AI and search

New research shows that 27% of adults are using AI platforms for traditional search functions. I am getting about a dozen direct inquiries on my site from ChatGPT, and I’ve secured two customers through AI.

So, how is this going to work? It seems that Google is in trouble, but how can you bet against the world’s number-one search engine?

That’s the subject of the new episode of The Marketing Companion. I welcome a new co-host, Andy Crestodina, one of the premier digital marketing wizards around. Andy has some well-informed views of what is happening, what is likely, and how we need to think about search in the next few years.

We also delve into a topic that is a bit more controversial (believe it or not!) LinkedIn newsletters. Historically, I have not been a fan. You’re turning over your email list, SEO value, and perhaps even content discoverability to LinkedIn. And hey, who ever heard of a newsletter going viral?

But Andy has had some success in this area and presents a compelling case for the platform. An interesting debate!  To hear it all, simply click here:

Click here to enjoy Marketing Companion Episode 310

Please support our sponsor, who brings you this fantastic episode.

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Now, any business can build automated customer experiences, email marketing workflows, and landing pages that guide your customer to your main message. We are here to support businesses successfully navigating their digital presence to strengthen their customer relationships.

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The post Goodbye Google? Dissecting the role of AI and SEO appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Over the past few years I’ve become skeptical about the true opportunities for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for many businesses. Some of my SEO friends have pushed back — but I’m unconvinced. I think the window for smart SEO investment is closing for several reasons:

• Organic search is benefitting fewer and fewer companies as Google holds on to an increasing number of search inquiries (more than half now!).
• Some search opportunities are leaking out to voice-based search.
• Search has become linked to content marketing and content marketing is becoming difficult or impossible for many businesses due to Content Shock.
• Realistically, only one or two companies will win the top search positions, setting up a never-ending battle between the two biggest, meanest junkyard dogs in any niche.

Now before I go on, I want to emphasize that SEO is not only viable but vital to many businesses. But not all. And I don’t think we should commit to an SEO investment just because we’re afraid not to. There are alternatives.

In this post, I want to provide a very “quick and dirty” way to determine if an SEO investment is right for your company.

I’ll express the SEO challenge and opportunity in a simple “three-dimensional model.” I’m a visual person and it’s always helpful for me to actually see a diagram or picture of things!

Here’s a diagram of the first two dimensions, which was inspired by a post created by Christopher Penn.

In this simple diagram, we see that the real SEO investment opportunity is for businesses serving a very specific niche instead of a broad product category — especially if you have a lot of expertise and money to devote to it. As I said, if you enter the SEO fray, you have to be prepared to be one of the junkyard dogs constantly fighting for the top spots.

This is probably obvious. But that’s not the whole picture. There’s another dimension.

The saturated niche

A few years ago, I was hired by a company in the medical device industry to help them get into blogging. The CEO felt that she was behind the competitors and needed to catch up and improve their SEO.

This company fit the criteria for an ideal SEO investment: it was serving a specific niche and had plenty of money. But I needed to make sure that my customer actually had a chance to compete with a blogging strategy. After all, if competitors are already dominating the search results, would blogging really make an impact on her success?

Here is a very simple analysis that I do — and anybody can do it. There is certainly a relationship between domain authority, content, and SEO investment.

Domain authority (a rating from 0-100) is an estimate of the “power” of your website and can be impacted by many factors including:

• prestige and age of a website
• quality of the information
• the relevance of the topics of your content
• competition around the subject matter

If a website has high domain authority, you can reliably predict it will have SEO dominance as well. My favorite tool to examine domain authority scores is SEMrush but there are others.

Here are the domain authority scores of my medical device customer and her three competitors in this niche:

• Company One = 71
• Company Two = 68
• My customer = 14

Yikes! We have just met our two junkyard dogs!

These competitor domain authority scores are astronomical. Without even looking at their sites, I could accurately predict these sites were incredibly content-rich — and they were. They had podcasts, videos, and years and years of amazing blog posts.

My customer was not going to win this game with a traditional content/SEO investment. In essence, her competitors had created content shock for her and blocked her out. We had to look for creative alternatives, which we did, but that’s a story for another day.

The point is, my customer had passed the criteria on the first two dimensions. She was in a niche and she had a lot of resources to throw at SEO. But she was too late. There was far too much content saturation for her to have a fighting chance with this strategy. She could blog for years and probably not make a dent in these SEO rankings.

The third dimension

So we can’t look at market niche and resources alone. We also have to examine the competitive landscape. We may be in the right market and have the right budget and still fail if the competitors have a significant head start (their cumulative advantage!)

We now must take that green box of opportunity from the first chart and look at it through the specific lens of competition.

We now see a more complete picture. In an unsaturated niche, even meager resources might be enough to make progress. But if there is overwhelmingly dominant competition, progress is unlikely and you might want to invest elsewhere.

This is a point I emphasize in all my classes. You can’t invest in content and SEO in a vacuum. Do the research.

Domain authority scenarios

In the medical device example above, I had to find alternatives for my customer. Could we publish in a different place or in a unique way that could earn traffic?

Let’s look at two other domain authority scenarios. What if my analysis looked like this:

• Company One = 16
• Company Two = 14
• My customer = 14

This is a very common competitive profile I see across many industries — this is an unsaturated niche! This analysis shows that everybody is asleep at the wheel. Nobody is using content in a smart way. In this case, there would be a significant opportunity for my customer and they could probably make fairly rapid progress with a content strategy and SEO investment.

