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.

There may be plenty of hyperbole surrounding Google’s algorithm change, but legitimate concern on behalf of content marketers is not unfounded. Getting knocked down in Google’s search rank costs real businesses real money. According to a 2014 Advanced Web Ranking study, 71.33 percent of searches lead to an organic click for sites on Google’s first page of search results. That’s only true for 5.59 percent of searches on the second and third results pages. What’s more, the first five results on a search page account for an astounding 67.60 precent of all clicks.

Here are six things you should know about Mobilegeddon.

1. You need to put Mobilegeddon in perspective

If Mobilegeddon has whipped you into an incapacitating panic attack, calm down. Despite such panic-stricken headlines as “Google is making a giant change this week that could crush millions of small businesses” and those freaking out about the unprecedented scope of the change, Re/code predicts Google’s “latest SEO tweak is not likely to reverberate as much as earlier ones.” That’s because Google has given plenty of advance warning on the change, as well as providing tools to help site owners evaluate and improve its mobile-friendliness.

Google is even downplaying the consequences of the algorithm change. “While the mobile-friendly change is important, we still use a variety of signals to rank search results,” a Google spokesperson told Re/code. High-quality content, for example, could boost a site’s rankings considerably even as mobile kinks are being worked out.

And if you are behind on mobile-optimizing your site, you won’t be punished permanently. “Unlike previous algorithm tweaks,” reports CNN Money, “websites can upgrade their ‘mobile-friendliness’ at any time to appear higher in Google’s search results.”

2. But you still need to act

Yes, you. We see you there, eagerly raising your hand in the back of the class, clamoring to point out that you’ve read that Mobilegeddon only affects mobile searches, and you think your traffic doesn’t come from mobile. If that’s true, it could be because your website looks terrible on mobile devices, but it’s most likely just flat-out false. According to CNN Money, mobile searches make up about half of all Google queries, and that number is rising. A Flurry analysis found that time spent on mobile grew in the U.S. by 9.3 percent over just nine months in 2014. Even if you’re not seeing your traffic come from mobile devices now, there’s a good chance you will in the near future.

3. And rely on Google’s evaluation of your site

You may think your site looks fine and dandy on mobile. You may be wrong, according to Google. And now, Google is the judge and jury of mobile friendliness. You need to meet its expectations, not your own (or anyone else’s.)

The Internet is full of marketers offering to evaluate the mobile-friendliness of your site, but but guess what? So is Google—for free. Google’s Mobile Friendly Test not only tells you how friendly any website is, it also explains why (“text too small to read,” “links too close together,” etc.) and how to improve. If you still can’t figure out how to get your “Page appears not mobile-friendly” result to upgrade into an “Awesome! This page is mobile-friendly,” feel free to hunt down some marketing help. But still use Google’s tool as the litmus test.

4. But don’t overcomplicate your fix

According to Forrester Research, 38 percent of sites for companies that have 1,000 or more employees—those one might assume have pretty decent tech budgets—don’t meet Google’s criteria for mobile-friendliness. Comparatively, for a small company funneling all of its resources into creating great content, the prospect of optimizing a content hub for mobile might sound daunting, but the technology is out there to make it less complicated.

Marketing firm Econsultancy recommends a simple responsive design on your site that “will [load] faster and allow your users to find, share, and link to your content more easily. It also means Google’s bots will be able to crawl and index your site’s content faster and more efficiently.”

Another option is an adaptive web design approach, which automatically changes the HTML of a website on mobile, but the user-agent detection can result in errors. When it comes to mobile, simpler is better.

5. You need to optimize your content for mobile, too

While chasing Google’s standards for a mobile-friendly site, don’t forget about your brand’s standards. Econsultancy recommends the following tips to reach your content goals as you become more mobile-friendly:

• Short, entertaining headlines with easily readable text are key. Also ensure links are far enough apart so fingers don’t bump the wrong one.
• Make sure your content’s structure and layout doesn’t require readers to scroll down, down, down to get to the majority of your content. Front load your important content at the top.
• Place your call to action within your content. Mobile readers shouldn’t have to thumb all the way to the end of the page.

