A big thanks to Marcia Riefer Johnston of Content Marketing Institute and her post about content relevance in search and the lessons to be learned from big data analytics. In a richly exampled piece, Ms. Riefer Johnston draws on the research of Searchmetrics founder Marcus Tober, AKA the European Search Personality of the year.
According to Mr. Tober, companies must do three things to make their content more relevant, which is essentially the same thing as making it more visible to searchers.
Develop a niche
That is, companies should produce content that speaks to special interests rather than to everyone. A good example is About.com, a huge site that publishes content about everything. Mr. Tober notes that despite more than half a million Google-indexed pages, the company lost almost all its SEO visibility over the course of two years, while others gained significantly. The winners in the visibility game? Specialized sites with far, far fewer pages that cater to searchers who are interested, for example, in cooking. The happy ending, in this case, is that About.com has spun off niche domains such as ThoughtCo.com (lifelong learning) and TheSpruce (homemaking).
Says Mr. Tober, “This means that if you specialize in something and make it really good because you understand the user, you can have great search performance.”
Get rid of redundant, outdated, trivial content
Otherwise known as ROT. Pretty much every site has it, and it’s important to clear it out.
On the other hand, it’s equally important not to get rid of something that is still drawing traffic. And that’s where big data analysis comes in. It may take as long as 12 to 18 months to do the work needed to get rid of outdated content, particularly if site traffic is seasonal. The rewards are significant, though. One German site catering to seniors that cleared out 95 percent of its content—dramatically reducing its Google-indexed pages—found that its visibility had increased a whopping 240%.
Update remaining content to address user intentions
The content you choose to keep should mesh with information needs that influence the keywords and phrases searchers use. Clearly, big data analytics are helpful here. Mr. Tober mentions Answer the Public, a site that uses machine learning to create a visual of the questions people ask about any topic. His company, Searchmetrics, actually vets questions so that users can mobilize them out of the box.
Though these recommendations are driven by data science, none of them are exactly rocket science. As Riefer Johnston observes, “Sometimes, what you need isn’t the advice but the motivation. If that’s your situation, Marcus’s numbers may give you just the motivation you need.”
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