Stating the obvious here, but content is a massively important part of any inbound marketing campaign. The problem that most of us run into — and I know this well from years of SEO consulting with publishers — is that even "good" content can fade from view without a share, link, or conversion. Engaging an audience isn't as simple as clicking "publish."
So, how do we avoid making phantom content a habit?
For Moz, timely data has been a big part of the answer. Over the years, we've built internal tools like 1Metric to guide our work. It's a simple strategy, but the more analysis we perform, the better we understand our audience. The better we understand our audience, the easier it is to produce engaging content.
When we blog and talk about those tools, folks in the community remind us that having something similar for their own use would be really helpful.
Well, we took that feedback to heart and, about a year ago, set out to create a product that helps marketers and content creators optimize their content efforts. Now, after lots of hard work, we’re ready to roll back the curtain on our latest offering: Moz Content.
Enough talk – let's check it out!
Here’s a quick overview of we came up with...
The Content Audit
At the heart of Moz Content is the Content Audit. With an Audit, you can crawl and analyze any site, including a competitor's. The Audit inventories a site's pages and uncovers wins based on social and link activity... In other words, the basic analysis you’re probably already cobbling together in Excel.
More importantly, Moz Content helps you find meaning in that mess of data with automatic tagging and filtering based on topics, authors, and even content types (think lists, videos, news articles, and more). With an Audit, you can answer important questions about a site's strategy, like:
How do Guides on the Moz Blog stack up against Lists?
vs.
Average links and shares are almost double for Guides. Let's keep it up!
The filtering lets you segment content to easily surface insights about your current strategy. Are "social media" or "link building" articles generating more links? How do Whiteboard Fridays compare with other videos? Audits let you shortcut the analysis and answer pressing questions about your audience's interests.
That point-in-time analysis is helpful when you're researching or course-correcting, but we also know that ongoing performance reporting is critical to a content marketer's workflow. That’s where Tracked Audits come in.
With a Tracked Audit, Moz Content will automatically re-crawl a site every week and trend your performance metrics. Then, with the handy Audit Selector, you can compare the Audits we’ve archived in order to measure your progress.
By comparing two Audits, you can easily surface gains or losses and learn if your latest efforts are resonating.
Content Search
When we built Moz Content, we knew that we’d need to help sites at both ends of the content creation spectrum. Tracked Audits are great if a site has an active audience, but if you're just getting started, the focus is usually on research. That's where Content Search comes in.
Content Search lets you explore popular articles from across the web with simple topic searches. Interested in SEO and content? A quick search for (no surprises here) "SEO AND content" surfaces competitor articles that have garnered lots of attention.
(You can also search for content on domains with the “site:” operator.)
Moz Content monitors hundreds of thousands of English-language sites in order to surface new content about the niches you play in. Use the tool to analyze competitors or research topics that are important to your audience.
For social media marketers, Content Search also helps with curation. After you find something interesting, you can share it directly with your followers:
It's worth mentioning that our index is still growing and you may see some gaps in the reporting. If that's the case, feel free to reach out with topics you'd like covered in the future.
And a final note: you'll probably notice we're not reporting Twitter shares. Twitter, as of a few days ago, shut down the endpoint that many of us were using to measure Tweet counts. We didn't want this wrinkle to hold up the launch, but we're on the case and working on alternatives.
Time to test drive
There are other details we could cover, but I'm guessing you'd rather just dive in and see for yourself. With Moz Content, we're providing free, limited access to the Audit and Content Search. Just head over to https://moz.com/content and take it for a spin. (Tip: Log in to your Community account first for elevated page limits, more searches, and a saved Audit.)
If you need more data and higher limits, you can always subscribe to Moz Content on a monthly or annual plan.
This is just the beginning for Moz Content — we’ll need your help as we improve and expand upon the functionality. Don’t hesitate to let us know what you'd like to see, and feel free to send any feedback our way with a comment below, a note to our Help Team, or outreach on social.
What's the difference between your Content Search & Buzzsumo or Ahrefs Content Search?
Great question Anthony. There are differences in the sites we're monitoring, as well as the page-level analysis. Buzzsumo and Ahrefs are solid tools. We think Moz Content is complimentary, especially with the Audit and Tracked Audit features.
Pleased? I believe you mean ecstatic! Nice work Jay and everyone on the Content Team.
How big of a wrench was Twitter removing share count?
Josh, it was easy enough to take it out of the math modeling for our Reach score. But we'll definitely need Twitter data going forward and we're working on something that factors in both shares and the influence of the sharer(s). We've got a good head start on this with Followerwonk.
Waiting for initial data to roll in...just had to say the interface is gorgeous! Good amount of help tips on first visit, and the right ones too. Some apps get carried away with these! Nice work. Now back to my data...
I experimented with Moz content and thought that it was an interesting tool. It also tabulates metrics for pages on a website that a lot of people enjoy.
I think that the product could be more valuable with additions similar to these.....
1) Give users a tracking code that they can place in the footer of their articles and another code that they place on their "conversion page" whatever that might be... shopping cart, lead form, signup, download, whatever. That will help users determine which content is on the path to conversions. That can place a value on their content that is closer to greenbacks.
2) A different tracking code might be placed on pages that generate income from advertising. This code will tally visitor metrics, and the processing would pull income values from Adsense (or a revenue estimate the the user inputs manually.
Now, if I have the ability to input my cost of producing the content, then Moz Content will be able to tell me which of my articles are making a profit, how long until a profit will be turned at current rate, how many pageviews will be needed to turn a profit. Then I can sort these numbers and know which of my pages are really making money and which ones are not.
