A concept we've covered regularly is what we call flywheel marketing, where the organic traffic, shares, and links you get from publishing one piece of content makes it easier for later pieces to see some success. One of the key pieces of that flywheel is the ability to get those social shares, and based on a recent study, we're ready to admit it: We were completely wrong about that key piece.
In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains why, and that the real value may lie in engagement.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about an assumption that I think many of us have made over the years. I know I have. In fact, I've amplified that. I might have even covered it on Whiteboard Friday. Thanks to some research that we've done together with BuzzSumo, as well as some research we've seen from our correlation study this summer, you know what? It's looking like we were just dead wrong on this very important aspect of how SEO and social media and content marketing fit together.
You've probably seen me present on this either here on Whiteboard Friday or in one of my slide decks or in a blog post. It's this idea of flywheel marketing, where you create some great content, you amplify that content via social media and your social channels, you attract visitors through that, you naturally earn links from some of those people who visit your site, and you grow your social following. Now, the next time your audience potential is bigger and your rankings potential is also bigger, because you have more links coming to your site, and that helps all the other pages on your site. You have a bigger social audience, so now there are more people to amplify to.
You know what? It actually looks like this is totally broken and wrong. The idea that you are naturally earning links from people who come via social looks to us like it was a bunk belief in its entirety. Let me show you.
First off, BuzzSumo did the vast majority of the work. I appreciate them including Moz as well. We did participate in some of our link metrics. The BuzzSumo crew did a bunch of this work. They looked at articles that received social shares, in fact a million articles that were taken from their database, and then they looked at the number of shares and the number of links those received.
The vast, vast majority received zero links. In fact, 75% plus of all articles they looked at received zero, not a single one, social shares. Same with links, by the way. I think it was 90% plus for links or maybe even more.
This is a like a power-law distribution. You're essentially seeing that a few articles get all the shares out there. Everything else really gets nothing. If you're not going to be in the top 10% of content that's created, don't even bother. You're not going to get shares. You're not going to get links. You're not going to get traffic. Forget it. A lot of content marketing is probably spent in vain. Granted, maybe a lot of that is learning what actually works and experimenting, and that's fine.
Then they looked at the correlation between links and shares.
As you can see from this crudely drawn scatter plot, no correlation whatsoever. If you were to draw the line here, it would probably be something like, "Oh look at that total crap correlation." Here are the numbers. Facebook, 0.0221. Twitter, 0.0281. Ooh, slightly better, but still in the realm of totally insignificant. Google+ 0.0058. You're just talking about numbers that suggest essentially that there is virtually no correlation between links and shares.
Now they did look at places where there were lots of shares and links, and those tended to be a few things. I'll let you read the report, and you should. I think it's one of the most important reports to come out in our industry in a while. Credit to BuzzSumo for putting it together.
We know from our research. We've done experiments looking at whether anchor text still moves things. We've done experiments looking at whether URL mentions move the needle. URL mentions don't, by the way. Once you turn them into live links, they do. We've looked at whether you can actually rank content without any links at all. It turns out almost impossible, so next to impossible that we couldn't find a single credible example of a page that ranked without any links unless it was on a site that had lots of links pointing to it.
We know we still need links to rank.
In fact, notably ranking correlations with links haven't dropped over the last few years. Even though we all feel like the algorithm's getting a little less link centric, and I think it is, links are still clearly very, very powerful. So we have to worry about things like outreach and link focused content and embeds and tools and badges and competitive link analysis and all the other many link building methods that the marketing industry has come up with over the years.
I have a theory about why this is.
I think Google is honest when they tell us, "We don't look at social shares to determine rankings." I think what Google sees is something Chartbeat showed a few years ago. This was another excellent study that I encourage you to check out. Chartbeat basically analyzed engagement on socially shared content. What they saw was a plot that looks like this. Very, very few social articles have high read time. Even the ones that have lots of social sharing have very little read time.
It turns out a ton of things that people share socially on the Web, they don't read at all. They may click Retweet. They may even include the URL. They might share it on Facebook. But they, themselves, may never have even visited that content. Sounds crazy, but I bet you've done it. I bet I've done it. I bet I've been like well, you know, it was probably a good edition of Whiteboard Friday, I'll go share it out, having not yet watched the video and seen whether I did a good job or not. That's just the way of the Web.
