How To Create Content That Doesn’t Suck

A few weeks ago, my bathtub faucet started spraying water all over the bathroom. I’m a pretty handy guy, so I decided to search for practical advice on Google and buy the parts to fix the problem on Amazon. That way, I could save a few bucks avoiding the plumber.

However, despite all the articles that offered five easy steps to fix a faucet or vowed to tell me everything one needs to know about tubs, the information I came across rarely lived up to the promise of the titles. The instructions didn’t quite make sense, and I still don’t know what tools I need. I think there’s some special type of wrench?

Unfortunately, I don’t think my faucet despair is an isolated case. The Internet is full of how-to content, and a lot of it misses the mark. Not everyone is qualified to give advice. But regardless of whether you’re selling tubs or B2B software, you can offer sound expertise by paying attention to a few important factors.

Let’s dig in.

Understand the value add

Understanding what you bring to the table should be your first step when thinking about a how-to story.

Let’s say you want to educate people on how to plant roses. Can you add more to the discussion than just the obvious? How about insider tips and tricks? What’s your unique angle?

If you’re unsure of where to start, ask yourself these questions:

• Are you aware of any pitfalls that readers should know about?
• Are you aware of any shortcuts or tips that would help the reader?
• Can you describe common use cases that apply to the instructions?
• Can you provide context or history on the topic?
• Can you compile your own research or data that proves one technique is better than another?
• Can you create your piece of content in a more intuitive medium?

Once you’ve answered these questions, then you can move on to evaluate what content about your topic already exists.

Research the competition

For every piece you want to publish, set aside some time to do a quick competitive audit; it should take 15 minutes. You can perform your audit using a number of different methods depending on your goals. If you’re looking for organic traffic, I’d recommend a quick search engine results page (SERP) analysis; if you’re curious about social distribution and engagement, a tool like BuzzSumo works best.

I include three components when conducting an audit: format, intent, and average word count. These variables will help you quickly identify what’s already been done as well as your opportunity to stand out.

To give you an example, here’s an audit I did for the search term “planting roses”:

Content format

The format, structure, and elements that you include in each how-to piece will influence whether or not users want to share, like, and link to your article. If you already have an engaged audience, start by thinking about what they’d respond to the most. Do they want step-by-step instructions? Videos? Printable lists?

Once you know your value add and what competitors have previously published, you should have a solid understanding of the best format for your topic.

User intent

This part can be subjective, but it’s also the most important of the three. Auditing competitors for user intent lets you perform a pre-production sanity check on both the keywords you’re optimizing and the overall direction of your thesis.

In the roses audit above, you can see how one broad topic becomes an umbrella for multiple intents. Some results only covered initial planting practices; others went into more depth to explain how to maintain roses after they’re first planted. You don’t want to be too granular when scoping out your advice because you want to maximize your appeal, but it can often help to specify your target upfront so you’ll stand out.

Word count

Word count is arguably the trickiest part of the audit. You want to be aware of the data, but writing to a word count can hurt your end product if someone adds too much fluff to hit a number or, conversely, turns in a draft with incomplete advice to keep the content digestible.

I’ve found that monitoring word counts is most helpful for recognizing when stories tend to lose engagement for being too long or too short.

In my experience, higher word count tends to correlate to more organic search traffic—which could be why the longer articles on planting roses had better search exposure. In the fall of 2014, Buffer suggested 1,600 words as the ideal length of a blog post.

Ultimately, however, the ideal length depends on your topic. if you’re creating content that addresses pain points, answers questions, and fulfills the needs of your readers, then don’t stress about hitting a certain word count. Just be aware of what the competition is doing,

Explain why, not just how

As a reader, I really appreciate sites that help me understand the reasoning behind instructions, why some techniques are better than others, and why certain elements are important.

As a content marketer, I believe there’s value in addressing the needs of my readers beyond the search query at hand. If readers are looking for instructions on how to plant roses, chances are they’re going to need general care instructions as well. Maybe they’ll need details on fertilizer or other products down the road. Either way, there’s an opportunity to to build trust with the user by going beyond bare bones advice.

Don’t dumb it down

This one is a personal pet peeve, but to be fair, it’s a challenge (especially with how-to content) to find a balance between being helpful, clear, and concise and treating the reader like an idiot.

If someone searches “how to plant roses,” you don’t need to explain what roses are. You don’t need to define rain or sunshine. You don’t need to fill space by writing, “Roses are one of the most beautiful, traditional, and flagrant flowers that you can plant in your garden.”

