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Posted by kaiserthesage

Content ties everything in the digital marketing realm together—that’s why it is king.

Content creation has been the core part of my blog/business’ inbound marketing strategy this year, which was around 70% of my entire marketing effort. The other 30% was allocated to content promotion/distribution, relationship building, site optimization, and analytics.

So this post is basically a case study of how I simplified a very complex process by only focusing on one integral part of inbound marketing (content), and how that led to hundreds of service leads for our company this year.

On content strategy

Content assets help brands communicate their messages to their target audiences. These may come in the form of visual guides, web-based tools, extensive resources and many more (as also listed by Cyrus Shepard on his recent Moz post).

In my case, I aim for every blog post I publish to be an asset that I can continuously optimize and improve.

So in order for my overall campaign to be really scalable (and for me to be able to easily integrate other inbound marketing practices), I based my content development efforts on these core principles:

• Create content that contains ideas/information that isn’t found anywhere else.
• Make the content very comprehensive and evergreen if possible.

And as for the content formats, I mostly focused on creating:

• Case studies
• Extensive and evergreen blog posts (how-to’s)
• Reusable content (newsletters, slide presentations, PDFs, etc.)

If in case you’re wondering about the content assets I’ve repurposed, here are few samples:

2 months ago, I released a 4 part newsletter series that talks about 12 different scalable link building tactics.

After a couple of weeks, I decided to publish the entire series as a long-form blog post here on Moz.

Another sample is with one of my most popular guides this year (that was also featured on Moz’s top-10 monthly newsletter) entitled 22 link building tips from @xightph, which I just recently turned into a SlideShare presentation:

Perhaps this approach of allocating the majority of my efforts into content development is easier for me to accomplish because I established my blog’s readership 2 years before I tried it, and also given that I’ve already built relationships with other online marketers who habitually share my new blog posts.

I still believe that this exact process is replicable for those who haven’t yet established themselves. Since it always comes down to what you can provide to your industry and finding ways to let others know you have it.

Content = links

Content assets are able to attract and build links over time, knowing that it is in the nature of content to be genuinely linkable.

Link building becomes automatic when you focus on creating useful and actionable content on a regular basis (and, of course, letting other people who’re interested in your content’s topic know that your content exists).

Your content won’t stand on its own and be linkable by itself, so it’s also important to make an effort for it to be more visible to your target audience. Here are a few things you can do to ensure it’ll get to your audience:

• Outreach: Connect with other content publishers, industry influencers, and enthusiasts, and see if they’re interested in checking out your content.
• Social ads: Use content placement services from Facebook or StumbleUpon to get more eyeballs to your content.
• Conversations: Participate and share your content on relevant discussions from online communities in your space (forums, groups, blogs, Q&A sites, etc.).
• Distribution: Promote your content assets through other content distribution channels such as guest blogging, regular columns, newsletters, slide presentations, videos, or podcasts.

Further reading:

• How to promote and build links to your great content
• 32 experts share their best content promotion tips

Content = relationships

Providing high-value content assets on a regular basis will also help you easily connect and engage other content publishers in your industry.

This can somehow impact how other people perceive your brand as a publisher, especially when other thought leaders are sharing your content, interacting with your brand, and inviting you to contribute to their websites (which is quite similar to what Moz has done in past years).

Relationships, partnerships, and alliances are vital in this age of marketing, as they can help increase your readership and follower base, and can particularly help improve the shareability of your site’s content.

Here are a few pointers on how to engage and build relationships with industry influencers:

• Mention or use their works as a reference for your content. You can also ask them to review and validate the information within your content to build a rapport (which is also a great way to get them to see the quality of your work).
• Make sure that your content appeals to their audience/followers; this increases the likelihood of getting your content shared.
• Don’t worry. You don’t have any reason to be afraid to reach out to influencers when you’re really confident with the caliber of your content.

Content = social activity

With the right push, a well-thought-out piece of content will almost always do well in terms of social sharing. Most content assets are designed to be share-worthy, and the common factors that make most content assets shareable are:

• Their design and if they’re visually appealing.
• If they’ve been shared by popular/influential entities in their industries.
• If the content is emotionally compelling, educational, useful, and/or just simply adds unique value to the industry.

Making your linkable assets timeless or evergreen can also amplify its social activity, given that every time it gets a new visitor the content remains relevant, which can continuously increase the amount of social shares it is getting.

And the more you create content assets on your website, the more you can grow your following base and network. Which is why content plays a big role in social media – because it’s what people are sharing.

