Categories
Content Effectiveness

What is the Value of Keywords Today?

The power of search engine keywords is waning. Since the introduction of semantic search with Google’s hummingbird search rewrite, they no longer have a decisive influence in search ranking. At best, they are simply one of dozens of factors involved with semantic search results. Perceptions about keywords have been slow to change for authors and marketers who don’t specialize in SEO, and even for some SEO consultants. Google  throttled the flow of keyword information to content producers, but many people still consider search keywords important or even essential.  Search keywords have become a crutch on which brands and authors rely to try to communicate with audiences.

It’s a challenge to reverse a decade or more of group-think relating to keywords.  For a keyword loyalist, giving up old habits can be hard, even habits that no longer make sense — especially when there are no obvious replacement tactics.  Keywords are more often used unthinkingly than used constructively.  The good news is that although keywords offer limited value to improve SEO, they can improve content quality in selective cases. It’s important to know the difference between the fetish use of keywords in content, and the creative application of keyword insights to improve the quality of content offered to audiences.  The difference between keyword hacks and keyword understanding is methodology.

Search Keywords Shouldn’t Describe Page Titles

The SEO industry has responded to Google’s introduction of semantic search with confusing advice. Although Google doesn’t match exact keywords on a page with keywords used in search queries, numerous SEO consultants still maintain search engine keywords are vital to how Google understands content.  Sure, Google can reinterpret search queries; but they argue if you write natively using the most popular keywords used in search queries, it’s simpler and more effective.  These people suggest that things have changed less than they seem. They note that Google still indexes keywords in search, and still has a keyword planner writers can use.

As Google has altered its behavior over time, SEO has deformed into an incoherent set of tactics.  Many ordinary content producers have lost the ability to understand what these tactics really deliver. They consult Google’s AdWords keyword planner to guide the creation of content, often at the urging of SEO consultants who encourage the practice. The AdWords keyword tool may present forecasts of impressions associated with a search keyword.  But ad impressions are not the same as search impressions (an impression being the existence of an item on a page accessed by a user, not necessarily an indication that the person noticed the item).  The algorithm Google uses to prioritize the display of paid advertising based entirely around keywords is different from the algorithm it uses to prioritize organic search results based on search terms and contextual information. It’s a mistake to use Google’s keyword planner for advertising and assume it will deliver a better search ranking or more qualified audience. But content producers make this assumption all the time, because it is convenient and they lack a conceptually sound process for developing and writing about content.

Significantly, Google’s AdWords encourage the decoupling of search keyword terms from the specific terms used in the content displayed in an ad.  Ad content can be related to the keyword bought without using the actual phrase.  The mandate  that you are supposed to use the exact term in your writing doesn’t even apply to advertising, the one area where Google encourages keyword research. Search engine keywords aren’t magic: they are simply a pricing mechanism for ads.

Search Engine Keywords Mask User Intent

Another common use of search engine keywords is to research popular topics.  SEO consultants and writers believe that search keywords provide them with data-rich market research that will tell them what content they should produce.  But search keywords have never been very solid as data to understand audiences. No matter what tool one uses, the tool won’t illuminate who is seeking information or necessarily why.  Making bold assumptions about people, their motivations, and their likely behavior based on a few search engine keywords is a risky thing to do.

Consider the case of people searching for the phrase “dead Wi-Fi.” This example is fairly typical of search terms: short, inelegant — and ambiguous. Who are the people typing this phrase and what is their intent?  Is the phrase “dead Wi-Fi” more likely to be entered by a 20 year old or a 60 year old? What might the phrase suggest about their level of understanding of wireless routers?  And most importantly, what can we infer about the intentions of the numerous people entering this phrase?  Are they all the same, or do different people have different goals when using the exact same phrase?  Why, when presenting search results matching the exact same search phrase, will different people make different choices about which article titles to click on? Rather than providing answers, the search keyword raises questions.

How search engine keyword can result in different audience behavior

Google prioritizes results to show the most popular pages that seem to match what Google interprets the search to be about. To illustrate, let’s suppose the first search result presents an article about Wi-Fi dead zones in your house.  Google presents a specific popular article on reception problems by interpreting dead to mean “dead zones.”  The eighth search result might provide an article on resolving general Wi-Fi problems, perhaps discussing when the Wi-Fi antenna on a phone or computer isn’t functioning. Here Google presents a popular page on fixing malfunctioning Wi-Fi equipment by interpreting the term dead to mean “not working.” The 15th search result might be entitled “Freedom from Dead Wi-Fi.”  This article title exactly matches the search term, but its purpose is not clear.  It is actually a page promoting the sale of new Wi-Fi equipment rather than a help article to fix existing equipment.   It features images and copy describing a futuristic looking box with many antennas that might appeal to the gamer crowd.

