Marketers are now caught in a balancing act—crafting high-quality content at breakneck speeds while ensuring they remain a step ahead of AI’s ever-advancing algorithms. As this new landscape unfolds, understanding the interplay between human creativity and the precision of AI SEO tools becomes pivotal for success.

The Impact of AI SEO on Content Creation

HubSpot recently published a State of Artificial Intelligence report, which found that 44% of marketers foresee a positive impact on their SEO strategy, seeing effectiveness in multiple areas.

Google has been astutely observant of the AI wave sweeping over content creation. Their stance is clear: While the technology is intriguing, the emphasis is unwaveringly on rewarding high-quality content. The burning question is: Does Google endorse AI-generated content? A deep dive into a recent announcement provides some clarity. Google acknowledges the potential of AI but is explicit that the content must not sacrifice quality on the altar of automation.

The end goal is the same. Content should be informative and relevant and meet the user’s query comprehensively. So, while AI SEO is reshaping the landscape, the bar for content excellence set by Google remains unchanged.

That being said, the emergence of tools like ChatGPT, Jasper, Frase, and Surfer means that the market is inundated with derivative or superficial content. So, it’s more crucial than ever to elevate your content, ensuring it offers genuine value to discerning readers.

Strategies to Stay Ahead of AI in SEO

The digital realm, empowered by AI SEO tools, is evolving rapidly. As a result, marketers are constantly recalibrating their strategies to stay a step ahead. Here are some cornerstone strategies to ensure your content not only matches but surpasses AI-driven outputs:

1. Answer User Queries Effectively and Match Intent.

Search engines prioritize content that effectively answers user queries. It’s not just about incorporating the right keywords; it’s about understanding the intent behind those searches. Dive deep into what the user is really seeking and tailor your content to provide comprehensive answers.

2. Uphold E-E-A-T Principles.

E-E-A-T, standing for Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trustworthiness, has emerged as a defining metric for content.

• Expertise: Showcase in-depth knowledge on your chosen topic. This isn’t about surface-level information but rather expressing a profound understanding.
• Experience: Demonstrate authentic, first-hand knowledge and encounters on the topic at hand. While AI can attempt to emulate human perspectives, it lacks the authenticity and uniqueness that real-life experiences bring to content.
• Authority: Establish your brand or website as a go-to source for specific topics or industries. Earn recognition through backlinks from reputable sources, endorsements, and consistent publication of valuable content.
• Trustworthiness: Ensure that your content is accurate, backed by credible sources, and that your website provides a secure user experience.

3. Emphasize the Human Touch.

While AI can generate content based on algorithms and data patterns, it lacks the innate human ability to truly resonate on an emotional level—yet. One report projects that content created using AI will reach human-level sophistication by 2028-2030.

Your content should be insightful, provoking thought or emotion, and should be able to establish a genuine connection with the reader. Share personal anecdotes, use relatable examples, and frame information in a manner that echoes human experiences. Remember, while AI can mimic human writing to an extent, the depth, nuance, and empathy of genuinely human content remain unparalleled.

By embracing these strategies, marketers can not only meet the evolving challenges of AI SEO but also ensure that their content continues to shine, resonate, and rank.

4. Strengthen AI Outputs With Precision Prompts.

AI, as advanced as it may be, operates on the principle of “garbage in, garbage out.” The input or prompt you provide to an AI tool plays a critical role in determining the quality and relevance of its output. When deploying AI for content creation, optimization, or even research, the magic often lies in the precision and clarity of the prompts.

But before jumping right in with prompts aimed at your main objective, back up a bit and start with priming steps that provide context and background for your main prompts. Let’s say your goal is to write a blog post about low-cost home decorating ideas to make your home look like you hired an interior designer. You may start to prime the AI model with a little background personality and topic guidance:

As you can see, priming can help generate topics and ideas that you can use to explore further/expand or use as a basis for your blog outline.

How to Use AI for SEO Optimization

Leveraging AI tools can significantly elevate SEO strategies. While AI presents immense potential, the key is understanding how to deploy it for optimal results without over-reliance. Here are several ways to use generative AI tools for optimization:

Data Analysis: AI tools can sift through massive datasets in moments, offering insights into user behavior, preferences, and search patterns, all crucial for tailoring effective SEO strategies.