For more actionable tips on increasing your content assets’ social activity, you might want to also check the post I wrote a few weeks ago at Hit Reach on how to get more social shares for your site.

Content = search rankings

The ways in which search engines determine web pages’ importance (and whether they really deserve to be prominently visible in search results) have evolved over the years.

Major factors such as relevance (which can be measured through usage/page activity) and authority (measured through social, links, domain authority, brand signals, etc.), though, still play a huge role in terms of search rankings. These metrics are also elements that most successful content assets embody.

Great content generates rankings.

A couple of pointers on making the most out of your site’s content pool to boost your SEO:

• Turn the pages on your website that target key industry terms into evergreen content assets.
• Optimize your important pages/content assets for interaction, conversions, and user-experience. For example, test your pages’ CTAs, encourag people to share the content, etc. These are the key areas that will make your pages rank better in search results.

Further reading:

• How to optimize content for search

Content = email subscribers

Email marketing is an essential part of inbound marketing, because it’s a marketing platform that many businesses have full control of (owned media).

Growing your email list is a whole lot easier when you’re consistently putting new content up on your site (and especially when you consider every piece of content you launch as an asset).

The more content you publish, the more people get to discover your brand, which can ultimately increase your chances of getting them to subscribe or sign up for your email newsletter.

Tips on how to increase email sign-ups:

• Make your opt-in form(s) very visible on the site’s key landing pages.
• Incentivize sign-ups by offering free content such as ebooks, whitepapers, newsletter series, and/or access to free web-based tools.

Content = conversions

Content assets can definitely lift conversions, mainly because they can strongly demonstrate the brand’s domain expertise and authority.

If you’ve planted a lot of useful and actionable content on your site, then these things are influencing your site’s ability to convert visitors.

More on improving your content assets’ conversions:

• Identify which landing pages/assets are constantly driving sales/new customers/service inquiries to your business. Make them more visible by building more internal/incoming links to them, improving or updating the content itself to earn better search rankings, sharing them on social networks, or basically anything that can improve their traffic.
• Continually test and improve the content’s calls to action.

Becoming a better inbound marketer

Before I became an SEO in 2010, I was a freelance writer. It never occurred to me that I’d be doing both in the future—and actually more.

But I guess knowing how to get the right traffic and having a better grasp of the kinds of content that my audience needs and wants to read made me a better inbound marketer.

I would love to hear your ideas about this approach to inbound marketing, or if you have questions, I’d also love to see them in the comments section. You can also follow me on Twitter @jasonacidre.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by BenMorel86

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.

We all know that over the past year, there have been some big updates to Google’s algorithms, and we have felt what it has been like to be in the middle of those updates. I wanted to take a big step back and analyse the cumulative effects of Google’s updates. To do that, I asked four questions and analysed a year of MozCast data to find the answers.

Looking back over the last year – or more precisely the last 15 months through 1st September 2013 – I aimed to answer four questions I felt are really important to SEOs and inbound marketers. These questions were:

• Are there really more turbulent days in the SERPs than we should expect, or are all SEOs British at heart and enjoy complaining about the weather?
• If it’s warmer today than yesterday, will it cool down tomorrow or get even warmer?
• It sometimes feels like big domains are taking over the SERPs; is this true, or just me being paranoid?
• What effects have Google’s spam-fighting had on exact and partial domain matches in SERPs?

Before We Start

First, thanks to Dr. Pete for sending me the dataset, and for checking this post over before submission to make sure all the maths made sense.

Second, as has been discussed many times before on Moz, there is a big caveat whenever we talk about statistics: correlation does not imply causation. It is important not to reverse engineer a cause from an effect and get things muddled up. In addition, Dr. Pete had a big caveat about this particular dataset:

“One major warning – I don’t always correct metrics data past 90 days, so sometimes there are issues with that data on the past. Notably, there was a problem with how we counted YouTube results in November/December, so some metrics like “Big 10” and diversity were out of whack during those months. In the case of temperatures, we actively correct bad data, but we didn’t catch this problem early enough…

All that’s to say that I can’t actually verify that any given piece of past data is completely accurate, outside of the temperatures (and a couple of those days have been adjusted). So, proceed with caution.”

So, with that warning, let’s have a look at the data and see if we can start to answer those questions.

