A few weeks ago, a post was published entitled The SEO Myth of Going Viral. It referenced 8 pieces of content across 4 different sites that went viral and, most importantly for SEO, gained hundreds of linking root domains. I was the creative director on a lot of those campaigns while working as the VP of Creative at Distilled. Today, I’d like to add some important context and detail to the original post.
I actually agree with much of what it said. However, it's based on the assumption that one big viral piece of content would result in a visible jump in rankings across the domain within about 3 months of the content being released. There are a few challenges with this as a basis for measuring success.
I wouldn’t advise setting your hopes on one big viral hit boosting your rankings across the domain. Not by itself. However, if that viral hit is part of ongoing link building efforts in which you build lots of links to lots of pieces of content, you can begin to see an upwards trend.
"Trend" is the important word here. If you’re looking for a dramatic step or jump as a direct result of one piece of viral content, this could cause you to overlook a positive trend in the right direction, and even tempt you to conclude that this form of content-based link building doesn’t work.
With regards to this type of link building and its impact on domain-wide rankings, I’d like to focus on the follow 4 points:
- How success really looks
- Why success looks like it does
- Other factors you need to consider
- How we can improve our approach
What successful link building really looks like
Simply Business was held up in the SEO myth post as an example of this kind of link building not working. I would argue the opposite, holding it up as an example of it working. So how can this be?
I believe it stems from a misunderstanding of what success looks like.
The post highlighted three of the most successful pieces of content Distilled created for Simply Business. However, focusing on those three pieces of content doesn’t provide the full picture. We didn’t make just three pieces of content; we made twenty-one. Here are the results of those pieces:
Note: Data missing for the first two pieces of content
That’s links from 1466 domains built to 19 pieces of content over a period of 3 years.
The myth in question is as follows:
Building lots of links to one piece of content will result in a jump in domain-wide rankings within a reasonable timeframe, e.g. 3 months.
Though this wasn’t the hypothesis explicitly stated at the start of the post, it was later clarified in a comment. However, that’s not necessarily how this works.
An accurate description of what works would be:
Building lots of links to lots of pieces of content sustainably, while taking other important factors into consideration, can result in an increase in domain-wide rankings over time.
To hold up, the myth required a directly attributable jump in rankings and organic traffic within approximately 3 months of the release of each piece of content. So where was the bump? The anticipated reward for all those links?
No. The movement we’re looking for is here:
Not a jump, but a general trend. Up and to the right.
Below is a SEMRush graph from the original post, showing estimated organic traffic to the Simply Business site:
At first glance, the graph between 2012 and 2014 might look unremarkable, but that’s because the four large spikes on the right-hand side push the rest of the chart down, creating a flattening effect. There's actually a 170% rise in traffic from June 2012 to June 2014. To see that more clearly, here’s the same data (up to June 2014) on a different scale:
Paints quite a different picture, don’t you think?
Okay, but what did this do for the company? Did they see an increase in rankings for valuable terms, or just terms related to the content itself?
Over the duration of these link building campaigns, Simply Business saw their most important keywords ("professional indemnity insurance" and "public liability insurance") move from positions 3 to 1 and 3 to 2, respectively. While writing this post, I contacted Jasper Martens, former Head of Marketing and Communications at Simply Business, now VP of Marketing at PensionBee. Jasper told me:
"A position change from 3 to 1 on our top keyword meant a 15% increase in sales."
That translates to money. A serious amount of it!
Simply Business also saw ranking improvements for other commercial terms, too. Here’s a small sample:
Note: This data was taken from a third-party tool, Sistrix. Data from third-party tools, as used both in this post and the original post, should be taken with a grain of salt. They don’t provide a totally accurate picture, but they can give you some indication of the direction of movement.
I notice Simply Business still ranks #1 today for some of their top commercial keywords, such as "professional indemnity insurance." That’s pretty incredible in a market filled with some seriously big players, household UK names with familiar TV ads and much bigger budgets.
Why success looks like it does
I remember the first time I was responsible for a piece of content going viral. The social shares, traffic, and links were rolling in. This was it! Link building nirvana! I was sitting back waiting for the rankings, organic traffic, and revenue to follow.
That day didn’t come.
I was gutted. I felt robbed!
I’ve come to terms with it now. But at the time, it was a blow.