I think Google cares much more about the engagement than they do about the social share counts themselves.
So you can see lots of things with social shares not performing well. But once they start to get engagement and start to earn links from that engagement, now they're suddenly ranking.
Hopefully, with this knowledge in mind, you can go back to the drawing board a little bit if you've built up, like we have, this mental model of how the flywheel works. Look, I'm not saying that this works for no one. This actually works pretty well for Moz. It works pretty well for us in this industry, but I think, and clearly the data is showing, that across the vast majority of the Web it's statistically extremely unlikely this will work for you or for everyone else.
I think we need to revisit this. We probably need to revisit our link building. We need to think about social in a different context of how and whether it's earning people who will actually come to our site and want to link to us and people who will come to our site and want to engage, or whether it's just a vanity metric.
All right, everyone, I look forward to your comments. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
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Over the past few years, one feature has been requested more than any other. We call it Multiseat, which, at its core, is the ability for Moz Pro account owners to provide unique logins for their team members and/or clients.
Multiseat support is something that we have prioritized, reprioritized, started, and restarted, and for a number of reasons (some good, some less good) we never quite got there. Well, I'm happy to announce that after a great collaborative engineering effort, it is finally here!
We actually launched this feature quietly in August and have been monitoring usage and fixing issues to ensure Multiseat was ready for prime time before promoting it. So far hundreds of people are using it, and everything looks good!
In this post I'm going to describe what Multiseat does, how to set it up, who gets access, and what improvements are on the horizon.
What does Multiseat include today?
This first version of Multiseat supports most of the core functions requested by customers. These include:
You can set up unique logins for team members or clients
With Multiseat, you can add anyone who has or creates a free Moz community profile to your account. Previously the only way to share access was to share your password, which was far from ideal and not a great practice from a security perspective.
Multiseat can be useful in many scenarios:
Providing access to members of your team
Offering access to a client
Inviting a consultant to come help with your campaigns
Before Multiseat, if you were sharing your login, it was a pain to change and redistribute passwords if a team member left or a client engagement ended. Now that logins are separate from your core account, you can revoke access to someone who leaves and keep all of your other logins and passwords intact.
Billing information is now kept private to the account owner
This has been a common request, especially for larger organizations. Credit card and billing information is now kept private and is accessible only to the account owner.
You can independently control which account emails you receive
If your company has a lot of people managing a lot of campaigns, you may receive an awful lot of emails about data updates and completed reports, and for this email clutter I sincerely apologize. The good news is that each person with access to an account can now choose which campaigns to follow and thus limit emails from campaigns that aren't relevant.
You can be a seat on multiple accounts
We've heard that some of you engage with multiple clients, each with their own Moz account. You now have the ability to be added to as many client accounts as you need to. For each account to which you have been granted access, you will be able to log in with your own Moz login and password. No more asking each client to give you their login information, and then trying to remember them all.
Your Moz profile, community history and points will stay intact regardless of which accounts you've joined or left
Another benefit of this update is the separation of community profiles from Moz Pro accounts.
As a seat on one or more accounts, your MozPoints and interactions with the community can now follow you from engagement to engagement.
Sweet! So how do I add add new logins to my account?
If you go to your account settings, you'll find a brand new tab called Manage Seats (http://moz.com/account). Once here, you will have the option to add one or more of your colleagues to your account.
For more details on how to add seats check out this Q&A post.
Who has access to Multiseat?
All Moz Pro customers get access to Multiseat! Depending on your subscription level, you will have access to between 2 and an unlimited number of seats for your team to use. We packaged Multiseat into our existing subscriptions in a way that offers more seats for levels that are are more agency and team-focused.
That said, we are not yet totally sure how customers will be using this feature, so we will learn and tune as we go forward.
While we've added a lot of new functionality with this release, there are still some important features that we haven't yet been able to get to. Most notably:
Transfer of account ownership
The next addition we know we need to make is the ability to transfer ownership of an account from one individual to another.
