You and your readers are being bombarded with information. Too often that’s in the shape of long-winded emails, blog posts, and reports that say very little or assume that because digital space is (virtually) free and unlimited, so is your time.
But time and attention are valuable. If you learn to practice concision in all your writing (from emails and reports to blog posts, whitepapers, and product copy), you’ll not only get your point across, you might also earn your readers’ trust, gratitude, and repeat traffic. Plus, concise copy converts better.
Quick advice on writing concisely
The best advice I ever received about writing concisely came from former newspaperman (and current Moz associate) Ronell Smith. He said that in order to clearly get your point across in the fewest possible words it’s essential to:
Write a one-sentence description of the post you wish to write (this is basically the headline)
Think of the number one thing you’d like readers to take away from the post
Highlight at least three facts (authoritative, supportive evidence) that support this main point
Jot down notes that help you tell the story using these facts
Spend a few days letting the elements “breathe”
Now if I were writing the most concise blog post ever, I’d stop right there, because Ronell already said the most important things. But sometimes it’s helpful to see how someone else puts advice into action. So here’s how I’m putting Ronell’s advice to work to write a post about concision.
Write a one-sentence description of the post
Learning how to make your point in as few words as possible will help you capture your audience’s attention.
I could (and should) stop there. But I want to make a couple of points about why this is important:
Your brain does a lot of work as it’s trying to condense that amazing idea in your head down into one sentence—as much work as creating a whole first draft.
Once you have a one-sentence description of where you’re going, it’s easy to toss aside all those other exciting ideas that try to plant themselves on the page and focus on what you wanted to say in the first place.
Think of the number one thing you’d like readers to take away from the post
Fewer words often makes for clearer, more impactful communication.
Once I know exactly what it is that I want you to take away from this post, I can make a promise that everything will contribute to that number one goal. This is good because:
It helps you focus on one audience. When you’re writing amazing tips on keyword research, it can be really easy to want to also remind readers why keyword research is important. That’s the moment when you lose the interest of people who get the whys of keyword research. They are now bored and done with you (even though you were just about to blow their minds with really revolutionary information).
You know what to lead with. Even if you’re writing a crucial email, you can bet not everyone will read every word (or paragraph). By leading with the most important part, your message is more likely to be understood.
Highlight at least three facts that support this main point
Technically, I’ve been cheating so far and adding in facts along the way. This step will help you:
Build an outline of what you want to say. It’s easier to write to outlines and you’ll be sure to include all the points you wanted to see.
Preview the quality of your argument. If you’re writing an article about how content is king and your first fact is “because everyone says so” and the second is “readers share stuff” and you’re struggling for a third fact, go back and find a stronger argument.
Stay on topic.
Jot down notes that help you tell the story using those three facts
Hooray! You finally get to elaborate. I’ll start my elaboration by telling you that I’ve deleted about 500 words from this post already just because I was thinking so hard about concision. Do I miss a little of my standard whimsy and storytelling style? Yes (although I’m making up for it in this paragraph).
Because you’ve already honed in tight on your subject, you can let your creative self a little loose now. Enjoy embellishing your evidence with relevant examples and case studies. Relish the chance to make your points more memorable and engage your audience by sharing pertinent stories.
Spend a few days letting the elements “breathe”
Once you’ve pulled together your main point with supporting facts and illustrated those with stories, you need to step away from your writing. If you’re writing an email, you might not have a few days, but at least go to lunch or grab a coffee. Giving your writing room to breathe allows you to:
Spot gaps. Everything makes perfect sense in your head, but a breath of fresh air might help you see where you forgot to actually write down a crucial piece of your argument.
See redundancies. Sometimes you’re so passionate about something you say it twice (although usually in slightly different ways). A second, later read can show you where you’re repeating yourself.
Be rational. Speaking of passion, sometimes we write things we’d never actually want to see out in the world. Allowing your writing to rest can help you make your point without saying anything you wouldn’t want repeated. This makes you easier to listen to as well.
The rest of the story
Now that we’ve seen Ronell’s points in action, there are a few more things I want to add.
Concision usually happens in editing
If you’ve been following Ronell’s advice, your writing is going to be a lot clearer, shorter, and more impactful. But don’t count on your first draft to be the best draft. You can usually clean up a lot of extra words (and random errors) with a second draft.