Greenbacks are the best metric for a lot of people.
It's a great point. Excellent feedback.
Conversion tracking is something we considered but held off on in order to provide a more generalized toolset (i.e. something you could use with any site)...but 100% agree there's a need there.
The larger, soon to be released, subscription packages will have GA integration. That'll be our first step at adding additional depth to the Audit reporting. And if there's sufficient demand we'd definitely consider building out the product's tracking capabilities.
As an aside, there are some nice enterprise-focused products that provide conversion reporting. Most are pretty expensive but could be a good fit depending on a site's revenue.
Tracking can be valuable for distributed content too. If a tracking code was inserted between <article> and </article> and that block of code was dropped into a page on a partner's website, then I will have access to how many times my article was viewed on their site. This would be valuable information for me to know the power of their site for driving traffic to my article. It would help me decide if I want to share more content with that website.
That data would also be valuable for the host publisher because they will know if my content is being viewed by their visitors and if they want to give me similar opportunities in the future. Maybe some people charge a fee for each time an article is viewed, with either the publisher or the author being paid, depending upon the details of their agreement. Third-party metrics would be nice for these arrangements.
I'd like to see someone develop a system where authors could offer content and publishers could shop, select, post and then the author would be paid on the basis of views - either through direct pay or the presence of my ad codes embedded within the <article></article>. This would be self-service through a membership site and eliminate contact, negotiate, accounting.
Added: Embedding of rel=canonical would be an important part of this system.
Agree. Content asset tracking across sites is a really interesting problem to solve. We heard this early on with images specifically. For example, if you create and distribute an infographic, your site traffic alone won't reflect the full impact of that piece of content.
If the idea of a content marketplace piqued anyone's interest, there are a few products that offer something similar. NewsCred and Percolate come to mind (both enterprise). NewsCred recently raised a big chunk of change so should be some interesting things coming out of that camp.
Thanks for the info on NewsCred and Percolate. I was not aware of them.
I tried, not disappointed. Another good alternative to Buzzsumo and ahrefs!! "Reach" is something new with this product. Great work Moz!
Granted, I've only used this for 15 minutes, but ...
How is this data being pulled? When I look at Buzzsumo for the same date range, I see completely different results. Moz numbers way lower on shares.
I love Moz, but I'm not sold on the value of this new tool vs what I'm getting now from Buzzsumo.
We're both crawling the web and building content indices, and then calculating the relevant metrics for shares/links. Having used both for months this year, sometimes we'll get better results and sometimes Buzzsumo delivers better results. We're actively working to improve the quality of our index and the results.
I think Buzzsumo is pretty great, and my best advice is to use what works for you. On our end, we'll work to build strong enough features and refine our data to make us a compelling alternative.
This is awesome...A perfect addition to your other tools.
I love the look and feel of the interface. It is clean and flat, great colors. I am excited to see how we can use this tool for our customers. Keep up the good work!
Thanks,
Anthony Biondo
Founder/CEO
Biondo Creative
I'm totally amazed by this tool ! I've just tried it for a first time and I've never expected to see the most popular content on any topic to be so well presented and full with information about the reach, backlinks and social shares!
Great job Moz !!!
Is it just me or is anyone else unable to start a new audit on Chrome...?
Same here
Hey! Do both of you mind shooting the domain you are trying the content audit on to [email protected] or using the little chat button in the bottom left to let us know! We'll take a look at it. Thanks for the feedback.
Hmm odd, I just tried and it was ok. It's still early in this part of the world, so we'll get the team looking at it soon!
very important news for content marketer ! Thanks again for new product which help us to reach to new targeted level of business.
just perfect!!! it´s like you say....this is so important for news content marketer
One more great content audit and research tool. Pretty excited to see how it helps in my content strategy. Thanks Moz for bringing a tool for topic (i.e. content) which is one of the most important things for the search industry. I have got three tools now Buzzsumo, ahref and Moz to do a content research. Keep it up guys!
I'm going to give it a try. This is my first day here... I'm a tad overwhelmed!
Really great work guys! Just got into the audit to look at the data. Me Likey.
Much needed tool. Have not tried it yet. Looking forward to trying it. Would like to know the advantages it has over buzzsumo which i am currently using.
Hey Vinodh. Great question.
The Audit and Tracked Audit features are unique to Moz Content. So if you're monitoring the performance of a site or simply analyzing an individual domain, that functionality will come in handy. Content Search and Buzzsumo do have similarities, though Content Search looks at a different set of domains so the results won't match. Using the two together can give a fuller picture of content trends around a specific topic.
I like all your posts ....great help for each & every blogger.
This tool will be proved effective to check content quality & content marketing, i really appreciate this.
Thank you, Jiya TET consulting at CBSE
This is a great tool to check content on your site. Thumbs up for that !
It's looking good. Let's check it out ;)
Jose Ramon Saura
cool , i have not reached the target, i hope as you later, perfect the article
Content marketing is definitely not rocket science, but it's science that requires concrete understanding and guidance. Thanks Moz for gifting us in the community this helpful tool!
The tool looks awesome. Will suerly give it a try.
Working in Chrome and can't get the audit to work for me. It will run, but when I click on the link I get a pop up to buy rather than seeing audit.
Awesome I'll def be checking it out
A great post and very important post content . Thank you Jay!
Wow..this blog is amazing.This is a great help for me being a blog marketer.
Rebecca Wright