The main driver behind this, of course, is the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, which have changed the way people find and consume information online. Instead of typing keywords into a search engine, users are now asking their favorite AI chatbot for an answer.

For marketers, this means just making sure your brand is at the top of SERPs is no longer enough. You also want your content represented in AI Overviews or cited in AI-generated answers when users ask related questions.

On its own, good old-fashioned SEO is no longer sufficient for discoverability. You also need to mix in some generative engine optimization (GEO) and answer engine optimization (AEO).

Read on for a breakdown of what these terms mean and how they differ from basic SEO.

Back to Basics: What Is SEO?

At its core, SEO is the process of improving a website so it ranks higher in organic search engine results pages (SERPs). Everyone who’s had a brush with digital marketing knows SEO is not a set-it-and-forget-it kind of situation.

Search algorithms evolve constantly, but the core components of SEO have remained fairly consistent. Here are a few of them:

• Technical SEO: Makes sure your site is crawlable, fast, mobile-friendly, and secure.
• Content optimization: Aligns on-page content with user intent and relevant keywords.
• On-page SEO: Improves readability, structure, and overall relevance.
• Backlinks: Earns high-quality inbound links from reputable sources to strengthen your site’s credibility and domain authority.

You can confidently say that most successful websites dominating SERPs right now have been built using smart SEO strategies.

Let’s take NerdWallet as an example. The website made masterful use of SEO techniques to become an authority in financial content. As a result, many relevant inquiries will lead users to one of its pages.

Years of evolving strategies and tools have helped many brands and publishers climb the ranks in similar ways, from simple keyword research tools that help uncover audience intent to more complex platforms like Seobility that offer comprehensive site audits and optimization checks.

Is SEO Dead?

Now that LLMs are wreaking havoc on search habits, does this mean SEO doesn’t matter anymore?

In reality, things started to change a while back. Younger generations, starting with Gen Z, are not big fans of Google Search. Years ago, they started using social media like TikTok or voice assistants like Alexa to find information. LLMs are just the next best thing.

Despite all of this, most brands are not ditching SEO entirely, and for good reasons.

Sure, search is evolving, but search engines are still very much relevant. In fact, Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) are simply new forms of content optimization for different methods of content distribution.

Emerging Terms: What Is GEO & AEO?

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) focuses on improving your chances of being referenced, cited, or paraphrased by AI-powered platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude. These models generate responses based on trained and retrieved information from many sources, so content that’s well-structured, credible, and semantically rich is more likely to appear in AI-generated answers.

For example, when users ask ChatGPT about the best debt relief companies in California, brands such as Freedom Debt Relief may surface in the response. It’s an illustration of how visibility in generative engines can reflect effective AI-era optimization.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), by contrast, focuses on earning visibility in direct-answer formats within traditional search engines, such as Google’s featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, or voice assistant results. This requires clear, concise, and structured content that aligns with user questions.

In short, GEO targets AI systems designed to generate, while AEO targets search engines designed to answer. Both rely on trust, clarity, and contextual depth, but GEO extends those principles to the new world of generative search.

How GEO & AEO Work

While AEO has been around for several years, GEO is newer and still rapidly evolving. We don’t yet have defined methods to measure impact or a playbook, but the foundational techniques are rooted in tried-and-true SEO principles.

Early adopters focus on a few key techniques that show promising results, such as:

1. Structured data & schema markup. Marking up your content with schema (like FAQPage, HowTo, or Article) helps machines understand your content contextually. It provides a strong signal for AEO, and may indirectly help GEO by improving how AI systems interpret your content.
2. Semantic clarity & factual precision. AI models and answer engines prefer clear, accurate language. Write your content in a way that’s direct, well-researched, and easy to parse.
3. Authority signals (E-E-A-T). Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness are still essential for high-quality content, whether you’re writing for search engines or AI. The best way to signal authority is by citing credible sources, showing author credentials, and maintaining internal consistency.
4. Structured FAQs. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) are a powerful format for AEO. A well-designed FAQ section increases the chances that your content will be picked up by AI overviews or voice search answers.Your FAQ section should first serve the user, and only then try to cater to AI crawlers. For instance, the FAQ section on the Event Ticket Center website is divided into nine categories so that anyone can find their answer within one minute of landing on the page.

GEO & AEO in Action

Here are a few examples that show you GEO and AEO are working for your content and what you should aspire to achieve:

• Your blog post is referenced or summarized in a ChatGPT or Copilot response
• Bing Copilot’s AI is using your product pages to formulate replies
• An informational article you wrote is used as a source in Perplexity’s multi-source summary
• A detailed how-to guide, such as ETC’s “How to Get Super Bowl Tickets in 2025” blog post, is picked up by Google’s AI Overview and cited as a source.

• Your brand is recommended in “near me” or “how to” queries
• Your FAQ page is pulled directly into a Google Assistant response when someone asks a question
• A snippet from your glossary page is used by Alexa to answer a terminology question

SEO vs. GEO vs. AEO: Three Facets of Online Visibility

Many of the techniques used in GEO and AEO, like schema markup, clean structure, and relevant language, depend on well-optimized SEO practices. Without crawlable pages, fast load times, and keyword relevance, there’s nothing for AI or voice assistants to pull from in the first place.

That’s because AI systems don’t invent information out of thin air. Many use Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) or similar methods to draw on existing content from trusted sources and turn it into natural-sounding answers.

In short, if your content is already ranking well, clearly structured, and properly marked up, you’re giving both AI and answer engines exactly what they need to surface your brand.

SEO, GEO, and AEO work together to make your content more visible online. Search is changing, but these methods can help you stay on top of things and in front of your target audience.

To keep pace with AI-driven discovery, embrace SEO as your foundation, then layer on GEO and AEO to future-proof your strategy and keep your brand discoverable. Start blending all three now for smarter, more sustainable growth.

Ben Kruger is the Chief Marketing Officer at Event Tickets Center, where he oversees all marketing efforts, including paid search, social media, affiliate marketing, and email campaigns. He builds and scales paid media campaigns for growth and retention, leveraging machine learning models and predictive analytics for marketing activations and analysis. Ben has spoken at industry events such as the Coalition for Ticket Fairness Annual Conference.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):

Do I need to overhaul my SEO strategy to add GEO and AEO?

Not at all. Think of SEO as your foundation for site speed, crawlability, and keyword relevance, and GEO/AEO as layers that build on top. If your SEO is strong, you’re already halfway there.

What types of content perform best in generative search?

Informational, evergreen, and expert-authored content tends to perform best, particularly pages that explain how or why something works, rather than simply selling a product.

How can I tell if my content is appearing in AI results?

You can manually check by prompting ChatGPT, Bing Copilot, or Perplexity with relevant queries to see if your brand or content is mentioned. Tools for tracking GEO visibility are still emerging, but expect more analytics options soon.

The post A Marketer’s Guide to the New Alphabet Soup of Search: SEO vs. AEO vs. GEO appeared first on Contently.

If it feels like every vendor suddenly has a “State of Something” report, you’re not imagining it. Benchmark studies and branded data have become the new calling cards of content marketing.

While blog posts and brand manifestos still have their place in the ecosystem, they rarely break through on their own anymore. Content fatigue has reached critical mass, and audiences simply scroll past “5 tips for better marketing” articles. At the same time, AI search has changed the SEO game and raised the bar for credibility; in order to rank and get cited by large language models, marketers need original insights no one else can offer.

One solution emerging across industries has been to double down on proprietary data. From HubSpot’s State of Marketing to LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report, companies are mining their unique data assets to create content that commands attention, drives citations, and builds lasting authority.

Here’s why the trend is on the rise — and why it works.

Why Now? The AI Search Effect

When ChatGPT answers a question about average email open rates or Perplexity summarizes industry trends, these AI systems pull from sources with transparent, compelling data and authoritative positioning. Branded benchmarking reports check these boxes by providing structured, factual content with clear methodologies and context.

Even in a “zero click” scenario, your brand still benefits from being cited as the source of record. There can be a compounding effect to such attributions: When your report becomes the default data point for “average B2B sales cycle length” or “content marketing budget allocation,” you gain visibility across thousands of AI-generated responses, journalist articles, analyst reports, and competitor presentations. Each mention amplifies your brand’s authority, and the qualified traffic that does flow back to your domain is more likely to convert than traffic from traditional SEO.

How Benchmarking Reports Drive Value

Smart marketing leaders recognize benchmarking reports deliver measurable value across three critical dimensions:

Public Relations Impact

Proprietary data transforms your brand into a media magnet. Journalists constantly hunt for fresh statistics to anchor their stories. When you publish exclusive insights about industry trends, you hand them ready-made hooks — and the result is earned media coverage that would cost six figures through traditional PR campaigns.

Pipeline Generation

Whether gated or ungated, benchmarking reports tend to attract high-intent prospects. Gated reports identify serious buyers willing to exchange contact information for valuable insights, and ungated versions can maximize reach by getting your data in front of analysts and influencers.

Trust and Authority

Publishing rigorous, methodology-driven research signals deep expertise. You shift from vendor to trusted advisor. Transparent methodology matters here — you’ll want to ensure you’re clearly explaining data sources, sample sizes, and analysis methods to give readers confidence in the validity of your findings.

What It Takes to Create a Report That Sticks

Building a benchmarking report that achieves these outcomes requires strategic planning across a few key areas:

Data Sourcing Strategy

Start with data only you possess, like first-party usage data from your platform that provides unmatched insights competitors cannot replicate. Combine this with customer surveys or supplement with subject matter expert quotes for qualitative depth. Aggregate and anonymize to protect individual customer data while revealing category-wide patterns.

Design and Format Excellence

The most successful reports balance comprehensive analysis with scannable highlights. Transform raw data into compelling visual stories by partnering with designers who understand data visualization. Create charts that reveal insights at a glance. Write copy that explains why the data matters, not just what it shows. Package statistics as “snackable” social media content, and include downloadable one-pagers for easy sharing.

Multi-Channel Distribution

Great data dies without strong distribution. To maximize impact, launch your report with coordinated campaigns across PR, social media, email, webinars, and sales enablement. Create tiered assets: executive summary for time-pressed leaders, full report for practitioners, slide decks for internal sharing, etc. And don’t forget to train sales teams to reference key statistics during their conversations with prospective clients.

Optimizing for Citations

You’ll also want to structure your content for maximum quotability and citability by AI engines. To boost discoverability, use descriptive subheadings that work as standalone facts, and be sure to create FAQ sections addressing common questions. Build infographics for visual learners, and implement schema markup to help search engines understand your data. Include methodology sections that establish credibility and, finally, make statistics easy to cite with clear sourcing guidelines.

Consistent Refresh Cadence

A report is only as valuable as it is current. To keep your data fresh, commit to regular updates, e.g. annually for comprehensive reports, quarterly for trend data. Mark your calendar now: If you launch in January, start data collection in October. Teasing an ongoing data initiative creates anticipation and provides reasons for re-engagement.

Pitfalls to Avoid

Even with the best intentions and compelling data, a few critical mistakes can undermine even well-executed benchmarking reports. Here are three to avoid:

Weak Methodology

Small sample sizes and cherry-picked data can destroy your credibility. Invest in rigorous methodology, even if it means less favorable results. Consider partnering with research professionals if your own team doesn’t have the resources necessary to produce a truly top-notch report. And always disclose limitations or margins of error.

Sales-First Content

Readers — both humans and machines — detect and reject reports that exist primarily to promote products. Focus on category-wide insights, include competitor data where relevant, and save product mentions for subtle footer CTAs.

Underinvesting in Distribution

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your report is if nobody reads it. Budget 40% of project resources for distribution and amplification. That number may sound daunting, but without aggressive distribution, even the most groundbreaking data won’t move the needle.

The Future of Authority Marketing

The window of opportunity is open now, but it won’t be forever. Categories without established benchmark reports offer first-mover advantages. So, it’s a good idea to start now: Begin by auditing your data assets, surveying your customers, or analyzing your platform metrics. Then, transform these insights into the authoritative report your industry needs but doesn’t yet have.

As AI search changes how information is surfaced and cited, the brands supplying reliable benchmarks will own the reference points that everyone else leans on. Those who wait risk competing in categories already defined by others’ data.

Need help turning raw data into a report that drives citations and pipeline? Talk to Contently about building your next benchmark study.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):

What makes a benchmarking report different from a white paper?

A white paper typically presents a company’s perspective or solution, while a benchmarking report is rooted in original data and industry-wide trends. The latter is designed to be cited, compared against, and referenced as an objective standard.

How much data do I need to publish a credible benchmarking report?

There’s no magic number, but larger sample sizes improve credibility. What matters most is transparency: Clearly explain your methodology, sample size, and any limitations so readers trust your findings.

What resources are required to create a strong benchmarking report?

Successful reports usually require collaboration across data, design, and distribution. This might mean partnering with research specialists, investing in design for clarity and impact, and budgeting a sizable share for promotion.

The post Why Branded Benchmarking Reports Are Everywhere Right Now appeared first on Contently.

The foundation of the $80 billion SEO market is cracking and something new is being born: LLM Optimization (LLMO). And the companies that understand this shift first will own a massive competitive advantage.

The Search Paradigm Has Already Changed

I’ve been watching this transformation accelerate over the past year, and the data is undeniable. Users aren’t clicking through search results anymore, they’re getting complete answers directly from AI.

Think about your own behavior. When was the last time you scrolled through multiple Google results for a simple question? Increasingly, we’re all turning to ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity and getting comprehensive answers in seconds.

The numbers tell the story: LLM search queries are now averaging 23 words instead of 4. Search sessions last 6 minutes instead of seconds. Users are having conversations with AI, not just typing keywords.

This is a fundamental rewiring of how information discovery works.

From Rankings to References

Traditional SEO was built on a simple premise: rank higher on the results page. But in an AI-first world, visibility means something entirely different. Success is no longer about where you appear, it’s about whether AI references you at all.

We’re moving from click-through rates to reference rates. The question isn’t “did they visit your page?” It’s “did the AI cite your content when answering the user’s question?”

I’ve been testing this personally. When I ask ChatGPT for marketing advice, which brands get mentioned? When I query Claude about content strategy, whose insights surface? The patterns are revealing and they have almost nothing to do with traditional SEO rankings.

The Platform Fragmentation Challenge

Here’s what makes this shift even more complex: search is fragmenting across platforms. Apple just announced that AI-native search engines like Perplexity and Claude will be built into Safari. Google’s distribution chokehold is breaking.

Users are searching on Instagram, asking Siri complex questions, querying AI assistants embedded in their work tools. Each platform has different models, different training data, different ways of surfacing information.

This fragmentation creates both challenge and opportunity. The old playbook of optimizing for one search engine is obsolete. But it also means early movers can establish presence across multiple AI platforms before the competition catches up.

Three Critical Shifts for Marketing Leaders

Structure Trumps Keywords

AI doesn’t care about keyword density or exact match phrases. It prioritizes content that’s well-organized, easy to parse, and dense with meaning.

The inverted pyramid style – leading with the answer, then supporting details – is becoming critical. I’ve seen our clients increase AI citations by 22x simply by restructuring existing content to be more AI-digestible.

Authority Signals Are Evolving

Traditional backlinks still matter, but AI is looking for different credibility signals. It favors content that cites reputable sources, includes author credentials, and demonstrates expertise through depth rather than keywords.

The old game of link building is being replaced by knowledge building. AI can detect thin, manipulative content instantly. Only genuinely valuable, well-researched content gets referenced.

Distribution Channels Multiplied

SEO focused on one channel: Google. LLMO requires presence across dozens of AI platforms, each with its own preferences and algorithms.

The brands winning are creating better content and ensuring that content is discoverable across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and the dozens of other AI interfaces emerging monthly.

We produced a detailed LLMO playbook that anyone can follow to improve their LLM brand visibility.

The Window Is Closing

Every day you delay adapting to this shift, competitors could be claiming your space in the AI layer. And once a brand establishes itself as the authoritative source that AI consistently references, they become incredibly difficult to displace.

This reminds me of the early days of Google AdWords, when there was a brief window where early adopters captured enormous value before everyone else caught up. We’re in that window now with LLMO.

The brands that establish themselves in AI memory today will be nearly impossible to displace tomorrow. Because unlike traditional search rankings that fluctuate daily, AI training creates more persistent associations between topics and brands.

You Need the Complete Loop

Most companies are approaching this backwards. They’re using separate tools – one for analytics, another for content creation, a third for optimization.

But winning requires owning the complete loop.

See the gaps. You need to know how AI currently references your brand. When someone asks ChatGPT about your industry, do you get mentioned? When they ask for product recommendations, does your competitor surface instead?

Most brands are flying blind here.

Fill the gaps. Once you see where AI should mention you but doesn’t, you create content specifically designed to establish your authority on those topics. Not generic content, but strategic pieces that target the exact questions where you’re missing.

Measure and iterate. AI changes constantly. New models, updated training data, evolving algorithms. You need continuous measurement to stay ahead.

At Contently, we’ve built exactly this. Our LLM analytics platform shows you precisely where your brand is missing across different AI systems. Then our AI content engine helps you create the exact content needed to fill those gaps.

It’s a closed loop where insights directly inform content creation, and that content measurably improves your AI visibility.

