As much as we like to debate content vs. links, sometimes great content just seems to dominate. I don't mean to say that great content doesn't get great links, or that the purposes of creating great content is not to get links, but simply that some content on the web seems to shine through the SERPs.
Content might not be king, but it has lot of sway in Google's kingdom.
After sifting through tons of SERP data to find million dollar answer boxes (answer box results that rank at the top for keywords driving millions of dollars in traffic), I decided to dig deep to find content just like it across the web. But I wanted to do something different, something harder. I wanted to find content that didn't have huge Domain Authority. Sure, it is easy for the Wikipedia's and YouTubes of this world to rank for huge keywords, but what about the little guy? Are there any pieces of content out there bringing in millions of dollars of traffic coming from domains with Domain Authority around 50 or lower? And if so, what sets this content apart from the rest? Let's find out!
First, I needed a little help in deconstructing exactly what makes this great content tick. I enlisted the SEO greats - Garrett French of CitationLabs who essentially wrote the book on linkable content, and Mark Traphagen, Internet social guru extraordinaire from Stone Temple.
So let's begin.Finding great content
I didn't want to start with any assumptions. I didn't want to assume that great content was pretty, or thorough, or authoritative. I wanted to judge content by its results, not its features. I set 3 distinct qualifications:
- The content URL couldn't be a home page.
- The domain couldn't have a Moz Domain Authority above 55.
- The content URL had to earn more than $1,000,000 a year in traffic based on a recent click through model, traffic volume, and estimated CPC of the keywords for which it ranks.
With those parameters set, I went digging. With SERPScape and the MozScape API, we quickly uncovered dozens of contenders out of just a sampling of the data set. So, what did we discover? What patterns did we find across the board? What set this content apart?
Feature #1: On-point
One of the most obvious trends was simply how perfectly and thoroughly the top content answered the users queries. It wasn't that the content was necessarily long (although in many cases it was). However, the content was highly relevant, regardless of its length. Take for example this "bed sizes" web page on SleepTrain.com.
Most webmasters would be content with just throwing up a quick intro paragraph and dimensions, but the SleepTrain site provides it several different ways...
- An overlay comparison image with Dimensions
- A textual table listing of sizes
- Several separate images showing people placement on the different mattresses
- A textual analysis of common bed sizes describing who would and would not fit by their height.
Now, I know what you are thinking. This isn't all that great!, but everything must be seen in context. Look at the next several listings. Wikipedia is a nightmare of text, BetterSleep is just text, bedding experts is a little better, but doesn't have the first overlay chart, SleepCountry only has the overlay chart... No other page in the top 10 answers all of a user's questions as thoroughly but succinctly as the SleepTrain site.
But don't take my word for it, we saw this over and over again in the data. We know that good, thorough content can rank well, and we saw just that. The average topical relevancy scores of our Million Dollar Content pieces were significantly better time and time again than the average competition in the SERPs.
In fact, some pages had scores that were truly mind blowing. One particular page on resume templates hit 99.96% relevancy! To get that level of precision, not only do you need to be highly thorough, you also have to be highly restrictive to prevent the addition of content that isn't relevant. That means no filler. Subsequently, this one particular page ranked for over 2,000 related keywords!
Feature #2: Bold
Conventional wisdom rarely helps you win in a competitive atmosphere. If you do what everyone else thinks should be done, you are predictable, and predictable is beatable.
For a few years now, one of the items on my regular audit list has been page speed. We know that TTFB (time-to-first-bite) correlates with search rankings, that fast download speeds correlate with increased conversions and better user engagement, and we even have an official announcement from Google that page speed matters for rankings.
Well, StyleGlam gives Google a giant middle finger when it comes to page speed. The page is bold, image-laden, and is even filled with ads.
The page clocks in at a turtle's pace of 24.9 seconds to load and an elephant's weight at 7.49MB in size! But maybe that is the point.