Why concision?
You’re busy. Your boss is busy. Your reader is busy. We’re all reading less and less of the information presented to us. But reading is still a critical way that we share information. By learning to say more with fewer words, you’ll get your point across and come out on top.
Concision ain’t easy
In fact, you might spend more time crafting your message. Making your point makes that time and effort worth the extra work. Take the Moz Top 10 for example: over the last six editions, the ones with the fewest number of words have had the highest click-through rates.
Shortening the Moz Top 10 often takes me an extra draft, but that kind of increase in CTR is worth one more pass.
How this works at Moz
I was shocked when Trevor and I found that the most popular Moz blog posts (usually) come in at 1,200-1,800 words. That seemed long to me (especially for the Internet), but then I realized how much advice and education are usually packed into one post.
Compare that with what we sometimes see in YouMoz, which are initial drafts of 4,000-8,000 words. I am certain that a few of those authors have that much valuable information to share about one topic. But my guess is that most of those articles are trying to do too much in one post or are repeating themselves unnecessarily. I’d also be really surprised if most readers manage to reach the end of a post that long. That’s the real tragedy of overly wordy writing: No matter how brilliant you are, unless you are the most engaging writer ever, no one is reading what you’re writing. And according to one study, visitors only read 18% of content beyond the 1,250 word mark.
Do you have tips for stripping the bloat from your writing? Or do you truly love (and actually read) long-form writing on the web? Write me a novel in the comments ☺
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How much does the context of a link really matter? In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand looks at on- and off-topic links to uncover what packs the greatest SEO punch and shares what you should be looking for when building a high-quality link.
For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat a little bit about on-topic and off-topic links. One of the questions and one of the topics that you see discussed all the time in the SEO world is: Do on-topic links matter more than off-topic links? By on topic, people generally mean they come from sites and pages that are on the same or very similar subject matter to the site or page that I’m trying to get the link to.
It sort of makes intuitive sense to us that Google would care somewhat about this, that they would say, “Oh, well, here’s our friend over here,” we’ll call him Steve. No we’re going to call him Carl, because Carl is a great name.
Carl, of course, has CarlsCloset.net, CarlsCloset.net being a home organization site. Carl is going out, and he’s doing some link building, which he should, and so he’s got some link targets in mind. He looks at places like RealSimple.com, the magazine site, Sunset Magazine, UnderwaterHoagies.com, Carl being a great fan of all things underwater and sandwich related. So as he’s looking at these sites, he’s thinking to himself, well, from an SEO perspective, is it necessary the case that Real Simple, which has a lot of content on home organization and on cleaning up clutter and those kinds of things, is that going to help Carl’s Closet site rank better than, say, a link from UnderwaterHoagies.com?
The answer is a little tough here. It could be the case that UnderwaterHoagies.com has a feature article all about how submariners can keep their home in order, even as they brunch under the sea. But maybe the link from RealSimple.com is coming from a less on-topic article and page. So this starts to get really messy. Is it the site that matters, or is it the page that matters? Is it the context that matters? Is it the link itself and where that’s embedded in the site? What is the real understanding that Google has between relationships of on-topic and off-topic? That’s where you get a lot of convoluted information.
I have seen and we have probably all heard a ton of anecdotal evidence on both sides. There are SEOs who will argue passionately from their experience that what they’ve seen is that on-topic links are hugely more beneficial than off-topic ones. You’ll see the complete opposite from some other folks. In fact, most of my personal experiences, when I was doing more directed link building for clients way back in my SEO consulting days and even more recently as I’ve helped startups and advised folks, has been that off-topic links, UnderwaterHoagies.com linking to Carl’s Closet, that still seems to provide quite a bit of benefit, and it’s very had to gauge whether it’s as much, less than, more than any of these other ones. So I think, on the anecdotal side, we’re in a tough spot.
What we can say is that probably there’s some additional value from on-topic sites, on-topic pages, or on-topic link connections, that Google has some idea of context. We’ve seen them make huge strides with algorithms like Hummingbird, certainly with their keyword matching and topic modeling algorithms. It seems very unlikely that there would be nothing in Google’s algorithm that looks at the context or relationship of content between linking pages and linking websites.