6. You did this to yourself

Yes: If your website isn’t yet legitimately mobile-friendly, Mobilegeddon could make your search ranking plummet. Did you think this day wasn’t going to come? Mobilegeddon isn’t the canary in the coal mine of consumer mobile behavior; it’s the massive rush of gas killing off the miners who ignored the canaries in the first place. CNN Money explains that Mobilegeddon is an “obvious tweak” to Google’s search algorithm. Its mobile-friendly test has been around since February, but for whatever reason, the public panic only started this week.

The bottom line is that consumers already were turning to their mobile devices for online content. If the mob-branded “Mobilegeddon” is what it takes to get enterprise attention, companies really have no one else to blame but themselves. But who needs to assign blame anyway? For giving them the extra push to go where the market is headed anyway—toward mobile—this SEO change could have content marketers thanking Google in the end.

The post 6 Tips Content Marketers Need to Know About Mobilegeddon, Google’s Big SEO Change appeared first on Contently.

Starting in the late ’90s, publishers and marketers alike started to taint SEO with the ugly of practice of keyword stuffing. As Google worked on updating their algorithm, marketers sabotaged the quality of their work by forcing feeding too many keywords into their writing to see if it would benefit a page’s ranking.

To see how keyword stuffing might look on an article page, Google gives an example about humidors:

We sell custom cigar humidors. Our custom cigar humidors are handmade. If you’re thinking of buying a custom cigar humidor, please contact our custom cigar humidor specialists at custom.cigar.humidors@example.com.

But Google stopped all this by changing their search algorithm so it would penalize content creators who tried to rely on cheap tricks like keyword stuffing by pushing them down search rankings. As many of you probably know already, Google’s algorithm is fluid and esoteric, meaning content marketers and publishers will always be a few steps behind SEO best practices. By 2003, Google’s Florida algorithm update had already begun to improve rankings, and over the next decade, dozens of updates from Panda to Penguin to Pigeon fine-tuned the process. Last September, for example, Google’s Panda 4.1 release sought to penalize publishers who stuffed keywords into meta descriptions and title tags, not just body text.

But as search engine algorithms have gotten more sophisticated, experts say we need to get more sophisticated as well.

“Instead of focusing on keywords, focus on content,” says Ambar Shrivastava, a veteran developer who is now VP of product management for Tutor.com and the Princeton Review. “Really try to map out content to your target audience. You want to think about your audience and what’s important to them instead of creating pages built for keywords.”

Find What Makes You Unique

Focusing on content is an umbrella strategy that encompasses a number of different SEO tactics. But just about everyone can agree that content should be unique and useful. In other words, content creators need to find a niche that will help them stand out and try their best to avoid self-promotional pitches cluttering their prose. Moz, an inbound software company, suggests a good benchmark to measure the value of a piece of content is for pages to “be described by 80%+ of visitors as useful, high quality, & unique.”

As “The Wizard of Moz”—seriously, that’s his title—Rand Fishkin told Contently in a recent interview, “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 ten 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.”

Learn to Love Long-Tail

If you have high-quality content, the next step is to make sure people can find it via search. All publishers want to show up on the first page of a search query on Google, but to direct users to relevant content, marketers need to learn how to master long-tail keywords, or distinct multi-word phrases specific to your brand and its publishing efforts.

According to Neil Patel, 70 percent of search traffic now comes from long-tail keywords. If you’re an up-and-coming men’s fashion service with a blog, like Trunk Club, you probably won’t get on the first Google page if someone searches “men’s clothes.” However, if you optimize your site effectively, when someone searches “handpicked men’s clothing,” you’ll show up near the very top of the first page.

The key is to be consistent. One of the major consequences of Google’s recent algorithm changes is that publishers can no longer track what keywords people type to find a site. In Google Analytics, search referral traffic shows up as “[not provided],” which makes it difficult to monitor popular keywords (although there are some external tools available for tracking them, such as HitTail, which Shrivastava helped build). However, this also has upsides, as it prevents content marketers from resorting to keyword stuffing. Instead, content creators can pay more attention to the little things. For example, page titles should be under 75 characters, URLs under 90 characters, and meta descriptions under 160 characters, per Moz.