The game of SEO is all about compromises. When you make a page load quickly, you often have to compromise on images, text, and thoroughness. When you make a page informative, you might have to compromise on conversion rates. In this case, the webmasters came up with a completely different balance. They chose not to compromise on thoroughness, information content, conversion points (look at the ads!) and instead let page speed die a horrendous death. But the trade-off worked!
StyleGlam wasn't the only site we saw throw page speed to the wind in order to go big. Sites in the resume space, calendar, degree and health care spaces often took refuge in being big before being quick.
But we also saw the opposite true. Paired-back resources that answer one question very quickly, very easily, very simply can also win. What seems to never make its way to the top though is conventional content on a conventional sites. If you aren't a big brand, you better be different, be better, be bold.
Feature #3: Fresh
Can content survive in high spam, high value keyword niches? You bet it can. I was shocked when I came upon this one, as it was just a well managed blog post that was now several years old. It was surrounded by the latest entrants into a niche that was notoriously getting shut down and cleaned out: free streaming movies.
So how does a simple blog post on the best free movie sites manage to bring in $1,000,000+ in traffic not just this year, or last year, or the year before but for years and years on end?
Well, one thing we noticed about it and many others was content freshness. I can't tell you how many times a client has been scared to update their content that already ranks. "But what if I break it? What if I lose rankings?"
Not updating your content IS breaking it.
The truth is that if you are not updating your content regularly, Google will have to assume that your content is losing its reliability. So why not? Over time, you will build up a great backlink profile by sheer longevity, while at the same time keeping content as fresh as new competitors entering the space.
The author here found a great opportunity. People wanted to find these sites, they kept disappearing, and someone needed to keep an up-to-date record of the best ones. Now, the webmaster didn't create it once and leave it, or update it annually. They updated it regularly. The net result?
This piece of content has enjoyed long-term, million-dollar rankings while competitors have come and gone. They have ranked for thousands of keywords for several years by simply creating great content and keeping it fresh.
Linkable million-dollar pages
I am now going to turn this study over to Garrett French. Garrett is the founder and chief link strategist of Citation Labs, a link-building agency and campaign incubator. He's developed multiple link-building tools, including the Link Prospector and the Broken Link Finder. He also co-wrote The Ultimate Guide to Link Building with Link Moses himself, Eric Ward. Garrett and his team lead monthly webinars on enterprise content strategy and promotion from the Citation Labs Blog.
Only 34% of the content studied has at least 1 link in OSE. That's right - there are tons of pages getting $1,000,000+ worth of organic search traffic yearly that have few if any external links. A lack of links does not necessarily demonstrate a lack of linkability, but I will say that overall these pages don't seem "designed" for linkability.
Before we get to individual examples of linkability though (they do exist in this set!) I'd like to outline some basics on how we evaluated these pages.
- At Citation Labs, we divide linkers into "curators" who collect URLs for a single existing resource page and "editors" who publish new topic pages. Tactically speaking, the curators support broken link building and "link request" efforts, while editors support PR and guest posting campaigns.
- We believe that it's primarily the linkers themselves who define a document's linkability - both by their decision or not to link and how many potential linkers there happen to be.
URLs Linkable to Curators
Linkable Document - Timberline Knolls
Drug addiction, a subcategory of mental health, is one of the single most linkable topics we've encountered in our work thus far. This URL provides clear and comprehensive information for concerned loved-ones of a potential heroin user. These concerned loved-ones are a "linker-valued audience."
To get a quick read on how many curators might be out there for this topic, search for this query heroin inurl:links.html. We use the inurl:links.html portion of the query to get a sense of volume. There's a ton out there for this document which makes it not only linkable but worthy of further promotion on its own.
Curators are - relatively speaking - quite rare. The existence of curators seems to be topically-driven and are especially prevalent across health and education.
