Longer, more thorough documents tend to do better in the search results. We know that's true, but why? And is there a way we can use that knowledge to our advantage? In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains how Google may be weighting content comprehensiveness and outlines his three-step methodology for gaining an edge over your competitors when it comes to meeting searchers' needs.
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Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about, well, something I've noticed, something we've noticed here at Moz, which is that there seems to be this extra weight that Google is putting right now on what I'm going to call content comprehensiveness, the degree to which a piece of content answers all of a searcher's potential questions. I think this is one of the reasons that we keep seeing statistics like word length and document length is well-correlated with higher rankings and why it tends to be the case that longer documents tend to do better in search results. I'm going to break this down.
Broad ranking inputs
But these four, all of which are sort of related:
- Searcher engagement and satisfaction, so the degree to which when people land on that page they have a good experience, they don't bounce back to the search results and click another result.
- The diversity and uniqueness of that content compared to everything else in the results.
- The raw content quality, which I think Google has probably lots of things they use to measure content quality, including engagement and satisfaction, so these might overlap.
- And then comprehensiveness.
It's sort of this right mix of these three things, like the depth, the trustworthiness, and the value that the content provides seems to really speak to this. It's something we've been seeing like Google kind of overweighting right now, especially over the last 12 to 18 months. There seems to be this confluence of queries, where this very comprehensive content comes up in ranking positions that we wouldn't ordinarily expect. It throws off things around link metrics and keyword targeting metrics, and sometimes SEOs go, "What is going on there?"
So, in particular, we see this happening with informational- and research-focused queries, with product and brand comparison type queries, like "best stereo" or "best noise cancelling headphones," so those types of things. Broad questions, implicit or explicit questions that have complex or multifaceted answers to them. So probably, yes, you would see this type of very comprehensive content ranking better, and, in fact, I did some of these queries. So for things like "job application best practices," "gender bias in hiring," "résumé examples," these are broad questions, informational/research focus, product comparison stuff.
Then, not so much, you would not see these in things like "job application for Walmart," which literally just takes you to Walmart's job application page, which is not a particularly comprehensive format. The comprehensive stuff ranks vastly below that. "Gender bias definition," which takes you to a short page with the definition, and "résumé template Google Docs," which takes you to Google Docs' résumé template. These are almost more navigational or more short-format answer in what they're doing. I didn't actually mean to replace that.
How to be more comprehensive than the competition
So if you want to nail this, if you identify that your queries are not in this bucket, but they are in this bucket, you probably want to try and aim for some of this content comprehensiveness. To do that, I've got kind of a three-step methodology. It is not easy, it is hard, and it is going to take a lot of work. I don't mean to oversimplify. But if you do this, you tend to be able to beat out even much more powerful websites for the queries you're going after.
1. Identify ALL the questions inherent in the search query term/phrase:
Same thing on their purpose. So some people who are searching for "job application best practices" may be employers. Some people may be job applicants. Some may be employees. Some may be people who are starting companies. Some may be HR directors. You need to provide that background for all of them.
One of the ways to do this, to get all the questions, truly all the questions is to survey. You can do that to your users or your community, or you can do it through some sort of third-party system. For example, Oli Gardner from Unbounce was very kind and did this for Moz recently, where he was asking about customer confusion and objections and issues. He used UsabilityHub's tests. UsabilityHub, you can use this there as well. You can also use Q and A sites, things like Quora. You can use social media sites, like Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook, if you're trying to gather some of this data informally.
2. Gather information your competition cannot/would not get:
- Proprietary data
- Competitive landscape information, which many folks are only willing to talk about themselves and not how they relate to others.
- It means industry and community opinions, which most folks are not willing to go out and get, especially if they're bigger.
- Aggregated or uniquely processed metrics, obviously one of the most salient recent examples from the election that's just passed is sites like FiveThirtyEight or the Upshot or Huffington Post, who build these models based on other people's data that they've aggregated and included.
- It also could mean that you are putting together information in visual or audio or interactive mediums.
3. Assemble in formats others don't/can't/won't use:
- That could be things like guides that require extraordinary amounts of work. "The Beginners Guide to SEO" is a good example from Moz, but there are many, many others in all sorts of fields.
- Highly customized formats that have these interactive or visual components that other people are generally unwilling to invest the effort in to create.
- Free to download or access to reports and data that other people would charge for or they put behind pay walls.