I assume most SEOs know it doesn’t work that way. But maybe they don’t. Maybe there’s an assumption that one big burst in links will result in a jump in rankings, as discussed in the original post. That’s the myth it was seeking to dispel. I get it. I’ve been there, too.
It doesn’t necessarily work that way. And, actually, it makes sense that it doesn’t.
- In two of the examples, the sites in question had one big viral hit, gaining hundreds of linking root domains, but this on its own didn’t result in a boost in domain-wide rankings. That’s true.
- Google would have pretty volatile search results if every time someone had a viral hit, they jumped up in the rankings for all their head terms.
- But if a site continues to build lots of links regularly over time, like Simply Business did, Google might want that site to be weighted more favorably and worthy of ranking higher.
The Google algorithm is an incredibly complex equation. It’s tempting to think that you put links in and you get rankings out, and a big jump in one will correspond to a big jump in the other. But the math involved is far more complicated than that. It’s not that linear.
Other factors to consider
Link building alone won’t improve your rankings.
There are a number of other influential factors at play. At a high level, these include:
- A variety of on-site (and technical) SEO factors
- Algorithmic updates and penalties
- Changes to the SERPs, like the knowledge box and position of paid results
- Competitor activity
I’m not going to go into great detail here, but I wanted to mention that you need to consider these factors and more when reviewing the impact of link building on a site's rankings.
Below is the graph from SearchMetrics for Concert Hotels, also via the original post. This is another site to which Distilled built a high volume of links.
As you can possibly tell from the large drop before Distilled started working with Concert Hotels, the site was suffering from an algorithmic penalty. We proceeded under the hypothesis that building high-quality links, alongside other on-site activity, would be important in the site’s recovery.
However, after three or four large link building successes without any corresponding uplift, we recommended to the client that we stop building links and shift all resources to focus on other activities.
As you’ll see at the end of the chart, there appears to be some positive movement happening. If and when the site fully recovers, we’ll never be able to tell exactly what contribution, if any, link building made to the site’s eventual rankings.
You can’t take the above as proof that link building doesn’t work. You have to consider the other factors that might be affecting a site’s performance.
How can we improve our approach?
As I mentioned at the start of this post, I actually agree with a lot of the points raised in the original post. In particular, there were some strong points made about the topical relevance of the content you create and the way in which the content sits within the site architecture.
Ideally, the content you create to gain links would be:
- Topically relevant to what you do
- Integrated into the site architecture to distribute link equity
- Valuable in its own right (even if it weren’t for links and SEO)
This can be a challenge, though, especially in certain industries, and you might not hit the sweet spot every time.
But let’s look at them in turn.
Topical relevance
If you can create a piece of content that gains links and is closely relevant to your product and what you do for customers, that’s great. That’s the ideal.
To give you an example of this, Distilled created a career aptitude test for Rasmussen, a career-focused college in America. This page earned links from 156 linking root domains (according to the Majestic Historic Index), and the site continues to rank well and drive relevant search traffic to the site.
Another example would be Moz’s own Search Engine Ranking Factors. Building lots of links to that page will certainly drive relevant and valuable traffic to the Moz site, as well as contributing to the overall strength of the domain.
However, your content doesn’t have to be about your product, as long as it’s relevant to your audience. In the case of Simply Business, the core audience (small business owners) doesn’t care about insurance as much as it cares about growing its businesses. That’s why we created several guides to small business marketing, which also gained lots of links.
As Jasper Martens explains:
“Before I left Simply Business, the guides we created attracted 15,000 unique visits a month with a healthy CTR to sign-up and sales. It was very effective to move prospects down the funnel and make them sales-ready. It also attracted a lot of small business owners not looking for insurance right now.”
Integrating the content into the site architecture
Distilled often places content outside the main architecture of the site. I’ll accept this isn’t optimal, but just for context, let me explain the reasons behind it:
- It creates a more immersive and compelling experience. Consider how impactful New York Times’ Snowfall would have been if it had to sit inside the normal page layout.
- It prevents conflicts between the site’s code and the interactive content’s code. This can be particularly useful for organizations that have restrictive development cycles, making live edits on the site difficult to negotiate. It also helps reduce the time, cost, and frustration on both the client-side and agency-side.
- It looks less branded. If a page looks too commercial, it can deter publishers from linking.