Try approaching your content with the assumption that your reader knows the basics, which frees you up to focus more on the value add.

Visualize the process

It’s tempting to ignore multimedia assets since creating them requires a lot of time and, in a lot of cases, money. But don’t underestimate the value of using visuals to illustrate your story. Case in point: BuzzFeed’s “Tasty” video series:

BuzzFeed has taken a how-to medium that’s been around for hundreds of years—recipes—and reinvented how we share them. If you’re on Facebook, you know how popular these clips are. I’m not exaggerating when I say that they make up half of my News Feed.

When you visualize your content, you’re not only creating a better user experience, you’re creating shareable assets. Experiment with visuals until you find the right combination for your site.

GIFs, for instance, are great for illustrating motion-based tutorials, like how to swing a golf club. Pull quotes pair well with tools like ClicktoTweet that encourage organic social promotion. Screenshots are great for tutorials that involve showing users where to click, what a multi-step process entails, or what that spreadsheet should look like. Infographics can be good investments if you break them up into blocks so readers can share one stat or section that resonates with them.

In terms of video, clips that don’t require sound thrive on social networks, where they often auto-play. Whiteboard tutorials, meanwhile, can be an easy and cost-effective way to break into video since they succeed at quickly breaking down complex issues.

Leverage your audience

If you’re sincerely interested in learning from your content mistakes and successes, skip the traditional post-mortem and opt for a content refresh 30, 60, or 90 days out from the publish date. At this point, you should read through comments (if you have them) and social media feedback, then tweak the content accordingly. Updating the piece will not only increase the quality, but should also please the Google gods and improve your SEO. Additionally, user feedback can also fuel ideation for future stories.

Understanding the products and services your audience need is also a critical part of addressing feedback. When users ask if you sell ancillary products or services, they’re telling you that they assume you would offer them—and that they’d be willing to purchase them from you instead of a competitor.

Companies are willing to pay big bucks for user research and testing, but why bother when you have direct access to people who actually use your service and visit your site?

Yes, there’s a lot of how-to content out there, but that doesn’t mean all of it is good. As I sit here writing this with my clawfoot tub torn apart and strewn across the dining room floor, I’m thinking about how much time I might have saved if thorough, illustrated, and useful content had been available. Be the guide your readers need.

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How to Optimize Your Social Media Posts for Search Engines

Social media networks started off as a place for people to keep connected online, to easily talk, share news, discuss events and everything else that falls in-between that.

Today, social media platforms have become a multi-billion dollar industry of their own. Almost half of the planet’s population (roughly as many people who have an internet connection) use at least one social media network that they use once a day.

With such insane popularity, social media absolutely shouldn’t be disregarded by marketers, especially when you are trying to improve your rankings in search engines, because Google and “the rest of the gang” pays a good amount of attention to your social presence and posts, just like they do to any other content.

Let’s start with the basics

Anything that you post on social media (article links, pictures, videos – everything) is essentially a part of your content, much like the written words in this article. Like any other content, your social media posts absolutely need to be of high quality and provide value to your audience. This is the first and most important thing that you need to keep in mind.

To make all your posts crystal clear for search engines, try to make use of semantic markup every time you share something on social. Semantic markup is the name for putting a HTML tag on your content (like a description for articles or alt-text for images/pictures) that tells search engines what exactly your content is about.1

Use a clear, catchy description and mix in a few keywords here and there. For example if your post is about making pancakes and includes a pancake image, you can use something like “Ever wondered how to make the most delicious pancakes at home in just an hour?” and make sure you pay attention to the image’s alt-text, which should read something like “the most delicious pancake recipe”.

It’s important to understand that people don’t only use the default “all” results page of Google. They also use videos, images, news and the rest of the categories. If your post can be found easily and receives likes and shares from people (which essentially means that they find your content valuable and you have social reputation), you will get a considerable amount of love from search engines too.

Don’t forget to monitor your efforts to have a clear idea of how you are doing in your endeavors. Not every description you come up with will be a good one and you need to know whether you need to further tweak your posts.

Build a network with the help of external inbound links

Social media is an excellent way to pump up the number of external links to your content or website.1 The more external links you have (preferably from different domains) the more authority your website will gain in search engines.

In order to make this happen you will have to start with point N1, which is having great quality content, otherwise you won’t have a chance to attract those links.