- Non-transactional or non-call-to-action-focused formats. For example, a lot of the times when you do stuff in this job search arena, you see folks who are trying to promote their service or their product, and therefore they want to have you input something before they give you anything back. If you do that for free, you can often overwhelm the comprehensiveness of what anyone else in the space is doing.
This process, like I said, not easy, but can be a true competitive advantage, especially if you're willing to take on these individual key phrases and terms in a way that your competition just can't or won't.
I'd love to hear if you've got any examples of these, if you've tried it before. If you do use this process, please feel free to post the results in the comments. We'd love to check it out. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
This is so huge. The timeliness of this video is perfect. Having run a website for 17 years, there are brand-new bloggers who are just dominating the rankings right now in my niche. All they do is write, write, write. They link out to everywhere. They link to me. They link to 15 different websites as part of nearly every article.
And for some reason, Google is rewarding them with top rankings because they're using that old school word press format where they've got at least 5 to 10 articles on the same page. Just going down the page forever. So they end up with content that is 5000+ words.
Now I don't know how they're going to work with duplicate content issues unless they're really carefully managing their canonicals. But it doesn't seem to be mattering right now. I know one thing is for sure, my website which has been an authority on the topic for nearly 2 decades, isn't ranking anywhere near theirs. And the only difference, is the length of their articles. And the comprehensiveness of their content.
This is the holy Grail right now for ranking. And I hope word does not get out to my competitors. These guys are doing it accidentally. I'm still old-school. Writing 600 word articles that aren't anywhere and we couldn't figure out why. Time to change everything up. As always: google rewards for hard work. This is true now more than ever.
NOTE: It very well may be that people are just stuck on the page longer, and that's why these pages are ranking better. They're longer. They take longer to look through. Therefore they retain the viewer longer. And Google "thinks" that the content is better. It very well may be that it's not about the length of the article directly, but simply how long the article keeps people on the page.
I think you're talking about "infinite scrolling". That's a completely different issue altogether.
Google doesn't see these multiple articles as a single page. In any case, they are not in-depth, comprehensive answers to any question.
Would be awesome if you adopted this new strategy relentlessly for 90 days and then reported back to us your results. Given that you've been doing it for so long, you already have a really strong control baseline. Do it!
Ha! I like this suggestion, Joe, but then again, my own posts here on the Moz Blog tend to be on the thorough side :) I'm a big fan of comprehensive content, ranking signal or not.
HLTalk, not 5 minutes ago, I finished watching Backlinko's new case study WASP, which will probably answer your question as to why the young bucks are linking everywhere. WEBRIS has been saying similar stuff for a while, too, FYI.
Personally, I think the techniques seems great for Content Producers (with capital Cs & Ps) but slightly ridiculous when applied to the average small business website.
Great post explaining how to use comprehensive content to outbeat competitors.
It has now been proved by a study published by Neil Patel in "How Google Hummingbird Really Works: What We Learned by Analyzing 9.93 Million Words of Content" that many websites whose link profile is tiny and rank lower in trust and authority, yet receive high results because they have great content in their pages which is comprehensive and thorough.
I have also noticed this in the course of my work that creating comprehensive content that covers a lot of the information that searchers are looking and covering a lot of long tail phrases around the main topic can give rich dividends for a website - in many cases 10X times or more
I've also noticed this trend too. I have many sites out there where I've spent a lot of time focusing on UX/UI segmenting and where to place content. The more effort put to answer questions with a conversational tone, I've seen really high rankings on initial indexing; it was quite surprising. But Google Hummingbird q/a are huge areas to gain trust and comprehensive impact on your content.
This also will overlap with Keyword Research process too. I built a new process that looks at all the terms and then hierarchical sort them and through doing this I was able to discover the "implicit keyword searches" and "explicit keyword search", which led to more "comprehensive content".......I have to agree here!
Yup, been milking this technique and getting tons of traffic for my travel site for about 2 years now :-D. In my case, my page is able to outrank well-targeted pages on TripAdvisor and USA Today websites despite having 1000x fewer backlinks, because they have minimal content on their pages for that topic.
People need to make more infographics. Escpecially with how easy it is. Just do some keyword research with keyword explorer and go "the most competitive keywords about dental care". Use Canva to transfer this data into visual format (canva graphs tool is awesome btw) and you're set. People will share that with great pleasure.
Hi Igor,
Agree it is easy to do.
Do you have any stats on this that relate to Rand's video? Thanks!