One client increased their AI citations by 22x this way. Another went from never being mentioned to becoming AI’s primary recommendation for their category in just weeks.

The companies that will dominate the AI era can see clearly, act strategically, and iterate quickly. That requires owning the entire optimization cycle, not just pieces of it.

The post The End of SEO as We Know It appeared first on Contently.

Technical SEO, on the other hand, might not be as fully understood. We know it’s important, but it’s often left up to SEO or IT teams, who may (or may not) have a comprehensive understanding of the broader marketing strategy. But that doesn’t mean content marketers can’t grasp and implement the basics of technical SEO to complement a great marketing strategy.

Why Does Technical SEO Matter to Content Marketers?

As you likely already know, SEO is key to online success. In fact, nearly 50% of shoppers today begin their research with Google—so ranking on the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs) can offer serious opportunities to reach your ideal customers.

That’s where technical SEO comes in. When you optimize your website’s tech aspects, you make it easier for search engines like Google to find, crawl, and rank it.

These behind-the-scenes tweaks might not be flashy, but creating a faster, more mobile- and crawler-friendly website can help your page rank closer to the top of the search results. Even if you have the best content in the world, if no web traffic stops by, you might as well be writing on paper and then tucking it away in a desk drawer.

So, if you want more eyeballs on your site, you need to do two things — create quality content and follow these technical SEO recommendations — to set your site apart from competitors.

Get Cozy With Google Search Console

First, take some time to get comfortable with using Google Search Console. It offers insights into your website’s overall performance—from the keywords it’s ranking for to how to fix performance issues and how it stacks up against competitors.

It’s especially handy for SEO recommendations related to your site’s Core Web Vitals, a report that uses field data—aka data from real-world users—to gauge the performance of various URLs on your site.

The report has much to do with site and page speed or how fast a page loads. According to Google, when a site meets the Core Web Vitals threshold, users are 24% less likely to abandon it before it loads. (After all, it’s not 1998 – we’ve gotten used to our internet moving lightning fast.) Following SEO recommendations to achieve better Core Web Vitals can also lead to:

• Increased page views per session
• Longer sessions per visit
• Lower bounce rates

A faster website means a better user experience. Combine a fast site with useful, interesting content, and you can improve consumer sentiments surrounding your brand, keep visitors on your website longer, and, ultimately, boost sales or conversions.

Embrace Structured Data and Schema Markups

Here’s where things get, well, a bit technical. However, as a marketing professional (who may have a limited understanding of coding), you can still use structured data and schema markups to your advantage.

Structured data uses a language called schema markups to explain the information on a webpage so search engines can easily understand it. Schema helps search engines crawl your website; it explains to Google and the other search engines what they can expect to find in the content that follows the code.

Basically, structured data is like adding labels to different parts of a webpage to tell search engines what each piece of information is about. For example, in a recipe, schema markups can tell Google which section contains the list of ingredients, which part contains the cooking time, and so on. Helpful, right?

By using structured data and schema markups, we can give search engines more context about a website’s content (try saying that 10 times fast). This helps search engines display richer search results, improving the user experience and making it easier for people to find what they’re looking for online.

People often forget useful SEO recommendations like using Schema markups. Fortunately, it’s easier than ever to use structured data to help your website get found by search engines.

Schema Made Simple

Even though Schema has been around for a while, it’s still highly relevant to SEO recommendations. One experiment found that twice as many sites with schema markups gained rankings in search engine results.

Check out Schema.org, where you can find a list of coding terms that can help your SEO; it was founded in 2011 by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to provide a common language that leads to better and more consistent search results, and it has all kinds of schema types available for you to browse.

Pro tip: You can easily add schema markups to your website using WordPress plugins like Schema Pro. These plugins automate markups and can also create Custom Fields.

Know Your Link Strategy

A strong internal link-building strategy is one of the basics of a good SEO strategy. When creating a new piece of content, think about other content on your site that is valuable, relevant, and related to the piece you’re writing to include as a hyperlink. For example, if you’re writing about savings accounts and mention compound interest, linking to an article on the topic would help your readers understand the bigger picture.

Many SEO recommendations suggest five to 10 internal links for every 2,000 words of content, which is roughly one link for every 200 words.

You can add links to your higher-traffic pages to support them or lower-traffic pages to boost them. But don’t overdo it! Adding too many links could distract, overwhelm or divert your reader from reaching the CTA.

It’s also worth it to run a check every once in a while to make sure you’re not linking to URLs that have been changed, deleted or moved. These “dead links” do nothing to help your search ranking and decrease readability.

Understanding External Links/Backlinks

External links/backlinks are another matter altogether. They come in two forms:

• Outbound links, which go from your web page to an external authoritative page
• Inbound links, which go from another authoritative site to your content

Let’s first talk about the ones we can control: Outbound links.

Outbound Links

If you’re writing about a topic, you can add links to pages that aren’t part of your site. These outbound links give readers more information on the topic from an authoritative source, like a government site or scientific study. When you’re linking to other sites, choose ones that:

• Don’t compete with yours
• Have credibility as a primary or authoritative source
• Are trustworthy

If the site doesn’t meet these requirements, but you still want to link to it – for instance, in the case of a sponsorship—add a “nofollow” link. Google won’t acknowledge that you linked to the page, but your readers can find it with a click.

Inbound links

Just as you want to link to authoritative sites, you want other sites to link to your content as a helpful resource, too. Google frowns upon link trading, buying links, or other ways of securing links that do not happen organically. It considers them “Link spam”; you should mark them with “nofollow” or risk being penalized. So keep an eye on your backlinks (using your trusty Google Search console or other tool) to make sure you’re in line with Google’s rules.

Instead, you can offer to post guest blogs on relevant sites or ask partners or influencers to link to you. If another site references your content—such as the results of a survey or study—you can reach out and ask if they can add a backlink. Similarly, if someone posts a positive review of your brand on their website, ask them for a link.

Effective link-building is a lot of work, but it can offer a valuable boost in rankings.

Link Disavowal

If Google sends you a scary-looking manual action for “unnatural links,” you can log into Google Search Console and browse the list of sites that link to you for the offending links. You can then request that Google disregard those links. There’s no guarantee that Google will do what you ask, and this may impact your search rankings—for better or worse—but it’s better than having bad links slowly tank your rankings.

Put in the Time to Become a Technical SEO Pro

Following technical SEO recommendations requires patience, attention to detail, and determination—especially if you have to level up your knowledge along the way. But just like any other skill, mastering it adds value and insight to your content.

Don’t Skip the Technical SEO Audit

Most people’s shoulders tense up with the mention of the word “audit,” but in this case, it just means assessing the technical SEO methods your site already uses, how well it uses them, and what you could implement to improve it. If you feel like you might need some help along the way, there are always technical SEO consultants providing technical SEO services and plentiful online resources to help you out.

If you install the correct schema markup plugins, understand how to use the Google Search Console, and develop a solid link-building strategy, you are well on your way to climbing those rankings and reaching your audience.

Ask The Content Strategist: FAQS About Technical SEO

What are the potential risks of relying solely on automated tools for technical SEO, and how can content marketers mitigate these risks?

Relying solely on automated tools for technical SEO may overlook nuanced issues that require manual intervention. Content marketers should supplement automated tools with manual audits and regular checks to ensure comprehensive optimization and mitigate the risk of overlooking critical issues.

How does user-generated content (UGC) impact technical SEO, and what strategies can content marketers employ to leverage UGC effectively for search visibility?

User-generated content can enrich websites with fresh and diverse content, potentially impacting technical SEO factors such as keyword density and content structure. Content marketers can encourage UGC through interactive features and community engagement, optimizing user-generated content for relevant keywords and ensuring proper technical implementation for search visibility.

What role does mobile optimization play in technical SEO, and how can content marketers ensure seamless user experiences across different devices?

Content marketers can ensure seamless user experiences across devices by implementing responsive design, optimizing page speed, and testing website performance on various mobile devices and screen sizes.

How do content distribution channels outside of search engines, such as social media platforms, impact technical SEO efforts, and what strategies can content marketers employ to maximize visibility across these channels?

Content distribution channels like social media platforms can indirectly impact technical SEO through increased brand visibility and referral traffic. Content marketers can maximize visibility across these channels by optimizing content for social sharing, engaging with relevant communities, and leveraging social media analytics to refine content distribution strategies for better search visibility.

Looking for more information on SEO best practices? Subscribe to The Content Strategist and follow us on Instagram.

The post What Is Technical SEO and How Does It Impact Content Performance? appeared first on Contently.

By optimize, I mean going through the content once more to nail your brand’s message, style, and language while also following the relevant style guidelines and—especially for a blog post or web page—SEO suggestions.

Optimization is easy to treat as an afterthought of the content creation process. The heavy lift of ideation, writing, and design is already done, after all. But since you or your team have put all those hours into creating a great content piece that helps your brand stand out from the crowd, it’s important to take that final step to review it again and optimize on a few factors.

Contently makes it easy to do with a set of tools to facilitate content optimization. Here’s where to find them and what they let creatives like you accomplish.

Easily Optimize Your Next Piece of Content

Inside the Contently editor—the part of the platform where writers draft their pieces—there are a set of right-hand tabs. The one that looks like a suitcase with a plus sign is the “Review” tab.

Inside, it has a trio of sub-functions with automated capabilities that allow you to “review” your writing and ensure it hits all the right notes. Those sub-tabs are:

• Quality check to catch grammar and editorial errors.
• Optimization to highlight authority and SEO improvements
• Recommendations to confirm the piece links out to relevant recent stories

When you click on the suitcase, the icon turns into an arrow, as seen below:

The Review section automatically opens the Quality tab, showcasing common language and editorial issues like broken links, double words, hidden verbs, misused words, or instances of passive voice.

Together, these optimization capabilities take content to the next level, increasing its appeal and readability and maximizing its alignment with the brand. They help writers do that final pass more quickly and with better results. Ultimately, that saves the managing editor time and delivers content that delights the customer and the audience.

Let’s dive a bit deeper to look at what these features let creatives on the Contently platform do.

1. Quality

The Contently Quality check scans your draft in search of common grammatical or editorial errors.

Has that sneaky passive voice slipped into the prose (it always does)? Does the same word repeat twice in succession? Invert a noun and a verb? Misuse a word? Include a broken hot link? The quality checker can catch all those common mistakes and more.

Even the most fastidious writers make these mistakes, and they are hard to see, especially when a person has been looking at the same screen for hours. The quality checker gives the whole content team an extra set of eyes.

2. Optimization

The second set of automation tools available on the Contently platform focus on optimizing the readability and authority of your content. The optimization scan provides information such as estimated reading time, title length, and whether the content fulfills the promise of the title as it relates to your chosen topic.

The optimization tool also considers the SEO keyword for the asset. It scans your piece to see whether you have used your keyword as frequently and consistently as recommended by SEO best practices.

Finally, the optimization tool checks the sites you’ve linked to in your piece to confirm their quality. If a site seems suspicious, Contently will flag it as low trust.

3. Recommendations

The final optimization check that Contently automates for you relates to internal links you can include in your content. Remember, your content is part of an ongoing conversation with the customer. Internal links help readers (and algorithms!) see the connections between pieces of content across your website.

If a new writer is working on your content, however, they may not think about all of the existing pieces they could link to. The recommendations button does it for them by flagging links to include.

Optimize Before Pressing Submit

Depending on the strength of a first draft, optimizing can take just a few minutes or up to a few hours. But the time spent is worth it. Content teams would spend far more without Contently’s automation tools. Now, get creating!

Unlock growth, one piece of content at a time. Transform your strategy with Contently. Request your discovery call today.

The post How Contently’s Content Optimization Tools Can Level-Up Your Impact appeared first on Contently.

It could be that your SEO efforts could use a boost from a content pillar page. (Spoiler alert: We’re sharing pillar page examples here that can help you get started.)

Now, if you’re asking how creating more content could ever drive less engagement, lucky you! In my world — and in the worlds of many less fortunate content professionals — consistent upward growth in engagement numbers requires you to meet some prerequisites, such as:

• You have a defined content marketing strategy centered around rich topics that matter to your customers — some marketers call those topics “content pillars.”
• You engage on those topics in a consistent way across platforms or assets.
• You tie those topics to the wants and needs of your customers and to the core value proposition of your product.

Considering that more than one in four organizations lack a content marketing strategy and one in three name message consistency among their top marketing challenges — according to a survey by the Content Marketing Institute — chances are high that some of your content is missing the mark on driving engagement.

Once you have those strong content foundations first (e.g., a strategy and clear messaging), you also need techniques to reinforce those foundations and engage customers consistently on topics they care about. Pillar pages are one example.

What Is a Content Pillar Page?

In basic terms, a pillar page is a detailed page on your website focused on one of your strategic content topics or pillars. Its function is to serve as a hub for all the content you have on your website related to that subject.

Think of what a “pillar” does. Per Oxford Languages, it’s a person or thing that provides essential support for something, e.g., “a pillar of the community.” As it relates to content, pillar pages provide essential support for engaging customers on a specific topic.

The pillar page provides a detailed overview of the pillar topic in a way that touches on all of the related subtopics relevant to your message. Pillar page examples include guides, “what is” explainers, or “how to” instructional pages on your website. A pillar page also links out to more specific content pages dedicated to a subtopic, geared to a particular audience, or angled around a specific industry or sub-group.

For content teams, pillar pages provide a way to organize all the different assets you develop related to your main topics by linking out and back to them from the central pillar hub.

Some even find they attract far more traffic than a blog on the same subject.

For a fun pillar page example, check out this page from Gardener’s Supply on Everything You Need to Know About Gardening in Raised Beds.

Benefits of Pillar Pages for Content Marketing

Small organizations, those with lean content teams, or those with early-stage or immature content strategies may not need to put pillar pages at the top of their content priority list.

You’ve probably got enough to do just creating a coherent and cohesive website that accurately reflects what you do for customers.

But once an organization has been developing content for a few years, they can confront a new challenge of having searchable content across web pages, blog posts, and so on that tackles your main topics in different ways.

Sometimes that’s incidental. More often, it happens as a result of your content team writing SEO-optimized blog posts or pages aimed at ranking for different search terms related to the same topic.

If you take a step back and think about how that jumble of different content assets with overlapping information comes through to customers, you can see that it’s very likely to confuse them. Even worse, it can even impact SEO.

Algorithms can get confused in the sense that they won’t rank multiple pages in a domain that seems to be dealing with the exact same subject. The consequence is that different pages of your own website can compete with each other for positioning on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Using pillar pages offers a way for you to map a customer content journey, using the pillar page as a kind of hub and related pages as the spokes. This approach brings a number of benefits.

For a pillar page example exemplifying the benefits of an effective “how to,” look at how the U.S. Chamber of Commerce describes the licensing process for women-owned businesses.

Pillar Page Advantages

• More backlinks. You can attract more visitors to a useful pillar page. Some of your visitors will link to it from their own website, leading to more backlinks and an even higher perception of authority for SEO benefits.
• Improved internal linking. Treating the pillar page as a hub and linking to related content in your web domain can improve the internal linking structure of your website, which can help search engines better understand the relationships between your pages.
• Increased authority and ranking. Having a comprehensive and well-structured piece of writing on a central topic provides search engines with the material they need to identify your website as a trusted authority on that subject. This can improve your website’s SEO ranking for related keywords and topics.
• A better user experience. Users who come to you directly can more easily find the subjects they care about, get an overview, and dive deeper into sub-topics relevant to them.

To see these advantages in action, visit this “what is” explainer pillar page example from Writer.com on generative AI.

Best Practices for Building a Pillar Page

To get started developing pillar pages, follow these steps:

1. Inventory your topics and related content.

Building a pillar page should start with your pillar topics. If you haven’t defined a core set of topics around which to anchor your content marketing strategy, get on that first. If you have, you’re ready for the next steps, which means you need to:

• Prioritize the topics you want to tackle first in pillar pages.
• Inventory the content you already have on those topics.
• Conduct initial research to identify competing pages on those topics and assess what they do well.

2. Analyze the content you already have on your pillar topics.

The inventory process may have identified some pages or assets on your website that have outlived their usefulness. It may also have identified some great resources you can update or improve with an additional section, new links, or other effective updates.

Analyze the content in your inventory with an eye on the following:

• Identify the hierarchy and relationships between your pillar topics and the rest of your web navigation, as well as the relationships between the pillars themselves and between pillar subtopics. Use a graphic or mind-mapping tool to visualize those relationships, if helpful.
• Use Google Analytics, SEO analytics tools, or other resources you have to analyze what content is performing well related to a given topic and what you need to improve.
• Identify gaps or aspects of the topic you don’t have content for. This gap analysis should include gaps in relevant SEO terms that searchers will expect to see. SEO research tools like those from SEMrush include useful research capabilities that can compare your page with competitor pages and identify improvements that can increase your SERP placement.

3. Develop your pillar page content.

Using the topic mapping and insight analysis, create a plan to develop the content for the pillar page and update the content on related subpages.

• Use SEO best practices in the writing and internal linking structure for the pages.
• Integrate visual assets to add value to the page.
• Coordinate with your web design team on the look and feel of the page.