Keyword Research: Beyond identifying high-volume search terms, AI can predict emerging trends, helping brands stay ahead of the curve and capture new audiences.

In the prompt below, for example, the writer uses AI to better understand what might be behind a user’s search intent for a specific keyword. Such insights can help you write content that’s more closely aligned with the information searchers are looking for.

Optimizing Meta Descriptions: AI can generate succinct and compelling meta descriptions that not only fit the character limit but are also optimized for click-through rates.

E-Commerce Product Descriptions: With vast product ranges, creating unique descriptions for each product is a challenge. AI can generate descriptive, persuasive, and SEO-friendly product details, enhancing discoverability.

AI SEO: The Danger Zones

In the enthusiastic rush to embrace AI’s capabilities in SEO, it’s crucial also to understand its limitations and potential pitfalls.

While it’s a powerful tool, AI can sometimes lead marketers astray if not wielded judiciously. Here are a few ways this can happen.

• Full-Length AI Articles: Generating entire pieces using AI tools, especially ones like ChatGPT, may result in content peppered with inaccuracies. Such articles may also lack the nuanced, genuine human voice that readers resonate with.
• The Plague of Unoriginality: Simply relying on AI to spin existing content or churn out repetitive pieces won’t do any favors for your SEO strategy. Search engines like Google have become adept at recognizing and deprioritizing content that’s not authentic or unique.
• Monotony Alert: An over-reliance on AI for content generation can result in monotonous, formulaic outputs. These lack a distinct voice or perspective, making it hard for brands to distinguish themselves in a saturated online environment.
• Skewed Data Interpretation: AI tools are data-driven. However, without proper human oversight, they might misinterpret certain trends or user behaviors, leading to misguided SEO strategies.

In the evolving landscape of digital marketing, AI undoubtedly has a pivotal role in shaping SEO. However, its most effective use is as a supportive asset, amplifying human creativity and expertise rather than attempting to replace the irreplaceable.

Embrace AI’s Efficiency Without Compromising Content Integrity

The rise of AI in SEO is nothing short of remarkable. Its profound capabilities are reshaping how we approach content creation and optimization. Yet, while AI offers powerful tools that can streamline processes and provide insights previously inaccessible, its function is supplementary.

AI is unparalleled in handling vast amounts of data quickly, predicting trends, or optimizing routine tasks. However, its ability to genuinely connect with human readers, to tell stories with nuance and empathy, remains limited.

In an increasingly AI-influenced landscape, some pillars of effective SEO remain unshaken. The hallmarks of quality, originality, and the indelible human touch are irreplaceable. These are the cornerstones upon which the success of SEO strategies rests, even in this era of rapid technological advancement.

Embracing AI’s strengths while staying rooted in authentic, human-centric content strategies ensures not only SEO success but also genuine, lasting connections with audiences.

Keep pace with the evolving world of AI in content creation. Subscribe to The Content Strategist newsletter and be the first to uncover the latest strategies, tools, and innovations shaping the future of content marketing.

The post Mastering AI SEO Without Losing the Human Touch 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.

Why are marketers so motivated to amp up their SEO? Likely because the search game has changed, and they’re in need of some help. While Google has been updating its Panda algorithm to punish keyword stuffers and reward quality content for the past decade, that effort has escalated this past year. Between Google’s recent “Quality Update” and Mobilegeddon, the industry has realized that you need great content if you want to succeed at search.

Here are five stats to prove it.

1. Content creation is the most important factor in SEO effectiveness.

According to a June 2015 report by Ascend2, 72 percent of marketers worldwide said relevant content creation was the most effective SEO tactic.

It also seems more and more marketers are starting to realize the SEO power of content. Just a year before, an April 2014 survey found that only 57 percent of marketers said content creation was the most effective strategy for SEO.

2. The majority of links and shares goes to the top 5 or 10 percent of content out there.

That’s what Moz’s Rand Fishkin told our editor-in-chief Joe Lazauskas earlier this year.

“I think there’s still a lot of [misguided] belief around quantity over quality,” he said. “There’s not a whole lot of value in writing a decent blog post anymore. [There’s not a lot of value] unless you can be pretty extraordinary.”

In other words, you should invest a lot of time in a few extraordinary pieces; the days of tricking search engines by polluting the web with mediocrity are long gone.