In my experience infographics don't rank well at all. Sure, in terms of share value they're pretty good. But this sounds suspiciously like advertising for Canva to me.
Hi Rand,
I've experienced what you said in this video.
I've zero external links to my domain and a DA of 17, and yet a good proportion of my posts rank in first three pages of Google serps. Two of them rank on page one (highest position being #6) for competitive keywords. The only reason I can think of is comprehensiveness and resulting user engagement.
It has given me lot of confidence, and now I'm pursuing links to some of these pages.
Good article.
I've seen this myself too.
It's absolutely vital that all website owners get on board with this as soon as possible, because this element of SEM is only going to grow.
Content is king, and whilst Google have always been technically limited in how they can measure that, they are getting much better at it now. More importantly though, they will continue to get better as AI improves.
I have no doubt that within 20 years, Google will be able to read page content more like a human than a robot. They will still be limited, but they'll be able to understand the deeper meanings of content and score them with quasi-metrics of value, detail and usefulness.
For now, I think one of the main reasons longer articles work better is because Google just has a lot more data to work with. It's a given that if you write useful content about a topic, where you're adding more because there's that much to talk about, and not because it's being artificially padded, then all of the usual content quality metrics will improve. I'm talking about uniqueness, more diversified content, and more opportunities to measure relationships between words.
But hey, that's just what it's all about now. A genuine desire to help people and inform them will be rewarded by Google if this is evident in your content.
Hey Rand,
I just saw this major study on Hummingbird published by Neil Patel that goes over this with examples. You guys need to see it. Here's the article
That Google Hummingbird Algorithm is pretty nasty!
Good morning, Mr. Fishkin,
I have a real estate website. This sector in my area is very competitive, so We work hard in SEO for appear in better positions as possible in Google.
I have a great experience working with the third point that you comment: 3. Assemble in formats others don't/can't/won't use.
In my sector, the typical format for show our properties is with images in format jpg.
For make something different we started now showing our properties with youtube videos in our channel, and then introducing our youtube videos on our website. This is a different way for see the properties, like a guided visit.
Since we used this new format, our positions in the last two months have risen to position number 6, for the terms real estate + our area. We still have a lot to be the first but if you want I can send you a progression every week to see the changes produced thanks to using formats different from those of our competitors
Thank you for this post! We will try to improve too the first two points on content
Interesting tip. In the period that you win more positions in google, do you make annother seo tips? or the effect its only due to use the YouTube channel?
Thanks!
Great presentation Rand. I think what Google is doing makes perfect sense. A few years ago I remember Brian Dean posting half-articles and asking for sign ups to reveal the rest of the post. It used to really annoy me. I don't think people should abuse the privilege of free traffic by giving the searcher a poor experience in that way.
The clamp down on pop ups (especially on mobile) and the drive for more comprehensive content leads to a better user experience. People don't want to pay for whatever google delivers (not even with emails).
From the perspective of a startup this is of course excellent news. Finally it looks like we can beat the established sites with better content.
While I agree that having to sign up to read the rest of the content can be annoying, it's not really an abuse of free traffic (unless they're cloaking and giving Google a different version of the page).
You are right it's not breaking the rules, but it's wasting my time. That's worse. :-)
I really agree with you. Very annoying and a great waste of time!
Regards,
Luis
When trying to come up with the questions that the user is trying to ask in the query, I would also recommend the AskReddit subreddit where you can ask the redditors all kinds of questions. Or course, if you need info about a more specific audience, you could look for a specific niche subreddit.
As for the formats for your content, I personally think that free-to-download reports or data will be most useful and comprehensive, from the users' point of view.
Hello Rand,
awesome job! This is exactly what I tell our clients, too. I can completly agree and super nice examples.
We are a SEO Agency located in Germany and we did exactly this since some years. And we "kicked lot of asses" with this approach. Instead of trying to get backlinks and doing other stupid useless things... We are just the only once(?) who give massive information for free focusing on clients daily questions. This lead to long visiting times, this lead to better ranking, better ranking leads to more views and of course longer visiting times... And at the end we are super super happy with our ranking and getting clients for free directly into our mailbox or phone^^
Best regards
Martin
I would love to hear people's opinion as to whether comprehensive content must include a lot of prose.
The website I am developing is very comprehensive, but most of the content is in tables (text labels and mainly numeric values), charts and maps. So my pages are very long. I am answering every question I can think of with data, but I'm not giving Google paragraph after paragraph of prose to index.