Linkable Document - Wixon Jewelers
I would examine the potential for a broken link building campaign in the "birthstones" area for this URL. In addition, it appears (based on this query: birthstones inurl:links.html) that there are enough potential opportunities to support a request campaign as well.
Birthstones probably won't get curators linking quite like addiction will. That said, they remain embedded in our collective psyche and if a related URL happens to be dead this could be a great candidate for a linkable page.
URLs linkable to editors
Linkable Document - SMU Mustangs
I'm not a sportser, but this URL stood out in our analysis because it had 60+ root linking domains. This seems to be a hub for SMU's football team, complete with a calendar. Bloggers, sports journalists, opponents, local events websites, all of these folks should be interested in linking to and supporting this team. Businesses could consider starting a competitive football team to replicate this effort ;)
But seriously, one takeaway, especially for local, is supporting the beloved local sports teams and events.
Linkable Document - The Best Schools
At first pass, my strategy would be to promote via PR, ideally in conjunction with the ranked schools to help them get the most out of their top ranking. Secondly, I'd run a low-scale branded guest posting effort. Guest posting topics could cover "following dreams," "seizing the day," "increasing your income," "going back to school as a parent", etc. If you repackage the data for a linker-valued audience (Best Online Colleges for Seniors) you could potentially build out a link request campaign too.
Linkable Document - Top 10 Home Remedies
The title - "How to Get Rid of Pimples Fast" - makes this one a tough pitch to skin health curators. That said, I think it could be a fantastic citation opportunity in a guest posting campaign. Target blogs that are more lifestyle oriented - makeup blogs perhaps, dating advice blogs etc - and build out titles that are not necessarily directly related to pimples or blemishes themselves.
Here are a couple more in that same vein - they could work well as supporting citations in a guest posting effort:
StayGlam: Nail Designs for Short Nails
Hair Style On Point: Top 10 Short Men's Hairstyles in 2015
Most editors would not think twice about allowing those links to live so long as they fit topically and have potential appeal to the reading audience.
Linkability takeaways
The majority of these million dollar pages are not purely linkable, but many could support link building campaigns. Pay close attention to the link profile of the entire domain for link building campaign guidance - the ranking pages may not be there based on their individual link earnings.
Shareable million-dollar pages
So how do these million dollar content pieces actually perform in the very different context of social media?
We'll let the venerable Mark Traphagen, Senior Director of Online Marketing at
Stone Temple Consulting and
give us some insights on how this high performing content makes out in the world of social media. Mark is a world traveler, speaker, consultant and is
actually a Klout Top 10 Expert for SEO & Content Marketing, meaning he actually does know how to make this social stuff work.
Just as Garrett revealed above that million dollar content does not necessarily have to have a lot of external links (or even any at all), so I found that there is little-to-no correlation between the number of social shares and whether or not content will win Russ's million dollar prize.
45% of our sample group had no social shares at all (according to Buzzsumo) and 66% had fewer than 300 shares.
Of course, just like having a lot of good links "sure can't hurt," having a lot of social shares certainly increases the chances that your content will do well organically. In fact, the page with the highest number of social shares in the sample group (it had over 1 million) also has the lowest domain authority of the group (21). Moreover, 60% of the pages with 1000 or more social shares have a DA of 40 or less.
Now I'm not suggesting that this proves that the million dollar status of those pages was driven directly by their social popularity. In fact, I consider it unlikely that social popularity is a direct ranking factor at the present time. However, it is likely that wide exposure via social media increases the chances of activity that very likely does factor into Google's ranking algorithm.
Before I take a deeper look at the most-shared content, I have to share two interesting tidbits from my examination of the pages Russ sampled for this study:
- Facebook is as killer for this type of content as most people think it is. For those pages with at least 100 social shares, a whopping 92% had the vast majority of those shares occur via Facebook. For most of those, almost all the social sharing happened on Facebook.
