Category Archives: Marketing

SEO Writing 101: Don’t Skip SERP Research

A good 90% of SEO writing is about creating content that’s valuable to the humans you hope will read it. But then there’s that other 10%—the part about understanding search engines and making sure your writing speaks to what the algorithms respond to.

And a key step in getting that 10% right (and helping with the 90% while you’re at it) is performing SERP research.

What is SERP Research?

SERP stands for search engine results page. Anytime you do a Google search, the page your search produces is the SERP for that keyword.

SERP research is performing an analysis of the SERP for a keyword you want to rank for. 

Digging into the SERP for a keyword yields useful insights about how people use the keyword, what Google deems good content on the topic, and what you need to do to effectively compete in the rankings.

How to Perform a SERP Analysis

The idea of SERP research may seem straightforward enough: perform a search, see what shows up. But to do an effective SERP analysis, you want to include a few key steps in your process.

1. Google your primary keyword.

Do a search for the primary keyword you have in mind. If you have a list of a few keywords you’re targeting, or are still trying to decide between a few, go ahead and do this for all of them so you can see how the SERPs compare.

Because Google sometimes provides personalized results based on past search history, this step is best performed in an incognito or private search window. 

2. Analyze the layout of the SERP.

The great aim of Google’s algorithm is to discern what the person searching wants to find, and deliver up the best possible results for their query. And because the company has massive quantities of data on people’s search habits and what they click on for each search, they do a pretty good job at understanding the intentions behind a keyword. 

For marketers, analyzing the layout of a SERP can reveal valuable information on what your target audience is thinking. You want the piece you write to address what they’re looking for, and the SERP helps you better understand what that is.

Sometimes the results you get will reveal people are searching for something entirely different than you thought. For example, if you do a search for “SERP research” the first result is for an organization called The Strategic Education Research Partnership Institute. 

That is…not how I’m using the term in this post. But because the rest of the results on the page have to do with SEO, that suggests that, other than the people searching for that specific organization, most of the people searching for that term are using it the way I’m talking about it. 

Beyond confirming the main meaning people have in mind for a keyword, a SERP analysis can help you better understand what type of results they’re looking for. For example, let’s look at the SERPs for two related keywords: ”how to improve energy” and “supplements for energy.”

The first has three main things on it: 

  • An answer box with information pulled from an article on the subject in a list format
  • A People Also Ask section with related questions 
  • Organic results dominated by articles that list tips

All three of these point to informational search intent. Google is convinced people performing this search want articles that provide actionable tips they can put to use, in list form. 

The latter search term looks different. Some of the organic results are informational articles like those on our first SERP, suggesting that’s what some people are looking for. But above that, we get shopping results.

Lower on the page, we get a local map of nearby stores that sell supplements. And several of the organic results are eCommerce brands. That all points to Google understanding this search term to have purchasing intent, at least some of the time. Some people doing this search want information, but many are ready to buy a product that meets their needs. 

3.  Identify any SERP features.

SERP features are all those extra features that show up on the SERP alongside the organic results. Some common examples include paid ads, the People Also Ask section, the Google local map, answer boxes, and knowledge graphs. 

A Backlinko analysis found that 97.6% of searches produce results with at least one SERP feature. Understanding the SERP features for your keyword is important for a few reasons:

  • They help you understand search intent (as with our supplements example above).
  • If a featured snippet tops the page, it’s something you’ll want to target with your content 
  • They allow you to gauge how valuable an organic result really is

To that last point, SERP features play a key role in how people will react to a SERP, and can impact how likely they are to click on organic results. For example, if you do a search for a movie, the knowledge graph that shows up on the right side of the page packs a lot of information.

You get images, the year the movie was made, its running time, where you can watch it, critics’ ratings, quotes from reviews, and a list of the top actors in the movie. In short, a decent number of the questions a person might have about the movie are answered right there on the SERP.

Even if you rank on page one for a keyword with a thorough knowledge graph like this—your content requires an extra click, and Google’s doesn’t. That might not make the keyword useless to target, but it means it shouldn’t be as high of a priority as a comparable term without a knowledge graph.

On the other hand, if the page is topped with an answer box, you’ll want to create content optimized for claiming that featured snippet. An Ahrefs study found that less than a third of featured snippets came from the top organic result. That means you don’t have to earn the top spot in Google’s organic results to be featured at the top of the page. 