The search ranking for the article “Freedom from Dead Wi-Fi” was determined by two factors: people who entered a different phrase but decided to click on the title, and those who entered the exact phrase. Those who entered a different search query may have been attracted to the aspirational, if vague, promise of having a hassle-free experience.  The term “dead” might resonate with gamers in particular, who don’t want to be on the dead side of anything.  Those who entered “dead Wi-Fi” as a search phrase probably clicked on the title because of confirmation bias: it exactly matched what they thought they were looking for.  Confirmation bias is the tendency to identify with things that confirm our preexisting impressions or concepts.  So if you have content that has intrinsic popularity— it ranks highly anyway because it gets many page views — including a popular search keyword in the title may spur some additional page views due to the confirmation bias factor.  On the other hand, a title that merely sounds like it is helpful can run the risk of disappointing the viewer.  Some people viewing the “Freedom From Dead Wi-Fi” page wanted help on their current Wi-Fi problems. Pages viewed are not the same as audience interest in the content.

Without actually looking through numerous results, it’s not possible to infer much from the search keywords.   Viewing the content within the pages, one can find that the search keywords don’t represent a coherent set of user intentions.

Rethinking Keywords from an Audience Perspective

The purpose of any keyword research should be to understand the language of your audience, not to guess what will rank high on search engines.  And it is important to know what specific audience segments matter most to your organization.

Many people have a naive belief that aggregated, unsegmented Google keyword data provides a perfect mirror of their audience. SEO consultants and writers may believe they are promoting audience interests by using search engine keywords, but they are being data-focused rather than audience-centric.  They aggregate activity to create figures to justify content decisions, rather than start with the more granular needs of individuals and then identify common patterns. They put blind faith in often dubious numbers.

The Myth of the Undifferentiated Audience

People in different roles, from marketing to technical writing, want to believe their audience is undifferentiated. They want to believe that “everyone wants the same thing.” It’s simpler to do so. This mentality is common in marketing in particular: some marketing managers believe they need to talk to everyone and that everyone will want to listen to the brand.

There are a few brands that only care about page views, and care less about who the audience is. Advertising-supported publishers don’t care who visits their page: the ad shown will programmatically change according to who the person is.  Businesses that are purely transactional, such as hotel booking sites, similarly don’t care so much about audience segmentation: they want as wide an audience as possible to generate transaction fees.  But most businesses seek to capture value based on targeting specific kinds of customers, and providing products tailored to their needs.  If some of your customers a more profitable than others — because they buy more, pay more, or are cheaper to serve — simply pursuing page views will skew your brand value.

When brands act as if everyone is equally important, it generally signals a problem in business strategy, or poor operational oversight.  They don’t know, or at least don’t communicate internally, who are their most valuable customers and the need to focus on them.   As a consequence, we have situations where SEO consultants dictate editorial choices, or copywriters rely on keywords to write generic copy because they don’t understand precisely who the audience is, and how they think about the topic.

Shifting the Role of Keywords from Discovery to Understanding

Popular keywords that aren’t specific to the audience segment a brand wants to attract, only provide the illusion of data.  To provide value, keywords need indicate information to authors that is better than what they can get relying on available subject expertise.

Brands too often expect keywords to tell them what to say.  They focus on target keywords instead of target audiences.  They get fixated on the circular logic of “discovery”: they hope to discover the right keyword so audiences can discover the right content (theirs).  If keywords exist to promote discovery, they can’t at the same time be the object of discovery.  When this happens, the keyword becomes the end, instead of a means to an end.  The keyword defines the audience, instead of the audience being the party defining appropriate keywords.

If instead we shift the role of keyword away from “discovery” toward understanding, we get a more realistic goal. Brands need to understand which audience keywords will promote understanding of their content.  Here we assume the brand already knows what they want to say, they just need to know exactly how to phrase it.  The target is a message; the keywords are simply guidelines for presenting the message. The keywords relate to terms used by a specific audience, rather than a magic box of gold at the end of a rainbow.

Understanding Audience Segments Through Language

Audience keywords — the specific terminology used by an audience segment — is not something available from Google search data.  But audience keywords can be derived from various sources, and brands can find it worthwhile to understand linguistic differences.

One outcome of the vast quantities of text data that are now available is a growing understanding of language differences among groups of people.  Social media scholars, for example, notice words and even neologisms being used frequently by people associated with one another, while these same terms aren’t used widely in the general population.  Our language usage seems to be drifting back into distinct linguistic dialects, a consequence of both our online social connectivity and our selectively accessing content (the filter bubble).  Now that the age of mass media is over, we no longer expect everyone to talk about things the same way.

Some writers may object to being concerned with linguistic differences.  For example, advocates of plain language argue that all content should be written in a way that anyone can understand it.  While such a goal is surely admirable for some sectors — government in particular — it is not true that all parties are equally satisfied with plain language descriptions.  I’ve seen scientists frustrated by the quality of writing using plain language to describe a topic that required more specialized words, which were not allowed.  They complain that a discussion is oversimplified or key details are missing.  Similarly, writers may insist they are writing about a topic of narrow interest, so that anyone interested in the topic is likely to talk about it in the same way.  But even for niche topics, there can be novices and experts.  I am not suggesting that the vocabulary of all topics need to be segmented by audience; I am simply noting that it can be presumptuous to act as if no differences in audience needs exist.