- None of the pages that had zero social shares had visible social sharing buttons. To be fair, several of them were simply landing pages linking to other content, and thus not really shareable. But most of the rest have characteristics that typically make content more attractive to shares, yet they provided no easy opportunity for visitors to take that action.
The shareability winners
Let's examine the factors that most likely made the three most-shared pages in our sample set so shareable.
80 Nail Designs for Short Nails - 1 million shares
This stayglam.com page is almost embarrassingly easy to analyze, as Buzzsumo shows that all but about 800 of its 1 million+ shares came from Pinterest.
If there ever were a textbook example of "made for Pinterest," it's this page. The entirety of the content is 80 dazzling images of colorful and exotic nail designs, such as the following:
The images are fashion-centered, brightly-colored, and oriented toward a female audience, the perfect trifecta of Pinterest shareability.
Here's the kicker: those 1 million Pinterest shares happened in spite of the fact that the stayglam.com page has no social share buttons! This serves as clear proof that if your content is amazingly shareable, and in particular well-adapted for a particular social network, visitors will share it even if it isn't easy to do so.
It's probable, though, that the vast majority of those 1 million shares weren't made directly from the content page. The most likely scenario is that a few influential Pinterest users did the initial sharing, and then thousands upon thousands of other Pinterest users repined those shares.
How to Get Rid of Pimples Fast- 73,300 shares
People love to share "how to" content that they think will be helpful to their social connections. Why? Social psychology tells us that the feeling of being helpful to others conveys as much benefit to the giver as to the receivers, and often more.
A HubSpot study found that content with the word "how" in the title is among the most shared on Twitter.
Furthermore, this content piece speaks directly to a very common (and embarrassing) problem with quick, easy fixes, exactly what people in such a situation seek. The page also has several easy-to-understand infographics, which undoubtedly make it even more appealing to share. The Open Graph image tag is properly set so that the most appealing of those images appears in shares on networks like Facebook and Google+.
Finally, this piece of content, like the previous, exemplifies that highly-shareable content will be shared, even if the site itself does not make sharing easy. In this case, the page does have share buttons for Twitter and Facebook, but they are at the bottom of the page, and below ads and other navigation. Nevertheless, once the content found its way to Facebook (where almost all of its shares occurred), it took off.
Positive & Inspirational Life Quotes- 15,800 shares
Frankly, this page has very little going for it other than the one thing that probably earned it 6.3K shares on Facebook and another 1000 on Twitter. It is well-optimized for a very popular sharing category on both those networks: quotations.
According to a New York Times commissioned study, people share content to satisfy any of four psychological needs. Those needs are:
- Entertainment
- Self-definition
- Relationship building
- Self-fulfillment
Inspirational quotes fulfill at least 1, 2, and 4 of the above, and probably help contribute to #3. They are entertaining in that they fit the kind of light, easily-digested, feel good moments that many people turn to Facebook and Twitter for. Quotations also help us define ourselves to our tribe. They are a quick "tag" to aspirations that are likely shared by others in our social circles. Finally, quotes provide self-fulfillment, as sharing them makes us feel like we have contributed something positive to the world (and with very little effort!).
Out of our sample group, this was the only content that had a volume of Twitter shares worth mentioning. Most likely that was because a number of the quotations used a "click to tweet" feature, where a Twitter user can, with one click, share the quote to her Twitter stream. Even though the previous two examples show that highly-sharable content can get shared even without the site providing an easy way to do so, making that content one-click sharable can boost the share volume even higher.
Shareability takeaways
- Social shares are not necessary to achieving million dollar content status in search. However, in some cases having them may improve your content's chances in that regard.
- Content that meets the criteria of being highly shareable sometimes needs little or no boost from the publishing site itself, as long as enough visitors take the initiative to share it themselves. A recent Buzzsumo study published here on the Moz Blog found that "surprising, unexpected and entertaining images, quizzes and videos have the potential to go viral with high shares." However, the study showed that those content types typically earn few links, even if they are highly shared. This confirms Garrett's findings above.