Pay attention to what kind of featured snippet it is. If it’s a list, structure your content in a list format. If it’s a paragraph answer box, include your keyword followed by a brief answer in the content itself, ideally near the top of the page. And of course, aim to make it better than the content currently claiming that spot. 

4. Review your top competitors.

This step is the most straightforward, but also the most time consuming. In order to write content that has a chance of ranking, you want to understand what’s ranking now. Click on the top few results, and spend some time reading what’s on the page. 

This accomplishes a few things at once:

  • It shows you what you need to beat. Unless your website has already built up a lot of authority (e.g. you’re writing for a big player like The New York Times or their equivalent in your space), your content needs to be better than the top results to have any chance of competing with them. You need to understand what you’re up against in order to create something that rivals it. 
  • It shows you what Google considers a good answer for the keyword. The content that ranks now can teach you a lot about what Google sees as the best way to cover the topic you’re writing about. Pay attention to what different sections the ranking content includes, what questions they answer, and what language they use. And also note the length. Has Google determined this a topic that requires a longform piece to cover it adequately? 
  • It helps you learn more about the topic. If you’re already an expert, maybe you won’t learn much you didn’t already know. But if you’re a freelance SEO writer who covers a lot of topics, this is an important step for making sure you understand the topic thoroughly before you start writing. 
  • It gives you the chance to look for what’s missing. As you look over these pages, is there a piece of information you feel is important that none of them address? That’s your angle for creating something different and better. You have to know what’s there to find what’s missing. 

This step takes time, but by the end of it you’ll not only be better prepared to create content that can rank, but you’ll find that creating your outline and doing the writing itself becomes much easier. 

SERP Research Enables Better SEO Writing

If professional writers have one secret for making writing easier, it’s to hold off on trying to write until you’ve done your research. When you understand your topic thoroughly, know what you want to say, and understand how to approach it to meet your goals—the writing itself comes much more fluidly. 

For SEO writing, spending time on SERP research gets you to that point. And specifically, it helps you to check off a number of goals at once. You will:

  • Make sure you understand search intent for your keyword. 
  • Confirm how valuable your keyword is, and whether ranking is realistic.
  • Determine how to structure your content to optimize for relevant SERP features.
  • Understand what Google considers “good” content for the keyword.
  • Make sure you’re answering the top questions your competition is, and then some.
  • Know what you need to do to write a piece that’s better than what’s ranking now.

All of that alone won’t promise rankings. Google cares too much about things like backlinks and website authority for good SEO writing to ensure rankings alone (as nice as that would be). But it ensures you’re doing all you can to increase your chances of claiming those top spots.

How to Avoid Content Writing Burnout

When a company embarks on a content marketing program, they often don’t realize just how hard creating great content is. Writing is a high-energy activity. It takes a lot of time, thought, and effort.

Research bears this out:

  • Orbit Media’s blogger survey has found the average blog post takes 3.5 hours to write.
  • Yet research into modern work habits has found the average knowledge worker is only productive 3 hours a day. The specific number of good writing hours you can get in a day will vary for different people, but there’s a hard limit for everybody (and I’d be genuinely shocked to meet someone who can do 8). 
  • HubSpot research reveals a clear relationship between blogging frequency and getting results. More blog posts = more website traffic. 

So, if you need to write a lot of blog posts, each post takes over 3 hours, and you only get around 3 good writing hours in a day for each content creator on your team—well, I’m a writer not a math person, so let’s just say it probably doesn’t add up well for most businesses. 

Content Writing Burnout is a Serious Problem

Burnout isn’t just about feeling tired, it’s a genuine health issue. If you overwork yourself for too long, it can lead to an array of health problems in the long term. But if protecting your health isn’t enough incentive, burnout will also hurt your work product. Good writing requires creativity and energy. Someone trying to crank out words while exhausted doesn’t have much of either to work with.

Avoiding content writing burnout is important both your team’s general well being, and to continue creating valuable content that gets results. 

How to Protect Yourself from Content Writing Burnout

There are no shortcuts in content marketing. To get results, you have to put in the work. So how can you do that without burning out? Mostly by working smarter, rather than harder. 