Control over which campaigns a seat can access
For v1, everyone can see all tools and campaigns. We've already received requests to allow the account owner to restrict individual logins so they can only see a subset of campaigns.
Please send us feedback!
This is just the start. We need your help to make this even better. Tell us what critical capabilities we are lacking. Tell us where we built things wrong. Tell us what is confusing. Now that we've launched this feature, we really want to make it work for you.
Also, while I have your attention...
I wanted to call out a few other updates that we've made this summer, just in case you missed them:
Mobile Rankings
Not only have we added Google mobile rankings to our capabilities, but we also gave everyone an extra search engine slot so that you can track mobile rankings for all of your existing campaign keywords without giving up any other search engine data you've been tracking. We also added tracking of Google's "Mobile-friendly" tag, so you can see which of the pages you rank for Google considers to be mobile-friendly. Learn more
Search Visibility Scores
It's been a challenge in the past to see how your rankings are trending across keywords. Search visibility represents the percentage of clicks we estimate that you get based on your ranking position(s) for the keywords you track. Filter by brand or any other tag you've added to see visibility for certain keywords sets, and compare your visibility against your competitors. Learn more
On-Page Analysis workflow improvements
After a lot of good customer feedback, we rethought the on-page analysis feature workflow. Aside from a general facelift, we added the ability for customers to add keywords and pages to analyze and track, or to choose them from a list of suggestions that we update each week. Keep an eye out for some more significant improvements to this feature soon. Learn more
You can now keep up with all of our new Moz Pro features and updates
To help you find all of the new features and updates we make each week, we've added a What's New page that is accessible from any Moz Analytics campaign.
Well, that's about it. Thanks for taking some time to read about our new updates, and as always, don't hesitate to let us know what we can do to make Moz better for you.
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In 2009 Fletcher Cleaves was a top high school football prospect ready for the next level, eager to do in college what he'd done in high school: rack up yards as a running back. But before Cleaves could realize his dream of playing at the next level, a texting, distracted driver plowed into the car he was driving, forever changing his life's trajectory.
Today, Cleaves, paralyzed from the chest down as a result of the accident, serves as a tragic reminder of something as seemingly harmless as texting and driving can alter lives. It's impossible to watch the video below and not immediately realize three important facts:
Texting and driving is a big deal.
This young man was unfairly robbed of his future.
This big brand nailed the messaging.
Telecommunications brands (and airline companies) enjoy some of the worst customer service ratings on the planet. And to make matters worse, their core messaging via print, radio and online ads is equally atrocious, doing very little to make would-be customers give them a second look.
However, with the latest iteration of the "It Can Wait" campaign, which is rich with stories and features stunning video recreation, AT&T did something all brands looking to make a mark in content marketing should copy: They delivered content with meaning.
The end of utility
We live in a world rich in information and teeming with data. The ability to analyze the results of our content marketing efforts, even in real-time, is as astonishing as it is mesmerizing and revealing. Our teams can know, before a word is written, a design delivered or a report is generated what the results should be based on the assigned key performance indicators (KPIs). The automation present in online marketing can make it feel as though the world we inhabit is more fantasy than reality, as if the press of a button will always lead to the results we expect.
Yet we still struggle with how to create content that commands attention, that nudges prospects to take immediate action, that leads to the vast majority of our customers moving from brand loyalists to brand ambassadors and advocates.
Why is this?
I propose that we've misread the tea leaves.
In the last three years, marketers (even this one) have sung from the rooftops that your content must be useful and relevant, have immediacy, and deliver impact. And if you followed this advice, you likely found a modicum of success, if only for a short time.
How could we expect any different when the customers we're all clamoring for are being bombarded with thousands of messages every day? When that happens, even the most resonant voices get drowned out. And for those of us who've thrown our hats into the usefulness and relevance ring, we've largely committed ourselves to a life of struggle that's tough to recover from.
This line of thinking occurred to me in July of 2014, as I finished Jay Baer's book Youtility during the plane ride home from MozCon 2014. I agree with and applaud Baer for bringing to light the novel term, which he defines as "Marketing that's wanted by customers. Youtility is massively useful information, provided for free, that creates long-term trust and kinship between your company and your customers."