Audience keywords involve a different set of tools and data than search engine keywords.  Audience keyword analysis basically involves comparing the frequency of words in a target texts (corpus) of an audience, with the frequency of words used in another set of texts, often representing the general population.   This comparison allows a writer to understand what vocabulary is most unique to the audience, and how they use this vocabulary.  There are commercial SaaS products that provide these capabilities, such as Sketch Engine.  There are also desktop software programs that one can use.  I’ve used the popular Antconc program, for example.  For those wanting to process large sets of data, text analysis libraries in Python and in the R statistical software can be used.

The next task is identifying what content exists that can reveal the vocabulary your audience uses to discuss a topic.  A range of sources offer a rich corpus of content to identify the vocabulary used by your customers:

  1. For audiences who belong to topic focused communities of interest, the texts of publications they read regularly, such as hobby magazines (for understanding keywords of enthusiasts), or specialized trade publications (for understanding the  keywords of a B2B vertical segment)
  2. Transcripts of focus groups of a target audience segment
  3. User comments from audiences in social media, or community forum discussions
  4. Terms used in internal search.

By analyzing such source content, writers identify words with special significance that are used more frequently by an audience segment than by the population as a whole.  They can understand their audience’s preferred terminology, and nuances in how they describe things, especially adjectives.  These can uncover value propositions.

Tribal publications — publications dedicated to distinct tribes such as specific professions or groups of avid fans of an activity — are different from general publications that don’t have such a tight audience focus.  They are more likely to use lingo or jargon, and reflect the internalized language of the audience who read these publications.  They are also likely to be read more loyally, and therefore promote the usage of words in a particular way.

A special comment about using internal search terms (also known as vertical search).  Why are internal search terms are okay, but external search engine terms not?  People using site search are more likely to be your target audience.  They have seen your site, got of sense of who you are, and feel motivated to explore further.  Vertical search was once considered an indication of UX or information architecture failures. Now vertical search is it a key differentiator for brands to guide their customers to find their products.  Search logs from internal searches can provide information about the terminology that people coming to your brand use.

Keywords are Clues, not Facts

Keywords can reveal interesting clues about audiences. Clues suggest something, but they should not dictate it.  A hint in a crossword puzzle is different from the answer.  Internal search keywords, for example, can provide hints about dimensions of topics, and ways to discuss topics, but are not themselves the answer to what you should be writing. Not being clear about this distinction results in the clueless, fatalistic question: “What does the data say we should do?”  Being data driven may be virtuous, but running on autopilot isn’t. Clues aren’t facts.

Keywords Aren’t Market Data

Keywords may provide clues to audience interests, but don’t provide direct data.  One can’t infer directly from keywords who is using them.  You need other forms of data to tie the reader to the keyword.  So if you find an odd kind of search query showing up on your internal search logs, it does not automatically indicate that you should be producing content using that keyword.  Search keywords are reliable indications of interest only when the search keywords match the keywords of the audience that you want to attract. Perhaps a number of people who aren’t your target audience mistakenly came to your content and are trying to find something you don’t offer, or care to offer. Your own internal analytics data will probably provide a better indication of what content you should produce than relying on internal search logs. There can be a role for  search terms to gauge potential interest on topics about which you have not written previously, but your internal content usage analytics will in most cases be a better indication of what resonates with the audiences you attract.

Relying On Keywords Can Distort Meaning

Algorithmic assessments should never be a substitute for judgment in writing.  Two terms that seem similar, but have different frequencies, are not necessarily identical in meaning.  Related and similar-sounding words can have subtly different meanings, or different connotations.  One shouldn’t use the most popular term simply because it’s the most popular.  Make sure the term chosen is exactly equivalent to the term not chosen.

Sometimes more formal (and less popular) terms carry more precise meanings.  The best way to connect a term that’s popular with your audience with a more precise term that you need to use in your content, is through cross referencing.

Keywords Can Help Brands Develop a Preferred Terminology for Topics and Audiences

If you routinely write about a certain topic, it may be worth your effort to analyze audience discussion relating to the topic.  Text analysis programs can help brands determine the audience-preferred terminology relating to a particular domain.  While this is obviously entails cost and effort, it may pay dividends.

Ideally all writers will have sufficient subject domain expertise internalized to know the preferred vocabulary for an audience segment.  But writers often need to write about varied topics, and writing is often outsourced to others. Having a list of audience-preferred terminology with associated definitions can enable any author to write appropriately on a given topic.  Text analysis can even support development of a style guide.  For fields such as health and wellness, where words have precise meaning, a preferred domain terminology is helpful if some writers are not deep subject experts.

In the not too distant future, I can imagine commercial firms will offer tailored keyword products.  Brands will be able to get a list of “keywords of 18 – 24 year old skateboarders” or “vacation-related keywords of upper income 50 – 60 year olds.”  For now, content strategists will need to do the legwork themselves.