While it worked for Simply Business, it would make sense, where you can, to pull these things into the normal site architecture to help distribute link equity further.
Content that's valuable in its own right (even if it weren't for links and SEO)
Google is always changing. What’s working now and what's worked in the past won’t necessarily continue to be the case. The most future-proof way you can build links to your site is via activity that’s valuable in its own right — activities like PR, branding, and growing your audience online.
So where do we go from here?
Link building via content marketing campaigns can still make a positive impact to domain-wide rankings. However, it’s important to enter any link building campaign with realistic expectations. The results might not be as direct and immediate as you might hope.
You need to be in it for the long haul, and build links to a number of pieces of content over time before you’ll really see results. When looking for results, focus on overall trends, not month-to-month movements.
Remember that link building alone won’t solve your SEO. You need to make sure you take other on-site, technical, and algorithmic factors into consideration.
It’s always worth refining the way you’re building links. The closer the topics are aligned with your product or core audience’s interests, the more the content is integrated into your site’s architecture, and the more the content you’re creating is valuable for reasons beyond SEO, the better.
It’s not easy to manage that every time, but if you can, you’ll be in a good position to sustainably build links and improve your site’s rankings over time.
Wonderful article Dude! Lots of ideas spinning in my head. Today link building is not just dropping link blindly on sites, lots of things changed over past years and I am trying to be regularly updated with trends.
So very true James William, it no more about trying to build links with anything and everything. Only relevant links are what really matters now.
I'm also working on a response to the viral myth post -- you beat me to it with this fantastic write up, Mark! Fortunately there's still much to discuss around this topic and I'll be sharing our client examples in a future post. :)
We have plenty of evidence that viral hits impact organic performance directly. This screenshot is just one of a variety of examples that show how viral content has helped spur organic growth for Fractl's clients. You can see a stagnant growth trajectory, which changed shortly after a very viral win for the client.
There's certainly work that could be done to suss out in which situations a viral hit will have the MOST impact, and it's definitely possible that there are situations where the content is far too tangential, or the inbound links too irrelevant, or perhaps just not of a high enough volume to make a noticeable impact.
With that said, creating valuable content that has the potential to also earn high authority links is still a worthwhile endeavor. Used consistently in conjunction with other SEO best practices and a robust on-site content strategy, you'll have a formula for long-term success.
Thanks, Kerry. I'll be very interested in reading your post when it comes out :)
Ditto, excited about your upcoming article Kerry!
Hi Mark Johnstone,
Content is always the king. In my experience Responsive design, speed (and onsite factors) with relevant content is much good.
Well I have some questions:
1. Those rankings improved for same targeted landing pages?
2. 2012 to 2015 is a huge time, that sounds bad to me?
thank you!
I love all of the examples Mark! Thank you for sharing. That NYT example is particular cool. Awesome development work.
I've found that sometimes the toughest thing about the "slow and steady" approach is getting client buy-in. Sometimes we try to sell a mini audit up front so that we can get some quick wins to earn more trust before launching our content marketing campaign, especially if the client has a limited understanding of SEO. It all depends on the relationship and the quality of their website.
Once in a while we attempt some "big swings" at more impactful content pieces, often when we can create some timeliness around it. But like everyone, sometimes we miss. So it goes. Consistency is key.
Hi Mark, thanks a lot for this post! I just read The SEO Myth of Going Viral today, and was quite depressed by the fact that viral content campaigns seem to not be worth the efforts. But you cheered me up by explaining what actually needs to be done to get the desired results.
My question is, when you're saying that you need to build a substantial amount of links to your site, do you mean that all these links will be to different viral content pages or do I need to try and build them to the home page?
I'll appreciate your answer.
Thanks,
Stacey.
There isn't really an exact answer to this question. Ultimately, it's important to build links to the domain. If you have a natural method for continuing to build lots of high quality editorially-given links to the homepage, that will be very valuable. However, often you need to create something to generate those links, which could be content but it could be other things (product launches, press releases etc), so those links might go to the content in question and not the homepage.
Thanks, Mark.
If you have a natural method for continuing to build lots of high quality editorially-given links to the homepage, that will be very valuable.
Do you know any examples?
Because when I did outreach for my infographics, I specifically asked the bloggers to link to my home page, which of course doesn't look natural at all.