Essentially, all of these factors point toward a new strain of SEO that favors a holistic experience. “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,” Fishkin said. “Whether they solve those search queries is the user experience you provide.”

Constantly Collaborate

UX looks like it will emerge as the final piece of the SEO puzzle. Even though some people view SEO as an editorial issue, it’s become much more nuanced than that. Editorial teams need to work closely with design and development teams to ensure that your content loads quickly on all platforms and that all visuals are formatted correctly.

“SEO and functionality are going to become much more intertwined,” Shrivastava adds. “Google is looking more at usability and user metrics. Making sure your site is mobile-friendly is becoming a big factor.”

Of course, these takes on SEO are all relevant right now, but Google will continue to refine their search algorithm, and when that happens, marketers will need to keep adjusting. SEO isn’t about gaming the system anymore; it’s about learning how to play by the rules. And the next time the rules change, publishers that focus on producing quality content will already be ahead of the game.

The post SEO Isn’t Dead. It’s Just Different 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.

Bots just may be ruining your content strategy.

Bot traffic—including scrapers, hackers, spammers, impersonators—has been estimated to be as high as 61 percent of all traffic, according to a 2013 report by Incapsula. The sheer enormity of web traffic coming from bots not only hurts the ability of publishers to accurately measure the success of their content, but also their ability to plan for the future. A swarm of bots could, in some circumstances, give you the false sense that a particular tactic is working and lead to poor editorial and business decisions.

For traditional publishers, bot traffic can provide an upside by inflating pageview numbers and ad revenue, but for brand publishers, they’re nothing but a plague. After all, smart brand publishers are primarily concerned with building relationships with actual humans and tracking how those relationships develop, and bots mess that up. To use another metaphor, it’s like having a bunch of androids show up to your pep rally; suddenly, the crowd goes from 90 percent engaged to 70 percent lifeless.

“If you use [Google] Analytics to make decisions, then you want the data as clean as possible,” explains Andy Crestodina, co-founder and strategic director at Orbit Media Studios. “That means filtering out any traffic that aren’t your visitors. Almost every site has Analytics set up to filter out traffic from their own office. Filtering out bot traffic is similar. The better the data, the better the Analytics and the better your decisions will be.”

This begs the question: If false traffic is a big issue, and Google prides itself on accurate Analytics data, why has it taken them so long to implement a solution?

“I think that the Google Analytics team is responding to the fact that more and more bots are out there executing code, when it was not normal practice a few years ago,” says Yehoshua Coren, founder and principal of Analytics Ninja.

When bots execute code, they act more like human readers, which makes the swarms of bot traffic harder to pick and filter out. In increasing numbers, bots are no longer simply reading a site’s code—the raw text of the programming instructions—but actually implementing programs such as JavaScript. So if a publisher has a widget on their WordPress site that pulls information from Twitter, the bot will now take actions that mimic what would happen if an actual human viewed the site and the widget loaded on their page. This makes it even more difficult to distinguish between human and non-human traffic, and skews results in Google Analytics, such as higher direct traffic, higher bounces, and often more traffic from a specific location or domain.

Google’s bot filtering solution is far from perfect. The update only filters out some non-human traffic, excluding known bots and spiders from the Interactive Advertising Bureau list, which is updated monthly. However, the list isn’t entirely comprehensive, and only includes a fraction of bots and spiders.

Luckily, there are other ways to spot bots, says Coren.

“With a quick look, it’s pretty easy to identify abnormal traffic,” Coren says. He typically looks for high bounces and direct traffic in the Google Analytics dashboard, and finds that it usually it comes from just one city and/or one ISP domain. He looks for traffic spikes coming through direct traffic, which is how bots typically show up. Before Google offered this new feature, he would simply create a filter or use advanced segments to exclude specific cities or domains.

That kind of next-level navigation of Google Analytics may sound daunting, but it’s likely necessary. You can’t rely on Google to get rid of all the bots for you; you need to be your own John Conner.

Contently arms brands with the tools and talent to become great content creators. Learn more.​

The post Bot Traffic May Be Ruining Your Content Strategy, and Google Knows It appeared first on Contently.