— Michael Andrews

Categories
Content Effectiveness

The Growing Irrelevance of SEO

If you listen to discussions about penguins, hummingbirds, pandas, and knowledge bots, you might get the impression that search engine optimization is starting to converge with the discipline of content strategy. The SEO industry sounds enlightened when they talk about the importance of content quality, and the value of semantics in positioning content. But it would be a mistake to assume that the SEO industry is now on the same page as content strategy. SEO consultants continue to view content through the wrong end of the telescope, and believe that demystifying Google is the key to content success. They still don’t understand that Google is not the audience for your content. The more you worry about Google, the more likely your content won’t meet the needs of your real audience, because you’ve diverted your attention from important goals, and squandered limited resources.

Why Fear Google?

No one knows exactly how big the SEO industry is — or even how to define it. According to some estimates, global SEO spending accounts for several billion dollars each year. Unlike search engine marketing, SEO is supposed to be cost-free; yet counterintuitively, firms spend billions of dollars on it. Brands seem to hire SEO consultants for two main reasons: the fear of making a costly mistake, and the fear they don’t understand what exactly Google is doing that might impact them. Google is a formidable (and secretive) $60 billion company. The software industry is full of consultants who exist to explain the proprietary products of big vendors. Microsoft and SAP have their third party explainers who decipher the products for customers, and help them implement them. Marketers have the SEO industry to take the fear out of Google. And since Google keeps changing things, the SEO consultants carry on explaining the supposed implications of the latest changes.

Change and Denial

On nearly every front, content discovery is experiencing massive changes. Search is declining as a source of referral traffic, as social media (Facebook in particular) becomes more important. Referral traffic is harder to track, as more traffic comes from offline and encrypted referrers. Digital ad revenues — the raison d’être for Google’s search business — are under pressure, due to the lack of mobile cookies, audience cross channel hopping, and ad oversupply. In the face of these pressures, Google has iteratively increased the sophistication of its search. It has transformed search ranking from being a set of practices that could be partially reverse engineered, to a complex data structure that is not knowable to outside parties.

SEO consultants comment on these changes profusely, while maintaining that the key to success is to continue following the same advice they’ve always given. Good SEO advice is timeless, they’d have you believe. I have yet to read any SEO consultant admit they’ve changed their mind about what’s effective. Tactics go out of fashion when Google publicly belittles them, changes priorities, or chooses to make an example out of a party that audaciously believes it can crack the system. The consultants tend to deny, when pressed, that they ever advocated now unfashionable tactics such as link building or keyword stuffing. But the power of keywords remains a core belief of the SEO industry.

Old Formulas are Broken

I was recently at a content strategy conference that featured a speaker who is an SEO specialist. I wasn’t previously familiar with her, but judging from her social media profile she’s well known with a large following. She provided a standard menu of recommendations about content:

  1. Research keywords you can use in your content
  2. Write content using your keywords
  3. Get a bigger audience.

Most of the talk focused on researching keywords. There are numerous tools trying to estimate or simulate what is happening in the web universe, and slice this data in various ways to provide insights. I admire the inventiveness of the data brokers in offering information that — on the surface at least — looks like it should be valuable. Who wouldn’t want to know which keywords are popular, or what ad words competitors are bidding for? Tools proliferate to provide pieces of data you don’t know. But rarely do SEO consultants debate how important it is to know these things, or how accurate the data is. Most of the data simply isn’t relevant.

SEO is driven by the herd instinct. What are other people doing? Let’s do what other people are doing! The practice of SEO is the practice of mimicry. Follow trends, rather than pursue one’s own goals or be by guided by one’s own results. When Google activity acts as the North Star guiding decisions, then the interests of brands and audiences consequently become a secondary priority.

Brands hope that if they rank high in a search by finding the perfect combination of popular but underutilized keywords, that audiences will want to engage with them. Brands can blame low engagement on poor search rank visibility due to a few poor keyword choices. With an SEO focus, the underlying quality of the content is never questioned.

SEO has been described, with justification, as the practice of “writing for Google.” Writing for Google is not the same as writing for audiences. It’s dangerous to assume that Google keywords reflect the content needs of audiences you want to reach.

Let’s imagine a small craft beer company. They take pride in the fine ingredients they use, and the attention they give to their beer making. But an SEO consultant tells them they are missing out on valuable web traffic. His research indicates that people online are searching for beer in combination with the topic of the beach. Moreover, one of big beer companies is running a beach themed marketing campaign relating to their beer. So the craft brewer develops some beach themed content featuring games with people in swimsuits, and does find that web traffic increases. But sales don’t improve: actually some core fans are turned off by the beach stuff. Turns out that the new web visitors are largely 14 year olds. By the time they can legally purchase the product, they will consider the brand too juvenile for their tastes.

This parable illustrates the two core fallacies of SEO.

SEO fallacy #1: Treating All Page Views as Equally Valuable

The logic of SEO is beguilingly simple: Better performing search terms result in higher rankings that result in more page views. This narrative is PowerPoint and Excel friendly. It’s easy to digest, because it avoids discussion of a messy variable called people.