“If [readers are] searching for an answer to a question, would they rather reach your piece of content than anything else on the Internet right now?” Fishkin encouraged marketers to ask themselves. “Unless the answer is a slam dunk, ‘Yes, this is 10 times better than anything else out there,’ I’m not necessarily sure it’s worth publishing.”

3. The most successful companies treat their search and content creation strategies as one.

According to a 2013 Conductor study, 66 percent of best-in-class companies involve search in their content creation process from the beginning. Only 9 percent don’t take search into account until the end of the content creation process.

What makes a best-in-class organization? As the report states, these companies are “highly successful at SEO and were significantly more likely to experience up to 200% search traffic and search conversion growth in the past 12 months.”

4. More content = more indexed pages

Search Engine Journal reports that companies that blog have 434 percent more indexed pages than those that do not.

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean you should just churn out tons of blog posts in hopes of something catching on. But, as Fishkin notes, the most effective way to satisfy the search gods is to consistently publish high-quality content that provides a valuable service to your audience.

The more you do that, the more search terms you’ll rank for, and the better off you’ll be.

On a related note, according to an infographic by Brafton, marketers identify web pages (50 percent) and white papers (40 percent) as being “very effective” for great SEO.

5. Lack of quality content is a major challenge to SEO success.

Naturally, marketers that aren’t producing strong content find themselves having trouble tackling SEO. The same June 2015 report from Ascend2 found that 33 percent of marketers identified lack of quality content as a major challenge to SEO success.

The top two challenges—changing search algorithms and budget constraints—are factors that are often outside of marketers’ control. However, what each marketing team should be able to control is the solid content that they produce. Once they do, strong search rankings should follow.

The post 5 Stats That Prove Great Content Is the Key to Great SEO appeared first on Contently.

How ghostly was it? At least enough for Google to initially fail to acknowledge its existence. Search engine wonks began sounding the alarms as early as May 5 when certain sites’ rankings began to drop dramatically, but two weeks passed before Google officially confirmed the update to Search Engine Land.

But analysts are now pulling a Scooby Doo on the Phantom, unmasking the digital ghost to reveal an update with some pretty clear outcomes. Here’s what content marketers need to know about the recently exposed Phantom Update.

So what is the update?

Search Engine Land’s renaming of the update, to the much less exciting “Quality Update,” says it all. Or, at least, it says as much can be said. “How Google assesses quality is sometimes a thing of mystery,” writes Thomas Smale for Entrepreneur, “but we do know that it wants to provide users with the best information possible.”

In other words, this update is all about rewarding sites that focused on improving the user experience and pushing quality content (and punishing those that have not).

That’s good news for content marketers who have been following the wise advice of industry analysts and focused on producing quality content. Search Metrics reports that sites like Amazon.com, Genius.com, and Thesaurus.com were big winners, while Examiner.com, RottenTomatoes.com, Answers.com, and WikiHow.com all took significant hits.

Has my site been affected?

At this point, it’s difficult to say. If your search ranking plummeted in May, well, there’s a pretty good chance the Phantom Update took its toll. If it did, you’re probably wondering: How is my content not quality? It’s a legitimate question, and for some, what defines quality is up for debate.

Co-founder of HubPages Paul Edmondson is among those in disagreement with Google’s assessment after the user-generated topical information site’s traffic tumbled.

“It’s pretty brutal,” Edmonson writes on his company’s blog. “I feel tremendously bad for Hubbers and the team at HubPages that have worked extremely hard over the last several years to improve the site.”

Observers have noted the update’s disproportionate impact on “how-to” sites, but Search Metric points out the change “has less to do with the content on the sites, and more to do with how the sites function (a lot of user-generated content) and earn money (a lot of ads).”

Ultimately, the low-quality culprits likely include redundant content, thin content, self-starting videos, banner ads, and 404 errors. If you said “Oops” more than once while reading that list, your site might be affected.

How to adjust

Filter user-generated content: Quora is proof that Phantom/Quality/Reverse Panda isn’t about punishing so-called how to content. The Q&A site’s ranking jumped with the recent update.

“This is likely due to Quora’s high content quality standards,” says Roy Hinkis of SimilarWeb. “Responding to a question with blatant self-promotion or even answering too generally and your answer can be flagged as spam.”

So if user-generated content is part of your strategy, improving your moderation strategy should be in your plans.