But I'm afraid this ship has largely sailed. Not because usefulness is any less importance, but because the threshold was so low that every brand and their sister jumped online via websites, social media, forums, message boards and everywhere else with information that temporarily sated prospects' appetites but did little to create a lasting impression.
If your desire is to create a brand whose content is sought-after and, indeed, clamored for, you must bake meaning into your content.
Without meaning, your brand's content is adrift
Like many of you, most of my early content-creation efforts were centered around pleasing Google, whereby my inspiration was for thinking in terms of queries:
1: Informational: Where prospects are likely to look for information
2: Navigational: What prospects are likely to be looking for on those sites
3: Transactional: What prospects are ready/likely to buy
The result of this thinking (outlined in the graphic below) was the myriad 350-word posts that now clog the web.
There's a better way.
It's time your content led with meaning, and that process begins with a revamping of the thought process surrounding content ideation and content creation. Why is that important?
We cannot win otherwise, says Bill Sebald, founder of Greenlane SEO, a Pennsylvania-based SEO firm.
"Think about it," he says. "Many brands are still writing low-quality articles that deliver little value and have zero impact to their customers or prospects. That's bad enough, but when you consider the prevalence of these thin content pieces, is there any wonder how the Panda Update evokes fear in these same brands? Being useful is great. It can and does work fine, for a while. But what you want as a brand is lasting impact, people seeking you out, top-of-mind awareness. As it regards content marketing, that only happens when your brand is known for delivering content with meaning, which sticks in the gut of the folks who read it."
Did I say something that will get someone’s attention?
Is the content part of a strategy?
Am I really an expert in this topic?
Did my copy focus on relationships Google knows about?
Any brand committed to asking themselves at least three of those questions before any content is created is swimming in the deep end of the pool, having moved away from the pack and on the way to delivering meaningful content.
After reading Sebald's post, I dug into my notes to discern what I think it takes to win the race for content marketings next frontier.
If your brand is looking to separate from the back, I'd like to share three ideas I've seen work well for brands of all sizes, even in boring verticals, such as HVAC and plumbing.
1. Be where your prospects are, at the time they need your information, with a message so good they cannot ignore you.
As a lifelong angler, I'm keen to compare marketing to bass fishing, whereby bait and location are pretty much all that matters. Or so I thought, until one day I got my hands on an underwater camera and could see fish swimming all around my lure, which they ignored.
That's when I realized bait and location are only as good as timing.
No matter how great the quality of my tackle or how well-placed was my lure, the fish must be ready to bite for me to find success.
How your brand can put this thinking to work: Personalize your company's blog by adding bi-weekly or monthly interviews with people who've used your services/products, and who can share information that's hyper-relevant to issues prospects are likely dealing with at the time.
For example, in the month of October a pool company might highlight a customer who maintains their own pool but who hires a pool company for winterization help. Or, in the same month, an accountant might share a video blog of a couple who owns a small business and does a great job of staying on top of expenses.
You might notice that I never said the person spotlighted mentions the brand or even uses them for service. That's immaterial. What's key is (a) the person shares a compelling story that's (b) delivered on your blog and (c) is information they can use right away for where they are in the decision-making process. (It's important that the content not appear salesy because too often the prospects who're most likely to need your services aren't even looking for those services. They're simply suckers for a good story.)
2. Make them feel confident about what the brand stands for, not simply the purchase they might someday make.
One of my favorite words from college is ubiquity. Get to know this word if your brand is to produce meaningful content. Your brand should show up in all the places and for all the things prospects would expect to find you ranking for, conversing about and, more important, being shared by others for.
To instill your content with meaning, it must show up in places and for things prospects likely would expect t find it showing up for. This isn't simply about ubiquity. It shows empathy.
A brand that does this better than most is Seattle-based REI. It's amazing the range of terms they rank highly for. If they sell it, there's a great chance REI shows up somewhere in or near the top of the SERPs for the category.
For example, I simply typed "snow goggles" into the search box, and voila, look who shows up. Also, look who they show up above. Better yet, imagine all of the large eyewear brands they're outcompeting for this position.