I agree that using outreach to build links to your homepage will be difficult to manage in a natural way, unless your company as a whole is particularly editorially interesting.
One example of an alternative method could be positioning your company as an expert for media sources - that way when they reach out to comment from you for articles or news pieces, you will get a mention which may also be a link. Of course, this is difficult, expensive and unreliable - which is exactly what Google wants.
I wasn't referring to anything in particular. I just meant if you have a way of building it to the homepage, then sure, go for that, but often you'll have to give them a reason to link, hence creating content.
In my experience working with content, you will always end up with a mix of links. Some journalists will link to the page where the content has been placed, others will link to the homepage, others will do both. So the wider the reach > the larger the number of features > the more chances you'll get links back to the homepage in the mix.
That is to say getting links naturally. That's right but you need more links to get good results
Stacey, it's not about quantity at all. For my new site I focused on writing articles for well known business titles. Just those and nothing else. I got maybe 20-30 links but within weeks those links had propelled my site to #1 - #3 for some fairly competitive terms.
I have to say that this post really contributes to the "viral content" post that was before. I think that too many SEO's hope that one piece of content can generate massive benefits when in reality it is a task that must flow or roll with the punches that the search engines give us. In other words and explained very well here creating content that will be valuable to your audience and shared naturally will not only help with the authority of a site but also help boost overall rankings as long as all factors have been taking into consideration.
There is no one shot and done with SEO but instead its the technical, on-page, and site structure factors that make it all work right in my point of view. Really amazing read here thanks for the contribution to the community and overall insight to various examples you gave. Something we can all grow from for sure.
Nice read Mark, thanks for sharing your insider thoughts. Getting your perspective on the success of these campaigns is fascinating.
The issue for many I feel is not being able to say big piece of content which earns a bucket of links offers ranking boost within X time frame makes convincing a client/boss to invest in the high-quality content experiences discussed here difficult. People love to be able to say do A, and B will follow. But being realistic about the complications & subtleties of Google's algo doesn't allow for this.
When I've worked out how to convince everyone to invest in content for at least a year to see gradual improvement, I'll let you all know...
That's why the note on topical relevance is key for me. By creating stuff that's audience helpful, you can put paid activities towards it, have the email team see it as a resource to push, get out on social etc.
That way, the content can start earning it's keep by getting traffic and conversions immediately. This keeps folks happy while the content gradually impacts the overall authority/visibility (pick your own industry term of choice). It also gives you a chance to rank for the related keyword topic in question, earning smaller, but all helpful organic traffic.
"Patience, grasshopper," as the saying goes. It takes time for the links to build, for SEs to crawl and index those links and for that to eventually feed through to the algo ranking of your site. But you've done a great job of explaining why link builders shouldn't expect immediate SERP gains from viral campaigns. Thanks.
From where webmaster will add link , everyone started using "nofollow" for links , even real and useful links are added with nofollow tag, google says content is king , now even "HOW TO" articles are 1000 to 2000 words and users started ignoring this and using youtube for how to stuff .
Its not easy to build link especially for those who are beginners , i have seen many sites who are very valuable for users are punished by google because of low content in there website even when there PA DA is very high , people are linking those article with nofollow tag , now in this case how they will earn backlinks . i don't think linkbuilding is helpful , its only helping in indexing but not ranking.
If the type of sites you are approaching are using nofollow then, sorry, but you're chasing the wrong type of sites. Try creating genuinely useful articles for industry publications, well known journals in your country, proper news websites... instead of chasing those blogs that advertise for guest posters or chasing other "cheap and easy" links like links in comments!
The phrase "large link building success" is made up of four links - why? :)
Link building serves 2 purposes. Sites gets visibility from search engines & from users as link exposure, even if they don't click they can see brand name or by hovering over the link.
Great Write up! Link building strategy is key for reaching SEO success. It takes time for the links to build, to crawl and index those links and for that to eventually feed through to the algorithm ranking of your site.
Very useful, because it clarifies an important point of inbound marketing and link building in general: you can not hope to have relevant results without investing a constant commitment and sufficient resources. The single campaign viral marketing then only produce peak traffic?
The Italian audience can read the Italian translation of this great post at ideawebitalia.it
I recently launched a business ideas blog. Seeing that this niche is really competitive, I'm planning to start building backlinks from high PR sites. Do you know if links from article directories still work? What is the best tool for evaluating the authority and trust score of a page before building link on it?
