Data Sources

• Moz Ranking Factors: hmny.co/mozfactors
• Searchmetrics Ranking Factors: hmny.co/searchmetricsfactors
• Backlinko 1 Million Study: hmny.co/backlinkofactors
• Buzzsumo/Moz Shares & Links: hmny.co/buzzmoz
• STAT Featured Snippets: hmny.co/statblog

Word Count for Rankings

Schema.org

Keyword Usage

Readability

Images & Video

Lists & Tables

Content for Links vs Content for Social Shares

Word Count for Link Earning

Content Formats for Links & Social Shares

Final Takeaways

Original Presentation

Session Description

Well-rounded, user-centric keyword research is a natural extension of the audience research and segmentation process. Kane will show attendees how dissecting content by audience, lifecycle / funnel stage, product type, and content medium will produce a more complete view of a company’s keyword universe. No more relying on Adwords and Keywordtool.io to spit out variants of what we already know.

99% of the time, they either leave out retention marketing entirely, and they visualize it in a way that makes it appear to be less valuable than it is.

The focal point for most funnels is the conversion stage, when a customer first makes a purchase with your company. Of course you want to win new customers, but it costs you 7x more to convert new leads than it does to keep a current a customer. If you’re treating each sale like a big win, but not putting any energy into retention marketing, you’re celebrating victory way too early.

Winning a new customer is great. But retaining a customer is typically easier and more valuable. Let’s take a closer look at a better way to visualize the sales funnel.

What Typical Sales Funnels Don’t Show You

Most businesses still envision their content marketing program as a sort of funnel that “leaks” unqualified leads along the way. As the name suggests, the number of prospects you start off with is always greater than the number of leads that convert into paying customers.

Take a look at Google Image results for “Sales Funnel” – they all visualize a literal funnel or ‘pizza slice’ shape.

Every sales funnel variation looks a little different—they might label sections differently than a traditional AIDA model or add some additional steps. Nevertheless, a typical sales funnel has three core stages:

Stage 1: Awareness

In the Awareness Stage, your goal is to make yourself visible to your new customers. In stage one, most of your target audience isn’t even aware that they have a need for your services—which is why your marketing is designed to build that first exposure with them.

Stage 2: Engagement & Consideration

Stage two is where your customers research their options. It’s your job to educate them on your products and services, and showcase why your solution is the best solution. Specific information on pricing, ROI, and revenue gain goes a long way toward differentiating you from your competitors.

Stage 3: Conversion

Conversion is the final stage of most sales funnels. The goal here is to land a sale, which means that you need to promote confidence in your brand. Here, you offer proof to win over customers on the brink of purchase.

These Models Are Missing A Key 4th Stage of the Sales Funnel

By the end of this process, you’ve made a sale and you can pat yourself on the back, right? Wrong. There’s one last stage, and it’s the most important:

Stage 4: Retention

We combine all post-conversion actions into a stage called retention marketing. It’s any process that encourages a customer who has made a single sale to either make additional purchases or to begin referring you. Conveniently, these tend to start with the letter R:

• Repeat or Recurring Revenue – any revenue that comes in after the first sale
• Upsell – Increases in services above the initial purchase level
• Referrals – word of mouth marketing at its best
• Reviews – public reviews of your business

In larger companies you’ll see these take the form of marketing teams dedicated to customer success, satisfaction, loyalty, word-of-mouth, and other similar subsets, but all share the broader goal of keeping and upselling current customers.

Businesses that ignore this crucial step are missing out on the most important part of their marketing campaign—Retention Marketing.

What Your Sales Funnel Should Look Like

When you focus on Retention Marketing, your sales funnel won’t look like a funnel anymore—it will look more like an hourglass.

This “hourglass funnel” widens again after conversion, until it looks more like this:

The Hourglass Sales Funnel

At the heart of every sales funnel is the desire to align your marketing and sales efforts. You want to turn visitors into leads, convince those leads to continue through the funnel, and eventually persuade them to make a purchase.

The hourglass funnel has the added benefit of showing that the crucial final step, customer retention, is actually an area for growth as opposed to diminishing value over time. By expanding back outwards, this model demonstrates that a healthy customer satisfaction and loyalty effort will grow your business, as satisfied customers evangelize your business and return for more services. New customers are then persuaded by referrals, and the whole process starts over.

The benefits of improving customer satisfaction and retention speak for themselves:

• Profits can increase by more than 25% after only a 5% increase in customer retention.
• There’s a 60-70% chance that you can convert an existing customer. With new customers, there’s only a 5-20% chance.
• Loyal customers are 70% more likely to refer your business to friends.

How To Grow The Value of Your Existing Customers

The goal of retention marketing is to increase revenue through your satisfied customers. In other words, you’re maximizing the lifetime value of your customers (typically abbreviated as LTV or CLV).

Why does this matter? Because loyal customers have been shown to be worth as much as 10x more than their first purchase and account for 80% of a company’s revenue.

You can promote loyalty and customer satisfaction a number of different ways, including:

1. Consistently Deliver Quality Services

It should go without saying, but the single most important element when it comes to purchase intent and loyalty is that your brand is always associated with exceptional quality. You want to develop satisfied customers who will tout your business—you can hardly expect that result if you consistently under-deliver.

Part of delivering a quality service is establishing a niche that you excel at. Publish content that establishes yourself as an expert in your industry, then your customers will turn to you for solutions.

2. Build A Relationship With Your Customers

Your community has the potential to be the single biggest driver of new customers. When your customers are satisfied, they’ll amplify your content on social media, and refer you to their friends.

It’s also important to respond to dissatisfied customers who reach out to you on social media. Work towards a solution with these customers and show them that you’re willing to run the extra mile to resolve their problem.

3. Encourage Repeat Purchases

Marketing campaigns aren’t just for new customers. A well-targeted email campaign or loyalty incentive program goes a long way towards winning new business from your existing customers too.

Starbucks is a great example of a loyalty program that’s working—their “My Starbucks Rewards” program, which makes payment easier and lets loyal customers win free drinks and food, now has over 10 million members. It’s a simple, but powerful incentive from a well-established brand.

4. Use Testimonials & Referrals

There are few things more persuasive than social proof. When you’ve inspired customers to believe in your brand, promote their experiences through testimonials on your website and social media pages.

You can also ask for referrals—don’t let pride stop you from reaching out to your community. Social media makes it easier than ever to share content that loyal customers will be happy to refer, and you can always run contests or promotions to further incentivize these referrals.

5. Learn From Dissatisfied Customers

When customers unsubscribe to your email campaigns or your loyalty program, don’t let them go without learning why. Find out what drove your customers to leave, and what changes or incentives you could offer that might entice them to return—this could work on more customers than you realize.

A similar lesson applies when you receive complaints—handle them as quickly and efficiently as possible. Treating complaints seriously will demonstrate that you care to your community. You can also use these as learning moments that you can turn into a blog post or FAQ to address your customers’ pain points.

Stop Referencing Broken Sales Funnels

In the digital age, the sales funnel is an imperfect model. The customer lifecycle is an effective visualization to demonstrate that customers don’t make purchases in linear steps, but not a complete replacement. The sales funnel is still a valuable way for marketers and sales teams to view the broad stages that make up that purchase process. But, as marketers, we need to use a model that represents the actual potential in the process.

Maybe the strategist wanted simple tips on container gardening for a beginner, but the content writer went off on a long tangent about the intricacies of soil testing. The result is everyone’s least favorite kind of revision: a total rewrite.

How do you prevent content creation from going so far off track?

With a content brief.

Providing a clear and complete content brief is the not-so-secret key to keeping content projects on the right track and avoiding frustrating rewrites.

What is a content brief?

A content brief is a set of requirements and recommendations that guides the writer as they create a piece of content. It typically includes basic requirements like word count, topic, title, and keywords to use. It can also provide in-depth information on the content’s goals, audience, and a rough outline.

One critical part of what makes a content brief is that it is documented. A meeting is not a content brief – and neither are your jumbled meeting notes. A content brief provides a written record of what is expected from the content.

You can use content briefs for any kind of content – blog posts, case studies, long-form articles, product pages, ebooks – but it’s especially important when you're producing SEO content that needs to rank in search results.

What information belongs in a content brief?

Anything that a writer might need to create the content should be in the brief. It’s better to go slightly overboard than to leave out necessary information.

Although different types of content may call for different brief templates, you can’t go wrong by covering:

• Suggested title and headings
• Primary keyword, an overview of subtopics or long-tail keywords
• Questions the content should answer
• Rough outline of the content and sections
• Goals for the content
• How the writer should match search intent
• Recommended word count
• Deadlines and milestones
• Requirements for internal and external links
• Background research
• Links to resources like a style guide
• Details about the target audience or customer
• Brand’s point of view on the topic
• Notes on the style, format, and tone of the content
• Next steps or CTAs for the reader
• Guidance on visual elements like graphics and illustrations
• Meta descriptions for search results and social media previews

One of the most important rules for writing briefs is that they should be structured. Even if your content brief starts as a brain dump, take the time to go back and organize your thoughts into sections and bullet points.

Want to build the best brief possible? Check out our free template.

Why are content briefs important?

Jumping into a content project without a content brief is a bit like asking a contractor to build you a house with no sketch and no blueprint. You’ll end up with a house, just not the house you want. It’s best to check out a blueprint before anyone starts pouring concrete.

Prevent rewrites and reduce revisions

Content briefs make it possible for the content team (clients, strategists, marketing managers, content creators, and editors) to align. Miscommunications happen all the time over questions like:

• Who is the intended audience or buyer persona for this content?
• What questions should the content answer?
• How in-depth does the content need to be?
• What’s the brand’s point of view on this topic?

With a great content brief, everyone has a clear understanding of what the writer will produce – critical for avoiding massive rewrites and multiple rounds of revisions.

Don’t miss any critical information

Ever tried to grocery shop without a list? It’s not great. Content briefs can function as a checklist for content. By highlighting the subtopics, facts, and questions that you want included in the content, you can help writers produce the kind of comprehensive content that search engines love. This prevents writers from omitting critical requirements in the content, such as up-to-date statistics, reference tables, graphs, and whatever else you feel is necessary.

Content Harmony makes it easy to review outlines for competitor content to be sure that you’re covering all relevant subtopics.

Provide a single source of truth for team communications

When you have a half-dozen different ways to communicate information – meetings, Google Docs, email, Slack, Trello – finding a specific piece of information is rough.

Collecting everything in the content brief eliminates the scavenger hunt. Everyone involved in the project knows exactly where to find information, which is even more important if your project has lots of stakeholders.

Get clear direction and approval

Whether you’re a freelance writer or run an agency, you can attest to the fact that it’s key to get external approval for the content before you create it. No one wants to spend hours ideating, researching, and writing content only to be told by your client that it’s not a fit for their business.

A content brief helps all stakeholders stay aligned. An initial back and forth helps set clear expectations on aspects such as word length, keywords, tone of voice, delivery timelines, publishing schedules, and more.

Every writer has a story of a client who changed direction midway through a project. Although a content brief can’t stop anyone from changing their mind, it does provide a milestone for checking in and ensuring that everyone is committed to a specific direction.

And if there are questions later? Anyone can refer back to the content brief as a record of what they decided on.

Who uses content briefs?

Anyone who works with content will benefit from content briefs, but here are two roles that typically create them.

Marketing Strategists

Marketing and SEO strategists are pros at keyword research, content strategy, and planning. Detailed content briefs give them a way to communicate their insights to writers, beyond basic requirements like primary keyword and word count.

For writers, one of the hardest parts of producing good content is knowing how their piece fits into a broader strategy. With a quality content brief, writers can produce content that aligns with the content marketing strategy, performs better, and requires less back-and-forth with an editor.

Writers

Not all content projects have a dedicated strategist. In those cases, the writer typically creates the content brief. Sharing this content brief gives them a way to get client buy-in on the content before they finish drafting. It’s not uncommon for clients to provide only high-level instruction, so an effective content brief lets the writer confirm that their plan matches the client’s.

Using the brief as a milestone for client review is particularly useful for a freelance writer working with a new client, since neither person has a firm understanding of the other’s expectations.

When should I use a content brief?

You should absolutely use a content brief with any content project that involves more than a single person. The more people are involved, the more you’ll need an awesome content brief. It’s the best way to keep everyone aligned and deliver content that achieves its goals.

Remember, though – a very large team doesn’t make for great content, even with a perfect brief. Too many stakeholders can confuse the piece’s core message.

A brief can also be a useful tool when working on content alone. It helps you organize your ideas, research, and keywords to make sure you don’t miss anything or waste time writing the wrong content. When working alone, you can often skip much of the structure of a larger brief and focus on critical research and the content outline itself.

Should I use templates for content briefs?

Yes, you definitely should. Drafting briefs from scratch for every piece of content is a waste of time – and creating great content briefs can already be time-consuming. (It’s way quicker with Content Harmony, though!)

A template helps you remember everything that you need to explain. When you’re creating a brief without a template, it’s easy to forget background information that’s important to guide the content – things like the buyer persona, sales funnel stage, or required internal links. Templates prevent that and provide a structure to keep your content brief organized and easy to follow.

To get started, you can download the Content Harmony content brief template.

Are content briefs different from creative briefs?

While they are similar, creative briefs are used on a broad variety of marketing projects, and content briefs are typically used for long-form written content. Creative briefs are more commonly used for ad campaigns, creative design projects, web design projects, and other design or copywriting focused projects. Content briefs are more commonly used for projects like blog posts or whitepapers.

Content briefs get you better content, faster

If you aren’t creating content briefs already (or are sometimes skipping them), it’s time to make them part of your content creation process. Spending time on an effective content brief saves frustration by helping you to get the best content possible the first time around.

Want to see how Content Harmony helps you build content that outranks the competition?

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If you’re publishing content regularly, the traffic to new posts may compensate for or even supersede older ones, making it difficult to recognize the problem.

Fortunately, it’s possible to regain both the old traffic and keyword rankings - not to mention create an entirely new content promotion opportunity - with a content refresh.

What is a content refresh?

A content refresh is an update to your existing content so that it addresses search intent with improved data, knowledge, quotes, and examples, and proves to search engines that it is still an authoritative source for that search query.

For example, let’s say that you published a guide about digital marketing best practices in 2018. The post did well initially and ranked for several keywords. By 2022, however, it might have started to slip down the SERPs. The marketing landscape has changed, the statistics cited to bolster your arguments may no longer be up to date, and your cited best practices are no longer relevant.

Google recognizes this and will reward those who update their content with the latest and greatest.

Does refreshing old content really help for SEO?

Fresh content has been a ranking factor for Google since at least 2011, and patents filed by the Mountain View company back in 2003 indicate that “data relating to document inception date” is one of the multiple factors that its algorithm takes into consideration when ranking search results.

Google compares fresh content to “🍪 warm cookies right out of the oven” — saying they’re best enjoyed when piping hot.

It adds that people want to see the most relevant information for their search query, whether it’s related to breaking news, recurring events like the Olympics or even product searches like “best DSLR cameras”.

For example, when we ran the keyword “how to refresh content” inside Content Harmony, the results indicated that the average age of the top-ranking posts was less than a year old.

Beyond this, we’ve seen a number of private and public case studies that show clear search improvements after updating content.

Hence, the answer is an emphatic yes. Refreshing old content definitely helps SEO.

As long as you can prove to search engines that you’re adding value to your content, there is an opportunity to regain lost traffic and improve rankings on your old content assets.

Ignore & neglect old content at your own peril.

How to figure out which content needs to be updated

As a general rule of thumb, we don’t recommend that you look at major overhauls of your content within the first six months of publishing. That is, of course, assuming that you spent time with keyword research, writing, editing, and distributing it.

Minor changes, such as fixing grammatical errors or changing some CTAs around are fine, but your time is better spent promoting this content since it’s likely still being tested by Google on many competitive topics. We often see it take 12-18 months for a piece of content to reach its peak traffic levels, meaning updating content before then may be premature.

This graphic gives an overview of the three main types of content refreshes–keep reading and we'll dive into each one.

1 - Quick Wins Audit

Goal: Focus on improving content that is almost ranking

Perhaps you published a piece of content about a year ago that’s doing very well in the SERPs. It’s ranking for several keywords and provides healthy organic traffic. But, it hasn’t reached those #1 rankings you wanted it to.

Doing a quick wins audit will help identify content that is ranking moderately well, but could be doing better.

In this content marketing quick wins tutorial, we focus on identifying content based upon rankings gathered from Google Search Console or tools like Ahrefs, and prioritizing the project list based upon traffic improvement potential.

2 - Content Decay Audit

Goal: Focus on improving content that used to rank well

Content decay refers to a period when the article begins to lose rankings for a certain keyword and traffic starts to drop off. This is usually content that did well initially, but growth started to plateau and eventually stagnate since search engines realize it’s not serving the topic as well as it used to, or competitors have released better or fresher content on the same topic.

You can find these opportunities quickly by doing year-over-year analysis of the Google Analytics report for Behavior > Site Content > All Pages. If you haven’t done this process recently, make sure to compare against multiple past years, eg 2021 vs 2018, to find URLs that had traffic peaks years ago.

3 - Evergreen Content Refreshes

Goal: Update and re-promote seasonal and evergreen content

Most good content marketing programs will have multiple content formats that are relevant seasonally (eg “best holiday gifts for gardeners”), annually (“best ad campaigns of 2021”), or on other recurring calendars (eg “what to expect at your first Consumer Electronics Show”)

Such content should be revisited periodically and updated a few months prior to its relevance. For instance, your “thanksgiving turkey recipes” hub should probably be updated during the summer or early fall to improve rankings by October and November.

Refreshing, updating, and promoting such content is often the only way to maintain rankings from year to year. If someone is searching for “TikTok marketing trends 2022” then an article published in 2020 isn’t going to serve that search intent very well.

These evergreen assets are also perfect to continually promote, and when done correctly on a single URL if appropriate, any links built will continue to drive value in the future as the page becomes more authoritative over time.

Example Analysis

Let’s take a look at Content Harmony’s post 11 proven ways to increase ecommerce conversion rates, first published in July 2016.

The blog post started to rank well in the first few months after publishing, but never realized its full potential, which would have caused it to show up in a quick wins audit done a year after publication.

Then it saw a steady increase in the amount of organic traffic, too, which puts it in our content decay category.

At its peak, it ranked for 4 keywords in the top 10 search results with total monthly traffic of about 30. It’s not our top-performing content by any means, but it seems like it was showing potential. If we decide we want to reach an audience of eCommerce marketers or store owners, it would be valuable to invest in updating it.

However, towards the end of 2017, the article started to lose monthly traffic—possibly due to lower clickthrough rates. It still maintained organic rankings for many keywords but those started to crater off too in mid-2019. The lower clickthrough rate must have played a role in lower rankings, too, alongside content freshness.

Since then, the article has performed poorly and received only 3 clicks in the past 3 months according to Google Search Console.  

It’s clear that the blog post needs to be refreshed for it to start ranking again.

While this is one example from our own blog, it’s possible that you have such content on your site too. There are many ways to track underperforming content, but the method we used was to navigate over to Google Search Console > Search Results > Pages.

This will give you the top-performing pages first, but as you scroll down you will see the ones that don’t get much traffic. Within this dashboard, you can also input individual URLs to see how well they’re performing and filter according to the time period. Try using the Compare feature on the date selection to see which posts have dropped off the most from past years.

Use our Content Marketing Quick Wins guide to go way deeper across your entire site and do a more advanced analysis for all of the keywords that you rank for.

How to update old content for SEO

Let’s take you through a 5-step process to refresh any piece of underperforming content on your site.

This graphic gives an overview of the overall process we use on all content refresh projects–keep reading and we'll dive into each one.

Everything we’re going to show you in this guide can be done manually - but we’ll run a Keyword Report and use the Content Grader in Content Harmony to show you how to do it faster.

We’ll be using the same article from our blog referenced earlier — 11 proven ways to increase eCommerce conversion rates.

That article was published almost five years ago, so let’s start by getting a fresh look at the data.

Step 1 - Make sure the content still matches search intent

Our first step has to be revisiting search intent to confirm whether our original approach is still correct and identify if any high-level content focus or structural changes need to be made.

While it’s definitely possible to open up dozens of tabs for manual queries and research, we’ll skip that step. Instead, we recommend that you run a keyword report for “increase eCommerce conversion rates” in Content Harmony, to give you all the information you need neatly sorted inside a single dashboard.

After running the report, the immediate things that stand out for this post are:

1. Our current article matches the research search intent, but with statistics that are out of date and best practices that aren’t applicable anymore.
2. The average SERP age is 1 year, meaning that our article definitely should be updated and that’s probably a big reason why it’s experiencing content decay.

Next, let’s head over to the content grading tool to see how it grades the current version of the content, and whether we need to beef up the word count and keyword suggestions.

To the best of our knowledge, there is no manual process that you can use at this stage. We couldn’t find a free content grading tool — you could always “CTRL+F” for keywords but that’s super tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone.

Plugging the existing content into the tool reveals that we’ve used only 31 out of a recommended 129 phrases — hence it’s clear that we need to add a little more context and semantically related keywords to the post. The tool also allows you to toggle between unused recommendations, giving us a solid list of sub-topics we can cover.

While it’s possible that the article covered the eCommerce landscape well in 2016, we’re now five years on so it’s likely that new eCommerce topics have emerged.

Shopify stock, for example, was $40 CAD in July 2016. It’s currently trading at $1,065 CAD, down from its all-time high of $2,139 in November 2021. It’s onboarded millions of new users, and the U.S. eCommerce industry has grown nearly 81% since 2017. Clearly, there’s a lot to catch up on.

Step 2 - Cover the topic more comprehensively

Our aim now is to uncover new search terms that may have emerged since we last published this article and make sure we don’t have any major gaps on core sub-topics.

Content Harmony’s Keyword Report section reveals new search queries, questions to answer, and authoritative sources to link to.

The first thing that stands out is the “related searches” section inside the topic model.

Some of these searches are definitely time-specific and can only be addressed with content that’s updated periodically. For example:

• Ecommerce conversion rate 2021: Self-explanatory, since conversion rates are different each year.
• Best converting eCommerce websites: Design and user acquisition best practices are constantly changing — eCommerce stores now eye UGC content delivered natively through TikTok as a big growth channel, which wasn’t the case in 2015. Hence, this list will need to be updated, too.
• Shopify conversion rate by industry: We definitely didn’t have as many Shopify stores in 2015 as we do now, so it’s worth addressing this question in the updated content.

It’s recommended that you scroll through the “Outline Analysis” tab, too. This helps you browse the top-ranking posts and what H2s / H3s they’ve used to address the topic. Select whatever stands out to you and add it to the brief.

Refresh title tags and meta description

We recommend that you update both your title tag and meta description when refreshing content. This serves as an additional signal to search engines that your content is new and worth a second look. What’s more, a mention of an update in the title tag also helps increase clickthrough rates since readers understand that they’ll be presented with the latest facts and data.

You can either write the new title and meta description at the research stage or put it as part of your notes for the writer.

Step 3 - Look for opportunities to make the content stand out

Are you able to add new images, visuals, charts, blockquotes, or videos to your content? Are there sections that need more examples to show the reader what you're talking about?

Does it make sense to spend time optimizing for featured snippets and FAQ Schema? Do you need to answer more reader Q&As in an FAQ section?

If you’re refreshing something that’s a few years old, there will be an opportunity to update more than just rewriting a few paragraphs.

For example, if we’re answering questions about eCommerce conversion rates and best-converting websites, we’ll be sure to include screenshots of which stores are knocking out of the park. It’s also possible to have charts showing the fluctuation of conversion rates by year or compared by industry so that it’s clear that you’re doing the best job in trying to address the freshness in that topic’s search intent.

Content Harmony’s visual analysis feature gives you the top-ranking images for that keyword, so you’re able to automate this step too. Look for ways to differentiate your visual assets or to improve on the ones that are currently ranking.

Step 4 - Update anything that is out of date

Refreshing old content means there’s an opportunity for you to add fresher data, statistics, and examples. Scan your article for sections where updated stats are necessary — in our eCommerce conversion rate post, for example, we can discuss 2021 conversion rate data.

It’s also possible that you’ve published a lot more content since this last post. Some of that content will be related to this new blog, so it’s always a good idea to double-check what new internal links you can add. This could be a combination of blogs, product pages, or features — whatever is relevant.

It’s possible to do this manually, but you might miss out on a few pages especially if you’re publishing a lot of content.

Content Harmony scans your site for topical relevance and top internal link targets so that’s another step that can be easily automated.

For this article, we found two articles on our blog that were not interlinked with the eCommerce conversion post, so we’ll be adding those too.

Step 5 - Publish and promote like new

The primary aim of updating old content might be to regain lost rankings in the SERPs, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore all of your normal promotional channels that you would use on a new piece of content.

If your content performed well earlier, it’s likely that users found it engaging and informative. Now that it’s updated, there’s no reason why they won’t enjoy reading it again.

Treat this like any other big content launch–tweet it, email it to your list, etc.

Some ways to promote your updated content are:

• Email it to your newsletter subscribers, with a mention that it’s updated with the latest statistics and data.
• Re-post on all owned social media channels.
• Send a personal email to subject matter experts who might have contributed to the updated article with a quote or comment.
• Share in relevant communities across Reddit, Quora, Slack, Facebook groups, & Twitter lists.

Closing thoughts

A content refresh project should be viewed as an opportunity to address search intent better and provide the most comprehensive answer for that query. The idea here is to devote sufficient time to the content update process so that you’re giving it the best possible chance at performing.

Minor updates such as a couple of hundred extra words in an existing sub-heading won’t accrue the same benefits. As outlined in the sections above, the full process gives you the opportunity to rank for more keywords, boost existing SERP rankings, and obtain both more traffic and backlinks to your content.

Want to see how Content Harmony helps you build content that outranks the competition?

The blog post you just read scores Good in our Content Grader for the topic "how to refresh content".

Grade your content against an AI-driven topic model using Content Harmony - get your first 10 credits for free when you schedule a demo, or sign up here to take it for a spin on your own.

