Google+ Local

How Do I Merge Two Google+ Page Pages? A Very Common Question

Mike Blumenthal

Because of the slow and never ending transition of Places to Plus and because of less than stellar communications from Google since the rollout of Plus, a very large number of small local businesses have ended up with more than one Google+ Page. Over the past 6 weeks I have received a stead stream of […]

seo industry

Think Bigger: 28 Ways to Be a Better SEO

Laura Lippay

Are your deliverables A huge list of problems, or A pathway to insightful solutions? Are you calling your clients out on what they’re doing wrong in your deliverables or are you supporting their intents to reach their business goals through your very specific expertise? The differences can be so slight but so powerful. At SEOgadget […]

The post Think Bigger: 28 Ways to Be a Better SEO appeared first on SEOgadget.

The Content Cycle: how to improve your campaign strategy

David Somerville

What is the Content Cycle?

Put simply, The Content Cycle is:

  • A way of helping to plan and implement your content strategy.
  • A way of making you focus on objectives and audiences.
  • A way of reporting fully on your content production and help to justify the ROI.

The process is visually represented in the image below.

 

Each of the different stages has distinct and important functions as part of the process, which must all be used.

Discovery

The discovery phase is really your ‘investigation’ stage. It ensures you have all of your content fundamentals in place. This stage helps to guide your content strategy and future campaigns.

Technically, it’s outside of the cycle itself, but is just as important as any of the other phases. In many cases you may carry out this discovery phase just once. That said, it’s worth reviewing regularly or even conducting from scratch if you are going to apply this process to a one-off campaign.

The key areas for you to look at during this discovery phase include:

  • Content audit. Audit your current content and build a S.W.O.T analysis. Consider areas such as technical limitations, structure of content, internal and external resources, user metrics, and competitor activity.
  • Audience personas. Build personas for your various audience groups (if you have more than one). Who are they and why would they want to view (and share) your content?
  • Popular content and opportunities. Use Google Analytics to review popular and unpopular content, plus tools such as Social Crawlytics to see what content is popular from social shares. Reviewing your internal site search, if you have one, can also provide clues as to what information or content people are searching for.
  • Identify internal experts. Who are the experts in your business that could help provide content? Can they write content for you or even be interviewed?
  • Repurpose content. Have a hunt around for any old content that’s not online (company brochures, photos that have not been uploaded, magazine articles etc.) then review if it could be repurposed on your website.

Once this stage is completed, then you will have a great handle on your current content and you are in a position to move onto the next phase.

Planning and setup

Now you’ve got a good base of knowledge about your current content situation, then this next stage aims to ensure that your content strategy or campaigns are well thought-out and have purpose.

The important areas for consideration include:

  • The customer journey. What does your customer journey look like and how should your content best fit this? For example, consider which type of content is great for awareness and which type is better for conversion.

  • Objectives and KPIs. Simply put, this focuses you on why you’re producing the content (objectives) and how you are going to measure its performance (KPIs).
  • Tools for ideas. Which tools do you have at your disposal to help generate a wide-range of content ideas? Tools can include alerts, such as Talkwalker, topic trend trackers, such as BuzzSumo, and social tools, such as Topsy.
  • Briefs. Ensure that you always produce detailed briefs for your content producers so they know exactly what you want produced. This includes elements such as the intended audience, dependencies, deadlines, objectives, keywords, and calls-to-action.
  • Responsibilities. If there is a team of people working on the content campaigns then you need to make sure everyone is aware of their roles and responsibilities. If you have a larger team, then pick and choose the people who have the best skills for the specific task.
  • Environments, Think about your content and how it is going to be viewed. Will people be viewing it on a mobile device (or, in the future, even Google Glass or on a ‘smartwatch’)?

Having solid planning in place before you start producing content will help to maximise efficiencies and also the potential ROI of that content.

Execution

Execution is the actual ‘doing’ stage. It’s when you get a chance to now produce your content and promote it.

