SEO is often treated as a skill that highly technical workers should have. But there’s a problem with this conception: it’s not true.
Google is continuing to make SEO more about producing great content and less about checking technical boxes. And that means if you’re a content strategist, you should know your way around the basics of SEO.
And that’s where the good news comes in: the basics are incredibly easy to get a grasp on.
In fact, SEO can be
summed up as an ongoing 3-step process:
Discovering what people are searching for
Making the content that satisfies those searches
Convincing Google* that your content is high quality
We just published a guide to doing this for a B2B website. Even if you’ve never done any SEO work before, this will get you started.
Check it out here, and if you think it’s great, please give it a share. (At least see if you can spot the Easter egg.)
Bad news: fake news beats truth
And now for some bad (but real) news.
MIT just published a massive study on how fake news spreads. They analyzed 126,000 news stories tweeted by 3 million users over more than 10 years, and the results aren’t pretty.
The Atlantic just wrote up a chilling summary—which you can read here. But here are some especially disconcerting quotes:
“The truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. […] Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.”
“False stories outperform the truth on every subject—including business.”
“Falsehoods were
still 70 percent more likely to get retweeted than accurate news.”
“The massive differences in how true and false news spreads on Twitter cannot be explained by the presence of bots.”
“It is unclear which interventions, if any, could reverse this tendency toward falsehood.”
Or, in other words:
Great. But what does this mean for content strategists? A few important things for us to have on our radar as a result of this:
Social networks are taking fake news seriously. Expect news feed algorithms to change accordingly.
Some people get fatigued by hoaxes and controversies. I’ll admit that it’s driven my time spent on Facebook and Twitter down a great deal. So ask yourself, “when your audience loses faith in social media, where do they go?” That’s a question you’ll need to answer to keep engaging them with
content.
Maybe(?) some good news
You may have noticed that sometimes tweets show up in Google results, like so:
Google does index some tweets.
But not all of them. In fact, according to Stone Temple’s latest study, Google is indexing fewer tweets than they have in the past five years. (It’s looking like only about 5% of tweets are getting indexed.)
The most interesting things about this study (to me):