Pillar Pages Are Dynamic — Don’t Neglect Them

Markets change, customer needs adapt, and new information emerges all the time. Some topics become less important over time as others rise. You are also writing new content all the time — some of which will relate to your pillars.

Expect to revisit and revise your pillar pages at least annually, if not more often (depending on your market and the subject matter), to ensure that they still reflect your most current thinking on the topic.

The process of continuous content improvement can help keep your web pages at the top of the SERPs.

Stay informed on the latest content trends and marketing strategies. Follow The Content Strategist newsletter for more content just like this!

The post From Strategy to Success: Pillar Page Examples for Content Engagement appeared first on Contently.

In its State of Content Marketing 2022 Global Report, keyword research tool company Semrush surveyed 1,500 content marketers worldwide. Only a little over half had a documented content marketing strategy despite nearly all (97 percent) reporting that content marketing was a part of their marketing strategy. Among their ongoing challenges: attracting traffic to content, improving its SEO performance, and generating content ideas.

Fortunately, Google Trends is a free tool to help solve these challenges. It can help you deliver the best content consistently and creatively. Google Trends can help you figure out:

• The topics to address and the content you could create (what you can cook)
• How to time your content (when to cook what)
• Which keywords to play with and the kinds of content that will likely resonate with your audience (the right ingredients to use)

Selecting a Content Topic Worthy of Engagement

You want to feed your readers the content they’re most curious about, which directly ties to your brand. Peeking into keyword search is a great way to get on-the-money content ideas, giving you insights about what readers want to know.

Compare and contrast keyword terms to determine how popular yours might be. For example, this chart shows that “car repair” consistently gets more hits than “car maintenance,” likely because repairs are more urgent than routine maintenance.

To discover other related keywords that audiences use in search, look under “Related Topics and Queries.” You can see “car maintenance cost” and “car service” both do well. Related topics and queries can be especially helpful for identifying alternatives to keywords with a lot of competition for top positions in Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). Such long-tail keywords found through Google Trends are easier to rank for.

Toggle “Rising” queries vs. “Top Queries,” and you’ll find the search terms gaining traction. Spotting and capitalizing on these trends early, especially in a B2C market, will help you ride the popularity wave while it crests. Be careful to time your activities.

Fads can crash quickly, and prospective consumers will tire of a topic if it’s seen too much air time before you’ve gotten to it.

Google Trends also enables you to parse search results by geography for further segmentation, which is useful for targeted pay-per-click campaigns. Look to Google Discover on mobile devices to sift for more contextual ideas.

Use Data to Target Your Audience at the Right Time

Successful content strategy is not just about discovering what topics and angles to cover; it’s also about targeting your customer at the right time. Use Google Trends to find keyword phrases relevant over long and short periods.

You can start from 2004 (which is how far back Google lets you go) and measure trends over a year, a month, or even a few hours. The latter is useful if you’re playing with rapid-fire breaking news—though this is rarely the case with B2B content marketing.

This screenshot shows the rise in searches about ChatGPT, an AI-driven language generation robot. While there were small blips in October and November 2022, it caught on like wildfire in December. Breakout trends like these might be worth harnessing, especially if you’re in the B2C market.

A note of caution: You always need an original point of view, especially when the web is filled with content addressing the same topic.

Watching trends play out over time can help your content strategy as you observe peaks and troughs for certain keywords. For example, do certain keywords trend as you approach Earth Day in April? Plan content calendars in advance so you can develop fresh takes every year.

Optimize Your Content on the Right Channels

Successful content uses relevant keywords and presents them in a format that suits the goals of the asset. If your strategy is not limited to written content alone, understanding what kinds of searches to optimize for (news, videos, etc.) will help. Toggle through the other options on Google Trends (Image Search, News Search, etc.) to find what kinds of content are doing well. It might spark ideas for diversifying your content buckets in the future.

Much like cooking, sometimes content strategy requires understanding how well existing content (listicles, blog posts) is performing and how you can repurpose them in new ways. You can also use Google Trends to get inspiration for adjacent categories by looking under the “Related Topics” widget. A related topic for the “Chat GPT” search term, for example, is “artificial intelligence.”

Google Trends can also help you keep tabs on your competition’s content efforts. Enter Pepsi vs. Coca-Cola in the comparison search boxes, and you can tell the cola wars are steady as ever. If your company’s search trend pattern dips compared to others, you may need to refresh your awareness-building efforts.

Research Google Trends for Content Topics with Reach

Google Trends is a helpful tool for identifying content marketing topics that have reach. Careful menu planning still doesn’t guarantee a great meal, however. Delivering consistent content that resonates requires you to understand your audience and audit content regularly to find the top performers.

Use your best judgment. If a keyword term is tired and used often, try and test new topics and approaches. There’s no substitute for well-produced content that is useful, resonates with your readers, and effectively positions your brand. It’s a tried-and-tested recipe that propels your content marketing strategy on the path to success.

To stay informed on all things content, subscribe to The Content Strategist for more insight on the latest news in digital transformation, content marketing strategy, and rising tech trends.

The post Three Ways to Use Google Trends for SEO in Your Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

Lead generation companies exist to gather the contact details of consumers and company owners to sell on to related businesses, and their owners are, from my dealings with them, absolutely obsessed with SEO. They live, breathe, and feel it—and that passion is their most important weapon.

So how can marketing teams compete with such a daunting adversary? Play them at their own game.

Why lead generation works

Lead generation companies make a lot of money. HomeAdvisor, one of the sites featured in the top results for “house extension cost”, charges up to $75 per lead and they often sell each lead to three different contractors. That’s a cool $225 for a name, address, email, and telephone number. Contractors also have to pay a $28.99 monthly fee for access to these leads too, according to VadaliaRental.

After a reasonably significant initial investment of time and money in keyword discovery, content creation, and backlink building, a lead generation company’s ongoing costs are then minimal.

Contractors put up with the high costs charged by lead gen companies for three reasons. First, they need leads to survive. Second, they often lack the ability to find new leads themselves. Third, each lead is heavily qualified to assess the actual level of interest in each enquirer prior to offering it for sale. A very effective way to get rid of tire kickers.

The secrets of its success

Owners of these companies generally dislike and distrust pay-per-click and they rely almost exclusively on organic search results to generate the leads they sell to clients.

These are the main approaches they take when producing and promoting organic content to win traffic and leads:

• Create super-long, keyword-dense, information-packed articles with tables, images, and external high domain authority links.
• Make sure to place the contact form above the fold.
• Target lower-competition, higher-volume keywords. Spend hours looking for intent-laden keywords on Ahrefs, Moz, and SEMRush which may have been overlooked by other companies.
• Link obsessively—external, internal, and backlinking particularly to .gov and .edu sites for better Trust Flow.
• Create top- and middle-funnel content with the purpose of providing internal linking to the main lead generation pages.
• Never let a hit to any page go to waste—always make sure you do everything you can to get visitors’ contact details.

How to compete against lead generation companies and win

First, find high-volume, low-competition keywords which have the necessary buying intent.

For example, according to Ahrefs, “dog groomers” attracts 86,000 searchers a month in the USA and it needs 123 or more quality links to rank on page one of Google SERP.

A better keyword to target would be “dog groomers near me.” That gets 89,000 searches a month and requires just six quality links to get onto page one. HomeGuide.com did just that and gets 19,000 visits to the page every month.

Before they decide on a course of action, the most successful lead generation companies I’ve worked with first look hard at the SERP for a potential keyword. What results does Google return? Which other sites have decided that this keyword is important enough to go after and what do they want from each visitor they receive? Would finishing on page one for this result make money?

Second, create supporting long-tail keyword blog content which links to the relevant main product or service page for SEO value. Lead gen companies hav the attitude of one chance to impress, mirror that and pitch your heart out to try to get their contact details.

For content, work with an experienced SEO copywriter who has a track record of balancing the need to please Google with the ability to sell in written form. The cost of hiring such a writer may be intimidating for smaller companies but it’s important to put this outlay in context with PPC.

Third, update Google every time content is added to or changed on your website. Compared with just a few years ago, the search engine giant seems to process the results remarkably quickly.

Finally, for national companies, build quality backlinks on high domain rating .com-type sites as well as .gov and .edu sites, but only target 3^rd party sites whose content actually relates to your products and services. For regional companies, localize your content as much as possible and build a formidable Google My Business presence.

SEO experts rightly tell marketers to concentrate on high-volume, low-competition keywords to win traffic. The success of lead generation sites proves them right. But that’s not the only reason they do well. For lead generation sites, buying intent is often just as important as a keyword’s winnability.

After all, what’s the point of spending time and money creating content to get thousands of new visitors if they’re never going to leave their contact details?

The post Using SEO to Compete with Lead Generation Sites appeared first on Contently.

Over 2,400 years later, technology, science, and medicine have evolved exponentially, but many words in the oath are still remarkably relevant: “I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife or the chemist’s drug.”

Good medicine, like good content, comes down to trust and results. That was true before the common era began. But the rise of digital health content has complicated the way people think about healthcare.

Every day, Google handles more than 1 billion health questions. However, over a third of U.S. adults have low health literacy. And according to a recent Weber Shandwick survey of 1,700 adults, 52 percent are concerned today’s health-related information is either false or misleading.

So it’s never been easier to search and find health content online. Yet that same content can be incorrect, promotional, contradictory, or overly complex. In the midst of a global pandemic, that trend is only going to increase as people look to learn about the latest symptoms, diagnoses, and treatments.

Where are patients supposed to turn? More importantly, what should doctors, hospitals, insurers, and healthcare companies do to improve the state of healthcare content online?

That’s what we’ve set out to answer in this report. We’ve extracted the most important healthcare content marketing trends using a combination of quantitative and qualitative data. We spoke to industry experts, analyzed macro content trends using our in-house content strategy technology, and highlighted companies creating great content. We also identified common challenges while explaining ways healthcare marketers could overcome them.

Like Hippocrates said, medicine is an art and a science. The same holds true for healthcare content. Let this be your prescription for success.

[If you prefer to view a PDF version of the report that’s easier to print, we’ve got you covered here.]

Methodology

Research for this report was compiled in May 2020. We analyzed 1,551 pieces of healthcare content using StoryBook, Contently’s content strategy tool, which measures top-performing topics, formats, social shares. The dataset includes 15 healthcare companies that publish content—none of which are Contently clients.

We also pulled some industry-level benchmarks, measured by Contently’s content marketing platform. This data looks at all content produced by our clients in the spring of 2020.

(To dive deeper on these findings, sign up for our live webinar on the state of healthcare content marketing. You’ll also get the webinar on-demand.)

5 Trends Shaping the Healthcare Industry 

1. Timely COVID Stories Perform Best, but They Have to Be Done Right
2. Healthcare Is Playing Catch-Up, but There’s a Playbook They Can Follow
3. Telemedicine + Healthtech Companies Are Leading the Field
4. CSR Is a Popular Use Case That Often Lacks Creativity
5. Reports + Data Are the Biggest Differentiators

1. Timely COVID Stories Perform Best, but They Have to Be Done Right

A global pandemic impacts everyone and everything. As cases started to spike, it wasn’t long before it seemed like every article, video, and social post tied back to the coronavirus.

For many companies, especially in healthcare, covering the topic was vital. They had an obligation to share their knowledge with the public. For others, though, it was just another trending topic to jump on. Even if it comes from a good place, we don’t need an email from a car dealership that says they’re “here for us during these troubling times.”

To gauge the immediate impact on content creation, we pulled the stories created by our clients across all industries and then tagged any that mentioned relevant terms like “pandemic,” “Covid,” and “quarantine.” In March, content related to the coronavirus accounted for 21 percent of all stories across all industries, a significant increase up from roughly 6 percent in February. The rate held steady through April until dipping slightly in May.

The surge in new content proved to be an interesting case study for healthcare publishers. There’s an overabundance of health content online, but it mostly consists of evergreen information on established domains like WebMD and Livestrong. These sites live off of consistent search traffic, but they typically don’t connect to the news cycle. Once the coronavirus hit, that all changed.

Since great storytelling thrives on specifics, other brands had a new opportunity to create timely content. Some of the top-performing stories in our dataset came from companies putting a unique spin on the public conversation.

For example, in late March, Cleveland Clinic published “Here’s the Damage Coronavirus Can Do to Your Lungs” with expert quotes and a link to a new video featuring an experienced lung pathologist. It was shared over 26,000 times on Facebook. Cigna ran an early how-to story on proper handwashing technique that generated thousands of shares. In April, 23andMe wrote about a research study it was working on to look at the connection between genetics and COVID-19.

If healthcare companies hope to compete with the WebMDs of the world, they have to drive awareness first with these kinds of original stories. Then, once they build trust and increase domain authority, they can fill in their output with more clinical, encyclopedic content.

However, that doesn’t mean healthcare brands should start pursuing journalistic content. These stories lead to conflicts of interest. Plus, brands usually don’t have the resources or infrastructure in place to go after hard news. However, they can break new ground and build an audience simply by reporting on the research and innovations being developed inside their own company.

“In the health category, there’s no such thing as a generalist … think about what your audience is searching for,” said Amy O’Connor, editor-in-chief of Healthination. “Unless you’re like AP or Reuters, it’s really hard to cover the news, and nobody wants you to, because it’s already out there.”

Your time and money would be better spent using trending topics as a springboard to provide insights and analysis the public can’t get anywhere else.

2. Healthcare Is Playing Catch-Up, but There’s a Playbook They Can Follow

The year 2000 feels like a different lifetime. Y2K was supposed to shut down society, the Human Genome Project was completed, and Contently’s co-founders were in high school.

So much has changed in the two decades since. For starters, technology survived the new millennium, and our co-founders graduated (we think?). But if you work in healthcare marketing, life might not look all that different.

“The rule of thumb is that it’s usually twenty years behind,” O’Connor said. “There are certainly exceptions, but one of the reasons it’s twenty years behind is because there are so many rules and regulations about how—can speak to consumers.”

That mindset still holds back many of the industry’s top brands across the globe. Seventy-two healthcare companies qualified for the Fortune 1000 list in 2020. They all earned at least $2 billion in revenue last year. However, 15 of them had no content presence whatsoever like a blog or resource center on their websites, while 30 more had extremely limited content outputs such as corporate newsrooms or bare blogs hidden in the footer of their sites.

This missed opportunity to build trust and reach new patients and customers is holding back these companies from moving up the list.

Right now, TV commercials are the most visible (and expensive) form of healthcare marketing. Total ad spend on pharma commercials topped $3.7 billion last year, according to ad tracker iSpot.tv, which is why it seems like the same drug clips play on a loop regardless of when or what you’re watching. In some cases, pharma companies spent hundreds of millions of dollars in a single year to market their treatments. AbbVie topped the list by doling out $465 million to promote Humira.

That system, however, is ripe for change. For starters, traditional TV viewership continues to drop as our media habits evolve. The commercials themselves lack creativity and don’t have enough air time to provide meaningful insights or specifics. And over the last decade, the American Medical Association has repeatedly called for a ban on all consumer ads from companies selling drugs or devices.

Companies can reroute part of these massive budgets to digital content that helps educate consumers while staying within industry rules and regulations. We know they’re capable of this because as the coronavirus spread, almost all of the healthcare brands on the Fortune 1000 list updated their sites and social channels with useful updates—even if they had no other content on their sites whatsoever. The announcements, letters, videos, and articles showed that healthcare companies could adapt quickly if the situation calls for it.

And as marketers revisit their plans for the future, how they allocate budgets for different programs is changing. LinkedIn recently reported that 78 percent of marketers expect budgets for online content to increase as a result of the pandemic.

“Have someone who is a content expert craft the engaging, effective, high-impact story. But work with a medical expert who can fact-check and reality-check what you’re writing,” O’Connor said. “That partnership can really enrich your content. It’s also really important for SEO. Google has higher standards for content that affects your health.”

Other industries like finance and technology are known for sophisticated content programs that build trust and boost the bottom line; there’s no reason healthcare can’t join their ranks. In fact, some companies are already leading the way.

3. Telemedicine and Healthtech Companies Are Leading the Field

Oscar, founded in 2012, has a very simple tagline: “Health insurance made easy.” Those four words tell us exactly what to expect whether we’re visiting Oscar’s brightly colored site for the first time or looking through its robust resource center.

That mission stands out because very few things about the healthcare system deserve to be described as “easy.” Science is complex, sure, but many healthcare companies have struggled to communicate complicated topics to a general audience. Low health literacy plagues millions of people across the world. In “The Great American Search for Healthcare Information,” Weber Shandwick discovered that 31 percent of adults found health information hard to understand.

From our research, it was clear that a new breed of healthcare company is rising through the industry. Digital-first brands in sectors like telemedicine and healthtech see content as a competitive advantage.

In some ways, organizations like Oscar, Epic, and athenahealth are acting more like tech companies than legacy healthcare brands. These newer players developed tools like Open Enrollment checklists and interactive Flu Dashboards to inform the public and heighten goodwill.

Site design is a significant factor here since it impacts how audiences find your content. As Contently VP of marketing Joe Lazauskas argued a few years ago, many Fortune 1000 brands have content hubs that look like they haven’t been updated since 1998—if they have any content at all.

“If the design of a content site is terrible, people won’t give the words a chance,” he wrote. “They’ll perceive it all as low quality.”