Hey Mark,
With SEO changing rapidly, it's save to say links are better created through valuable content and target correlation to your industry or niche. Based on research I have done over the past 3 years, I also found out the one of the sites I created with 38 inbound links, ranked higher in search for my keywords - while the competition with over 230 inbound links was no where in site. As I mentioned before, link building should be focused on your industry proxies in order to see value.
Nice write up. I run a small business that we launched in October. I'm trying to build a backlink profile, and it really seems to me the only sustainable way to improve rankings is by creating awesome content people want to share with their readers.
I've often seen a short term bump from an increase in links but I much prefer to see steady growth before I start to create the kind of content that I think will generate a lot of links. This is a much more sustainable approach, plus it puts things in content.
I do agree with your article of concentrating on-site, technical, and algorithmic factors for improving SEO Results. Thanks for sharing the most valuable article.
@Mark,
Might be off topic, but related to backlinks. My question is regarding paid backlinking esp. webmasters doing through paid guest posts (for branded and non branded keywords), is it good practice? any harm or penalty?
Thanks in advance (Y)
No it is still in debate whether paid linking is right practice or not as startups don't get links directly they need to get from some source at the first and they are mostly paid so in my thinking if paid links are some recognizable domains it do not harm
[link removed by editor]
I would suggest to not go for it.
The overall pracitce is not good. But there will certainly be valid exceptions to the rule, where paying for a media spot is acceptable practice. It comes down to the quality of the media spot.
Hey Mark, a good addition to the conversation!
Here are my thoughts, as discussed previously:
- the Simply Business growth you're talking about happened over 3 years of time, within which time, presumably, there's been a lot of SEO, other than content marketing, done to contribute to / fuel the growth. If the growth were due to content marketing, it's strange that their 3 year SEO growth has been acquired through 2 very distinct step ups and that these would happen - 3 months and 5 months after the significant content marketing successes that preceded them. The last of the big pieces (and actually all of the #15 to #19 combined) never caused any positive effect on the graph, the next step up bump was 12 months after it.
- as you said yourself, Concert Hotels did not benefit from content marketing. Fair point, that this example is most relevant to people suffering from other SEO ills, but it's still a cautionary tale. Conversely, Amplifon did not seem to be and JustPark wasn't under Google penalties when their link windfalls happened.
More generally, "Building lots of links to lots of pieces of content sustainably, while taking other important factors into consideration, can result in an increase in domain-wide rankings over time." - this could be true! But as far as hypothesis go, this one is not very scientific as it is unprovable (a hundred other SEO factors could cause ranking improvement over the long term) and unfalsifiable (over the long run other SEO factors can be blamed for the lack of "increase in domain-wide rankings"). I am not saying that people should not be doing content marketing, but rather that if anyone does they have to be clear that there is no data showing a clear positive effect of this to SEO.
Tomas, so if content marketing doesn't have that much of an impact on SEO, what do you advise doing? What should be the percentage of content marketing in the whole mix of SEO efforts?
Hey Stacey, that's a very hard question and really depends on the circumstances of the specific company.
I think Coca-Cola should be doing content marketing, tangential or not, as the PR / Social value they'd get from it will almost certainly be worth the tiny fraction of their overall marketing budget that they would end up spending.
In contrast, I think, a company with an SEO budget of tens or low hundreds of thousands, would probably be better prioritising technical SEO and other kinds of link building that are aimed at acquiring links to the homepage or the "product" section of their website, ahead of the kind of content marketing we're discussing here.
Thank you for clarifying, Tomas, one more question from me: what would be some examples of other kinds of link building that are aimed at acquiring links to the homepage or the "product" section of their website?
Sorry for being so meticulous, but this topic is really important for me.
Good question Stacey and I am also interested to hear Tomas answer it. I fear that without using content as a way to earn real links, then we are stuck with guest posting or paying for links which we all know can have very negative consequences when it comes to search visibility.
Much like the question of prioritisation of SEO activities, the types of link building that could drive links to the homepage / product sections of a given website depend on the nature and the industry of the website. PR and relationship based link building and link reclamation activities work fairly universally. Though the holy grail is really to identify strengths / USPs of your product or website and look for ways to get links promoting some part of your offering from relevant sites, for example, Majestic & SEMRush get the kinds of links that Google really want to use in its algorithm from people putting together SEO guides and SEO resource lists, Codecademy earns relevant links from articles talking about ways to learn programming and Bose get links from people raving about their sound systems.