1.  Be strategic.

A strategy doesn’t just help you do better content marketing, it also helps you figure out your priorities. Someone who tries to do everything will burn out faster than someone who thinks carefully about which tactics and topics to tackle to get the best results.

Take time to learn who your audience is, what they care about, and how they learn about and consume content online. You’ll still want to do testing to see what works best, and be willing to change up the strategy you create based on the results you get. But being strategic will help you cut down on the total amount of work you do, since you’ll know where to focus your energies for the best results. 

2. Keep your goals realistic.

A lot of people don’t realize how much work creating content is until they start trying to do it regularly. Setting goals that require more writing than your team is capable of is a sure recipe for disappointment and burnout.

If the most you can reasonably create is one blog post a week and an ebook every other month, then don’t aim for two posts a day and an ebook every week. Make sure you give yourself and your team the time you need to do quality work, it’s not good for anyone if you put out rushed, sloppy pieces.

Create a content marketing calendar that helps you plan out realistic timelines for all your content pieces, and keeps you consistent in getting great content out there. 

3. Keep a swipe file.

Content marketing requires creating new, original content on an ongoing basis. At some point, you’re going to hit up against the challenge of figuring out what to write about. Having a strategy will help with that, since researching keywords, competitors, and your audience usually leads to healthy list of topic ideas.

But you don’t want to reach a day where you run through the list and get to the end. To avoid that fate, keep a swipe file. This is a folder or document where you save other good ideas you see around the web. Any time you’re doing research, browsing the web, shopping, or just going about your life and you see something you like, save it. Over time, you’ll have a file full of links, screen shots, and hastily scribbled notes you can turn to for inspiration.

When it’s time to fill in your content marketing calendar with new ideas, your swipe file will keep them flowing. 

4. Create outlines before writing.

Staring at a blank page is a notoriously frustrating experience for writers.

You know what’s easier than starting to write from scratch? Creating an outline. Then you’re not faced with a blank page when writing time comes, you already have your structure and basic ideas in place. 

Creating an outline not only makes content writing easier, it also makes the end result stronger. It forces you to do research and organize your thoughts before you start putting words on the page. Organization at the front end produces a piece that will be more intuitive and readable on the user end. 

5. Figure out your best process.

Writing productivity isn’t one size fits all. Each content writer will have to figure out for themselves what process most efficiently leads to good work. Analyze your working style carefully and try out a few different ways of approaching the creative process to see what works best for you. 

Some techniques worth trying are:

  • The Pomodoro Technique
  • Batching your blog posts or outlines (i.e. doing a bunch all at once)
  • Identifying your most productive time of day and scheduling all your writing work within that time
  • Creating mini-milestones to work toward to keep a big project moving

Track your time as you try out different techniques and see which ones lead to getting more writing done in less time. 

6. Take breaks.

When you’re overwhelmed and looking at a to-do list for the day that’s still far too long, taking a break feels like the last thing you should do. But breaks aren’t something to feel guilty about. They’re a necessary part of the creative process. And more than that, they’re proven to improve productivity.

Taking more breaks can mean getting more writing done.

If you’re not intentional about breaks, your brain will probably force them on you. Ever find yourself scrolling Facebook when you’re stressed out and have a million other things you should be doing? 

Instead, schedule breaks into your day intentionally, and find ways to use them that help energize you. For me, an exercise break inevitably translates into more productivity in the hours afterward. For you, a nap or a few minutes of meditation may do the same. This is one of those things to test out when figuring out your best process. 

7. Outsource.

No matter what hacks you use to get more content out of the time and energy you have available, you’re human and can only accomplish so much on your own. The most important step to avoid content writing burnout is recognizing when your team is overwhelmed. At that point, you can either scale back (which will likely mean slowing down your results), or you can outsource. 

An overworked, stressed out team is a good reason to hire a freelance content writer. Someone who specializes in content marketing writing will take some of the work off your to do list, and deliver work that helps you meet your goals. 

Avoiding Burnout = Better Content

Don’t work your team to the point of exhaustion. You’re much better off expanding your team with a skilled, capable freelancer (or a few) who lighten the load. 

If you’re ready to find the right freelancer for your needs, check out how I work and get in touch to see if we’re a fit. 