👉 Get Your First 10 Briefs For $10

▶️ Webinar Recording

💻 Presentation Slides

🎙 YouTube Transcript

We'll try to clean this up properly someday. In the meantime, here's the full YouTube transcript for lazy SEO purposes:

3:21

okay hey how's it going hey everybody hey Tyler hey man so I'm so glad to have you on uh

3:27

as I said I think this is such an interesting topic to me because I think it's one of those things that people just sort of take it at face value you

3:33

know especially when you're learning the tools and you know it kind of feels like a a magic thing that you don't really know how it works so I'm excited to

3:39

unpack this topic and really learn a little bit more of the nuance and the the Wizardry that goes into it totally

3:45

yeah keyword difficulty KD it's it's like this magical column inside the keyword difficult inside the keyword

3:51

tools we all use and uh the magic part of it makes it really easy to ignore how it actually works but um yeah

3:59

there's a lot going on there awesome awesome uh real quick just uh

4:04

before you kick off uh Kane one thing I just want to mention for the audience here I forgot to say uh if you have questions as uh Kane's going through his

4:11

um his Workshop today please pop those in the chat uh also just say hi to us in the chat so we know uh who's here and

4:17

where you all are from and uh and yeah we'll either get to the questions during the discussion today or we'll have some time at the end uh to go through

4:23

questions so feel free to drop those in the chat sweet

4:29

all right is that my cue time to hop here yeah all

4:34

right by all means yeah let's uh let's let's get into it sweet well thanks for the intro Tyler uh I'm Kane uh you know

4:40

the presentation Title Here Today is the keyword difficulty myth but um really I think keyword difficulties

4:46

kind of this portal into the question of can I rank and so we're actually going

4:52

to be talking about a few different things today other than just keyword difficulty um how to actually

4:58

replace keyword difficulty because I think it's a concept that is sort of broken especially how it's integrated in

5:03

a lot of tools now and so we'll talk about why current keyword difficulty methods are broken uh we'll get into how

5:09

search intent is part of what's actually determining true keyword difficulty and then we'll switch into kind of more of

5:15

the actionable stuff of how your team should actually be assessing ranking potential and then how I think you can

5:21

actually make keyword difficulty irrelevant to your site to the point where for the topics that really matter

5:26

for your brand you can start to ignore keyword difficulty even if you're that small site that doesn't think you can

5:32

rank for the big difficulty keywords and things like that um so that's sort of the promise

5:38

um you are you're not going to walk out of here with a a new single fancy keyword difficulty so this is my stupid

5:45

Photoshop to go along with that please don't sue me Columbia Records but um I don't think it's possible to

5:52

replace keyword difficulty with like one simple number that you should be looking at

5:57

um but I do think it's possible to make keyword difficulty better still use it in different ways part of that's going

6:03

to be me showing you how we do content Harmony uh keyword difficulty a little bit differently inside of content

6:08

Harmony um I'll show you a few content Harmony screenshots mostly for convenience but the stuff I'm talking about even if you

6:14

don't use content Harmony you can apply it to the process you're already doing with the tools you already have so

6:20

um not just of a big old pitch for what we're doing for metrics um

6:25

so yeah let's jump in um I'm gonna jump in the way back machine for a minute and go back in time

6:31

uh any of the old school seos on the call may remember this thing called toolbar pagerank and so if you were

6:38

doing publishing on the web in 2004 2008 the closest thing we had to keyword

6:45

difficulty was logging in doing a Google Search and then clicking on each result and seeing how long that little green

6:51

bar was inside of the Google Toolbar and so like the original keyword difficulty is everybody ranking has a page rank of

6:59

four to seven and my page rank is three I gotta get my page rank up before I deserve to rank on page one so keyword

7:05

difficulty there's a there's a long history that leads up to the tools that we use today and call keyword difficulty

7:12

there was never to my knowledge a single metric that was like average page rank of what's ranking although I think a

7:17

couple of toolbars might have tried to show it all on the search results but this was there for a while and if you

7:23

were still using it in 2016 when it shut down you've got bigger problems with your SEO approach but it was around for

7:29

a long time where you could still look up toolbar page rank um and thank you to search engine land

7:34

for documenting the history because they're like one of the only people that has a decent image of pagerank and how it used to look

7:41

um and so that was there and you know that was the Dark Ages and eventually I think one of the first ones I ever saw

7:47

was Moz coming along with the keyword difficulty report and it was after they'd established domain Authority page

7:52

Authority as metrics and and linkscape and this is kind of a throwback report uh it's I this one's from 2013 but I

8:00

think the tool was around for a few years before that and what's what was really cool about this butterfly chart just to get nostalgic for a minute is

8:06

you could kind of look at the orange arrows and be like I've got a domain Authority a 20. I think I should be able

8:12

to fit somewhere in the bottom half of this page and this was back when links on the page actually were kind of the

8:18

main linking uh you know ranking factor in play and so this is kind of a cool approach it allowed you to get a feel

8:24

for like what the landscape for a keyword was like and this in my mind kind of set the groundwork for what

8:30

keyword difficulty has become um now let's fast forward to what we've been on using for the past five or ten

8:37

years um I break down the current keyword landscape or keyword difficulty landscape into two groups Blended Factor

8:43

metrics and single Factor metrics Moz and semrush are here on the screen Moz

8:48

and semrush use what I call Blended Factor keyword difficulty metrics they both have a difficulty column they both

8:55

have a number 0 to 100 that represents keyword difficulty if you look at their documentation they

9:01

are both based on a variety of factors so on the left Moz basis keyword difficulty on page Authority domain

9:09

Authority click-through rate their keyword difficulty puts a weight on higher ranking versus lower ranking less

9:14

visible pages and then they like factor in a few other modifiers and things so

9:19

there's that on the semra side I can find less documentation but from what I can tell there's a similar it takes into

9:26

account competitors and Link metrics content quality search intent backlinks domain Authority

9:32

that's what the Blended Factor metrics look like on the other side of the market hrefs

9:38

uses what I call a single Factor metric what I think is magical about this and

9:43

the reason I think a lot of seos have treated as treated it as kind of like the um

9:48

I don't know Best in Class whatever keyword difficulty for a long time is we Advanced seos know exactly what it is

9:55

telling us it's based on a single Factor they say right there in the documentation we calculate hrefs KD by

10:02

taking a trimmed mean of the number of linking domains to the current top 10. they take the referring domains to the

10:07

site's ranking on page one they drop the highest links they drop the lowest links they take the stuff in the middle average it out put it on a scale of zero

10:15

to 100 it doesn't take into account any other variables whatsoever and for me as an SEO that knows what I'm doing that's

10:21

magical because I know what this number means um it's telling me how bad is the link

10:27

building going to be to rank on this search result so 0 to 100 how many links am I going to have to build and you know

10:33

slap a number on there for how you figure out your cost per link and like cost of content promotion or whatever

10:38

it's kind of a cost to rank for some people that depending on the type of Niche you're in so that's the hrefs

10:45

approach and the single Factor single Factor keyword difficulty approach

10:52

I think keyword difficulty the way we're using it here in the popular tools falls apart in a few ways so I'm going to walk

10:58

through those um on the first hand we've got the Blended Factor metrics my problem with Blended

11:04

Factor metrics is I don't understand why a keyword diff is hard to rank for so on

11:10

the left you'll see five keywords and hrefs that are big brand names or like big queries keyword difficulties 90 plus

11:17

which means they've got hundreds of referring domains on average to the stuff on page one on the right you see

11:22

the same keywords in Moz and the difficulty here are in the 60s that's great I'm not saying it should

11:29

necessarily be 60 or b90 but when I look at the single Factor metrics in hrefs I

11:34

know exactly why the keyword difficulty is 90. when I look at the Blended Factor metrics and this is not to to pick on

11:39

Moz because theirs may be more accurate for some level of that serp but I I

11:45

can't tell what it means like it says 60 but I can't actually rank for Six Flags I can't actually rank for BMW and I'm

11:52

sure not ranking for the stock market as long as Google Finance exists and takes up a few search results right so

11:58

what does keyword difficulty mean and so for my purposes and for training my team on how to think about keyword difficulty

12:05

I have to throw it out the window because I can't tell them what to do with that so that's my problem with Blended Factor

12:11

metrics even though there's some really smart seos working on those metrics and there's some really cool stuff Blended in I don't understand how to use it

12:17

oftentimes which is not to say that the single Factor metrics fix it all single Factor

12:23

metrics only work if that factor is actually a ranking Factor so here's a cherry-picked list of keywords that's

12:30

low keyword difficulty and super high volume in ahrefs if you look at the keyword volume this is a million monthly

12:36

down to 400 000 monthly searches like these are Big queries and they're all brand names or local intent queries you

12:43

will not rank for any of these if you're Yelp sure you can rank for it if you're the brand itself you can rank for it

12:50

the problem with this is not when you're looking at a single keyword at a time obviously you can look at Noodles and

12:56

Company and know like all right guys we're just not ranking for this pull that keyword out the problem is when you're looking at 10 000 keywords in a

13:02

spreadsheet and you're trying to filter them off keyword difficulty and you're like man look at all this volume we can

13:07

go after and you tell a client or your stakeholder I think we can get a good few hundred thousand sessions off the

13:12

keywords inside of this spreadsheet because nobody pulled Noodles and Company out of there with a low keyword

13:17

difficulty because it's like yeah it's 10 we can do that that's it feels like a little bit of

13:23

like a contrived or strained example but that's the reality of how keyword difficulty gets used by a lot of teams

13:29

and so in a case like this with heavily local intent heavy branded intent queries they're actually truly High

13:35

difficulty queries most sites do not deserve to rank for this keyword difficulty leads you to believe

13:41

you can and it muddies up your data because it's just sitting there inside your spreadsheets full of keywords you

13:47

think you can rank for on the flip side there are other problems with keyword

13:53

difficulty that are not actually a result of keyword difficulty one of them is keyword difficulty can't or won't

13:58

clearly tell you if you're in a low click-through rate or a low traffic opportunity environment that is not a

14:04

problem with keyword difficulty that is a problem with how teams use keyword difficulty so when we get into a

14:10

situation where teams are treating keyword difficulty as one of the only value filters like imagine I only showed

14:16

you three columns on this table you see the keyword you see the difficulty and you see the volume and maybe if you're a

14:21

homework or a science website you scroll down to the middle and you see Iron II oxide formula keyword difficulty one

14:28

2500 volume we're going to clean up on that like getting into the content

14:33

calendar publish something about this formula thing let's get it out there because we're going to earn some traffic and you might miss the sneaky little

14:40

column on the right that's clicks per search where hrefs kudos to them for giving out this data in a sensible way

14:46

tells you only one in 10 people ever actually click on that serve so you might get the featured snip and on the

14:52

serp and maybe best case scenario you get 250 visits off that head term

14:57

and so seos will pull in volume the pollen keyword difficulty and they'll put together a really awesome editorial

15:04

calendar of titles to approve stuff they should publish on and they'll ignore

15:09

these other factors because it's hard to fit into their process and so keyword difficulty is deceptive because it leads

15:16

you into thinking yeah you can rank for it but you may not get the value you think you're getting

15:21

here's another example and this one doesn't show up on CPS so I'm kind of taking this further but let's say you're

15:28

a fashion site and you spot the keyword how to tie a tie that seems like a

15:34

fantastic opportunity for a fashion site 360k volume keyword difficulty 62 but

15:40

you know maybe we're a medium big site we we rank for other keywords that are in that range I think we've got a shot 70 000 traffic potential let's say we

15:48

are checking that clicks per search and we see 0.6 60 of people click on something that's pretty good that's

15:53

better than like a 30 click-through rate type of model right so we put this in our editorial calendar

16:00

the right you know we build a brief the writer starts working on it and at some point maybe while it's being worked on

16:06

or a month after it's published somebody Googles the keyword and says hey um there's a really big video at the top of

16:12

the page and I don't think we're ever actually going to get 70 000 visits from writing an article about how to tie a

16:18

tie and that's because nobody stopped and checked search intent to tell you that

16:23

there's a giant video featured snippet followed by a big video pack they've both been there for multiple years and

16:29

even if you scroll two or three click you know Scrolls down the fold and go into the deeper into search results you

16:35

have to be brooksbrothers or ties.com to rank in the number one or two organic slots they're hiding way further down on

16:41

the page so you're thinking this is a big win and you're missing out on the fact that you

16:47

have to approach this content entirely different than the rest of your editorial calendar and this has to be part of your YouTube and your video

16:53

strategy even if you want a shot at ranking organically but if you want a shot at showing up in these video serves

16:58

and so keyword difficulty leads you to think that you can basically Escape search intent and you can't

17:08

on the flip side keyword difficulty also hides opportunities to punch above your weight

17:13

this is a syrup overview for protein benefits that's a big keyword I forgot to look at the volume but I I know it's

17:19

in the many thousands right keyword difficulty 82 super hard all the

17:24

sites ranking WebMD Healthline myplate.gov have domain ranks and hrefs

17:30

in the 70s 80s 90s and then right at the bottom of the serp somebody chwb online

17:35

it's like a local Health Clinic is showing up in number 10. now granted not the highest click-through rate slot on

17:40

the page but this site domain rank 29 19 referring domains has no business on

17:46

Earth ranking for this keyword according to keyword keyword difficulty and what most of us seos know it should take to

17:52

rank on this type of query I'm not saying this is going to rank here forever but keyword difficulty

17:57

hides these type of opportunities because even if this number 10 page is getting tested on this head term and

18:03

even if they don't rank number one and get the traffic for protein benefits they probably get some secondary and

18:09

tertiary keyword visibility and some actual traffic to that page that they may not have tried to produce content

18:15

about if they were just leaning on keyword difficulty to prioritize opportunities

18:20

so that's one thing it's hiding these great opportunities from you there is a flip side to that and I forgot to put a

18:27

slide in the deck but keyword difficulty looks like difficulty because it's in

18:32

the name it looks like it's gonna be hard to rank for this thing if you're thinking about it as an SEO

18:37

that's trying to skate by and rank for the easiest stuff keyword difficulty is something to avoid

18:42

if you're thinking about an SEO who wants to clean up on a bunch of links without sending a bunch of emails keyword difficulty actually means this

18:49

is super linkable content tons of sites are linking to high keyword difficulty search results if you go you know you

18:56

read the the cool blog posts in the SEO space about you should do statistics content you should do proprietary

19:02

research they have huge keyword difficulties on those keywords it's not necessarily because the link building's

19:07

hard it's actually because the linked link building is easy you can clean up on links because it is highly linkable

19:13

content so you're over here prioritizing low keyword difficulty content and actually hampering your ability to build

19:19

your domain Authority and earn more links because you're avoiding all the content that's worth linking to

19:25

I should have put a slide in about that I'll go back and do it later that's a big Point you're ignoring some of the

19:30

best link acquisition opportunities so your team doesn't have to send another thousand emails right

19:35

all right this one I shouldn't I should have skipped this slide I think it's a lighter point but I think keyword

19:41

difficulty can actually lure big sites into thinking they can get away with weak content so here's an example and

19:47

you know WebMD they've got two ranking slots on this serve this is for fish oil benefits it's one I refer to often

19:52

because it's kind of a fascinating search to watch they're getting the feature snippet

19:57

right now sometimes Healthline gets it sometimes it's a double featured snippet their content score in the this is a

20:02

Content Harmony screenshot is eight they are very lowly optimized very short word count on this piece of content

20:08

but they've got 674 domains they've got webmd's domain Authority so they're not

20:14

really worried about that they might be looking at this keyword and saying we've got the feature snippet we've got the links to stay in competition and they

20:21

might be thinking skip that serp we've got other opportunities for new content to publish other content to refresh and I think it

20:28

can lures sites into thinking that they don't have a bigger opportunity to improve their content or that they can

20:34

keep getting away with weaker content just because it's performing currently and if so if you're doing a Content uh

20:39

refresh analysis and you're looking at pages that are performing that you don't have to refresh this might show up in

20:44

the list of like nah we're good to go there we're cleaning up on traffic Google likes us and so it's not

20:50

necessarily fully a keyword difficulty problem but if you're looking at how this page is performing in this serp you

20:56

might be thinking we're doing all right we've got the links to compete the page is doing fine when in reality this this

21:01

page is only ranking there because there's some latent intent for high blood pressure related official benefits

21:06

and this page just happens to serve it right now but they should be matching that intent

21:12

on the page that's actually keyword optimized for fish oil benefits so I could go a few different directions

21:17

with that but I think even big sites are affected by thinking keyword difficulty has them safe when it really doesn't

21:23

right content the expertise of the topic still matters

21:28

cure difficulty can also trick you into thinking that you can brute force your way past search intent so we looked at

21:34

this a little bit with those uh HRS keyword difficulty examples for the big brand names here's a here's a more clear

21:39

example this is uh or more day-to-day example of a keyword you might go after best sublimation printer pretty classic

21:47

affiliate keyword pretty classic keyword if you're you know Best Buy or office space and you sell sublimation printers

21:53

so a lot of different sites are competing on this stuff now if you type best sublimation printer singular

21:59

and you look at down this Earth all 10 links say printers there's some list intent whether or not you type printer

22:06

or printers in your query Google thinks most users seem to want a list of printers to look at and with the

22:12

exception of this one green example in the middle of the page all the other stuff ranking for the singular search

22:17

are plural printers articles and that might feel like it's just a

22:23

coincidence or Google's rewriting the title but if I actually throw a modifier on the search to remove anything with

22:28

printers plural in the title you see a bunch of really highly optimized content that these sites think they've done a

22:35

great job of optimizing for not visible on page one they're meeting a different intent they're talking about the best

22:42

sublimation printer instead of the best printers by subcategory or whatever and now there's a couple that do have a

22:48

little list intent in here it's not a perfect example up and down the board but we see a lot of great content pieces

22:55

not ranking simply because the search intent got ignored that people are looking for a list and you know I'm

23:01

guilty as charged we've done this on content Harmony stuff too where we we look at something and we write the

23:06

singular article there's a list intent it's it's a pretty common type of mistake and keyword difficulty would

23:12

lead you to think we can rank for it we've got the links and even content optimization tools like

23:17

content Harmony and others would tell you hey you're optimized for this but you ignored the step in the beginning to look at search intent and so that's not

23:24

necessarily a keyword difficulty problem again but it's how teams use keyword difficulty to think they're in the clear

23:29

and they've skipped over a critical step like search and tap

23:34

the flip side of that is that keyword difficulty also ignores how your site can perform for a keyword so let's back

23:40

up two slides A to Z of sublimation.com ranking number third for best

23:45

sublimation printer this site is less than a year old hrefs

23:51

gives a domain rank of 0.1 they have less than 150 referring domains and they're getting 10 000 visits a month

23:57

from 2000 keywords I assure you they have far less domain Authority I mean at point one everybody

24:03

has more domain Authority but I assure you that crafting spree Jennifer maker

24:08

color me crafty these other sites not showing up on page one that didn't meet the intent probably have way higher

24:14

domain Authority and for all intents and purposes for looking at keyword difficulty they deserve to rank more

24:20

but this site's got something they don't and that's topical Authority because all they've written for the past year that

24:26

they've existed is a hundred articles about sublimation and so if you write you know it's not even an exact match or

24:33

partial match domain thing if you write 100 articles about sublimation and you're going up against a craft site

24:38

with five or ten articles on the topic you have something they don't that keyword difficulty can't show you and

24:44

that's an incredible amount of expertise and Authority even if you know I don't know this site I don't know who owns it

24:49

I wouldn't be surprised if they were getting like classic affiliate content written by one of the uh the content

24:55

marketplaces like they might not have true expertise but they've demonstrated through their editorial calendar that

25:01

this is all they talk about so something's going on there where they've established enough expertise to be

25:08

cleaning it up on an affiliate keyword like best sublimation printer and I think these things cost like a thousand or thousands of dollars I don't think

25:13

they're like an inkjet right so if you're getting an estimated six hundred thousand two thousand sessions a month

25:19

you're probably making some decent affiliate money without building any links or having any domain Authority and so what point is it to track keyword

25:26

difficulty when a site with more topical Authority than you can just ignore keyword difficulty altogether

25:36

so there's a trend here a couple of them the first one is that keyword difficulty

25:41

is mostly relevant in a world with 10 Blue Links those serps do still exist but we generally live in this world

25:48

where there are top 24 laptops widgets showing up above your affiliate review where there are news stories video packs

25:55

video feature Snippets local business packs you can find search results with 10 Blue

26:01

Links and those are the search results where perfectly optimized on-page content plus links is still the ranking

26:08

equation that you need to solve but a lot more search nowadays look like this an Organics ranking slots are not

26:15

necessarily the only ones or the primary ones you need to be optimizing for keyword difficulty hides this from you

26:23

also keyword difficulty matters in a world where e doesn't exist this is a screenshot taken by Lily Ray and she has

26:30

an amazing presentation or had an amazing presentation at mozcon this summer I've got the link to the

26:35

SlideShare there I recommend looking through the examples and some of the more technical Google things she

26:41

references um and finding the video whenever you can get your hands on it but she shows a

26:48

great example here of some big notable Publishers parents I assume that's parents.com Psychology today medicine

26:53

net I would look at these domains and be like oh yeah High Authority High expertise like they know what they're

26:59

talking about and this is a five-year traffic Trend I don't know cystrix or whatever she's using for this since 2017

27:05

and you can see just a clear downward trend on the site-wide traffic estimates to

27:11

these sites and then you flip over to who's replacing them and you see sites like Cleveland Clinic Mayo Clinic the FDA the

27:18

CDC medical space not necessarily the most perfect example for all of us in spaces where that you know your money

27:25

your life trust factor is not quite the same but what what she's showing in this

27:30

screenshot she gives a bunch of others and other topics that are less medically oriented is sites with true expertise

27:37

and authority and Trust are replacing the ones that just happen to publish a little bit about a piece of content

27:43

[Music] um we are in a world where you cannot rely on a single metric for ranking

27:48

visibility feasibility if you look at keyword difficulty it's simply trying to answer the question can I rank or how

27:54

hard will it be to rank and keyword difficulty is not the metric that you can use for that anymore and most teams are still using it that way and so of

28:01

course we've got our classic Square Wheels where we're too busy to improve our process because we're working so hard and cure difficulties a

28:08

little bit like that because you throw these keywords with low keyword difficulty through your process and then you're wondering why traffic's not

28:14

taking off on them and it's because you skipped other checks along the way in your process that could have helped you focus on the

28:20

keywords that would have produced results for you okay that's that's sort of the end of my

28:26

taking your medicine on keyword difficulty section of the presentation now I get to focus on the fun part which is how do you actually do better what

28:33

what can your team actually be doing um the first thing is introducing better

28:39

metrics this is one part where I show you how we do things differently in content Harmony but even if you don't

28:44

use content Harmony you can still figure out some of these same Concepts in your current tools because we're transparent

28:50

about what we're doing to calculate these things there's a lot on the screen so let me guide your vision to the

28:57

purple column uh linking domains on the serp rolling up into a link difficulty

29:03

score this is content Harmony's version of what hrefs calls keyword difficulty the average number of referring domains

29:10

to Pages ranking averaged out into a zero to 100 score of how bad is the link

29:15

building going to be we use Moz as our underlying link database but we still see comparable scoring patterns to when

29:22

we compare it to hrefs keyword difficulty so we've renamed it link difficulty because in my opinion that's

29:28

a more specific version of it is of what it is how hard will the link building be in this case we're looking at a keyword

29:34

report for how to cook bacon so you can imagine some of the content written is fairly good these Pages have some links

29:40

but not necessarily the most on the internet and they come from reasonably large like food Publishers but not like

29:45

you know the FDA or something like that and so we have two other metrics on the

29:50

left and right on the right side you'll see what we call domain difficulty domain difficulty is the average domain

29:56

Authority for page one results that is actually domain Authority from Moz

30:02

um and they're credited inside the tool again there are link Source we average out their domain Authority metric and

30:07

roll it up into what we call domain difficulty the reason we do that is because that is one of the areas that we

30:13

see uh link difficulty fall apart is when you have a low number of links to a page but very high average domain

30:20

Authority if you look back at those examples I shared earlier with like the the fast food names like Noodles and

30:25

Company low keyword difficulty in hrefs if there is a domain difficulty next to

30:31

it it would be very high 70s 80s 90s and that's because the sites that rank for Branded queries tend to be Facebook

30:37

Instagram Twitter profiles for that brand they are big domains therefore you

30:42

see domain difficulty go up you need to be a big site to rank for those keywords on the left side you'll see what we call

30:49

content difficulty and this one's a little less simple to calculate because it's based off of our content score down

30:54

here and that's basically assessing how hard are these Pages trying to rank for the keyword how to cook bacon and in

31:01

this case these are actually relatively high scores for the way content Harmony currently does these content scores this

31:07

number two result is almost an exact match result for how to cook bacon and it shows up throughout the content the

31:13

contents optimized really well and so what we're trying to show with content difficulty is regardless of the link

31:18

building challenge regardless of the domain Authority challenge how good does your content need to be and so if you

31:24

see a one of those 10 Blue Links results where every single result is very well optimized for the keyword you tend to

31:30

see a higher content difficulty score you need to really come with your best content to compete on this sir

31:35

on the flip side when you see a keyword where sites really aren't trying to rank for it maybe they're tangentially

31:41

related and this is a new developing keyword and there's not a lot of content for it you see content difficulty scaled

31:47

down and that's because these key these sites are not necessarily targeting that keyword they're targeting another topic and they happen to be ranking for this

31:53

one and so that allows us to uncover opportunities of basically content weakness where these Pages might be

32:00

optimized for some keyword but they're not optimized for this keyword and there's a chance for you to come in with the best optimized piece of content and

32:06

maybe skip over the link style keyword difficulty metrics because your content's better

32:14

um so when you actually back this out into a set of keywords on the top I have a list of Home Improvement keywords on the

32:20

bottom I have a list of nutrition and health style keywords you can start to see some cool Trends where we can pick

32:26

out content link and domain difficulty and start to cherry pick opportunities to win these search results in different

32:33

ways maybe I look at build a deck on the top row and I say content's really well optimized here but you know we're Home

32:40

Depot so we probably stand a really good chance as long as our content's good and we've got some links to that page I'm

32:45

not worried about it or maybe I'm a new publishing site and I see the load domain difficulty and I think my my

32:51

domain can play in that result I just have to build some links or something if you go to all the way down the bottom result blood oxygen level more of a

32:58

medical query you see domain difficulty rise into the 80s and that's because you know the FDA and some big news

33:04

Publishers are the ones ranking for that site and so the content is not as well optimized especially with some of the

33:10

fresh news intent happening on that query so we see content score go down compared to the other keywords in this

33:16

set but domain difficulty Rises and what that's telling me is simply that you know freshness is going to be a factor

33:22

domain Authority is going to be a factor I need to be a big publisher but and there's some trust factors in play

33:27

so we can start to figure out a little bit more clearly why a keyword set might

33:33

be difficult to rank for and look for little different Trends in a set of keywords that we're going after

33:39

the second thing that your process needs to account for is introducing a search intent check and what I mean by that is

33:44

you need to be introducing search intent reviews checkpoints earlier in your process

33:50

content Harmony has what I think is one of the best search intent classification systems out there we're always trying to

33:57

make it better but um I could spend another hour telling you why informational navigational and

34:02

transactional is a stupid and broken way of assessing search intent it's not meant for seos to use it's meant for

34:09

search engines to use to figure out what a user wants and your job is not to figure out what the user wants it's to

34:14

figure out what the user wants and what Google wants to show them and so what our system allows you to do is basically

34:20

get a clear idea for what type of results appear in this case we've got a query for weighted blankets and this

34:26

actually has some split intent to it you see a bunch of green check marks there but our system goes in and looks for 80

34:32

different footprints in the serps and highlights hey there's shopping pack results there's e-commerce category or

34:37

product pages ranking there are some fresh news types of results could be actually news stories or could be more

34:43

qdf recently updated content types of factors there are some local factors going on there's a local shopping pack

34:50

because Bed Bath and Beyond has weighted blankets in stock and there's a little bit of research intent there like this

34:55

is clearly a head term somebody searching for weighted blankets doesn't necessarily know what kind they want and stuff and so we're seeing some paas or

35:02

maybe a you know something suggesting research intent so there's a lot of different intent but the predominant one

35:08

is transactional that tells me that maybe I want to come at this with a very even though it's a head term with split

35:13

intent maybe I want to rank in the transactional slots and go after that intent maybe that's the direction that this keyword is going to head long term

35:21

and so again when you back this out across a set of keywords you can start to pick out cool Trends now these these

35:27

keywords are slightly contrived health benefits of pumpkin seeds is a lot different than the keyword just pumpkin seeds pumpkin carving tools but all of

35:35

these are pumpkin related and so if I you know you can imagine the keyword research you'd go through for your gardening website client where you drop

35:42

a whole bunch of pumpkin keywords into a list if you run all of them through something like this and you can see

35:47

search intent pulled out so that the transactional keywords don't get mixed in with your article suggestions for the

35:53

client's editorial calendar that's the type of intent check that we need at the top of our process to make

35:59

sure that we don't write an article about pumpkin seeds based on a volume estimate for that keyword because that's

36:04

a big keyword and you are not ranking for it with an article about you know 10 places to buy pumpkin seeds or how to

36:10

plant pumpkin seeds that is a different intent than the one showing on the head term

36:15

um as I'm looking at keyword difficulty one

36:21

of the things I want to walk away with is to stop treating keyword difficulty as a metric and start treating it as a

36:26

process keyword difficulty is a set of things you need to check not one number this is not necessarily the only process

36:33

you can go through but if I'm teaching a junior SEO how to think about uh keyword difficulty I'd be telling

36:41

them first off for the keyword you're looking at or for the cluster of keywords you want to Target with this page what's the primary search intent

36:48

and then the corollary to that is what's the right page type for that search intent you know if we're getting a big

36:53

transactional search result we need to comment we need a category page or an affiliate review page or a product page

36:59

not a blog post on what is from there we can decide is on-page

37:05

optimization a dominant Factor if you have a bunch of e-commerce category Pages ranking they might not have any on-page content they might just have a

37:11

list of in-stock products and that might be the ranking Factor aside from just raw domain Authority and so secondly

37:18

then is this topic relevant for us can we produce the right page type on the type of site we're running maybe your

37:24

affiliate review site can't produce an e-commerce category page right now so this keyword might be closed off to you

37:30

at the moment I then put do we have authority on this topic and I scratched it out and left it

37:36

on screen because I want to emphasize have we established Authority on this topic is a different question as an SEO

37:42

I can say yeah I've got Authority on SEO I've got Authority on cro link building marketing but have I gone through and

37:48

done the work to establish that Authority with Google and with my audience to the point where

37:54

I'm I I've established that I know as much about it as anybody else writing about the topic on the internet and so

37:59

we're going to hit on that more in a second but the very last thing I have here is what are the link acquisition requirements and so if I showed this to