Here’s another example. What if an industry domain authority profile looked like this:

• Company One = 30
• Company Two = 20
• My customer = 14

This is also a common scenario — One competitor has edged ahead of the pack but is not dominant. A 20 point difference in domain authority is significant, but not insurmountable. In this case, I would want to take a very detailed look at Company One. Is there some place where they are vulnerable? Are they building momentum to increase this gap, or can we catch them and surpass them?

Most of the time in a case like this, I would recommend an aggressive content/SEO strategy … but it will take more time and more resources to see meaningful progress.

What’s right for you?

One thing I always emphasize is that there is no cookie-cutter solution to business problems. Today the speed and complexity of a marketplace demands careful research and wise analysis. Is an investment in SEO right for you? I hope this simple, high-level view helps.

This article is meant to help you start thinking about SEO more strategically. I’m not anti-SEO. I’m “anti” making decisions to spend money just because somebody is selling you a package. Ask the hard questions. Ask for a domain authority analysis. Consider the realistic opportunity for success or failure and how much time and money that will take.

Mark Schaefer is the executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions. He is the author of several best-selling digital marketing books and is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant.  The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world. Contact Mark to have him speak to your company event or conference soon.

The post Is an SEO investment always smart for your business? appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

I was minding my own business when, unprovoked, these digital marketing statistics snuck up and attacked me the other day. The nerve!

After I dusted myself off, I realized that these were harmless and rambunctious numbers meant to educate, and possibly amuse me. Perhaps you will have a similar reaction.

A few digital marketing statistics that made me go wow:

1. 93 percent of U.S. traffic comes from Google search, Google Images, and Google Maps.

If you think about the competitive nature of business in general, it’s hard to believe that one company owns 93 percent market share of anything.

There is an interesting dichotomy of human nature. We demand choice but love convenience even more. The concentrated nature of search concerns me, but not enough to use something other than Google!

We see the same thing happening with Facebook as a social network and Amazon as an eCommerce hub. We generally only have the mental bandwidth for one solution.

Source:  (Sparktoro)

2. SEO drives 1000%+ more traffic than organic social media.

This makes me wonder … is social media marketing an oxymoron? If organic social media doesn’t drive customers to your site then what is it supposed to do? Is social media marketing really just social media advertising these days?

Why do social media marketing at all?

Source: (BrightEdge)

3. Content with high levels of social engagement tends to perform well in voice search. In fact, the average voice search result has 1,199 Facebook shares and 44 Tweets. 

Oh.

That’s why we do social media marketing. Never mind.

Source: (Backlinko)

4. 76 percent of people who search on their smartphones for something nearby visit a business within a day.

This is not necessarily a surprising number, but it’s an impressive one. Emphasizes the importance of local search and that means local content.

Source: (Think With Google)

5. The average length of a first-page YouTube video is nearly 15 minutes.

This fact made me do some pondering and I am one dangerous man when I ponder.

On the surface, it makes no sense. Shorter videos are most popular on YouTube — music videos, funny cats, how-to demonstrations.

So I looked at my YouTube home page and every single video was UNDER 10 minutes … except one, which was 90 minutes. So yeah … I guess this entire page would average to be about 15 minutes.

I think this is probably a deceptive statistic. The average length of a first-page YouTube video might be 15 minutes, but MOST of the popular videos are nowhere near that long.

Source: (Backlinko)

6. 52.2 percent of all website traffic worldwide comes from mobile phones.

With the global penetration of smart phones, I would have guessed this to be much higher. According to the analytics for my site, about 80 percent of you are reading this blog on a mobile device, for example.

So I did some digging. Turns out this statistic is three years old and the growth has been about a 2 percentage points a year. So if we added another 6 percent to the number we’re close to 60 percent and that makes more sense to me.

Source: (Statista)

7. On average, ranking in position #1 on mobile gets you 27.7% of the clicks, whereas ranking in position #1 on desktop gets you 19.3% of the clicks.

Wow. Just wow. I think smaller screens result in less engagement on every kind of content and this supports that view.

On the desktop people scroll down and look at more sites – more engagement. On mobile, it’s just getting the job done.

Source: (SEOClarity)

8. Websites with strong domain authority tend to rank well in voice search. In fact, the average domain rating of a Google Home result is 76.8.

As more search goes to voice, this is a sobering fact. There are not many non-media businesses in this world with a domain authority that high. For a typical small business, getting to a 50 is a massive achievement. Does this mean small businesses are screwed?

Source: (Backlinko)

9. There is a big difference in the results of a voice search and a web search on the same topic. Only 75 percent of voice search results rank in the top 3 for that query on the web.

On the surface, this seems counter-intuitive. Why should a person see differing search results in two different places from the same company — Google?

As I dug into this, it looks like the content criteria that lifts a site in a voice search is significantly different than what is considered in a web search. A good explanation can be found with the source of this statistic: (Backlinko)

10. The average cost of buying a link is $361.44.

I have never accepted a paid backlink on this site. It makes me feel like I am crossing a line that takes advantage of the trust of my readers. But $361? That’s not bad in a down economy.

Source: (Ahrefs)

BONUS STATISTIC:  98 percent of the people who read Mark Schaefer’s {grow} blog are 78.2 percent smarter and 89.3 percent better looking than their competitors.