While being active on social media, share your content in relevant discussions if you know that it will provide value to the users. This will help you in becoming an authority figure on social media (as a brand who knows what it’s talking about and has the right answers). It will also maximize your chance of gaining external links through social shares, which is your primary objective. Here is an infographic that will tell you more about social shares (point N4).

Social media profiles are a big part of search results

If you go to Google search and look up “Victoria’s Secret” you will get their website as the first result.

Do you know what you will get bellow that? Yup, their social media profiles. This can be a hint of how important your social media profiles really are.

Of course, Victoria’s Secret has an insane brand presence around the world, but it hasn’t come out of nowhere. Quality products, quality content and consistent social media engagement throughout the years – that’s all there is. You can do that as well.

Also keep in mind that social media profiles can be just as good for gathering information about a brand as Google. When a user wants to know more about a brand, they are as likely to click on the social media profile in the search results as the official website. In fact, some people might skip Google and go straight to Facebook to find out more about a brand.

Social media channels = search engines

Do you know the number one search channel in the world? Okay, yes it’s Google. You are right. Google has around 67% market share.

But do you know the second one? It’s YouTube, which is a social media channel, which is just video based.

That’s right, people use YouTube to search for stuff more than any search engine, except Google. The same can be said (though it’s considerably less) for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, G+ and others.

The point here is that ones’ social media presence and engagement has a strong correlation to your search results. The more fans, followers, likes and re-tweets your brand has on social media, the more love you will receive from search engines.

Another impressive advantage of being active on social media in terms of SEO is speeding up the process of getting your content indexed.

In case you don’t know what indexed pages are, here goes. Whenever you publish a new piece of content it doesn’t immediately appear in search engines, it has to be indexed by search engine bots first. While bots are constantly crawling your website, looking for new stuff to index, it takes time.

If your fresh piece of content is re-tweeted a high number of times on Twitter, it can cut the time needed for bots to index that specific page by as much as 50%, since Google and Twitter have made a deal about it.

A must know about Google+

What do you know about G+? I know that it’s a relatively underused channel compared to the rest of the giants, its audience doesn’t really suit most businesses as a “relevant social media channel”. All that, and it’s owned by Google.

If you do a few searches for brands and look at the results, the ones that have an active G+ account will be on the top. This is an excellent opportunity for brands to boost their search engine results. If you still don’t have a G+ account or are inactive on it, fix that right away!

G+ may not be the most popular social media network in terms of fans and engagement, but if you really want to have good search engine rankings, you should absolutely pay attention to this network. Here is a chart showing search engines response to social signals from different networks (source):

Social media usage is growing day by day, and you don’t need to be a fortune teller to know that it will become even more important as time goes on.

On a final note, it’s never too late to start. Even if you didn’t pay much attention to social media before reading this post, you can start improving today.

When you take a look at the bigger picture, it all comes down to how much value you can bring to your audience with your content. The better user experience will result in higher search engine rankings, simple as that. Having a good idea of what you need to do on social media will help you increase your customer base, further your social media reach and ultimately, drive your brand’s name to the top results of search pages.

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The Marriage Between Conversion Optimization & SEO

As SEOs, our job is to increase the amount of qualified traffic to clients’ brands with the intention of having end users buy something, fill out a form, download a brochure or perform other actions on a site.

While improving traffic is great, it doesn’t necessarily result in more sales. So how do we actually get our clients more business through organic search? The answer is quite simple: conversion optimization.

Conversion optimization is the most powerful way to improve your clients’ revenue and conversions from end users. We can optimize every element of a site (e.g., technical, links, on-page, social and so on), but if users don’t convert, our efforts toward driving qualified traffic through organic search are not as valuable (unless traffic is your main KPI).

There is an extremely close correlation between SEO and conversion optimization. Therefore, the two must work together to turn visitors into customers.

How Do We Improve Conversion Through SEO?

This is the million-dollar question that a lot of us scratch our heads about. However, there are some things you should do to improve conversions through organic search.

Simply stated, it’s all about intent. Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Digital Marketing evangelist, came up with See-Think-Do: A Content, Marketing, Measurement Business Framework, a framework that categorizes users into different consideration stages based on intent.

See refers to your largest potential audience. Think is the audience “delineated by even the slightest amount of intent.” Do is the consideration stage for users who are actually looking to buy something.