38:06

myself five or ten years ago the mind-blowing thing for me talking to my former self would have been links are

38:13

the last Factor I'm looking at and deciding whether or not I should publish content about this topic

38:20

it still it still surprises me to hear myself say it out loud because you know I like I like link building links often

38:25

win right like it still works sometimes but links are the last factor that I would consider and whether I should

38:31

write about this topic and here's why links are telling you whether or not you can rank now for a topic they're not

38:38

telling you whether or not your brand should be writing about the topic and they're not telling you whether or

38:43

not your brand might be that little site that can rank for protein benefits and become the big site that's the authority

38:49

on protein or whatever the topic might be because you went through the work to write the topics that you can't rank for

38:55

now now I understand you know agency and like stakeholder requirements we got to drive some traffic put some numbers on

39:02

the board but if you're skipping over a bunch of high keyword difficulty things ignoring the fact that you could be

39:07

building links from them you are skipping the fact of this that you haven't established topical Authority on

39:13

that topic you're skipping over the fact that you understand protein benefits better than

39:18

anyone else on the internet and forget whether or not you're going to rank for it right now are you going to rank for it in five years and does that content

39:25

help you establish topical Authority for your other protein content that does have low keyword difficulty in the

39:31

classic sense that you can rank for now so

39:36

links might tell you what your short-term performance is going to look like but it's not telling you what you

39:42

should actually publish as a company as a brand

39:48

all right I've got this chart I want to pause here this to me this table is like an SEO Rorschach test

39:54

I've got six keywords on here how to grow pumpkins pumpkin companion plants pumpkin seeds pumpkin pie recipes

40:01

pumpkin carving tools health benefits of pumpkin seeds that same set of keywords you can imagine pumpkin keywords coming

40:07

out of like a keyword a topic research process for a client I think I can show you this table and

40:14

how do you tell me which factors matter most and tell me which keywords a site should try to rank for and I can tell

40:20

you how you think as an SEO in regards to content in regards to Links in regards to search intent in regards to topical relevance and probably a few

40:27

other things um so let's pretend I'm running a gardening site right we might have

40:32

dozens of articles on pumpkins we have dozens of growing guides we have like breeds of pumpkins we're covering and we

40:39

certainly have content about pumpkin seeds but maybe we don't cover the health benefits of pumpkin seeds maybe

40:44

we don't cover pumpkin seed recipes and so we might have some gardening lifestyle content about pumpkin carving

40:50

but we're certainly not like the people talking about best pumpkin carving across the board that's not our area of

40:56

authority so we're not experts on recipes carving some of this other stuff and so looking at this I think it's easy

41:02

to Dive Right In and you start staring at these metrics and searching volume and intent and it's easy to forget that

41:07

three of these three or four of these keywords are just topics you have no business ranking for whatsoever they look like keywords that you're kind of

41:14

like yeah we could fit that in our editorial calendar you have no business ranking for them and you are not gonna suddenly rank for pumpkin pie recipes

41:20

compared to you know so and so's recipe site that has 52 ways to cook pumpkin pie

41:26

I assume there's 52 ways like Curry pumpkin pie and stuff right um it's easy as an SEO to get lost in

41:33

the metrics and forget that like this should not be something our brand is covering and maybe eventually we come

41:39

back and we establish Authority around pumpkin seeds or health benefits but at

41:44

that point we should be doing health benefits of chia seeds health benefits of other stuff coming out of your garden

41:49

right cardamom or something and that kind of brings me to one of the other takeaways I have for you which is that

41:55

the best way to render keyword difficulty completely irrelevant for your site is to be focused on building

42:01

this overwhelming Authority for the topics that matter most to you the best way

42:06

for keyword difficulty to not matter is for Google to have to look at you and say like all right well we have to rank

42:12

this site because they're the overwhelming Authority on how to grow pumpkins but then we're going to look at link metrics for the rest of these

42:17

people that haven't established that Authority so my fourth tip for you is to build

42:23

overwhelming topical Authority uh my example another example that I have for

42:29

you here this is a site called insteading I own this site it's about gardening and homesteading topics which is like you know sort of passion project

42:35

stuff for me it's also like an SEO playground for the type of stuff that I want to play with and we cover all

42:41

things homesteading right we cover how to grow pumpkins uh we might even get

42:46

into like health benefits of pumpkin seeds it's a little outside our purview but we'll also cover raising chickens

42:51

raising Ducks DIY chicken coops stuff like that and we have a section here on beekeeping you can see it in like the

42:57

middle column underneath animals we've published a decent amount of posts I think there's nine or ten pages on

43:03

that content Hub about beekeeping like we we're not we're not nothing on the topic when I actually look at how we are

43:10

performing across B and honey and pollinator related topics uh we're sucking it up pretty hard

43:17

we have one page that's performing and it's DIY beehive plans and that actually has nothing to do with beekeeping that

43:23

has it that has to do with building your own DIY beehive plans and if you look at the rest of our site we have a lot of

43:30

great building topics on our site so DIY beehive plans we have some Authority

43:35

there across the site on building DIY stuff for whatever reason if I look down the

43:40

middle of the page we don't we have an established Authority on how to catch a bee swarm even though we have a decent article on there we're ranking on page

43:46

four for it and if I look at who is ranking it's be built honey flow horizontal Hive

43:52

Carolina honeybees it's sites that don't have nine articles about beekeeping it's

43:57

sites that have 900 articles about beekeeping it's the overwhelming authorities in this space and a couple

44:04

of them are probably in the same domain Authority domain rank range but a couple of them are probably smaller but they

44:10

are experts and so if we go back even if you think eat is just Google PR speak

44:16

it's showing up in the search results whether you like it or not even if you can't quantify or qualify eat as a score

44:22

it doesn't mean it's not killing off rankings that you thought you used to deserve that you don't anymore because

44:27

you haven't established the expertise and Authority on the topic the way these people have

44:34

so it's not enough to cover a topic a few times now this is an example where we really we have to go really deep on

44:40

beekeeping and probably have a hundred articles on the topic to really perform well on it not just five or ten

44:46

um but even if you're working on smaller sites as we get into the actionable stuff I think you can be building

44:52

topical Authority faster for your site one of the tips I have for you on how to do that is to go all in on structures

44:58

like content hubs and this is we have this post on different ways to structure content hubs which is kind of a cool

45:03

adjacent topic but the reason I'm referencing it today is because if you can build an editorial and

45:09

promotion calendar around a structure like this you know this is about kites but pretend it's about bees or protein

45:15

go all in on that topic for a quarter or for a year or whatever it is that's

45:22

going to allow you to focus your content creation efforts for a period of time on a core set of related topics it's going

45:27

to allow you to recruit writers around that expertise area and give them 20 projects not one it's going to allow

45:33

your team to do a better job of interlinking building these Pages out to support each other when you do them all in the same work Sprint like protein or

45:40

kites or whatever is going to be top of mind for them your promotion efforts are going to go further we can actually

45:46

align Outreach and all your social media and stuff to this larger overall campaign push

45:52

and you're going to be able to demonstrate to Google that you you know instead of doing this random active

45:57

keyword selection every three to six months that like you really know what the hell you're talking about you're going to see better traffic growth when

46:03

you can go all in on topic and get to this topical Authority in six months instead of six years because you know

46:08

you're just picking off things and you're like oh yeah we never covered kite festivals let's do that so

46:14

that's a little bit of a hack on how you can do this if you're an agency it actually makes for a pretty cool like

46:20

you can you can really sell a client on a vision of like we're going to be the dominant Authority on this subtopic

46:25

first forget all that other stuff you want to publish or if you're working with a stakeholder like hey we've got

46:31

this product coming out we're going to be let's be the overwhelming Authority on that area of the product and we'll get to the other stuff later but that's

46:37

going to allow us to really like carve out some space that we own and all of that work together is going to build on

46:43

top of each other the second thing is you're not stuck doing this once you can do this over and

46:50

over again it looks like all my little q1 Q2 Q3 indicators on this actually got

46:55

turned into white text so sorry but the idea here is q1 do your guide to kites

47:00

Q2 do your guide to I don't know DIY crafts protein fish oil benefits

47:05

whatever that topic is you can align your editorial account around it again

47:11

and again and when you get a year or two years into a calendar like this you've built up topical Authority in all the

47:17

areas that you wanted to but you did it in a way that got results potentially faster

47:22

this doesn't mean that the the left white box is just supposed to say q1 Q2

47:28

Q3 Q4 q1 again this doesn't mean that the only thing you publish on for three

47:33

three months has to be that topic right so here's an example of how maybe you know imagine orange subtopic is what I'm

47:39

focused on in q1 the dark gray subtopic is what I'm focused on in Q2 the green one is what I'm focused on in Q3 and I'm

47:47

teasing out the next upcoming topic this quarter but next quarter is when five out of 10 pieces on publishing are about

47:53

that topic that I'm trying to build Authority on so you start to introduce basically themes to your editorial

47:59

calendar but you're doing it in a way where the SEO implications are we're getting results faster we're building up

48:05

the authority we want this is how small sites can compete and

48:11

ignore keyword difficulty this is how small sites can prove that they're an authority even though they have zero

48:17

worthwhile links they're just going overboard for a year and Publishing sublimation sublimation sublimation

48:22

sublimation so a lot of the sites thinking about keyword difficulty are inherently small sites who think a

48:28

keyword is too difficult so you know if you're the big players you might not be thinking about keyword difficulty as much you might not even be watching this

48:34

presentation but if you're a small site this is how you break through a keyword difficulty and ignore it all together

48:40

because Google has to rank you you're just such a darn good authority on it keyword difficulty becomes irrelevant to

48:47

you this is also how the big sites become relevant though this is an example of customer success

48:54

content published on hubspot.com on the bottom right you can see on May 10 2018

48:59

HubSpot launches service Hub to transform the Way businesses Delight their customers on the left hand side an

49:05

ahrefs content Explorer you can see a big old burst of content on customer success one month prior on the pubspot

49:12

blog so you know that somewhere in December January February March the HubSpot editorial team you know got the

49:19

note from on high like hey we got a new product coming out we'd really like to be relevant for customer success and 11

49:25

articles later at the end of April headed into their product launch they've got some stuff to share about customer

49:30

success and they kept it going at the half the Cadence for May and June and obviously they're still publishing in

49:35

the years to come as they come up with new topics but right out of the gate biggest orientative uh content about

49:42

customer success they've got blog posts to link to from the landing page this is how big multi-thousand person SAS

49:49

companies launch products and Thai content marketing into their product marketing roadmap as well and when you

49:55

can tell your stakeholders we're now visible for a thousand queries a month related to customer success

50:00

that's really nice when it's the same quarter that you launched the customer success product

50:05

this is not like groundbreaking content like it's good you know HubSpot does good content but it's how to turn a case

50:10

study into a customer success study top 15 customer success metrics that matter eight customer success strategy like

50:17

it's just your bread and butter customer success content and you can easily see how they could dedicate a quarter to

50:23

going all in on customer success and then afterwards it just becomes one of their standard editorial silos that they

50:29

do one or two pieces a month so my point here is you can ignore

50:35

keyword difficulty if you can break through these link types of metrics if you can analyze the intent and

50:41

understand what it actually takes to show up for that keyword aside from just links so the trick to making keyword

50:48

difficulty Irrelevant for your brand it's getting better metrics into your process introducing search intent early

50:53

in your workflow treating keyword difficulty as a process not a metric and then alighting your overall content

51:00

editorial efforts to actually build the authority that you need to ignore the

51:05

metrics that other people have to worry about building topic Authority faster in your editorial calendar by double down

51:11

and repeating that process um that's it

51:19

that was awesome wow uh okay well I'm sure we'll have some questions so first

51:25

of all folks again if you have questions for for Kane uh I want to chat about uh

51:31

keyword difficulty and some of these topics drop them in the chat here um I definitely somebody mentioned this

51:37

and I wanted to bring it up so Casey was was talking about content velocity yeah uh which I think you're you're sort of

51:44

touching a little bit here is more you know focused on focusing

51:49

around key clusters rather than velocity being kind of a key metric but I'd love to get your take on that

51:55

two ways to build hubs there's the intentional way where you build out 10 pages at a time in a classic Hub and spoke and then there's the backing into

52:02

it because you've covered it 20 times already and like hey we should throw a hub together instead of just a weak category page

52:09

um so I mean if you've already done the work to be relevant on a topic do I think it makes sense to build a hub to

52:14

Cluster all of that relevance into one nice landing page on the head term like heck yeah but going forward as you're

52:22

trying to be relevant for new topics I think thinking through the thinking

52:27

through an initial content velocity that kind of does a hard push into a topic and then

52:33

it becomes just your normal once in a while editorial thing is uh it's a great

52:38

way to get over some of the topical Authority challenges that I see happening and so like you know as an

52:43

example content Harmony has this blog post from years ago on branding guidelines and we give you 30 examples of PDFs of brand guidelines it's just

52:50

it's just a list we cleaned up on traffic for that for years we are not experts on branding but we had just a

52:57

darn good post with better formatting and then we slipped against sites like

53:02

HubSpot that have 200 posts about branding who caught on that we were winning a lot of traffic on a big head

53:07

turn for brand guidelines and they did a post you know like you know not copying us but like they did their own version

53:12

of the post that was good but they have the topical authority to really power through and content Harmony slaved on

53:18

brand guidelines and we didn't care because you know it was kind of weird that we were getting all this traffic and you know the links were nice but it

53:24

wasn't our that's not what we care about ranking for as a brand so we didn't try and build up the topical authority to

53:29

beat it but when I look at what happened from when we published that in 2014 to how we've sloped off over eight years

53:35

we just abandoned the topic like it was kind of a one-off thing where we were like that's cool blog post let's publish it

53:41

if I look at the stuff we do care about like search intent keyword difficulty content hubs content briefs that's where

53:47

I'm like all right we need to keep building authority on these because that's what we care about that that's that's where our software helps you do

53:52

is build briefs and build better content and then you know align it into good clusters things like that so

53:58

um that's a little tangential from the original question but thinking about content velocity I think you can I think

54:05

content velocity overall matters but I think you can look at topical Authority from a velocity lens too build it

54:11

quickly establish it get some links promote it and it's not it's not necessarily a check box but like I feel

54:18

like you you've now passed the hurdle a lot faster to have the authority there right right

54:24

yeah and I think too that's such a good tool like internally you know if you need to get buy-in or you get you know

54:30

you want to improve to your client that's working or whatever you know if you can can sort of batch in and publish it quickly around us around a core topic

54:37

uh and sort of establish that Authority early show progress and then you know get more investment or whatever you need

54:42

to do to keep the program running and to that point I'm sitting here talking about the SEO stuff I'm the type of SEO

54:49

that just likes to talk shop with other seos I'm completely skipping over the fact that like that's a hell of a lot better Vision to sell the people that

54:56

don't care about SEO yeah we we're visible for 10 000 sessions a month about con

55:01

uh customer success that that's a vision that a c-suite hears and you know it's traffic based

55:07

but like it meets brand goals they don't care about topical Authority they care about the part where you're winning for

55:13

a topic that they care about and so there's a lot of this that can paint one big vision for a Content program and get

55:19

better buy-in and better resources to execute a bigger content Vision than just random acts of content even if

55:26

you've got an editorial calendar that's like on brand and things like that love that love that

55:32

uh Mark had a question about reverse silos versus content hubs what's the

55:38

reverse silo yeah I'm I'm also curious about that yeah you might know Mark oh

55:44

okay there's a couple SEO sites publishing on it um

55:49

typically silos are a product of the site architecture I don't know there's some worksheet here I'm gonna learn along with you

55:55

[Laughter] everybody wants to chat me yeah maybe

56:01

it's maybe it's like an article that is not in the navigation but acts as a Content Hub page and interlinks like a

56:08

like a Gateway sort of page in a way I don't know sounds cool interesting so do I have an opinion no it to me it just

56:14

sounds like a different way of structuring content hubs in the site architecture that content hubs post

56:19

there's a bunch of drawings I made and some of them are like here's how to do a classic Hub and spoke but some of them are here's how to do what I call a topic

56:25

Gateway page which is really just a category a Blog category page that isn't sucky

56:31

um so I think there's a lot of cool ways to integrate content hubs and really it boils down to does it sit in the navigation how does the inner linking

56:38

work and how do users interact with um

56:43

interact with that page in order to find other related content is it an article where they read through and there's lots

56:48

of internal links whereas an index or a database where they do a search filter in order to find content appearing in a

56:55

database underneath there so different types of content hubs and how they're integrated get differently and I care more about following that pattern in a

57:02

way that users expect and having a lot of good internal links make sense yeah but I'll Google it

57:09

reverse sounds cool sounds sophisticated I don't know what it is I'm a sucker for a good tactic

57:16

let's do it uh what's the top three things Ecom sites should look at to establish topical Authority oh that's an

57:22

interesting one um I mean REI is my evergreen Playbook on how sites should establish Authority

57:29

around a topic and tie it back to their product pages how to start hiking ultra light hiking ultralight hiking packing

57:36

guide you have to link to your e-commerce category Pages like it's just a no-brainer and so

57:41

um back the questions out I really like brainstorming worksheets or brainstorming grids like imagine a grid

57:47

where the top row is REI selling bikes commuter Bikes mountain bikes electric

57:53

bikes road bikes and then imagine a row of beginner intermediate Advanced expert

58:01

and now do a brainstorming across your product silos and across your buyer types in each category and think what

58:07

questions does this person have about the bike they're about to buy about the accessory they're about to buy

58:13

and all of a sudden you have a beginner question about commuter biking that's a lot more uh differentiated from an

58:19

advanced bike commuter looking for a better Helmet or whatever and so that to me is the best way to do that

58:25

brainstorming and it's impossible you know you set up one of these little brainstorming grids and it's impossible

58:30

not to have 64 content ideas and I think the topical Authority will come with executing on those q a fillers whatever

58:37

whatever it is yeah yeah I love that that's that's sort of kind of how we do it as well we we

58:43

use sort of our jobs to be done driven model but it's kind of the same thing right we're trying to build topical Authority around you know a specific

58:49

feature or something use case for a product or whatever and yeah it's kind of working backwards to say okay what

58:55

are the questions people have about this topic you know broadly and how do we sort of build around around that that sense of theme

59:01

the other thing I think about too is like we treat like a feature page or you know a product page like eCommerce site

59:06

we think of that as like basically it's like a middle of the funnel page and so how do we sort of build out a ramp from around that and sort of incorporate that

59:12

into you know our funnel model and a hub and spoke model Etc

59:17

yeah the one dangerous thing I've seen is we have clients in e-commerce spaces that are authoritative sites that create

59:23

these you know pretend they're the manufacturer and not the retailer they create these beautiful pages to meet the

59:28

category uh keyword of you know type of product or whatever

59:34

and they lose out to shitty sites that have a classic e-commerce category page because Google can tell it's an e-commerce category page with 12

59:40

products and a grid yeah so that's that's kind of where I go back to the intent figuring out like is

59:45

on-page optimization and a beautiful customer experience the core ranking factor or do you just need an ugly grid

59:51

of products and then you know you've got some higher FAQs and my other my other

59:56

go-to for all things e-commerce category pages is look at the FAQ content on the bottom of any Home Depot category page

1:00:03

it's awesome it's the exact questions that users have about the product they're about to buy so that's one of

1:00:09

the we show you a big old list of paas and quora threads and Reddit questions inside of content Harmony reports and

1:00:16

that's one of the ways we teach teams to use it for e-commerce category pages is you're not using content Harmony because

1:00:21

you need a perfectly optimized e-commerce category page you need a bunch of products in stock and then

1:00:26

here's a list of questions you should answer about buying the product and that's that's how you win on-page

1:00:32

content optimization on a category page it's not about having twenty thousand words it's about answering the questions buyers actually have on those products

1:00:39

uh and Home Depot just cleans up on it love that love that

1:00:45

well that's awesome man well uh first of all uh thank you again Kane uh we're at our hour here so I want to be respectful

1:00:50

of your time um yeah folks uh real quick do you want to pull up that last slide one more time

1:00:55

just so folks see your yeah I think this link is actually 404 tofu Harmony it's gonna like take you to a vegan

1:01:01

restaurant or something um that link will work within the next hour so I think the page is going up

1:01:06

soon but we'll have a landing page for the tofu community and we'll leave that up long term for just you know member

1:01:11

benefits for people that are in the tofu Community already um but we give you uh give you free

1:01:17

credits to to try out content Harmony if you DM me and slack on the tofu Community I'm there happy to get you set

1:01:23

up email you a link uh when you activate uh when you activate a subscription that's when we give you the two months

1:01:28

of free bonus credits at whatever plan level you're at but if you're if your team is building content and your content brief process could be better

1:01:35

your optimization could be better that's where content Harmony really shines and we'd love to show you the cool stuff you can do

1:01:41

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1:01:46

haven't already hit the link uh it should be in the description below to check out content Harmony and as Kane mentioned join us here in uh in top of

1:01:53

the funnel yes aftermath.com tofu you can connect with him directly and and of course uh take them up on this awesome

1:01:59

offer for uh some free contact Harmony credits sweet thanks everybody I'm on Twitter thank you for this if uh if

1:02:05

there's immediate questions and stuff too

1:02:13

right there thank you thanks again thanks all for

1:02:18

joining and have a great day cheers

One of the fastest wins in that situation is to find opportunities to identify old content that is underperforming, improve the content, and see fast improvements on traffic.

Improving outdated or poorly written content probably made up 15% of the work for one of our past case studies as an agency, and produced 30-40% of the first 6 months of results.

We have learned the hard way that when you’re kicking off a 6-month project with a high monthly budget, nothing makes clients more squirmy than getting 3-5 months in without some of these noticeable wins. And when most of our work involves publishing new content, it often takes 4-12 months for a content asset to (A) start ranking on page 1-2, and (B) move up enough on page 1 to start actually seeing some clicks and not just Search Console impressions.

Naturally, you’re often going to want to be looking for new keyword opportunities that a website hasn’t covered yet – that is covered by a separate Gap Analysis which we’ll cover in a future post.

A Quick Wins analysis is completely focused on improvements we can make to the existing content on the site to get better performance out of what we already have.

“Hey Man, This Is Basic Keyword Research & SEO Stuff”

True!

Doing a quick wins review at the beginning of an SEO or marketing engagement isn’t especially innovative – lots of agencies do this and lots of people have documented similar processes to the one I describe below for quick wins. (Here are 3 solid examples from BuiltVisible, From The Future, and Kevin Gibbons). And most SEOs have seen some version of this analysis over the years with SEMRush data being the classic source.

So the quick wins analysis alone isn’t what I’m focused on here. This tutorial exists to solely focus on the content marketing aspects of the quick wins review (so I’m not going to cover things like easy technical SEO fixes, or fixing broken links to your site).

More importantly – it also focuses more heavily on the outcomes of the quick wins review – how we approach improving content to actually take advantage of the opportunity we just identified. We’re going to go beyond looking at keyword opportunities and look at a methodology for how to effect change on the URLs where we identify potential.

So – with that said, here’s the process we’ve used with success multiple times:

1. Build a Quick Wins report using link metrics, rankings, and conversion values.
2. Prioritize opportunity based upon volume or value.
3. Review content and identify improvements needed.
4. Improvements: Improve the content itself (Easier).
5. Improvements: Build new internal links (Easier).
6. Improvements: Build new external links (Harder).

Let’s jump in:

Step 1: Build The Quick Wins Report:

1) Pull full list of Organic Keywords the site ranks for from Ahrefs.

If the list is really large, sort by keywords where position is <30. If that’s still too large, filter by other factors you care about until the list is small enough to export in 1-5 CSV chunks.

2) Pull full list of Best Pages By Links.

We want to know which pages have links, but, we just need to know Referring Domain count – we don’t care about seeing individual links for this project.

Since Ahrefs has released internal link data in Site Explorer, pull that, too. We’ll save ourselves a site crawl and use that data for internal ranking improvements.

3) Pull Page Value from Google Analytics.

This works a heck of a lot better when the company has a GA account with accurate data (meaning somebody set up Goals with tracked monetary value, or eCommerce tracking with accurate cart values).

If you don’t have GA access, you can use a raw substitute like keyword CPC, but you won’t be able to get data nearly as customized to optimize organic traffic for your *actual* conversion funnel.

Step 1B: Merge The Data

Once all 3 of these data sources are pulled, you’ll want to build a spreadsheet with 4 tabs. Leave the first tab blank, add each of the above data sections to the next 3 tabs, and now we’ll start the process of combining the data sources together.

Note: I’m in the habit of doing some of these tasks manually so that I can explore the data in Ahrefs and Google Analytics a bit before exporting it. I’ll often do this during the onboarding process as we’re getting to know the client’s data. But, you can make some of these easier using tools like URL Profiler which can also grab link metrics from Ahrefs, GA values if you have site access, and factors like word count and readability. You’ll still need to fetch rankings from Ahrefs Organic Keywords for the site manually.

Our Example Site For This Tutorial

For the rest of the post, I’m going to use Insteading[dot]com as an example site, because it’s a domain we own and it’s easy to share data for this post if we need to. It’s also gone through some recent traffic fluctuations in 2018 because of thin legacy content, so it’s a good candidate for both content upgrades as well as content pruning, though we won’t focus on pruning in this post.

It’s not quite as good of an example for this post as an eCommerce site since we don’t have any cart transactions to track for page value, but we can use a proxy like the keyword’s CPC to estimate the rough affiliate potential of a keyword. We’ll set page value to be, say, 10% of CPC value to account for that. If you’re doing this type of analysis for a prospective client, or a client you don’t have page data for, this is one way to guess at page value, but I would take any CPC-driven opportunities with a large grain of salt.

So, here’s what our tabs look like:

Note: In the screenshot above for Top Organic Keywords, I have added Protocol/Subdomain/Path1/2/3/4 Columns to the end to make it easier to analyze opportunities by subfolder section of the site. All you do to get this is Paste the URL column at the end of the table, then use Text To Columns under the Data section of the Excel ribbon, and split columns by the forward slash character “/”. If you have parameters used on your site, spit those out by “?” first, name the column parameters and move it left of the raw URL, and then perform the split by “/”.

So now we have a couple of ways to combine this data. One way would be to pull the link data into the organic keywords tab. This is fairly easily done with a VLOOKUP like this:

=VLOOKUP(G2,'ahrefs top pages by links'!C:E,3,FALSE)

We have a few hundred thousand rows so this will take a second. If you’re doing this on a full million row Excel document, your data may take a minute or more. If you start getting into VLOOKUPS that take 10-60 minutes then Excel isn’t the best tool – you should be using an application like Tableau or PowerBI or similar options.

Step 2: Prioritize opportunity based upon volume or value.

Now that you have all of your data in a single worksheet, it’s time to figure out the best way to prioritize the data.

We already have a few key data points that we’ll be using to calculate new metrics:

We’re going to create a few new columns for this as follows:

Potential Traffic & Traffic Increase

Potential Traffic = [Traffic] * [Position]

Traffic Increase = [Potential Traffic] – [Traffic]

Potential Traffic is a rough metric. We’re trying to take advantage of the fact that Ahrefs has already factored a CTR curve into their Traffic estimate for our current position. We’re also going to assume that every position offers traffic improvements over the position underneath it. It basically models a CTR curve where position 1 gets double the clicks of position 2, triple the traffic of position 3, etc. But I believe it still retains some of the root data from Ahrefs that downplays traffic estimates on lower CTR keywords.

So in this case, if we’re getting 2,000 estimated traffic at position 2, we’re estimating that we’d see 4,000 clicks at position 1.

If we’re getting 2,000 estimated traffic at position 11, we’re going to estimate that we’d be seeing 20,000 clicks at position 1 for that keyword.

These are inherently rough numbers. I’m not trying to get exact figures here – I’m trying to create a relative potential for the keyword in order to compare it against other potential opportunities we could improve on the site in question. We’re ignoring so many long-tail keywords in an analysis like this, I think that overestimating the potential of a head term by a little bit probably ends up being a wash in the end.

If the fact that I’m using rough data here bugs you, there are a few ways you can get better data if you want to take the time to do so.

1. One would be to pull CTR data from Ahrefs Keyword Explorer. This is easier on small keyword lists, but doable.
2. Another could be to build in Google Search Console data that provides closer-to-reality-but-still-not-perfect CTR and Click estimates.
3. A third option would be to send fancy gifts to the Ahrefs team until they start reporting “Clicks” data from Keyword Explorer through the Organic Keywords export in Site Explorer.
4. Moz’s Keyword Explorer doesn’t report CTR on domain-wide keyword exports but if they did, they would be a good option here. You’d get less overall keywords to export but you’d still cover most of your big win head terms.