I just made that up. Or did I?

Most of these digital marketing statistics were originally curated on the Ahrefs blog

Thanks to Married to the Sea and Toothpaste for Dinner for the awesome cartoons.

Top illustration courtesy Unsplash.com. 

Mark Schaefer is the chief blogger for this site, executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, and the author of several best-selling digital marketing books. He is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant.  The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world. Contact Mark to have him speak to your company event or conference soon.

The post 10 Digital marketing statistics that made me say WOW appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

One of the problems in the digital marketing world today is that leaders are using an outdated playbook — especially when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. I think the future of SEO is taking some pretty wild and unexpected turns right now so let’s explore that today.

Content as SEO fuel

The major innovation with SEO over the past few years is that it has largely become a content strategy. Beginning with the “inbound marketing” concept introduced by Hubspot in 2005 and growing into very sophisticated AI-driven techniques today, creating content that can auto-magically bring qualified leads to your site has been a reliable strategy.

But there are a few trends that are changing that and content certainly does not work for SEO like it used to. The future of SEO is moving in a dramatic new direction.

The changing search landscape

Let’s look at the future of SEO and content as it is unveiling itself through three significant trends.

First — voice search. When you search Alexa or Google home by verbalizing a question, you don’t get a list of content suggestions like blog posts or videos. You get an answer. So content has a much-diminished impact in the world of voice search.

It’s impossible to tell exactly how much of the total search pie is going to voice queries, but let’s be ultra-conservative and say 20 percent.

When you ask Alexa or Siri to do something for you, you normally don’t get a list of blog posts or podcast episodes in the results. So the implication is that your content is potentially impacting much less of the search market than it did in the pre-voice days five years ago. But wait, it gets worse.

Trend number two — In 2020, something very significant happened in the search world. For the first time, more than half (51 percent) of the search inquiries on Google were kept by Google.

This means, Google kept the SEO “answers” away from businesses and content creators and directed them to their own knowledge panels, internal properties, and paid partnerships.

An investigative report on The Markup shows how this impacts sites trying to compete for any search ranking:

When we examined the top 15 percent of the page, the equivalent of the first screen on an iPhone X, Google-owend search jumped to 63 percent. For one in five searches in our sample, links to external websites did not appear on the first screen at all.

A trending search in our data for “myocardial infarction” shows how Google has piled up its products at the top. It returned:

• Google’s dictionary definition.
• A “people also ask” box that expanded to answer related questions without leaving the search results page.
• A “knowledge panel,” which is an abridged encyclopedia entry with various links.
• And a “related conditions” carousel leading to various new Google searches for other diseases.

All of these appeared before search results by WebMD, Harvard University, and Medscape. In fact, a user would have to scroll nearly halfway down the page—about 42 percent—before reaching the first “organic” result in that search.

 

Will this trend continue to grow in the Google direction? The government will have some say over this. Google’s increasing dominance in this space is a subject of a Department of Justice probe. The company owns the dominant tool at every link in the complex chain between online publishers and advertisers, giving it unique power over the monetization of digital content.

So now we have a truer picture of the emerging search world. In the past five years, the majority of organic search traffic that was available to be attracted by your content has been in steady decline.

The main idea here is, the available search inquiries that can be served by your SEO-oriented content has been evaporating over the past five years.

And when we look at the future of SEO … it gets even worse.

Trend three — While the piece of the pie available to organic search inquiries has been in rapid decline, the amount of content competing for that shrinking pie has literally exploded.

When you have more and more content competing for the same search traffic, eventually content marketing is not a sustainable strategy for some businesses. This is an idea I proposed some years ago called Content Shock.

This graph from WordPress shows the number of blog posts published each month since the beginning of the content marketing era. You don’t have to be a statistician to realize it’s harder to compete for attention in a world of 80 million blog posts every month compared to one million a month 10 years ago. In fact, your competition has increased by 8,000 percent in a few years. A tough world for an inbound marketer!

Of course, the same thing is happening on podcasts, visual content, and video (there are 300 hours of new video uploaded to YouTube every minute of the day!).

To break through in this environment, you need to either spend more money on quality to win the content arms race or spend more to promote your content. Either way, traditional content marketing becomes more expensive and less accessible for many businesses in this environment.

So is this the end of content marketing?

No.

We just need to think about content and its benefits in an entirely different way.

SEO and junkyard dogs

I was recently hired by a company in Seattle to conduct a personal branding workshop based on my book KNOWN.

When you think about it, this was an extremely unlikely pairing. If you search for “personal branding consultant,” there are 40 million results. Even if you search for “personal branding consultant Seattle” there are 2.1 million results.

I am not in those top search results. Not even close.

This is not an unusual situation for a small business. I am NEVER going to be in the top search results. Really, the only thing that matters is the top three slots. The top three slots will be won by the biggest, meanest, richest SEO junkyard dogs.

It’s an expensive and never-ending battle that I will never win for terms like “digital marketing consultant,” “marketing strategy, “keynote speaker,” or any of the other jobs that I do.

Chances are, unless you’re the junkyard dog in your industry, you won’t win your SEO battle either. And yet, every company I know is pouring money into content trying to win the SEO battle!

This just makes no sense.

But here I was in Seattle, conducting an awesome workshop. How did my client find me in all this hopeless SEO mess? Through my content. But not through search.