Get rid of annoying ad formats: When you’ve got awesome traffic and advertisers are clamoring to hand you cash, it’s mighty tempting to shove in ads anywhere you can. But here’s the thing: Not only do excessive and disruptive ads (pop-ups, “above-the-fold ads,” and so on) annoy visitors, they apparently really annoy Google. And where’s your traffic going to come without either of them?

And for the love of all that is holy, take down those auto-play videos. Like other disruptive ad formats, they’re bad for the user experience, and they’re bad for your Google rank.

Trash the thin content: According to Google, thin content can include automatically generated articles; doorway pages that exist only to connect visitors to a new page; thin affiliates (ads from which the host site makes money on sales, but for which the product adds no value to the site); or thin syndication, which includes content pulled in from article banks or RSS.

Forget Google rankings for a second here. Do any of those things make for great content? Not really. So now is as good a time as any to get rid of them. To know what stuff to get rid of, follow the words of the friendly Google employee in the explainer video: “Ask yourself, ‘What is the value?'”

Clean up your page: A gratuitous amount of comments, lots of 404 errors, and other clutter all dampen the user experience. And guess what? Google doesn’t like that either. Again, this is something that should be a priority anyway, whether Google punishes it or not.

Though the change had a large impact on many sites, the quality-first principles upon which the update was apparently based on have been around for a long time. That’s why Search Engine Land‘s Barry Schwartz says there’s not much more for sites to do than what they should have been doing in the first place. “Keep focusing on building out a better web site, aimed at your users and overall quality,” he writes.

Still, it’s a little unclear why Google felt the need to employ all the smoke and mirrors. Perhaps Google wanted to catch sites still landing top search rankings with poor quality content. Shady? Definitely. But Google has been prioritizing quality content since its 2011 Panda update. If you got caught by the Phantom Update, you likely had it coming.

The post Google’s ‘Quality Update’: What Content Marketers Need to Know appeared first on Contently.

At the center of it all is Fishkin, who’s built a uniquely personal relationship with the marketing community through thousands of blog posts, hundreds of White Board Friday videos, and some deeply intimate pieces, such as this fantastic essay about his year battling depression while running Moz. Content is the engine that drives Moz’s inbound marketing machine, but it’s also more than that. As Rand likes to say, it’s part of their DNA.

I spoke with “The Wizard of Moz” to find out more about how he built an audience of over 300,000 monthly readers, where SEO is headed in 2015, why licensing content doesn’t work, and, of course, who his favorite wizard is.

Moz has been making a really strong commitment to content marketing for the better part of a decade. Why has content continued to be such a priority for you?

I think there’s two things. One is it’s part of our DNA. We believe in sharing and being transparent in putting out there the things that we’ve learned. Then the second piece is just that it continues to show tremendous return on investment for us. We have a pretty thorough content team in-house. We have a small team of three folks who work on our content team. Then we also have people around the company who contribute on a semi-regular basis, myself included.

We’ve become a hub for content and tactical and strategical advice for our industry. That platform has meant that many other contributors of content from around the marketing world want to share their stuff on Moz. We got a lot of terrific donations of content and could get contributions as well.

What about your three-person in-house team? How is that structured?

Cyrus [Shepard] leads that team. He’s our head of content and SEO. Then Isla [McKetta] and Trevor [Klein] both report up to him and they work on editing, they work on content ideas, and on filling in gaps and holes. They work on the content schedule, with external writers and our internal folks to get stuff, and promotional marketing posts about stuff that Moz is launching.

You guys post at least one thing every day. Why do you think it’s valuable to offer your audience something new on a daily basis?

Actually, we are testing whether it is the case that it’s valuable.

Interesting.

It’s a habit that we’ve had since 2004, when I started the blog. It’s one of those things where I was writing every night. I think one of the big reasons that that worked so well in the pre-social-media era was because the Moz comments and the Moz blogs were like the Twitter or Facebook for our little communities.

We’d post every night and there was active conversation on topics the next day. I’m not sure that, within the era of social media and the era of content, that quantity is the best thing in the world versus quality. We’re actually going to try going down to two or three posts a week and going up to eight or nine post a week and seeing what effect those things have.

Do you feel like, with two to three posts a week, you could do higher quality stuff than you’re doing right now with daily posts?