Current Value, Potential Value, & Value Increase

Current Value = [Traffic] * [Page Value]

or, without page value: Current Value = [Traffic] * [CPC]

Potential Value = [Potential Traffic] * [Page Value]

or, without page value: Potential Value = [Potential Traffic] * [CPC]

Value Increase = [Potential Value] – [Current Value]

This is an estimate of the rough value of ranking for a keyword based upon our current Page Value from Google Analytics (preferred), or based upon CPC.

Then we calculate the potential value based upon our Potential Traffic value from a minute ago.

If you don’t have Google Analytics data, CPC is one alternative value you can use here, but I’m way less willing to lean on it for decision making than Page Value.

Note: If you still want to estimate *some* value on pages with $0 page value or on keywords with $0.00 CPC, you can add $0.01 or 10 cents to the value to make sure that you’re not missing large traffic increases labeled as zero value.

Here’s what our 3 new columns look like in our master table:

In the final table above we’re using CPC, so some of these potential value metrics are admittedly silly for the type of publishing/affiliate site we’re running. We’re not going to be able to capture that much value each month.

If we want to make the monthly numbers more realistic, dividing our CPC figures by 10 is a perfectly reasonable way to get a little bit closer to reality. However since the value represents “Monthly Value,” we might be looking at a reasonable estimate of the lifetime value of the page from the potential traffic increases, so that is a reason to leave the numbers as-is. Just make sure you know which is which if you show rough numbers like this to a client or stakeholder.

Yowza. That’s a lot of Excel so far, but, it’s not that bad. I can do the steps above in 5-10 minutes for most sites, it’s just wordy to explain the process in a blog post.

Let’s move on to the fun stuff! Most of the steps I’ve shown you so far are pretty basic. Now it’s time to start analyzing our potential, which is where the process starts to turn into valuable information.

Let’s build our pivot table. Highlight your entire sheet of data and new metrics and put the pivot table in a new Worksheet:

There are a few different ways we can analyze this data. I’m including the Pivot Table Fields on the right side of the screenshot so you can drag and drop and replicate, and then show you what our table looks like:

Here we have our full set of Site URLs, with secondary data underneath for keywords that each URL ranks for.

From there, we’ve added two columns for Sum of Traffic Increase and Sum of Value Increase. The first effectively estimates total traffic increase potential for the URL (with individual keyword-level increases shown below), and the second does the same thing with our value estimates. We’re also sorting the full table Largest To Smallest by the Value Increase potential. You need to do this on a URL level and again on a keyword level, so it will require sorting twice.

This is the basic core data we need to estimate which pages have the most potential to be increased, but we’re also going to add two columns for Average of Keyword Difficulty and Average of Referring Domains. This will basically tell us if we should expect good results from simply updating the content, or if we’ll need to build some links, too.

Step 3: Review content and identify improvements needed.

How To Analyze This Data

You don’t need to read too far into this analysis.

You could simply improve the content quality on each of the top 10-20 URLs in the list at this point and you’d see 70% of the results we’re looking for.

And that’s the first set of pages that you should focus on. But, you can do some sub-analysis on each page like the following:

1 – Use the Keywords List for Targeting Improvements

You can basically look at the top secondary keywords for each URL as a list of keywords that might need to be more closely targeted within the content. At a basic level, do your best to use each variation once.

2 – Add “Number of Keywords” Data To Find New Spin-Off Content Opportunities

On a really popular page ranking for thousands of keywords, there’s a good opportunity to create some new long-tail content. The Farmhouse Tables screenshot above is a decent example – some of those secondary keywords definitely deserve their own new piece of content that is exact match targeted.

Add a new Field for Count of Positions to effectively see how many keywords each page is ranking for, then sort the new column Largest To Smallest:

In the end, however, the biggest thing you should do is sort this sheet by the pages with the largest traffic increase or value increase potential, and then we’re going to work through our three-part framework for improving rankings on the pages we’ve identified:

How To Act On Your Quick Wins Audit

1. Improve Your Content – This is the easiest action to take. We’ll go through some methods in the next section.
2. Building Internal Links – This is the next easiest way to drive more link equity to your newly rebuilt piece of content.
3. Building External Links – If content improvements and internal link building aren’t enough to push the needle, our last set of opportunities is focused on building more referring domains that link to this particular URL.

Step 4: Improve the content

You’ll want to do a subjective review on the content and look for opportunities like the following:

1. Go through your list of secondary keywords. Look for topics you haven’t covered well in the existing piece, and add sections of content that address them.
2. Add length and word count on sections that are poorly explained. Word count alone isn’t a great metric to go by, but, we’ve rarely seen a case where taking an 800-word article and making it 2400 words didn’t improve rankings and traffic.
3. Add strong H2/H3 article structure if one isn’t already in place. If the article order is a bit confusing, I wouldn’t be afraid of re-ordering some sections are rewriting the confusing parts entirely.
4. Add screenshots, graphics, or examples throughout the post to bolster arguments and make the piece more visual.
5. Look for non-competitor videos that might make sense to embed in the content.
6. Look for new internal linking opportunities.
7. Update any out-of-date information.
8. Add Q&A sections that correspond to People Also Ask questions in search results, or top Quora topics (both of these are features in our new toolset).

We’ll elaborate on this section in a future post, but the most important thing is to look at the other sites ranking better than you and look for things that are missing from your content. If there are search result features like featured snippets and People Also Ask questions, structure your content to increase the likelihood of taking over one of those results, and so on from there.

A bit of a preview here – one of the core features of the upcoming software platform we’re releasing is helping your team audit the keywords that you’re trying to rank for and automate the process of finding these opportunities. Not just keywords you need to add to the content, but entity analysis, questions, visual content, and more.

Sign up for early access here:

Sign Up For Early Product Access

Step 5: Build new internal links

Search your website for the core keyword or related topics. A good search option is just doing [“keyword here” site:mydomain.com] and reviewing the top results in Google.

For each of the results you see that is relevant, find a good way to link in the body text to the piece of content that you’re trying to improve.

We’ll cover more ways to find internal linking opportunities in a future post, but here are some other good posts that elaborate in the meantime:

• https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/18796/internal-linking/
• https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/internal-linking/
• https://www.iqseo.org/building-internal-links-for-seo-wins/

Step 6: Build new external links

Building new offsite links are the last option we use – updating content and building internal links tend to be way easier and it’s more cost effective to start there.

That said, you rarely need 100 new referring domains to be competitive in a quick wins analysis because it’s by definition focused on content where you’re already doing pretty well.

Guest posting is a great place to start. Building links through guest posting can be slow and tedious and it’s not always our first choice of link building approaches. But, when you’re leveraging the time spent on it by building links to high priority pages of content on your site like the ones you’ll identify in your quick wins analysis, then you’re leveraging your guest blogging time and effort way more effectively.

Guest posts are also a great way to grab a link to eCommerce product/category pages that don’t earn links organically themselves…

.

Aside from guest posting, it also makes sense to do some basic content promotion outreach and look for related pieces of content that are naturally earning links you could replicate. Again – 1 or 2 links or referring domains here will usually go a long way.

One way to use the analysis we built above to analyze link building requirements would be to add a Net Links calculation. Ahrefs uses a 0-100 scale for Keyword Difficulty, so it’s not a perfect representation of the number of links to the average result on page 1.

But if you look at the scale, Keyword Difficulty roughly scales like this:

So, with this rough conversion rate in mind, we can build an Excel formula like this:

Links Needed = (([Keyword Difficulty] + 15) / 20) * [Keyword Difficulty] – [Referring Domains]

OK, what exactly is this formula doing?

We’re taking the Ahrefs KD scale and turning it into a multiplier. By adding 15 and then dividing by 25, we turn a 0-100 scale into a 1-6 scale. We’re adding 15 so that not as many results comes back with decimal results under 1.0. So KD 75 gets turned into 3.6. KD 24 gets turned into 1.6. If this doesn’t make any sense, don’t worry about it.

The important thing to know is that we’re editing Ahrefs KD to spit back mostly larger numbers so we can estimate how many links we need.

So here’s what your new Links Needed metric would look like:

What’s cool about this is we can use it in 3 ways:

1. We can sort by smallest to largest to find opportunities where we probably don’t need links. If Links Needed is negative – we’re already probably the largest linked page on that keyword! Likewise, if Links Needed is close to 0, we probably will see solid results from content improvements alone.
2. We can sort Difficulty by largest to smallest and find existing content that is ranking in a link-heavy space. If our content is similar to the type of content earning lots of links in this particular keyword set, if we can find a way to make our content better than everyone else’s and then conduct outreach, we probably have a strong potential link building resource on our hands. Even if we manage to build 10-20 new links and don’t move any rankings on that URL – who cares? We just found an untapped link building asset on our domain.

This Is Just The Beginning

I’ve already mentioned some cool ways you can expand this analysis, but here’s a list to get you started.

• Substitute Ahrefs link/keyword data for Moz or SEMRush data and look for other opportunities that didn’t make it into your first analysis.
• Add in different types of conversion data to optimize for different outcomes (shopping cart conversions vs lead gen forms vs email subscriber signups, etc.)
• Add in Google Search Console data to better compare against other keywords and Clicks that 3rd party tools won’t tell you about.
• Pull in word count data from a site scrape to find thin content that is underperforming.
• Pull in internal linking data to find under-linked top performers.
• Pull in Adwords conversion data on these keywords to understand potential conversions by keyword that may not be properly represented in your Page Value data, eg if you’re sending PPC traffic to a separate landing page.
• Pull

Please comment with additional ideas!

Wrapping Up Your Quick Wins Analysis

There are undoubtedly some improvements to all of the processes I describe in this post, but I’ve focused the content on the easiest approach to get 80% of the results. Every business we work with is different, and the way you do this analysis for an enterprise SaaS company compared to a midsize eCommerce company will need to differ to fit that organization.

Conduct this type of quick wins audit every 6 to 12 months after you kick off on a project, as ongoing rankings changes and new content that is suddenly ranking on page 3 for lots of keywords will present new opportunities for quick wins in the future.

Also – here’s the XLSX file I used for this post so you can play with the pivot tables and other data.

I’ve removed the VLOOKUP formulas in order to keep the data static, but you should be able to replicate some of the queries I used. Columns may have changed in each case. There’s no proprietary data in there that you couldn’t pull from any Ahrefs report, so try replicating this on a site that you work on and feel free to leave questions in the comments.

Want to see how Content Harmony helps you build content that outranks the competition?

The blog post you just read scores Good in our Content Grader for the topic "content marketing quick wins".

Grade your content against an AI-driven topic model using Content Harmony - get your first 10 credits for free when you schedule a demo, or sign up here to take it for a spin on your own.

What's New

We opened up on API in Beta earlier this year that allow you to fetch team details, retrieve/create/update your Projects, and create/retrieve basic Content Workflow details.

In November, we significantly expanded our API with full read-level access to every section of your Content Workflow.

The API now includes 20+ dedicated endpoints that give you programmatic access to every component of your content research workflow.

Content Workflows API Updates

All endpoints are now organized under /api/v2/content_workflows/:id/ with dedicated resources for each tab or section of the workflow.

Core Workflow Data:

• List, create, and retrieve content workflows
• Access workflow metadata and status

A sample response for a Content Workflow:

{
  "object": "keyword_brief",
  "id": 1,
  "keywords": "tatooine",
  "country_code": "US",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "project_id": 1,
  "status": "completed",
  "created_at": "2024-12-02T23:39:21.288Z",
  "started_at": null,
  "completed_at": "2025-12-01T23:39:21.288Z",
  "content_difficulty": null,
  "average_word_count": null,
  "search_volume": null,
  "cpc": null,
  "links": [
    {
      "object": "link",
      "id": null,
      "show_discussion": true,
      "url": "https://app.contentharmony.com/l/abcd12303/brief"
    },
    {
      "object": "link",
      "id": null,
      "show_discussion": false,
      "url": "https://app.contentharmony.com/l/abcd12304/brief"
    }
  ],
  "resources": {
    "intent": "https://app.contentharmony.com/api/v2/content_workflows/1/intent",
    "topics": "https://app.contentharmony.com/api/v2/content_workflows/1/topics",
    "related_keywords": "https://app.contentharmony.com/api/v2/content_workflows/1/related_keywords",
    "outline": "https://app.contentharmony.com/api/v2/content_workflows/1/outline",
    "questions": "https://app.contentharmony.com/api/v2/content_workflows/1/questions",
    "referenced_links": "https://app.contentharmony.com/api/v2/content_workflows/1/referenced_links",
    "internal_links": "https://app.contentharmony.com/api/v2/content_workflows/1/internal_links",
    "gov_edu_sources": "https://app.contentharmony.com/api/v2/content_workflows/1/gov_edu_sources",
    "news_sources": "https://app.contentharmony.com/api/v2/content_workflows/1/news_sources",
    "suggested_images": "https://app.contentharmony.com/api/v2/content_workflows/1/suggested_images",
    "google_image_results": "https://app.contentharmony.com/api/v2/content_workflows/1/google_image_results",
    "competitor_images": "https://app.contentharmony.com/api/v2/content_workflows/1/competitor_images",
    "shopping_images": "https://app.contentharmony.com/api/v2/content_workflows/1/shopping_images",
    "videos": "https://app.contentharmony.com/api/v2/content_workflows/1/videos",
    "competitors": "https://app.contentharmony.com/api/v2/content_workflows/1/competitors"
  }
}

 Research & Analysis:

• Intent Analysis - Search intent classification, freshness, and more
• Topics - Our full topic model with priority scoring and competitor usage
• Related Keywords - Semantic keyword variations and search volume data
• Outline - AI-generated & competitor content outlines with heading hierarchy
• Competitors - Top-ranking competitor analysis with metrics
• Questions - Questions from AI Suggestions, PAAs, Quora, and Reddit
• Referenced Links - Curated external sources to reference
• Internal Links - Suggested internal linking opportunities
• Gov/Edu Sources - Authority sources from .gov and .edu domains
• News Sources - Recent news articles related to your topic
• Suggested Images - AI suggested images for your content
• Image Results - Search-based image recommendations
• Competitor Images - Images used by top-ranking competitors
• Shopping Images - Product images from eCommerce results
• Videos - Related video content and YouTube results

Sample response from our Questions tab:

{
  "object": "list",
  "metadata": {
    "total_count": 3,
    "highlighted_count": 1,
    "by_category": {
      "ai_suggestions": 1,
      "google_paa": 2,
      "quora": 0,
      "stack_exchange": 0,
      "reddit": 0,
      "yahoo_answers": 0
    },
    "links": [
      {
        "object": "link",
        "id": null,
        "show_discussion": true,
        "url": "https://app.contentharmony.com/l/abcd123013/questions"
      },
      {
        "object": "link",
        "id": null,
        "show_discussion": false,
        "url": "https://app.contentharmony.com/l/abcd123014/questions"
      }
    ]
  },
  "questions": [
    {
      "object": "question",
      "id": 1,
      "question_text": "Where is Tatooine in real life?",
      "category": "ai_suggestion",
      "category_name": "AI Suggestion",
      "source_position": 0,
      "snippet": null,
      "title": null,
      "displayed_link": null,
      "highlighted": true
    },
    {
      "object": "question",
      "id": 2,
      "question_text": "Why is Tatooine included in so many Star Wars plots?",
      "category": "desktop",
      "category_name": "Google PAA",
      "source_position": 0,
      "snippet": "Tatooine filming locations include Tunisia in North Africa...",
      "title": "Tatooine Filming Locations",
      "displayed_link": "en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatooine",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatooine",
      "highlighted": false
    },
    {
      "object": "question",
      "id": 3,
      "question_text": "What's so special about Tatooine?",
      "category": "desktop",
      "category_name": "Google PAA",
      "source_position": 1,
      "snippet": "It appeared twice in the original trilogy because it was Luke's home planet...",
      "title": "Understanding Tatooine's Importance",
      "displayed_link": "starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Tatooine",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatooine",
      "highlighted": false
    }
  ]
}

In addition to the research data from the Keyword Report, you can also access HTML copies of both the Content Brief and the Content Grader:

Content Tools:

• Brief Content - Export editable brief HTML for Google Docs, Word, or other editors
• Content Grader - Score your draft content with readability metrics, word count analysis, and topic coverage

Sample response from our Content Grader:

{
  "object": "content_grader",
  "keyword_brief_id": 1,
  "id": 1,
  "created_at": "2025-11-25T23:39:22.077Z",
  "updated_at": "2025-12-02T22:39:22.077Z",
  "metadata": {
    "links": [
      {
        "object": "link",
        "id": 1,
        "show_discussion": true,
        "url": "https://app.contentharmony.com/l/abc123def456/grader"
      },
      {
        "object": "link",
        "id": 2,
        "show_discussion": false,
        "url": "https://app.contentharmony.com/l/xyz789ghi012/grader"
      }
    ]
  },
  "content_scoring": {
    "content_score": 78,
    "content_score_label": "Great",
    "content_score_label_color": "grader-great",
    "current_word_count": 487,
    "recommended_word_count": 650,
    "current_readability": 68,
    "current_readability_label": "8th Grade",
    "recommended_readability": 70,
    "recommended_terms_used": 7,
    "recommended_terms_total": 10
  },
  "content_draft": {
    "title": "Complete Guide to Living on Tatooine",
    "html_content": "<h1>Complete Guide to Living on Tatooine</h1><p>Tatooine, the desert planet orbiting twin suns, presents unique challenges for settlers and moisture farmers. This comprehensive guide covers everything you need to know about surviving and thriving in this harsh environment.</p><h2>Essential Moisture Farming Equipment</h2><p>Moisture farming on Tatooine requires specialized vaporators that extract water from the atmosphere. Quality moisture farming equipment can mean the difference between prosperity and failure in the desert.</p><h2>Key Survival Tips</h2><ul><li>Maintain your vaporator maintenance schedule</li><li>Avoid traveling during the hottest hours</li><li>Watch for Tusken Raider activity</li><li>Keep sandcrawler parts in stock for repairs</li></ul><p>By following these guidelines, you can successfully establish your homestead on Tatooine.</p>",
    "url": "https://example.com/tatooine-settlers-guide",
    "has_content": true
  },
  "topics": {
    "metadata": {
      "total_count": 3,
      "highlighted_count": 1
    },
    "items": [
      {
        "object": "topic",
        "id": 1,
        "phrase": "moisture farming equipment",
        "documents_count": 8,
        "total_occurrences_count": 42,
        "priority": 85,
        "variants": [
          "moisture vaporators",
          "water collection equipment"
        ],
        "highlighted": true,
        "ignored": false,
        "content_grader_uses": 3
      },
      ... (topics continued)

API Documentation Improvements

We've completely redesigned our API documentation with:

• Individual pages for each resource type with detailed field descriptions
• Live example responses using realistic data
• Clear endpoint paths and authentication examples
• Inline code samples for cURL, Javascript, Python, and Ruby, along with usage notes

Visit the updated docs portal at https://app.contentharmony.com/api to explore all available endpoints.

How your team can use Content Harmony's API

This update provides the foundation for teams to build sophisticated content operations workflows on top of Content Harmony's data.

• Export workflow data to your content management system with tools like Zapier, Make.com, and n8n
• Build custom dashboards with your content research metrics
• Automate content creation workflows with programmatic access
• Integrate with your tools like Airtable, Notion, or custom applications
• Pull content briefs directly into Google Docs or Microsoft Word

Each endpoint returns JSON data that's ready to use in your applications, with comprehensive field documentation to help you build robust integrations.

So today, we released a configurable "Copy Terms To Clipboard" feature accessible in any Content Grader:

By default, we will export All Keywords and Keyword Variants to your clipboard. If you'd like, you can also export Priority details (eg 87% priority) and usage details (eg currently used 15x (avg 12x) ).

You can also export all of this data to line-separated or comma-separated format depending on what is most useful to your workflow.

This feature works for both logged in users, and guest users who are accessing shareable Content Workflow URLs.

Here's an example of the default formatting:

fatty acids, fatty acid
hair
hair loss
omega-3, omega-3s
fish oil, Fish oils
hair follicles, hair follicle
hair growth
oil, oils
supplements, supplement
study, studies
hair health
alpha-linolenic acid, Alpha Linolenic Acid
diet
docosahexaenoic acid
eicosapentaenoic acid
fish oil supplements, fish oil supplement
... etc

And here's an example of the fully formatted version with usage and priority details:

fatty acids, fatty acid - 80% priority, currently used 2x (avg 5x)
hair - 69% priority, currently used 3x (avg 7x)
hair loss - 69% priority, currently used 0x (avg 4x)
omega-3, omega-3s - 61% priority, currently used 1x (avg 8x)
fish oil, Fish oils - 61% priority, currently used 0x (avg 7x)
hair follicles, hair follicle - 61% priority, currently used 0x (avg 2x)
hair growth - 53% priority, currently used 5x (avg 5x)
oil, oils - 46% priority, currently used 0x (avg 6x)
supplements, supplement - 42% priority, currently used 4x (avg 3x)
study, studies - 34% priority, currently used 3x (avg 3x)
hair health - 34% priority, currently used 0x (avg 2x)
alpha-linolenic acid, Alpha Linolenic Acid - 34% priority, currently used 2x (avg 1x)
diet - 30% priority, currently used 1x (avg 3x)
docosahexaenoic acid - 30% priority, currently used 2x (avg 1x)
eicosapentaenoic acid - 30% priority, currently used 1x (avg 1x)
fish oil supplements, fish oil supplement - 26% priority, currently used 0x (avg 4x)

Here's an example prompt you can use with a current draft of content to have an LLM automatically suggest content additions based upon currently unused terms:

Here's a Loom video on how to upgrade an existing draft of content in just 4 minutes and easily see which changes the LLM has added to your content. Basically we use the prompt above, followed by:

While logged in anywhere in the Content Harmony app, you can now type CMD+K on Mac, or CTRL+K on Windows, and load up a command palette.

From there you can navigate common jumplinks with your up/down keyboard strokes, or search across all of your Projects, Content Workflows, and Promotion Workflows.

This is a big quality of life improvement for teams with hundreds or thousands of briefs across many projects.

Additionally, we've launched quick short cut links on the team dashboard to your three most recent Workflows and your three most recent Projects:

1) Refresh My Credits & Reset Billing Cycle

We used to tell users to contact us via live chat if they needed more credits before their billing renewal date.

In those cases, what we usually would recommend is just resetting the monthly billing date to today to trigger a new batch of credits.

Now we've introduced a button to let you do that yourself:

Credits are issued immediately after successful payment, which usually takes just a few seconds to show up on your dashboard.

2) Edit Billing Contacts, Download Invoice Copies, & Update Payment Methods

The second big update is that we've integrated more deeply with Stripe Portal, allowing your admin users to edit billing contacts (email, address, and tax ID), download recent invoice copies, and manage your payment methods beyond credit cards.

From the Stripe Portal you can manage each of these directly:

We have tried to format these similarly to what you'll encounter in actual SERPs, while also making it easy to review Reference URLs that are being cited.

Here's the 'natural' version of the AI Overview shown above.

Our AI Overview previews are resizable if you need to zoom out, since we've seen results that have 300+ words of content and 45! citations.

Sometimes Google doesn't display AI Overviews correctly due to various LLM errors. When that happens, we'll still let you know that Google tried to display an AI Overview and that you should take a look in your own browser.

It's also common for Google to offer an AI Overview but require further user interaction before displaying it. In that case we'll display a similar message prompting the user to go take a look in their own browser.

EditorNinja is a flat-rate editing and content creation service that integrates directly with Content Harmony. You can send your content briefs to EditorNinja for content creation, and you can submit your content grader links to EditorNinja for editing as well as content optimization services.

Teams can enable the integration themselves on the new Team Integrations page at https://app.contentharmony.com/account/integrations, as well as get access to a signup bonus offer to give EditorNinja a try.

Learn more about the integration features here.

Highlight All and Unhighlight All are available on most tabs of your Keyword Report (Questions are coming soon).

I was mindlessly scrolling for a minute this afternoon and spotted this picture making the rounds on Facebook and Reddit (/r/coolguides).

Supposedly, it's a list of rules for every Looney Tunes episode of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner.

Here is the text version:

Rule 1. The Road Runner cannot harm the Coyote except by going “beep-beep!”

Rule 2. No outside force can harm the Coyote—only his own ineptitude or the failure of the Acme products.

Rule 3. The Coyote could stop anytime—if he were not a fanatic. (Repeat: “A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.” —George Santayana.)

Rule 4. No dialogue ever, except “beep-beep!”

Rule 5. The Road Runner must stay on the road—otherwise, logically, he would not be called Road Runner.

Rule 6. All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters—the Southwest American desert.

Rule 7. All materials, tools, weapons, or mechanical conveniences must be obtained from the Acme Corporation.

Rule 8. Whenever possible, make gravity the Coyote’s greatest enemy.

Rule 9. The Coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures.

This document is what your editorial guidelines should look like if you actually want people to read them.

Guidelines or Guardrails?

It is tempting to build a 34-page editorial guidelines document, filled with examples for everyone to follow. I have done it for clients.

Here on the Content Harmony blog our post on how to create editorial guidelines even advises to 'go as deep as possible'. I have been tempted to do it for Content Harmony, although we kept our published editorial guidelines short and readable.

But even if you create that 34-page document, in the end, not enough team members will read it and internalize everything it has to share. And it's a pain to keep it up-to-date.

It might be the final source of truth, but maybe it's not the document you should send to new writers and team members?

Instead...

What are the 9 rules to producing content for your brand?

What are the 5 things that a writer must always do in every content asset your team publishes?

It's not about how we handle bullets and blockquotes - it's about what makes the content ours.

Those are the most essential pieces of information to put in front of new team members.

In reality, a single page guide like this Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner example will be way more read and digested - which probably means it's wildly more effective.

Fixed Principles, Flexible Execution

Look at the language used in these rules: cannot, only, no dialogue ever, no outside force, must, all action must, all materials etc must, whenever possible, always.

These are inviolable, immutable, unchanging directives. It clearly lays out parameters for writers to successfully write an episode of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner even if Chuck Jones and his team weren't in the room.

Nearly half of the rules focus on the physics of the coyote & road runner's universe.

Your goal for your brand should be to make your editorial guidelines this clear.

They need to be this grounded and principled and embedded in the story you want to tell.

These constraints aren't telling the writers how to be funny. They're just establishing Wile E. Coyote & Road Runner's relationship and the "rules" of their universe.

Your guidelines shouldn't tell your writers how to be smart or insightful. They should be establishing your brand's relationship with its customers and the "physics" of your brand's universe.

Example Content Rules in Practice

Since I'm not aware of any brands that have done this in reality, let's look at some examples I made up.

Content Rules for Content Harmony

Here is an example I have built for Content Harmony. It's not official, but it's a decent first draft of where I might take this:

Rule 1. We exist to help content marketers be more effective. All of our content must support that.

Rule 2. Show, don't tell. Every article must have examples that readers can copy, either real or made up for that piece.

Rule 3. Sometimes it's hard to find examples you can publish publicly. In that case, don't skip it, make your own. Then let the reader download a copy of what you built.

Rule 4. Never assume knowledge. Define terms on first use.

Rule 5. Always include screenshots, examples, or mockups.

Rule 6. Write like you're helping a friend. Cut back on marketing jargon or buzzwords.

Rule 7. Every piece needs one surprising insight. What can we contribute to the topic that nobody else has?

Rule 8. Focus on one problem at a time. Solve it completely.

Rule 9. End with a clear next step. Readers should know exactly what to do when they finish reading.

Content Rules for REI

Here is an example of a direction you might go if you're REI (again, these aren't official, I made them up):

Rule 1. All gear reviews must include testing in real conditions. No lab-only or theoretical reviews.

Rule 2. Nature always appears untouched. No staged campfires, moved rocks, or manufactured scenes.

Rule 3. Every how-to guide must work for both beginners and experts. No assuming experience level.

Rule 4. People in photos must follow actual safety practices. No compromising safety for style.

Rule 5. We always respect nature. No ignoring sustainability.

Rule 6. All writers must have real world experience in their topic.

Rule 7. Include specific locations and conditions. No generic "great for hiking" claims.

Rule 8. Show a spectrum of outdoor participants. No defaulting to any single group or skill level.

Rule 9. We exist to inspire and equip everyone to get outside. Our content should always do this as well.

