clients generally need 100+ links per asset to move the needle—content helps me meet that demand to acquire large amounts of new linking root domains at once.

Over the past two years I’ve become obsessed with content (and Reddit, unfortunately). I’ve started to keep the companies that are producing the best and most successful digital content on my radar. Two companies that have recently started to stick out are Movoto and Airbnb. Both are scaling link acquisition via content, but they are going about it in entirely different ways. Airbnb is growing its own grassroots community, while Movoto is actively targeting existing and passionate online communities with its content marketing.

Before we dive in, both companies are growing rapidly in terms of organic search according to SEMrush:

Airbnb

Movoto

Both of these companies are starting to do exceptionally well in the SERPs, primarily due to either growing (Airbnb) or targeting (Movoto) an audience.

Perception, product, and content

Airbnb and Movoto are both trying to rank for extremely competitive terms, however their content marketing strategies couldn’t be further from each other, and that fact hinges mainly on two aspects of these businesses’ models:

1. The length of the customer purchase journey
2. The probability of repeat purchases

First, let’s think about both of these sites’ customer purchase journeys and their customer lifetime value (LTV). Airbnb is selling rentals, which someone could need multiple times a year. Movoto is selling homes. The price point and level of commitment required from the customer are wildly different. More importantly, people generally only look for a new home during or after a major life event, like marriage, death, having a baby, or getting a new job. On the other hand, you could decide to take a random weekend ski trip at 4:15 p.m. on a Friday and book an Airbnb almost instantly. If Airbnb customers really enjoy their Airbnb experience, there’s a good chance that they will rent another Airbnb and continue to add to the company’s bottom line. However, no matter how awesome a time someone has buying a home, there’s a very small chance that they will decide to repeat the experience anytime soon.

Movoto and Airbnb’s business models differ in the sense that Airbnb is incrementally extracting value out of customers over a long period of time, while Movoto is most likely getting 100% of the customer’s LTV at the first purchase.

For Airbnb, creating their own community is a pragmatic marketing strategy for keeping users engaged. I theorize that’s why most of Airbnb’s content is either about their business, their community of users and hosts, or about their product.

Where Airbnb is winning in content

• Charitable efforts: During Hurricane Sandy, Airbnb community members put up displaced New Yorkers for free, generating 300 linking root domains.

• Really unique homes: Some of the listings on Airbnb are naturally link worthy, like this igloo or this treehouse. As Airbnb grows, and more interesting and unusual listings pop up, these interesting listings will continue to scale Airbnb’s link acquisition.

• Dev blog: Airbnb is up to some pretty impressive stuff in terms of technology and development, and they regularly share their innovations with the dev community. Like this post on isometric JavaScript which earned more than 130 linking root domains.

• Neighborhood guides: These gorgeous neighborhood guides have built 130 links to date, however, they also accomplish a lot more. I asked Dennis Goedegebuure, head of SEO for Airbnb, why they created these amazing guides:

• Product/community blog: Airbnb has a bit of a leg up here in terms of link acquisition. Because they are a prominent company disrupting an established industry, pretty much anything they do is newsworthy. However, when you take a look at their blog, it’s not so much a place for them to market themselves as it is a forum to address critical issues, consumer concerns, and changes with the product. It’s racked up a lot of links over time (1900+ linking root domains), but it’s racked up way more hearts and minds—and most likely converted a fair amount of users into first time renters by alleviating their pain points while researching the product.

• One-off content marketing efforts: The Airbnb Annual Report is an amazing piece of content marketing – but it also speaks to how savvy Airbnb is when it comes to marketing itself. By showing the community how quickly Airbnb is growing (and how much money is out there for hosts to make) Airbnb is educating people about the company trajectory, its product and the future of the industry as a whole – all through beautiful, product-centric, interactive content.

The overarching theme of Airbnb’s content

All of Airbnb’s content keeps the brand, its product and the Airbnb community in the front of the users mind. Airbnb relies on a community in order to function, and because that community is inclusive, empathetic and charitable—it’s one of the most marketable aspects of the Airbnb brand. Airbnb also faces certain challenges—like regulation and challenges from the hospitality industry. Because their business model is still being established, they need those hearts and minds on their side to fight for them and champion their product.

Movoto is taking a different path

Because a home purchase is so infrequent, constantly trying to grow a community through ongoing social media and brand-centric content marketing could get tiresome for readers, especially because those interacting with the brand would most likely have little motivation to purchase a home until a major life event occurs. However, Movoto still needs to scale link building, and in order to do that without building a community of their own, they must engage an audience in a way that causes them to share and tweet the content they produce.

Targeting existing audiences

Movoto creates content that appeals to pre-existing audiences. They are also great at picking their subject matter—they choose topics that are popular enough to be covered in mainstream press, but also appeal to the hardcore niche fanboy sites.

Their most successful content takes some type of pop-culture reference or hot topic, applies it to real estate, and then earns press from both big news sites and mid-level authority blogs. The Harry Potter Hogwarts Property Evaluation Infographic may be the best example of this strategy in action:

It’s earned links from over 140 domains including mainstream sites like Daily Mail, Fox News, and Daily Finance, and it also earned links from fan sites like Nerdophiles, Toy To The World, and Potter Talk.