Where is the audience? They are hiding behind the search terms, and the page views. SEO consultants presume there is one mass audience that is typing search terms and one mass audience viewing pages, and that these audiences are one and the same. Then, in an even bigger leap of faith, they assume that the audience viewing a page is the same as the audience you are looking to attract because, after all, they clicked on your page.

Even if we assume SEO can deliver a larger audience, it doesn’t follow that it delivers the right audience. SEO lacks an effective concept of audience segmentation. It may be able to tell you what terms are being used in searches, but can’t tell you who is using these terms. Even ad words only offer crude segmentation data, and provide no real ability to parse how different audience segments use words in different ways. The terms that are most popular in a general sense aren’t necessarily the terms popular with your target audience.

The limitations of keywords are apparent when one starts from the end goal and works backwards. Suppose you produce an expensive ceiling fan that looks amazing and sells for several thousand dollars. You want to attract an audience prepared to spend that amount of money on a fan and appreciate it. What keywords do you use? Ideally you want to use the keywords that would be used by the real customers of your product. But the mass audience of SEO doesn’t help you pinpoint which keywords are right. You don’t know if high-end shoppers really search using such terms as “luxury” or “designer,” or if those are down-market terms used by people who aspire to products they believe are fancier than they really are. A flawed keyword focus might end up driving traffic to your website from people looking for a designer fan they saw at Walmart. You’ve won the page view sweepstakes, but haven’t succeeded attracting serious prospects. Rather than try to second guess search terms, it could be more effective to talk authentically about the product and rely on the content to provide the connections to search engines.

SEO Fallacy #2: Having Search Terms Drive Brand and Content Strategy

Chasing what’s popular means you are hostage to fads. Planning content around popular keywords is not strategic. Popularity changes. You may believe you “own” a keyword until a bigger competitor starts using it and wipes out your search position. Keywords are rarely decisive in determining search rank, which is heavily influenced by the general authority of the hosting website.

Your content should reflect consistent and enduring priorities for your brand and your content strategy. What ranks well on Google today may not rank well in six months, if keywords are the decisive reason. Google is changing its ranking algorithm continuously, and it is foolish to try to shape your content to fit it if you want your content to be valuable over the longer term.

With keyword-driven content, you surrender control over what you talk about. You start creating content because it is popular, not because it is relevant to your brand or to the specific audience you want to attract. You loose control of your brand voice and message, since keywords reflect a generic, lowest common denominator mode of expression, a modern form of caveman talk. People may use primitive vocabulary in a search box, but they don’t necessarily want the content they see to be as dumbed down as the search they have parsimoniously entered. Emphasizing the most popular keywords in your content can undermine your brand’s credibility with the audiences you most want to attract.

You Don’t Control Semantic Search

There are signs that some SEO consultants are starting to pivot on keywords. As Google search increasingly relies on identifying semantic and linguistic relationships, SEO consultants have turned their attention to unlocking how semantic search works.

Even though Google has redefined how they retrieve and rank search items, the idea that you can, and should, write for Google refuses to die in the SEO industry. What remains true is that the ability to gain a competitive advantage by writing for search engines is limited. Making search engines the priority of your writing is ultimately counterproductive. If you adopt some of the latest SEO thinking, you will make your content operations less efficient, and baffle your audience in the process.

Various SEO consultants in recent months have offered explanations of semantic search, making it sound fiendish. If fear of the unknown animated prior discussion of SEO mysteries, semantic search is presented as even more cryptic; SEO consultants seem eager to detail its complexities. But rather than admit they don’t know exactly how Google weights the numerous factors they use, SEO consultants imply the black box of Google search can still be reverse engineered. The advice being offered can border on comical. Instead of suggesting repetitively using keywords (the so-called keyword density tactic), SEO consultants now suggest using many synonyms in what you write about, since Google considers synonyms in its search results. The theory is that using lots of synonyms will make the content appear “less thin” to Google.

We find SEO consultants urging clients to develop topic modelling of their content so they can improve “on page optimization.” How toying with topic modelling (the computer modelling of thematically related words) is supposed to improve search ranking is never clear; presumably it is based on the idea that if the brand talks the same way that Google’s algorithms evaluate pages, then it will rank more highly. Like much other semantic SEO advice, its value is taken on faith. The advice is not actionable by authors, who have no practical means to implement it.

A writer on Moz asks: “What is this page about? As marketers, helping search engines answer that basic question is one of our most important tasks.” He recommends clients evaluate their “term frequency–inverse document frequency” to “help” Google. Here is another example of expropriating a technical concept from the science of information retrieval, and assuming that content authors can somehow usefully apply these insights to better serve audiences.

Much of the new wave of semantic SEO advice is warmed-over keyword stuffing. Instead of stuffing keywords, they urge clients to stuff “concepts.” Writers are supposed to add pointless words to their content to bulk up the number of explicit conceptual associations mentioned. Never mind if the audience finds this verbiage superfluous. The semantic SEO advice implies that all pages should look like Wikipedia: brimming with as many concrete nouns as possible so that they rank highly according to what they imagine Google’s semantic search is looking for.