Maybe. We’re not sure about that but we want to try it.

What key metrics will you look at to determine whether that experiment is successful?

We actually have this little system called One Metric at Moz that basically collects all of our metrics and looks at how content historically has performed over time in our funnel—how visitors who touched certain content or performed in our funnel and then we correlate all the metrics. We link those up so that we can basically assign a single metric score to any given piece of content. after its first seven or eight days of performance.

[Editor’s note: Read more about One Metric here. It’s really cool.]

How much of an advantage is it to have that owned audience and community that Moz has?

I think it’s almost indescribably huge. I think if we didn’t have it, we’d be constantly working on building it.

What are the key benefits that you’ve seen?

I think that a bunch of them include cost of traffic. That’s absolutely a big one. There’s the tangible and obvious benefits of having an audience that is pre-disposed through sharing and amplifying your content. Even just hitting the publish button means that thousand of visits are going to come your way, which is crazy but pretty awesome.

You will also have a barometer. I think with a lot of folks, when they publish content, it’s tough for them to tell whether they didn’t promote it well or whether the content didn’t resonate. For us, it’s pretty easy to know that if a content resonates, it will be promoted and shared and reach lots of people.

I think it also means that our content is perceived more authoritatively because of the community behind it and because of the track [record] and history we’ve built up in the market leadership. I think there’s a high standard that the content is held to—which can be a really tough thing when you have let folks down.

Over the last 10 years, how has your approach to content marketing changed?

I’m not sure that our fundamental underlying approach to content has changed much over time. I think we still taken it to a tune of, “Hey, we want to invest in content regularly. We want to share what we learned and know. We want to collect the best opinions from people, whoever they are and wherever they are in our industry, and share them.”

We want to try and help marketers first. That’s our underlying goal. Then if it so happens that they end up becoming customers of Moz, that’s great too, but that’s a side benefit. We really don’t think about content marketing as being part of our funnel. It’s part of our mission.

What are some of the key tactics you guys have used to grow your audience over the years?

Email is certainly big, most of all the Moz Top 10, which is our bi-weekly newsletter. So is investing in different kinds of media. Obviously video with Whiteboard Friday, but also illustrations and bigger interactive pieces, like “MozCast” and “The Google Algorithm Change History.”

Big content pieces like “The Beginner’s Guide to SEO” [have also helped]. I think it’s important to balance out between daily content and big content investments that take a person or a team months to work on. Social media has been huge for us over the last five, six years as well.

We still get a good amount of referral traffic from other people blogging and sharing our stuff on the web. SEO has been terrific.

Speaking of SEO, it seems like, as Google evolves quite rapidly, there’s a lot of misconceptions out there. What do you think is the biggest misconception right now about SEO?

So many misconceptions. One big one for sure is that all SEO is manipulative and evil, and if you intentionally invest in it, then you are doing something wrong or bad. I think one of the most visible holders of that opinion is Matt Mullenweg over at WordPress. He speak at conferences and if he hears the word SEO, he’s like, “Get off my stage. You’re evil!”

Another interesting and odd one is that SEO will take care of itself—that if I publish unique content, then the search engines will rank it. Nothing could be further from the truth. SEO is a process: the way things earn attention, how they are amplified; who amplifies them; how they earn links; whether they’re targeted at things that people actually search for. Whether they solve those search queries is the user experience you provide.

I think there’s still a lot of [misguided] belief around quantity over quality. The vast vast majority of links and shares and amplification signals of all kinds are going to only the top five or 10 percent of content that gets put out. There’s not a whole lot of value in writing a decent blog post anymore. [There’s not a lot of value] unless you can be pretty extraordinary.

Ask [this]: If they’re searching for an answer to a question, would they rather reach your piece of content than anything else on the Internet right now?

Unless the answer is a slam dunk, “Yes, this is 10 times better than anything else out there,” I’m not necessarily sure it’s worth publishing.

What advice would you give brands who are stuck publishing a lot of mediocre content?

Prior to deciding you’re going to publish on a topic or coming up with an idea, I would go research everything that’s out there and make sure I have the ability to say that this piece is better than this other piece, and here’s why.

Then I need to be impartial, and just passionate enough to apply that same logic to my own work. That can be done by looking at what ranks in search engines. You can also see what’s been shared in a particular topic or niche with BuzzSumo.