By clicking on the query, you immediately see why they're at the top of the SERPS: The content is rich in visuals and answers every question a prospect would ever have surrounding snow goggles.
I discovered the strength of REI's content ideation and creation efforts in 2013, while completing a content strategy roadmap for one of the largest two-way radio manufacturers in the world.
Despite the brand's heft, REI was always ahead of them in the SERPs, with social shares, in online conversations, etc.
When I visited with Jonathon Colman, formerly the in-house SEO for REI, at Facebook headquarters in
San Francisco, I understood why REI had content ubiquity: "From the start, they did something right that continues to [work in their favor]," says Colman, who works for Facebook in the areas of product user experience and content strategy. "They simply focused on creating and sharing the best content for their users, not on marketing."
Those words resonated with me, as they should with you.
How your brand can put this thinking to work
Stop thinking like a marketer and start thinking like a customer. I've written before about keeping and sharing a document that lists the questions and comments prospects and customers share during calls, on social media and via any any other platforms used to capture customer sentiment.
This document could form the basis for content that's written and shared by your marketing team. However, your brand must go farther to deliver meaning through it's content.
An approach I've recommended to clients and seen good success with works as follows:
Focus on creating one big piece of content per month: This pulls your team away from thinking about creating content for content's sake. It also ensures that the team is able to marshal its resources to research, design, and create content with meaning. The goal with each big content piece is to answer every reasonable question and/or objection a prospect might have before doing business with you. For example, an SEO agency might, in month one, create a big content piece titled "How Small Companies Can Win With Personalized Content," detailing in depth how becoming a popular local expert can earn the brand links, gain press attention and increase overall business. In month two, the same agency might go all-in on a post titled "How Your Mom and Pop Shop Can Beat the Big Guys," whereby they outline an actionable plan for how to smartly use their blog, one social media platform and a small PPC budget to generate awareness, site visits, links and earned media. Prospects are likely to see the agency as the one to help get them over the hump.
Ignore the competition: Instead of checking the SERPs to see what's ranking highest for content in your vertical on the topic you wish to create, look at the content that's being shared outside your area by brands that have no relation to your vertical. You cannot win long-term by copying a strategy that your competition is better equipped to deploy, so don't emulate them. Look at what non-competing brands are doing to deliver meaningful content. It could be a TV show, even, which you study for how characters are developed. Think of the regional car dealerships who grew to be household names in the late '90s by delivering sitcom-style commercials and ads based off popular TV shows that meant something to the audience. Your brand can find similar inspiration by looking outside your area.
Make consistency a mainstay: REI wins at content marketing in large part because the brand is consistent. No matter where you find their content, it's thorough and deserving of its place in the pantheon of content marketers. Don't simply pour your heart into the big content piece, then allow everything else to fall by the wayside. Your brand must imbue every area, all departments and any content shared with meaning. This effort takes shape as the development, design and product teams placing users in the driver's seat early on in the process; the marketing team only sharing information that, first and foremost, addresses the needs of the audience; the customer service team creating customer happiness, not quashing complaints; and sales team members frequently checking on prospects, even when no sale is imminent.
The goal here is to, as the saying goes, be so good they cannot ignore you.
3. Help your customers become the best versions of themselves
It's likely you've seen the graphic below online before, maybe even on the Buffer Blog, which is where I found it. The image expertly sums up where I think the brands who ultimately win at content marketing will have to go: Turning away from their own interests and keying in on how the brand can better enable the customer to (a) better do what they endeavor to do and (b) become a version of themselves they never imagined possible.
Sound far-fetched? Imagine the car commercials showing an average Joe who is all of a sudden a handsome hero admired by beautiful passersby because of his new wheels.
Your brand can become the means-something-to-prospects darling of its industry, too, with the adoption of three simple steps applied with conviction:
Personalization — Develop people (at least one, but a few would be even better) in your company who can become the public face of the brand, who make it easier for prospects to form a connection with the company and more likely that content is shared and amplified more frequently as their popularity increases.