However, in the real world, things are almost never equal. It’s not like they’re going to get exactly the same anchor text from the same importance of a page that has the same number of external links, that the content is exactly the same on all three of these websites pointing over to Carl’s Closet. In the real world, Carl is going to struggle much harder to get some of these links than others. So I think that the questions we need to ask ourselves, as folks who are doing directed marketing and trying to earn links, is: Will the link actually help people? Is that link going to be clicked?
If you’re on a page on Real Simple that you think very few people ever reach, you think very few people will ever click that link because it just doesn’t appear to provide much value, versus you’re in an article all about home organization on Underwater Hoagies, and it was featured on their home page, and you’re pretty sure that a lot of the submariners who are eating their subs under the sea are very interested in this topic and they’re going to click on that link, well you know what? That’s a link that helps people. That probably means search engines are going to treat it with some reverence as well.
Does the link make sense in context? This is a good one to ask yourself when you are doing any kind of link building that’s directed that could potentially be manipulative. If the link makes sense in context, it tends to be the case that it’s going to be more useful. So if Carl contributes the article to UnderwaterHoagies.com, and the link makes sense in context, and it will help people, I think it’s appropriate to put it there. If that’s not the case, it could look a little manipulative. It could certainly be perceived as self-serving.
Then, can you actually acquire the link? It’s wonderful when you go out and you make a list of, hey, here’s the most important and relevant sites in our sector and niche, and this is how we’re going to build topical authority. But if you can’t get those links, hey that’s tough potatoes, man. It’s no better than putting a list of links and just sorting them by, God knows, a horrible metric like PageRank or Alexa rank or something like that.
I would instead ask yourself if it’s realistic for you to be able to get those links and pursue those as well as pursuing or looking at the metrics, and the importance, and the topical relevance.
Let’s think about this from a broad perspective. Search engines are caring about what? They’re caring about matching the content relevance to the searcher’s query. They care about raw link popularity. That’s sort of like the old-school algorithms of PageRank and number of links and that kind of thing. They do care about topical authority and brand authority. We talked about on Whiteboard Friday previously around some topical authorities and how Google determines the authority and the subject matter of a site’s authority. They care about domain authority, the raw importance of a domain on the web, and they care about things like engagement, user and usage data, and given how much they can follow all of us around the web these days, they probably know pretty well whether people are clicking on these articles using these pages or not.
Then anchor text. Not every link that you might build or acquire or earn is going to provide all of these in one single package. Each of them are going to be contributing pieces of those puzzles. When it comes to the on-topic/off-topic link debate, I’m much more about caring about the answers to these kinds of questions — Can I acquire the link? Is it useful to people? Will they actually use it? Does the link make sense in context? — than I am about is it on-topic or off-topic? I’m not sure that I would ever urge you to prioritize based on that.
That said, I’m certainly looking forward to your feedback this week and hearing about your experiences with on-topic and off-topic links, and hopefully we’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
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Roger Dooley, neuromarketing expert, reminds us in his book Brainfluence that in 80% of cases we take a decision before being rationally aware of it.
Although Dooley explains this effect in terms of how our brain works, in my opinion, distinctly separating neuroscience and the theory of archetypes would be incorrect. On the contrary, I believe that these two aspects of the study of the human mind are complementary.
According to Jung, archetypes are “[…] forms or images of a collective nature which occur practically all over the Earth as constituents of myths and—at the same time—as individual products of unconscious”. He then, added something that interests us greatly: “The [forms and images] are imprinted and hardwired into out psyches”.
Being able to design a brand personality around an archetype that connects unconsciously with our audience is a big first step for: brand loyalty, community creation, engagement, conversions.
The Slender Man is the “Internet age” version of the archetype figure of the Shadow
Archetypes can be also used for differentiating our brand and its messaging from others in our same market niche and to give that brand a unique voice.
If we put users at the center of our marketing strategy, then we cannot limit ourselves in knowing how they search, how they talk on social media, what they like to share or what their demographics are.
No, we should also understand the deep psychological reasons why they desire something they search for, talk the way they talk, share what they share, and their psychological relation with the environment and society they live in.
Knowing that, we can use archetypes to create a deep emotional connection with our audience and earn their strong positive attitude toward us thanks to the empathy that is created between them and us.
Narrative modes, then, help us in shaping in a structured way a brand storytelling able to guide and engage the users, and not simply selling or creating content narrative doomed to fail.