The problem is that the companies you mentioned don't need link building.
How would you approach the vast majority of businesses who are not brands, don't have an active relevant audience and yet still want to beat their competitors in the SERPs?
I believe one thing worth considering is targeting Google schema, by using the schema markup - you can find some data about it on the web. However, to get those you already need to be in good position.
Fair point, Bose wasn't a great example as they likely built their brand through traditional / above-the-line marketing and now have an easier way with link building. The reason I included it was to show a commercial product which will be getting lots of links because of its exceptional quality.
The other examples still stand, as Majestic, SEMRush and Codecademy all started as unknown companies and have built themselves up organically because of their great products which helped with their PR, community work and ultimately the kinds of links that Google wants to take into account.
I'll try to guess the real question behind your and a few other comments here - what if a client / employer is paying to get to the top of Google and they are not the, objectively, best result?
Well, in this case getting strong natural signals will be extremely hard and you will likely have to do some things on the grey-hat spectrum. In the long run, though, Google will get smarter and a company with, e.g. the 10-th best online t-shirt shop will gravitate down its appropriate ranking position irrespective of what tangential tricks their SEO tries to pull.
I'd like to take this opportunity to suggest a new definition for white-hat SEO - SEO activities aimed at helping Google rank a website in it's, objectively, appropriate position in SERPs.
I agree with Danny on this one. For example, a group of young programmers start an online courses website. Even if they offer something uniquely different from Codeacademy, it'll be hard for them to acquire links the way Codeacademy does. So yes, they will have to start with a bit of paid links, a bit of commenting and guest posting. And content marketing will be the least risky way here, if they want to avoid penalties. Do you agree with this?
Sorry Tomas, I'm 1 of the thumbs down but I thumbed down by accident. I just wanted to see who had voted negatively
:))) did you find out?
I've upvoted all your comments in this thread. Genuinely don't understand why people are downvoting you here.
Much love Tom! :)
One big jump in links will not necessarily result in one big jump in rankings within a set timeframe. Your analysis of the situation is based on that assumption. The Google algorithm is far from linear.
You have to look at the correlation. It’s true, it’s not causation, but in an uncontrolled, real-world environment, that’s what you get to work with. Real-life data is often messier than you’d like. As you say, you have to then consider what other activities might also be responsible (and correlated) with the increase. The client and agency were aware of the other activity going on with the site at the time, and it does not match up with your assumption that the results must have been due to other SEO activity.
I agree with you about the other 3 examples - one big viral hit doesn’t result in a jump in rankings, and neither, as it turns out, will link-building alone pull you out of a penalty. So these are separate cases, and are not comparable with the Simply Business example.
With a lot of SEO activity, not just link-building, you don’t always get a crystal clear ‘we did this’ followed by a really obvious and directly attributable jump in rankings. If you manage to discover a bunch of pages that were hidden from the index that you can get indexed, for example, you could see something like that. But in other situations, the results are a lot less clear-cut than that. I’m sure you must have experienced this.
In the Simply Business example, you appear to be reaching your conclusion based on one SearchMetrics graph and the assumption that it must have been other activity that caused the rise.
@Mark, just to be clear, if the conclusion that you referred to was - "content marketing could have positive effects on SEO, but SimplyBusiness data is not a valid stand-alone verification of it" - then, yes, I am reading that from the SearchMetrics & SEMRush graphs for SimplyBusiness.
On the other hand, my personal opinion that tangential content marketing is by now all but ignored by Google (because building a piece on the Tech Company Acquisitions does not make one a better provider of, nor a more relevant result for "business insurance") is based on:
- personal experience of the Emergency Stop Game and 10+ other smaller content marketing pieces I've launched at JustPark and Rightmove,
- the trend among all 4 examples I covered in the article,
- the fact that SimplyBusiness have not released a new content marketing piece since August 2015,
- and the lack of positive case studies published by the peers
None of the above can stand up on their own, but they're enough for me to move the investment away from this kind of SEO to other avenues.
Hi Tomas.