I think both of those processes can help you. I’d also probably urge you to get some harsh internal critique. Find some harsh critics who can bring their judgment to bear on your work. Get them to take a look at what you’ve done.

A lot of brands are still looking for an easy way out when it comes to SEO and content marketing by simply licensing content from other publishers—like the AP, Forbes, and The New York Times—to populate their blog. Do you think that has any value?

I think certain forms of re-publishing content can add value for certain publishers and media outlets, but it’s very rare.

If you’re a small or mid-sized website and you’re licensing content from the AP and the Times, you’re probably sunk. That’s not going to do much for what you’re building. That’s not going to do much for your SEO. You may be getting some stragglers of traffic when Google accidentally thinks you’re the original source, but yeah, that’s not a great model.

On the other hand, I see folks like Slate and Salon and The Washington Post and this fantastic blog post that was written by this author in this smaller space. That can be awesome. They have a huge megaphone and they can amplify a great piece of work that maybe has only been seen by a very, very small niche community.

So licensing works for big media companies, but not for brands.

Yeah, unfortunately. I think some brands are pretty smart about this. Some brands do say, “Hey, we’ve been building an audience with content. We have an audience, we found this great niche thing, we asked this person to contribute a unique piece for us—or we got their permission to republish it—and we shared it with our audience and that helped our credibility.”

That can work, but if you’re licensing from the AP, I don’t get it. I have not seen that work.

What do you think is going to change in SEO this year? What does 2015 hold?

I think we’re seeing a few big trends ongoing. One certainly is dark traffic and loss of data. More and more search referrals are coming through without a referral strain, which is very frustrating because it means a lot of your search traffic is being reported as direct. The search traffic that is coming, through, 95 percent of it is coming without a keyword referral, so you don’t know what people searched for.

I don’t think technology has caught up to this yet. We don’t have something out there where analytics are getting predictive about saying, “Hey, this is why we think the search traffic landed on this page; it probably came with this keyword.” You see some SEOs technologies doing that, but not web analytics technologies.

I think we’re going to keep seeing trends of growth in mobile search and flatter growth in desktop search, which is okay, and we have still an insane metric ton of desktop search going on. Mobile is growing much faster and I think that is putting different requirements on publishers of all kinds—especially in terms of the formatting of content, and what the content is intended to accomplish. Because your conversion rates on mobile are just [bad]—for anything other than the most simple transactions with brands you’ve already transacted with, mobile is not a transaction-heavy device. We’re all going to have to make changes there.

With conversions so difficult on mobile, how should brands approach change?

I think what you’re trying to convert people to is familiarity, trust, or a relationship with your brand. Hopefully maybe some social sharing, maybe an email address if you’re very lucky, but not “Fill out this 10-field form” or “Go through this three-step transaction process.”

You guys are really honest and transparent talking about your successes and your failures and your challenges as a company. It’s really rare. What benefits does that bring?

I think it has both benefits and drawbacks. We don’t do that because we believe it will make us more successful or because we believe it has a high return on investment. We do that because that’s who we are. That’s what we believe in. That’s what we wish other companies and organizations and governments and people of all kinds and sizes and shapes would do. It’s not a business requirement; it’s a values judgement.

Nonetheless, it seems to work. It feels like all those type of pieces get an incredible amount of comments and engagement from your audience. It seems to resonate.

Yeah, I think they do. I would say that they have benefits and drawbacks. When we’re growing and Moz is looking really good—when even if we struggle to raise capital, our customer keep us going and we have a terrific year —I don’t think it’s anything but positive. It tells a great story.

But over the last year and a half, we’ve grown at a much much slower rate than the prior six years. We’ve encountered hardships and launched some buggy software and spent months fixing it and those kind of things. [So] I think being transparent maybe has had its drawbacks too.

People love an underdog with a story, but they don’t necessarily love a company that became a market leaders and then stumbled. I think it doesn’t matter. It’s the right thing to do, and it’s the right thing for us.

Do you think content marketing is going to continue to grow in importance or is it the flavor of the day?

We’ve been doing content marketing since the dawn of the Internet and way before that. We just didn’t call it content marketing. I think SEOs called it linkbait for a while and they certainly did lots of that. I’m not sure what the Guinness Brewery Corporation called The Guinness Book of World Records, but that was certainly content marketing.