The chart above presents the 12 Jungian archetypes (i.e: Hero), to what principal human desire (i.e.: leave a mark on the world) they correspond and what is the main behavior each one uses for achieving that desire (i.e.: mastery).
Remember: if the audience instinctively recognizes the archetypal figure of the brand and its symbolism and instinctively connect with it, then your audience is more ready to like and trust what your brand proposes.
On the other hand, it is also a good exercise to experiment with archetypes that we would not think are our brand’s one, expanding the practice of A/B tests to make sure we’re working with the correct archetype.
The Creator
In my last post I used Lego as example of a brand that is winning Internet marketing thanks to its holistic and synergistic use of offline and online marketing channels.
I explained also how part of its success is due to the fact Lego was able to shape its messages and brand personality around the Creator archetype (sometimes called the “Builder”) which is embodied by their tagline, “let’s build”.
Creators tend to be nonconformist and to enjoy self expression. A Creator brand, then, will empower and prize its audience as much as it is able to express itself using its products.
The Ruler is the leader, the one setting the rules others will follow, even competitors. Usually it’s paired with an idea of exclusiveness and status growth.
A brand that presents itself as a Ruler is suggesting to their audience that they can be rulers too.
A classic example of Ruler brand is Mercedes:
The Caregiver
Altruism, compassion, generosity. Caregiver brands present themselves as someone to trust, because they care and empathize with their audience.
The Caregiver is one of the most positive archetypes, and it is obviously used by nonprofit organizations or governmental institutions like UNICEF, but brands like Johnson & Johnson have also shaped their personality and messages around this figure.
The Innocent
The Innocent finds positive sides in everyone and everything.
It sees beauty even in things that others will not even consider, and feels in peace with its inner beauty.
Dove, obviously, is a good representation of the Innocent archetype.
The Sage
The Sages wants to know and understand things.
The Sage is deeply humanist and believe in the power of humankind to shape a better world through knowledge.
However, the Sage also has a shadowed side: intolerance to ideas others than their own.
Google, in both cases, is a good example a Sage brand.
The Explorer
The Explorer is adventurous, brave, and loves challenges. He tends to be an individualist too, and loves to challenge himself so as to find his real self.
Explorer brands prompt their audience to challenge themselves and to discover the Explorer within.
Red Bull is a classic example of these kinds of brands, but REI and Patagonia are even better representations.
The Hero
In many aspects, the Hero archetype is similar to the Explorer and Outlaw ones, with the difference that the Hero many times never wanted to be the hero, but injustice and external events obliged him to find the courage, braveness, and the honor to become one.
Nike, and also its competitor Adidas, shapes its brand voice around this archetypal figure.
The Magician
The Magician is clever, intelligent, and sometimes his ability can be considered supernatural.
The Magician is able to make the impossible possible. Because of that some of the best known technology brands use this archetype as their own to showcase their innovation and how they use their advanced knowledge creatively.
Apple—even if you are not an Apple fan—created a powerful brand by shaping it around this archetype.
The Outlaw
The Outlaw is the rebel, the one who breaks the rules in order to free his true self.
The Outlaw goes against the canon and is very aware of the constrictions society creates.
A great example of a brand that very well represents the Outlaw archetype is Betabrand.
The Everyman
It is perfectly fine to be “normal,” and happiness can come from simply sharing things with people we love.
Brands targeting the Everyman audience (and painting themselves as such) craft their messages about the beauty of simple things and daily real life.
Ikea is probably the brand that’s achieved mastery in the use of this archetype over the past few years.
The Jester
Fun, irreverent, energetic, impulsive and against the established rules at the same time, the Jester is also the only one who is able to tell the truth with a joke.
Jesters can be revolutionary too, and their motto could be “a laugh will bury you all.”
A brand that presents itself as the Jester is a brand that wants to make our lives easier and more bearable, providing us joy.
The Lover
Sensuality is the main characteristic of the Lover archetype, as well as strong physicality, passion, and a need for deep and strong sensations.
But the Lover can be also the idealist, the romantic longing for the perfect love.
Therefore, once we have decided what archetype figure best responds both to our audience and our values as a brand, we must translate the psychology we created for our brand into
brand storytelling. That storytelling must then be attuned to the psychology of our audience based on our psychographic analysis of them.