Understanding and making sure you have the right content based on intent at all stages of the user journey can greatly improve your conversion rates. If you serve end users with something that they need in “the moment” — whether they are researching something, thinking about doing something or looking to purchase something — your chances of improving conversions will greatly increase.

Another way to increase conversions from SEO is to look at user behavior and work very closely with your analytics team to uncover why users are not converting.

Numbers don’t lie. Take a look at your analytics and see where users are bouncing at various landing pages on your site. Also, consider answering the following questions from an end-user perspective.

• Is your site easy to navigate?
• Do you use simple call-to-action statements?
• Does your site have a one-step conversion process that makes it easy for end users to reach the ultimate end goal (e.g., a brochure download or purchase)?
• Does your page load fast enough, and is your site mobile-friendly?
• Does your site have content that meets the needs of end users, and is your content valuable?

If the answer to any of those questions is “no,” you need to take a closer look at your website and content strategy and make some changes.

Where Are Your Users Going? What Are They Doing On Your Site?

There are a number of different analytics tools, among them Crazy Egg, that will provide insights from a heat map on where users are clicking on your site.

If you determine that users are clicking on a certain part of your landing pages instead of your call-to-action triggers, make changes and keep testing until you come closer to reaching your conversion goals.

Of course, you should always test different landing pages and elements of your site using A/B and multivariate testing. There are a number of different tools, like Optimzely, that can help you determine what works best for your target audience.

What Are Users Saying?

Another way to find out why your users are not converting is to ask them by conducting surveys using different survey platforms and by conducting usability tests with tools like Clicktale.

This will enable you to find insights into what challenges users face when navigating through your site and find out why they don’t convert.

Final Thoughts

Conversion optimization and SEO are joined at the hip. SEOs must focus on increasing conversions when delivering qualified traffic to their clients’ websites.

In order to do that, we must make sure all of our clients have sound content strategies based on intent at all stages of the user journey and moment. Then we must work closely with the analytics team and review data, taking the necessary steps to find out why users are not converting and turn them into customers.

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Making The Most Of Social Media, Even When It’s Not Driving Sales

Despite much of the hype around social media “Buy” buttons and shoppable links, social channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest continue to drive only a small portion of online retail sales.

In fact, according to the Custora E-commerce Pulse Holidata Report (Disclosure: Custora is my employer), less than two percent of e-commerce sales this past holiday season were attributed to social media.

While many other marketing channels saw significant year-over-year growth, the percentage of orders from social media actually decreased from last year.

The bottom line is that when it comes to driving sales, marketers have yet to unlock the formula to produce real results from social. While the jury may still be out on whether social media will live up to its hype, the following are some best practices for marketers looking to optimize their return on social media.

Take Advantage Of Advanced Facebook Ads Functionality

Facebook’s advertising solution provides a number of features beyond the automated distribution of ads, and it’s in marketers’ best interest to learn and implement some of the more advanced functionalities Facebook has to offer.

Facebook’s Custom Audiences allows marketers to match their house lists against Facebook data to yield more targeted, relevant marketing messages to consumers.

Take your Custom Audience Ads to the next level using Facebook’s Audience Insights. This often-overlooked feature lets you drill down to specific segments and personas of your custom audience.

For example, if your ad creative features a new line of women’s yoga pants, you may want to target customers who have bought your athletic wear, then drill down to women who have listed yoga as an interest on Facebook. This feature allows marketers to effectively segment their customers to provide hyper-relevant content and move one step closer to achieving a one-to-one marketing reality.

Another useful Facebook Ads functionality enables marketers to A/B test their messaging and creative. As with all A/B testing, the results of Facebook A/B tests enable you to continue to iterate, improve and optimize your marketing.

For example, an e-commerce retailer might use a Facebook ad with a call to action to click through to its spring catalog. By testing a few different versions of copy, the marketing team can better understand which messaging resonates best with their customers.

Perhaps there are certain segments that prefer one version over the other. Through continued testing, you can continue to optimize the message for each segment of customers to provide powerfully relevant messages.

Enable Your Customers And Fans To Tell Your Story

Anecdotally, we’ve heard many e-commerce brands report significant social revenue coming from Pinterest. However, upon closer inspection, we’ve found that this revenue is generally being driven from fan-generated content, not branded pins.

For example, a customer pins a picture of himself sporting an outfit from a brand’s new line, and someone else feels inspired to buy that pair of pants immediately. It can be likened to digital word of mouth — consumers trust other consumers more than they trust brands.