According to Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab, 46 percent of people believe that “design look” is the number one indicator of a brand’s credibility. It affects everything from time spent on your site to bounce rate to conversions.

Creating visual content also tends to give newer healthtech firms a leg up on legacy companies. Animated videos and infographics, for instance, can make a site come across as more innovative and trustworthy. Seventy-five percent of marketers drive better ROI when they use visuals with their content, according to a joint study we did with Libris in 2019. And content with a video element was eight times as engaging as purely written content.

“Complex topics, simple execution,” O’Connor said. “The more complicated and inaccessible you’re making your content, the less you’re serving your audience. Break it down so anyone in the sixth grade can read and comprehend and take action.”

RealSelf, which helps people find doctors and cosmetic surgeons online, has taken this advice to heart. Its content hub makes use of a simple layout and pastel aesthetic that resembles an Instagram feed (which is likely part of the reason its content generated hundreds of backlicks in our report, second only to Cleveland Clinic.)

It’s actual Instagram feed, meanwhile, is full of short videos that demystify procedures like tattoo removals and botox. Captions complement the visuals with key details like average cost, user ratings, and a brief breakdown of the science involved. These posts regularly rack up over 50,000 views.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B_NcsRThvfm/

We expect visual content and thoughtful design will only increase as time goes on. And you don’t have to be a healthtech startup to reap the benefits. During the pandemic, there’s been a surge of coronavirus graphics from publishers and healthcare companies alike that break down complex concepts for visual learners.

On this front, the Center for Health Care Strategies (CHCS) offers resources for improving health literacy through content. The CHCS advocates for elements like white space, clear language, bullets, and more. To simplify information, they even reference tools like the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level test, which measures readability, and Sustainability Assessment of Materials (or SAM), which looks at areas like graphics, layout, and cultural appropriateness.

4. CSR Is a Popular Use Case That Often Lacks Creativity

The healthcare industry has a bit of an image problem. The U.S. spends more on healthcare than any other country, costs have increased more than 30x since the 1970s, yet we still have one of the lowest life expectancies compared to other developed countries.

According to a 2019 Gallup poll, 70 percent of people have a negative view of the U.S. healthcare system. To counter this narrative, a lot of healthcare companies have focused their content marketing efforts on corporate social responsibility.

This tactic makes sense on the surface, but companies could do a better job developing their CSR efforts into engaging stories that audiences can find. During our research, we discovered that this kind of content was often buried in corporate newsrooms. (Some newsroom pages could only be accessed by scrolling to the footer of the site.) In terms of creative value, CSR stories tend to have the dry tone of a press release.

Publishing this kind of content doesn’t have to be rocket science. CSR topics actually have a more natural fit in healthcare than other industries. Given all of the crucial research and development that healthcare companies are working on, it doesn’t feel as forced to talk about the impact on the community. These companies are saving lives. That makes for a compelling story–as long as you tell it the right way.

Just look at what GE Reports has done.

Over the last decade, GE Reports has become arguably the best brand blog there is. Led by former Forbes editor Tomas Kellner, the content hub highlights inspirational work carried out by GE employees around the world. It’s CSR content on steroids with the polish of a journalistic outlet.

For example, when there was a ventilator shortage, the GE healthcare team sprang into action, using 3D printing technology to increase production in Wisconsin. Naturally, Kellner and his team sprang into action as well, telling an inspirational story that makes GE look good without overt self-promotion.

“The time your audience spends with your content is really a transaction,” Kellner told us last year. “You have to give them back something of value. If the content becomes too promotional, too self-serving, you will lose your audience very quickly.”

Also worth noting: There has never been a better time to be a healthcare publisher. Audiences are hungry for uplifting healthcare stories, especially when there’s a shortage of good news to go around.

Epic, a B2B healthcare software company, has also been active on this front. In addition to webinars and whitepapers about managing COVID-19 care, the company has also profiled a rural Pennsylvania healthcare system helping patients prepare for their first telehealth appointments.

Patient stories are another CSR initiative gaining momentum in the industry. Think of them like case studies from the patient’s perspective that reveal the journey someone took to overcome health issues.

Patient stories should appeal to healthcare marketers because they’re driven by a clear story. They’re also inherently accessible, offering a personal touch that stands out among the complex, clinical info we’re used to.

The key, though, is figuring out how to tell the story respectfully. Some patients will feel comfortable crafting their own experiences while others may want an experienced creator to translate their thoughts.

“To find patient advocates, social media is a great tool,” said Nancie George, head of content at Oshi Health, which specializes in digestive healthcare. “It’s really about working with people who have identified themselves as an advocate and want to be contacted to share their story.”

5. Reports + Data Are the Biggest Differentiators

As the saying goes, write what you know.

If you’re starting from scratch, trying to compete with established content hubs can seem overwhelming. But most companies have a hidden content advantage sitting right in front of them: their own data.

In data-driven industries like healthcare and finance, internal information is a powerful differentiator. Most content adds to an existing dialogue, but proprietary research is newsworthy content. It creates a conversation, drives shares, and lends itself nicely to visual content. For that reason, it’s the easiest way to boost social engagement, press coverage, and backlinks.

In our research of healthcare content, original reports and guides emerged as some of the top-performing pieces that companies published.

Doctor on Demand has The State of Primary Care in America. ZocDoc launched a series called ZocTrends that reveals interesting data on patient behavior. Roman, the “digital health clinic for men” even named its content hub Health Guide. It’s steadily pumped helpful advice, analysis, and resources to patients. Its most recent project is the Novel Coronavirus Resource Hub, which compiles 18 pieces of content in one place, including a free telehealth assessment.

This strategy works so well for companies newer to content marketing because research can be dissected and repurposed for blog posts, e-books, animated explainer videos, and social graphics. So you don’t need a big marketing team or giant budget to make an immediate impact. Also, the results from these big rock projects can help convince internal stakeholders to increase their content investment.

“A few years ago, our company realized we were sitting on a treasure trove of data about healthcare in the U.S.,” John Fox, former executive director of content for athenahealth, wrote on our blog. “We decided to invest in building a robust research team to capture and serve up insights to our B2B clients in medical groups and hospitals.”

After studying electronic health records (EHR) at the state and national level, athenahealth launched the Flu Dashboard. Every year, it tracks the spread of flu over time in all 50 states with an interactive map. Users can also compare week-by-week flu visits and see vaccination trends.

According to Fox, athenahealth was able to notice flu trends faster for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

When the project took off a few years ago, the company doubled down on its content success. Since then, athenahealth has also developed dashboards for Lyme Disease and, more recently, COVID-19.

“We hire field-tested reporters who have a nose for great stories and aren’t shy about tackling complex topics or parsing data,” Fox explained. “With this approach, we’ve reported with original data on trending topics like the opioid crisis, Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, and the rush of IUD visits following the last presidential election. Our in-house designers are visual storytellers who can take in a data dump on chronic health conditions in the U.S. and turn out an interactive tool that demands exploration.”

Even corporate reports meant for shareholders could yield powerful stories that demand attention. Every year, Cleveland Clinic publishes its internal State of the Clinic report that rounds up data on patients and caregivers across its operations. Not all of the info is relevant to the public, but stats about a decrease in patient falls (down 15 percent) or an increase in virtual visits (up 29 percent) could easily be repurposed for a wider audience interested in healthcare.

When you’re turning data into content, make sure you use it responsibly. Improving health literacy takes more than just digestible information. Setting standards—and publicizing them in your work with research methodologies and sound sourcing—will go a long way toward building trust.

“Over the last decade, there are more points of view available in healthcare, which is both good and bad,” George said. “We’ve found internal reporting guidelines to be really helpful. It includes best practices like not overstating your findings, adding timestamps, using primary sources when possible. We have a big responsibility to the public.”

The post State of Healthcare Content Marketing: 5 Trends Transforming the Industry appeared first on Contently.

“SEO” may be the most ubiquitous marketing word out there—an OG term that sits alongside “engagement” and “cross-channel” in the pantheon of lexicon that’ll never die. But even though everyone from junior marketing coordinators to seasoned CMOs will give lip service to it, a great SEO strategy is hard to find.

Which brings us to CarMax. The nation’s largest retailer of used cars has also become one of the world’s most popular content destinations for car shoppers—thanks in large part to its unique combo of SEO dominance and editorial excellence.

Recently, CarMax let us take a look under the hood of a content program that’s driven over $56M in content value over the past year, and come to rank for 1.5 million keywords worldwide.

Hero, Hub, Help

One of the most impressive things about CarMax’s sophisticated content program is that it didn’t really exist until 2016.

According to Malissa Mackenzie, director of creative services at CarMax, the turning point was gaining support from the company’s senior leadership. After the team ran a small experiment with a few pieces of content, they were able to make a data-driven case for how content could drive valuable search traffic while also helping consumers make smarter decisions. Immediately, the leadership team bought in.

Malissa MacKenzie, director of creative services at CarMax

“Even at the senior executive level, you have those different perspectives coming in, listening to each other, and agreeing on this is a place that’s worthy to invest,” Mackenzie explained.

It also helps that a heavy investment in content just makes sense for CarMax. Car shopping is a high-consideration purchase, so people do a lot of research online. Since CarMax isn’t biased towards any one manufacturer or model, the content team can take an unbiased, editorial approach that puts the customer first.

The content team can take an unbiased, editorial approach that puts the customer first.

They’ve scaled the maturity of their program in record time by adopting the “Hero, Hub, Help” framework, which was developed for YouTube in 2015.

“Hero” content consists of bigger, flashier pieces that draw your audience in and build your brand. (To use the most dramatic example, think of Red Bull dropping Felix Baumgartner from space.)

“Hub” content includes content series that get people to return to your site. (Think Moz’s “White Board Friday” series.)

“Help” content answers key questions your audience is asking—and as you’ll see, it’s where CarMax has shined brightest.

Helping shoppers

In such a competitive automotive content landscape, figuring out what content to create and what questions to answer are key.

CarMax tackled these challenges by working collaboratively across teams. “Our strategy incorporates inputs from SEO strategists, content strategy analysts, as well as creative and UX,” Mackenzie said. “We have this culture of continuous improvement. We recognize there’s a lot of companies that publish automotive and car shopping content, so we want to make sure we’re developing content that’s unique.”

At the heart of that strategy is CarMax’s comprehensive rankings—like The Best Affordable Sports Cars of 2021 or 7 Best Off-Road Vehicles—and trend stories, like this examination of how classic cars are making a comeback. These guides help buyers during the research process, bring them to CarMax’s site, and keep the brand top-of-mind when someone is ready to make a purchase.

The team takes an art-and-science approach to bring that content to life. “It’s a collaboration between passionate editors and passionate SEO strategists,” Mackenzie said. SEO insights help CarMax figure out what models and categories to zero in on, then editors figure out the unique approach the company can take.

But CarMax doesn’t stop there. They also layer in customer research, product development insights, and qualitative feedback from its associates on the ground. That results in a lot of different content that CarMax needs to create to meet the needs of its audience, which is where Contently’s content marketing platform and award-winning network of freelance writers come in.

“Our partnership with Contently has been a huge benefit to us because we couldn’t do the volume that we’re doing without them.”

“Our partnership with Contently has been a huge benefit to us because we couldn’t do the volume that we’re doing without them,” Mackenzie said. “We pull in CarMax data to make sure that our Contently writers can incorporate a CarMax perspective into those topics specifically.”

That data-driven approach comes to life in pieces like the 4WD/AWD Index, which uses CarMax data to look at where four-wheel drive and all-wheel drive vehicles are most popular in the country, creating a piece of visually engaging storytelling that can be repurposed across channels.

“Contently’s been an amazing partner, and I was really impressed early on by the ability to have a Contently editor who has automotive experience,” Mackenzie said.

Contently writers and editors join CarMax’s weekly standup, which has allowed for incredible collaboration. “It almost feels like they are a part of our in-house team.”

It’s working. Millions of people read CarMax’s content each month—with 75 percent of its traffic coming from search. And that traffic is worth over $56 million, according to Contently’s Content Value Tracker, which measures how much a competitor would have to pay to replicate a brand’s organic traffic through Google search ads.

Embracing video for Hero and Hub content

In early 2020, CarMax partnered with Edmunds, a car review and shopping site, to up their video content, and later acquired the company in 2021. The acquisition strengthened the partnership they already had on dynamic video content.

Video has helped CarMax extend its search dominance to YouTube, the second-largest search engine on earth. The well-edited, informative, and entertaining clips are hosted by Edmunds editors. Just check out this review of the Dodge Challenger vs. Dodge Charger, which has earned 1,200 likes and over 268,000 views on YouTube.

“CarMax brings data on what we know about sales shoppers, and then Edmunds brings the vehicle expertise that they have with a whole team of car experts,” Mackenzie said.

These videos are TV-quality productions that keep car junkies hooked. Ultimately, it’s all about finding ways to both serve CarMax’s audience and bolster the business case for its content program.

“We hope that we can add value and inspire readers to choose CarMax as the place they want to complete their shopping process, ” Mackenzie said. “But we’re very happy if we know that we’ve added value to the research that they’re doing.”

And that dedication to their audience is CarMax’s guiding light.

“It’s our responsibility to always advocate that the intention of creating content is to help the customer,” Mackenzie said. “That’s the highest business goal we have.”

The post How CarMax Drove $56 Million in Content Value Through the Art & Science of SEO appeared first on Contently.

Mint was building a budgeting app that could track spending and help with financial planning. But their secret sauce was content. They started the MintLife blog before the app even launched, offering straightforward advice to young professionals who wanted guidance on everything from taxes to credit scores. While most finserv content at the time took the form of dry PDFs, Mint’s blog sounded like it was written by your friend’s cool older sibling who worked on Wall Street but went to Vassar, and had somehow saved up $100K by age 27.

The content took off almost immediately. According to Mint founder Aaron Patzer, by the time the app launched, “MintLife was driving more traffic than their competitors were to their entire websites.” Mint became one of content marketing’s first rags-to-riches story when Intuit acquired the company for $170 million in 2009, in large part because of how the blog had helped them establish a strong brand, acquire users, and earn their brand loyalty.

Then, seemingly before the ink dried on the deal, everyone started copying Mint. Companies with retail banking divisions invested in educational resources centers. Personal finance guides popped up on lifestyle sites. And tons of bloggers began offering their budgeting hacks. Today, the space for personal finance content has become incredibly overcrowded.

At this point, it may not even be worth trying to replicate what Mint accomplished, because any brand would have to deal with so much more competition and diminishing returns. Case in point: The current keyword difficulty for “budgeting” is 94 percent, per SEMrush. As they put it: “The hardest keyword to compete for. It will take a lot of on-page SEO, link building, and content promotion efforts.”

If you want to create effective educational content, start by answering a basic question: How can I help my audience? You should always aim to provide sound advice. But helping your audience also means focusing on fresh topics that haven’t been covered over and over.

Right now, the content topic with the most potential in financial services may be cryptocurrency. Only about 17 percent of U.S. adults own crypto, per a 2021 study from the New York Digital Investment Group, but 75 percent of respondents expressed interest in learning more about it.

When we analyzed 1,180 pieces of content from fintech and cryptocurrency brands, 11 of the top 20 links were educational posts from Binance Academy and Coinbase’s learning center. They each averaged 10,073 social shares.

This dwarfs the engagement we found in more traditional finance sectors. In our B2B finserv data set, the top 20 pieces of content averaged 4,221 shares. In the B2C finserv report, the top 20 links brought in 2,614 shares.

The main point is to find the sweet spot for educational topics that have high interest and low competition. Then go all-in on developing easily digestible lessons.

Crypto content has quickly become an important topic for most finserv companies. In March, Morgan Stanley became the first U.S. bank to offer clients a crypto fund. Since then, dozens of big banks have followed suit. In B2C, there’s a serious need for content that can help people invest responsibility, given that crypto assets can be both lucrative and incredible volatile.

Brands seeking to create crypto content should try to be candid and informative. That’s exactly what Binance Academy did, building its reputation and credibility by training people on the ins and outs of an emerging field. The Academy has a clear starting point for newcomers. The educational hub also organizes content around three different learning tracks—beginner, intermediate, and advanced—so anyone who visits the site can benefit.

If you’re interested in creating educational resources this year, here’s some more encouraging news: In our 2021 State of Content Marketing Report, only 2 percent of respondents chose educational courses as their most important content format. So the finserv marketers who target the right topics today will have a huge edge over everyone else in the future.

Big takeaway: Help your audience by teaching them something new rather than recycling old educational topics others have already covered.

The post Here’s Why Finance Brands Need to Care About Cryptocurrency Content appeared first on Contently.

Flexiple is a network that helps companies match with freelance designers and developers. Four years after starting it from scratch, we hit $2 million in annual revenue. But along the way, there was an incredible amount of trial and error as I figured out how to launch a product, think about SEO, find the right distribution channels, and much more.

Those experiences came in handy when I started Remote Tools, an online community for remote workers. Suddenly, some of my previous hurdles didn’t seem so daunting. But starting—and maintaining—and online community brought its own set of challenges.

Now that both sites are doing well, I wanted to share what I learned about marketing over the years. Here’s my own crash course, full of the 13 biggest marketing lessons I wish professors taught me in business school.