Good (brand) storytelling is very hard to achieve, and most of the time we see brands that miserably fail when trying to tell branded stories.
Introducing the Theory of Literary (or Narrative) Modes
In order to help my clients find the correct narrative, I rely on something that usually is not considered by marketers: the Theory of Literary Modes.
I use this theory, presented first by Northrop Frye in it essay Anatomy of Criticism, because it is close to our “technical marketer” mindset.
In fact:
The theory is based on a objective and “scientific” analysis of data (the literary corpus produced by humans);
It refuses “personal taste” as a metric, which in web marketing would be the same as creating a campaign with tactics you like but you don’t really know if your public is interested in. Even worse, it would be like saying “create great content” without defining what that means.
Moreover, the Theory of Literary Modes is deeply structured and strongly relies on semiotics, which is going to be the natural evolution of how search engines like Google will comprehend the content published in the Internet. Semantic thinking is just the first step as well explained Isla McKetta here on Moz few months ago.
Finally, Northrop Fryed considers also archetypes this theory because of the psychological and semiotic value of the symbolism attached to the archetypal figure.
Therefore, my election to use the Theory of Literary Modes responds
To the need to translate ideal brand storytelling into something real that can instinctively connect with the brand’s audience;
To make the content based on that storytelling process understandable also by search engines.
The Theory of Literary Modes in marketing
To understand how this works in marketing, we need to dig a little deeper into the theory.
A literary work can be classified in two different but complementary ways:
1) Considering only the relation between the nature of the main character (the Hero) and the ambient (or environment) where he acts.
2) Considering also if the Hero is refused or accepted by society (Tragedy and Comedy).
In the first case, as represented in the schema above, if the Hero:
Is higher by nature than the readers and acts in a completely different ambient than theirs, we have a Romance;
Is higher by nature than the readers, but acts in their same ambient, we have an Epic;
Is someone like the reader and acts in the reader’s own ambient, we are in field of Realism;
Is someone lower by nature than the readers and acts in a different or identical ambient, we are in the realm of Irony, which is meant as “distance.”
A fifth situation exists too, the Myth, when the nature of the Hero is different than ours and acts in an ambient different than ours. The Hero, in this case, is the God.
If we consider also if society refuses or accepts the hero, we can discover the different versions of Tragedy and Comedy.
I will not enter in the details of Tragedy, because we will not use its modes for brand storytelling (this is only common in specific cases of political marketing or propaganda, classic examples are the mythology of Nazism or Communism).
On the contrary, the most common modes used in brand storytelling are related to Comedy, where the Hero, who usually is the target audience, is eventually accepted by society (the archetypal world designed by the brand).
In Comedy we have several sub modes of storytelling:
“The God Accepted.” The Hero is a god or god-like kind of person who must pass through trials in order to be accepted by the society;
The Idyll, where the Hero uses his skills to explore (or conquer) an ideal world and/or become part of an ideal society. Far West and its heir, Space Opera (think of Interstellar) are classic examples.
Comedy sees the hero trying to impose his own view of the world, fighting for it and finally being awarded with acceptance of his worldview. A good example of this is every well ending biopic of an entrepreneur, and Comedy is the exact contrary of melodrama.
On a lower level we can find the Picaresque Comedy, where the hero is by nature inferior to the society, but – thanks to his cleverness – is able to elevate himself to society’s level. Some technology business companies use this narrative mode for telling their users that they can “conquer” their market niche despite not having the same economic possibilities as the big brands (this conquering usually involves the brand’s tools).
Finally we have the Irony Mode of Comedy which is quite complex to define.
It can represent stories where the hero is actually an antihero, who finally fails in his integration into the society.
It can also be about inflicting pain on helpless victims, as in mystery novels.
It can also be Parody.
Some examples
The Magician, gamification, and the Idyllic mode
Consider this brand plot:
The user (the Hero) can become part of a community of users only if he or she passes through a series of tasks, which will award prizes and more capabilities. If the user is able to pass through all the tasks, he will not only be accepted but also may have the opportunity to be among the leaders of the community itself.
And now consider sites, which are strongly centered on communities like GitHub and Code Academy. Consider also SAAS companies that present the freemium model like Moz or mobile games like Boom Beach, where you can unlock new weapons only if you pass a given trial (or you buy them).