The business case for resonance

The night before my workshop, I had a wonderful seafood dinner with my client. I asked my friend … “Why did you hire me?”

“Your content resonates with me,” he said without hesitation.

Isn’t that an interesting word … resonates.

My content was not at the top of an SEO stack for personal branding. I’m certainly not going to make the Alexa hit parade.

But a person who hired me for this important work chose me because there was an emotional connection that resonated with him on a personal and professional level.

This reveals a more practical and realistic value of content in this competitive environment and a value that is almost entirely overlooked by marketers today.

At this point, I would like to interrupt myself. Whenever I write a mega-trend blog post like this, I am pointing out an idea that is very broad … and it may not apply to everybody. There certainly is still room today for SEO-driven content, and there always will be as far out into the future as I can see. The numbers I’ve presented here are high level. The true search volume for your industry could result in mostly organic results, especially in smaller niche markets.

The answer to every marketing question is, “it depends,” and that is certainly true here.

But overall, SEO-driven content is probably working less well for most businesses and content that attracts customers due to its authority is becoming more important.

Content and authority

So there are really two basic content strategies you can use to win new business: Content meant to win SEO and content meant to earn authority (content that resonates with readers). And of course, you can have overlap between these strategies:

I won the business in Seattle — against all SEO odds — because I ignored SEO. I write for my readers. If I do that well and consistently, I’ll earn subscribers. Eventually, these subscribers will grow to know me, trust me and hire me. I think that is the future of SEO, which is really not SEO at all!

It’s a different way to look at content strategy but for 90 percent of the businesses out there who will never win the SEO battle, content built on authority might be the best and only strategic option.

I’m not creating content to trick you into clicking a link. I am creating content that consistently connects with your hopes and dreams and business needs. I’m building a long-term connection that resonates.

Make sense?

Mark Schaefer is the chief blogger for this site, executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, and the author of several best-selling digital marketing books. He is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant.  The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world.  Contact Mark to have him speak to your company event or conference soon.

Illustration courtesy Unsplash.com. 

The post Why “resonance” is the future of SEO appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

By Brooke B. Sellas, {grow} Contributing Columnist

Mr. Peanut — or should I now say Baby Nut — can teach us all a lesson in search marketing.

I know, I know. You’re probably sick and tired of hearing about which Super Bowl ads were good or bad. Or how the halftime show was “awful” (um … please let me look like JLo or Shakira when I’m their age!).

But I promise, thanks to some wicked smaht (a Super Bowl pun!) SEO friends of mine this will be a very insightful post on how to run (and not run) your campaigns. Even if they don’t cost you $6M.

(I apologize for all of the peanut puns in advance … I can’t help myself)

It Started With The Peanut Gallery

Before the Super Bowl even started, marketers went OFF about the death of Mr. Peanut.

It is with heavy hearts that we confirm that Mr. Peanut has died at 104. In the ultimate selfless act, he sacrificed himself to save his friends when they needed him most. Please pay your respects with #RIPeanut pic.twitter.com/VFnEFod4Zp

— The Estate of Mr. Peanut (@MrPeanut) January 22, 2020

This was Planters build-up to a Super Bowl commercial. Followers of the hashtag #RIPeanut were encouraged to use this to pay respect and tune in to Mr. Peanut’s funeral during the big game.

I would have to assume that Planters would put some heavy thought into all aspects of this campaign, including search marketing since they paid Super Bowl dollars for it to air. I would assume wrong, but more on that later.

Is it risky to kill off an over 100-year-old mascot? Sure.

However, a few days after the campaign launched the idea behind it was explained. Mike Pierantozzi, the Group Creative Director at Planters’ agency (VaynerMedia, btw) said they were influenced by Tony Stark’s death in Avengers: Endgame.

“We started talking about how the internet treats when someone dies — specifically, we were thinking about fictional characters, [like when] Iron Man died. When Iron Man died, we saw an incredible reaction on Twitter and on social media. It’s such a strange phenomenon.”

For the record, I LOVED that movie. I’m a total comic book nerd. I also once owned the comic where Superman died. So I get their angle.

Then, after the tragic death of Kobe Bryant and others, Planters decided to pull this campaign’s paid media efforts to be sensitive.

In a Word? Nutty.

Before I get into what went down Super Bowl Sunday, there are some other things that I think we marketers need to address. A brand strategy is not something to be taken lightly. Especially one that involves an iconic brand representative that’s been around since 1916.

1) Was it a good idea to kill off a beloved mascot?

I mean, I probably wouldn’t do it but who knows. If no PR is bad PR then I suppose this campaign is going well [insert big grimace here].

2) Shouldn’t $6M Super Bowl ads be original?

We’ve seen the reinvention of a character as a baby before, both with Groot and more recently Baby Yoda. This is one area that really marred the campaign in the court of public opinion.

Planters really out here trying to compete with the likes of Baby Groot and Baby Yoda with #BabyNut. pic.twitter.com/k92tNJVAwn

— Braddington (@bradwhipple) February 3, 2020

3) The interactive part of the campaign was roasted by viewers.

What kind of campaign would dare try to take watchers of the Super Bowl away from the game to interact with Baby Nut? This campaign, apparently. [insert eye roll and a really, really heavy sigh]

Then Came The Super Bowl (Sans Search Marketing)

Finally, Game Day arrived and many marketers were live-tweeting about #BrandBowl or #AdsBowl (hashtags to follow if you’re into IRL conversations about Super Bowl ads).