Questions To Get You Started

Here's a set of grouped questions you can use as a brainstorming guide as you build your own:

Core Identity Questions:

• What would make a piece of content instantly recognizable as NOT your brand?
• What do you refuse to compromise on, even when it would be easier?
• What are your "physics" - the fundamental laws that govern how your brand operates?
• What do competitors do that you would never do?
• What practices do you consider "cheating" in your industry?

Content Creation Questions:

• What makes your audience immediately trust a piece of content?
• What makes them immediately distrust it?
• What must appear in every single piece?
• What can never appear?
• What tone mistakes would stand out as jarring to regular readers?
• What formatting or structural elements must stay consistent?
• What sources or types of evidence do you consider valid?
• What sources or types of evidence are forbidden?

Visual Questions:

• What must all imagery include?
• What can never appear in images?
• What angles, compositions, or styles are forbidden?
• What colors or visual elements must stay consistent?
• What visual clichés in your industry do you reject?

Voice Questions:

• What words or phrases are forbidden?
• What industry jargon do you embrace vs reject?
• What reading level do you target?
• What assumptions about the reader are never allowed?
• What tone elements must stay consistent?

Process Questions:

• What steps in creation are unskippable?
• What shortcuts are never allowed?
• What must be verified before publishing?
• What level of evidence is required for claims?
• What types of examples must be included?

Audience Questions:

• Who are we always speaking to?
• What questions must every piece answer for the reader?
• What promised value must every piece deliver?
• What audience pain points must you acknowledge?
• What audience expertise level do you assume/not assume?
• What actions should readers always be able to take after consuming your content?

Mission Alignment:

• How must each piece advance your larger mission?
• What principles can never be sacrificed for engagement?
• What industry myths are you committed to fighting?
• What truths must you always tell, even when uncomfortable?
• What positive change must each piece drive toward?

Distribution Questions:

• What contexts must your content work within?
• What platforms or formats are forbidden?
• What presentation elements must stay consistent across channels?
• What types of promotion are never allowed?

Ethical Guidelines:

• What practices do you consider unethical in your space?
• What disclosures must always be included?
• What relationships must be transparent?
• What conflicts of interest are never acceptable?

Legacy Questions:

• What do you want to be known for in 5 years?
• What industry practices are you trying to change?
• What would make future audiences lose trust in your archive?
• What timeless elements must persist as trends change?

The new design is lighter, more modern, and paves the way for a number of upcoming features and improvements throughout the app.

We have lots more to come in the next few months as we continue upgrading old features and launching new ones! Let us know what you'd like to see next.

Paste a published URL into our new Content Grader field, select Fetch Article or Fetch Full Page from the dropdown button, and we'll go off and fetch the live content of that URL.

Fetch Article vs Fetch Full Page

Currently we recommend you use Fetch Article for most blog & article formatted content. However our content parser will try to delete or ignore lots of marked up content like sidebars, nav menus, footers, etc.

If you find that you try to import using Fetch Article and we are missing content from the page, try Fetch Full Page instead.

Fetch Full Page will still delete quite a bit of unnecessary HTML and header/footer/sidebar type of content, but it is less restrictive on things like widget and hero content, so it works better for things like homepages, landing pages, etc.

Here is an example of pulling in more dynamic content like tables:

However you'll also need to manually delete things like Breadcrumbs or CTAs that appear in your content:

Today we're releasing AI Suggested Questions, which help your content team brainstorm important questions and answers to add to your FAQs or outline in your brief:

We have backfilled historical questions on all existing Content Workflows in Content Harmony, and we're providing suggested questions and answers for all Content Workflows created since May 2023.

Here are a few ways to use AI Suggested Questions in your content:

• Build comprehensive FAQ sections: Utilize AI Suggested Questions to improve your FAQ sections and provide detailed answers to your audience's most common queries.
• Highlight core search intent angles in your outline: Include suggested questions and answers in an outline or FAQ section of your content brief to help guide your writers and ensure you're covering all-important aspects of the topic.
• Develop useful content for sales pages: Answering core user questions are easily my favorite way to improve sales pages, whether it's eCommerce product/category pages, software landing/feature pages, or any other kind of business service page. Take a look at the first example below for "kids snowboard boots" for a great example.
• Identify FAQSchema opportunities: Marking up FAQs in FAQSchema offers an easy SERP feature addition for many page types.

With AI Suggested Questions now live in all Content Harmony reports, your team can quickly hone in on top user questions to answer that go beyond what PAAs can provide.

Here are some more examples of AI Suggested Questions in action:

Today we're releasing AI Suggested Images, which help your content team brainstorm critical visual assets to set your content apart:

In the AI-fueled era of content creation, your team's ability to set your content apart through creativity, formatting, and visual supporting content is essential to running a content marketing program that will earn attention.

My content team used to spend hours every week brainstorming ideas for useful graphics that we could add to content. That doesn't even include the time to figure out the text that goes in each graphic or actually have the graphic designer create it!

Now we can come up with these same ideas in seconds, and spend that time making these graphics ideas better, and producing visual assets more reliably across all of our content efforts.

We weren't just doing this for fun or to make our content more visual - having awesome shareable graphics is one of the secrets of successful link building (and link earning).

AI Suggested Images are now live in all Content Harmony reports (yes, we backfilled every historical report in your account).

Here's a few more ideas on how you can use these graphics in your content program:

1. Brainstorm visual elements for landing pages: AI Suggested Images aren't just for articles - they're awesome at helping you come up with visual design elements for landing pages, eCommerce product pages, and other high converting pages.
2. Build more effective infographics and data visualizations: Utilize AI Suggested Images to develop informative infographics and data visualizations that can effectively present complex information in an easily digestible and visually engaging manner.
3. Improve your email outreach: Incorporate AI Suggested Images into your email outreach and newsletters to drive higher click-through rates.
4. Increase click-through rates on search results: Compelling images can improve the click-through rate of your content in search results by making your content stand out among other search listings.
5. Develop shareable content upgrades (my personal favorite): Use the suggested images to create content upgrades such as checklists, cheat sheets, or templates that are visually appealing and shareable, enticing readers to join your email list or share your content.
6. Save on design costs: AI Suggested Images can help you cut down on design costs by coming up with design ideas faster. This means less back and forth and editing with your design team and asking them to "come up with a graphic idea for this article."
7. Promote your content more easily on social channels: AI Suggested Images can help your long-form content perform better on social media when you have useful graphics to share.

With AI Suggested Images now live in all Content Harmony reports, your team can save even more time creating great visual content.

Here are some more examples of AI Suggested Images in action:

In short, most of the fast-growing AI writing tools out there were producing garbage output from earlier GPT-3 models.

I didn't want to bolt on weak features that generated repetitive gibberish just to ride the AI wave.

But, with the release of the davinci-003 model last November, and the better known release of ChatGPT a few days later, the quality of AI-generated suggestions has finally reached a quality level that I'm comfortable delivering to our users.

More importantly, I think it's a mistake for our users to not be using AI-generated suggestions and ideas to build better content. Good brainstorming assistance saves hours in the content creation process every week.

With that in mind, I'm excited to announce that we're releasing AI Suggested Headings in Content Harmony today.

This is the first in a series of AI-backed features we'll be adding in the coming months.

Our initial AI features will fit right inside of the workflow you already like in Content Harmony. For Headings, this means you'll be able to highlight headings right inside the Outline section of your Keyword Report, and they'll show up in your Content Brief:

AI Suggested Headings are live today for all users, and we've backfilled data for every existing Content Workflow in your account.

P.S. - I've talked to more than one content marketer who's a bit unsure about using AI in their creative workflow. We've put together some notes on how we recommend using the AI Suggestions in Content Harmony to make your content better. If you're still working on implementing policies within your team, I'd recommend that as a good starting point for discussion.

The new Content Brief tab inside the Content Harmony app no longer has static form fields, but rather a fully-customizable block editor that allows you to add tables, checklists, emojis, notes, comments, and more.

When you first log in, we’ll prompt you to select a template from our library to help you get up to speed quicker. You can customize these to your liking or create new ones for different projects and content types.

Highlighted data from the Keyword Report shows up automatically inside the Content Brief. Keep it in the same format for your writer or convert it to editable text with one click.

More resources for the new brief system:

• Content Brief Product Overview
• Content Brief Templates Product Overview
• Help Doc: How do I use the Content Briefs tab? (Coming Soon)
• Help Doc: How do I create and edit Content Brief Templates? (Coming Soon)
• Article: How to Write SEO-Focused Content Briefs
• Article: 17 Content Brief Templates (Coming Soon)

The new system is now available to all Content Harmony users, and new Teams will be added to the editor by default.

We’ll be sending out more information to existing teams on the upcoming migration process for your existing briefs in the old editing system.

This new editor will allow us to build a bunch of cool upcoming integrations, so stay tuned for new block types coming soon!

Yeah, you can run a basic content program with one or two people, but if you really want to scale a content marketing program, you're going to need a team.

So, one of the common questions we'll see is "what roles belong on my content team?" and "who should I hire first?".

Those are good questions, and we'll cover them a bit in this post. But our main goal here is to take an inventory of all of the different roles that play a part in content marketing. From the ~100+ agency projects I've worked on, this list includes every single role/team that I have encountered within client organizations and how they can be involved in content efforts.

You should use this list as a brainstorming tool. It's a list of who in your company may be able to contribute to your content marketing program. You can also use it to make sure you've considered all of the functions that may need to happen in a full-fledged content operation.

Caveats about content marketing roles

So before we dive in, there are a few things we should mention:

Content marketing roles extend beyond the content team

Aside from the obvious roles that are dedicated full-time to content marketing efforts, in this post we’ll also discuss other stakeholder and partner roles that will interact with content marketing teams periodically.

Many of these roles will overlap on smaller teams

It’s unrealistic for most teams to build out an entire dedicated content marketing department. Only the largest organizations will have everyone on this list.

Nevertheless, if you're hiring a single content marketer or two, you'll need to be realistic and make sure that those team members can perform multiple functions found below.

Few content marketers can do everything on this list well

If you’re trying to hire a one-person-army content marketer, keep in mind that you’ll need a very special candidate if you want them to be able to do strategy, content creation, content promotion, and more.

It's often better to hire a candidate who can do 1-2 things well and interact with team members to cover the rest of the roles, like content creation. For example, a strategist who can promote content well is a great person to pair with freelance content writers.

🎨 Content Producers

When it comes to content marketing teams, the role of a content producer is an obvious one. But the title ‘content producer’ is often thrown around with multiple overlapping responsibilities. The type of content producer you need on your team really depends on your content marketing strategy — if you’re focusing on SEO content, then a writer is a natural fit. A videographer may be a natural addition for those who want to branch out into a video program.

While it’s definitely possible to pull in freelance support for content production, this type of arrangement can only be successful if you have very strong project management, editing, and strategy coverage (we’ll cover those next).

Writers

The content writer is usually one of the most critical roles in a content marketing team. These individual contributors must combine a flair for storytelling with a deep understanding of the product, the target audience, and conversion tactics to drive user behavior.

A writer is usually the first hire on a content marketing team, simply because the allure of SEO as a marketing and acquisition channel is too big to ignore. Writers support so many aspects of the entire marketing team — from product marketing, demand generation, even brand & community — that their value is hard to beat.

While some content writers will have basic SEO knowledge and can play around with SEO SaaS tools, they should be hired on the basis of their writing chops alone. They could potentially plug in some SEO gaps in the very early stages of a content marketing program, but you will need to hire a more specialist fit as you scale.

The core skills and capabilities of a content writer should include:

• Superior research and analytical skills, the ability to get to the heart of a story, and separate fact from fiction
• Expertise in the niche, either through formal training or prior experience
• A demonstrated knack for writing, with a portfolio of published content
• Cross-format skills, e.g. ability to convert a blog post into Twitter threads, video scripts, emails, infographics

Designers

Design roles aren’t just about pretty featured images or illustrations.

A designer focused on content marketing should be equipped to build instructional graphics, charts, tables, and a variety of other visual assets that will help the post go beyond simple text formatting.

Designers can also help you craft engaging decks for sales enablement material, e-books, gated downloads, and custom images to use for paid social and email campaigns. What’s more, they ensure adherence to things like brand style guides, responsive visual assets, and image compression for quicker site loads.

The responsibilities of a content designer include:

• Using a creative brief from the editor or content manager to create new visual assets
• Working with content writers to repurpose blog posts into infographics
• Annotating screenshots and other product-led visual assets for informational content
• Collaborating with product managers for conversion-driven landing pages
• Understanding and applying best practices for design assets across paid acquisition channels
• Developing or maintaining brand guidelines, and ensuring consistency across owned channels (website, social media pages, directory listings, video platforms)

Video Editors

Video editors are helpful if you’re looking to leverage platforms like YouTube for your content marketing strategy or use video as a key facet of your marketing flywheel. You could, of course, invest in both written / visual content as well as video if budgets allow.

The key responsibilities of a video editor include:

• Working with editorial teams for video storyboarding and scripts
• Editing raw footage content and cutting video sequences
• Organizing and managing all audio and video assets
• Ensuring consistency with brand guidelines
• Expertise in editing software such as Premiere Pro, After Effect, Photoshop, etc.

Web Developers

If your content marketing efforts will include interactive tools or content, those will go beyond what normal graphic design roles are capable of, and will require developers or data visualization skill sets and team members.

While a dedicated web developer is not a common hire on a content marketing team, we’ve seen their utility in mature content programs and larger organizations.

For example, you may already have a dedicated front-end developer who focuses on building the rest of your site, but also assists the content marketing team with things like improving page load speeds, custom visual elements, and overall content governance.

Likewise, interactive content will often require custom programming or other site integration which web developers will handle.

🗺 Project Managers & Editors

Once a content program scales up, you'll need somebody to keep track of all of the moving parts. Even before then, you'll often need an editor in place to help guide content structure, proofread, and more.

Content Editor / Manager

The content editor is a tactical role that is responsible for planning and executing the editorial calendar, ensuring a regular publishing schedule, managing a team of in-house or freelance writers, editing submissions, and acting as the first quality control check for brand voice, tone, and design.

We’ve seen larger content programs have multiple editors, each of whom is focused on a separate aspect of the content marketing strategy. For example, one content manager is responsible for increasing blog traffic and ancillary metrics such as brand mentions, awareness, and backlinks.

Another may be tasked with building out conversion-focused landing pages, gated content, and sales enablement material. A third may focus on helpdesk content and technical support writing.

Regardless of how the team is structured, a content manager must have the following skills and attributes:

• Communication and people management skills to work with individual contributors
• Project management to ensure timely delivery of all content assets
• Numbers driven, comfortable with spreadsheets or other data visualization platforms
• Strong content management and governance skills
• Ability to conduct basic keyword research and idea validation
• Top-notch writing and editing skills
• Comfort with martech tools and attribution software
• Understanding of buyer journeys and the role content plays at each stage of the funnel
• Demonstrated ability to produce compelling content briefs and outlines

Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)

Subject matter experts (often referred to as SMEs) can have multiple responsibilities, but they are often the person tasked with promoting thought leadership as well as ensuring that content in a deeply technical industry is consistent, accurate, and relevant.

The SME is involved in customer success and marketing efforts like attending trade shows, running webinars, and informing actual product decisions. They can also play an important role in brand building, especially when a company is trying to position itself as the preeminent thought leader in their industry.

For example, the Digital Security Lab team at ExpressVPN is comprised of subject matter experts in the internet security and privacy industry. They’re not traditional content marketers — in fact they're researchers and privacy enthusiasts — but they play an important role in producing best-in-class content that’s of wider benefit to the community as well as shaping future product development.

‍🧠 Strategists & Analysts

Strategist and analyst roles typically aren't working on content creation, but are helping with strategy and measurement projects. Examples include identifying content opportunities through processes like keyword research, and helping measure content performance through analytics or other business insights approaches.

Content Marketing Strategist

This role is typically responsible for some or all editorial or content-driven SEO strategy. Oftentimes this role is also handling the managing editor and project manager roles listed above, and perhaps content promotion tasks as well.

Someone in a Content Marketing Strategist role should be capable of handling all elements of content marketing, but ideally, they should be supported by a team of writers or other roles alongside them.

Content Strategist (as opposed to Content Marketing Strategist) is often used interchangeably, however that job title can also refer to non-editorial content roles. Typically those Content Strategy roles are working with UX, product, and other teams to accomplish non-marketing goals.

SEO Strategist

Depending on the nature of your content goals, it’s worth investing in a dedicated SEO expert. Consider this: in 2021, 85% of all blog traffic stemmed from organic search. The corresponding figure for 2020 was slightly under 60%.

Search is a consistent, predictable, and time-tested referral tactic. It’s not prone to the same wild algorithmic fluctuations as social channels or the time needed to build up an owned list, like email.

We’re not recommending that a dedicated SEO analyst be present in content marketing teams consisting of just a couple of people. But if you’re running a wildly successful content program that’s churning out multiple pieces of content per week, has multiple thousand live blogs, and invest in a number of content formats, then your efforts will be significantly boosted with an SEO analyst on the team.

Some of the responsibilities of the content SEO analyst could include:

• Identifying new keywords to target across all stages of the buyer journey
• Creating content briefs or optimizing content
• Keep a careful eye on competitors and their content efforts
• Ensuring adherence to URL structure and other technical SEO best practices
• Act as the gatekeeper for all on-page SEO before a page goes live
• Make sure all attribution and UTM tags are set up and tracked correctly
• Identify opportunities to grow traffic by optimizing legacy blogs and pages
• Grow domain authority through link building, guest posts, and digital PR

Business Insights / Non-Marketing Analysts

These roles aren’t usually involved in content marketing day-to-day but they may be a common contact for assisting with performance measurement, analytics setup, data gathering, and other reporting & measurement tasks.

If your company can only pull useful analytics through a business insights tool or SQL queries - you're probably going to work alongside a business insights role to help with your initial reporting setup or ongoing data access.

📣 Promotion Specialists

You'll need somebody to promote your content. You might have one marketing manager occupying all promotion roles, or there may be other marketing teams that contribute time or resources towards ongoing content promotion or campaigns.

Email Marketing Specialist

In the average small to mid-sized content marketing team, content-focused emails will simply be a newsletter that is sent by someone on the team that manages the email software.

In larger teams, you’ll often see dedicated email marketing roles. In B2C situations like eCommerce it's typically a performance marketing team sending merchandise offers or product emails. In B2B companies it tends to be a demand gen or marketing automation role. Either way, email marketing specialist roles are often focused on lower-funnel offers, and you may need to launch a separate email program or work closely with these teams to figure out how to introduce editorial content into the email marketing funnel.

Social Media & Community Management

The most common role here is simply sharing content marketing assets through social channels. There are ways to make it more complex, like writing long-form content threads that tie back to longer-form content on your site, but at the end of the day social media roles will have a shared goal of building an audience, and hopefully getting them back to your site.

On larger teams, this will be a coordinated effort with the social media team or whoever owns social channels. On smaller teams, this might be the same marketing manager who is handling content marketing efforts like project management, so it's less about coordination and more about prioritizing content promotion efforts.

If your brand has a community management role, you may also have similar partnerships to get content shared on those internal community channels as well.

PR & Outreach Specialist

This role mostly pertains to distributing content so that it reaches your audience wherever they're spending time online.

That may overlap several organic or shared media channels, such as paid advertising, digital PR, influencer outreach, social media, email marketing, and guest posts.

Most teams won't perform outreach for every single content marketing project they work on, but will put together a larger PR effort on projects that are noteworthy in some way. Common examples include custom brand research and data analysis which is newsworthy in the industry or tieing content marketing into more classic PR efforts like brand-driven stories.

The responsibilities of a PR & outreach specialist include:

• Building brand awareness by engaging with discussions on platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, & Reddit
• Growing backlink profile via digital PR and broken backlink efforts
• Building relationships with key publishers and influencers to increase brand reach
• Collaborating with the editorial team to improve distribution potential for upcoming posts and campaigns

Paid Media / PPC Specialist

If your brand does a lot of paid media, it's probably heavily weighted towards brand building or performance marketing. But, there's still room for paid promotion of content marketing efforts, either ongoing or for specific campaigns.

Smaller teams may simply load up a campaign into Facebook or Twitter ads, set a maximum campaign spend, and let it rip. Larger teams will likely establish custom campaigns and carve off a percentage of larger paid media budget, or specifically use some of content marketing team's budget for promotion with oversight from a separate paid media team.

There's many decent approaches to how team and role are structured - the important thing is to have clear goals outlined for the paid content marketing promotion. If the goal is to build an audience instead of driving immediate conversions, then content and paid teams should be clear about that goal upfront.

🏢 Stakeholders

Your stakeholders may not be involved in content creation, but they're the folks who will hold the content team accountable to goals, act as the content evangelist, and justify your content marketing investment to C-suite execs.

Director of Content Marketing / VP Content Marketing

We’ve seen some variations on the title here, but the role of the Director of Content Marketing is to act as the leader of the content team and the bonafide content evangelist inside the firm.

This incumbent usually has a strong background in writing and editing, and may have spent several years in a Content Marketing Strategist type of role before leading a larger team. This background gives them the skills to understand all aspects of content marketing, even if they're not doing each one daily.

Beyond basic project management, a Director/VP level indicates more of a leadership role. That means they’re able to have a strong grip on the entire content lifecycle, and can plan strategically for how content goals will ultimately meet business objectives.  

The Director of Content will usually report to the VP of Marketing or CMO and can be responsible for a range of metrics, including:

• Month over month growth of website blog traffic
• Increase in conversion rates of key product and sales pages
• Higher SERP rankings for valuable keywords and search terms
• Growth in newsletter subscriptions, open rates, and engagement
• Number of content assets for demand-gen, product, and sales teams
• Supporting go-to-market efforts by planning and executing content needs
• Boosting PR efforts with timely and proprietary content based on trending topics
• Growing brand awareness and domain authority with content that drives backlinks
• Reduction in customer support requests with self-serve helpdesks and troubleshooting

Depending on the size of the business, this director/head of content could also be the solitary full-time content function, supported by contractors or freelancers specializing in other tactical areas. In this case, they're typically acting as a more experienced version of the Content Marketing Strategist role.

VP Marketing / CMO

Your VP of Marketing or CMO is typically the level of stakeholder that wants to understand content marketing at a quarterly level, but may not care to have access to the editorial calendar.

Their #1 objective should be agreement on what the content marketing program is trying to achieve for the brand, high-level sign-off on budget and how it's used, and holding the content marketing team accountable for their high-level objectives.

Chief Content Officer

This role is a unicorn: it’s talked about but rarely exists, and if it does, it’s usually in a company with an alternative corporate structure.

That’s not to say it isn’t a viable role in the right company. It can make sense in a large company like Coca Cola or Lego, where content truly is a large revenue stream or major part of marketing and brand initiatives.

In smaller companies, it can exist as well, but it’s typically a variation of a VP Marketing role, or a version of VP Content that has been elevated because of the importance of content in that organization’s goals.

This doesn't diminish the role, but should guide expectations for how the role interacts with the rest of the organization. Content must be super important, either because it is the product the company sells (eg publishers and media companies) or because the company is all-in on content marketing as their primary form of marketing.

CEO / Founder

In regards to content marketing, most CEOs should be treated similarly to VP Marketing / CMO roles. They're usually a stakeholder who needs to understand how content marketing supports their stated brand objectives, but they don't necessarily need to be involved beyond that.

Many CEOs will be more focused on brand goals and sales than on traditional marketing metrics, but this varies greatly based upon company size and their personal background.

If your CEO or Founder wants to be involved in content marketing, it's usually because they enjoy the process and are personally invested in being an industry thought leader.

In that case, if you are a content marketer on a team that has both buy-in and time committed by CEO or Founder, then your focus should be on taking tedious tasks off their plate. A senior executive should primarily be focused on hard-to-replace activities like content generation or public speaking. You don't want your CEO wasting time formatting blog posts or editing day-to-day content drafts.

🤝 Internal Partners

Internal Partners are typically other non-marketing teams who will request content, help guide editorial direction, provide input on brand and audience priorities, and more.

Sales

Sales team interactions are often limited to requesting content assets to support sales efforts.

However, there's a strong opportunity to have a deeper partnership. Ideally, Sales should be assisting with content ideation beyond random sales assets, especially at the bottom of the funnel.

• What would help SDRs connect with new prospects?
• What would help enterprise account managers make their customers more successful?
• Can you share the most common sales objections from each of our target personas for each of our products? How do these vary by pipeline stage?

When you can get answers to those types of questions it should help your content marketing team produce more extensive customer resources so they can tackle objections through blog posts and other assets.

Sales may also be the team in the company with the greatest access to subject matter experts. Sometimes those SMEs will be the sales team themselves, or it could also be actual customers who are the SMEs, and the content team can get introduced to them through their account managers on the Sales team.

Customer Success

Much like sales, our content marketing team is ideally partnering with Customer Success to resolve common customer problems before they ever happen.

Customer Success is likely writing content in the form of help docs - can we repurpose and extend these as blog posts targeted at users who are still in the purchase process?

How else can we prepare prospects earlier in the funnel to help them be successful?

Similar to Sales team, your Customer Success team is a great place in the company to find Subject Matter Experts who understand the customers, the product, and how the product can solve customer problems.  

Development / Product Team

Varies greatly by company, could be highly integrated with customer success or could simply be the team that manages the website and CMS needs of the content team.

In a software startup, the Product team will likely have control over website and customer experiences and will need content marketing support on things like product marketing and feature launches.

In other companies, Development could be more like IT or just managing the website, and the relationship will be closer to the Web Developer role described earlier.

Brand Team

I think Brand teams are quite important. Letting anyone in the company deviate from brand guidelines however they want isn't good for business.

Unfortunately, in my experience, brand teams often want to restrict the editorial content experience and treat it like advertising. Because of that, there's often a lot of back and forth with content teams about new visual styles, how the brand extends regular brand voice into an editorial tone & voice, and similar concerns.

So, if you find yourself working alongside a brand team that "gets" content marketing and editorial style requirements, buy them lunch. Try to understand how the content team can potentially support various brand initiatives that are happening.

If you don't have a brand team that understands content marketing right away, you'll need to spend time educating them on how you need the content marketing program to speak and look in order to provide value to your audience. You'll also need to work with them to expand brand guidelines to accommodate editorial tone, voice, topic, and style requirements.

Legal / Compliance

Legal teams and specialist compliance teams are very common in highly regulated industries – healthcare, finance, alcohol/tobacco, cannabis, etc. Compliance teams typically cover specific subject areas, like a medical review team that ensures content doesn't violate U.S. Health & Human Services compliance laws, or perhaps reviewing content against certain non-governmental industry rules.

Usually, legal & compliance teams don't care what content marketing publishes... so long as it doesn't touch certain topics that are off-limits.

As a content marketing team you have a few goals here:

1. The first is to get your legal team to provide a list of things you can/can't say, and topics that require a review from them.
2. The second is to simplify those rules for your content team to make sure that your content either avoids those topics, or only covers them in a way that is pre-approved by legal team.

Usually, legal & compliance teams are super busy, and content marketing is one of their lowest priorities.

If you put forth the effort upfront to get them to "pre-approve" certain guidelines so that you can skip the content review process, it can often unlock your content from weeks of sitting in a review queue.

🤝 External Partners

Your brand doesn't exist in a vacuum. There are lots of outside partners who may be willing to create and distribute content with you.

Brand Partners & Ad Sponsors

These relationships can vary wildly.

• If you’re Red Bull Racing it might mean Oracle (or likewise, if you’re Oracle you definitely want to get all the value you can from your sponsorship of Red Bull Racing).
• If you're an HR software platform, it might mean industry publications and conferences that you sponsor.

Either way, content marketing can be injected into these traditional partners and sponsorships through co-branded content creation, or shared promotion efforts.

These efforts don't necessarily have to be a line item in a sponsorship. The fact that your brands are partnered together may be enough to approach the partner and ask if they'd like to partner on specific content projects that may benefit them as well.

Influencers & Brand Advocates

This can range from the small end of social media influencers and bloggers to the high end of large celebrity endorsement deals.

Either way, if content is a valuable piece of the company, those spokespeople are a potential promotion channel for that content.

Content creation can be part of the partnership as well. This can range from the obvious stuff, like an influencer creating a few product videos for social media and allowing the company to use the videos in paid advertising, or it can be extended into bigger content creation partnerships.

In a longer timeline, these partnerships typically become 'brand ambassador' types of relationships instead of one-off projects. Look at how companies like Traeger Ambassadors and Lululemon Global Ambassadors operate to see how brands can work together with outside influencers to build content and even new product lines.