- While making content easy to share (by providing easy-to-find share buttons, for example), while not necessary, can boost the number of overall shares, and/or get the content shared to other networks where an influencer hasn't done the work already.
- Despite all the negative press about how much Facebook has reduced the ability for brand content to get organic reach, it remains by far the most "viral-ready" social network. If your content can get a good toehold there by being shared by some influencers, Facebook can still provide organic reach magic. Of course, paid boosting of content can vastly accelerate the chances of that happening, and this study did not examine whether any of the content was supported with paid social advertising.
Overall takeaways
So what are the takeaways? What makes something million-dollar content? I think there are a few standouts...
- Go big and bold. You have to stand out from the crowd, and if you can't do that with your domain authority, you have to do it with your content.
- Stay relevant, both in freshness and thoroughness. Know what your user wants and deliver it.
- Some sites just get lucky, but other sites make their luck. There were certainly a number of pages that still seemed to rank inexplicably, with average content, few social shares, and even fewer links. Don't bank on that. Do the leg work and you too can create million dollar content.
Something I'd like to point out that you managed to capture in your 1st example but may not have noticed... The example page targets "mattress sizes" not "bed sizes". The fact that the page performs well for "bed sizes" is a prime example of Google Hummingbird at work. A=B for those keywords in that vertical.
Yep, if you notice there is a hummingbird graphic later on in that section. To be fair, though, the word "bed" occurs 33 times on that page ;-)
Hey Russ, Mark here speaking from Innovate.
I hope you don't mind but I for one think you forgot something to mention. According to your Feature #1 On Point: Content length isn't necessary long, although in many cases it was, as long as it is point-relevant to the question asked. I totally agree with this, but isn't it the readability of data/information that makes it stand-out the most?
For Sleep Train case, the audience can easily digest the information because of its simplicity and cleanliness - no unnecessary designs, no distractions.
Just out of curiosity, when you said content might not be king - then what might it be?
Thank you for your comments! I agree that readability of data/information is important, but I think at best those types of metrics are acquired by Google via user-engagement. I don't think Google can easily assess the "readability" of a graphic, or more specifically its usefulness to users. Instead, I think that content specificity really matters, which is why I used the description "on-point". The content is exhaustive but it is not excessively verbose. Another way to describe it is that the content is dense with related terms, rather than long and sparse.
My vote on what is king? Esse quam videri
Nice article Russ!
Content is very important for SEO. We have to do a content that is interesting and quality for our customers and call attention to continue receiving visits and get more. If the content is bad, our customers lose interest in our website and go looking for other sites.
But apart from good content must take into account many more things like keyword, spelling, text length, not too often repeat the keyword, etc.
Thank you for sharing this post.
Thanks for your comment. When I use the word "content", I include most of the things you are mentioning - such as keyword usage - but I think Google is using far more sophisticated techniques to get at the question "what is quality content" than raw metrics like the number of words in a document (text length).
As for social actions I think Google is able to determine those sectors that are more likely to be shared by users. Example: A web of recipes always have more social actions a web betting.
Thanks for the article and study. A greeting.
I think you are certainly correct here, although I am not convinced that Google is using any social metrics directly in their rankings algorithms. There is likely a natural relationship between the industry and social performance expectations, though, regardless of whether or not Google implemented it directly in their algorithm. A highly shared, highly social industry will be more competitive in that space, thus it will simply take more to stand out from the crowd so to speak.
Bonus tip:
Google:
273 most expensive Google keywords
The most expensive search is for car insurance quotes - more than $70.00 a click!
This list is a great way to find expensive words that get over 100,000 searches a month.
An early Christmas present for you guys.
wrong account
Mortirolo, for my argument on why I don't think it likely Google is using social activity as a direct ranking factor, see the link in my section of this post.