The RIP Mr. Peanut commercial came out and it was … as expected. Mr. Peanut did, in fact, die and Baby Nut was born. Some people enjoyed this. More, however, were not on board.

I outlined a few reasons above, but the biggest lesson to learn is really about all the ways in which this campaign missed out on search marketing. I was alerted to this fact on Twitter and then saw a super-smart post on LinkedIn from my friend Dan Shure (an SEO expert) talking about how things went wrong.

Apparently, none of the six-million dollar budget went to search marketing.

• There was no (apparent) organic search
• There was no (apparent) paid search (including on social channels, like Facebook)
• Just a few days ago, this website and campaign weren’t even ranking for phrases like, “Planters Super Bowl” “Planters commercial” “Planters ad” etc.

Gary V replied to my friend Dan on Twitter and said that his team didn’t create the website. But, I mean, COME ON.

Another tweet said that they “didn’t have time” to focus on search marketing because of the death of Kobe. Um, no? I’m sure the website and interactive parts of this weren’t planned in just a couple of days.

This failure feels like it goes beyond search marketing and SEO. Where was the communication between partners? Why wasn’t search marketing — from an organic or paid perspective — ever discussed by someone?

It’s one thing to get booed by ordinary people on social media. It’s a totally different flop when a key strategic component was entirely missed.

Can We Leave Search Marketing & SEO Alone Now?

“Is SEO dead?” Stop that! No! Search engine optimization is extremely important.

In fact, another friend of mine (hey, Amanda!) at Fractl found that search marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach your audience.

[Image Source: MOZ]

As the MOZ article that highlights this research from Fractl says …

Don’t let anyone tell you a channel is dead (except for maybe MySpace and other sites that are abandoned.)

What did you think about the Baby Nut campaign? And a bigger question: who you do think is responsible for leaving out search marketing? Everyone? No one? Let me know in the comments section below!

Brooke B. Sellas is the Founder  & CEO of B Squared Media, an award-winning done-for-you social media management, advertising, and customer care agency. She’s also Mark Schaefer’s Co-host on the top-rated Marketing Companion Podcast. Brooke’s marketing mantra is “Think Conversation, Not Campaign” so be sure to give her a shout on Twitter!

The post What a Peanut Can Teach You About Search Marketing appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

I was recently in a lively discussion about the state of content distribution and it reminded me that this is a topic I haven’t covered in a long time. This was a dominant theme for me when I was working on the 2015 book The Content Code and it’s time to take a fresh look at things. So let’s dig in.

Content shock is alive and well

We are approaching the fifth anniversary of the most popular blog post I’ve written — Content Shock. It went viral because it pricked at the pomposity of the content marketing gurus and proclaimed that the popular notion of inbound marketing just doesn’t work like it used to.

And … it doesn’t.

There’s no denying that my prediction came true. As niches swelled with meaningful, helpful content, it became more difficult and expensive to compete. Social sharing and page views declined and our collective ability to stand out was muted by this hurricane of content competitors.

This suggested that content alone could no longer be the answer to the marketer’s dilemma. Creating more content just added to the problem. We needed our content to move. It had to be seen, it had to be shared. It had to be ignited.

Content ignition — that is the true source of content marketing value! There is no economic value to publishing content unless that content is seen and shared.

So how do we ignite our content? Let’s look at the state of the nation.

First — A caveat. There is no cookie-cutter solution or idea in the marketing world. Every industry, business, and product is complex. So, there are lots of exceptions. Today I am presenting high-level ideas, not specific solutions.

Search engine optimization

For nearly three decades, SEO has been the go-to strategy for content distribution. There is no more intoxicating marketing idea than having high potential customers auto-magically find our content organically through that little search box.

That is the heart of the idea behind inbound marketing, a concept that is much less relevant today than it was five years ago.

SEO is important, and it always will be, but my view it is far less important to most businesses than they think, for a simple reason. To win at SEO, you have to own one of the top search results. So in this never-ending battle for SEO supremacy, there can only be one or two winners in an entire product category.

In essence, SEO is like two big, mean junkyard dogs fighting over the same bone, week after week, year after year. Unless you’re one of those top dogs, SEO can be an expensive way to achieve endless frustration. Another option for content ignition — and probably a better option for most businesses — is to develop content that builds authority.

Authority-based content is produced for the customer, not a search engine, and wins the distribution war if it is good enough to earn customer subscriptions and organic advocacy.

If you want to dive into this idea more deeply, here are resources that can help. In another blog post, I explain the junkyard dog idea and in a second post I break down the two most likely content marketing strategies, including authority.

Promotions and advertising

If we can’t organically earn our way into the attention span of our customers, can we buy our way in through ads that boost our content? That is also getting more difficult.

Here’s a sign of the advertising apocalypse before us. One of the themes at the last Cannes Lions Festival was the desperate push from agencies to get Netflix to show ads. This sad and ridiculous strategy is coming about because of a couple of megatrends.

First, at an increasing rate, content being consumed today does not feature ads. Netflix. Amazon Prime. Spotify. Audiobooks. None of them show ads. Why? Consumers hate ads and consumers always win. Traditional advertising as we know it is dying.

Second, the only place where advertising is growing — digital — is filling up. As the ad inventory declines, the prices rise, making digital ads less accessible for some businesses, or products with slim margins.