I think you're absolutely right about case studies. We (Distilled and its peers) need to get better at this, and hopefully you'll see more of it from us in the future. There's already a few in the works including the one I shared a graph from with you in the comments of your post. I think you're also right to say that "tangential" content is probably something Google is or has been moving away from over time, and Mark would probably agree.
You're also right to say that the Simply Business case doesn't prove that the viral content for SEO is effective, and Mark is right to say that the examples you cite do not prove it is ineffective. I can't imagine a case study that would completely prove it either way, but it all comes down to correlations and available alternative theories to explain the evidence that we see. As do most things in marketing, really.
It's also worth noting in cases like RightMove that you wouldn't expect even the most successful linkbuilding piece to have a visible effect - it would still be a drop in the ocean for that domain, which ranks a very stable first or second for most of its key terms. In their case, content is likely a defensive and/or branding play anyway. The cases where I would be most comfortable recommending campaigns like the Simply Business example and predicting visible results would be weaker or newer sites that want to rapidly catch up in a competitive space. Simply Business was an example of this, and so are other sites where I've seen more obvious correlations.
In other cases, I'd be more likely to recommend either more traditional PR plays (that may also result in links) or content strategies that look more like what Distilled and Moz do with their industry-centric content.
- Tom
Hey Tom, good points, as always! A few thoughts back:
- I agree that proving SEO theories is hard (though I, as most SEOs have seen a number of convincing cause-effect cases of technical SEO and targeted link building; and we have a number of controlled experiments, like IMEC Lab page-level link building test, helping us), but disproving them is nigh on impossible, especially if one allows for an indefinite delay of the effects. This is part of the reason why there are so many myths in the SEO field... I assume I'm not the only one that's been asked "whether buying PPC (directly) boosts your organic rankings (because Google's wants to reward paying them)?" :)
- It is indeed not very surprising that Rightmove didn't see a jump in search rankings alongside their content marketing link gains. That's why I had hope for content marketing when I moved to JustPark. 8 out of the 10+ pieces I referred to were done at JustPark whose link profile more than doubled on the back of them, so I did expect a clear reaction in money term rankings and that never came through.
In all fairness, I do expect that more convincing (non-anonymous) case studies of link windfalls causing SEO gains will turn up. However, taking into account the 4 cases I looked at and a number of people publicly and privately corroborating the lack of results from (tangential) content marketing, I will, firstly, be looking for reasons why the yet-to-be-published examples have behaved differently from the rest ("new sites" could be one of them).
A good example of this is the Stone Temple case study where a couple of on-topic articles went viral, got lots of links and immediately boosted overall rankings of all of their blog. That's a fairly distinctive case study, though, and raises a number of convincing hypotheses of why the SEO response was so drastic.
Great (and may I say very civilized) debate with strong arguments on both sides. Tomas I think you've achieved your aim of sparking a conversation and critical evaluation of content marketing (and well done Mark for taking the time for an excellent rebuttal - I expect you both to be an "SEO Mythbusters" double act on the conference circuit before too long!). Disclaimer: I've worked directly with Tomas before so might hold a slightly biased opinion. It's hard to pick the meat from the bones on the assessment of success from the metrics given on both sides. @Tomas, I think "myth" is probably too strong a word as it implies a false belief, but I guess you knew this already and went for the clickbait/attention grabbing headline anyway :)
I do agree with your core message that virality and links by themselves have no likely impact on SEO. Also share the consensus that you and Mark seem to have on the need for topical relevance, site integration and genuine usefulness to the target demographic of the site. Even if you're not aligned on the specific case studies highlighted across the two posts, I think it's been great work on both sides (and good to see the moz community continuing to self-evaluate on established practices).
One (throwaway) comment on the metrics (as I know its not realistic to share in the public space): I would love to see LRD metrics discarded entirely and replaced with metrics that reflect the consensus topics, e.g. visitors reached, % of content consumed (time on page/scroll depth), % of new visitors reached who return within X weeks, maybe even social shares. They'd keep the focus where it should be (on the customer), should be much easier to evaluate/benchmark the jobs being done across different content pieces, and I'd bet money they correlate better with rankings than LRD's. I'd imagine case studies like these would also be more palatable and understandable for clients too.
Thanks guys
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Link Building has got lot to do with patience, wisdom and consistency. A great article. Thanks.