If brands embrace this new talk about concept stuffing, it is only a matter of time before Google identifies and penalizes black hat semantic markup that is superfluous and not reflective of the genuine substance of an article.

It may be a shock to the SEO industry, but Google doesn’t need their help to understand what a page is about. Google is famous for developing a driverless car. They certainly don’t need back seat drivers directing their search engines. Google has been trying to shake off the influence of SEO consultants for some time. They’d rather collect ad money from brands directly, instead of having SEO consultants volunteer confusing guidance that makes brands wary of Google.

Google Doesn’t Care about Keywords, but Humans Do

For better or worse, Google search has entered a post-literal phase. In the past, one could type a phrase with a unique combination of words, and retrieve a document containing those search terms. The “Googlewhack” became a source of amusement and fascination, discovering what mysteries were hidden in the vast ocean of content. Today, Google will reinterpret your Googlewhack search and spoil any fun. So many factors influence search today that one is never sure what results will return highly when entering a search. The relationship between what a brand writes, and what a user types in a search box, has never been less clear.

This is not to imply that language doesn’t matter. It matters to people. Content professionals should be concerned about what words mean to people, instead of what they mean to search engines. According to its original meaning in corpus linguistics, keywords refer to the words a specific group of people use most frequently in their speech or writing relative to other groups. It is important to use the keywords of your audience: just don’t expect to find them from Google searches. Most people rely on a small set of words in daily conversation and writing. I have a handy dictionary on my iPhone called the Longman Keywords Dictionary that lists the 3000 most frequent words in spoken and written English. It also provides common collocations of words (words that tend to be used together). While intended for learners of English as a second language, it provides a white list of words you should be using if trying to reach a broad audience. These are the words people use and know without thinking twice. You can save more unique words for special situations or ideas where you want to bring attention to what you are discussing, and make people notice a less common word or phrase. The goal should be to focus audience attention on what’s novel and interesting, not to bludgeon them with repetition.

Don’t worry about how Google manages your content — worry about how you manage it

SEO consultants at times highlight interesting information from Google such as academic research and patent applications. Google is a clever and fascinating company, and people who use Google search are naturally curious about what the search giant is doing. But apart from a small quantity of Google-published materials, people who do not work at Google can’t possibly explain with any confidence what is happening inside an impenetrable, proprietary product. So instead we get speculation about what Google is doing, opinion surveys of consultants that rank order their opinions, and experimental tests that generally can’t be reproduced over time by different people.

While impressive, Google search is far from perfect. It will continue to evolve. Semantic search will continue to play a central role, but contextual data relating to personal behavior will probably become more prominent in future releases of Google search. Google search is a moving target: there’s little point trying to subdue it by orienting your content to suit its changing characteristics.

Rather than worry about how Google manages their content, brands should worry how they manage their content themselves. The needs of human audiences are straightforward compared with the ever-shifting priorities of Google search algorithms. Brands should focus on audience needs, and resist the distractions of fickle popularity of search rankings. They need to make a sustained effort understanding and serving the needs of core customers.

One benefit of all the chatter about semantic search is the growing awareness of semantic technologies. Many of the same technical approaches Google uses to index and evaluate content can be used by any brand for their own content operations. Such open source tools as Mallet, NLTK, Solr and elasticsearch offer amazing capabilities to improve the discoverability and distribution of content within the brand’s own content platforms. Critically, brands that make investments in their own platforms gain valuable knowledge of audiences from the data they generate, in stark contrast to the black box of Google.

SEO’s Value and Future

The primary value of SEO is promoting clean metadata. SEO consultants provide a service when they highlight the potential problems arising from lacking proper metadata. Due to the size of the SEO industry, they have become, through the twists of fate, the door-to-door sales force explaining the concept of metadata to ordinary marketers. Many organizations learn about metadata through their engagement of an SEO consultant.

Unfortunately, because SEO consultants talk selectively about metadata such as Schema.org, people who are not content professionals can erroneously assume that search engine metadata is the only metadata that matters. Most marketers mistakenly believe that Schema.org markup is useful only for search. They do not realize that it can be used in conjunction with APIs to make content available to resellers, or provide dynamic updates. Metadata can play a far larger role than supporting search. Metadata is essential to enable the effective utilization of content for many different purposes.

The future of SEO is uncertain. Google’s de-emphasis of links and keywords has rendered it largely irrelevant. It is becoming a side show to search marketing and other “in bound” marketing techniques. As a branch of marketing, the SEO industry is engulfed by the ethos of pay-to-play: to perform better than the competition requires spending more ad dollars.

For SEO consultants who are genuinely interested in the power of content quality to improve organic engagement, I hope they will apply their knowledge of metadata and analytics more broadly to the field of content strategy. Much SEO knowledge is highly transferrable, and is far more impactful when applied to all dimensions of content, not just search.