1. Marketing starts way before you ship the product

You should begin building your audience well before you finish coding or make any sort of public announcement about your plans.

For instance, I gained 1,259 subscribers for my newsletter before I wrote a single word of content about my last company. How? One of my LinkedIn posts went viral. The post was simply an announcement about starting a newsletter, and it gave a glimpse of what to expect when you subscribe.

2. Don’t leave your launch day up to luck

I got lucky when I launched Remote Tools in 2018. I stumbled upon Product Hunt and submitted what we had without preparing much. I even made the mistake of submitting late at night, but fortunately, one of the site admins rescheduled my post for the next day. I may not be here writing this to you if that didn’t happen. Right off the bat, we had four deals and 10,000 visitors.

But after that, I never left a launch to luck. I’ve since done 10 successful Product Hunt launches and spent months preparing a marketing plan for each.

Whenever you decide to launch, you should have:

• A list of people (e.g. beta users) who can support you
• A list of channels where you can talk about your launch
• Approved content and social posts ready to post on launch day

3. Distribute on multiple channels because you can’t guarantee which ones will work

When you’re piecing together a launch calendar, make sure you plan to post on multiple distribution channels. The core details won’t change much, so using an additional channel only requires incremental effort.

For instance, we prepared for months to launch new Flexiple feature called Scale on Product Hunt, but it didn’t make to the top 10 products of the day. However, the same day, we had huge success on Reddit, to the tune of 150,000 visitors in 24 hours.

4. Think beyond the launch

We made a huge mistake in 2018 with the first version of Remote Tools. Even though 10,000 people visited our site in a matter of days, we had nothing in place to capture their contact info.

When you get a traffic spike on launch day, make sure you give people a way to follow you and return to your site.

In 2019, when we launched the Remote Tools newsletter, we had multiple CTAs on the website to gather users’ details. In two days, we lined up over 1,500 subscribers.

5. Focus on SEO from day 1

SEO is a gradual process. It takes time to build your website authority and have people link back to your work. So the earlier you can focus on SEO, the better off you’ll be.

You can help yourself early on by taking care of on-page ranking factors like title tags and meta descriptions. In a sense, you’re telling readers and search engines that you know what you’re doing.

But I also recommend focusing heavily on building backlinks. That’s what we did for both Flexiple and Remote Tools in the first six months after launching. This primarily included writing guest posts on high authority websites in our domain. You can drive more backlinks by releasing original research or unique tools that would warrant press coverage.

6. And be patient as you wait for rankings to improve

Last year, we conducted some new keyword research on our blog. We identified a new list of target keywords that hit the sweet spot of high volume and low competition, knowing that it would take months (if not a year or two) to see our rankings improve.

In the past, we only really published long articles, but to produce content quicker and cover all the keywords, we decided to write shorter posts as well. In 2021, this has really started to pay off.

As you can see in the chart, our traffic only inched up from October to December. But since the new year came along, our traffic has jumped 250 percent, much of this because of the high-value keywords we went after.

7. Email lists are essential

I’m not going to spend too much time on this because it’s been covered before on The Content Strategist, but an email newsletter is one of the best ways to reach your audience on a regular basis.

If you want to read more about how I write and manage multiple newsletters, check out this Twitter thread:

I write & manage 4 newsletters with 5000+ subscribers and closed down 2 others with 2000+ subscribers (due to lack of time).

15 useful & non-obvious tips on how to run & market your newsletter

— Hrishikesh Pardeshi (@hrishiptweets) March 30, 2021

8. Side projects can boost your traffic

In April 2021, I built a Trump Chatbot as a joke, hoping it would go viral. It didn’t. So I stuffed it in the back of a drawer and forgot about it.

That changed in November 2020 during the U.S. election. I redistributed it across some go-to channels like LinkedIn, and it started to get some traction. As an added bonus, the chatbot now ranks on Google and brings in a tiny bit of traffic to Remote Tools each month.

Even if a side project veers from your typical brand voice or marketing strategy, don’t discount it. Remote Tools actually started as a side project for Flexiple. We launched it in 2018 to drive more traffic and generate leads. It took off so much that we ended up spinning it off into its own site.

9. Build a consistent distribution checklist

Sporadic content distribution yields sporadic results. Your distribution efforts have to be consistent. For instance, my distribution engine for my content is a simple table with checkboxes for the following channels:

• HackerNews
• IndieHackers
• Remote Clan
• Twitter
• Reddit

Find the handful of channels that make the most sense for your company, and keep supplying them with consistent posts so audiences get to know you.

10. Talk to your customers (rather than at them)

This lesson applies to multiple teams, but marketing should take it to heart. I keep in touch with a few of Flexiple’s initial clients and ask them to join brainstorming meetings when possible. They’ve basically become like friends to the company, and that’s led to insightful contributions over the years.

For instance, when we first looked into paid ads, one of our clients joined a number of discussions and offered advice based on their own experiences with Google Ads. In fact, we ended up working with the agency they recommended.

11. Social media users want to talk to people more than brands

Every company needs to be active on social media, but I’m a firm believer that your personal accounts should take priority over them. People want to connect with founders, experts, and leaders. Plus, it’s much easier to have a conversation when you know who you’re talking to.

For brand accounts, I tend to focus more on sharing company updates, posting links to content, and offering customer support help.

12. Share both good and bad experiences

From afar, it can seem like experts on social media are perfect. Everything they do works out, and they’re constantly posting about new achievements (especially on LinedkIn). But I think there’s a lot of value in sharing the missteps along the way.

A number of the lessons I’ve written about here came from trial and error. One thing I like to do is write about a new product or feature as we’re building it. This approach lets me:

• Explain why we are building this product or feature
• Give a behind-the-scenes look at how we built it
• Detail specific data, like how much money we spent or how many hours something took, which tends to resonate because people love numbers

For instance, I wrote a behind-the-scenes Twitter thread about how I built a community platform and published a version of it on the Remote Tools blog. Then I shared it on Dev.to & Hashnode, where I received more encouraging responses and feedback.

13. Marketing isn’t always about acquiring customers right away

A lot of my marketing success has come down to trust and patience. Build trust with your audience by providing value selflessly. Then show people how you can help them when they’re ready to reach out. Simple, I know, but still important ideas that I always come back to in the end.

The post 13 Marketing Lessons I Learned Growing My Startup to $2 Million in Revenue appeared first on Contently.

“They’ve got all this data at their fingertips,” Hatch said. “And yet, the organization doesn’t know how to use it effectively.”

Over the past few years, I’ve found that this problem plagues most organizations when it comes to content strategy. Everyone says they want to create data-driven content based on their audience’s interests, but many marketers have no idea what data matters or how to use it.

Wouldn’t it be much easier if someone told them what content their audience craves, and how to stand out from their competition?

We’ve spent the last three years working to make that a reality.

What brands get wrong about data-driven content

As marketers, we tend to view data as a magic wand that’ll solve everything. Why? Well, at the start of the 2010s, just about every marketing automation and analytics platform claimed to have the intel that would make our jobs easy and our results foolproof.

These platforms promised that Step 1 was data, and Step 2 was SUCCESS—business success, content success, marketing success, sales success. Whatever kind of success would get you to sign on the dotted line.

By 2016, there were nearly 4,000 offerings in Scott Brinker’s terrifying martech supergraphic, each promising that they would lead marketers to the promised land. Brinker’s supergraphic is at 8,000 companies now. Many of them have added bells and whistles to their software, hoping to differentiate their way into the “Leader” section of the next analyst report, but few have delivered on that initial promise.

That promise was flawed. There’s no magic wand. Data-driven content marketing isn’t a two-step process.

To create quality content that performs, you need five steps, sound data, and smart people. Most importantly, you need raw data to become helpful insights that humans can understand.

Step 1: Analyze data through tools that offer timely insights and recommendations .

Step 2: Come up with specific story ideas based on those insights.

Step 3: Create content, assigning the story to a specialized content creator. (For our customers, this is where our Global Talent Network plays a huge role.)

Step 4: Distribute channel-specific content in the places where your audience spends their time.

Step 5: Measure what works and optimize for the next round of content creation.

Those insights in the first step are the key. So three years ago, we started building a content strategy tool called StoryBook to help us make better decisions.

StoryBook tell us things like the formats, topics, and channels an audience craves. The voice and tone traits that’ll resonate. The headline and image types that’ll drive the best click rate. And which types of stories will help them stand out from their competition and drive the better results, faster.

StoryBook’s insights, however, are only step 1. Veteran content teams can take those insights and create high-performing content, but many organizations need more hands-on help along the way.

So we decided to develop three new content strategy offerings, powered by StoryBook, to help brands at all levels of content maturity.

Content Intelligence: Pure content strategy insights and recommendations from StoryBook for mature content marketing programs to execute on, with the help of Contently’s content marketing platform and talent network.

Contently Accelerator: An elite content strategy program designed for teams who need a dedicated partner every step of the way and want to level up their content maturity.

Contently Studio: Our new program that offers the total management of your content marketing, for brands that want to give strategic direction and then have our team execute.

You can check them out in the video below.

We developed these new solutions because it’s never been more important to create content that builds trust and helps people. With in-person events paused for the foreseeable future, all marketing is now digital. And digital marketing simply doesn’t work without great content.

Great content makes your organic and paid social campaigns more effective. Your landing pages convert better. It nurtures leads, proves your brand’s worth, and makes your sales team’s job a hell of a lot easier.

Simply put, the best way to do marketing is to create content that people love. And the easiest way to create great content is to arm smart creatives with the audience insights they need.

If you’re interested in learning more about our offerings, shoot us an email at sales@contently.com, or request a free content consultation here.

The post 3 Data-Driven Content Strategy Solutions for the Next Era of Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

Marketing copy heaves with destinations that are “state of the art,” “off the beaten path,” or “sun-kissed”—phrases with no function other than to add bloat. Some are so common that they’ve spawned satirical blog posts, such as Grumpy Traveller’s The 65 Greatest Cities of Contrasts.

Travel photography fares no better—just look at Insta Repeat, which collates formulaic Instagram posts with pithy captions such as “Person standing centered at the end of dock” and “Person standing at the edge of this one cliff.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/B_ITs93HF_z/

Clichés are the literary equivalent of fast food, easy to grab but not great for you. Original content takes more time and effort, but it provides a meaningful payoff. It gives travelers a reason to trust you. Tell them that your hotel is the city’s “best-kept secret,” and you’ll get an eye roll. Tell them about the fresh roses delivered weekly, the hand-painted murals, and the teak canopy bed, and you’ll get their attention.

“Empty phrases such as ‘state of the art’ or ‘world-class’… like, what even are those?” said Kelsey Ogletree, a freelance writer who has written for Condé Nast Traveler and Travel + Leisure. “I think we all fall back on these things, but it’s just lazy writing.”

Here are some tips to rise above the noise and never resort to a “bustling market” ever again.

1. Avoid generalizations

“Blanket statements can get really cringey,” said Skye Sherman, a freelance travel writer based in South Florida. “The things I read about South Florida are so off base and outdated, they make my blood boil. There is so much more to it than theme parks and retirement communities. They miss the millions of young people who are doing incredible things—entrepreneurial ventures in art and theatre, all these amazing elements that are super cool and unique.”

Focusing on the people who make your business or destination—the cooks, the artists, the flight crew—is a simple way to circumvent stereotypes. However, avoid overuse of the word “local,” another meaningless trope enjoying a surge in popularity.

“’The local cheese, the local market,’ that means nothing to me,” said Nick Papa, marketing copywriter at online magazine and travel company Atlas Obscura. “Has it been in the family for five generations? Do they get fish from a fisherman who lives down the street and catches the fish in the body of water next to the neighborhood? What is the actual thing that makes it ‘of the neighborhood,’ as opposed to any chain store that could open up?”

This blog post about Yemeni coffee from Nashville café Crema Coffee exemplifies this writing style. The post goes into detail about the two friends who founded Yemen’s first coffee mill in a warzone and the environmental conditions that make the coffee stand out.

2. Think about your audience

In attempting to please everyone, travel content often pleases no one.

“The statement ‘something for everyone’ always warrants an eye roll,” Sherman said. “Not every location has something for everyone, and that’s okay.”

What you write for millennial parents will differ from copy meant for boomer retirees or Gen X foodies. Keeping your audience in mind will help you to decide what details to include. This is an essential skill for writing short descriptions, which will otherwise end up loaded with empty adjectives.

Compare, for example, the blogs of Contiki Travel and Saga. Contiki Travel knows exactly what their Generation Z and millennial readers want: beautiful, shareable photography; wellness; and responsible travel. Saga, on the other hand, covers wildlife-spotting, beaches, and museums appropriate for its 50-plus audience.

If you’re unsure what your audience wants, ask them. During the coronavirus crisis, Papa has been conducting weekly polls of Atlas Obscura’s followers to ask them which destination they should focus on. He then curates the company’s new “WFH” (Wonder from Home) virtual content to reflect this.

“Our Scotland trip leader did a bagpipe concert. Our Lisbon trip leader did a virtual Aperitivo,” he said.

The series triggered a massive spike in engagement. In March, Atlas Obscura saw 743 percent more Facebook shares, 321 percent more blog pageviews, and 629 percent more website referrals than in February.

3. Use humor and personality

While working on a piece for Midwest Living magazine about Bloomington, Indiana, Ogletree was struggling to come up with an intro, so she took an unconventional route: She used an unflattering anecdote.

“We got tossed out of a liquor store because they were really serious about everyone showing their IDs when walking in there,” she said. “We are in our thirties, so we thought it was really funny. I didn’t think anything of it but then I ended up finding a way to work that into the story; my editor said he laughed out loud when he read it. If you can be comfortable with it, find a personal anecdote that says, ‘This is a real experience’ and take it up to a new level.”

While much depends on your audience—not everyone will want to read about hardships—anecdotal evidence suggests that a sprinkling of the inconvenient attracts rather than repels.

Travel writers Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux inspired thousands of backpackers to follow their lead, despite describing their trials in great detail. Chatwin frequently slept in a sleeping bag at the side of the road, while Theroux endured uncomfortable carriages and difficult companions on his train journeys across Asia.

Travel companies can capture some of this magic. The blog of adventure tour company GeoEx (edited by acclaimed travel writer Don George) sprinkles unpleasant anecdotes among tales of wonder. In recounting an ant attack, this story about a traveler’s expedition to the Congo becomes more compelling and believable.

4. Catch clichés in your revisions

During the manic, just-get-the-idea-down phase of a first draft, clichés can be useful, serving as placeholders until you think of something better. Fill that page with as many hidden gems and azure waters as you like, but on that second pass, be ruthless.

“Don’t edit as you go. You need to write it up first,” Ogletree said. “Then review the adjectives and ask, ‘Does this sentence actually add to the story?’ If you’re using words like ‘luxurious’ and ‘charming,’ use something different that is more specific and says what you mean.”

Software can assist in this process. SmartEdit, which comes in free and paid versions, allows users to create their own list of “monitored words and phrases,” which it will then scan for and flag.

5. Turn SEO insights into original content

A common complaint from writers is that SEO tactics strangle originality. Perhaps this was once the case, but Google’s algorithm updates over the years have put the focus back on expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.

“A lot of writers look at SEO as a constraint,” Papa said. “But at the end of the day, SEO is all about what actual travelers are typing into Google. What is it that they’re looking for, and how do I deliver content that answers the question? I would look at it as an opportunity.”

To get this competitive edge, marketers can use a keyword research tool such as Moz’s Keyword Explorer or Answer the Public.

At Atlas Obscura, a tour business catering to nonconformist travelers, Papa focuses on longtail keywords that target niche interests. “We typically look for opportunities to rank for keywords that include more than three words,” he said. “The demand for these keywords is less, but the intent of the user is much higher.”

Recent longtail keywords like “Are tailless whip scorpions arachnids,” “Eat like a local in Lisbon,” and “Tips for better travel photography” have all led to unique travel stories.

These words and phrases can help you avoid the pitfalls of travel clichés. “Create content that is as targeted as possible,” Papa said. “That’s always a better time investment than ‘Top 5 Things to Do in Croatia.’ Everyone’s done that, so why would you want to do it again and compete in that space?”

The post No More Hidden Gems: How to Hook Consumers and Avoid Travel Content Clichés appeared first on Contently.

Agencies took on the big campaign work—TV commercials, out-of-home advertising, print, media buys, etc. Then as digital came along, they took on website design, banners, and the occasional god awful microsite.

Meanwhile, the in-house team tackled anything that required an intimate and technical knowledge of the brand. Think website copywriting, brochures and one-sheets, help centers, email newsletters, the occasional blog post and press release.

That traditional model is collapsing before our very eyes.

The variety of content brands need has increased exponentially—social video, animated explainers, blog posts, data visualizations, video case studies, interactive tools, white papers, infographics, and more. They need to create it all quickly, cost efficiently, and across all stages of the customer journey.

Content used to be considered primarily a top-of-funnel tool. Today, however, consumers expect helpful, high-quality content across every touchpoint. And to accomplish it all, we need a new model.

The problem with an internal solution

Faced with these growing demands, some companies have tried to adopt by growing their in-house team, putting up job postings for more copywriters, videographers, and designers. In a few rare occasions, brands (Red Bull, Reebok) have made this work.