Advertising is still a relevant content distribution strategy in some places of course, but it is also a victim of Content Shock — as the competition to standout increases, the cost to compete and distribute that content rises until some businesses will simply have to drop out.

The importance of WHO

So in this weird and noisy world, how do we get our message through? I think the future of content marketing and distribution is found in the word WHO.

Content distribution is a real mess compared to a few years ago. It’s harder to get our content seen and shared and even when we boost it with an ad, people probably still don’t see it or believe it. In fact, trust in businesses, brands, and ads have declined 10 years in a row, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.

Who do people trust? Each other! We trust people like …

• Friends and neighbors
• Business leaders
• Technical experts
• Entrepreneurs
• Influencers and celebrities

I believe completely that this simple fact will dictate the future of content marketing and content distribution.

The key idea is that yes, the WHAT of our story is important, but perhaps even more important is the WHO — WHO IS TELLING THE STORY?

If your company is telling the story through your content, it’s less likely that it will be seen, believed, and shared. But if people I trust are telling me this story, the content becomes internalized and actionable. The content ignites in the very best way — from people we trust.

Content ignition through trusted audiences is the true state of the art in content distribution. If you want to dive into this a little more, in another post I describe how this is an ongoing process of being invited on to the customer “islands.”

The future of content distribution

Marketing success in this new environment means adopting an entirely new mindset. We do not control the message, the pipeline, or the customer journey. The customer is the marketer. How do we help them do the job?

This is a scary and unfamiliar concept. It’s going to be hard to explain to a boss who is still entrenched in 2013. Content marketing success is going to be harder to measure. It’s going to take some bold leadership to accomplish.

But in this world of rapid change and uncertainty, this is one thing I know: We don’t have a choice but to keep moving ahead. We have to pivot and accept these new marketing realities.

The future of content distribution will rely on us creating stories and experiences that are so unmissable and conversational that the customers become the marketing department.

The key to our future success isn’t necessarily the story. It’s who is telling it.

Mark Schaefer is the chief blogger for this site, executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, and the author of several best-selling digital marketing books. He is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant.  The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world. Contact Mark to have him speak to your company event or conference soon.

Illustration courtesy Unsplash.com

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My friend left a thought-provoking comment on my blog the other day. I had written about the necessity to provide quality content over time as the only sustainable strategy to rise above the social media clutter.

She challenged me, contending that there are marketing gurus out there over-posting tons of useless AI-generated crap every day, and they seem to be rewarded for it. How can this be explained?

A good question, and here is my answer.

The four ways to stand out

First, let’s step back and look at the four ways you can transcend the social media clutter and get noticed in this world:

1. SEO

Traditionally, most of the content marketing strategy aims at winning at Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but earning your way to a place in the top three search results requires a relentless, brutal battle of attrition. The SEO competition is like a bunch of nasty dogs fighting over the same keyword bone and if you aren’t one of those dogs, there is little hope to win.

One note: An SEO strategy still depends on quality content.

2. Authority

A better option for many businesses is to establish authority. You more or less abandon the SEO fight and establish a relevant audience. Instead of writing for SEO, you become known by creating content for the benefit of your audience. You earn their attention through stellar insights and helpful, authentic, human-centered content. This is not necessarily an easier battle to fight. Competition demands that you remain consistent, relevant, and superior to win.

3. Entertaining

There are a few “social media influencers” I enjoy following simply because they are just so funny and interesting. They’re not building authority, they could care less about SEO … they’re endlessly entertaining. A person certainly can earn attention in this world by creating amazing content that makes you sit there and laugh or go “wow.”

This is especially true on TikTok where there is incredible pressure to be entertaining every day!

4. Fame

If you’re a politician, supermodel, or celebrity, you don’t have to create SEO-friendly or authoritative content. You don’t even have to entertain. You just have to post pictures of yourself now and then to earn an audience.

There are two ways to become famous — The old-fashioned way by being a movie star, best-selling author, or elite athlete, and the new media way that involves a combination of content, reach, and social proof. This is where it gets interesting, and this is the category that is causing Amanda’s concern.

Fake fame

I suppose there is a fifth category, but it is unsustainable — lie about everything.

I once had a friend who was a list-worthy social media superstar. Years ago, he confided in me that his fame was entirely manufactured. He had bought his followers, had other people creating his content, faked his accomplishments — he had even written his own reviews. He is no longer in the business because the pressure of maintaining this fake front became unbearable. In fact he had a mental breakdown.

But many people still do it.  The New York Times published an explosive piece showing how many influencers had faked their way to fame. Some have demonstrated that you can create entirely fake personas that can earn the attention of brands. Several social media gurus have faked Twitter accounts that would complement them around the web.

When I entered this space 10 years ago, I marveled at this manufactured authority. How did these folks maintain an audience without really producing anything of value? My theory is there is a constant churn of new people who see them as authorities because they are on influencer lists and 2) even people who have figured them out still follow them because they’re afraid not to.

Staying centered amid the social media clutter

The truth is, these folks are outliers, and we need to ignore their example. Maybe they will continue to skirt detection, maybe not. But any business practice based on deception is not sustainable in the long run.

It’s hard to keep focused on the hard work of being consistent, relevant, and superior in your niche, but there really is no shortcut. Whether you choose to win at SEO, authority, entertainment, or fame, you have to do the work.