Movoto is creating and marketing useful, fun and informative content that directly appeals to a particular niche audience—but it also has a larger mainstream appeal. Because Movoto executes content well in terms of information and visuals—they are racking up links and quickly rising in the rankings. They’ve also produced a number of successful interactives, like How Many Legos Would it Take to Build your House, or alternatively How Many Tetris Blocks.

Many of Movoto’s blog posts have earned over 100 linking root domains, primarily due to their ability to target an audience that will engage and share content online. Because they don’t have to structure their communication around a growing community, like Airbnb, they are free to be pretty creative with their subject matter and publish things that are going to get a strong response (like 54,000 shares on Facebook for that post alone).

Community building isn’t for everyone. It’s best suited for communal products

As digital marketers we’re quick to champion new strategies that result in increased traffic, links and social shares—but it’s important to consider how our marketing efforts fit with the overall business model. After all, it’s not just links and shares we’re after, we are all trying to grow businesses in the most cost effective manner possible.

Community building really only makes sense for communal products. So, while it’s the perfect growth strategy for a product like Airbnb, it makes no sense for a real estate site like Movoto. If you’re stressing over social singles and your lack of community engagement—maybe you don’t have a product that the community can get behind and actively support—and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, you just need to go elsewhere for your links because that’s what your business model demands.

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Presuming that both the UK and the US are the same purely because they speak the same language can prove fatal for many.

Our dialectal differences may mean that we can confuse our tomato, data, and routers. But don’t make the mistake that both countries speaking English makes them the same.

According to FT.com:

As the UK and US share the same language, there is often an underlying assumption that the countries make obvious partners. But this assumption can come unstuck when it comes to doing business.

95% of US citizens claim to speak English ‘well’ or ‘very well’. However only 80% consider it their mother tongue, with Spanish (12.4%) and Indo-European (3.7%) also being noticeably prevalent.

Considering the impact of that when it comes to the representative amounts of the total population means that 39,266,902 claim Spanish as their mother tongue, in other words 82% of the entire Spanish population (47,270,000).

Curiously, and perhaps in light of the diplomatic roots that America was founded on, no official language actually exists on a federal level.

Perhaps not so polarized as the US, the UK still shows a proportion of the population that do not speak English as their main language (4%).

The fantastic resource from the Guardian data blog (linked above, pictured below) shows the concentration of the non-English speaking areas of the country, determining the UKs’ patchwork quilt of languages, particularly when it comes to Greater London:

The UK and Europe: more than one market

Companies [from outside of Europe] looking at the UK sometimes fail to see how convoluted a market Europe is.

There are 23 official languages spoken in the current EU, and several more not included in these figures, taking the total to some 40 languages.

This resents a very different picture to that of North America where, other than the influence of Spanish, few other languages should be considered as part of the tapestry of languages covering a far wider geographic region.

In addition to this the proportion of ‘second language’ speakers is also something that differentiates the markets:

This poses two very interesting takeaways:

1. By sticking to English as the primary language you still leave yourself open to the widest audience.
2. While Europe possesses a broad and complex market the geographical resemblances are simple compared to the culture and language.

Content

Content marketing was top of mind and top of agenda for marketers in 2013. There is no shortage of articles, statistics, guides and tips out there on the web and we have no intention on covering all content bases. This is not a content marketing post. 

The Content Statistics Compendium provides you with over 120 pages of facts and figures you need that’s includes UK, US, and APAC markets.

Building a content strategy that fuels digital marketing strategy does not vary too much via country. Content marketers face similar challenges of production, scale and measurement.

However, strategy does differ with regard to consumer profiles and economic trends. Tactics can vary dramatically based on culture and buyer personas.

Confidence and uncertainty

In a recent survey from the Content Marketing Institute and the DMA key comparisons between the UK and US content markets provided interesting insights.

One of the key findings was that 48% of UK marketers consider themselves to be more effective at content marketing when compared with the US where 41% of marketers consider themselves to be more effective.

The biggest area of difference was highlighted when marketers where asked about documented content strategy.

Only 42% of UK marketers stated that they have a documented content strategy. 10% of respondents were unsure.

Search marketing

According to research from Kenshoo, paid search ad spend increased globally but decreased in Europe. There was a 24% increase in U.S. search ad spend, while in Europe, UK paid search advertisers were spending 11% less YoY while the rest of continental Europe was spending 4% less.. 

The United States and United Kingdom tend to look very similar on the outside and Google often tests new initiatives first on these two markets.

Which market is chooses can be based on a number of factors such as size of market v risk and adoption factor, demand, and audience demographic.

Google normally releases beta opportunities to advertisers, generally, in the US first. The UK often follows as the second release group.

Source: Search Engine Land 

We managed to speak to Justin Hayward, CEO of MakeItRain, who has specific experience in expanding from the UK into US search markets.