Analysis: MozCast gives us a metric for turbulence straight away: temperature. That makes this one of the easier questions to answer. All we need to do is to take the temperature’s mean, standard deviation, skew (to see whether the graph is symmetric or not), and kurtosis (to see how “fat” the tails of the curve are). Do that, and we get the following:

What does all this mean? Well:

• A normal day should feel pretty mild (to the Brits out there, 68°F is 20°C). The standard deviation tells us that 90% of all days should be between 46°F and 90°F (8°C and 32°C), which is a nicely temperate range.
• However, the positive skew means that there are more days on the warm side than the cool side of 68°F.
• On top of this, the positive kurtosis means we actually experience more days above 90°F than we would expect.

You can see all of this in the graph below, with its big, fat tail to the right of the mean.

Graph showing the frequency of recorded temperatures (columns) and how a normal distribution of temperatures would look (line).

As you can see from the graph, there have definitely been more warm days than we would expect, and more days of extreme heat. In fact, while the normal distribution tells us we should see temperatures over 100°F (38°C) about once a year we have actually seen 14 of them. That’s two full weeks of the year! Most of those were in June of this year (the 10th, 14th, 18th, 19th, 26th, 28th, 29th to be precise, coinciding with the multi-week update that Dr. Pete wrote about)

And it looks like we’ve had it especially bad over the last few months. If we take data up to the end of May the average is only 66°F (19°C), so the average temperature over the last three months has actually been a toasty 73°F (23°C).

Answer: The short answer to the question is “pretty turbulent, especially recently”. The high temperatures this summer indicate a lot of turbulence, while the big fat tail on the temperature graph tells us that it has regularly been warmer than we might expect throughout the last 15 months. We have had a number of days of unusually high turbulence, and there are no truly calm days. So, it looks like SEOs haven’t just been griping about the unpredictable SERPs they’ve had to deal with, they’ve been right.

Analysis: The real value of knowing about the weather is in being able to make predictions with that knowledge. So, if today’s MozCast shows is warmer than yesterday it would be useful to know whether it will be warmer again tomorrow or colder.

To find out, I turned to something called the Hurst exponent, H. If you want the full explanation, which involves autocorrelations, rescaled ranges, and partial time series, then head over to Wikipedia. If not, all you need to know is that:

• If H<0.5 then the data is anti-persistent (an up-swing today means that there is likely to be a down-swing tomorrow)
• If H>0.5 the data is persistent (an increase is likely to be followed by another increase)
• If H=0.5 then today’s data has no effect on tomorrow’s

The closer H is to 0 or 1 the longer the influence of a single day exists through the data.

A normal distribution – like the red bell curve in the graph above – has a Hurst exponent of H=0.5. Since we know the distribution of temperatures with its definite lean and fat tails not normal, we can guess that its Hurst exponent probably won’t be 0.5. So, is the data persistent or anti-persistent?

Well, as of 4^th September that answer is persistent: H=0.68. But if you’d asked on 16^th July – just after Google’s Multi-week Update but before The Day The Knowledge Graph Exploded – the answer would have been “H=0.48, so neither”: it seems that one effect of that multi-week update was to reduce the long-term predictability of search result changes. But back in May, before that update, the answer would again have been “H=0.65, so the data is persistent”.

Answer: With the current data, I am pretty confident in saying that if the last few days have got steadily warmer, it’s likely to get warmer again tomorrow. If Google launches another major algorithm change, we might have to revisit that conclusion. The good news is that the apparent persistence of temperature changes should give us a few days warning of that algo change.

Analysis: We’ve all felt at some point like Wikipedia and About.com have taken over the SERPs. That we’re never going to beat Target or Tesco despite the fact that they never seem to produce any interesting content. Again, MozCast supplies us with a couple of ready-made metrics to analyse whether or not this is true or not: Big 10 and Domain Diversity.

First, domain diversity. Plotting each day’s domain diversity for the last 15 months gives you the graph below (I’ve taken a five-day moving average to reduce noise and make trends clearer).

Trends in domain diversity, showing a clear drop in the number of domains in the SERPs used for the MozCast.

As you can see, domain diversity has dropped quite a lot. It dropped 16% from 57% in June 2012 to 48% in August 2013. There were a couple of big dips in domain diversity – 6^th May 2012, 29^th September 2012, and 31^st January 2013 – but really this seems like a definite trend, not the result of a few jumps.

Meanwhile, if we plot the proportion of the SERPs being taken over by the Big 10 we see a big increase over the same period, from 14.3% to 15.4%. That’s an increase of 8%.

Trends in the five-day moving average of the proportion of SERPs used in the MozCast dataset taken up by the daily Big 10 domains.