Why Content Writing Requires Empathy

What are the most important skills a content writer needs? Some of the obvious answers that may first come to mind are:

content writing requires empathy

Image via recitethis.com

  • Knack for language
  • Ability to research
  • Understanding of how to format content for the web
  • Ability to write easy-to-read content
  • Ability to create a content calendar and stick with deadlines

The two answers that came up the most often when I asked content strategists what skills the best content writers possessed were creativity and curiosity.

All of that matters. Good content writing requires a pretty significant skillset. But nothing on that list would be enough to create compelling content that people want to read without the skill that’s arguably most important of all: empathy. You probably won’t see it show up on a resume or the list of qualifications in a job ad, but without empathy, nothing a content writer produces will resonate with the target audience.

The Case for Empathy in Content Marketing

Marketers talk a lot about how important empathy is, but often in other terms. How many times have you heard your marketing colleagues use the phrase “know your audience.” It’s an easy thing to say, but empathy can actually be really challenging. It’s not something that’s taught in school. Most businesses don’t exactly cover it in their training. Trying to truly understand what someone else is thinking and feeling is difficult.

Our default mode is to view our own perception of the world as the most obvious, natural way to see things. It’s just how we’re wired. Getting outside of our own heads in order to figure out the differences in how others see things takes effort and practice.

No one’s arguing against empathy in marketing, but not many organizations are putting it front and center. Probably in large part because it is so much harder than it looks. It’s easy enough to think you know your audience, but much harder to actually go the extra mile to really understand them.

How Can Someone Get Better At Empathy?

Image via Natalie CollinsThat poses the question: what can we actually do about it? First and foremost, read.

If there’s one main way to flex our brain’s empathy muscle, it’s to get inside the heads of other people through books, short stories, and articles. Fiction and non-fiction are both good for this. Through reading, you can take a ride through the mindset and perceptions of the writer or character and learn about the experiences of others.

Devoting more time to reading is great advice for anyone who cares about becoming empathetic (or becoming a better writer in any format). But there’s a whole set of other steps you can take to become more empathetic to your particular audience.

Find them online. Then just hang out and listen.

Look for forums, social media groups, and blog comment sections where your audience hangs out. There are so many spaces online today where people share their thoughts and feelings, if you can figure out where those spaces are for your audience then you’ll have an easy glimpse into the kinds of questions and concerns they have.

Talk to your salespeople and customer service reps.

There are people within your company working directly with your customers and prospects every day. Your salespeople and customer service representatives hear first hand what your target audience is thinking about, the issues they’re facing, the questions they commonly have and the kinds of problems they regularly deal with. All of that information can help you understand your audience better and craft your content calendar based on the topics they actually care about.

Look to your data.

Marketers have more data today than they ever have in the history of the profession. You likely already have at your fingertips loads of information on what your prospects are searching for, the terms they use, and the types of content they’re most commonly seeking out. Data can seem dry and impersonal, but with the proper analysis, it can provide content writers with important insights into the minds of your prospects.

Revisit and refine your personas semi-regularly.

Personas shouldn’t be a project you tackle once and then leave alone. You’re constantly learning more about your audience – what issues they care about, what types of content they respond to, what topics they’re discussing online – your new insights should make their way into the personas you have. Commit to revisiting your personas at least once or twice a year to improve upon them based on new information.

 

Empathy is a crucial skill to have as a content writer, but more importantly, it helps people to become better human beings. When you make an effort to understand what other people go through and how they feel, becoming better at communicating and treating people with greater compassion are natural side effects. The same skill that will make your content more relatable and successful will pay off in your life far beyond the effects it has on your work.

Content Marketing in 2016: 5 Trends to Keep On Your Radar

content-marketing-trends-2016At this point it’s old news to say that content marketing just keeps growing in influence. But it’s true this year, just like it was last year and the year before that. While a year or two ago, some businesses were still holding out, most have realized by now that content is an important part of any marketing plan. In fact, according to the Content Marketing Institute:

  • 88% of B2B organizations use content marketing
  • 76% plan to produce more in 2016
  • Content marketing gets an average of 28% of the marketing budget
  • And 51% say they expect that amount to increase in the coming year

While most businesses have started to at least dabble in creating content to drive new leads and sales, many are still struggling to figure out what that investment should look like. If you’re trying to figure out where best to spend your content marketing budget in 2016, here are some of the main trends shaping the content marketing industry this year.