I suspect it doesn't need to be primarily text. As long as it answers people's questions, is comprehensive, is mega useful. You'll still be giving Google signals about how long people are spending on the page, whether they continue searching for the answer after visiting your page etc.
Hi Donald,
I don't believe it needs to have a lot of prose. My view on what's important to keep in mind:
-Meet or exceed minimum word count
-Engage the reader - I think supporting visuals are important yet this depends on your user persona
Apply what Rand listed in general. I would recommend looking at sites similar to yours and just do a better job with content quality and comprehensiveness - the four bubbles on the left Rand pointed out. There really is a lot of crap quality out there and I think with a little bit of time invested this is easy enough to do.
Also test your content. Send it out to your Twitter audience or end users and ask them to rate it based on X factors. I'm sure you will get a couple of directional responses.
Good luck!
Great stuff on what can be complex, but in the end is super rewarding to learn. Much of what is discussed here can be done via the Moz Keyword Explorer's "Topic" suggestions. What's awesome about tools that do natural language processing, as your tool does, mostly by backwards analyzing big AI robots like Google, is it can both "take the place of" an expert or compliment an expert. I've done a ton a work with another company with a tool like this to identify topics to cover in very high growth, nascent niches where the leading "expert ideas" is unclear.
We're already seeing machine learning replace expert "opinions," although I think some people go to far in thinking that humans need not be part of a process in finding what is "comprehensive" to a theme. It's good for content strategy as much as it is for holistic, comprehensive, and thorough content that the Hummingbird algo looks for. It helps for 1 web page, but even more complex and rewarding, for relationships between pages on an entire website.
Hey Rand
i am exactly on the place you have just posted about. I have written my post on focusing "SEO guide". i am on 1st page in matter of days. Let me know if you can find it with for domain BlogRex .....!
i would say "Common sense" is the super power when are doing research work to develop your content. I mean we human beings, in general are very much predictable. And you are right, that we should have deep focus on our targeted audience.
One more thing, awesome content development can be made super easy if you are working on your "passion relevant" niche, and also following MOZ blog to improve your SEO knowledge. ;)
Afraz
Hi Rand,
Excelent post. I like the way Google is encouraging people to create good content by ranking better the websites who follow this best practices. This will be a search evolution and it will provide better information to the users :)
Hey Rand!
Top-notch video and information.
No wonder "SEO: The Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization" currently is the #1 organic result for the keyword "seo"
You guys provide clear, comprehensive, and relevant content and his video is no exception.
Thank you
-----------------------------------------------
As for what I would add to the discussion:
I am a little bit mad at Google because I truly feel what you mentioned is true. Google puts too much emphasis on "content" mostly in word form. This creates a problem and a huge disadvantage for very specific websites.
For example,
Just imagine the amount of SEO that has to be done to get any SERP exposure for a website featuring one item for sale.... Say... a car or a real estate property being sold directly...or anything else along those lines...
You can only put so much "content" in such websites...and I doubt it would be enough to compete with websites like zillow.com or autotrader.com
Thoughts... anyone?
Hello Dear
Content length is truly a ranking factor these days. But i don't think its only the length even if it is working good right now. This thing is never gonna last long. Just think straight like the user of your product. Today i might be appreciating lengthy content on any topic on any website, but what i feel i'd like to visit brand blogs/sites with precise length of content and well presented.
For now, even i am focusing on developing lengthy content for my blog and its working well. ;)
That's right! As more and more content generated every single day your best bet to reach the top is a nonparail content (sure thing, with some descriptive infographics). But I have a question: should I focus on trending topics in my niche or devise a strict content plan?
And what would be the steps and tools I should use. I know I can set up tools like Mention or Notify to monitor my niche keywords. Or I can use Moz, Semrush or Serpstat for various data mining purposes.
But what else makes your content a tick?
Who would have known that working harder and trying harder makes the difference :D Jokes aside, I (like many above me) agree with most of what is being said in the video. These days it's not very easy to differentiate yourself from competitors - I often get the impression that everything has already been done. That's when I turn to my own experience and stuff I learned myself, something no one from competition doesn't have.
We also encourage our clients to try and create infographics and ebooks for their sites, since that's definitely one good way to stand out and be different and have great content.
Great post Rand. All your posts are really very informative.
