SEO News

Where to start

It’s unlikely that we are going to reach a commonly accepted definition of content marketing, so it’s important to be prepared before you engage. Your overarching goals should be clearly defined and should dictate the strategy.

Different types of content strategies will achieve different goals and the two main content approaches can be defined as:

•  Brand
•  Direct Response

Brand based content such as the Red Bull Stratos jump tends to have huge reach, creates a lot of social buzz and has sizeable advertising backing. However, these campaigns tend to drive less benefits in areas such organic search than a DR focussed campaign.

DR based content is more focussed towards driving organic search success. The content strategy will deliver valuable new on-site content and very specific off-site content that will drive links. 

However, this type of content will not drive anywhere near as much brand recognition when compared to a brand focussed strategy.

Each content strategy has vastly different outcomes, so as I mentioned early it is vital to set clear goals for the campaign.

How to get the best results

Content marketing simply cannot work in a silo, and whilst all the various types of agency are developing product offerings ultimately the best results will be achieved through four areas:

• Clear objectives, KPIs measurement criteria.
• Using your objectives and KPIs to define your content strategy, don’t let your agency push you down a route just because that’s where there skillset lies.
• Collaboration between agencies – I firmly believe that a single agency cannot own Content Marketing because there is far too much crossover between channels, it should be a collaboration between creative, SEO, social, media and PR. 

Remember Content Marketing is about producing great content, not vast amounts of poor or average quality content.

Wait, something’s missing

Earlier I touched on the fact that SEOs were the first to jump on the Content Marketing band-wagon and a vast quantity of the articles written about content marketing are being produced by SEOs.  

There’s nothing wrong with this as content is a fundamental part of SEO, but to succeed in content marketing you cannot purely live in an SEO world. 

Content marketing should not be led by keywords and requirements for improving rankings. 

To-date as far as I can see across the market there has been a real lack of involvement from user experience teams and this just isn’t right.

User experience teams bring some of the most valuable information to a content strategy through their approach:

• Speak with the target audience and find out what content they would like to see,
• Speak with the target audience and discover whether they are facing any issues or problems they need help with,
• In collaboration with SEO and Social teams they will work to determine on-site content gaps, areas that naturally lend themselves to great content and will meet the needs of the target audience,

Where does advertising fit in?

Content marketing is not advertising and a banner ad should not be seen as content. However, advertising can form a key part of a conten strategy, but the extent of this support depends on whether the overarching objective is brand or direct response. 

In general, advertising is used to amplify content or in the case of TV the ad can be part of the content.

Brand campaigns will naturally lend themselves to advertising, but the direct benefit for channels, such as organic search, will limited.

Direct response campaigns are much smaller in scale and in many cases won’t require any advertising support unless you have a very shareable piece of content that you want to amplify.

What’s holding you back?

Content is fantastic way of engaging consumers and if done well, pushing your organic search performance to new levels. 

Speak with your agency/agencies and join the dots and set some clear objectives for content. 

If you’ve already got SEO, Social and PR campaigns in place you’ll probably be surprised at how much of a role content is already playing, but what will surprise you even more if how much harder you could be making your content work.

Emails from SEO agencies that want us to remove old links

We recently heard from an SEO agency that had taken on a new client. The client’s old agency had published a press release on our site, seven years ago. The press release included a link to the client’s website, within the opening couple of paragraphs, but no shady anchor text. 

The email we received went along these lines:

Please can you remove or no_follow the link?

Our stock response is ‘no’. Why? Because there are better things to be doing, mainly, but for a press release that is more than half a decade old we simply refuse to do this. It’s a waste of everybody’s time, and is unimportant, archived content. Furthermore the press release distribution tool did not include ‘free post-publication editing services’, and we don’t want to undertake link sculpting of any kind.

So, having told the SEO agency that we don’t edit old press releases things escalated somewhat…

If the link cannot be removed we will add it to our Google Disavow list.

Great. So now we’re being threatened. Clearly we don’t want to find our way onto a Google shitlist, but I hate this kind of shakedown. It is completely unreasonable for SEO agencies to expect publishers to clear up their mess, especially when the link in question seems perfectly valid. As I pointed out, if we were to receive 100 similar requests every day then we’d get nothing done. 

In some cases guest bloggers have heard from SEO agencies that want links removed… links that have been earned, that they have naturally placed in their articles, and that are perfectly acceptable. I find it mindboggling. It seems that a lot of folks have a bad case of The Fear.

Emails from brands that want us to remove links to infographics

We’ve also heard from brands that have created and shared infographics with us, and presumably with the whole world thereafter. I know that penalties have been meted out for excessive infographic sharing, and in some cases there is concern about link profiles (or perhaps, more accurately, with link velocity, as successful infographics can sometimes accrue too many new links too quickly, for Google’s liking at least). In short, I think publishers and brands alike need to be more careful with infographics. A win isn’t always a win.