Hayward stated:

There is a huge opportunity for US agencies to take advantage of international agency experience due to a more refined market in the UK and Europe and less reliance on technology.

The US has relied on a technology solution for search for too long which needs to change. With the huge emphasis Google places on quality content, it’s time for more human search marketing to return to the US 

Social

No matter which way you cut it, social penetration by country is also incredibly similar.

When based on active users of the largest active social network in each country the results are:

• USA – 56%

• UK 57%

When based on GlobalWebIndex survey of each of the countries’ internet users the results are: 

• USA – 75%

• UK – 76%

Similar to the penetration figures, there is little difference when you consider the differences in platform popularity between the US and the UK. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn rule in terms of popularity.

The fastest growing network stats feature Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr in both the UK and the US.

In the UK, 87% of internet users own an account on a social network.

In the USA, 92% of internet users own an account on a social network:

• More than 40% of UK businesses use social networks. [Source: ONS, December 2013]
• Roughly 81% of US SMBs are using social media. [Source: Mashable, Feb 2014]

Spending on social media by global companies by region shows a big difference between North America and Europe though, as is demonstrated below:

Source: TCS, October 2013

Having said that social media has taken center stage irrespective of geography, the developed regions of North America (66.6%) and Western Europe (61.5%) both demonstrate below average social media penetration.

It appears that the social media habits of the US and UK seem overall fairly aligned. Where one network makes up ground in the US this is often counter-balanced by another in the UK.

A very newsworthy point here is the recent acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook for a staggering $19bn.

Many commentators have stated that the main reasoning for this was to tap into a huge user base primarily in emerging markets and, interestingly enough, Europe.

In particular the importance of acquiring this user base by Facebook in this recent acquisition, although a vast some of money, is demonstrated in the image (below) where the European penetration of WhatsApp far outweighs that of Facebook messenger. 

Example: Twitter differentiation for the UK and USA

When conducting research for this study we floated the ‘differences between the UK and the US’ on Twitter Dan Barker weighed in with the following opinion/analogy:

SEO

Search engine market share and strategies vary dramatically across UK and US markets. Culture, language and location are the key drivers of differentiation.

US

Noticeably, Bing commands some 18.2% of the US search market, far ahead of it’s traction in the UK. 

UK 

The UK, on the other hand, is a very different picture, with Google taking up some 88.71% of the total UK search engine market share.

Image Source: http://gs.statcounter.com/

Taking a broader view we can see that Europe on a whole is more closely associated with the UK than the US when it comes to overall search engine market share, with Bing only really being a sizeable enough proportion to be a real consideration in the US.

Image Source: http://gs.statcounter.com/

SEO and language

One consideration that is central to this report is understanding which language to cater for when optimizing for SEO. 

Many marketers default to English as a catchall. However, this should be very dependent on context and also your target market[s]. Language penetration across the US and the UK can differ. Marketers need to consider international SEO techniques to employ as part of web presence strategies.

For example, perhaps you’re a company based in the US, but targeting certain areas that have shown that having a Spanish language alternative to your site, optimized and appropriately marked-up for international SEO best practice could significantly increase your conversion rate amongst this target market.

While international SEO can often be sometimes overcomplicated, important aspects that are often overlooked should include the following key considerations:

• Target audience: Should you consider language targeting or regional targeting?

• User experience (signposting): Clearly show your user where they are (flags work well for this) as leading international SEO Aleyda Solis points out in the image below:

• Technological considerations: IP redirection (generally bad practice), however a simple option for the user to select themselves is good practice:

Mobile

Central & Eastern Europe leads other global regions for mobile penetration.

UK

The UK has the highest smartphone penetration in Europe is way ahead of it’s neighbors France, Germany, Spain and Italy, although in line with its Scandinavian counterparts Norway and Sweden.

US

The U.S. has three times as many smartphone users as the UK has people, however both markets show vast smartphone penetration rates.

Whereas the US was ahead of its North American counterpart Canada (which crossed the threshold in 2013).

Similarities

Growth in overall online commerce has been represented by the increasing growth in investment in ‘Omni-channel’ offerings (often by large retail chains) due to the high penetration of mobile in both markets.

Driven by intrinsic motivations, the much-referenced Google: The New Multi-Screen World study demonstrated that both US and UK citizens utilise:

• Computers: to keep us productive and informed

• Smartphones: to keep us connected

• Tablets: to keep us entertained

On a cultural basis consumer habits are also developing in a similar way, many individuals are ‘second screening’, switching between screens/devices to perform a multitude of tasks:

End note: a global talent gap

Most digital marketers now operate in a multi-dimensional, multi-functional and global environment.

The convergence of content and digital marketing and the rapid growth of data has meant that “siloed” talent sets are becoming obsolete.

This creates a significant challenge for companies, globally, who need to attract agile digital talent. Take the US for example, it could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep data analysis skills by 2018.

Regardless of your market, location and digital discipline, with growth and scale comes challenge. In our next series we will go into email and marketing automation in more detail. Stay tuned for more.