Answer: The diversity of domains is almost certainly going down, and big domains are taking over at least a portion of the space those smaller domains leave behind. Whether this is a good or bad thing almost certainly depends on personal opinion: somebody who owns one of the domains that have disappeared from the listings would probably say it’s a bad thing, Mr. Cutts would probably say that a lot of the domains that have gone were spammy or full of thin content so it’s a good thing. Either way, it highlights the importance of building a brand.

Analysis: Keyword-matched domains are a rather interesting subject. Looking purely at the trends, the proportion of listings with exact (EMD) and partial (PMD) matched domains is definitely going down. A few updates in particular have had an effect: One huge jolt in December 2012 had a particular and long-lasting effect, knocking 10% of EMDs and 10% of PMDs out of the listings; Matt Cutts himself announced the bump in September 2012; and that multi-week update that cause the temperature highs in June also bumped down the influence of PMDs.

Trends in the five day moving averages of Exact and Partial Matched Domain (EMD and PMD) influence in the SERPs used in the MozCast dataset.

Not surprisingly, there is a strong correlation (0.86) between changes in the proportion of EMDs and PMDs in the SERPs. What is more interesting is that there is also a correlation (0.63) between their 10-day volatilities, the standard deviation of all their values over the last 10 days. This implies that when one metric sees a big swing it is likely that the other will see a big swing in the same direction – mostly down, according to the graph. This supports the statements Google have made about various updates tackling low-quality keyword-matched domains.

Something else rather interesting that is linked to our previous question is the very strong correlation between the portion proportion of PMDs in the SERPs and domain diversity. This is a whopping 0.94, meaning that a move up or down in domain diversity is almost always accompanied by a swing the same way for the proportion of SERP space occupied by PMDs, and vice versa.

All of this would seem to indicate that keyword matching domains is becoming less important in the search engines’ eyes. But hold your conclusions-drawing horses: this year’s Moz ranking factors study tells us that “In our data collected in early June (before the June 25 update), we found EMD correlations to be relatively high at 0.17… just about on par with the value from our 2011 study”. So, how can the correlation stay the same but the number of results go down? Well, I would tend to agree with Matt Peters‘ hypothesis in that post that it could be due to “Google removing lower quality EMDs”. There is also the fact that keyword matches do tend to have some relevance to searches: if I’m looking for pizzas and I see benspizzzas.com in the listings I’m quite likely to think “they sound like they do pizzas – I’ll take a look at them”. So domain matches are still relevant to search queries, as long as they are supported by relevant content.

So, how can the correlation stay the same but the numbers of results drop? Well, the ranking factors report looks at how well sites rank once they have already ranks. If only a few websites with EMDs rank but they rank very highly, the correlation between rankings and domain matching might be the same as if a number of websites rank way down the list. So if lower quality EMDs have been removed from the ranking – as Dr. Matt and Dr. Pete speculate – but the ones remaining rank higher than they used to, the correlation coefficient we measure will be the same today in 2011.

Answer: The number of exact and partial matches is definitely going down, but domain matches are still relevant to search queries – as long as they are supported by relevant content. We know about this relevance because brands constantly put their major services into their names: look at SEOmoz (before it changed), or British Gas, or HSBC (Hong Kong-Shanghai Banking Corporation). Brands do this because it means their customers can instantly see what they do – and the same goes for domains.

So, if you plan on creating useful, interesting content for your industry then go ahead and buy a domain with a keyword or two in. You could even buy the exact match domain, even if that doesn’t match your brand (although this might give people trust issues, which is a whole different story). But if you don’t plan on creating that content, buying a keyword-matched domain looks unlikely to help you, and you could even be in for a more rocky ride in the future than if you stick to your branded domain.

Whew, that was a long post. So what conclusions can we draw from all of this?

Well, in short:

• Although the “average” day is relatively uneventful, there are more hot, stormy days than we would hope for
• Keyword-matched domains, whether exact or partial, have seen a huge decline in influence over the last 15 months – and if you own one, you’ve probably seen some big drops in a short space of time
• The SERPs are less diverse than they were a year ago, and the big brands have extended their influence
• When EMD/PMD influence drops, ERP diversity also drops. Could the two be connected?
• If today is warmer than yesterday, it’s likely that tomorrow will be warmer still

What are your thoughts on the past year? Does this analysis answer any questions you had – or make you want to ask more? Let me know in the comments below (if it does make you ask more questions I’ll try to do some more digging and answer them).

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

I’m always on the hunt for people who are doing content marketing really well. It’s inspiring to find sites that are taking this whole process to heart. It also acts as a great resource anytime I need to boost my own creativity during this ongoing hunt for the perfect piece of content.

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