— Michael Andrews

Categories
Content Effectiveness

Adaptive headlines: the right genre for the right context

In a world of too much information, headlines signal if content is worth considering.  Headlines determine if content is viewed, shared, and discussed.  Writers and marketing experts offer much advice on crafting headlines.  However, one shouldn’t apply one approach to all headlines.  As the content landscape changes and evolves, different channels, and different audience experiences, require different kinds of headlines.  To realize greatest impact, headlines must anticipate the intent of their audiences.

Headlines can be optimized for six kinds of goals:

  • to aid the scanning of content
  • to facilitate discovery of enjoyable content
  • to get the audience to want something
  • to provide a summary of content
  • to indicate the nature of advice available
  • to aid in the finding and retrieval of content

The importance of context

Whether we call them headlines, page titles or message headers, their purposes are the same:

  • to attract audience attention
  • to describe the content, and set expectations
  • to motivate the audience to view

The context and goals of the audience shape their attention, expectations, and motivation.  The audience may pursue a “lean forward” experience, using a desktop to research intensively a topic, or a “lean back” experience on a tablet, casually browsing content.  Different genres of headlines have arisen to suit different content genres and channels.  As content is delivered through a wider array of channels (mobile, social media, personalized magazine aggregation apps), the rules of what headlines will work best become more complex.

Different audience behaviors imply specific aspects of headlines to prioritize.  While it is possible to combine several of these aspects together, it is difficult to address all of them with one style of headline.  To know which characteristics to prioritize, brands must be able to anticipate the context and goals of their audience.

Screenshot of headlines from Mail Online
genre bending headlines from the Mail Online (screenshot)

Audience goal: scanning content for relevance

Audiences scan content when they aren’t sure what is relevant or interesting to them.  Scanning is different from leisurely browsing, in that it is more goal oriented.  Audiences often check content sources they’ve found useful in the past, and scan lists of article titles or message titles.  As more content is delivered through feeds, this behavior is becoming more important.  Many tweets are article titles with links to the full article, for example.  Audiences need to both comprehend these, and keep up with the volume of titles they receive.  Eye tracking indicates that people only look at the first two or three words (10 or 12 characters) before moving on to the next item, unless these words seem to match their interests.  They make a snap judgment.

Headlines for scanning prioritizes the significance of the first couple of words.  In some social media contexts, audiences look for a relevant hashtags, especially if the viewing app highlights this in a different color.

Audience goal: enjoyment and discovery

In their personal lives, audiences seek and use content largely for enjoyment rather than necessity.  They often aren’t seeking anything particular: they hope to discover content that promises to be interesting and worth their effort to read.  Headlines play an important role in promoting discovery of recreational content.

Of the many kinds of recreational content, two types are noteworthy.  The first is the traditional feature, often a heartfelt story.  The headline needs to draw readers in. It will often preview something exciting contained in the story.  Headlines may use strong verbs, or use a label that captures a key moment of the story.

Conversational content is the second significant type of recreational content.  Content is optimized to promote sharing and discussion, so headlines play an important role.  Such content is typically distributed through social media.  The best known example of this kind of content is Upworthy, which has spawned many imitators.  Upworthy uses Facebook to distribute its content.  It frames the content with headlines employing a technique they call a “curiosity gap.”  Headlines are a teaser for the content: they violate the journalistic convention that headlines should never tempt without informing.  Upworthy decides the headline should not “give it away,” but should set an expectation that you don’t realize what you’ve been missing: what you think you currently know is incomplete or even wrong, or something extraordinary happened to someone seemingly ordinary.  Upworthy rigorously tests alternative headlines to determine which one generates the most interest as demonstrated by clicks and shares.

Headlines for recreational content prioritize attention over informational completeness.  Sometimes they are even vague, when such an approach enhances the perceived desirability of the content.

Brand goal: get the audience to want something

Persuasive content needs to work harder than any other content type to get attention.  It uses a call-to-action headline to get you to notice and learn more.  In the pre-digital era, it was a slogan used in print ads and direct marketing.  Today, email subject lines, or message notifications in mobile apps, urge you to do something.  Audiences think to themselves: I didn’t ask for this, so why should I look at it?

The discipline of copywriting developed to figure out how to get our attention.   Copywriting can be divided into creative-based, and practice-based.   Practice-based copywriting may rely on common wisdom developed from tried and true experience. Or it may use real-time feedback from A/B testing and analytics to iterate headline copy.  When using the common wisdom approach, copywriters commonly recommend “proven” stock formulas for headlines, such as “You can [benefit of product] Even if [objection]”, and suggest using certain trigger words in headlines, such as “free” or “now.”

Ultimately, the effectiveness of a call-to-action headline depends on how successful it is at getting attention, and encouraging action.  One person’s genius simplicity is another’s cliché.  It can be dangerous to presume what will work.  It’s more prudent to experiment, and test your success.

Audience goal: get a summary of content

The classic headline summarizes the content.  That’s different from summarizing the theme of the content.  A good headline summary gives the audience enough information to know the most important information, without having to read the content.