I think it will continue to be with us for a long time because great content is a great way to earn attention and awareness and trust, and to get people to engage with your brand and spread your message.

Final question: Who is your favorite wizard?

Well, probably Gandalf. He’s awesome.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

The post Moz’s Rand Fishkin on Why Licensing Content Is for Suckers, His Favorite Wizard, and the Future of SEO appeared first on Contently.

Patel launched his first entrepreneurial venture—an online job board called Advice Monkey—when he was 15. And by the time he was in college, he had co-founded an SEO and marketing company called Advantage Consulting Services that counted Fortune 500 companies like Samsung, Amazon, Microsoft, and Viacom amongst its clients. Before he turned 21, Patel had made enough money to invest a million dollars in a hosting company, Vision Web Hosting. He lost all the money from that investment, but it didn’t really slow him down.

Today, Patel is 29 years old, and he’s already the founder of two successful marketing software companies—Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics—as well as Quick Sprout, a site that started as Patel’s personal blog but has quickly turned into a million-dollar consulting business.

The most impressive thing about Patel, though, might be the fact that he’s managed to build blogs with over 100,000 readers for all three of his major ventures, leading the charge by personally writing eight blog posts a week. He dishes out an unbeatable combination of content marketing hacks, practical advice, and measurement secrets that have made his posts a must-read for anyone in the industry.

I caught up with Patel to discuss how brands should measure content marketing success, the ways SEO has changed, and how to create passionate content that resonates with readers.

Serial entrepreneur Neil Patel

Do you ever sleep? Because your career is absolutely insane so far.

Thank you. Yeah, I sleep well, but I probably work a bit too much.

How did you manage to launch a million-dollar marketing consulting business when you were still in college?

It took some hard work. The thing I learned from it was that people will pay for results. If you can actually get really good at something and provide results and aren’t full of crap, you’d be shocked at how much business you can generate.

That makes a decent transition to the topic of content marketing, because a lot of content marketers are struggling to show their bosses that what they’re doing works. What advice would you have for them?

When it comes to showing that it works, all that you have to do is go through the analytics and you can show them how many more visitors that they’re getting. That’s one way, and that’s extra brand reach.

Two, if you’re collecting emails, you can show them how many more emails you’re collecting—because emails are worth money. Corporations know that if you get emails, then you’re going to get sales.

Third, you can show them how many more leads or sales or conversion points that you’re actually getting through the content marketing. Through any analytics tool you can actually track conversions based on entry sources. You can see, “All right, here’s all the people that came through from the blog, and here’s all the conversion that went through.”

Do you think with that kind of methodology it’s possible to tie a piece of content to a hard revenue figure?

Yes, I do. You may not get a full figure in which there’s more revenue, but you can at least track directly: “Here’s all the traffic we got from the blog and here’s how many leads it generated, and here’s what a lead is [worth to us], or here’s how many sales were generated.”

We do it with our own businesses. We know how much a lead is worth based on what our sales team quotes back, et cetera. We can actually see content marketing as a cash-flow positive.

For a lot of brands, tying content to revenue is a little bit of a chicken before the egg situation, since many are struggling to build a loyal audience. You’ve been able to grow three different brand blogs to over 100,000 readers. How did you do it?

It comes down to going above and beyond. If you look at most people in the content marketing world, all they’re doing is writing content to get traffic or sales. They’re not going above and beyond. If you can actually make your design way better or create content that’s much more detailed and actionable, people take notice and are more likely to share and tell others about it.

Why do you think that most big brands with way bigger budgets than you struggle to even approach a six-figure audience?

Because most big brands and blogs look at how much money can they spend to actually get the people over to the site, to create a popular blog or whatever it may be, versus actually thinking in different ways.

It’s not how big of a budget or what you can do with the money. It’s “What is your target audience or ideal customer, what are their pain points? How are they struggling?” Then, from a blogging perspective, you need to go in and solve those pain points.

Big brands are just throwing money at things and they’re not necessarily thinking it through fully. Just like anything else in marketing, it’s all about solving problems. If you can help people solve their problems through your content, you’re much more likely to get them to read your blog and pick up much more traction than if you’re saying, “Hey, let’s spend 100 grand on content marketing.” All right, what are you going to do with $100,000?

You work with a lot of big brands. Is that essentially the advice that you give them? How do you get them to change their behavior?