1. Long-Form Content

It seems distant now, but there was a point in time when marketers were singing the praises of short content. People were convinced that busy people simply would not take the time to read anything long. The popularity of social media seemed ample evidence of the preference for keeping things short and fast.

Perhaps because people do get their fix for short content on social media, plenty of evidence in the past few years has shown that when it comes to written content, people will take the time to read long form. In fact, it typically performs better on many websites than shorter pieces.

And then, there’s Google. The deciding factor for many content marketers is how their content will influence their website’s SEO. Studies by SEO professionals have shown that long form tends to rule in the search engines for a large number of competitive keywords. So think about lengthening your blog posts (think more like 1,500-2,500 words rather than 500), and setting aside budgeting for other valuable long-form types of content like whitepapers, guides, and ebooks.

Always keep in mind that length isn’t necessarily an arbiter of quality. If you choose to make the investment in long form, make sure you deliver both.

2. Content Personalization

Content personalization has been on the scene for a while, particularly in its most common form – including a recipient’s name in the emails you send. As content management technology gets more and more sophisticated, marketers are able to take their personalization much further.

Technology can track user behavior on your website and tie individual actions back to subscribers and customers when relevant. When you have that much information on individual customers, you can deliver up content that’s specific to their user persona and their point in the buyer’s journey.

That’s powerful. Marketers who use content marketing technology that allows them to align the content they provide with specific personas typically see a 60% increase in how effective their content is at meeting their goals. Content personalization works, which means many businesses will either continue to refine their personalization efforts in 2016, or start to dip their toes in and try it for the first time this year.

3. Data, Data, Data

Effective content marketing relies on good data. You can’t know how well your content is working if you don’t track its success as you go. Like most industries, marketing has therefore seen an uptick in how much decision-making relies on collecting and analyzing all available data.

Businesses that effectively practice data-driven content marketing see big results – nearly five times as much revenue from their marketing efforts, according to one study.

Data-driven marketing can play out in a number of ways. Content personalization relies completely on data. By collecting data on how visitors and customers interact with your website and content, you gain a picture of which of your personas they match, what types of content they respond best to, and can provide them with the right content accordingly.

Data should also shape your larger marketing efforts. Even if you don’t have the technology to provide sophisticated content personalization, you do have access to Google Analytics and other tools to help you measure how well your larger audience responds to your content. You should always be analyzing what’s working and tweaking your content plan based on what types of content and subjects perform best with your audience.

4. Interactive Content

Engagement is one of those words marketers throw around with great regularity. It’s a term that manages to be vague, while also serving as a holy grail of sorts in the world of content marketing. We don’t want people passively hearing about our brand. That may have seemed like enough in the era of outbound, but now we want them to actively interact with us, show us there’s a real connection there.

So much of how we gauge and measure our marketing efforts is based on trying to demonstrate this idea of engagement. That’s why interactive content has become an especially attractive form of content to consider. It requires prospects to perform a more active form of engaging during the process of consuming it than other forms of content.

And it works. 93% of marketers have said they consider interactive content to be more effective at educating consumers than passive content.

From quizzes to games to interactive white papers, interactive content can take on many forms. Many of the content forms your team creates now could probably be tweaked to become interactive with a little creativity and the right technology.

A side benefit of interactive content is that it can often help with #3 – how your audience interacts with your content can provide valuable data on who they are, what they’re interested in, and how they think. You can use that when you’re refining your personas or determining what content to create in months to come.

5. Content Shock

In 2014, Mark Schaefer identified a problem that many content marketers were grappling with. Even those of us who fervently believe in how effective content marketing can be and are quick to proselytize to businesses that haven’t yet taken the plunge were starting to see that the recommendation should come with a caveat. For business getting into the game late, making a splash with content marketing gets harder and harder every day as markets grow more competitive and businesses (especially small and medium sized ones) have to do more and more to get anything from the content they produce.

Schaefer termed this idea content shock and it inspired a flurry of think pieces, rebuttals, and social media conversations in the marketing world. Content marketing does work, but it’s hard and requires playing the long game – and the more competitive it becomes, the less you can skimp.