The Magician is usually the archetype of reference for these kinds of brands. The Hero (the user) will be able to dominate a complex art thanks to the help of a Master (the brand), which will offer him instruments (i.e.: tools/courses/weapons).
Trials are not necessarily tests. A trial can be doing something that will be awarded, for instance, with points (like commenting on a Moz blog post), and the more the points the more the recognition, with all the advantages that it may offer.
Gamification, then, assumes an even stronger meaning and narrative function when tied to an archetype and literary mode.
Ikea, the Everyman, and the Comedic mode
Another example is Ikea, which we cited before when talking of the Everyman archetype.
In this case, the Hero is someone like me or you who is not an interior designer or decorator or, maybe, who does not have the money for hiring those professionals or buying very expensive furniture and decoration.
But, faithful to its mission statements (“design for all”, “design your own life”…), Ikea is there to help Everyman kind of people like me and you in every way as we decorate our own houses.
On the practical side, this narrative is delivered in all the possible channels used by Ikea: web site, mobile app, social media (look at its Twitter profile) and YouTube channel.
Betabrand, the Outlaw, and Picaresque Comedy
A third and last example can be Betabrand.
In this case both the brand and the audience is portrayed using the Outlaw archetype, and the brand narrative tend to use the Picaresque mode.
The Heroes is the Betabrand community who does not care what the mainstream concept of fashion is and designs and crowdfounds “its fashion.”
How to use archetypes and narrative modes in your brand storytelling
The first thing you must understand is what archetype best responds to your company tenets and mission.
Usually this is not something an SEO can decide by him- or herself, but it is something that founders, CEOs, and directors of a company can inform.
Oftentimes a small to medium business company can achieve this with a long talk among those company figures and where they are asked to directly define the idealistic “why?” of their company.
In case of bigger companies, defining an archetype can seem almost impossible to do, but the same history of the company and hidden treasure pages like “About Us” can offer clear inspiration.
Look at REI:
Clearly the archetype figure that bests fits REI is the Explorer.
Then, using the information we retrieve when creating the psychographic of our audience and buyer personas, matching with the characteristics each archetype has, and comparing it with the same brand core values, we can start to understand the archetype and narrative mode. If we look at REI’s audience, then we will see how it also has a certain affinity with the Everyman archetypal figure (and that also explains why REI also dedicates great attention to family as audience).
Once we have defined the best archetype commonly shared by our company and our audience, we must translate this figure and its symbolism into brand storytelling, which in web site includes design, especially the following:
Color pattern, because colors have a direct relation with psychological reaction (see this article, especially all the sources it links to)
Images, considering that in user-centric marketing the ideal is always to represent our targeted audience (or a credible approximation) as their main characters. I am talking of the so called “hero-shots”, about which Angie Shoetmuller brilliantly discussed in the deck I embed here below:
If you want to dig deeper in discovering the meaning and value of symbols worldwide, I suggest you become member of Aras.org or to buy the Book of Symbols curated by Aras.
Define the best narrative mode to use. REI, again, does this well, using the Idyllic mode where the Hero explores and become part of an ideal society (the REI community, which literally means becoming a member of REI).
We should, then:
Continue investigating the archetypal nature of our audience conducting surveys
Analyzing the demographic data Google Analytics offers us about our users
Using GA insights in combination with the data and demographic information offered by social networks’ ad platforms in order to create not only the interest graph of our audience but also to understand the psychology behind those interests
Doing A/B tests so to see whether symbols, images, and copywriting based on the targeted archetypes work better and if we have the correct archetype.
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We’d all love to show up first in Google for something.
There’s likely at least one golden search term or keyword you’re striving for —and we’ve all heard plenty of different get-to-the-front-page-of-Google formulas.
It can get a little dizzying keeping all the approaches straight.
But it can be done. If you’re willing to invest some time, resources and brainpower, you can create the top content on any topic.
To share exactly how, I made an infographic mapping out not one, but six foolproof, can’t-miss strategies that real-life people …
I love SEO. I love talking about SEO. Most non-SEO folk you talk to are generally very nice people. They may not understand everything you say, but they often nod their head and smile. The open-minded may even ask you to look at their site.