For execution, it’s important to consider areas such as:

  • Basic content optimisation. Make sure your content is search friendly. Despite Google’s algorithm changes, it’s vital that your content can be found easily, recognised for its relevance and that users can read it. Make sure you check things such as H1s and H2s, image usage and alt tags, structure, readability, tone of voice, grammar and spelling.
  • Content marketing or promotion – Consider all of the options you have available to promote your content. These may alter depending on the type of content and its objectives, however can include outreach and PR, paid advertising (PPC, display or social ads), social seeding and bookmarking, forums, email.
  • Influencers vs brand advocates – Influencers can be really useful for helping to promote your content, however don’t forget about your brand advocates too. These are your loyal customers who have an affinity to your business and therefore are likely to share it.
  • Make it shareable – If you’re going to the trouble of creating great content, then make sure that your users can share it easily. Ensure you have active social sharing buttons visible on your site and that they are optimised correctly to provide the right support for the shared links (correct page titles, relevant thumbnails and good descriptions).

Getting the content ‘right’ is important, but equally important is how you are able to promote this in order to give it the best chance of visibility to the right audiences.

Reporting, analysis and insight

So you’ve started producing your content now and are getting it out there, but is it working?

This stage is for analysing and reporting on what has happened as a result of your content campaigns and can include elements such as:

  • Content tagging. Tagging the URLs before they are promoted means that at this stage you can better report on the activity you did.

    Use Google UTM tags on your content URLs, ensuring you correctly label the source, medium and campaign name. Then check your results within the ‘Campaigns’ section of Google Analytics.

  • Metrics. Contrary to what some people think, the performance of content can be measured. There are a number of metrics to consider, including links (who is linking to your content?), reach (the  number of ‘eyeballs’ that have seen your content), social reach, brand mentions and sentiment, Google Analytics metrics (traffic, time on site, etc.), conversions and assisted conversions.
  • Reporting tools. For each of the metrics above there are a wide range of tools that can be used, including Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO (links), Google Webmaster Tools and tracking pixels (reach), Social Crawlytics and SharedCount (social reach), Social Mention or Brandwatch (brand or sentiment measurement).

Refinement 

This is the final stage and is vital in order to complete the cycle. At this stage, you take a look back at your content campaigns or strategy and review it, asking questions such as:

  • What worked?
  • What didn’t work?
  • Did it meet your objectives?

Another useful thing to help refine your content is to gain feedback on your content from the people who you are producing it for – your audience. Look at your comments under articles, plus directly ask people via your social media channels.

You are bound to get the extremes of people saying they either ‘love it’ or ‘hate it’, but filter through this and you should find some gems of useful feedback.

Taking this information, you then combine it with the results from the reporting phase, then feedback this learning into either the execution phase, if only minor amends are required, or back into the planning phase if you need to start again with a different approach.

The cycle is complete

The Content Cycle is a simple process that can be adopted by any business, big or small, to help ensure that they are producing online content that reaches their digital objectives.

It’s vital that each of the phases are given equal attention, as they are all required to make the process work effectively.

Implementing it is a sure-fire way to not only improve the efficiency of content production, but also to prove that content can most certainly deliver ROI for your business.

To find out more about The Content Cycle then you can view the full presentation from the Brighton Digital Marketing Festival.

Google Google: Penalties Google: SEO link disavow rap genius Search Engine Land Top News Uncategorized

Rap Genius Back In Google After 10 Day Penalty, Ranks For Its Name But What About Lyrics?

Danny Sullivan

Lyrics site Rap Genius says that is is no longer penalized within Google after taking action to correct “unnatural links” that it helped create. The site was hit with a penalty for 10 days, which meant people seeking it by name couldn’t find it. That’s been fixed, though…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

SEO Book Uncategorized

Did @mattcutts Endorse Rap Genius Link Spam?

Aaron Wall

On TWIG Matt Cutts spoke about the importance of defunding spammers & breaking their spirits.