I want to offer some encouragement to all of those working so hard but feeling some how diminished by the fakes who have manufactured their web presence.

There’s no way you can fake it and earn true fans. The fakers may be surrounded by purchased followers and sycophants, but they don’t have true fans who will help them accomplish their goals.

When you earn true fans, your “marketing” can stop because you’ll have other people telling your story, sharing your content, and recommending you for business opportunities. That is the goal, that is the gold. In the long run, it will pay off.

Stay centered, stay positive, do the work.

Mark Schaefer is the executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions. He is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books and is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant. The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world. Contact Mark to have him speak at your company event or conference soon.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.

Illustration courtesy of Unsplash.com

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I have written about my loathing for arbitrary rankings and especially these “influencer lists.” But every once in while I see a list that captures my attention … and last week provided an extraordinary surprise — the best SEO book!

Book Authority just named my work, The Content Code, as the best book on SEO in the world (out of 58 books on the subject).

The thing that is remarkable about the award is that I never thought of my book as an SEO book — it’s not even listed in that category on Amazon.

But it does make sense. And the success of the book goes back to a controversial decision I made about SEO for my business and my blogging career 10 years ago. I’d like to discuss that decision today and why it might be relevant for you, too.

Why SEO sucked

Before I dissect this lesson, let me thank BookAuthority for this honor. The site uses a proprietary, independent methodology  to identify and rate the best nonfiction books in an objective and data-based manner. They are not associated with any publisher or commercial venture. So … good job with that, and thank you.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming:

In 2008, social media and content was just coming into the mainstream as marketing ideas. Google was dominating the search space and everybody was trying to figure out how to win those coveted first spaces on the organic results … including me.

I’ll never forget attending an early SEO conference and learning about all the dirty “black-hat” tricks that were going on back then. One guy stood up and talked about how he was hiring shut-ins to pose as other people posting content to try to get links back to customer sites.

I asked him, “Isn’t this patently unethical?”

He responded: “Yes. But big companies are willing to pay me millions of dollars to this and if I don’t do it, they’ll find somebody else who will.”

And he wasn’t kidding. His client list included some Fortune 500 companies.

As I learned about the SEO business, even the “white hat” shops seemed to be dabbling in some gray areas when it came to ethics, links, and content. I made a decision that I would never, ever fall into that trap. I did not want to be associated with anything this slimy. I was either going to make it or fail, but I wasn’t going to play these gray-area SEO games and tricks.

Best SEO book!

My decision was not just based on ethics. It was also based on logic.

I thought, “There is NO WAY Google can let these guys win. If they are going to survive as a company, they can’t let the bad guys rule the organic results. Google has to reward the best, purest, most helpful content in the long-run.”

And so, I engaged in none of the weird SEO strategies of the day. This might sound like a rational and enlightened plan today, but believe me, it was unnerving going down a path by yourself. Literally, I watched the whole industry going a different direction, so my plan was radical at the time and there was no certain success.

But, I was right.

Month by month and year by year, Google changed their algorithm to beat back the link merchants. Every change they made moved the industry closer to what I had been practicing all along, and something I wrote about in my very first blog posts 10 years ago. The key to winning in the digital world is:

• Creating meaningful content
• Engaging with a relevant audience
• Being authentically helpful

To me, this wasn’t SEO, it was common sense. But today — finally! — SEO is starting to look more like common sense than a secretive black market for links.

In this era, SEO is content marketing, more or less. There is still some horse-trading for links going on but eventually Google will find a way to punish those people too.

The next step in SEO

Today, my SEO strategy is essentially the same as it was 10 years ago: focus on content that is extremely useful and interesting to my audience.  I use the Yoast WordPress plug-in to try to make my posts more discoverable. My website also gets a little TLC from my friend Douglas Karr, who I have hired to fix the things that break. Let’s be honest. Websites are mysteries.

If I could go back in time, I would have added a fourth bullet point to my original list of three rules of success, and it would be this: Ignite your content.

Ten years ago when I wrote that original advice, any sort of content on the web was a novelty. It didn’t take much to build an audience for a blog, podcast, or video channel. Today, it is insanely hard to accomplish that. There’s just too much stuff.

The economic value of content that is not seen and shared is zero. How do we get our content to IGNITE throughout our audience, and beyond?

A few years ago, I tackled that issue in The Content Code. The book is not just the evolution of content marketing, it truly is the evolution of SEO, too.

So yeah. maybe it is the best SEO book … and it all started with an unconventional approach to blogging 10 years ago. It was an unnerving risk at the time, but it has been the best path for me and my customers and I hope you’ll also discover this truth in The Content Code.

Mark Schaefer is the executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions. He is friends with John apparently. He is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books and is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant. The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world. Contact Mark to have him speak at your company event or conference soon.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.

Illustration courtesy Unsplash

The post The best SEO book in the world? A surprising discovery. appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

By Mark Schaefer

I was helping out a friend by reviewing his blog. His goal was to build search traffic for his small marketing agency and, on the surface, everything seemed to be in order:

• His content was interesting and relevant, offering tips and how-to posts that might address customer questions
• The writing was very strong. The copy was somewhat impersonal, but well-written.
• He published consistently, averaging two posts per week for more than two years.
• The posts were well-constructed with popular marketing keywords in the headline, the top of the post, in sub-heads and sprinkled throughout the post.
• Every post had a meaningful call-to-action to learn more.
• He had visuals with every post.