On the other hand, there’s the non-SEO “expert” (loosely defined as someone who has a cousin in marketing) who represents a different beast altogether. Well intentioned but misinformed, they believe SEO is urban legend, no better than a Ponzi scheme.
Here’s what I have to say to a few of the worst offenders.
1. SEO is a scam
What the friggin’ what?
The above screenshot of organic traffic to Moz’s own website shows the kind of success many strive for, but it is neither unusual or nor unattainable for folks that consistently invest in SEO as a marketing strategy.
Sadly, many business owners have been approached by less-than-ethical marketing vendors who promise SEO services but basically deliver nothing. If you are paying $49/month to a service that promises you top rankings in Google, it is almost certainly a scam.
That’s not SEO.
Perhaps this most harmful of myths stems from those seeking quick and easy wins with little effort. Indeed, there are cases of SEO wins that meet these criteria, typically when a site has easily correctable technical problems. In other cases, SEO involves real effort and commitment which often pays additional rewards beyond the increase in traffic.
2. Google will figure it out
No. No they friggin’ won’t.
Here’s what many webmasters see far too often when they trust search engines to do their SEO for them.
The temptation of many website owners and developers is to throw as many URLs as possible—sometimes millions—at Google’s crawlers and pray that their mysterious algorithms will magically deliver these pages to valuable users. Alternatively, even sites with a handful of pages expect search engines to do all the heavy lifting.
Google is smart, but not magic.
What’s forgotten in this equation is that Google and other search engines strive to mimic human behavior in evaluating content (and no human wants to sort through a million near-duplicate pages) and use human generated signals (such as links and engagement metrics) to crawl and rank results.
Every page delivered in search results should be unique, valuable, and more often than not contain technical clues to help search engines sort them from the billions of possible pages on the web. Without these qualities, search marketing is a game of chance that almost always loses.
3. We did SEO once
Congratulations. Buy yourself a cookie.
It’s sad to see organic search traffic fall over time, but all to often that’s exactly what happens when no effort is applied. Continually maintaining your SEO efforts is essential because of:
Link degradation (a.k.a. link rot)
Publishing new pages
Evolving search engine algorithms
The competition moving ahead of you
Outdated content
…and more
For a small minority of sites, SEO doesn’t need continual investment. My father-in-law’s auto shop is a perfect example. He has more business than he needs, and as long as folks find him when searching for “Helfer Auto” he’s happy. In this case, simply monitoring your SEO with the addition of a deeper dive 2-3 times per year may be sufficient.
For the rest of us, one-and-done SEO falls short.
4. Link building is dead (again)
Sigh.
Recently the SEO world got worked up when Google’s John Mueller stated link building is something he’d “try to avoid.”
Many misinterpreted this to mean that link building is bad, against the rules, and Google will penalize you for it.
In fact, nothing has changed that the fact that search engines use link authority and anchor text signals heavily in their search ranking algorithms. Or that white-hat link building is a completely legitimate and time-tested marketing practice.
I’m certain John was referring to the more manipulative type of link building, no doubt encountered frequently at Google. To be fair, this type of non-relevant, scaled approach to links should be avoided at all costs, and search engines have taken great strides to algorithmically detect and punish this behavior.
Marketers build links in a number of natural ways, and attracting links to your website remains darn-near essential for any successful SEO undertaking. If you need help, we write about it frequently.
5. I want to rank #1 for “magic keyword”
No. No you friggin’ don’t.
Look, here’s a personal example. I really want to rank #1 for “SEO” because Moz offers SEO software. Because of our Beginner’s Guide to SEO. Because SEO is our lifeblood.
But we don’t, and it doesn’t matter.
Moz typically ranks #2-3 for “SEO”. It sends good traffic, but not nearly as good as the thousands of long-tail keywords with more focused intent. In fact, if you went through our entire keyword set, you would find that “SEO” by itself only sends a tiny fraction of our entire traffic, and we could easily survive without it.
The truth is, when you create solid content focused around topics, you almost always receive far more (and oftentimes better) traffic from long-tail keywords that you didn’t try to rank for.
The magic happens when visits reach your site because the content matched thier needs, but not necessarily when you matched the right keywords.
6. Google hates SEO
Some days, it feels that way.
In truth, Google’s relationship with SEO is much more nuanced.
