Bunch of good stuff for you today, folks. I hope you have lots of SEO or social media conversations this week—’cuz we have plenty of goodies for you to quote here.
Social sharing of content has fallen by about 50% since 2015.
While most new content gets zero backlinks, "authoritative evergreen content" still wins links and shares in the long run.
"Clickbait style headlines and listicles are far less effective at generating social engagement than they were."
Put it this way, if you wrote an article in 2017 and it got 62 shares, it was in the top 10% of posts. So, if that’s you, way to go:
A few things influencing these trends:
More content is being published**, and brands are more competitive about promoting it.
People share articles privately more often than they did before.
And of course, Facebook’s algorithm changes.
** Remember when it seemed like everyone was writing about Bitcoin in December? Maybe that wasn’t so far off. For a month, forty thousand new Bitcoin articles were published every week.
What should you do about this? Create memorable, reference-worthy content.
Not every blog post needs to be a viral State-of-the-Industry standalone work. But if you want shares and links, you need to create something epic, authoritative, and easy for people to reference again and again.
Friends don’t let friends blog on subdomains There are all kinds of reasons to put your company blog on a subdomain.
SEO isn’t one of them.
It’s almost always the better move for your blog to live at yoursite.com/blog than blog.yoursite.com
Search wizard Rand Fishkin has been saying
this for a while, but one of his recent tweet threads just pulled together a list of case studies to back him up.
You should check these out. You’ll find goodies like:
How Craig Emerson went from not even in the top 200 results to #57 simply by moving from subdomain to subfolder. (Everything else stayed constant.)
How iwantmyname lost organic traffic by moving from a subfolder to a subdomain.
Or even the impact it had on SEO software company Moz itself:
This is crazy, because Google has expressly stated that subdomains should not matter when it comes to ranking. Google’s John Mueller said in 2016 that Google’s algorithms do a "pretty good job" finding and indexing and ranking your subdomain content.
Which means Google plans to make the subdomain/subdirectory debate obsolete … someday.
But for today, it’s best to take Fishkin’s advice: "Subdomains can seriously impair ranking potential. Don't use them unless you absolutely have no choice."
Europe wants to know how Google works The EU wants to keep big tech companies like Google in check. They’re drafting legislature to make them "more transparent about how they rank search results and why they delist some services."
But really they just want someone to explain SEO to them like they’re five:
The EU’s antitrust chief should start by reading this h*kkin’ primer on
B2B SEO. But I’d probably pay money to see Gary Illyes explain RankBrain to the EU.
Speaking of Rankbrain …
You’ve heard it come up in conversations with the advanced SEO geeks in your building.
Maybe you’ve even had your VP tell you to "make sure we’re optimized" for RankBrain.
Or maybe this is the first you’ve heard of it.
Rankbrain is crazy important when it comes to SEO, and it’s something anyone speaking into content strategy should understand. Google has said that after content and links, RankBrain is the third most-important ranking factor.
Check it out, and if you think it’s great, give it a share. You belong in the important conversations.
A closing thought here:
Closing thought: get in more non-marketing meetings
Christine Alemany’s article on integrating marketers throughout the company is on my mind today. She notes how founders from technical backgrounds often try to keep marketing siloed off from the parts of the company that they understand better (like development and sales).
"This bias, left unchecked, leads to a divided company and suboptimal, potentially disappointing marketing outcomes." I’ve worked for one of those divided companies. It’s not fun.
If you’re doing content strategy right, you should be an expert on what your market is looking for and interested in. If that’s true of you, you have a lot of helpful context to share with other departments.
If that’s not true of you, some of the other departments
(like sales, CS, and product) might help you get there.
Either way, fight the silo. Spend time mind-melding with execs and other departments. The better a content strategist you are, the more valuable you become to the other teams—and the better you understand the other teams, the better a content
strategist you become.
There ya go. Next week: we take to the SERPs to find out just how much of the first page Google is hogging to itself.
--
Jeffrey Kranz Co-founder and editor Overthink Group