This is something we started to notice while studying competitor's top ranked content, but we were having a hard time articulating it. That said, this week's Whiteboard Friday ROCKS! Exactly what we needed.Thanks for sharing, Rand!
As a side note, that's a killer shirt. ;)
Great post, Rand. I've come to notice that many of these comprehensive, long page, informative pieces of content throw some of the old rules out of the window. For example on readability.
Many SEO plugins and other content analysis tools often analyse readability and urge making the content simpler to read. However, I've been finding of late that comprehensive articles that do well in SERPs wouldn't pass many of these readability tests.
Your thoughts?
Excellent article, It is clear that the content gives much value to the web, in addition to everything multimedia like graphics, infographics, videos, etc ... increase user interest, is more time on the web and improves the rebound percentage.
A big hug!
Will this comprehensive content strategy will have same benefits if combined with podcasting?
Comprehensive content to be competitive. I like it!
Nice article - Is there any of your advice that I could use to 'pad out' my portfolio pages at all? They get flagged up as having thin content - https://www.stevesims.com/portfolio/portfolio.htm and I'm wondering if there is something I can do about this without having to write long case studies for each page...
As other members said, this is a huge topic. I'm agree with your arguments Rand. :)
I could only add what @Igor Gorbenko said. People need to see more inphographics. In particular, I can tell you that in my niche people like E-Books that explain everything. People, I don't know why, but LOVE E-Books. It's like if they can trust better the company and that's one of the reasons I trusted (MORE) in Moz. Because I've downloaded information E-Books from you :)
I think this is part of what you refer to "Assemble in formats others don't/can't/won't use."
I think that nowadays Rand Fishkin is a brand. You make ultra comprehensive information and a funny way to export it to us.
Hi all, Good idea!! very good.
More thanks Rand Fishkin
Thank you, I want to beat my competitor.
Hey Rand, thanks, just isn't long format content generally a contradiction to Google's mobile first momentum
Good job, for those who want a good link I advise you to evernote, besides getting organized our work we get a nice backlink.
For infographics I recommend genial.ly
Great post Rand. Of course quality content with a high comprehensiveness is the better way to rank #1 on Google. That's easy to say but not easy to do, to write good articles with the correct information is hard, but it's better one good article than three no so good
I'm just using competitors backlinks technique and this is working good for me for my websites. comprehensive content is really good and I'll work for this.
Good work Rand, as usual. We've seen this strategy used to some extend in your Whiteboard Fridays.
Hey Rand! Good both video and shirt! hehe When it comes to content and SEO I'm having a doubt lately which is: all right we have to give our different users the different answers they might be looking for, so we need to think in all our potential targets. But in terms of SEO does this mean we need to provide all this info only in one page? I mean according to this long tail theory we used to place different ideas such as "how to vote for the United State" or "how is the management of the voters of the United States" and so on... So each query would go to a specific page. Now it seems we need to give all this related info in the same page and expect for this page to position all those long tail keywords.
Does it makes sense with the theory you mentioned in the video?
Thanks for the video.
David
Hello Rand,
Your viewpoint to outrank the competitors are just awesome. To establish our footsteps, it would be better to that can't be done by others. Great post it is! Thanks.
Another great post Rand. From recent memory, I thought Myles Anderson at BrightLocal created a good example of this type of content, comparing citation services. https://www.brightlocal.com/2016/11/02/moz-local-vs-yext-vs-brightlocal-vs-whitespark/
There are so many reports saying people are time poor, yet Google likes longer intensive content that better suits university text books.
Do real average day people have the time to invest in this content in the long term.
I don't read half of what is in most blogs anymore.
How to Beat Your Competitor's?
- Just hit them strong in face
For a while now I have been thinking that it is not the lenght of the content but that in depth articles are the ones that rank. Thanks for sharing this idea!
Hey Madara
It is surely not about the length of the content only. It is also about how much your content is engaging and interesting for the users to be on your website. I remember, i wrote a topic and was on number one within 6 days of posting. The content quality was actually compromised. I remained on that position for just about 4 to 5 days, and then gradually my ranking was getting down. Yes! i had good length content which took me to #1, but got dropped down due to less engaging...! :)
I have updated it properly, and will be back to number #1 shortly. ;)
Competitor back links helps a lot to gain powerful back links for your site..
Thanks Rand very helpful..
thanks
Hi Rand.
I agree with this content point. really good idea.
I will ask to my team and apply work for this.