We've seen brands turn to their ambassadors as a go-to subject matter experts team, helping review content and contribute quotes to make content marketing assets more authentic or impactful.

Integration Partners

If you’re Salesforce, every software company you integrate with is a potential partner as it relates to that integration and feature set.

If you're a SaaS company, you'll probably interact with Zapier's integrations team eventually.

Regardless of how you integrate, these partners are typically willing to help with a few project types:

• Creating content for SEO and landing pages.
• Creating customer support content.
• Cross-promoting how each company's userbase can be successful with the integration through webinars, announcements, etc.

Retail / Channel Partners

Retail and channel partners can be internal or external, but they're typically involved in selling your product to end users.

• If you’re Microsoft, Best Buy could be an example of a retail partner for your consumer and SMB products.
• Likewise, if you're REI, your retail associates would be a good example of an internal retail partner.
• For a B2B/enterprise example, Value-Added Resellers like consulting firms often resell software from companies like Microsoft, along with additional implementation and consulting services.

Either way, if these partners are selling your product, then there's a good chance your content marketing assets will be useful to them.

These partners might come seeking content from you ("we need more case studies and sell sheets"), or your content team and your reseller/retail/channel team might work together to produce content that can be distributed to these teams for use across their customer interactions ("here are some whitepapers you can use to help customers understand this new product we launched".

We warned you upfront... content marketing is a team sport, and this was going to be a pretty long list.

Want to see how Content Harmony helps you build content that outranks the competition?

The blog post you just read scores Good in our Content Grader for the topic "content marketing roles".

Grade your content against an AI-driven topic model using Content Harmony - get your first 10 credits for free when you schedule a demo, or sign up here to take it for a spin on your own.

But what does that mean exactly? In this guide, we’ll explain how to optimize your content for SEO, without compromising on any of the elements that make it a delightful experience for human readers.

What is content optimization?

Content optimization is the process of building the best possible piece of content based upon the expectations of users and search engines for that topic. This typically includes matching the user’s search intent, making the content more comprehensive, adding multimedia like images and videos, and formatting content to be easier to read.

What is the content optimization process?

At Content Harmony, we divide the content optimization process into the following framework.

We recommend focusing on these three types of content optimizations, in this order of priority:

1 - Optimize for search intent & user expectations

• Are we giving users exactly what they’re searching for?
• Does our content cover the right material, in the right angle, using the right format that search engines predict users want?

2 - Optimize for topic coverage

• Have we covered the topic at a granular level, answering as many relevant and related questions as possible?

3 - Optimize for enhanced user experience

• Is our content structured in a way that’s accessible, engaging, and keeps readers interested?
• Does our content include relevant visuals, videos, infographics, or bite-sized quotes that help users digest what they’re reading?
• Does our site load fast enough and offer easy navigation?

Why is content optimization important?

Content optimization is important because without it, all the time and resources you’ve spent creating the content can go to waste. When you optimize content, you’re giving yourself the best possible chance for search engines to index and rank your content, and for users to engage with it, share it, link to it, convert to a paying customer, and more.

This opens up a whole new avenue where people can find your content organically, allowing you to get the full value from your content investment. Optimizing content for SEO in particular is an incredibly powerful growth lever for your business.

How to optimize content for SEO (and readers)

The following checklist covers the most critical search engine optimization steps. If you follow all of these consistently, you’ll see much better results from your content marketing efforts.

For this guide, we’re going to assume you already know the core keyword/topic you want to rank for.

Let’s dive in:

1. Understand the search intent that you need to match

Correctly identifying and addressing search intent can make or break your content program. If you can’t identify exactly what your audience wants from this search, you risk spending your time building content that simply won’t get the search results you want.

What that means is if you’re trying to cater to a high-purchase intent search (eg “wicker patio sets under $500”) with mostly informational content (eg “how to pick a wicker patio set”, then the chances of you ranking well in the SERPs has just been greatly reduced, at least for that high-purchase intent query.

Google makes it pretty clear how important search intent is when it comes to ranking. In its search quality evaluator guidelines, there’s an entire section dedicated to understanding what users want from their search queries, and providing general guidelines for quality control.

If you nail search intent right at the beginning of the research process, the rest of your content optimization strategy will flow smoothly.

For years, SEOs have classified search intent into 3 broad categories:

• Navigational ⇒ Users want to find a specific page or site, such as googling ‘Twitter’ instead of typing twitter.com in their browser.
• Informational ⇒ Searchers need answers to their queries and will include modifiers like “how to”, “what is”, why does” inside their search terms.
• Transactional ⇒ Users want to complete an action of some sort. This could either be a purchase, represented by a search such as “hiking boots under $150”, or a query that leads to a conversion, such as “salesforce demo signup”.
  

Honestly, this is just a broken system overall, for the reasons that Kane lays out in our post, There’s A Better Way to Classify Search Intent. In short, marketers need to understand intent beyond a simplistic 3-part system, and our software has helped automate the process when you’re doing keyword research or building a content brief.

In some cases, we find there’s split search intent, where Google assumes that the search term can be addressed with multiple methods. A great example is “fish oil”, which includes results for eCommerce category/product pages, informational articles, nutritional facts, and Google News results.

Clearly, Google understands that you might want a variety of different options with such a broad query.

On the other hand, let’s say you’re trying to rank for the term “fish oil benefits”. From the outset, it seems more clear that the user wants to understand the benefits of incorporating fish oil into their daily diet, and the possible downsides or risks this might have in the long term.

Content Harmony correctly classifies this search as Research Intent, but also helps you spot that there are strong signals that users are looking for video content, too.

Clicking on the SERPs confirms the video intent signals. Google serves up video content about halfway through the first page, indicating that it believes many users want to stream videos for this search query, too.

Without proper research, you might have written a long-form blog post about the topic and called it a day.

While that approach is the right place to start, it’s clear that including video content for this term will give you the best possible chance at ranking well. A fully optimized content asset will serve both of these intent types.

We can’t overstate the importance of correctly identifying and catering to search intent — it should be the first step in your content optimization checklist.

2. Build an effective content outline

Once we understand search intent the next step is to build out our initial outline and decide what content we need to include in this article–and what topics we shouldn’t include in this particular outline.

We usually approach this in two ways - first understanding core sub-topics, and second, reviewing competitor outlines to make sure ours is better.

Make sure our outline covers the most critical sub-topics

One of the things that our keyword report for “fish oil benefits” inside of Content Harmony shows us is Related Keywords data:

These are literally the same related keywords that Google shows us on almost every SERP:

From looking at this, it’s clear that an effective article about “fish oil benefits” should go into essential sub-topics like

• Benefits for sub-groups like men and women
• Benefits to different body parts like skin, hair, etc
• Side effects or risks of fish oil
• When to take fish oil (dosage? Time of day?)
• Whether it’s right for the reader (“should I take?”)

Including these sections in your content is a cheat code for better search rankings. When producing content, you want your content to be viewed as the most authoritative source for that query — related searches are a strong signal from Google that users want the answers to these sub-queries.

Review the best highlights from competitor outlines

While we don’t encourage copying the same approach that your competitors have taken, studying their structure and heading strategy is one of the fastest ways to understand how to better organize your own outline.

You should be looking for ways to structure your content more clearly, as well as looking for content gaps you can use to differentiate your content and cover the topic more comprehensively overall.

3. Answer common reader questions

Accurately and clearly answering related questions and search terms is our next important step in making sure our outline is complete. Keyword research at the search intent stage helps you fully understand what users want from their query - but looking through other sources of user questions will help you answer more specific variations and understand how readers think about the topic overall.

The Question Analysis section in Content Harmony scrapes related questions from Google PAAs (People Also Ask), Reddit, Quora, and Stack Exchange. Answering these questions, particularly those that appear in Google PAAs, increases the chances that you will show up in that section.

More importantly, it helps you understand the voice of the customer and how readers in your market actually talk about this topic.

Once you identify good questions, here are the three most common ways to incorporate them into your outline:

• Include an FAQ section towards the end of the post, where you answer the questions directly
• Sprinkle the questions as H2s/H3s throughout your content
• Answer the questions implicitly in your post (meaning the reader will know the answer by the time they’re done reading)

If those variations don’t fit in your current article, use them to fill out new content ideas in your editorial calendar.

4. Optimize for topic coverage & comprehensiveness

We’ve now built out an effective content outline that addresses user search intent — at this point, we probably have what we need to start writing a draft.

If you’re building content as a team, this might be where you keep doing additional research to put into a content brief and send it to your writer.

But if you’re writing the article yourself and you’ve properly addressed search intent and built a solid outline, at this stage you should be looking for more nuanced sub-topics that you may not have covered already in your outline or draft.

The best way to do this is with an automated content grader that takes a topic model and checks with sub-topics you haven’t covered yet.

There are a few ways to build topic models but the most common and most effective approach for SEO and content teams is to rely on a topic model generated from the content that is currently ranking for your target query.

Navigating back into the Topic Analysis section, Content Harmony suggests multiple semantically-related keywords that are used by the top-ranking competitors for our target query.

We specifically prioritize our topic model based upon which phrases are most commonly used, helping you focus on the most relevant phrases that should appear in your content.

In the olden days of SEO, you would literally have to check for all of these phrases in your content manually to compare your draft against the content that was ranking well.

Nowadays, it’s much faster and more reliable to use a content grader to check for these phrases automatically.

Here’s what Content Harmony’s Content Grader looks like in action:

A content grader isn’t a holy grail that tells you exactly what you need to write.

Nonetheless, it’s the best way to spot common phrases and sub-topics that you haven’t included in your content yet.

It also serves as a fast final check that you’ve covered the topic comprehensively, without having to check for every keyword manually on your own.

5. Link to relevant pages on your site

Internal links develop a contextual relationship between your content and are a signal to search engines about the topical authority of your website. For example, if you’ve written about a topic that’s mentioned in another blog or web page, simply link back to it.

Not only is that best practice, but it’s also useful for readers who would like to learn more too.

The more content you create about a certain topic, the higher the interlinking opportunities. For a large site like NutritionFacts.org writing about ‘fish oil benefits’, we see a bunch of great internal link opportunities, such as:

• “benefits of eating fish”
• “is fish oil just snake oil”
• “the risks of fish oil supplements”
• the topic page itself for “fish oil”

The more content we create, and the more we link to each other, the higher the chances of ranking well in the SERPs. That’s because it’s a signal to search engines that we have plenty of content in the content marketing niche, and that we should be considered a topical authority on the subject.

6. Cite credible, high-authority external sources

An additional method you can use to display authority to search engines is by including credible external links in your content. Navigating over to Content Harmony’s ‘Sources’ tab gives you a plethora of high-authority sources for your search query.

In the case of ‘fish oil benefits,’ we’re able to see overlapping links (these are external links being cited by multiple competitors), trustworthy sources from government and educational websites, and top news results.

The folks at Reboot Online ran an interesting experiment that demonstrates the effectiveness of using high-authority educational sources.

They created 10 brand new websites, each trying to rank for the same keyword. The sites that included external links to educational websites ranked higher than those that didn’t:

So, back to our Keyword Report–there are a few notable .GOV and .EDU resources showing up that we might want to reference:

Of course, you will come across other sites too during the process of your research. If you’re struggling to determine whether it’s an authoritative source or not, consider the following:

• Does the site include other content relevant to the niche you’re talking about?
• Is it a primary source?
• Is the site credible and has a good reputation?
• How old is the page?
• Are the statistics recent?
• Does the author have a history of writing about similar topics?

7. Optimize title tag and meta description

Your blog’s title tag is the first step for search engines to determine the relevance of your content for specific keywords. The meta description helps draw in readers by showing them that you’re covering the core related sub-topics they want to learn about.

In both cases, this is your chance to show the user how well you understand the intent behind their search.

For example, the title tags for the top 3 results in “fish oil benefits” are highlighted below.

Including a keyword in your title tag is vital, ideally within the first 60 characters. Title tags longer than that are cut off by the SERPs (the third example shows that clearly).

If you can’t include all the information you’d like in your title tag, don’t worry. The meta description is another opportunity for you to give both search engines and readers information about your content.

The maximum recommended length for meta descriptions is about 300 characters, so there’s an opportunity here to go into a bit of detail. There is a slight chance that Google might not pull the same title tag and meta description that you specify in your CMS, but we recommend that you continue to optimize both for best results.

8. Have a top-notch reader experience

Google loves indexing and ranking URLs that offer a fast, fluid, and pleasant user experience. Here are some tips you can use to ensure that readers have a great experience on your site:

Go easy on the pop-ups:

Google considers popups to be intrusive, spammy, and doesn’t like them much. If you must include popups, do so at exit intent. Tempting as it might be to offer discount codes or ask for email addresses as soon as users land on your page, it’s definitely going to hurt your SEO.

Format your content well:

Giant walls of text are boring and tedious to read. It doesn’t matter how well-written your content is, your readers aren’t going to scroll through to the end of the page if all they see is black and white font.

Using headers, bulleted lists, and appropriate white space around the text adds clarity to your writing and makes it look easier on the eyes.

Add visuals & screenshots:

Placing relevant screenshots, infographics, videos, even GIFs gives you an opportunity to stand out. It’s not just a better user experience, it helps you explain a complex subject you might be trying to address with your content or showcase some related statistics to drive home the message.

It’s also commonly accepted that the time people spend on your page is a blog SEO ranking factor. Visuals keep people hooked and engaged with your content, and the more time they spend reading your article, the better it is to boost rankings.

Make your content easier to read:

The average American reads at a grade eight level, so if your writing is hard to understand and full of jargon, don’t expect great engagement with your posts.

But that said, sometimes people are searching for complex topics and want more advanced content. So it’s OK to publish content with college-level readability if that is what your users expect.

Nevertheless, you should still try to explain the concepts succinctly and clearly for the user.

The editor, style checker, and de-jargonizer tools in our best content writing tools post should help remove some of the fluff from your content. Additionally, we recommend that you use short, punchy sentences and paragraphs that don’t exceed four to five lines.

All Keyword Reports created in Content Harmony use Flesch-Kincaid scores to analyze the top-ranking pages for that keyword, and show you an average “readability score”. The content grader will do the same for your content, helping you adjust as needed.

Include image alt text:

Google image search is an underrated aspect of content optimization with many publishers overlooking the importance of alt text.

Alt text, an attribute that can be added to an image tag in HTML, tells search engines what the image is about. While humans may be able to look at an image and make their own conclusions, search algorithms don’t function in the same manner. Alt text helps guide them tells them what the image represents and is definitely a ranking factor.

9. Optimize the rest of your site UX beyond the content itself

Beyond the post itself, your content needs to be served from a site that’s ready to convert readers and give them a good experience. Most of that boils down to two focus areas:

Improve page speed:

If your site doesn’t load in three seconds or less, expect most visitors to close the tab altogether. Hence, it doesn’t matter how good your content is, the slow site speed will dissuade most from exploring further.

What’s more, site speed has been a ranking factor for Google since 2010 so if you’re not optimizing for fast load times, you run the risk of sluggish SEO results.

As a first step, navigate over to the Page Speed Insights tool. It’ll tell you how fast your site is and suggest areas of improvement. You can also use the HTML-cleaner tool, which shows you unnecessary code and how to remove it.

Optimize your mobile experience:

Google moved to mobile-first indexing in 2019, which means it primarily uses the mobile site version for indexing and ranking. Hence if your site isn’t set up to be responsive and easy to read on mobile devices, expect your rankings on the SERPs to be affected, too.

To see how well your site performs on mobile, check out the Page Speed Insights tool again. It gives you a detailed overview of how Google analyzes your performance, both on the desktop and mobile versions. Those optimization suggestions are a good place to start improving your mobile experience.

In most industries a mobile device is the most common way for readers to experience your content, so make sure it’s easy to read on mobile devices. Most of the time this means building a responsive website and using large enough fonts.

Going beyond on-page content optimization

Other than on-page edits and site optimization, there are a couple of additional steps you can take to help your content reach more readers.

Consistently promote your content

No matter how optimized it is for search, publishing content is never the final step of the content lifecycle. You want more people to read it, right? Well, instead of relying on them to stumble across it organically through search engines, there are a number of things you can do to promote it.

A content distribution strategy is often as important as a regular publishing cadence.

Broadly speaking, distribution can be bucketed into three main channels:

• Owned channels: Examples of owned channels include your email list, social media accounts, website popups, and other digital properties that you control. Promoting your content on these channels should be the first step of your distribution strategy since it will reach people already interested in your product or service.
• Earned channels: Ever get the feeling of excitement when a stranger shares your content? That’s an example of an earned channel. Said channels include guest articles, social shares, journalists and bloggers, and product review sites.
• Paid channels: Sponsored content, paid social ads, and PPC campaigns are effective when you’re in the early stages of building your audience and would like to get the message across quicker.

Update and refresh old content periodically

A content refresh can breathe new life into existing content — posts that used to get a lot of traffic but perhaps don’t rank for as many keywords anymore.

Updating your posts with new data helps optimize content and prove to search engines that it’s still an authoritative source for the search query.

Our recent post on how to refresh content gives you a two-step framework to help you understand which content deserves to be updated, and best practices on how to go about doing it.

Want to see how Content Harmony helps you build content that outranks the competition?

The blog post you just read scores Good in our Content Grader for the topic "how to optimize content for SEO".

Grade your content against an AI-driven topic model using Content Harmony - get your first 10 credits for free when you schedule a demo, or sign up here to take it for a spin on your own.

👉 Get Your First 10 Briefs For $10

Now, let me tell you more about *why*.

First off, some of you know Content Harmony as an agency. That's how we started way back around 2012.

But shortly after our software launch in July 2020, we actually divided up the company. Content Harmony became a new software-only company, and our agency team rebranded.

Now, I feel pretty strongly that venture capital & SEO tools don't mix well.

Simple math: 99% of SEO tools are destined to be niche & therefore incompatible with VC model.

So right off the bat, those funds (and the idea of wasting time pitching 80 VCs) weren't on the table.

I didn't want to pin Content Harmony's success on unobtainable VC growth metrics.

So why take any money at all?

Well first, I'm a solo founder, competing almost exclusively with companies that launched sooner & have multiple cofounders. We bootstrapped our entire platform to date with my own development time and funds from running our agency, but we don't have the resources to fund a full-time developer out of pocket for at least another year while Content Harmony's revenue grows to support a full team.

I sat down and ran the numbers from our growth and what Content Harmony needs to hit break-even.

It was clear that partnering with a team like Calm Company Fund would allow us to plow ahead with our product roadmap *an entire year earlier* than we could by continuing to bootstrap.

And just as importantly - we wouldn't have to alter our goals to fit into a new model.

We are still focused entirely on the SEO & content marketing audience that we want to serve, and we don't have to become a swiss army knife to fuel growth from irrelevant audiences.

On top of that, we're able to dive in way faster than expected on some ambitious upcoming features that we might not have tackled until 2022 and beyond.

This will unlock the resources for us to make some big updates coming to search intent, our brief workflows, & the potential for new tools.

Stay tuned for more!

Reddit:

and Stack Exchange:

The bad news is that we finally got around to adding these because Yahoo! Answers is shutting down next month, so we will be removing Yahoo as a source in our Questions analysis.

Now, you can laugh, but for over 2 years now we've actually seen really good Yahoo! Answers question ideas in consumer segments.

On the other hand, Yahoo! Answers wasn't really a great source for questions about enterprise IT security.

Go figure ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyways, if you're feeling sad about this you can head over to Buzzfeed and enjoy some of their favorite Yahoo! Answers threads over the years.

I was going to pull some actual examples from our database but TLDR, they were all wildly NSFW.

Ready to try it out? Head over to our Desktop Apps page to choose your download option.

That means you can get the same Search Intent data that we deliver inside each Keyword Report as a separate report.

Additionally, we give you a full desktop and mobile set of rankings inside of each Search Intent Report:

That paves the way for us to begin offering dedicated Search Intent plans for our customers who primarily want on-demand data, instead of a Content Brief & Content Grader workflow.

Because we already include a Search Intent Report embedded inside of each Keyword Report, you'll also be able to view that data separately in our Search Intent Reports section of each project, like this:

Stay tuned for more great search intent features launching this spring. 😉

Keyword Highlighting

As of today you can now see keywords highlighted in our Content Grader as you type:

Keyword highlighting has been fairly quick and reliable in our testing, however if you experience slowness on large documents (usually 5-10k words or more), you can turn off keyword highlighting with the blue toggle switch above the text editor.

Custom Variants & Ignored Phrases

These two features go hand in hand - we're now giving you simple ways to modify our default topic model.

Add Your Own Custom Variations

The first is that you can add custom variants to any of our suggested phrases to accommodate things like your brand's style requirements, or variations we may not have seen competitors using based upon capitalization, pluralization, etc.

In the example below, we suggest using the phrase "plastic shell", and the user is adding a custom variation for "plastic shells" to match the syntax they used inside of their draft.

Ignoring Phrases

Likewise, we may encounter phrases that you want to remove from our topic model that are off-topic or otherwise undesirable. That's fine by us - you should always be able to make simple customizations like that to improve how the tool is working for you.

In Content Harmony it's as simple as clicking on a suggested phrase and selecting "Ignore This Suggestion" - we'll hide it at the bottom of the list, and then remove it from the scoring model.

Gremlin is a tool that helps companies prevent downtime by randomly attempting to break things on their site (it’s called Chaos Engineering). So it’s fitting that they released this “Cost of eCommerce Downtime” data analysis to estimate how much money large online retailers are losing when their websites are down, based upon their estimated revenue per year, hour, and second.

The piece highlights 20+ top retailers early on, and calculates how much money they would have lost if their websites had been down since you loaded the page:

From there, they go on to show how critical downtime is for Amazon, since their revenue per second is larger than the next 25 estimated eCommerce websites combined.

While the piece is short, the cost to produce this content should have been relatively low: find estimated revenues, convert it from years to hours to seconds, visualize the data and make it interactive and publish. The total written content is under 300 words, excluding the data table.

Nevertheless, their team has been able to get links from over 16 referring domains, including a few key industry publishers like digitalcommerce360.com that likely put this content in front of some key eCommerce executives (allowing them to then be retargeted…).

And finally, they end the piece with a strong call to action, turning this project into a potential lead gen opportunity, and tying the content back to the company’s mission.

Just select the gear icon on any Keyword Report, Search Intent Report, or Project, and we'll hide it from your main list:

Don't worry - once you archive stuff it's not gone forever. You can just scroll to the bottom of your dashboard or the bottom of your reports list, and click "View Archived" button to see your archived items. Anything can be un-archived if you need to bring it back.

Now that we’ve launched our new content grader, it allows us to do some fun partnerships with other teams who will be using that grader in their own content production processes.

I’m happy to share the first company on that list is WordAgents.

WordAgents is a content creation agency specializing in blog posts, website content, production descriptions, and other SEO-driven content support.

A number of Content Harmony customers already use them, and in fact, we use their team as our primary source of content on a couple of affiliate websites that we own and manage.

I’m happy to be able to vouch that their team does great work (especially when you give them a brief from Content Harmony).

This new integration allows your team to request their writers to grade content drafts inside of Content Harmony’s content grader.

To use it, you simply add one of our shareable brief URLs to your order form, and their team will take care of reaching whatever content grade you request. We generally would advise you to request writers to hit a score of “Great” on our scoring model. Most likely your long form content should already come close to scoring “Good” if the writers are following a comprehensive brief and outline.

The WordAgents order form even allows you to do bulk orders and included dedicated content grader links for each of them:

Ready to try it out? Head over to wordagents.com/content-harmony/ and you can currently get 30% off of your first order today.

When we first set out to build Content Harmony back in 2018, modern content graders barely existed. We didn’t actually hear about any until 3-4 months after we started building Content Harmony.

That’s because our original goal was to help you build really awesome Content Briefs – not optimize existing content.

I’ll admit, when I first looked at them, I shrugged them off because frankly, content graders don’t do a good job of helping you build briefs.

But – content graders have taken over the SEO space in the past two years.

And the thing is – we’re already generating the awesome topic model that you need in order to build a modern content grader.

In fact, we’ve been generating an awesome topic model for over the last year in order for those terms to be included in your content briefs. We already analyze 30-40 of your top competitor’s through IBM’s Watson API and do an overlap analysis to understand which phrases show up most frequently for the topic you’re targeting.

So Content Grading has been a natural next step on Content Harmony’s road map.

And now, you can take that same AI-driven topic model and grade your content against it.

Learn more about how our Content Grader works on our product page at https://www.contentharmony.com/product/content-grader/

But in the meantime, we just wrapped up our new Highlightable Headings feature and some design tweaks to make your brief workflow easier:

Highlightable Headings

Say goodbye to static unclickable headings in your Outline tab – you can now click any competitor’s H1, H2, H3, and H4 headings and have them show up in your brief. And, we’re now showing them to you in their true indentable document tree formatting:​​

Once you highlight those in the Outlines tab, you’ll find them waiting for you towards the top of your Brief in the “What is this content about?” section:​

We’ve built this feature to fit your normal workflow. Most of the time you want to quickly spot check competitor headings, and then write out your own (rather than just highlighting competitor headings which your writers might accidentally re-use as-is).

Here’s a quick video to show you how we typically use these highlights as a reference, and then unhighlight them to remove them from the final brief:​​

Watch the full video here.

Naturally, all highlighted competitor headings will show up properly in bulleted sections of your exported brief.

URLs Removed From Highlightable Tiles

We had some small quirks when a link was hiding inside of a highlightable element. If you clicked the link, not only would it open in a new tab, but you would highlight or unhighlight the tile at the same time.

So, we’ve redesigned all of our tiles to remove links from inside them. If we show you a display link inside of the tile and you click it, it will highlight/unhighlight, and we give you a “Source” link underneath the tile that is easy to click. This also includes image and video links.

Reliability Improvements:

Aside from those we’ve been fixing some other quirks and bugs with Google’s search results to make our own reports more reliable and finish quicker. We’ve also fixed a few quirks from Google Images result changes in the past couple months.

Our average report completion time for the past two months has been around 2-5 minutes with only about 1% of reports taking up to 10-25 minutes, and a 100% report success rate. 💪

United Arab Emirates Results:

Since we added New Zealand and South African results in our last updates, we’ve also enabled English results for the UAE recently.

SEO Jumplinks:

We’ve added a bunch of quick jumplinks to analyze your competitors in other SEO tools, such as Ahrefs, Moz, SEMRush, Pagespeed Insights, and Archive.org.

You can find these inside of each expanded Competitor section, like so:

1 – Default Countries

You can now set up a default country for Teams & Projects.

• When you add a default country to your entire Team, it will attach itself to each new Project you create
• When you add a default country to your Project, it will show up as the default country selection when you go to run new keyword reports.

So if your agency and most clients are based in Australia, go ahead and set up Australia as your Team’s default country. If you get a new client in the UK, set that Project’s default country as UK instead.

You can always override this for individual batches of reports, so it is possible for a team member to run reports for any country by changing it for that batch of reports.

3 – We added results for New Zealand and South Africa

We’re now up to 6 total countries available – all results are in English for each country:​

2 – Localized GOV & EDU Results

When we pull Authoritative Sources from GOV & EDU domains in the US, we specifically look for .gov and .edu TLDs.

We have updated this to match the Government & University TLDs for each country.

That means in the UK, the “GOV & EDU Sources” section will show you results from .gov.uk and .ac.uk domains.

Here’s the full list of patterns we’re checking for each country:

• US: gov & edu
• UK: gov.uk & ac.uk
• AU: gov.au & edu.au
• NZ: govt.nz & ac.nz
• ZA: gov.za & ac.za
• CA: gc.ca & edu

Note: Apparently most Canadian universities use .ca extensions, so, we’re defaulting y’all to .edu results rather than mixing in non-university domains.

For our power users who are producing a large number of briefs every week (which is most of you), we should be able to save you a ton of time with our new Brief Templates feature.

You can now create default formatting for every brief field at the Team or Project level. If you’re constantly copy pasting formatted sections from old briefs, this is the feature that will fix that for you.​​

We’ll use those defaults on every new brief that you create. Your Team templates will be used across all projects, and if you want to override them for a specific project, you can just edit that field on that project:​

Once you run a new report – your templates will be sitting there waiting for you so you can build your briefs faster.

To set this up, you’ll need to edit your team settings (top right on your dashboard), or edit your Project settings (top right on your Project dashboard). Currently all users can edit Project templates, and Team Admins can edit Team templates – but we’re considering changing that in the future if it turns out to be a headache.