That being said, I think the most likely reason most ranking studies find highly shared and/or liked content on social correlated with higher search rankings is that much of that content has the other factors that Russ and Garrett enumerated here.
Hey Mark - I read your analysis with great interest... (though did skip Russ' part - wow he has "lots" to say ;)...
We (at CL) don't charge for "shares" so have never focused on social success or designing content to work well socially.
That said, I realized from reading your section that guest posting (non-scaled, audience-centric) would be my starting point tactic to build links to content that has already proven itself socially...
Before reading your section I would have passed these socially successful ops by completely as pages to design campaigns around.
I put Garrett's in the middle because most people just read the beginning and skim to the end.
Garrett, I also skipped over Russ's part, figuring it was just the introduction, and knowing that the real meat of a post is usually buried in the middle. ;-)
Yeah, what you picked up on there is one of our main tactics now, for ourselves and clients. Spend the time and effort to build what Rand Fishkin calls "10x content" (we call it anchor content) and then get guest post opportunities where we can write more extensively about one aspect of the anchor content. In such cases, a link back to the anchor piece on your own site is legit, as you're just referring people to more info on the same topic.
Hi Russ:
There is a small linking mistake which I observed while reading this post that the hyper link corresponding to the anchor text "Top 10 Home Remedies" is actually a broken link. So I think that you can correct it down. Thanks.
Thanks for the heads up! I have fixed it!
Good work @rjonesx!
Fantasitic Job Russ, et al. I've been doing data science with the SEMrush API for almost two years and it's fantastic to see you doing it with the same kind of SERP metrics. I don't think many people in search appreciate the importance of starting with a data set that like yours:
1. is looking at the "most popular" keywords for the most part, to get cut out industry/sector bias in results.
2. Has over 30mm keywords-- with all there metrics at its core.
Much of the work I'd like to do but don't have time to do is multivariate analysis with the same type of data-set as SERPscape (SEMrush). Compairing many to many domains, for example, shows you the content overlap and thus the key charactoristics of the group. I've done that and it's amazing what can be uncovered.
Can't wait to see more of your work using SERPscape w/ Moz data. Look out data scentist at Conductor and Search Metrics (who I have much respect for as well)!
Content is the best linkbuilder, if we have good content, the links and shares will boost! Thanks for the article!
Thank you for this article
Thanks!!
Now i can see in the details is virtue. it is clear that content is king, but to differentiate ourselves a good graphic designer can make the delights of our organic traffic. You can speak very well , but you also dress well . Board of girl for you guys .
Thanks @Russ
This is a great post! Definitely got me thinking of adding more elements to my contents efforts as I haven’t learned how to create info graphics myself. I know there are programs out there that help you put together a info graphic but as beginner what do you recommend for someone in the digital marketing and network marketing niche to create as a info graphic?
Regards:
Infographics are created from humans. And you need least one:
Once you have designer you need to show them other infographics to give some idea what are your goals or draw a sketch of your ig. Also you need to show him data your research and discuss how to position different elements in image.
Sound easy as 1-2-3 but isn't. Research can take few hours (5-10 or even more). Discussion with designer also take few hours. And design process will be time consuming. This dependent from designer and his experience in ig. Also some of elements there need to be drawn from scratch just to fit to ig design style.
Result - process for minimum week (2 or 3 TBH) and expensive. So no it's not a Silver Bullet solution.
Hey Ali,
I would be hesitant to make an infographic a primary strategy for developing long-term, successful evergreen content like that which we discuss above. Infographics did not feature prominently in any of the pieces of content we studied (although a handful had infographics on the page as part of the total strategy).
The biggest limitation of infographics is that they remove Google's primary data point for determining long and mid-tail rankings: textual content. The infographic both condenses content into short factual statements and, generally speaking, only includes them in the image itself, making it largely inaccessible to Googlebot.