We have been pitched thousands of infographics over the past few years, and we’ve always viewed them with a certain degree of scepticism. Some of them have made it onto the site: the ones that contained interesting content, and that weren’t terribly designed. This is what editorial people should be good at.

Last summer Google’s Matt Cutts said that he: 

…would not be surprised if at some point in the future we did not start to discount these infographic-type links to a degree. The link is often embedded in the infographic in a way that people don’t realise, vs. a true endorsement of your site”.

It now seems that this has happened / is happening, so be warned. 

The above quote seems to directly reference embed codes, which provide writers with a quick and easy way to share content. They essentially point at third party websites to access content, so they’re a great way to build links. But if they have a habit of breaking then we publishers will stop using them. That aside, we a) perfectly well understand how they work and b) do not publish rubbish on our website. Embed codes do not suck… only low quality content sucks. Smart publishers do not publish low quality content. 

But now it seems that some people have started to freak out, and in their state of panic they have – in some cases – removed the infographics from their own website, along with everything that goes with it. That means that some embed codes that we have used to display some infographics no longer work: they simply point to a 404 page. 

It is these ‘404 links’ that people ask us to remove, which is fair enough. But from a publisher’s perspective it is akin to an act of vandalism. Posts that contained these (now AWOL) infographics by way of an embed code now display nothing at all, or a missing image icon. It leads to the disfigurement of our blog. It also makes us look rather silly, and it gives us a very good reason to avoid using embed codes in the future. 

It is deeply frustrating to have to spend time cleaning up these pages (the very same pages that PR / SEO / marketing people wanted us to create when pitching us in the first place). Must we keep an eye on all pages with third party infographics or embed codes, as a kind of hygiene factor? Boring. I’d be more inclined to ban infographics completely, and get on with creating new, unique content, but that seems like a kneejerk reaction to a relatively small – though potentially worrying – problem.

Emails from guest bloggers, who have been notified about suspicious links from Google

Now, I haven’t heard from Big G directly, but I have heard from a couple of our guest bloggers that they have received warnings from Google about suspicious links. Among the examples shown to them were their ‘signatures’ on the Econsultancy blog. 

Their signature is a brief bio that can be found at the foot of each post, in a little box that sits separately to the main body of the article. I see no reason why these signature links should be considered in any way sketchy. 

Here’s what a bio looks like, and we’re very much into standardisation – a name, role and company, and a few social profiles. I’ve chosen Mark at random – as far as I know he hasn’t been contacted:

This is just good manners, from where I’m sitting. I simply cannot believe that this sort of thing poses any problems for Google, so I’m very surprised to learn that these links have raised eyebrows.

We have some firm rules about the signatures. Firstly, they should follow our standard format, and we never allow bloggers to use descriptive anchor text: a company name will link to a company website, but we won’t allow them to write ‘amazing digital agency in London’. Frankly we think worse of people who think that sort of thing is a good idea.

We are also have some clear guidelines for guest bloggers, in order to maintain the quality of content on this blog. One of those rules is ‘no promo’, and anything deemed too self-referential will not be published. Guest bloggers are invited to talk about the subjects that they know about, rather than the amazing things they have done for their clients. All posts by guest bloggers are unique to Econsultancy: we do not allow cross-posting. All posts are edited prior to publication. It is not in our interests to lower the quality bar. Google needs to recognise that not all guest blogging operations are the same.

In January we asked a few search experts about the future of SEO. Rishi Lakhani, who is often ahead of the curve, called it:  

I am pretty sure that Google will target guest posting soon. As a result, am staying away from author signature / profile links at the end of the post. If it isn’t in the main body, I don’t want it.

This may now be the case, and we may have to review what we’re doing in this area. But I for one think it is ridiculous: I don’t believe that the Google algorithm is that stupid. We’re led to believe that it can identify different types of links on a page, and apply different weightings. Do we really think that a link in the comments area of a blog that does not adopt no_follow will be given the same value as a descriptive link in the opening paragraph? No.

Does Google really want writers to shoehorn a link into the body text of a post, every time they submit a guest blog, because they don’t have a valid link in their signature? That’s only going to worsen the quality of the content. So much for our ‘no promo’ guidelines.

I guess we’ll wait and see. If other guest bloggers from this or any other publication have had a word in their ear from Google then now is the time to shout about it. Is this actually becoming a thing? Incidentally, I’m not alone in worrying about guest blogging, and I also consider the many ‘guest post’ requests we receive to be akin to reciprocal link spam.

This post is something of an open letter to Google, and it would be good to get some guidance. I don’t think we’re doing anything wrong, far from it, but if Google is narrowing its eyes in our direction then like to find out about it sooner rather than later, and preferably in an open and transparent way. 

Any insight from search experts and fellow publishers – and Google itself – would be great. Do leave a comment below.