We’ve had blank spaces in our keyword reports for a little while now where readability scores were intended to go – those are now working on both new reports as well as your existing reports.

In the app we specifically show you readability as one of the following Grade levels:

• 5th Grade
• 6th Grade
• 7th Grade
• 8th Grade
• 10th Grade
• College
• Graduate

You can find the average score for all competitors in the top metrics bar:​

And you can find individual page scores in the Competitors tab:​

Copy Brief To Clipboard:

Version 1 of our top requested feature is now live for testing.

While our briefs look nice with shareable URLs, sometimes you just need to export the whole thing to a Google doc or a DOCX file.

Rather than just offering a single export option, our first approach is to let you copy the entire brief to your clipboard.

​From there you can paste the brief wherever you like:

• Type CTRL + T, then “docs.new“, and you’ll have a fresh Google doc in your browser.
• Paste into Microsoft Word or Office 365.
• Paste into Project Management systems like Basecamp, Asana, etc. (data in tables such as highlighted competitors may not always look pretty but everything else should translate well).

There are tons of variations in text editors so if you spot any quirks, please let us know. We expect that you can spend less than a few minutes and get a fully branded brief experience, and we’ll publish tutorials in the future on how to paste these briefs into nice branded template files.

Other Fixes & Tweaks:

Internal Links are working better: We just fixed a bug that was preventing Internal Link Suggestions from showing up on the Sources tab. For any reports where you have a domain set up in your project settings, you should see your internal link suggestions showing up properly now.​

​

Your Domain is highlighted in the competitor’s tab: We give you a cute little star so you can spot it from across the room.​

We removed Google Books results: Honestly they just weren’t good enough to keep fetching. To paraphrase Marie Kondo, “If this data doesn’t bring you joy, don’t waste your proxies.”

In Case You Missed It:

UK, Australia, & Canadian Reports are now available
We emailed about this a few weeks back, but for those who missed it, you can now run English reports in UK, AU, and CA. Reports feature localized SERPs, keyword data, questions, authoritative sources, and more.

Support for UK queries was one of our top three requested features since we launched last week, and we’re opening up UK, Canada, and Australia searches for beta testing.​

​When I say beta testing, what I really mean is that it works great for me, but I’m going on vacation next week and if you see anything broken, I’ll fix it the next week. 😄

We’ve tested all of our major features to make sure data is pulling in correctly, but here’s a few things to keep an eye on as you start pulling your own reports:

1. Search Volume & CPC should be properly localized to your country.
2. Search Intent patterns look mostly correct – we’ve seen a few image patterns go missing but otherwise we’re getting reliable results. Google Trends widgets have been properly updated by country as well.
3. All of our Google searches are pulled through local SERPs, but you’ll still see plenty of .com and US results, such as Quora and Yahoo Answers threads. Google News, Images, & Video results are localized.
4. Right now we’re still pulling in US .gov and .edu results. I’m going to try to localize that as best we can for the appropriate versions, eg ac.uk and gov.uk for UK results, but that will either go out tomorrow or in 2 weeks. This is now fixed!

This isn’t the most elaborate piece of content marketing – even with 6 long data tables it only comes in around 1800 words of content – but its performance metrics make it obvious that it has filled an informational niche in YourMechanic’s industry.

The format of the piece centers around highlighting 6 angles of data regarding which vehicles are the most and least affordable to maintain. Here’s an example of the costliest cars:

When we start looking at performance metrics, we start seeing why this piece of content is so valuable:

The traffic numbers are good – this piece is currently in the top 20 highest organic traffic URLs on YourMechanic.com, ranking for approximately 1500 keywords with an estimated 3700 monthly clicks.

But beyond the traffic – this piece of content has hit on a goldmine for link acquisition – 629 domains have been spotted linking to this content with over 300 of them currently live.

If we look at the Referring Domains trend, we see a nice upward trend over time (that spike upwards in mid 2016 matches the publish date, and could be due to an initial outreach campaign or could be the result of redirecting another piece of content to this URL):

Let’s take a look at some of the top links this piece has earned:

Those are pretty solid domains. I would bet that if we went through and analyzed them all, we’d see a healthy combination of links driven by outreach, guest posts, and natural organic sharing. Here’s an awesome forum link on Bogleheads that was likely a natural link from a forum member:

The other aspect of this content that I love is that it’s great for Featured Snippets. Here’s an example for “car maintenance cost”, a keyword with modest volume (250/month) but has a lot of other variations.

Admittedly, I don’t think this featured snippet will stand the test of time. It’s nowhere near as valuable to the user as this competitor’s featured snippet for “cheapest cars to maintain”:

Nevertheless, featured snippets can be tested and changed by the content team so there’s an opportunity here for improvement. The data is in place, testing would primarily involve changing around the formatting of the data tables, adding in additional columns of data (eg model and make in separate columns, adding the model year, etc.).

In particular, one of the most common confusing situations we encounter in content marketing is how to handle things like “topic clusters”, “content hubs”, and “pillar pages” (the list of names just adds to the confusion). We get this question all the time internally from team members, and from clients, and it’s one of the most common questions I see on Twitter and in SEO communities like Traffic Think Tank.

But – I’ve never seen someone publish a really great list of content hub examples, nor have I seen anyone document the different types of content hubs.

So I’ve decided to finally sit down and document my own mental framework for different types of topic clusters, and share my private list of content hub examples, too.

Think you’ve got a great content hub example that deserves to be on this list?

If you’ve seen or built a great content hub and think it deserves to be on this list, leave a comment below or ping me on Twitter. I’ll publish all the comments that aren’t spammy, and if it’s a really exceptional example I’ll add it to the article.

1 – Classic Hub & Spoke

Format: Parent page plus 5-20 static subpages.

One head page, 5-20 static subpages. That’s the classic Hub & Spoke model of content hubs.

Most content is evergreen, and the subpages don’t tend to change much. The content is published and updated occasionally but is generally fairly static.

It’s tried and true and it works great for many topics, and sometimes you don’t need to reinvent the wheel (I swear I’m not trying to make a joke about ‘spokes’ here).

This framework works best when your content won’t change much. If you plan to be constantly adding new content about the topic, you may want a more dynamic page template, like the Topic Gateways mentioned below.

Classic Hub & Spoke Examples

• Podia’s How To Create & Sell A Profitable Online Course (see chapter listings towards bottom of page)
• Zapier’s Learn Guides, eg The Ultimate Guide To Remote Work
• Insteading’s Tiny House Guide
• Big Fish Game’s Texas Hold ‘Em Guide (via Archive.org)
• Airbnb’s Neighborhoods Guide – I will say this is a favorite content example of mine, I’ve written about it before, and it is woefully underinvested and has so much more potential than its current form.
• SecurityNerd’s Apartment Security Guides – I think this page could benefit from more static content in order to give the parent page a better shot at ranking for “apartment security” keywords, but if you’re not sure where to start on adding pillar pages to your website and you already have some strong spoke pages to include, this is a great and easy starting point: just list each guide with a paragraph description and a featured image, and add the parent page into your site navigation. These spoke pages are great examples of valuable affiliate review pages, too, so this is a hub page that can drive conversions.
• Plurilock’s Behavioral Biometrics Guide – this is pretty niche stuff so I won’t pretend to understand it all, but that’s OK – I’m not the audience! I love sharing examples that go into really niche topics because it’s likely that Plurilock can accurately claim to be the world’s best resource on this subject after producing a guide like this. That’s the entire goal of content marketing in most B2B settings.
• Clique Studio’s What Is Web Design Guides – This is a good set of 101/introduction level posts about web design that help Clique build relevance with Google and earn some links over time, and help attract users to topics deeper in the funnel, such as website footer design examples, which is likely a post their team can share with clients when trying to actually go through their design process.

2 – The Content Library

Format: Parent page listing individual content by category or subgroup, plus links to those sub-category pages.

The Library approach is the way Blog homepages should be built by default.

Tons of content sorted into categories, highlighting both evergreen popular content as well as fresh content that was just published.

This is generally the best way to approach blog taxonomy rather than a ‘newest content first‘ default that most blog CMSs default to. The Animalz team has done a good job of explaining this in their post, Your Blog Is Not A Publication.

The Library is the right approach to use when you have a lot of content about a variety of different subtopics, and there isn’t one clear way to sort all of them. When you have a lot of content about a more specific topic, you should use a Topic Gateway, which we’ll discuss next.

Content Library Examples

• LiquidWeb’s WooCommerce Hub (via Archive.org)
• HelpScout’s Resources & Guides
• Corporate Finance Institute’s Resources section

3 - The Topic Gateway

Format: Dedicated page with topic overview and links to evergreen resources, and usually ending with dynamic links to recent content published for that topic.

Topic Gateways are like blog category pages on steroids.

Instead of your classic blog category page which lists a bunch of posts in the category, you build a decent page of static content giving an overview of the topic, and then link to subcategories of content.

Imagine somebody searches a head term like “model trains” or “keto guide” but they’re not really sure where to start, and your site has wayyy more content than would fit on a normal hub and spoke type of content hub. That’s a great scenario to build out a Topic Gateway that gives brief overviews of key aspects of the topic, and then points the user towards further resources they should start with.

Honestly, many Wikipedia pages are good examples of this, by giving large overviews of a topic with tons of internal links for a user to browse further depending on what they want to learn more about.

How is a Topic Gateway different than a Content Library format?

Well, library formats tend to be large and encompass more topics, eg a library of content about Human Resources. Gateways tend to be a better fit for a user looking to deep dive in a single topic group, eg Employee Onboarding.

As a result, Gateway & Library formats play well together – try formatting sub-category pages inside of a content library using the Gateway approach. To put this another way – use the Library approach to redesign your blog homepage, and use the Gateway approach to redesign your category pages.

How is a Topic Gateway different than an “Ultimate Guide” format?

Honestly, the overlap is huge here. Lots of examples below are category pages with static content, but there are also lots of long-form guides with tons of internal links. The difference is kind of moot – whether you publish an awesome long-form Post or Page or Category page template doesn’t matter so long as you interlink the page well with the rest of your website, and use the page to drive readers and traffic deeper into your site and your conversion funnel.

Topic Gateway Examples

• CompareCard’s Blog Category Pages, eg Balance Transfers.
• DietDoctor’s Keto for Beginners Guide – not literally a category page, this is a static landing page that is filled with every nook and cranny someone might want to explore when they are researching a ketogenic diet.
• Drift’s Guide to Chatbot Technology – this is a great example of a really custom page design and layout that doesn’t feel like it was cobbled together. The page has solid chapters of standalone value to readers, but also does a good job of driving traffic to mid-funnel education pages (“Still curious? Click here to find out How does a chatbot work?“) as well as bottom-of-funnel conversion pages (“Still curious? Click here to learn about the benefits of chatbots.“).
• Insteading’s Chickens Hub Page – This is a publishing site that we own. We’ve built these to function as advanced category pages, pushing evergreen content like building chicken coops, raising chickens, and information on specific chicken breeds to the top of the page. Then we’ve listed other miscellaneous chicken content show up in the most recent content section at the bottom.
• VetStreet’s Complete Guide To Caring For Dogs
• Traeger Grills’ Thanksgiving Guide
• Tofugo’s Learn Japanese: A Ridiculously Detailed Guide
• WineFolly’s Wine Basics: A Beginner’s Guide To Drinking Wine
• PainScience’s Types of Body Pain

And here’s a few good examples of sites or pages that could benefit from *becoming* more of a gateway page to other content, if they went through and added more static content to the pages.

• Techcrunch’s Tag & Entity pages, eg techcrunch.com/tag/tesla/ – imagine what a robust page this could be if it had static and evergreen content for top Tesla topics alongside ‘recent stories’.
• Model Railroader Magazine’s Beginners Guide page has some of their essential content for people looking to get into model trains, and they’ve made a smart choice by adding it to their navigation with a Getting Started link. This is a classic blogger approach, to build a Start Here page into the navigation that has the site’s manifesto and “greatest hits’ content on it, but it’s rare to see larger publishers do it and rank for phrases like “model trains beginners guide”. But the page could and should be developed further similar to the Keto Beginner’s guide mentioned above.

4 – The Content Database

Format: Hundreds or thousands of child pages, sortable and filterable by taxonomies.

The Content Database model is perfect situations where you have tons of potential child pages, you want to let users browse and explore, and you plan to potentially add more content in the future.

Oftentimes these will show up as variations like a Directory (such as a directory of businesses), a set of examples of something that you can search through, or in structured formats like Glossaries that define a set of topics.

Use these when you have a substantial amount of one content type for users to explore, and when users will want to filter their own custom lists for inspiration or to find a needle in your content haystack.

Content Database Examples

• AdEspresso’s Facebook Ad Database – awesome for browsing Facebook ad examples. (Note, it appears this got turned into a regular blog post by their team, possibly due to shift in search intent. See the old version on archive.org)
• Content Harmony’s Content Marketing Examples Database – our own humble content database showing off content marketing examples that we love.
• Muscle&Strength’s Workout Database – visual database, not dynamically filterable, but with buttons to keep exploring by gender and workout type.
• Bigger Pocket’s Hard Money Lenders Directory – find real estate lenders by geographic location.
• GreenRoof.com’s Green Roof Project Database – find examples of green roof projects by location.
• Sole Collector’s Collectible Sneakers Database – browse through a database of collectible shoes by brand and product line.
• The Kaplan Group’s Alternative Financing Directory – sort through a list of alternative B2B financing lenders.
• Audubon’s Guide to North American Birds – sort birds by their family and region, click to hear their audio file quickly, or click for a full page of information on that species. Their species pages are excellent content examples, too, check out this page for the Barn Owl.
• LemList’s Cold Email Templates Hub – Good list of posts describing cold email outreach templates that were successful and why. This one isn’t a huge database but could grow over time, and even with a small number of entries compared to some examples above, it does a great job of drawing you into each particular post because there are strong insights in each one.

5 – The Topic Matrix

Format: Consistent subpages across an index of tens, hundreds, or thousands of parent pages.

The magic element of a Topic Index is really the set of consistent subpage types. By building large volumes of consistent content you can spend more time investing in advanced page formats that will make your UX way better than a competitor’s generic blog post.

The Topic Matrix concept often shows up in the form of a complete site architecture – think of these types of examples:

• Yelp divided up by location and business type
• Redfin or Zillow divided up by cities, neighborhoods, and types of homes.

But, while it’s typically used for key conversion content and landing page systems, it’s also possible to build Topic Indexes for more informational types of content — or at least blend more informational content into your landing page system.

Topic matrixes can be deep – with lots of subpage types – or wide – with extensive sets of parent pages.

Medical sites are a good example of this – you might have a series of lots of disease and conditions pages that show up as hubs, and subpages under each hub that are consistent for all drug types.

Can you show me an example?

Let’s look at MayoClinic’s Diseases & Conditions hub as an example of this (I’ve edited URLs slightly for illustration purposes):

• https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/
• /acl-injury/ (primary condition page)
• /symptoms-causes/syc-20350738 (repeated subpage type)
• /diagnosis-treatment/drc-20350744 (repeated subpage type)
• /doctors-departments/ddc-20350745 (repeated subpage type)
• /agoraphobia/
• /symptoms-causes/syc-20355987
• /diagnosis-treatment/drc-20355993
• /alcohol-use-disorder/
• /symptoms-causes/syc-20369243
• /diagnosis-treatment/drc-20369250
• /doctors-departments/ddc-20369252
• /care-at-mayo-clinic/mac-20369256
• etc. for thousands of other conditions

See how each disease or condition has a Symptoms & Causes page that acts as the main page for that condition, and then a set of optional subpages like Diagnosis & Treatments, Doctors & Departments, and finally Care At Mayo Clinic if it’s a condition they’re looking to drive patients towards?

Many will look at this and say “that’s just good site structure” and they’re totally right, but, how you build this into your site’s URL and navigation structure is a pattern that can be reused in many types of content.

I don’t want you to miss the conversion part I mentioned there, either, because that’s a huge element of how Topic Indexes can be successful:

Mayo Clinic is a good example of using educational content and flexing their domain authority and trust to drive site users towards care pages like https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/alcohol-use-disorder/care-at-mayo-clinic/mac-20369256 that can educate people on services that they offer.

Topic Matrix Examples

• Mayo Clinic’s Disease & Conditions hub, Tests & Procedures hub, and others for Drugs and Symptoms.
• TheCultureTrip’s site architecture split up by Travel Destination (Puerto Rico shown as an example in the list below, but they have many more articles and destinations on each hub page):
• theculturetrip.com/north-america/caribbean/
• /north-america/puerto-rico/
• /caribbean/puerto-rico/ (interestingly this subfolder path used in the articles below redirects to the /north-america/ one shown above)
• /articles/puerto-rico-s-top-10-restaurants-fine-dining-and-local-eats/
• /articles/8-magical-spots-in-puerto-rico-that-are-straight-out-of-a-fairytale/
• /articles/10-myths-legends-and-superstitions-of-puerto-rico/
• /articles/top-10-coffee-shops-in-old-san-juan-puerto-rico/

Still have questions about the best way to build the hub you’re planning?

Got a great content hub example to share?

Leave a comment – we’ll answer all of your questions, and promote the best examples you share to the list above.

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Three new feature updates for you based upon this week’s beta user feedback!

1. Content briefs are live
2. Public sharing URLs are active (use this to share with freelancers and clients)
3. You can review all competitor H1/H2 structures at once in the Topics tab

Check it out 👇

1 – Content Brief text fields are now live:

You can update and save any data on the brief tab to share with other users.​

Be sure to hit the save button at the bottom of the page. We’ll be adding “auto-save” as a feature soon.

2 – Shareable URLs are working:

You can now share keyword briefs with clients, freelance writers, and other people who you don’t want to add to your entire team.

Just click on the Sharing tab in your brief, and you can choose to share with content brief notes, or just share the keyword brief data without internal notes:​

Most people will want to share the full brief, which is the second button, so that’s a mild annoyance ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. We’re going to eventually remove the sharing tab and just have a button at the top of your screen to share this report, so that will improve soon.

3 – Headline Analysis has been added to the Topics tab:

You can now see H1/H2 structure of competitors at a glance at the bottom of the topics tab. Now you can scan all of a competitors headlines at once to help brainstorm your own document outline. This is version 0.1 and we’d like to hear ways to improve it.

Update 2020-10: you can see the updated version here.

Coming Soon: Image/Video analysis for each competitor:

A final preview of other features in development based upon calls this week: When you click the dropdown in each competitor URL, we will soon show you a carousel of images and videos we found on the page:​

But, understanding search intent is only one factor in understanding how to get your content to rank well for a specific query in Google search results.

One of the features we’re really excited about is how we’re approaching the concept of Keyword Difficulty in our new toolset.

TLDR – We’ve released a new three-part keyword difficulty scoring model that factors in Content Difficulty, Link Difficulty, and Domain Difficulty as distinct concepts that help you quickly understand why a keyword is easy or difficult.

This may not matter when you’re analyzing 10,000 keywords at a time, but when you’re working your tail off to produce content for one really important keyword (the problem our software is trying to solve), knowing everything you can about that keyword quickly is super important.

So – why release a new approach to keyword difficulty? What’s not working with other solutions already out there?

A Short History of Keyword Difficulty Metrics

SEOs have a long history of trying to measure keyword difficulty.

One of the earlier well-used examples was Moz’s original keyword difficulty rating. This forum post from 2012 explains how it was measured (via Archive.org), but to quote Nick’s reply on that page, it factored in “everything from on page scores, links metrics, and rank to calculate the difficulty of a KW.”

Do you guys remember how awesome those butterfly charts were?? I would stare at them like they were magic. I was always that tiny DA 12 site at #8 trying to figure out how that DA 25 site at #5 got there. I shoulda spent that time building links, but, I digress. [screenshot via old Q&A thread via archive.org]

This was a pretty good start and better than any other options out there, but, it didn’t always produce results that SEOs could rely on to know how hard it would be for them to rank for a given keyword. Rand himself wrote an assessment of the good and bad points of this keyword difficulty score in a 2017 post on the Moz Community Forums (via Archive.org).

Still, it was better than other solutions out there aside from building your own keyword difficulty models in Excel that accounted for the ranking factors you cared about most.

Fast forward a few years….

Enter Ahrefs’ Keyword Difficulty Scores

Ahrefs’ Keyword Difficulty was pretty awesome when it launched because it focused exclusively on links to the URLs on page one of a SERP for the keyword that you’re analyzing. I like this because it’s very clear how the score is calculated, and from a practical perspective, it gives us a decent idea of how hard it will be to rank without proactive link building efforts.

Because of that, it’s currently the score we use most frequently when doing keyword research for clients.

But, we’ve encountered gaps in this links-only approach. It often flags very difficult keywords as easy, because it doesn’t factor in SERPs that are extremely difficult to rank for due to non-link reasons. This is a search intent problem most commonly, where links are not the dominant ranking factor.

Take these examples of high volume keywords with KD under 10 and you can see this in effect:

As you can see, there are some search queries in here that only a handful of sites could reasonably rank for.

I guarantee you that you’re not going to rank in the top 4 results for “Buy Buy Baby” (against buybuybaby.com, twitter.com, yelp.com, and retailmenot.com) just by building more links and creating a well targeted page. A Keyword Difficulty score of 9 is deceptive here.

But, these types of keywords often slip into your keyword research when you’re dealing with thousands of keywords at a time, and they require lots of manual filtering to remove them from a spreadsheet of good opportunities.

As I said above, we really like the Ahrefs KD score and use it frequently. But these examples are a big part of the reason we’ve been considering more advanced ways to measure keyword difficulty across all types of SERPs – not just link-driven ones.

Moz’s New Keyword Difficulty Score

Moz’s relaunched their Keyword Difficulty scores in 2017. From what I can see, Moz has made a lot of improvements to their old scoring system. Their link data quality has improved drastically, and their use of clickstream data allows them to understand click-through rate of a keyword that may or may not be worthwhile to try and target

But – it’s really difficult for me to get on board with using it because of the underlying concept in how it’s created: it blends a large number of factors together (via Archive.org) in a way that hides the reason the keyword earned a particular score. To me this is a deal killer because it just doesn’t explain why a keyword is hard to rank for. What if it’s hard to rank for because there are lots of high authority domains, but I’m publishing on a site that’s DA 80?

This isn’t a knock against the Moz team. They have multiple team members working on this product that are incredibly smart and have each been working on internet-wide keyword research 10x longer than I have. And, they are building for a much different audience – they’re looking to serve 100k to 1 million marketers – I’m looking for data that will serve 1k to 2k top-of-their-field SEOs and content marketers who have different needs.

Other attempts from SEO toolsets that I’ve seen of measuring keyword difficulty just haven’t stuck, mostly due to prioritizing what I believe are the wrong data inputs, using datasets that are unreliable or not comprehensive enough, or overly favoring factors that in my experience don’t make much of a difference. If I can’t trust your underlying data, I can’t trust your metrics.

The problem with looking at Keyword Difficulty as a single number between 0-100 is that it doesn’t clearly tell you *why* a keyword is hard to rank for. Using one-metric-to-explain-it-all for keyword difficulty creates more confusion for the analyst or marketer trying to understand a given search result.

I believe that the answer to fixing this is to divide Keyword Difficulty into multiple metrics – different types of difficulty, specifically.

We’ve done this in our new toolset by splitting Keyword Difficulty into a set of 3 types of difficulty, each on a scale of 0-100:

1. Content Difficulty – how keyword-targeted and optimized the top ranking pages are.
2. Link Difficulty – how many links the average page one result has to that exact page.
3. Domain Difficulty – the average Domain Authority/Rating the page one results have.

By doing so we’re able to give users a clear picture for whether they’re up against big sites, whether they’re up against highly linked pages, and whether they’re up against highly targeted pages. You should be able to look at our 3 metrics and know why a keyword is going to be easy or hard to rank for.

A live screenshot of what these Difficulty scores look like side by side in the Content Harmony toolset. In this example, we’re looking at a SERP that is dominated by large sites (high Domain Difficulty) with moderately well-targeted pages of content (medium Content Difficulty), but low-to-medium Link Difficulty. I would approach this keyword differently if I was a new site versus a big established domain.

Let’s jump in to how we’re calculating each of these scores:

Content Difficulty

This is probably the most complex of the three difficulty scores, but in essence, we’re grading the page one results of a SERP for a basic on-page SEO grade.

We look at a “brute force keyword match” analysis of each page ranking on page 1, and then score them.

• Is the keyword (or a close variant) in the title tag?
• Is the keyword (or a close variant) in the URL?
• Is the keyword (or a close variant) in the H1?
• Is the keyword on the page multiple times?

We’re also looking at the following rough content quality metrics, though at a slightly lower weight than keyword targeting:

• What is the average word count?
• Are there photos/images on the page?
• Are there videos on the page?

A lot of people might suggest that such a basic look at keyword targeting and things like content length is too simplistic. I fully expect this difficulty score to be the one that earns the most pushback and disagreement. But, even though we intend to evolve this score over time, we believe that keeping this rating simplistic is for the better.

Why?

We want to tell SEOs and content producers how closely matched the results on page 1 are. If there are 10 sites with highly optimized pages for that exact keyword, we want to know that quickly, and looking at top ranking factors like keyword usage throughout the page is a reliable way to do that.

What Does A High Content Difficulty Look Like?

For instance, take a search like [best small business crms]:

Highly targeted content for [best small business crms]

An example like [best small business crms] would have a high Content Difficulty score, because the SERP is full of exact-match content that is perfectly optimized to rank for this query. These pages are almost all long form, with multiple images/screenshots, and high focus on keyword usage throughout the content. We would expect to return a Content Difficulty score between 70 to 100 for a search result like this.

While the rest of our toolset uses more advanced methods of content topic and entity analysis, we feel a raw partial-match or exact-match approach presents a clearer picture of Content Difficulty.

Furthermore, if Google is trying to match user intent more than they are trying to rank pages with exact match keyword targeting, we want that to show up in our reports. A search result with low exact match keyword targeting *should* score lower on content difficulty, so that you focus more heavily on other factors like search intent.

Link Difficulty

Simply put, this is an estimate of how much link building or link earning you’ll need to do to be competitive with the other results on page one.

This is most closely related to Ahrefs Keyword Difficulty, which is also based on page-level links.

To calculate this score, we’ll take the number of linking domains to each result on the page and average them, then normalize that on a scale of 0-100. We’re also testing scores where we toss out outliers that would skew the mean.

I go into more detail below on link data sources, but our initial plan is to use Moz’s linking domains metric for calculating Link Difficulty.

What Does A High Link Difficulty Look Like?

This search result for [time tracking software] is a good example:

High Link Difficulty from [time tracking software] due to lots of highly linked homepages.

Because it’s a popular and competitive search phrase, and particularly because many of the results are homepages that are likely to have lots of links, we would expect to see a fairly high Link Difficulty score around 70-100 for this keyword.

As a comparison, Ahref’s Keyword Difficulty (which is also entirely based on page-level links) for [time tracking software] is scored as a 72.

Domain Difficulty

Much like link difficulty analyzes page-level links, with domain difficulty we’re taking domain-wide link metrics and averaging them across the page one results.

In this case we’ll roughly be reporting an average Domain Authority as measured by Moz, since it has already been normalized on a 0-100 scale to represent domain’s link authority as compared to all other domains on the internet. We also show the lowest DA score in the top page of results, which you can also find in the competitor analysis section of our reports.

On search results that score low on both link difficulty and content difficulty, but highly on domain difficulty, we want to make sure that users understand smaller domains still may be up against some tough competitors when trying to rank for this keyword (then again – sometimes SERPs are filled with big domains that poorly target a keyword because nobody else has done a good job of targeting that keyword yet. That’s up to you the SEO Strategist to decide).

A good example of low Link & Content Difficulty but high Domain Difficulty? Branded search results (which our intent detection would also flag as branded)

What Does A High Domain Difficulty Look Like?

Let’s say you search for [coca cola website]:

Our reports will accurately rate this keyword’s search intent as “Branded”, and you’ll also see a very high Domain Difficulty. That’s because the domains ranking for this search phrase, like coca-cola.com, Wikipedia, Linkedin, Facebook, and other branded sites like https://www.worldofcoca-cola.com, are all highly authoritative.

Those pages may not be highly targeted to the user’s query, and they may not have a ton of links themselves, but that doesn’t mean this is an easy keyword to rank for.

Using a phrase like [coca cola website] is an easier example since the intent behind ‘website’ is clearly branded, but this type of search result is common with most branded search results, since Google wants the user to be able to find pages like social profiles and other official branded webpages. Try searching for a smaller company name like [content harmony] and you’ll still see high authority results like Facebook, Twitter, Glassdoor, and so on.