Even using a textual transcript of the graphic is often insufficient because of the condensed nature of the text included (the purpose of the infographic is to convey information via graphics, not words), but Google needs that language to determine rankings for related terms.
This is not to say that infographics shouldn't be a part of your overall strategy - they certainly can be hugely helpful. However, they are more likely to succeed as short-term link building strategies than as your primary long-term content.
Thank you so much for your time and answer.. Now its totally clear..
You are right about infographic but what, if we use intrectgraphic *I probably just coined a term”. Interactive content satisfied both users and boots. We just have to play with some development stuff which unfortunately isn’t so easy.
You just need to move 1 step further and engage with developer to turn your infographic into intrectgraphic.
I think this is better, but still possibly insufficient. Most infographics attempt to condense content and let the graphs, data, etc. tell the story. Content needs to be somewhat verbose to capture all the related words and phrases.
Nicely written, To the point, Bold & Fresh Post :) For me Content is always a kings, As to get quality links we need quality content in some way.
Content is at the heart of today’s marketing strategies as businesses use websites and blogs to demonstrate their own expertise. Apart from, Google counts everything like, keywords, content length, relevant title or description, grammatical mistakes, visitor time, bounce rate, and absolutely social shares. If a content is really good quality, well optimized with quality links and relevant for visitor then i must say that will be effective for you and Google. Well covered article.
Hi Russ!
Hairstyleonpoint . com - I have analyzed this domain with MOZ, ahrefs, majestic thoroughly. The site was born November 2014 and rose very quickly in traffic throughout this year. How is it possible to go from zero to multi-million plus monthly unique visitors (99% organic search) in a short time? Would you do a more complete analysis on this domain or share some thoughts? I'm perplexed.
I noticed that an article on therighthairstyles.com / 20-cool-short-hairstyles-and-haircuts-for-boys-and-men/ shares backlinks with the hairstyleonpoint page you examined /top-10-short-mens-hairstyles-2015/
Both domains and URLs seem to have had similar quick million dollar rises in organic.
Would love a full analysis! :)
Awesome article Russ! I was especially thrilled to see it because I was the SEO responsible for the creation of that page on SleepTrain.com. A little backstory on the page for anyone who is interested:
The Mattress Size Chart page was actually a revamp of an existing page which only had about 100 words, one table chart and one image. While it was a decent performer as an organic landing page, user engagement was not so great. Most users bounced after visiting that page. My team and I assumed it was because they got the information they needed, but since assuming makes an *ss out of you and me, we wanted to do better with it. We wanted to keep them on the site longer and hopefully increase some metrics like pages/session and time on site. If we could get some micro-conversions out of it too, then that would be icing on the cake.
The goals in the revamp were twofold: (1) to rank better on more keywords (the page had been doing well on "mattress dimension" related keywords, but not on "mattress size" or "bed size" keywords) and (2) to meet all user needs/expectations for visitors coming to the page. The success of the latter was more important to us than the former. We wanted the page to be an informative end all to anyone who had questions about mattress sizes.
While I had a very clear search strategy from the start, equal credit must go to the Content Marketing Manager I worked with. She was very involved in developing copy, layout and working with our designers on presenting some very bland information in creative ways.
Within weeks of the revamp, the page's success in bringing in new organic traffic was astounding. I can't give exact numbers, but the amount of organic impressions and overall lift it brought was huge. I always like to credit the success of that page to both SEO and Content Strategy working hand in hand.
It also taught us a good lesson that sometimes you don't have to go far to find good content ideas. This one was already there, we just had to re-approach it from and angle of what our users wanted to see and combine it with a solid SEO foundation.
Great information on content analysis. My mind is buzzing right now with all of these useful tips! It is very interesting how some content can just have the natural strength to stand alone and flourish even without the help of tons of inbound links and sometimes not even the most thorough content. Content creation and marketing is definitely and ongoing art and science to be explored as I am learning from your blog and other informative blogs that I follow like webris https://webris.org/content-marketing/creation/ where I just finished reading about content creation before landing here. Personally, I have found that I create the best content when I just let my creative juices flow without worrying about metrics. Thanks again for sharing your insight. Will definitely share this post and revisit soon!