If you want to stop spam, the most straight forward way to do it is to deny people money because they care about the money and that should be their end goal. But if you really want to stop spam, it is a little bit mean, but what you want to do, is break their spirits. You want to make them frustrated and angry. There are parts of Google’s algorithms specifically designed to frustrate spammers and mystify them and make them frustrated. And some of the stuff we do gives people a hint their site is going to drop and then a week or two later their site actually does drop so they get a little bit more frustrated. And so hopefully, and we’ve seen this happen, people step away from the dark side and say “you know, that was so much pain and anguish and frustration, let’s just stay on the high road from now on” some of the stuff I like best is when people say “you know this SEO stuff is too unpredictable, I’m just going to write some apps. I’m going to go off and do something productive for society.” And that’s great because all that energy is channeled at something good.

What was less covered was that in the same video Matt Cutts made it sound like anything beyond information architecture, duplicate content cleanup & clean URLs was quickly approaching scamming – especially anything to do with links. So over time more and more behaviors get reclassified as black hat spam as Google gains greater control over the ecosystem.

there’s the kind of SEO that is better architecture, cleaner URLs, not duplicate content … that’s just like making sure your resume doesn’t have any typos on it. that’s just clever stuff. and then there’s the type of SEO that is sort of cheating. trying to get a lot of bad backlinks or scamming, and that’s more like lying on your resume. when you get caught sometime’s there’s repercussions. and it definitely helps to personalize because now anywhere you search for plumbers there’s local results and they are not the same across the world. we’ve done a diligent job of trying to crack down on black hat spam. so we had an algorithm named Penguin that launched that kind of had a really big impact. we had a more recent launch just a few months ago. and if you go and patrole the black hat SEO forums where the guys talk about the techniques that work, now its more people trying to sell other people scams rather than just trading tips. a lot of the life has gone out of those forums. and even the smaller networks that they’re trying to promote “oh buy my anglo rank or whatever” we’re in the process of tackling a lot of those link networks as well. the good part is if you want to create a real site you don’t have to worry as much about these bad guys jumping ahead of you. the playing ground is a lot more level now. panda was for low quality. penguin was for spam – actual cheating.

The Matt Cutts BDSM School of SEO

As part of the ongoing campaign to “break their spirits” we get increasing obfuscation, greater time delays between certain algorithmic updates, algorithmic features built explicitly with the goal of frustrating people, greater brand bias, and more outrageous selective enforcement of the guidelines.

Those who were hit by either Panda or Penguin in some cases took a year or more to recover. Far more common is no recovery — ever. How long do you invest in & how much do you invest in a dying project when the recovery timeline is unknown?

You Don’t Get to Fascism Without 2-Tier Enforcement

While success in and of itself may make one a “spammer” to the biased eyes of a search engineer (especially if you are not VC funded nor part of a large corporation), many who are considered “spammers” self-regulate in a way that make them far more conservative than the alleged “clean” sites do.

Pretend you are Ask.com and watch yourself get slaughtered without warning.

Build a big brand & you will have advanced notification & free customer support inside the GooglePlex:

In my experience with large brand penalties, (ie, LARGE global brands) Google have reached out in advance of the ban every single time. – Martin Macdonald

Launching a Viral Linkspam Sitemap Campaign

When RapGenius was penalized, the reason they were penalized is they were broadly and openly and publicly soliciting to promote bloggers who would dump a list of keyword rich deeplinks into their blog posts. They were basically turning boatloads of blogs into mini-sitemaps for popular new song albums.

Remember reading dozens (hundreds?) of blog posts last year about how guest posts are spam & Google should kill them? Well these posts from RapGenius were like a guest post on steroids. The post “buyer” didn’t have to pay a single cent for the content, didn’t care at all about relevancy, AND a sitemap full of keyword rich deep linking spam was included in EACH AND EVERY post.