So he was definitely following the classic SEO “playbook.” And yet, after more than 200 posts, he had almost no results. Few subscriptions, little engagement, almost no increases in web traffic.

What’s going on here?

In reality, his strategy is back-firing on him. Let’s find out why.

A strategy in context

A content marketing strategy doesn’t begin with an employee, a blog, or a content plan. It starts with an assessment of the content density in your marketplace. You need to figure out how you can maneuver to out-wit the competition.

For example, I had another friend who was starting a blog about “babymoons” (a romantic holiday before the baby comes!). That is an unsaturated niche — he is the first to create content on that topic in a meaningful way. So by following the SEO “playbook” based on that keyword, he is likely to get massive attention from Google, eventually.

But in the case of my marketing agency friend, how many digital marketing blogs are there? A bajillion — a very saturated niche. By simply creating more content in this crowded field, my friend is simply adding to the noise of the marketplace with little hope of any SEO results. In fact, this keyword-based SEO strategy is working against his progress.

Are you a junkyard dog?

Does this mean he should quit? No. But it does mean he’ll need to find a new way to maneuver.

This is precisely the subject I cover in my book The Content Code — winning in a world of overwhelming information density.

There are a lot of great ideas from the book that would be relevant for my friend, but I wanted to call out one specific topic today. Maybe he should NOT write for SEO. That may seem heretical, but hear me out.

When I think about the never-ending fight for SEO dominance, I have a picture in my head of a couple of mean old junkyard dogs ferociously fighting over a bone. In a crowded content market, the only way to win is to be one of those junkyard dogs and win that bone, week after week after week.

But there is more to Google and search success than keywords. Much more, in fact.

Let’s consider this graphic depicting some of the important search considerations for Google, which comes to us courtesy of Zyppy.com:

Google uses thousands of factors to determine your search ranking and these are just the top 10 (or at least we think so). The problem is, “SEO” for most companies means focusing on only item number one (targeted content), which is aimed at keyword strategy.

And no question, that is very, very important (in most cases). But the problem is, every competitor is going to be in a keyword cage match and only 2-3 companies will be at the top of the search results. Those are the biggest, meanest junkyard dogs in the pack … the alpha dogs.

My friend is not an alpha dog. His little agency is more like a cute puppy just looking for a little Google hug. Pick me up and play with me, he’s barking. But no. Google is too distracted by that never-ending, high-stakes dogfight.

But look at these other nine factors in the chart. We still have a lot of room to maneuver, don’t we? Maybe my friend needs to hunt in an area being ignored by the rest of the pack.

The anti-SEO strategy

So what do you do if you have no chance to snag that bone?

By definition, when you’re optimizing for the most important keywords, you’re battling over popular terms. You’re probably not going to have a viral content sensation because you’re writing about the same ol’ crap everybody is writing about too.

So one idea is to step completely away from keyword-SEO and build an audience by establishing thought leadership along your own path.

Let’s string together some of the other factors from the chart to plot another strategy that is less dependent on keywords. Google will reward you for content that is:

• Useful
• Unique
• Authoritative
• Fresh

If you’re a bright, original thinker in a crowded niche (and my friend is) breaking from the dog pack and writing for the reader instead of for the keywords is a legitimate strategy. The idea is to earn an audience (and maybe even backlinks!) because you’re so darn interesting.

Case studies

When you get right down to it, I’m in the same situation as my friend. I’m a puppy in the big-dog digital world. I am never, ever going to write a post that will outrank content machines like Social Media Examiner, Moz, or Hubspot.

But if I’m interesting enough, I don’t have to. I’ve been able to build a massive and loyal following for my content even though I don’t rank well for any significant keywords. See if you can find a pattern in some of my most popular posts:

• Content Shock: Why content marketing is not a sustainable strategy This post proposed a new view of the economics of content marketing. The term “content shock” has become an industry term now.
• Here’s Why 100,000 people unfollowed me on Twitter  I revealed the underside of Twitter and how people game the system.
• What are the best social media platforms for your business? This post showcased a unique matrix with a new way to look social media platforms.
• 15 Amazing ways social media is changing the world  I was the first to report on some interesting new university research.
• What will replace Facebook? Six considerations  This was an original analysis of what it would take to unseat Facebook.

In each case, I wrote on a topic that only I could write about: A new idea, a different perspective, a personal story. In this post I could have included some industry keywords in the title. Am I trying to rank for the term “alpha dog?” That would be dumb. I’m trying to write a headline — and a post — that people really want to read.

I’m never fighting over that SEO bone. I’m the SEO puppy that is so adorable that you can’t help but stop by and pet me a little every day. If I get enough people to do that, Google will notice too.

There is no single solution

Today I’m presenting a perspective, not a solution. There is no single solution or strategy that fits every business. There is also no reason you can’t work on both SEO and thought leadership, and there are many different ways to differentiate yourself over time.

If you’re in a crowded niche, I wanted to write a post that can provide some hope. You do have options. There is a world beyond keyword-based SEO, and there are ways to win, even if you’re in the puppy pound like me.

Mark Schaefer is an SEO puppy and the chief blogger for this site, executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, and the author of several best-selling digital marketing books. He is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant.  The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world.  Contact Mark to have him speak to your company event or conference soon.

Illustrations courtesy Unsplash.com

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