The way I get them to change their behavior is, I say, “Hey you know what? Before we decide how much we want to spend and what we want to do, let’s survey people—your potential customers, your current customers—and let’s find out what they want.”

It doesn’t matter what you want to do or what I want to do. All that matters is you want to make your customers happier. From there you take the data and show them based on the data that here’s what we should do. You’ve got to make them create decisions based on the data points versus just doing whatever they want.

One frustration I hear a lot is that a lot of brands tend to have an outdated concept of what SEO is. They’re still focused on keyword-stuffing tactics, as opposed to adjusting to how things have evolved with Google’s Panda algorithm. What’s important for SEO right now?

When it comes to SEO, you can’t end up erasing crap. That’s what I always tell big brands. It’s good product and good services that continually sell in the long run. If you ask Coca-Cola “Why are you successful?” [it’s] because people love Coke. The product is awesome.

You’ve got to focus on putting the best product out there. The same goes with the web. Whether it’s SEO, content marketing, whatever it may be, you’ve got to create the best product on the Internet to give to people. They usually understand that feel. When you pitch that to big brands, they get that and are like, “Oh, cool. It’s not just about keywords.”

How do you usually advise that brands go about actually creating the content? Should they build an in house team? Should they tap freelancers or an ad agency? What do you think works best?

I think all approaches work well and fail. It just depends on what a company wants to do. It’s just about finding the right people, whether they’re in an ad agency, or you’re hiring them as contractors, or maybe as full-time employees. It’s all about talent.

If it’s a good person, it doesn’t matter where they’re located or how you hire them. You want to get the right people working on the project. People with experience, and people who are passionate about the content that they’re creating.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

The post Neil Patel Reveals How to Tie Your Content Marketing to Revenue appeared first on Contently.

Introducing: The Content Marketing Dictionary

The only thing more terrifying this Halloween than your boss’s Miley Cyrus costume is the incredible amount of jargon that’s taking over the content marketing world. Have no fear: We’re here with a (very snarky) guide to the Content Marketing Newspeak. Read it.

How ‘The New York Times’ Built Its Content Marketing Machine

In just one year, The New York Times has built arguably the most impressive content marketing studio in the world. In this week’s feature story, we examine how they did it:

Last September, The New York Times hired Sebastian Tomich and gave him a critical task: Help introduce the most controversial advertising product in the 165-year-existence of the Gray Lady.

Just six years out of college, Tomich was making the career leap those in the media business dream about. As the newly minted vice president of advertising at the Times, he’d be reunited with his former boss at Forbes Media, Meredith Levien, who had been named executive vice president of advertising just two months prior. Hiring the duo wasn’t without risk. Though Forbes‘ native advertising platform had been financially successful, it had also come under some media scrutiny—from the Times and elsewhere. Read it.

‘SEO Is Not a Unicorn’: 3 Crucial SEO Tips for Content Marketers

There are a lot of misconceptions about SEO floating around the marketing world; Camille Padilla examines what content marketers are getting wrong, and takes a deep dive into three strategies that will help them up their game.

This Is the Biggest Guest Post Fail We’ve Seen in a Long Time

What happens when you let a major sponsor of your publication publish a terribly biased article in your publication, and then don’t even label it as an opinions piece or disclose your business relationship? Bad, bad things, writes Yael Grauer:

The Los Angeles Times called it “a corporate advertisement presented as ‘opinion.’” The Washington Post condemned it as “free native advertising.” New York magazine, Newsweek, and the The New Republic, among other news outlets, all criticized it.

This past Tuesday, Politico ran “No, BP Didn’t Ruin the Gulf,” an op-ed piece claiming the damage caused by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was minimal—written not by a credentialed journalist, but by BP’s senior vice president of U.S. communications and external affairs, Geoff Morrell. Read it.

We Made You a ‘Game of Thrones’-Style Map of the Content Marketing World

We love content marketing, and we love Game of Thrones, so we decided to take that to its logical conclusion….

Click the post for a full-sized version, as well as the embed code. Also, here’s a picture of our VP of sales, Khaleesi Cool, pimping our map, because that’s how we do here at Contently:

Happy Halloween!

The post Content Marketing Catchup: The Content Marketing World as Westeros, SEO Tips, and More Must-Reads appeared first on Contently.