We spot this all the time while doing keyword research for clients where what appears to be a normal unbranded keyword is actually somebody’s brand name, especially in markets where there are lots of generic names or exact match domains used. While doing keyword research, we wouldn’t want that keyword to slip into a list of recommendations for blog posts to prioritize because the keyword looks “easy” according to page-level link metrics, and has abnormally high search volume (because of people searching for the brand name).

Where Are We Getting Our Link Data?

The primary two sources I trust for my own team are Moz’s newly relaunched link data and Ahrefs. A bunch of SEOs I respect also use Majestic heavily but I’ve never been able to make it work with my workflow.

Our plan for Content Harmony’s toolset is to integrate Moz’s link data directly into our toolset, and we also plan to allow users to add their own Ahrefs API credentials if they want to augment the data. Ahrefs doesn’t allow their data to be sold directly to other tool providers, otherwise we would just pull data from both sources.

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• AJ Kohn, https://www.blindfiveyearold.com/algorithm-analysis-in-the-age-of-embeddings
• Stephanie Briggs, https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/searchdriven-content-strategy-mozcon-2018-105014924/105014924
• Dana DiTomaso, https://moz.com/blog/using-stat-for-content-strategy
• Kevin Indig, User Intent Mapping on Steroids (via Archive.org)
• Tom Rayner, https://raynernomics.com/predict-keyword-latent-intent/(via Archive.org)

(There are definitely others but these are some of my favorites).

Why is search intent suddenly in the SEO zeitgeist?

I believe it’s because Google’s search results have shifted in the past few years. Google has gotten significantly better at producing search results that deliver what the user is looking for without relying solely on classical SEO factors.

In the process, I think we’ve seen search intent become a more dominant factor on multiple types of search results, often outweighing classic SEO ranking factors like links, title tags, and other SEO basics. Historical domain-wide link factors (domain authority, basically) no longer carry the importance that we saw in 2010-2015.

I’m burying the lede a little bit here, but I’m really excited to share that in the spring of 2019, Content Harmony will be releasing a new SaaS toolset that helps SEOs & content marketers produce better content.

One of the great features in that toolset is a new scoring system we’ve developed for classifying search intent.

In this post, I’m going to lay out why we felt this was a key part of the puzzle in producing better content. I’m not satisfied with current methods of classifying search intent, and I’ll walk you the new classification and intent scoring process that we have built and show you some examples.

How We Talk About Search Intent Hasn’t Changed Much Since 2002

There are two common ways of labeling search intent that I’ve seen over the years.

The first classification that most of us have encountered is Navigational, Informational, or Transactional.

This methodology dates back to a 2002 peer-reviewed paper from Andrei Broder at Altavista (thanks Tom Anthony for this post with the Alta Vista paper link and some other thoughts on this system):

Broder’s paper defines each category as follows:

• Navigational: The immediate intent is to reach a particular site.
• Informational: The intent is to acquire some information assumed to be present on one or more web pages.
• Transactional: The intent is to perform some web-mediated activity.

The paper goes on to explain an interesting methodology they used to survey users to understand the intent behind their search.

Fast forward a few years. In the early 2010s Google starts referring to their own variation on this, talking about Know, Go, Do, & Buy “micro moments”. These are a bit more user friendly but basically cover the same categories that we see with Navigational, Informational, and Transactional.

I think these traditional classification systems are useful to help beginners understand how different searches are intended to yield different results, but they’re not very useful to SEOs and content creators on a day-to-day basis.

So where do these systems fall apart?

1) [Navigational / Informational / Transactional] Is Too Broad

As SEOs and content creators, we can produce much better content if we understand what a typical user is looking for. Unfortunately I think the systems that exist now are good for explaining search intent in hypothetical terms, but when you try to start applying them to keyword research and showing content creators and writers how to factor that into their content, I think their usefulness is diminished.

If you’re trying to understand the difference between a format-driven navigational search to reach Youtube, like [snowboard videos] or a branded navigational search, like [seattle metro routes], seeing them both labeled as Navigational isn’t super helpful. And grouping keywords together in this system is too generic to be very useful during the keyword research and mapping process.

2) Navigational / Informational / Transactional Don’t Account For Overlapping Intent

Additionally – I can think of many searches that fall into multiple categories. If somebody searches “amazon laptop deals”, would you label that Navigational (trying to reach Amazon) or Transactional (trying to buy a laptop)? So trying to categorize intent as a distinct category rather than a bunch of overlapping intents is problematic as well.

3) Search Intent Labels Are Often Guessed Manually Based Upon The Query Itself, Not The Actual Search Results

Most of the methods people use during the keyword research process involve adding modifiers that we expect to generate a specific intent. An SEO Strategist reviews a long list of keyword in the hundreds or thousands and fills in a column with Transactional, Informational, or Navigational.

For example, if users add words like “sale“, “cheap“, “deals“, or “for sale” to a query, we mark them as transactional and move on. If we encounter a query where it’s not clear what the intent is from glancing at the keyword, we mark it as Split Intent or with our best guess and then we keep moving down the spreadsheet. Who has the time to actually look at all of these SERPs and see what types of results are actually showing up, right?

(Interesting sidenote on manually assigning intent: that 2002 paper explicitly mentions that “…we need to clarify that there is no assumption here that this intent can be inferred with any certitude from the query.”)

Another approach is to look for a city name or modifier like “near me” to label a query as local – even though many of our non-modified search terms might be showing local packs at the top of the results.

No shame is intended if this sounds familiar – I’ve done it, too – but it’s a process that leads to mistakes and incorrect assumptions.

The experienced SEOs in the room should be able to think of many times when a search yielded a number of unexpected result types as Google seemed to shift the implicit intent they were trying to serve.

It’s also not hard to find shifts in intent that occur from query changes that don’t look significant when you’re looking at them in Excel sheet. Take a look at [texas electric] vs [texas electricity]:

The problem underlying these examples is that we’re trying to do this classification manually, rather than introducing tools into the process that can do it more reliably.

4) SEOs Don’t Need To Understand Intent The Same Way Search Engines Understand It

We (the SEO community) are not search engines and we are not trying to decide what results a user wants to see, so it’s OK for us to look at intent differently than a classical information retrieval model.

The goal we (Content Harmony) are trying to reach is not to understand the true intent(s) of all users. The goal of our tool is to understand the type of content that Google is looking to serve to users based upon what Google knows about the user’s intent, so that we can help SEOs & content creators make the best content for that keyword that they can. I’ve been really careful throughout this post to discuss “search intent”, not “user intent”, for basically that reason.

As SEOs, we mainly need to understand whether our content (and the format it’s in) fit the format that Google is looking to deliver.

How Content Harmony is Classifying Search Intent

OK, so, money where my mouth is – how exactly do I propose we measure search intent more usefully, and more reliably?

I believe that it’s more useful to classify search intent in a way that more closely aligns with SERP features. Here are the Intent Types we’ve begun using in our software (presented in no particular order):

1) Research Intent

One of the most common result types, this would generally consist of search phrases that generate results like Wikipedia pages, definition boxes, scholarly examples, lots of blog posts or articles, in-depth articles, and other SERP features that suggest users are looking for answers or insights into a topic.

2) Answer Intent

Slightly different from research, there are quite a few searches where users don’t generally care about clicking into a result and researching it – they just want a quick answer. Good examples are definition boxes, answer boxes, calculator boxes, sports scores, and other SERPs that feature a non-featured snippet version of an answer box, as well as a very low click-through rate (CTR) on search results.

3) Transactional Intent

Users looking to buy products or research them are easy to detect, since Google tends to be aggressive with Shopping boxes and other purchase-intent features. Other easy methods of detection would include multiple results from known ecommerce players like Amazon or Walmart, results consisting of /product/ types of URL structure, and multiple results that feature eCommerce category/page schema markup.

4) Local Intent

Dominated by a combination of local packs, geographic markers that have recently started showing up in organic results, Maps intent in the top navigation, and if there’s a way of detecting it, localized organic results for the IP being used to search.

5) Visual Intent

These are easier to track using Image packs and thumbnails, however prominence is a factor. Many SERPs have Image packs in the top 100 results by default – placement in the top 10 is a more significant sign, as well as 2 rows of results, or perhaps top 10 rankings from sites like Pinterest.

6) Video Intent

Originally I was going to classify Video Intent alongside images as a Visual Intent category, but as I started reviewing more and more search results, it became clear that Video was really it’s own type of intent. Between video carousels, video thumbnails, and even video featured snippets now becoming commonplace, video is becoming critical to ranking for certain types of queries.

7) Fresh/News Intent

When we see News Intent in the navigation, Top stories boxes, Recent Tweets, and heavy use of recent dates in the past day/week/month in the organic results, that tells us that there is a high volume of content being produced by this topic, and we can probably infer that Google sees higher user interaction with more recent results for this topic.

8) Branded Intent

Brand intent queries tend to be dominated by brand homepage results with sitelinks, or domain clustering from a single domain when a keyword includes a known brand entity (eg “walmart TVs”).

9) Split Intent

This last one is more of a “meta intent” type. When we see signs that there are a number of potential intents a user could have, we should be triggering a “Split intent” warning to the user, since these queries are often difficult to rank in if you’re not the first result for a certain intent. EG if you’re not the first Research Intent result, like Wikipedia, your blog post may not have a shot at ranking. This is covered more heavily in the sections below.

While our system is currently focused on the 9 intent classifications, we’ve built our scoring process in a way that allows us to add new intent types in the future. When Google rolls out virtual reality search results, we’ll be ready for it.

How Content Harmony Is Scoring Intent

One of the challenges facing us in search results these days is that it’s very common to find a SERP with multiple potential intent options. So we need a way to indicate overlapping intent.

We also need a way to differentiate between a SERP that contains an image pack at the bottom, with a SERP that contains an image pack in the #1 ranking slot – the Visual Intent of those two searches can’t be scored the same. Intent is not a boolean “Yes” or “No” status – intent can be stronger or weaker on different keywords.

So, we developed our own scoring method.

Publicly to our users, Content Harmony will report search intent uses a scale of 0-3 depending on the prevalence of certain search features.

• 0 – A score of zero means no signs of this intent were found in the search results.
• 1 – A score of one means we saw some signs of this intent type, but they didn’t appear to be very strong.
• 2 – A score of two means we see enough signs to believe this is one of the top 2-3 types of intent for this query.
• 3 – A score of three doesn’t happen on every result we analyze, but when it does you can be sure that this is a clear intent for that keyword.

We report the Primary Search Intent back to the user depending on which type of intent scored the highest on our scale:

Internally, we track somewhere between 4 and 20 different possible signals for each type of search intent. For example, we might have 11 different signals that suggest local intent on a search result. Each of those signals has its own raw score relative to each other, and by tracking each signal that shows up for a keyword, we calculate a raw score. Again, this raw score is entirely internal since it will evolve over time as we add new intent signals.

Our software will support API queries out of the box. An example JSON result for search intent score might look like this:

{ "primary_intent" : "Transactional",
  "intent_scores" : {
         "Transactional" : 3,
         "Branded" : 2,
         "Visual" : 1,
         "Research" : 1,
         "Answer" : 0,
         "Fresh / News" : 0,
         "Local" : 0,
         "Video" : 0
        }
}

(Formatting is subject to change of course. I’m sure our developer will tell me I missed a semicolon or something).

FAQ & Other Search Intent Considerations

“Isn’t Some of This Actually Formats, Not Intent?”

Good question! Yes, we are mingling format with intent to a degree. I believe that format and intent are heavily intertwined. Formats are simply different type of results and intent is nothing but the user wanting to see a certain type of result, so, they all go hand in hand. Describing intent in relation to format is also a much clearer way to tell SEOs and content writers what type of content they’ll need to produce to meet the intent we’re seeing for that keyword.

A user may not know they’re looking for a video when they search for [how to tie a tie], but good luck trying to rank for that search query without a video if that’s the best format to serve the user’s intent, which is seeing how the hell to tie a half windsor.

A user may not know type the words “image gallery” when they search for [house paint inspiration], but good luck trying to rank for that query without some beautiful custom or user-submitted photography. Detecting visual intent on that search result is critical to understanding what that user wants.

This question of detecting formats vs intent is closely related with my notes earlier regarding SEOs needing to understand intent differently than search engines do. We’re not trying to present the user with a set of results that makes them happy, we’re trying to figure out what the best result is to show Google to reach those users.

“Wait, If Intent Is Always Changing Then What If Your Intent Score Is Wrong A Week From Now?”

Another good question! This is absolutely correct, there are excellent examples out there of keywords where the intent can change daily, or even hourly throughout the day (I’m looking at you, Black Friday SERPs).

This tweet from JR Oakes illustrates this well (follow him, it’s worth it):

Here’s the thing – when intent changes in a way that negatively affects your content’s performance, you should be able to spot that in other tools.

Your week-over-week traffic drop alert in Google Analytics will go off. Your rankings tracker will show you lost the top spot for a keyword that you’ve been #1 on for the past 2 years. Your conversions from that page will be down.

Those are normal daily occurrences in the life of an SEO. And sometimes, your content needs to change, too!

When that happens, sometimes you’ll be able to look at the search result and see what is happening (eg a competitor with similar content took over your spot). But sometimes you won’t be quite sure what has changed, and running a new report for keyword intent is the correct way to compare before and after if you previously ran a report for that keyword.

We have an interesting example from the August 1, 2018 algorithm update of how this affected a B2B SaaS Client we used to work with. I tweeted about it in this thread:

How We’re Determining Split Intent

If a SERP scores 2 or 3 in a number of areas, that would be an appropriate time to report “Split Intent” to the researcher.

For example, in the [hockey] example below, we see multiple results indicating intent that would score 3 on our scale:

1. Fresh Intent and news results
2. Multiple Research Intent signs from Wikipedia, knowledge graph boxes, and PAA results.
3. Multiple Visual Intent signs from video packs, and Image Video intent suggestions in the navigation.
4. Multiple Local Intent signs from a local pack in the top 20 results, and localized organic results such as SeattleThunderbirds.com in my area.

In this case it would be misleading to an analyst to call this a Fresh Intent query or a Research Intent query. I would report this as a Split Intent keyword, and perhaps tell the user a ‘secondary intent’ of Fresh Intent.

How We’re Handling Unknown Intent

There will always be “10 blue link” search results where the intent just isn’t clear to us. We’re currently deciding between returning a primary intent of “None” or “General” in these cases and we’d be open to feedback.

I feel that “General” indicates the intent is unclear, but it’s different than a nil result of some type where data was missing.

Want To Take It For A Spin?

We now offer full access to standalone search intent reports inside of Content Harmony's software.

Bulk data pricing and service options will be released during 2021.

Schedule a demo to learn more or see if we can solve your use case.

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If your brand’s mission is to help people simplify their homes and put things into storage without all of the hassles, it makes sense to build a content strategy that puts your brand in front of people who are trying to organize their homes.

So today’s example on Bedroom Storage Hacks and Solutions from MakeSpace is a great example of top-of-funnel content that is on-brand and relevant to their target audience.

The post is built around curated photos and ideas, with custom commentary from MakeSpace. This is both a great way to assemble long-form content with a branded spin on it, and a great way to interact with those bloggers and influencers that they’re citing throughout the post:

Even with a mild estimated traffic dropoff in the screenshot below, this article has shown some strong organic traffic results since it was first published in 2016:

On top of that, it’s proven to be a reliable link earning content asset for their brand, earning them hundreds of great referring domains:

What I love most, however, is the ability for MakeSpace to build paid ad campaigns based upon the traffic from this post.

The obvious choice is to retarget all of the visitors to this piece that are in their target audience. There’s only one problem with that – for now, MakeSpace only operates in ~4 cities (when they first launched the piece I believe they were only operating in NYC):

But, for a smart paid social campaign, that’s OK.

Why? Because they can build lookalike audiences from the entire traffic profile of people coming to this blog post, and then geo-restrict it to the markets they operate in.

Why is that cool, you ask???

Because they’ve built an entire social profile of people who are trying to figure out how to fit more stuff into their homes. An enormous audience of people who either (A) have too much stuff or (B) don’t have enough space, and they can target them on Facebook and other channels forever more!

This basically means that they have an instant campaign ready to be built for the 1% of people in any city they operate in that is most likely to need extra storage!

Seriously, this is some awesome content marketing potential right here – we’re hitting goals related to SEO, brand awareness, social ad targeting, and more, since the links they’ve acquired to this piece of content will help the rest of their site rank for some difficult search terms related to “storage space”.

Restaurants rely on their menu to bring diners through the door and drive demand for their dishes. However, menu design is often overlooked; it should not only describe the food in a delectable manner but also incorporate tested psychological and sales tactics to increase revenues.

Upserve’s Restaurant Menu Builder is an excellent example of how restaurant owners can have it all when it comes to their menu. The interactive template incorporates menu research from across the U.S., leveraging best practices to improve menus and make restaurants more profitable.

Upserve is a restaurant management software suite, so building a tool that helps restaurants build better menus is a great way to build highly relevant brand awareness, build a super valuable retargeting and lookalike audience in paid social tools, and capture restaurant management teams that are likely in a lifecycle stage where they’re upgrading their processes and operations. That’s a win-win for the audience that uses the tool, and the company that built it.

Content that serves a demand

Designing a menu combines many different disciplines: culinary, current trends, sales research, psychological tactics, and more. That’s why thousands of restaurateurs take to Google each month to find tips and tricks to improving their menu.

According to team members at Upserve, their team had the opportunity to analyze millions of transactions from thousands of restaurants to build this tool more effectively than a single restaurant could do with their own data. Combining that data with the newest research, Upserve created a smart menu builder to capture their target audience.

It Provides Critical Information

Upserve’s Smart Menu Builder isn’t just a template with pretty graphics. It’s an interactive tool that informs restaurateurs what tactics they should use to sell more dishes, what their perfect menu ratio is, what should be included versus what shouldn’t be, and other important information. The final product is a beautiful menu, customized to your restaurant concept.

But Does it Work As Content Marketing?

The answer is yes. It ranks on page 1-2 for most target queries, and according to the Upserve team, drove 1,500 unique page views in July 2018. Here’s the top volume keyword visibility from Ahrefs data in September 2018:

Upserve’s Smart Menu Builder also had over 200 downloads in the same period. Creating a Smart Menu Builder clearly was a smart marketing tactic for Upserve and has long-lasting marketing potential from their initial content investment.

Trello has built out hundreds of example boards in their Inspiring Boards section.

“A collection of boards to inspire new and creative uses of Trello in both your personal and work life. All of these boards can be copied and used as a jumping off point for projects of your own.”

A recent great example? A Voting Resources board, assembled and shared before a recent US election day:

They’re using their own product to build interesting scannable content, not just shoving it into another blog post format that would be less on-brand.

It’s evergreen content – they’ve been adding new boards since 2014 and building up links and traffic throughout that time:

Note: these are just the link examples for the homepage of the project – we haven’t gone through and analyzed links or traffic estimates for each board itself since there’s just shy of 300 of them.

It’s normal for a company like Trello (or Airtable, or Zapier, etc.) to build out example dashboards from their community showing how people are using the tool. What I really love about this example is that they’re building actual editorial-like content in here and curating it in a valuable way. It gives new users a way to discover Trello and it gives their existing userbase some insights into creative new ways to user their tools, hopefully building up loyalty & retention in the process.

There are 25 team members on this Trello group, so it’s likely a great way to recruit people across their organization to assist with creating new content and boards as well.

Here’s an interesting example curated or guest contributed from a blogger showing how she uses Trello to track her kids’ artwork and projects over the years with high quality photos, so she doesn’t feel bad about throwing out some of the projects that are building clutter. Seriously cool!

As it turns out, the voice they used was so powerful, they’ve created one of the web’s most shared, most linked-to content pieces about water conservation: Their 100+ Ways To Conserve Water Guide.

Their water conservation guide has been shared more than 18,000 times on Facebook, nearly 4,000 times on Pinterest, and ranks on the first page of Google results for key searches like “how to save water” and “ways to conserve water.”

Why has this piece of content been so wildly successful?

It’s Easy To Find A Tip You Care About

The list is organized multiple ways, all of which make it simple for someone to find a tip that applies to their personal situation or their audience.

You can view the tips organized by “outdoor tips”, “indoor tips” “kids” and “office.” Or, you can see them all at a glance in the list view. You can drill down ever further if you like, into categories like “kitchen” and “lawn care”.

It Feels Comprehensive

100+ ways — that’s a lot of ways. More isn’t always better: 100+ ways to make toast would feel like way too many. But for an important topic like water conservation, that number feels right. By publicizing the guide as “100+”, rather than a specific number, Water Use It Wisely’s content team can always add new ways as they learn about them. As I write this, their list is up to 190.

It’s Easy To Share

The gallery view for each tip offers share buttons for the major social networks, as well as a download button for people who want to manage the process themselves. Giving people multiple options to share not only make it easy on them, but also gives them tacit permission to spread your message far and wide. Make sure you make it clear—we want you to share!

It Uses A Variety Of Pleasing But Impactful Color Combinations

The creators of this content could have just confined their color usage to the brand colors, or to approved combinations. Instead, they created a palette of color combinations that both give the page variety but also encourage shares and clicks. The designers leaned heavily on primary colors like blue, red, and yellow, plus warm colors like orange, green, and pink.

The designers obviously have a strong grasp of how colors work together, because they all play well together on the page—if a non-designer tried this, they could end up picking colors that clash.

Some big companies are experimenting with using multiple colors in their branding. See how Dropbox has reimagined their branding, for example.

It Uses A Consistent Layout

Still, if you’re going to create 100 of anything, you need a template. The designers were smart to make color the element that gives this piece variety, since that’s such an easy change to make. All of the designs feature a standard layout. Any imagery used in the designs uses a standard filter as well.

It’s Evergreen

The vast majority of the tips in the guide will be as applicable in 20 years as they are right now. (Although, hopefully, if we all follow the advice in the guide, they won’t be as necessary.)

In recent years, Instagram has inspired a trend towards stock imagery that doesn’t look like stock imagery. But rather than usher in a creative revolution, this trend has simply redefined horrible. The new clichés are food porn, #wingshots out airplane windows, and bare feet on the beach.

Luckily, Getty Images has put together a guide to help iStock users “stand out in a sea of sameness.” This article is loaded with value, helping users get the most out of a product they already have, and empowering even the most uncreative to find unique and eye-catching images to enhance their content.

Why It’s Great Content Marketing

It’s Based On A Real Pain-Point

The author of this post may have started by asking themself something like: How can I help people pick out stock photos that don’t suck?

This is a real problem that the article helps solve. It answers questions you were probably asking yourself before you read it.

It Knows Its Audience

This article speaks to someone who may not be an artistic genius but is under immense pressure to pick out visually striking photos as part of their job.

The tone is very much “crawl, walk, run.” Each section starts by pointing out why certain images don’t work and then suggests how to find better ones and gives examples. A potentially stressful task becomes accessible and even fun.

The Format Fits The Subject

It wouldn’t make any sense to talk about Instagram using big bulky paragraphs and tons of subheadings. This post writes about Instagram in a way that feels like, well, Instagram.

The titles are hashtags, the placement of images feels like an Instagram feed, and the paragraphs are super digestible and skim-friendly. You can learn from this post without even reading it.

It’s Actionable

For each example of stock photo clichés, you get a summary of how not to make that mistake. It tells you which hashtags to search, and what to look for in a stock photo.

This isn’t a bunch of theory; it’s a plan of action.

It’s Mostly Visual

The words and images are complementary—the pictures tell you more than you get from the text, and the text takes you beyond the surface impression of the pictures. Seeing all these incredible examples in one place inspires future creativity.

The Words Deliver A Ton Of Value

Like all truly amazing content, this article saves you more time than it takes to read. Anyone who reads this is spared the trial and error it takes to research hashtags and source images.

Not only do you learn what works, but you learn why. You come away with talking points you could bring to your team, use to design a new campaign, or even improve your personal social media accounts. This article sets you on the path to expertise in a really important niche.

It Helps Users Get The Most From Their Existing Getty Account

Simply put, this article helps you do your job. It’s the ultimate win-win. You’re more effective, your business gets a social media reality check in the time it takes to read a blog post, and Getty levels up the importance of their product to your organization.

By educating users about the features and benefits of their service, Getty boosts the lifetime value of those relationships and makes their product more indispensible.

Not bad for a few short paragraphs and some screenshots.

The rest of us have competition—and with VCs always on call to fund the next “disruptive” product, competition is fiercer than ever.

When competition is well-funded or there’s lots of it, marketers need to find a way to stand out. If your message is no different than your competitors’ it will simply get drowned in a sea of sameness.

Purple is one of many startups battling to disrupt the long-stagnant mattress industry. Casper, Winkbeds, Nectar, Bear, Crave — all, like Purple, are less than five years old.

To amplify their message, Purple invested in high-quality, information-dense, high-production-value video commercials. The videos for products like Purple’s platform and mattress are terrific examples of conversion-oriented marketing. Here’s why:

It Appeals To Anyone, Not Just People Looking for Mattresses

Not everyone is actively looking for a mattress, but just about everyone has a mattress. These videos attract views from people who have never heard of the company, educate them on the product and drive them towards conversion—even if that conversion happens years down the road.

It Holds The Viewer’s Interest

Like other popular viral sales videos of the past few years (Dollar Shave Club’s being the most cited example), Purple’s videos give viewers a reason to keep watching and learning more about the product by keeping them entertained:

Elaborate “stunts” like dropping huge panes of glass on a mattress, or having two sumo wrestlers have a wrestling match on top of your bed frame to show that it won’t squeak, go above and beyond more boring ways to illustrate that point – and convince you to buy in the process.

It’s Being Deployed Across Multiple Platforms

The videos are seamlessly integrated into Purple’s product pages, and can be used as preroll advertising on Youtube, in-feed video ads on Facebook, and on other distribution channels.

It Keeps Existing Customers Engaged

Imagine if you already owned their mattress, and then saw their Sumo wrestler video in your inbox — wouldn’t you be convinced to upgrade your mattress platform, too?

This page features resources from my presentation at MozCon 2017, including slides, additional targeting examples, resources for Facebook Ads and paid social, and perhaps more.

Watch the full video on Moz:

Moz - The 8 Paid Promotion Tactics That Will Get You To Quit Organic Traffic

Please feel free to add comments with questions or requests for additional resources!

Kane’s MozCon 2017 Slides

8 Paid Promotion Tactics That Will Get You To Quit Organic Traffic from Kane Jamison

Resources For Paid Social:

• Facebook Ad Targeting Guide
• How to Use Facebook Ads to Drive Sustainable Traffic & Boost Sales (Duct Tape Marketing)
• Twitter Ads Guide (AdEspresso)
• 6 Facebook Power Editor Features You Should Be Using
• 6 Facebook Ad Examples for the SaaS Customer Lifecycle (Autopilot)
• Linkedin Ads for Beginners (AdEspresso)
• 10 Things I’ve Learned While Learning Facebook Ads (Moz)
• Facebook Ad Examples (AdEspresso)
• Facebook Ads Beginner’s Guide (AdEspresso)

Influencer Outreach With Paid Media:

Target bloggers with job titles such as:

• Blogger Job Titles: Beauty Blogger, Blog Writer, Blogger,  Freelance Writer/ Blogger, Full Time Blogger, Writer and Blogger, Writer/Blogger, Owner/Blogger, Professional Blogger
• Vlogger Job Titles: Livestreamer, Video Blogger, Vloger/YouTuber, Vlogger, YouTube Partner
• Niche Blogger Job Titles: Fashion Blogger,  Food Blogger

Target journalists/bloggers with job titles:

• Job Titles: Contributing Writer, Radio Broadcaster, Journalist/Writer, Writer/Producer, Copy Editor/Writer, News Writer, Writer/Editor, Professional Blogger, Features Editor, Writer/Reporter, Contributor/Writer, News Producer, Reporter/Producer, Anchor/Reporter, Staff writer, Journalist, Editor-in-chief, Political Editor, Managing editor, Correspondent, News Anchor/Reporter, Columnist, Senior Reporter, News presenter, Investigative Reporter, Editorial Assistant, News Editor, Editorial Director, Feature Writer, Copy Editor, Radio Talk Show Host, Broadcaster, Broadcast Journalist

Target webmasters, influencers, social media managers, and bloggers with Facebook Page Manager access:

• Behaviors > Digital activities: Event creators (only use this one with further targeting), Facebook Page Admins