 

Many of the trends we’ve covered so far in this piece are developing in response to content shock and demonstrate how important it is to make a significant investment in content marketing for it to pay off.

  • Long-form content takes longer to write and costs more if you’re hiring a freelance content writer to help.
  • Interactive content will usually require the work of several members of your team with different skills and the cost of the technology required to make your content interactive.
  • Data and content personalization both require the right technology to pull off, technology that can seem prohibitively expensive to smaller businesses.

 

No one likes to hear that doing content marketing well will mean spending more, but it wouldn’t be honest for professionals in the industry to suggest otherwise at this point. That can sound dispiriting, but it’s a business truth that’s long been true for most things a business bothers to invest in. Doing something well will always pay off more than trying to skimp.

It’s important to note that the takeaway from Schaefer’s argument isn’t that content shock means content marketing isn’t worth trying. If you want your business to be relevant and visible online, it’s pretty much a requirement at this point. Instead, it means businesses have to be careful to be strategic. Make content promotion a significant part of your marketing plan. Pay attention to how your content is performing so you can optimize your content strategy as you go. Use personas to make sure the content you create is targeted to the people you most want to reach.

In short, commit. Give your content marketing efforts the time, energy, and budget they require. That was important in 2015 and it’s even more important in 2016 as ever more businesses enter the content marketing landscape to vie for the attention of your audience. You can still reach the right people; you just can’t expect it to be easy.

Unpopular Opinion: Stop Calling Blogs Social Media

blogs aren't social mediaLanguage can be so complicated, can’t it? Especially when you’re dealing with words that are new and still evolving. The word “blog” only just came onto the scene in 1997. The first use of “social media” may have beat it by a few years, but the evidence of its earliest use is unclear. These are words that apply to technology that keeps evolving. And even as the technology itself evolves at a rapid pace, the way we use it changes even faster.

For a long time, blogging has been lumped in under the larger category of social media. I think it’s time for us to acknowledge that it no longer belongs there.

3 Reasons That Blogging Is No Longer Social Media

  • Blogs increasingly resemble media properties more than they do the content on social networking websites.

Brands have spent years trying to throw everything at the wall to see what sticks when it comes to blogging. Recently, we’ve started to gain a clearer idea of just what does work and, in most cases, it’s well researched, meaty, long-form blog posts that more closely resemble the articles common to media properties than the short and pithy posts of social media.

The difference between this type of blog post and a tweet is comparable to the difference between a magazine article and a slogan – they’re completely different types of writing, with different goals, and vastly different work processes involved. The way we talk about them should reflect that.

  • The most social thing about blogs – the comments – are only a prominent feature on a small portion of blogs.

If there’s one component of blogging you could use to really make a case for their being social media, it’s the comments. But how many blogs do you visit that don’t seem to have any comments at all, much less significant social interaction in the comments? Many prominent blogs have even done away with comments altogether, due to the increasing workload of sifting through comment spam. Copyblogger, a big proponent of calling blogs social media back in 2009, famously disabled the comments on their blog in 2014. They felt confident people would move the social component of interacting with their blog to social platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

So if the blog is for putting quality, article-like content out there and social networking platforms are for talking about them (and anything else you want to discuss), perhaps it’s time to acknowledge they’re serving different purposes.

  • The goals of a blog are different than those of a social media presence (although they’re related).

Social media is all about interaction, awareness and promotion. Blogging is about education, thought leadership, and traffic. The specific goals and KPIs for the two mediums should differ.

Social media’s a great tool for promoting your blog posts and ideally developing the community that will visit your blog, and blogging can be an opportunity to gain the trust of readers and turn them into social media followers – and both should be helping you work toward the larger goal of building trust and gaining customers. But they each have a distinct role to play within the larger strategy of content marketing.

 

When you hear the term “social media,” what do you picture? For the vast majority of us, the interfaces of Facebook or Twitter will be the main images that come to mind. I’d be genuinely surprised if you told me that the image of your favorite blog popped into your head. Blogs are a type of media, and they’re often social. But they don’t fit with how most us now use and understand the term “social media.” It’s time to acknowledge that, as important as the relationship between the two mediums is, they’re not the same thing.