But most companies that aren’t hot consumer brands have found that it’s really hard to recruit top-flight creative talent to work at a bank, insurance company, healthcare company, etc.

Also, while you may need help for a specific content format (like data viz), the need isn’t great enough to justify a full-time head. It’s often hard to produce great creative work when everyone lives inside the echo chamber of your own brand.

The problem with an agency solution

Others, meanwhile, have relied on agencies to pick up the load—particularly as more and more shops rebrand as content-centric. But many brands have struggled here as well because you still end up having to pay full-time employees just to project-manage endless messy email chains, Google Docs, and compliance reviews.

While your agency was great at the big campaign work, they aren’t built to handle the brand’s wide array of content needs at scale—e-books, webinars, case studies, explainer videos, etc. Even when the content does get created, it’s super expensive, because agencies jack up the hourly price of creative talent by 2-4x. That doesn’t work long term.

The new generation of content marketing

Over the past few years, four big shifts have changed the course of content marketing.

1. Brands accept that their content can’t be full of product plugs. With an emphasis on true storytelling, the creative class is more open to working for them.

Granted, this is a work in progress because too many marketers are focused on outdated SEO stuffing tactics and product plugs. But content that puts the audience first is now an established best practice.

2. We’re in the midst of a media apocalypse.

I wrote about this dynamic earlier in the year. Layoffs and takeovers by private equity vampires are hurting traditional media companies. (As someone who once ran a failed news site, I know this pain all too well.) We’re now entering a world in which some of the best-funded content operations are run by brands, and freelance creatives are giving them a much longer look than they did five years ago.

3. For the first time, the technology exists for brands to collaborate with remote freelance creatives at scale.

Invoicing, brainstorming, and creating content with independent freelancers was a nightmare before the rise of content marketing platforms. Now, it’s as seamless as working with an in-house employee.

4. A new generation of marketers is coming into power.

This last point is really important. The new wave of marketers that’ll dominate the 2020s are unattached to the old ways of doing things. They often come from a digital media background, and they’re eager to build deeper relationships with their customers across channels.”Companies get it best when they hire people who are video editors or have journalism backgrounds,” Crystal Eastman, who’s led marketing at Blackrock and Amex, told me recently. “They bring that external view and expertise on how to create content that people would actually consume and look forward to. Then you can merge the artistry and the science of those experts with the internal teams that are the experts at the product. That’s the way best content gets created for customers.”

What’s to come

As these ambitious, content-savvy marketers rise into leadership positions, they’re gravitating toward a model that lets them build deep relationships with their audience. They’re allergic to the idea of producing mediocre content that merely checks a box.

We’ve seen this model work first-hand at Contently, by fusing our content marketing platform with world-class content creation talent and strategy services.

With this system, the results can be incredible—just look at Marriott Traveler, which attracts millions of readers each month across over 50 local editions across the globe; or RBC’s Discover and Learn financial education hub; or ENI’s ambitious thought leadership on renewable energy and climate change. It’s inspiring to see what great marketers will do when they can access and collaborate with some of the world’s best creative firepower on demand.

In the future, this model will enable the creative renaissance for branded content we’ve all been waiting for. It’ll usher in an era in which helpful, entertaining content becomes the centerpiece of marketing—an era in which marketers will rise up to the challenge of telling great stories. What a great era it’ll be.

The post 4 Big Shifts That Will Usher in a New Generation of Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

SEO remains a huge part of content marketing, as it should be. High-ranking content creates long-term value for your brand. It’s a key part of what Tomasz Tunguz calls the compounding returns of content marketing.

When you invest in content and a strong SEO strategy, you drive more and more valuable traffic to your site over time, resulting in compounding returns on your content marketing investment.

The problem with SEO is that many companies’ content SEO strategy looks like this:

Step 1: The content team creates a pretty good article.

Step 2: They pass it off to the SEO team, who stuff the piece with a bunch of keywords that make it nearly unreadable and press publish.

Step 3: The content team cries, and the piece doesn’t perform well against search anyway BECAUSE THAT’S NOT HOW SEO WORKS ANYMORE.

Even in 2020, I see this same mistake made over and over again. Instead, marketers should:

A) Factor a target keyword into content planning and production from the beginning, so that it’s naturally integrated into the piece. Since Google has shifted to semantic search, you want to focus on long-tail keywords associated with a question that someone’s trying to answer. (i.e., “What makes good content marketing,” “content marketing tips”). By answering the question at hand, you build SEO into the editorial process and avoid keyword stuffing.

B) Prioritize quality over everything else. Nowadays, Google prioritizes backlinks and E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) ratings in their rankings. The easiest way to drive both of those up is to create interesting content with original research and reporting related to your industry. You need to create content that inspires people to link, share, and spend time on page. And you need Google to see you as an expert in the core topics you’re covering.

In 2020, this is what matters. Traditional keyword stuffing is now terrible for your SEO. And mediocre content that won’t earn links is essentially worthless. Focus on publishing original research and reporting that helps answer your audience’s big questions. Focus on quality over quantity. Bring your SEO team in at the beginning of the content planning process—and then politely kick them out of the editing room. If you do that, I promise: You’ll see greater SEO results this year.

The post The Biggest SEO Mistake Content Marketers Make appeared first on Contently.

Most marketers invest in optimizing their website SEO, but they miss the massive opportunity to rank their video content on YouTube. YouTube SEO may seem complicated, but if you’ve ever Googled how to do something mundane, you likely already understand it.

For example, I recently decided to make a fennel and herb stuffing. But there was one problem. When I pulled out a giant bunch of fennel, I realized I had absolutely no idea what to do with it. So, of course, I Googled “how do I chop a fennel bulb?” This is what I found:

A huge amount of Google search traffic navigates directly to video results. YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, one spot behind its parent company, Google. And really, they’re intertwined. When you search Google, you’re also searching YouTube.

Understanding YouTube’s SEO Ecosystem

You probably already know that 500 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute. And when you go to YouTube’s home page or search for a video, you’re presented with a well curated collection of relevant videos.

YouTube thrives because it serves content viewers want, keeping them engaged. It has evolved to bury all things boring, irrelevant, and misleading with ruthless efficiency.

That’s why you need to make it easy for YouTube to understand why your content is relevant to a particular topic.

Perfecting your YouTube SEO strategy

A great YouTube SEO strategy takes 10 relatively easy steps. And like all things SEO, it begins with the all mighty keyword.

1. Identify your target keywords

Identifying your target keywords is step one in the content development process. Doing this first will allow you to organically build them into your content. Remember, everything in your video is searchable (more on that later). If you neglect keywords during the briefing and scripting phase, you’ve already missed an opportunity to help your videos rank.

Use a keyword tool like TubeBuddy or SEMRush to make sure you’re picking keywords that people will search for, but also aren’t so saturated that your video would never stand a chance (good luck getting that generic makeup tutorial to rank).

Since both Google and YouTube leverage semantic search, you want to focus on keywords that relate to a specific “query”, or question someone is trying to answer—like how to chop a fennel bulb.

Using TubeBuddy we can see that, “how to chop a fennel bulb” is a good keyword to target because it’s specific, not too competitive, and has enough search volume to make it worth targeting. That means you can plan a video tutorial on how to chop fennel and you’ll have a decent shot at ranking with related keyword searches.

2. Make sure the content is relevant and keyword rich

When you search “How to chop a fennel bulb”, you get videos like this one:

Shockingly, it’s about how to cut fennel, with a keyword rich script. This is crucial, because you can upload an SRT file of your script alongside your video to make it easier for YouTube to understand the content of your video. (More on that in step 8.)

3. Name your file

Google uses every piece of information available to assess what a video is about. This includes the file name. Before you upload your file, make sure to put your main keyword in the file name. Instead of using ‘final-4-master-NEW.mov’, try something like ‘how-to-chop-fennel.mov’.

4. Create a keyword-rich title (but don’t make it weird or boring)

This is only one small piece of the puzzle, so don’t let your SEO strategy begin and end with putting your keyword in the title. But it does help. Integrate your keyword organically and make sure your title is under 70 characters and accurately represents the video. So “The Art and Science of Root Vegetable Preparation Through The Lens of Millennial Ennui in Twenty-first Century America” might not be the best title for our fennel chopping example.

5. Write an engaging description

Far too often, brands underutilize YouTube’s description field. This space is an opportunity to tell your audience and YouTube what your video is about and provide call-to-action links.

YouTube only shows the first couple lines in the description field before asking the viewer to click “Show More”. So if your primary goal is to drive traffic to your website, it’s a good idea to put your call to action first. Make it clear and simple: “Check out our website to see our 3 favorite fennel recipes.”

The rest of your description is an opportunity to get in some keywords, but don’t overdo it. Descriptions are shown to have very little impact on search rankings. A brief, catchy, and relevant description will serve you better than something packed with keywords.

6. Tag, tag, tag

Now we’re getting to the good stuff. When you upload your video, you’ll get the opportunity to add tags under the “More Options” section.

Don’t just stop at your main keyword. Go ahead and add related phrases as well. This will give you more chances to rank, since it will attach your video to more search terms and related videos. Using tools like Keywords Anywhere can help you generate a list of related keywords. You won’t want to use all of them, but it’s a good place to start.

You can narrow down your list by checking each keyword’s score and weeding out low performers. Start out with the most relevant keywords, and use a mix of both long and short-tail terms.

7. Select a category

YouTube allows you to categorize your own videos. While this may seem straightforward, it’s a good idea to be thoughtful when selecting a category.

Do a little bit of research into what performs well within a specific category before you assign it to your video. You can find a video’s category at the bottom of the video’s description.

If you click on that category, you will be directed to a channel automatically generated by YouTube’s video discovery process. Explore these category pages and look at the channels and videos that perform well. This information can help you select a category that makes sense for your video.

Not only will this research help you associate your video with similar content and give it a better chance at ranking, it will also help you get more familiar with whats currently working well on the platform.

8. Add subtitles and SRT file

Remember when I said everything in your video is searchable? Adding subtitles will make your videos more accessible and help them rank. There are a few ways to do this. You can use YouTube’s creator studio to add these manually. You can also upload an SRT file to your video. If you work with a video producer, you can usually ask them to deliver these with your video, just keep in mind some will charge extra to include this service.

Rev.com is also an awesome tool to get a transcript of your video’s audio.

9. Choose your thumbnail

YouTube rewards quality. While you can use the thumbnail (the image you see that represents the video) generated by YouTube when you upload, that image tends to come out not so great. YouTube is a visual platform and let’s face it, people respond more to eye-catching thumbnails than a video’s title.

Design high-quality thumbnails (no more than 2MB). They should be the right aspect ratio, 1280×720 (16:9) and feature an eye-catching image. You don’t want something overly detailed or confusing. People respond to faces, so using a medium shot of the person in the video is a pretty safe bet.

10. Integrate cards and end screens

These give your video relevance by connecting it with other content. Cards are the little icons that appear during a video that direct the viewer somewhere. End screens are the page you see at the end of a video directing you to subscribe and watch another video. Adding these to your video can help your video rank because it gives your audience more chances to interact with your content. This interaction indicates to YouTube your content will keep users on the platform longer. There are a number of things you can do with these tools so it’s a good idea to learn more about them.

Following these strategies will give your content a better chance of rising above the chaos and deliver real results for your brand.

But at the end of the day, it’s vital to remember who you’re making videos for. Search engines are a tool to help your audience find your content. Optimizing for those tools alone won’t make your video something worth watching. Create videos your audience will actually want to watch regardless of SEO rankings. Use your brand authority to answer their questions. Tell them a great story about an inspiring customer. Teach them about a topic they want to learn more about.

In short, make content people will find helpful, entertaining, and worth watching.

The post How to Master YouTube SEO, in 10 Easy Steps appeared first on Contently.

I searched through Glassdoor, LinkedIn, and Indeed for traditional internships at media companies. But after browsing hundreds of postings, I quickly saw similar positions at brands. The skill overlap was similar, but not identical. And when I showed up for my first day at Contently, the marketing team had a list of links ready for me to read through.

As I got more comfortable in the role, I picked up more nuances. Aside from the core responsibilities of writing and editing, content marketing has its own ecosystem of terms and disciplines. New interns will have to learn everything from the confusing marketing lexicon to email marketing and ROI (that’s return on investment).

The point is: You’ll learn a lot. Colleges may be getting better at adapting to digital media and digital marketing, but graduates interested in content marketing would benefit from a guide. The more you can research going in, the better you’ll be.

To help all the new and aspiring content marketing interns out there, I decided to create this syllabus. It’s basically what I wished I knew on day one. Now go forth, excel at your internship, and get your content career off to a promising start.

A Marketer’s Guide to Decoding Social Media Algorithms in 2019 | Buffer

Having an online social media presence is very important for any company online.

Buffer, which offers clients social media management tool, also has a weekly podcast about all your social needs. This episode in particular, on social platform algorithms, is exceptionally useful for figuring the algorithms of the four social media giants: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn.

The episode (which also includes an edited transcript below the fold) covers user interaction with social content in detail. Commenting and liking a post is basic, but what about engagements through chat apps like Messenger or private DMs. How about posting things natively instead of trying to bring people back to your site? This podcast will answer all of your pressing questions.

The Beginner’s Guide to SEO | Moz

Showing up on the first page of a Google search is one of the most important aspect of building a business today. If your audience can’t find you, it doesn’t matter if you think your products and services are great. That’s where SEO (search engine optimization) comes in.

Moz, arguably the top SEO expert out there, created this guide that covers almost everything you need to know about search engine optimization. Though the world of SEO optimization is ever-changing, understanding the basics of it can go a long way as a content marketing intern.

Divided into seven chapters, the guide includes practices, step-by-step visuals, and a glossary. It covers background knowledge about how search engines think about your content before getting into useful technical advice for topics like titles, URLs, meta descriptions, and snippets.

Though the content can be a lot to digest, it’s incredibly detail and should be an easy enough read if you’re looking for something specific. You can even just thoroughly go through chapter one if you’re solely creating blog posts for your brand.

A Marketing to Media Translation Dictionary | Contently

Content marketing is its own language. Sit through a marketing meeting, and you’ll hear at least one acronym that means nothing to you. With that can comes fear and confusion. What does it mean when your boss says, “Don’t forget to include a CTA” or “Make sure your piece is for a B2B buyer”?

Sometimes marketers use a ten-dollar word and then later preach that simplicity is important. They tend to use phrases and buzzwords that are due for retirement. But to make sure you can decipher your responsibilities, it pays to understand what they mean—even if you have no intention of ever saying the word “snackable.”

Lucky for you, we have exactly what you need: A Marketing to Media Translation Dictionary. These 13 phrases should help you figure what “map against your KPIs” means and more.

Though this dictionary will still apply to most recent content marketing interns, we might have to make a new one as soon as next year. Who knows what new buzzwords marketers will come up with next?

B2B Content Marketing: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends | Content Marketing Institute

As a content marketing intern, knowing industry trends and benchmarks will help you conquer the learning curve so you can contribute to your team quicker. Every year Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs put out a survey on content marketing priorities from B2B companies of all sizes.

Each report compares the data to the previous year on topics like team size, preferred content distribution channels, content strategy, and more. Here’s an important insight from this year’s findings: Companies are prioritizing their audience’s information needs over the brand’s sales/promotional message.

The reports are free to access, so to trace the growth of content marketing, I’d recommend looking through the last five years.

How to Use MailChimp | MailChimp

The amount of email service providers can drive you insane, but at Contently we use Mailchimp for its reliability and user-friendly interface. You can’t guarantee that your company will use MailChimp, but this beginner’s guide can still give you a good primer for the basics of email marketing and company newsletters.

Even if you’ve never sent an email campaign before, MailChimp will walk you through picking (or designing) templates, adding content, selecting your audience, and sending. This will make your life so much easier.

If, like me, you’re tasked with setting up your brand’s newsletters, it’ll take some time to get the hang of any tool. But once you’re comfortable with more advanced projects like A/B testing campaigns, you’ll build muscle memory to set emails up quickly so you can focus on more creative projects.

The Ultimate Guide to Video Marketing | HubSpot

Marketers love to talk about the rise of video (for better or worse). Even if you’re angling for an editorial or marketing-specific internship, understanding video will give you an advantage over other applicants.

Everyone watches videos online, but marketing videos (just like marketing terminology) are their own thing. HubSpot’s guide to video marketing offers basics on shooting, editing, and posting videos—all through the lens of marketing best practice. You can learn the difference between demo videos, how-to clips, brand overviews, etc.

If you’re not familiar with video production in any way, this would be a great place to start. I’d also recommend you go to YouTube for additional help on deciding editing software, establishing shots, and tips and tricks you’re going to want to know during production.

Podcasts Marketing Best Practices | Podcast Motor

If anything gets talked about more than video, it’s podcasts. People of ages listen to podcasts, and people of all ages want to start their own podcasts. But career marketers shouldn’t just hop on the trend because everyone else is doing it. As a content marketing intern, this is one area in particular you could offer a crucial perspective that your team lacks.

If your brand has decided to jump on the podcasting bandwagon and create one of their own, you need to be aware of the best practices of podcasts marketing. Helping out your brand through all the stages of production starts with understanding what makes podcasts so sought after right now. Don’t be afraid to aim for niche ideas either. The more passionate you are about the subject matter, the more interesting it will be to the right audience.

