In 2013, most businesses realise the importance of content. That’s why so many SEO agencies are repositioning themselves as content agencies, or at least offering it as a primary product. Our Content Marketing courses used to attract mainly bloggers, but since the Panda and Penguin Google updates we have seen a large increase in SEOs wanting to learn about content.
Yet this mass conversion to content brings up some issues – there is too much noise. Most businesses are still stuck in an outdated content strategy – regular, mediocre quality blog posts with little intent. The content is happening, but is it working?
With content at the forefront of so many marketing strategies, it seems at first glance that big businesses have a massive advantage. Whole in-house marketing teams as well as high profile agencies on hand to craft incredible content. How does a small business compete against this with a 1-3 person marketing team?
Big Evergreen Content
The idea for this post was sparked by Hannah Smith‘s talk at BrightonSEO ‘Go Big or Go Home’ (excellent write up on State of Search), which prompted me to revisit Dr. Pete’s SEOmoz post at the end of last year ‘Why Big Content Is Worth the Risk’. Both Hannah and Dr. Pete explain why big content is necessary and how it can help your business stand out in a very crowded world of below par blog posts:
“We all want the low-hanging fruit, but let’s be honest – the low-hanging fruit is rotten, bruised, and covered with the grubby fingerprints of all the other spoiled brats pawing at it.”
The consensus of both the talk and the post is that big content takes around 40 hours to produce. Hannah compared this to an average 12 hours for ‘small content’ but I think that’s a huge overestimation for the majority of businesses. James Carson recently alerted Twitter to the existence of a job ad for an agency looking for a Marketing Executive who for £18,000 a year had to write 25 blog posts a day. That’s well over 6,000 articles a year on a range of topics, written by somebody with little knowledge about the subject and obviously no research.
With that much noise, it’s important to be different to break through, and that’s where big content comes in. But I’m going to go a step further and ask you to consider another element - sustainability. Another popular topic at BrightonSEO, and a common phrase in marketing blogs at the moment is Evergreen Content.
In the rest of this post I’m going to try and convince you why your content should be both big and evergreen for the holy grail of content marketing.
Last night Facebook announcedFacebook Graph Search, putting to rest the many rumours surrounding the cryptic launch event in Los Angeles.
These rumours included Facebook Mobile & an external search engine, but the most popular rumour turned out to be spot on – Facebook has radically overhauled their internal search function in a move that should frighten other social networks, traditional search engines and privacy advocates alike.
There are already tons of posts about the new search function and very few people have access yet (you can sign up for beta here), so instead we are going to focus on how brands (and individuals) can optimise to appear higher and more frequently in search results. One of those lucky few to get early access was Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land, so head over there for a full run down of how Facebook Graph Search works.
It’s very interesting that Facebook is the first social network to bring out a search engine like this. On our SEO courses and social media workshops we emphasise how you can use social media to help rank better in search engines, maybe now we’ll have to include a section on using SEO to rank better in social networks!
How Does Visibility Work with Facebook Graph Search?
Mark Zuckerberg may claim that Graph Search isn’t a direct competitor to Google, but it’s still a search engine and so there will always be ways to rank higher. Facebook have managed to produce something that Google have been working on for a while – an Internet of Things. Instead of a database of web pages, they have a database of information on things – likes, photos, businesses, people, jobs, locations and many more – and can distinguish between these items.
Your visibility rests on how your business is connected to searchers – the more of their friends have connected with you, the more visible you are in their search results. But this can be just one of many factors affecting your visibility, including:
Total number of likes
Total number of check-ins
The level of engagement on your page
How often people talk about your business
The frequency that people check in/ engage
The recency of check-ins/ engagement
Your location
Your potential reach (are your likes/check-ins just local or are people coming from further afield?)
There are likely to be many more I haven’t thought of, and the impact of each is determined by the type of search performed.
If a searcher is looking for businesses their friends like, then that will be the major factor. If they’re looking for businesses in their area then total likes and of course location will have more of an impact.
But it’s not just friends! You can search using an overwhelming number of factors. My favourite example of this is again from Danny Sullivan – “Search for Restaurants run by employees of a particular cooking school”. So it’s not just about number of connections, but about the type and value of those connections. Read the rest of "Optimising Business Pages for Facebook Graph Search"
Google have just announced an incredible new Data Highlighter in Webmaster Tools which allows you to mark up events on your site with simple point-and-click actions.
This is a life saver for webmasters who want to add structured data to their sites but don’t have the skills to implement microdata, microformats or RDFa on their site.
For those unfamiliar with structured data markup, it is code added to a site, page or page element that makes content more understandable to search engines and other crawlers which is then translated into Rich Snippets – extra information shown in SERPs with your result. Previously, this would involve marking up elements individually using tags like schemas but now with Google’s new Data Highlighter even those with no understanding of HTML can markup certain elements.