Most “spammers” would never attempt such a campaign because they would view it as being far too spammy. They would have a zero percent chance of recovery as Google effectively deletes their site from the web.

And while RG is quick to distance itself from scraper sites, for almost the entirety of their history virtually none of the lyrics posted on their site were even licensed.

In the past I’ve mentioned Google is known to time the news cycle. It comes without surprise that on a Saturday barely a week after being penalized Google restored RapGenius’s rankings.

How to Gain Over 400% More Links, While Allegedly Losing

While the following graph may look scary in isolation, if you know the penalty is only a week or two then there’s virtually no downside.

Since being penalized, RapGenius has gained links from over 1,000* domains

  • December 25th: 129
  • December 26th: 85
  • December 27th: 87
  • December 28th: 54
  • December 29th: 61
  • December 30th: 105
  • December 31st: 182
  • January 1st: 142
  • January 2nd: 112
  • January 3rd: 122

The above add up to 1,079 & RapGenius only has built a total of 11,930 unique linking domains in their lifetime. They grew about 10% in 10 days!

On every single day the number of new referring domains VASTLY exceeded the number of referring domains that disappeared. And many of these new referring domains are the mainstream media and tech press sites, which are both vastly over-represented in importance/authority on the link graph. They not only gained far more links than they lost, but they also gained far higher quality links that will be nearly impossible for their (less spammy) competitors to duplicate.

They not only got links, but the press coverage acted as a branded advertising campaign for RapGenius.

Here’s some quotes from RapGenius on their quick recovery:

  • “we owe a big thanks to Google for being fair and transparent and allowing us back onto their results pages” <– Not the least bit true. RapGenius was not treated fairly, but rather they were given a free ride compared to the death hundreds of thousands of small businesses have been been handed over the past couple years.
  • “On guest posts, we appended lists of song links (often tracklists of popular new albums) that were sometimes completely unrelated to the music that was the subject of the post.” <– and yet others are afraid of writing relevant on topic posts due to Google’s ramped fearmongering campaigns
  • “we compiled a list of 100 “potentially problematic domains”” <– so their initial list of domains to inspect was less than 10% the number of links they gained while being penalized
  • “Generally Google doesn’t hold you responsible for unnatural inbound links outside of your control” <– another lie
  • “of the 286 potentially problematic URLs that we manually identified, 217 (more than 75 percent!) have already had all unnatural links purged.” <– even the “all in” removal of pages was less than 25% of the number of unique linking domains generated during the penalty period

And Google allowed the above bullshit during a period when they were sending out messages telling other people WHO DID THINGS FAR LESS EGREGIOUS that they are required to remove more links & Google won’t even look at their review requests for at least a couple weeks – A TIME PERIOD GREATER THAN THE ENTIRE TIME RAPGENIUS WAS PENALIZED FOR.

Failed reconsideration requests are now coming with this email that tells site owners they must remove more links: pic.twitter.com/tiyXtPvY32— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) January 2, 2014

In Conclusion…

If you tell people what works and why you are a spammer with no morals. But if you are VC funded, Matt Cutts has made it clear that you should spam the crap out of Google. Just make sure you hire a PR firm to trump up press coverage of the “unexpected” event & then have a faux apology saved in advance. So long as you lie to others and spread Google’s propaganda you are behaving in an ethical white hat manner.

Google & @mattcutts didn’t ACTUALLY care about Rap Genius’ link scheme, they just didn’t want to miss a propaganda opportunity.— Ben Cook (@Skitzzo) January 4, 2014

Notes

* These stats are from Ahrefs. A few of these links may have been in place before the penality and only recently crawled. However it is also worth mentioning that all third party databases of links are limited in size & refresh rate by optimizing their capital spend, so there are likely hundreds more links which have not yet been crawled by Ahrefs. One should also note that the story is still ongoing and they keep generating more links every day. By the time the story is done spreading they are likely to see roughly a 30% growth in unique linking domains in about 6 weeks.

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