All these resources should help you tackle your internship head on. The truth is, the best place to learn is hands-on. Pay close attention to your boss and the rest of your team. Ask to help with new projects even if you’re not an expert yet. Being an intern gives you the opportunity to learn as you grow. Before you know it, you’ll be knowledgeable enough to teach someone yourself.

The post The Content Marketing Intern’s Syllabus appeared first on Contently.

That sounds great, but you probably don’t have that kind of time. You already spend enough researching, writing, and editing. By the time you get your article into the CMS, you may only have a placeholder title that’s been there since you first started the process.

You might have a quick brainstorm with your colleagues. Or maybe you just come up with something on the fly. Sound familiar? It’s something we’ve all done at some point, but it’s a false economy.

“If your headline doesn’t pull the browsing reader in and get them engaged in the piece, all the other work you’ve done was wasted,” explained Peter Beech, a copy editor at the Guardian.

How can you make sure you’re writing a catchy headline that does justice to the article behind it? I asked Beech and three other headline experts to share their best pieces of advice.

Read a ton of headlines

When authors and reporters offer writing wisdom, they always mention one tip: read a lot. The same goes for headlines.

According to Dan Mennella, former homepage editor at the New York Post, “Read headlines—as many as possible—so you become conversant in ‘headline speak.'” That way you start to understand what formats, styles, and even specific words make for an effective title.

Doing so can be as simple as setting up a Google alert for the latest content in your field and seeing what resonates. For a good starter course, CoSchedule offers a tearsheet full of 500 “power words” that help with building emotional headlines. If you want to go one better, sign up for a tool like BuzzSumo, which will show you the most popular headlines on a given topic.

Don’t get too clever or cryptic

The main objective of a headline is to convey what an audience should expect from the actual piece. For that reason, clear and descriptive beat clever and cryptic most of the time.

“Don’t live by the Forrest Gump rule,” warned Judann Pollack, executive editor at Ad Age. “A good headline is not like a box of chocolates. You should always know what you’re going to get.”

For example, when this Quartz headline tells you that “Mao Zedong’s Favorite Car is Now a Luxury Limo with Personal AC and Massage Functions,” you know exactly what information you’re going to find. Bloomberg’s attempt at covering the same story leaves potential readers slightly more confused, and therefore less likely to click: “Mao’s Red Flag May Need to Evoke Panda DNA to Beat Audi.”

Heidi Moore, a digital media consultant who has worked with publications like Mashable and The Wall Street Journal, agreed. “The biggest mistakes in headline writing occur when editors get comfortable with vagueness. Nobody’s curiosity is piqued by something vague,” she said. “Headlines should be entirely direct.”

However, that doesn’t mean your headline has to read like a dull press release. There’s still room for creativity, as long as it’s unambiguous. The best way to test that is to ask someone who wasn’t involved in the creative process. “Turn to a friend or colleague and share your suggested headline,” Moore said. “They should be able to tell you exactly what the piece is about.”

Seek out inspiration online

“Headlines have to do an incredible amount of work in such a small space,” Beech said. “Pound for pound, they carry the same density as poetry.”

That kind of pressure can leave you staring at your computer screen, unable to think of anything suitable. In those situations, head online for some creative inspiration. To find the right words, Beech relies on a dictionary website that lists English idioms, searchable by keywords. He also turns to Rhymezone, “because sometimes a cunning rhyme can make a great headline.”

If you’re still stuck, Manella recommended a more direct solution: “Look for a piece of content that’s on the same topic and try tweaking its headline.” Of course, nobody is suggesting you rip off other people’s work. But certain topics have specific angles so make a few small changes and test how it performs.

Don’t over-promise and under-deliver

Remember when everything in your Facebook feed was some variation of the “You’ll never guess what happened next” clickbait headline? Audiences quickly figured out these pieces rarely delivered on their promises.

“At one point, these headlines were wildly effective, but then, through saturation, they became absurd clichés,” Moore said. “If you’re trying to write a headline the same way you’d market a used car, it will inevitably fail.”

So how does she recommend coming up with a headline that’s enticing but doesn’t oversell the content and leave readers disappointed? “Find the most important, funniest, or oddest thing in the story and make that the headline,” she said. For example, while many media outlets have covered the border crisis, the New York Times still managed to cut through the noise by focusing on the human cost of the government decision to separate parents from their children. One story about a family is titled “’I Can’t Go Without My Son,’ a Mother Pleaded as She Was Deported to Guatemala.” It captures the essence of the topic and narrative perfectly.

If you can’t do that, you should probably question whether the piece is even worth publishing. “The hardest pieces to headline are the ones where the editor is asking: ‘Why did we even write this?” Moore said. “In those cases, all you’re doing is adding to the noise.”

Match the tone of the piece

Earlier this year, a British tabloid reported that a child with a dairy allergy was in a coma after eating his mom’s secret stash of Wispa, a popular candy bar in the UK. The headline? “Careless Wispa.” The editor who came up with that play on a George Michael song probably felt really clever, but the tone was jarring given the seriousness of the issue, and the newspaper was widely criticized.

“If the article is about something serious, you don’t want to go hunting for a pun that will have people snorting into their breakfast cereal,” Beech said.

You can avoid that path by taking a step back and reading the piece with a fresh pair of eyes. Maybe get someone who wasn’t involved in the editorial process to review.

“The headline process has to start with distilling the essence of the story. It must accurately reflect what’s in the piece and be tonally in sync with it,” Pollack said. “You don’t want to put a flippant headline on a story about a natural disaster, but if your piece is about cute cats, you can have a little more fun.”

Remember to think about SEO

Back in the days when print media reigned supreme, all a headline writer had to do was capture people’s attention. Now that person must also capture the attention of spiders that crawl the web ranking content for quality and relevance.

To make sure your content is showing up in search rankings, keywords in headlines are, well, key. “Because digital content is so dependent on SEO, your headline should include words that readers will actually be looking up on a search engine,” Mennella said. “You don’t want to cram so many in that it’s indecipherable, but they should be there.”

While SEO considerations do take some of the creativity out of headline writing, they can also make the process easier. “If you have a news piece about Lady Gaga, you’ll want her name in the headline, and preferably at the very start,” Beech said. “If she’s been doing something that involves other search terms—like performing at the Oscars with Bradley Cooper—your headline will pretty much write itself.”

The post How to Write a Helpful Headline People Will Want to Click appeared first on Contently.

Brand awareness can seem like a vague force that’s hard to measure. But just because it’s trickier to track than a sale or a conversion doesn’t mean spreading awareness is without value. Building your brand through top-of-funnel content establishes a connection with a new audience. It can even change the way the existing audience perceives you.

Without that awareness foundation, it’s harder to achieve other goals down the marketing funnel. Why would someone buy something from you if they have no idea who you are?

At Contently, we wanted to get a better understanding of the biggest brand awareness challenges, so we turned to our own customers to find out more. When we set down to review the data, the same few challenges popped up over and over. Here’s how you can address them before they hurt your marketing efforts.

1. When your content ranks low on search

When you give SEO proper attention, you’ll see the effects on all of your content, old and new. Marketers trip up, however, when they plan branding and SEO efforts separately. By integrating the two, you effectively use organic traffic to increase brand reach.

The first step is identifying which keywords are right for your brand and realistically attainable. If you rank high for the wrong keywords or aim for keywords out of your reach, you’ll just continue to struggle.

Google Keyword Tool is a great (free!) tool that generates a list of keyword suggestions based on what users are searching. Simply click on “Search for a new keyword” and enter the main topics that you’re looking to cover. Once you have a target keyword list nailed down, you’re ready to take further steps and seed those keywords into your content.

We also have a content audit tool that provides recommendations for infusing the right SEO strategy into your content program. While many content marketers fall victim to keyword stuffing, we prefer to only use target keywords when they’re relevant—search engine “spiders” like to rank sites with content that sees consistent engagement. This verifies keyword relevancy. Auditing your existing library of content to identify high and low traffic keywords will help guide your keyword strategy.

When it comes to implementation, optimizing your website with technical SEO can help search engines access, crawl, interpret and index your website without any problems. By getting your front-end code in the right state, you’re effectively inviting Google to come in and look around to see what it likes.

Diagnosing and treating your site health can boost your brand’s reach with each small step. Optimizing title tag and meta description length is an easy fix—the earlier you can use a keyword in the title tag, the better, for example. Once you make those fixes, you’ll see your content start to climb up the rankings. And higher rankings will mean better reach.

2. When you have trouble getting the word out

It’s not enough to create great content—it has to be seen. Getting your content in front of the right people is important at any stage of your content program, but it’s especially important in the early days. That new infographic you created could be rich in information and beautifully designed, but you won’t see high ROI if no one knows where to find it.

To reach your audience on the right platforms, you have to understand their media habits. Blog posts and video, for example, are usually good fits for Facebook and Twitter because they tend to be quick and sharable. Guides and webinars, on the other hand, are better suited for LinkedIn’s audience of curious professionals.

When you analyze the interplay between these channels, it’s crucial to map them to different parts of the marketing funnel. The way you distribute content and connect with your audience should evolve down the funnel. If you choose the most opportune ways to distribute your content, then you’ll compel your audience to take the right action at the right time.

For Cardinal Health (a Contently customer), paid distribution has been incredibly helpful for learning more about what resonates. A/B testing across various channels with different formats is one reason why the company hit its primary awareness goals. Starting with a mix of social channels and content discovery platforms, such as Outbrain, Cardinal Health zeroed in on Facebook and LinkedIn as the top performing primary channels for their paid program.

3. When you aren’t reaching the right audience

Metrics like social shares get overlooked, but they can serve as a proxy for understanding audience preferences. They speak to how the audience engages with different content types. If your content underperforms, it may be an indicator that you’re not getting it in front of the right people.

As a strategist, I use a suite of SEO and social listening tools to first define who you should be talking to and then evaluate that audience’s engagement through a combination of metrics. We use social shares, number of keywords, backlinks, and more.

Let’s say, for example, that infographics receive the most social shares from your audience, while longform articles get the lowest share. This data is an important indicator that your audience has an appetite for visual content that’s easy to digest. In this case, I’d recommend adjusting your strategy to prioritize more multimedia and shortform content. It’s your responsibility to give the audience what they want.

Reaching a target audience can become extra challenging when you have regional and language considerations. For one international finance company, segmenting content in different global markets posed an additional obstacle. A good first step is finding what you can repurpose. Look for similarities across your audience segments. What unites them? What makes them unique? This will help you identify the potential content pieces for transcreation.

4. When your brand isn’t perceived correctly

If you polled 100 prospects, how many would be aware of your brand? Remember that number. Now, how many of those people have an accurate idea of what your brand offers? Did your number change?

For one major electronics company, this discrepancy was a major obstacle. The marketing leaders noted, “we’re struggling to reach the right people at scale and to educate them, but it’s hard to make a real impact at scale [and] change their perception of the company.”

Although it may seem like a massive branding problem, there’s a content-driven solution for adjusting perception. Our strategy team measures tone to set a benchmark for the way the public feels about certain topics . Is your audience looking for more emotionally charged language and opinions? Do they want to read about topics that make them feel conscientious?

By going through this process, you can shifting that perception by adjusting your tone and/or the topics you choose to cover.

5. When you have low share of voice

Imagine someone hands megaphones to you and your competitors. These megaphones are fairly uniform, except each one has a volume setting that’s a bit higher than the next. You turn on your megaphone and begin to speak, but no matter how hard you try, the person next to you is so loud that it drowns out your voice. Annoying, right?

With so much great content out there, it’s important to track how you stack up against your competitors. You do this by monitoring your market share.

To get an idea of where you stand for organic reach, measure the total number of keywords you care about as well as the traffic being driven from those keywords.

The bad news is, moving the needle on market share doesn’t happen overnight. You’ll need to have a strong understanding of what your audience is hungry for, and you’ll have to identify opportunities to own corners of the market by developing a unique perspective. A good starting point is to do some quantitative research by visiting your competitor’s content hubs. Educate yourself on their mission statements and identify opportunities for future angles and topics.

For more information on brand awareness best practices, download this free guide from Contently’s strategy services.

The post How to Solve the 5 Most Common Brand Awareness Problems appeared first on Contently.

The first approach yields a timeline of newspaper articles, which you can piece together to create a full story. The image below reveals what you get when you plug “Brexit” into the New York Times app, which is coincidentally the first thing I look at every morning. Notice the articles pop up out of chronological order. (It’s not clear what order they’re in.) You have the choice of listening to a podcast episode, reading an op-ed, checking breaking news, or digesting a collection of quotes from European citizens on the subject. In this view, you get nuanced pieces to a puzzle, but you never get the whole thing.

On the contrary, if you route to an outlet like Vox and search the term “Brexit,” you’re greeted with this:

1. Britain’s roiling Brexit crisis, explained (and updated regularly)
2. Brexit: 9 questions you were too embarrassed to ask
3. What’s going on with Brexit, explained in under 500 words
4. Brexit: what happens when Britain leaves the EU
5. The latest Brexit drama, explained
6. The Brexit deal was defeated in Parliament. Here’s what happens next.

The upside of Vox’s style is that the audience is spoon-fed important information framed around questions the new stories inspire. The downside is that Vox rarely breaks stories, so its information is mostly aggregated. Aggregation is an old practice in journalism, and digital transformation has only encouraged it. But Vox is often credited (or blamed, depending on whom you ask) for heralding the modern explainer format.

On the whole, digital media doesn’t just tell stories anymore; it answers questions and anticipates follow-up inquiries, delivering explanatory content on intricacies you might have missed. Gone is the impetus to build a narrative from disparate headlines that once fell on readers. But who molded the media landscape this way?

A quick explainer on explainers

Vox launched in 2014, around the time ESPN acquired FiveThirtyEight, the data-explainer site run by Nate Silver. That same year, The New York Times launched The Upshot, the Grey Lady’s best attempt at a Vox-y project.

When all three websites came to life, The Guardian‘s James Ball penned a nervous op-ed about it. “It’s worth thinking about what we actually want the standard fare of our data journalism—or explanatory journalism, if you prefer that more marketable description—to become,” he wrote. “And how much is too much—are we being over-served, under-served, or have we now hit the Goldilocks point?”

Ball wasn’t able to predict that Vox’s staff and readership would skew disproportionately white, straight, and cis-male, but that has become a notable snag in the Vox paradigm.

It’s not just accusations of bias. Critics say explanatory journalism can be patronizing, simplifying complex stories for readers who ingest most information on their smartphones while doing something else.

To counter, Vox founder and editor-at-large Ezra Klein believes the explainer is the only logical format for a modern media company “where everything is archivable, where it’s all linkable, where it’s embeddable, persistent, and length isn’t a problem.” He described the Vox mission to The Content Strategist and other reporters at a recent press event.

Of course, Klein couldn’t simply write explainers for his readers on request, and when he began to amass a team around him, he realized journalists weren’t always the right hire. “Obsessives first,” Klein said. “That was the thing. We hired a lot of people who were not journalists. In fact, a lot of people who are at Vox now or have come through Vox, who are the absolute best at the job, weren’t hired out of journalism.”

Vox assembled professionals at the top of their fields by asking them to explain what they did to capture a curious audience. “I can teach you to report. I can teach you to pick up a phone,” Klein said, “but what I can’t teach is that obsessive passion and interest in a topic that will make you seek out the updates and teach yourself about it, and read the reports on it, and read down into the footnotes, whether or not anyone is paying you to do so.”

Vox pays creators, of course, and hiring curious people and letting them off the leash led to a big part of Vox’s content strategy: the explainer that beats a reader to a question. Some of Vox’s best straightforward explainers in the last few years include this infographic visualizing data on Earth’s biodiversity, a piece on psychedelics, and this article on impeachment. You’ll notice the latter is broken into sub-questions that Vox assumes might arise when one asks, “Can we impeach President Trump?” Some of Vox’s coolest explainers answer questions you may not have been curious about until you saw the link, like “Why do rappers talk about Grey Poupon so much?”

Andrew Golis, Vox general manager and VP of network development, said some of the best explainers answer questions that haven’t occurred to readers yet. Or, as he put it, “The ones that make you say, ‘Oh, I’ve never really thought about that before.'”

Golis believes Vox’s editorial viewpoint reflects its internal culture. “Vox was born at a moment of wild change in the American machine,” he said. “It is amazing to me how much the culture of data consumption, reader attention, and optimizing in a thoughtful way, is baked into the brand.”

The post-Vox explainer

Did the Vox experiment, an entire media brand based around explainers, ultimately work out? For Vox’s investors, sure. For readers? Well, it depends on who you ask. Today, explainers coming from Vox, FiveThirtyEight, and The Upshot remain the format’s gold standard. But, these publishers swim upstream in a river full of cheap imitations.

At the event, Klein clarified that a great explainer adds context to a simple question. “There were explainers before Vox, but they were fundamentally pretty different,” he said. “The audience they seemed to have in mind was somebody who wanted to know about an issue, but didn’t want to know much. It was like we all imagined a reader who’d say, ‘Tell me about Obamacare, but very little about it.’ It was like three paragraphs, right? Like definitions. News for kids. And that wasn’t my experience of digital media audiences at all.”