The idea behind Structured Data is to take the internet beyond just an archive of ‘pages’ and instead becomes an ‘internet of things’ – something that search engines are racing to be the best at. It’s something Facebook does – recognising people, relationships, faces and interests. Google are on the right track with authors, publishers, knowledge graph and semantic search but they need the help of webmasters to take this a step further.
Structured data is vital for SEO – something we’re looking to add to our SEO courses – not only does it help search engines understand your content but also gives you more visibility in SERPs. Likewise it’s a must for content marketers – not so much for blog posts but for other content that needs clear labelling.
Currently the Data Highlighter tool just for events, but we believe that if this test is successful then other elements will be supported. Google made a similar move by making authorship markup (rel=author) easier to implement using email verification rather than tags.
How to Use Google Data Highlighter
The main point of Google’s new Data Highlighter tool is that it is dead simple to use. It just requires a Webmaster Tools account and (of course) events on your website.
Disclaimer: If you’re thinking “I love the sound of extra real estate in SERPs, but I don’t have events, I had better set some up!” then please stop right there. Tools like these only work if they’re not abused. If you must, think hard about what real event you could put on – it could be a talk, a free session or a demonstration – just don’t set up fake events.
During my morning round up of BrightonSEO I asked the question ‘Has SEO grown up?‘ For my afternoon round up I’m going to focus on one tip from each talk and why I liked it.
The afternoon was as varied as the morning with topics from linguistics to affiliate marketing, all from good speakers with something interesting to say and wisdom to impart on the audience.
We were also lucky enough to spot one of our Top SEO Trumps in the flesh! Here’s Ralph Tegtmeier enjoying his pack. We left our final packs dotted about at the after party. Did you find one? Let us know!
Last Friday we attended BrightonSEO at the Dome. There was a marked change from the previous event and I don’t mean the 27 algorithm updates in the past year, or the extra 500 people attending.
There has been a shift in attitude. The talks were varied and focused on the bigger picture of SEO as a marketing tool, not an elite club where we sneer at Google and keep everything close to our chest.
People who were there just to find out what small trick they can do rank better would have gone home disappointed. Those who want to improve their businesses, make better websites, keep up good relationships with clients and evolve an industry would have gone home with big smiles on their faces.
There was a lot to learn about the psychology of marketing, the importance of language, the benefits of teamwork and overall the need to grow up as an industry, to stop being seen as snake oil salesmen and seen as a viable marketing channel for global businesses. Congratulations to Kelvin for putting on such a diverse selection of speakers.
Of course, amongst all the seriousness there was still time to be a bit silly:
Professor Puppet welcomes some familiar critters on to the stage
There was a lot less Google bashing than the last BrightonSEO – other than the penguin and panda carcasses hung from a coat rack on stage of course. When panda and penguin were mentioned, it was as a warning of what happens when you relentlessly go after the algorithm and try to con the results.
In this round up, I’m going to run through each talk and explain what we can learn to become better at what we do. How SEO can evolve from the common misconceptions in the media and many boardrooms to a recognised and trusted industry. Read the rest of "BrightonSEO 2012: Has SEO Grown Up?"
If your site(s) aren’t sticking to those rules, then look back to the first print out – “Google doesn’t own you anything”. Read the first few lines very carefully:
“Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the “Quality Guidelines,” which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise impacted by an algorithmic or manual spam action.”
If you break the guidelines, you risk a penalty.
You may be wondering why we’ve chosen to publish such seemingly obvious advice, especially as the guidelines have been around for years and years. It’s something we teach on our SEO courses, and seems to be common sense.
The reason is articles like this and comments like this that essentially boil down to individuals and companies who are either venting their anger or seeking damages against Google.
Read through the other comments on that second post to get an idea of the anger felt towards Google by large portions of the search industry. So why is everyone so angry? Read the rest of "Google Doesn’t Owe You Anything"
In simple terms, negative SEO is any act performed to harm a competitor. In this case I’m going to look at links as that’s the biggest talking point and easiest to spot, but if you want to scare yourself then I recommend reading Kristine Schachinger‘s hair raising post on Extreme Negative SEO.
The act of building bulk backlinks to your site with exact match anchor text used to be a great idea. It resulted in higher ranking and was relatively easy to do. However, since the search engines have started cracking down on this hard, it’s become a very bad thing for your site – just the sort of thing that can get your site penalised or even delisted by Google.
This is a move that promotes quality – that’s great! But what if you’re not the one building links to your site? What if a rival decides to turn their mass link building schemes on your site instead of theirs? Read the rest of "How to Find Negative SEO Links Aimed at Your Site"
The main point of Google’s new Data Highlighter tool is that it is dead simple to use. It just requires a Webmaster Tools account and (of course) events on your website.