The lesson here for marketers: Rather than spending time pinning (or posting or tweeting or snapping) yourself, put those resources toward making it as easy and fun as possible for your fans to do so. The impact of a tweet from your customers is much more likely to drive sales.

With this in mind, consider running a Pinterest or Instagram contest encouraging fans to post, or highlighting social mentions from fans on your website.

Don’t Forget About More “Traditional” Marketing Methods

Social is certainly one of the sexier online marketing channels today, but given the lack of results we’ve seen from it thus far, it’s important that CMOs don’t discount the value of more traditional marketing methods.

Email continues to be a major player in e-commerce sales. According to Custora’s E-commerce Pulse Holidata Report, email drove 20 percent of all online orders during the 2015 holiday season.

Email’s influence was even more pronounced over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, when it took over as the primary channel driving online sales, accounting for more than 23 percent of orders.

Smart marketers should look to leverage social channels like Twitter for capturing email addresses — not just as channels for driving direct sales. Getting into people’s inboxes can be more valuable than driving a one-time social purchase, as it sets up a foundation for continued interaction with a customer.

Final Thoughts

According to a 2015 Global Web Index report, the average person has five social media accounts and spends around one hour and 40 minutes browsing these networks every day. So although social hasn’t yet lived up to its promise to drive e-commerce sales, it’s no surprise that it has become a staple of the modern marketer’s toolbox.

It’s clear that marketers can no longer write social media off as a fad, but they should try to make the most of their marketing dollars spent there by targeting the right people, optimizing their messages and enabling their fans to speak for themselves.

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How The New Snapchat “On-Demand Geofilters” Work

One of the coolest things in Snapchat is the ability to add a geofilter to an image or a video —  a special stamp with the name of a place, business or event. Now, anyone, including brands, can easily make their own.

Snapchat announced the news today, saying that for as little as $5, you can create geofilters for anywhere within the US, the UK and Canada.

Here’s a walk-through of how these work. In this example, I went through the process to make one that would appear for anyone attending our SMX West search marketing conference next month.

Submit Your Image

The first step is to visit the new On-Demand Geofilters area at Snapchat. You have to sign in with your Snapchat account information, then upload a file that meets the technical and creative guidelines.

Pick Your Dates

Next, you choose the date or dates you want the geofilter to be available. The longer it runs, the more you pay — though you won’t know the exact cost until you pick a location.

Select Your Location

Now for the fun part — geofencing. This means you’ll draw a virtual fence around the area where you want the geofilter to be available. It’s easy. You just click to highlight the area you want, which needs to be at least 20,000 square feet. Then you’ll be shown the cost for that area and those dates:

Pay & Play

Finally, you’ll be asked to submit a credit card and indicate if the geofilter is for personal or business use. The main difference is that personal geofilters can’t include brand images.

After placing your order, the geofilter goes off to Snapchat for review — there’s no ability for it to appear instantly. Currently, Snapchat says you’ll know by the next business day if it’s approved. In my test, it took about five minutes — but I can’t show how it looks, because despite same-day approval, you can’t actually have a filter appear until the day after you create it.

If approved, then you’ll have filters like some of these I’ve spotted myself, in the past:

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Danny Sullivan 

✔‎@dannysullivan

Nice All Day Breakfast Filter on @Snapchat by @McDonalds#AllDayBreakfast

6:10 AM - 7 Oct 2015 · McDonald's, United States

 
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Danny Sullivan 

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The @Snapchat sponsored geofilters so smart.

6:53 PM - 2 Dec 2015

 
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Targeting Competitors?

It’ll be interesting to see how these play out. It certainly makes it super-easy for many brands to quickly build them around their own businesses. But it also makes it possible for brands to target other businesses and events offered by competitors.

Microsoft, for example, potentially could target Google’s big I/O conference — and Google could do the same with Microsoft’s Build event. The guidelines don’t seem to prevent this. Will dueling geofilters be headed our way?

Postscript: After It Goes Live

My test went live, though sadly, I missed actually being able to try it. I thought my purchase was for an entire day, but I’d actually bought it for an hour — yes, one hour is the minimum, it seems.

Snapchat will email you when your geofilter goes live and send you another email when it ends. You can also view metrics for your geofilter — when my next test goes active, and I actually use it, I’ll show what those are like.

Sadly, you can’t take a preexisting geofilter and reuse it. Instead, you have to create an entire new order from scratch, including uploading your image again.

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