Klein bet his audience was smarter than that because he had listened to reader feedback as a young reporter. “When I would get e-mails from readers, and when I would talk to people, their question was never, ‘What happened today in Obamacare?’ or ‘What’s going on today?'” he said. Instead, he’d get emails from readers drilling down into specific sub-topics. They’d ask, “how do premiums work in the new health care act?” or “What is the individual mandate?”

He grew frustrated without any useful resources to send his readers.

“I would think, ‘We do such good coverage of this. Why don’t we have anything for this person? Why is it on them to know that six and a half months ago, we broke one article explaining the foundational questions about what we’re doing?” He searched around, discovering there was a huge gulf between news and encyclopedic information. “What, they could go to Wikipedia? That’s it? That’s what the entire news industry had for them?” Eventually, Klein gathered the funds—$40 million—to launch Vox as a remedy.

Vox’s team used (and still uses!) search engine data as a loose inspiration for their editorial calendar, but they nix any story that doesn’t add anything to a simple query. “Search is a very easy thing to be inspired by,” Klein said. “It’s whatever people are asking about today in the world. That’s the viewer centered answer.” However, content that follows this equation…

Popular Google search term + aggregated information from other sources = viral content

…quickly stifles both creators and their audience. Writers and video producers don’t want to churn out formulaic faire, and readers can’t develop an emotional attachment to the brands that generate it. As a result, media becomes homogenous and boring when it’s saturated with lazy explainers.

Are explainers the future of content marketing?

After Vox set up this content model, it was easy to expand into an explainer podcast, a Netflix series, a YouTube channel, a Snapchat Discover content, and brand-sponsored projects from its content marketing wing, the Vox Explainer Studio. The latter, founded in 2017, has already created explainer content for Google, Microsoft, MailChimp, the Gates Foundation, and Walmart, defining how content marketers can muscle in on the explainer format and use it to their advantage.

The explainer format is especially conducive to content marketing because it positions the writer as an authority figure—or, as marketers put it, a subject matter expert (SME). The educational aspect also helps brands avoid reporting on conflicts of interest or criticizing their own industries. Just like Vox, a B2B brand that’s committed to content marketing wants to educate and entertain a captive audience by writing about the industry they occupy. If you’re explaining why your brand offers the best product or service in the game, you need to put that claim in context. For example, a bank would do well to publish explainers on all the financial topics they can counsel clients in: retirement accounts, playing the stock market, investing, cryptocurrency, whatever.

Mint is a shining example of a brand using explainers to flesh out its content hub. Like Vox, they strive to create trustworthy content and contextualize relevant news stories for their audience. Their “WTFinance” vertical stands out in particular, explaining subjects ranging from compound interest to credit scores.

The goal is the same, whether you’re a brand selling a product or a digital media company commodifying attention. You have to educate, entertain, and own your audience. Explainers are an easy way to do all three.

If a brand listens to its audience’s pain points, concerns, and curiosities for inspiration, but constantly digs deeper for audience-centric angles, it will, like Vox, find a unique editorial voice. Producing truly great explainers won’t just elevate that brand above its competitors; it could place it among top tier digital publishers.

The post How the Explainer Changed Digital Media Forever appeared first on Contently.

With that kind of intro, I could make some vague marketing connections about teamwork and competition and playmaking, but those are all corny. There is, however, a much more interesting parallel between basketball and blog posts that could impact the way creators talk to their audience. It all comes down to data and analytics.

Even if you don’t know anything about the NBA, you’re probably familiar with the concept of analytics. Access to good data helps us make smarter decisions, regardless of the field.

Basketball went through an analytics revolution over the last decade that changed the way teams play. The gist of the evolution comes down to simple math about which plays offer the most value. Layups, dunks, and foul shots are easy and usually net two points. Hitting a three-pointer is harder, but it’s worth an extra point. The most inefficient play in basketball is a mid-range jump shot because it’s hard to make yet still only counts for two points. So teams stopped taking those shots and replaced them with more threes and layups.

The last few years, I’ve had this theory that the same type of thinking took over publishing and marketing. Companies found that longform content—typically defined as anything over 2,000 words—drove more value than middling posts, even though most digital articles fall under 1,000 words. Those 800-word posts became inefficient. A BuzzSumo study of 100 million articles revealed that longform content gets more shares. Per CoSchedule, there’s a similar correlation for search engine rankings. A joint report from BuzzSumo and Moz also found that longer stories received more referral links than shorter posts.

The takeaway was very clear: The longer the content, the better.

There’s nothing empirically wrong with this data. Based on what we know about search and social platforms, their algorithms have picked up on these signals that favor longer word counts. I, like many other editors, adjusted accordingly. I pushed our marketing team to think long or short. Short posts were still easy wins. We could write 300 words about an infographic in an hour and get decent traffic. A long reported story might take a week or two, but the SEO payoff would be worth it. At one point, I started telling new hires and freelancers point blank: Don’t turn in anything between 700 and 1,000 words.

But what if these algorithmic signals missed something?

In December, we surveyed 1,024 people in the U.S. to find out about their media and marketing preferences. One of our questions dealt with preferred word count when reading online. According to the survey, 75 percent of the public prefers articles they read to be under 1,000 words. Only 5 percent prefer articles over 2,000 words.

When I saw the data, this was my reaction:

The more I thought about it, the more both points could coexist. The average adult reads about 200 words per minute, which means longform articles take at least 10 minutes to complete. Most people can’t dedicate that much time during the day. But they can find four minutes between meetings or during lunch. At the same time, if I wanted to thoroughly learn about a topic, I’d much rather shell out 10 minutes to read a definitive source than piece together knowledge here and there from a bunch of 800-word blog posts.

As an editor and writer, this made me rethink my hard stance on word counts. It makes sense that people would validate the best longform content on search and social even as they typically stick with the mid-range blog posts. That doesn’t mean every longform post is good. In fact, plenty of them are worse than Ben Simmons at the foul line. Some stories work best at 850 words, regardless of what Google prioritizes.

Here’s the true answer to the word count dilemma: It depends. As is usually the case, blanket solutions aren’t that helpful. If you write about transparent hiring practices in the tech industry, your audience probably needs you to write more. If you’re dreaming up a Taco Bell subway system, probably not. The only real rule you should adopt is being open to the word count that your story deserves.

But now I have to wrap it up. I’m over 800 words, and I don’t want to force a longer word count for no reason. As my old basketball coaches would say, sometimes it’s best to take what the defense gives you.

Contently’s full report on 2019 content preferences will be published the end of January. To get early access to some of the data, click here to sign up for our email newsletter.

The post The Lost Art of the Mid-Range Blog Post appeared first on Contently.

On September 24, Google unveiled plans for new search features. The centerpiece of the revamped search will be Google Discover, which offers users a customized content feed regardless of whether they type in a search query. It’s unclear if Discover will also draw on past searches, but people can pick topics that interest them to fill the feed. The recommendations won’t just be breaking news, either. According to Karen Corby, Google’s group product manager for search, the move will still serve up evergreen pieces of content that “aren’t new to the web, but are new to you.”

Sound familiar? This version of Google starts to look a lot like parts of Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and Pinterest. As we’ve pointed out on this site in the past, tech companies like to copy each other. Instagram copied Snapchat’s Stories feature. Google is morphing search into a Facebook-esque newsfeed. And word’s out that Instagram is testing a repost feature that’ll function just like Twitter retweets. We’re not that far away from a world where all major platforms have slightly different versions of the same features.

Google Discover does have an important distinction, though: It’s still not social. You can’t like or retweet or upvote (for now). If you work for a publisher or a brand, that has its pros and cons. You won’t be able to build a community or interact with your audience, but I’d argue Google is making a smart play. Social media platforms have gotten hammered for facilitating filter bubbles and digital mobs. A curated content feed—without loud commentary from obnoxious high school acquaintances—sounds appealing, especially coming from a go-to destination like Google. It’s like the quiet night you need at home while everyone else is out raging recklessly.

The announcement could also signal a new approach to SEO. Anyone who creates content for a digital audience has had to appease search algorithms. That often leads to forcing keywords into titles, subheads, meta descriptions, and more. Google has definitely improved its SEO requirements over the last few years to favor high-quality content, but most marketers and publishers I talk to still feel like they have to play a game they don’t totally understand. By giving users a chance to find stories without entering a search, some of that awkwardness disappears.

In a blog post about the release, Nick Fox, Google’s VP of product & design for search and assistant, said, “All of this marks a fundamental transformation in the way Search understands interests and longer journeys to help you find information.”

It’s no accident that Fox used the word “journeys” multiple times in his article. As brands and publishers continue to focus on the customer experience and loyal audiences, search engines and social media platforms have the technology to power those long-term relationships. Google will likely continue to prioritize ad sales from paid search, but these updates suggest the search giant is taking a more nuanced approach to content discovery.

The post Google’s New Search Could Significantly Change Content Discovery appeared first on Contently.

Once I got it, though, all I really did was clumsily scoot back and forth on our driveway. On summer afternoons, I watched neighborhood kids mess around on their boards, laughing when they had to bail on a trick gone wrong. Didn’t they care that they looked stupid? It occurs to me now that I could have asked those kids for advice, but the idea of not mastering skateboarding immediately embarrassed me. So I gave up.

I’m reminded of this logical fallacy when I talk to fellow writers about SEO. We all hate traffic quotas, sure, but it’s astounding to me how many of us resent having to use technology at all. I wrote at Newsweek alongside veteran investigative reporters who struggled to take Google traffic as seriously as magazine subscribers, but this resistance isn’t just limited to older generations. If a writer hasn’t bothered to study basic SEO principles by now, they’re refusing to do so for one of two reasons: They either fancy themselves above it or they fear looking stupid.

If you’re publishing anything online, figuring out what Google wants will only help your craft. Despite how daunting it can feel, here are four reasons to teach yourself some basic SEO.

To improve your pitches

The sooner you prove yourself as a guaranteed source of traffic, the more likely your editor is to let you off the leash once in a while.

One way to get there is to focus on long-tail keywords, which refers to niche and less competitive search terms. These do much more for a writer than generate clicks. With a long-tail mindset, you’ll develop a level of expertise that generalists can’t match when they answer random questions for a wide audience.

When I worked at Inverse, for example, I covered the animated series Rick and Morty, and that show presents a unique problem to content creators. People constantly google “Rick and Morty” and “Rick and Morty Season 4,” so I knew that muscling my way onto that first SERP (Search Engine Results Page) was going to be arduous. However, because I’m obsessed with Rick and Morty, I knew the search terms that fanatics like me wanted to read about.

Instead of updating the same old “When is Rick and Morty coming back?” post each week, I wrote or assigned down articles about Rick and Birdperson’s experiences in the war against the Galactic Federation and whether Rick is an existentialist or a nihilist. Because those articles got long-tail love, my team wasn’t asked to write things like “Rick and Morty Co-Creator Tweets…Whatever.”

To plan all my pitches, I put all my long-tail search terms in a Google Doc and came up with multiple story ideas from each one. Inverse was already high on Google results for robotics, innovation, and AI, so I pitched or assigned out multiple stories on the intersection of Rick and Morty and technology.

Had I just fixated on Google Trends every day, I would have bored myself to tears. Content that only answers simple questions (“When does this season premiere?”) will drive down engagement time on your site. Posts like that may get clicks the first day, but they won’t help SEO over time. They also burn out writers and breed discontent in a newsroom.

To avoid harmful SEO ‘tricks’

In my experience, engineers and audience development folks are more than happy to explain what they do. You just have to show up to their internal tutorial sessions. If I had breezed through those meetings at prior jobs or blown them off altogether, I wouldn’t have understood what data my employers were gathering.

It didn’t take long to learn that our CMS included useful fields I had been ignoring, ones that could bump my writing up in search rankings. The team told me not to stuff my nut graf with keywords for Google’s sake, but to review related keywords and choose a couple relevant ones to expand on.

When I moved to a much larger outlet, the first thing I did was introduce myself to the social media manager and sign up for all the SEO trainings. Any traffic I got from SEO strategies struck some colleagues as dark magic. I knew, for instance, that Newsweek’s brand awareness would push my articles about geek media high into Google’s results, so I took the opportunity to report on Rick and Morty, B-grade horror films and anime from their arts desk, adding Newsweek’s name in the Google news carousel alongside smaller, less-trusted outlets. As I built my body of work, I back-linked to my explainers and interviews, encouraging readers who entered the site from Google to stick around and engage with me for long periods of time.

After I made those professional allies, my stories were often moved to the top of the pile for paid promotion. My fellow journalists who fought every mention of SEO were perceived as petulant by our colleagues. And rightfully so! What, are you too good for more readers?

To know your audience

When I ran the superhero vertical at Inverse, detailed talks with our audience development manager revealed that our returning readers were far more likely to engage with positive, hopeful content. Readers didn’t want to hear another critic tearing down Batman v Superman. But they stayed on the page and eventually shared articles that suggested constructive changes to their favorite films, especially if those fixes were based on comics lore.

The next step was figuring out the audience loved spending time within the vertical. If I could get them to read two posts about superhero news, they would keep scrolling and digest more. I even let that data affect my work in a granular sense; I stopped writing stand-alone articles about movies or TV and added a line about upcoming franchise developments at the end of my news posts, encouraging readers to stick around. The search data made me think about my contribution to the full user experience we wanted readers to have on our site.

SEO can help you in a pinch too. After several years of covering genre film from an optimistic prospective, I knew that Netflix’s Bright was about to get lambasted by critics when I saw a press preview. I also knew I could cover it from my point of view, as a geek who loves anything related to orcs. SEO had taught me that Netflix’s new releases receive a flurry of short-tail search queries for several days after their opening date, but if I found a way to put a positive spin on the film, my article would stand out among all the gleefully negative coverage. I pitched my niche take on the film to my editor, citing my SEO strategy from earlier works, and when she approved my review, it raked in readers who stayed on the page for far longer than our average time.

To inoculate yourself against misinformation

If you teach yourself basic SEO, you’ll become a formidable voice in the newsroom whenever an editor suggests something grayhat (or worse, blackhat). An SEO expert once told me that too many content creators think of Google as an evil robot to trick or manipulate. Regardless of whether you think Google is evil, it’s silly to try to outsmart the algorithm.

Instead, let search algorithm constrictions propel your work. According to SEO best practices, sites that keep readers engaged and on-site, enjoying content and returning habitually, rise to the top of SERPs. So any editor who asks you for clickbait isn’t thinking long-term. Their strategies, which are actually pretty pessimistic and insulting to both writer and reader, will eventually get your company in trouble.

That said, it’ll be much easier to push back against an editor if you have the SEO facts and fluency backing you up. It also helps if you follow that up with SEO-friendly pitches, which you can’t produce until you start your education.

The post Why Every Writer Should Learn Basic SEO Principles appeared first on Contently.

Some of these spoofs were good. Some were bad. Most of it blurred together, which is what you’d expect when a bunch of copywriters try to be clever for the sake of being clever. But there’s a bigger problem at play here: These brands are spending resources to make an impact, but they all sound the same.

That sameness was most evident in the coverage of the April Fools’ content. Not only did industry pubs like Adweek post roundups, but so did The Washington Post, CNBC, and Teen Vogue. These articles are interchangeable, low-hanging clickbait that loses its relevance after 48 hours. We’ve hit a point where the coverage is more about the aggregate output of all April Fools’ content than the effort of individual companies.

Strategic differentiation is a big theme for brands in 2018. Simply being helpful or funny isn’t enough anymore. Audiences wade through so much content on a daily basis that brands have to put extreme thought into standing out. And that applies to activation just as much as it does to content creation.

The film industry has been aware of this issue for years. Studios constantly jostle for position and change release dates to make sure their movies don’t have to compete against similar movies or unbeatable blockbusters. Brands are thinking backwards, though, intentionally lumping themselves together based on the calendar. If they don’t have breakthrough content that destroys the competition, there’s almost no point.

Take Logitech’s fake Business Speak Detection product video that earned a spot on the major roundups. It’s one of the best examples of April Fools’ content I came across, with some legitimate funny lines and a concept that ties back to the product. But it gets buried by lesser examples. (Think of it this way: What’s the benefit of paying millions in ransom to run a Super Bowl commercial that’s just above average?) Logitech could’ve waited a month or two, pushed out the same clip, and owned the spotlight.

Years ago, we ran The Content Strategist this way, squeezing into conversations where we didn’t necessarily have to be. We ran some similar roundups that performed reasonably well and are backed by sound SEO tactics. The pieces aren’t bad—and we weren’t dealing with as much competition at the time—but we just came to the conclusion that the people who would read these articles probably aren’t the same ones who are going to sign contracts with us. So we stopped.

By avoiding the typical event calendar, we sacrificed some superficial traffic increase for a more meaningful relationship with our audience. The decision was liberating and has also helped us focus more on telling better stories. Unless you’re reporting news or really putting a fresh spin on current events, I’d recommend at least reconsidering how your content maps to the calendar. Because July 4th, Black Friday, and Christmas will get here soon enough, and chasing those clicks is only going to become more of a fool’s errand.

The post How the Holiday Calendar Crushes Good Content appeared first on Contently.