Summary headlines, though used less frequently these days, still have a role.  Bloomberg news is renowned for their headlines.  Around 300,000 people across the globe use Bloomberg terminals to access financial news.  They read headlines on these terminals, and on many occasions don’t have time to read a full article.  They need to act on news instantly.   Bloomberg prioritizes certain details in their headlines: the names of people in the story (if big, market moving names), what’s the key surprise, and any key facts and figures in the article.

Audience goal: help and advice

Brands provide product support information.  Various specialized publishers offer “how to” content addressing health and household concerns. The field of technical communications is dedicated to this area.  Help and advice content is an important category of user generated content.  People post questions on forums, and post video tutorials and reviews on YouTube.

Headlines for task-focused content are utilitarian, even boring.   Typically they read: “how to [action] [subject].”  Because people are motivated to find useful content, the goal of the headline is to show them where the most appropriate content is.  The most effective headlines contain a precise description of the product or topic.  Headlines generally contain a key action verb, such as install, replace, or fix.  The headline is more challenging to write when the user doesn’t know what they need to do.  In such cases, a symptom may be used in the headline, such as “what to do if your [product] [symptom].”  Frequently, users cite the symptom when posting a question on a forum.   Other times headlines aim to be instructional, conveying “what you need to know about your [product]”.

Audience goal: find and retrieve content

Search remains the most common way people discover content, even though its dominance is being challenged by social media and subscription services that rely on feeds.  Headlines matter vitally to search.  Headlines need to match the expectations of the searcher, and also reflect the “about-ness” of an article.

Writers have criticized the practice of SEO-optimized headlines as writing for Google, where creativity is quashed to serve the humorless needs of the search engine.  According to a quip: “Google doesn’t laugh.”  A BBC editor explains how headlines simultaneously must serve the needs of Google, and the needs of humans: “The text still needs to compel a search engine user enough to click on the story, but if it never appears in a search result then it is wasted effort.”

SEO is largely about using the same exact terms as the audience uses, so-called keywords.  Keywords in SEO are the specific search terms used by the searcher.  The audience uses search terms to describe what they seek.  The search terms are often a product name or category, and may include an attribute, such as durable, big, or easy.

How search engineers think about keywords is different from how linguists do.  Linguists, who invented the concept of keywords, look for words and combinations of words that are used more frequently than would be expected.  The keyword may be comparatively rare, but its use in a specific context is prominent compared with its use in general contexts.  SEO keywords in contrast tend to look at the most common words used for search in a general context, not a specific one.   Google uses many other signals besides keywords, so it checks if the keywords of the search match the keywords of the title and article, together with a couple hundred other factors such as page rank, to determine the ordering of search results.

Named entities are often good words to search in headlines because they yield precise retrieval of results.  The BBC recommends using proper nouns in headlines, because people tend to search on items they know well (even though that limits the audience size who know the item by that specific name).

Keyword literalism is supposedly going away.  Much has been made of Google’s shift to semantic search, and its knowledge graph.  Google now discourages doing research to find popular keywords, and promises to be able to locate content based on the intent of the searcher, not just what they literally specify.  In many respects this is a positive development: it would free the headline writer from using only the most popular keywords in headlines.  The search could contain a proper noun such as a location, but the title shown in the search results doesn’t have to contain that term.  The topic matching works fine when the searcher is looking for named entities, and the content is primarily about named entities.  However, when the search or the content is about something more general or difficult to describe, the situation is more complicated.  The knowledge graph only maps a handful of (admittedly) common entities such as products, events, and people, but doesn’t cover harder-to-model attributes such as “what is the most romantic activity to do while on your honeymoon?”

I predict keywords will remain an important aspect of headlines for the foreseeable future.  Google and other search engines  (including internal site search) will need to rely on them to infer of the intent of content, and users will rely on headlines because they will remain the most succinct description of what the content is about.

Moving forward: adaptive headlines

Headlines can have many different roles, and must work effectively in different channels.  There is more to headlines than making them SEO-optimized.  In fact, in some contexts, an SEO-optimized headline may attract less audience attention.  Generally, SEO-optimized headlines are neither curiosity invoking, persuasive, nor have informational value on their own.

Screen size is also an important consideration.  Common SEO advice suggests restricting headlines to 65 characters, because Google truncates longer headlines.  That’s a line of text in most browsers, but on mobile screens, a line is far shorter, and headlines need to be as well.  When looking at headlines for wearable devices, headlines may need to summarize content, not just indicate what an article is about, because there is no space for details.

These differences suggest that headlines for content need to adapt to the different channels and platforms in which they will appear.  The concept of adaptive content, championed by content strategist Karen McGrane, considers how content needs to adapt to different devices and channels.  Content creators will need to create variations for the headline to address the different contexts in which it will be seen.  Content management tools will need to support headline variations in their feature set.

A single headline shouldn’t try to do everything. Channel-specific headlines optimized for different audience goals will make headline compromises a thing of the past.

— Michael Andrews