Thank you for this awesome article. I was able to get some great information that I didn't know and really appreciate.
Good work man!
Hi Russ nice post.
Very well written! Thanks for sharing. Learned a lot.
So interesting, thanks a lot
But what about content theft? How can you prevent or reduce it? And what to do when it happens?
Great article, Russ. Thank you for sharing your insight with the community!
Yes thing that is very important for you to publish quality content, not so much, because as we all know Google already I miss the amount, now based more on quality. I feel very good your contribution.
Great post Russ.
I think the key is a good title, good content and good use of keywords.
It is also very important to constantly update our content.
About social networks, it seems to me that all contribute and are more important than many think.
I have a couple of questions in regards to whether or not doing certain things would hurt SEO performance.
(1) I've been running an experiment where, instead of loading a page full of keywords that are hyperlinked, I create HTML tables and put the (hyperlinked) key phrases in each cell <td>. Will this hurt SEO? Is it looked at in the same way (as spammy linking)?
(2) I've learned that almost every blog and/or website has a self searching feature. It usually involves taking ANY phrase and separating the words with the "+" symbol. It wold look something like this >> https://www.example.com/apps/search?q=key+word –– or here is an example of a blogger/blogspot search link –– https://maktownnews.blogspot.com/search?q=Majestic+Instrumentals –– so my theory is that, if I can have people click a link... that leads to search the same site they are already viewing it creates a loop that leads back to the same post they are already reading and/or any post with that keyword (much like the 'labels' or 'tags' feature on blogs but it's unrestricted to any certain number of tags) –– is this good for SEO or bad?
Great post with really good advice and content strategy tips. The look at Sleep Train's content and how they presented it in a useable, informative way to their customers (and in a number of formats) was really interesting to see. Got me thinking that presenting content in more than one way (particularly informative content) will make it more valuable to readers, who each have their own way of taking in information, which could be visual/textual/etc.
Thanks Rush. I doubt I have nothing to say that will add value to your post. Anyway, Thank you again. :)
Good Article Russ. And that's why we more focus on the ever green content. Make your content clean, seo friendly with attractive images or infographics and you'll get the reward at last.
Great read. Love the Pinterest example. Will have to use this for my clients for sure. Thanks again Russ.
Great article
Images are always a very important part of content. In a time when human attention spans are shrinking you need to be creative to grab as much attention as you can
Thanks for the insightful research Russ. A content doesn't necessarily be in text or an infographic form. A content can be in any way whether it's video, podcast, ebook or a collection of some interesting data in the graphical form (not lengthy as infographics) but they should be based on user's demand/need.
By your research, I can conclude that we need to change our mindset and the way we see things and this should reflect in the content we are developing.
Seriously great points to consider, indirectly it giving me a different approach to identify and enhance traffic value of individual blogs, thanks
Hi Russ,
But without changing content many website since 4-5 years ranking on top of SERP's from "SEO SERVICE" keywords what is the reason behind it linkbuilding?
Great article, thanks for sharing.
I discovered the Moz blog and i can´t stop reading.
Thanks for all the information
Thank you for this. This is well thought-out and evidenced, and extremely helpful!
Great details. I've been googling (like almost everyday) and keeping tabs for some secret recipe/s in writing a content that gives readers a "THIS IS IT!" kind of comment. And overall, I can say it's all about consistency and giving value -- not so secret after all. Thanks for your insights, I have something new to apply.
Great read mate! some good points in here. I think we all need to realise that content means so much more these days than just text on a page... it is more 'the context in how things are said, presented or created" When I do SEO or content marketing my rule is this. Don't think like an SEO, don't think like a content marketer. Think like the person reading about my topic.
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