Become a helper, not a hero—Stop thinking that your content or your product or your service needs to be life-changing to get the attention of prospects. They desire to be the heroes and sheroes of their own journey; they simply need an assist from you to create a lasting bond they won't soon forget about.
Make users' stories a core of your marketing efforts —Let's get this straight: No one gives a damn about your story. Your brand's story only becomes relevant when prospects have been made to feel important, special by you then desire to explore further the meaning behind the brands. How do you accomplish that task? By integrating the stories of customers into your marketing efforts.
How your brand can put this thinking to work
The importance of using an engaging personality to deliver meaning for your content cannot be overstated. In fact, it's likely the shortest path to winning attention and garnering success.
I'll use Canadian personal trainer Dean Somerset as an example. I discovered Somerset a few years ago when he dropped a few helpful knowledge bombs in the comments of a fitness blog I was reading. I then found a link to his blog, which I have now become a religious follower of. Over the years, we've traded numerous emails, interacted myriad times via Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and I've even hired him for training assessments.
Why?
Aside from being brilliant, he's a goofball who takes his work, not himself, too seriously.
But most important, the core of every post he creates or video he shares or every Facebook Q&A he offers is helping others become better at physical health and physical fitness than they ever imagined they could.
The result is that, in a relatively short time span, Somerset has become one of the top young minds in the fitness industry, in no small part because he creates heroes with nearly every piece of content he shares. (If you doubt me, watch the video below.)
Don't think for a second that your brand can't do the same:
Look for members on your team who have personality and who are uniquely qualified to create content (e.g., video, text, SlideShare, etc.) on topics readers care about. Empower them to share, converse and engage around this content, whether locally (e.g., Meetups) nationally (e.g., conferences) or online (e.g., blogs, social media, etc.).
The script these experts must work from, for everything they share, should begin with the question, "How can this [blog, video, etc.] help at least one person do something better tomorrow that they cannot yet do today?" Answer this question, and you won't simply create meaning for your content, you'll create meaning, relevance and top-of-mind awareness for the brand as well.
It's hard for a brand to escape being successful if this mindset is ever-present.
The last area we'll look at is storytelling, which is very popular in content marketing. And almost no one gets it right.
Yes, people do love stories. They eat them up, especially compelling, heart-wrenching stories or, even better, tales of tremendous uplift.
However, people are not interested in your brand's story — at least not yet.
The only story brands should be telling are those of their users. The brands who have realized this are leaving the brand storytellers in the dust, while turning up the dial on meaning and significance to the audience.
A great example is Patagonia and their Worn Wear video series. Instead of creating ads showcasing the durability of their products, they filmed actual customers who've been using the same Patagonia products for years and who wouldn't trade the brand's products for those of any other company.
These are rabid fans, loyal to the nth degree.
Don't drink the brand storytelling Kool-Aid. Tell the stories of your users.
Identify a handful of ardent fans of your product or service, then reach out to them via phone to ask if they'd mind being part of a short-video series you're doing to showcase people and brands doing great things. (I mentioned a similar approach earlier, which is ideal for the smallest companies. I think this effort plays into a much broader strategy for larger brands.)
Depending on your budget and their location, you could either have a small camera crew visit their office or walk them through how to shoot what you need on their mobile devices. You could also provide them with a script.
Here's the kicker: During the video, they are not allowed to talk about your brand, product or service in any way shape or form.
The goal is to get video of them going about their day, at home and at work, as they share what makes them tick, what's important to them, who they are and why they do what they do.
This is their story, remember? And as such, your brand is a bit player, not a/the star. Also, the lack of a mention washes away any suspicion viewers might have of your brand's motives. Most important, however, you get a real, authentic success story on your website and domain, so the implication is that your brand was a helper in this heroic journey.
If this post accomplishes anything, my wish is that it makes clear how necessary and how realistic it is for your brand to create meaningful content.
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From media platforms like Pinterest to e-commerce sites like Amazon, brand-to-consumer communication remains driven by search with a comprehension of customer intent the epicenter.
Internal linking is a key SEO tactic for publishers. In this post I’ll look at what it is, why it’s important, and provide some key tips for an effective internal linking strategy.
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