Google readily states that SEO can “potentially improve your site and save time” and that many SEO agencies “provide useful services.” Google even advises “If you’re thinking about hiring an SEO, the earlier the better.”
Google published their own SEO Starter Guide. While a bit out of date, it certainly encourages people to take advantage of SEO techniques to improve search visibility.
Google Analytics offers a series of SEO Reports. Keep in mind, these are almost laughably unusable due to the handicapped data quality.
While Google seems to encourage search engine optimization, it almost certainly hates manipulative SEO. The type of SEO meant to trick search engines into believing false popularity and relevancy signals in order to rank content higher.
In fact, many of the myths in the post boil down to some folks’ inability to distinguish between hard-working SEO and search engine spam. Which leads us to:
7. SEO is dead, because Google Answers
It’s scary for SEOs when we ask Google a question and see an actual answer instead of a link, as in the example below. It’s even more frightening when Google takes over entire verticals such as the weather, mortgage calculators, or song lyrics.
With the flip of a button, it seems Google can wipe out entire business models.
In reality, search growth and traffic continues to grow for most industries. Consider the following:
World Internet and search activitycontinues to rise, particularly in the mobile sector. This generally indicates that more users are performing more searches on a greater number of devices.
MozCast reports only 4.9% of Google searches result in an answer box.
A recent study by Stone Temple showed that 74.3% of Google answer boxes contained linked attribution, while the rest was public domain knowledge.
Anecdotal evidence further suggests that even when presented with answer boxes, a large number of users click through to the cited website.
People want answers, but at least for now they also want their websites.
8. SEO is all tricks
Really? This is plain sad. Somebody make me a sad salad.
“Tricks” is what professionals call bad, manipulative SEO that gets you penalized. The problem, I believe, is the first thing any developer or marketing manager hears about SEO is something close to “put more keywords in the title tag.”
If that’s all SEO is, it does sound like tricks.
Real SEO makes every part of content organization and the browsing experience better. This includes:
Creating content that reverse engineers user needs
Making content more discoverable, both for humans and search engine crawlers
Improving accessibility through site architecture and user experience
Structuring data for unambiguous understanding
Optimizing for social sharing standards
Improving search presence by understanding how search engines generate snippets
Technical standards to help search engines categorize and serve content to the right audience
Improving website performance through optimizations such as site speed
Sharing content with the right audiences, increasing exposure and traffic through links and mentions
Each of these actions is valuable by itself. By optimizing your web content from every angle, you may not even realize you’re doing SEO, but you’ll reap many times the rewards.
9. PageRank
Actually, I like PageRank.
But it’s still a flippin’ myth.
PageRank was an incredibly innovative solution allowing Google to gauge the popularity of a webpage to the point that they could build the world’s best search engine on the concept.
Despite what people say, PageRank is very likely still a part of Google’s algorithm (although with severely reduced influence). More than that, PageRank gave Google the ability to build more advanced algorithms on top of the basic system.
Consider concepts like Topic Sensitive Page Rank or even this recent paper on entity salience from Google Research which highlights the use of a PageRank-like system.
Toolbar PageRank, the PageRank most SEOs talk about, will likely never be updated again.
PageRank correlates poorly with search engine rankings, to the point that we quit studying it long ago.
PageRank is easy to manipulate.
Fortunately, Google has moved away from talking about PageRank or supporting it in a public-facing way. This will hopefully lead to an end of people using PageRank for manipulative purposes, such as selling links and shady services.
On the other hand, successful social activity can have significant secondary effects on your SEO efforts. Social activity helps address two of the major tasks facing SEOs:
Search engine discovery and indexation
Content distribution, which leads to links and shares
Perhaps no one explains it better than AJ Kohn, in his excellent Social Signals and SEO.
Successful social activity puts your content in front of the right group of users, increasing visits, engagement, and brand signals like the number of users searching for your site. Finally, the simple act of more influencers visiting your content can lead to more links and further sharing, and the cycle repeats itself. All of these secondary effects can significantly boost your SEO efforts.
More myths from SEOs
We asked several folks on Twitter about thier least favorite SEO myths. Here are a few favorite replies.
@CyrusShepard That Google doesn't use any visit/engagement/traffic data in any way in their search quality systems
What SEO myth drives you nuts? Let us know in the comments below!
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