Content and Karma and Pandas, Oh My

Last week we looked at the inconvenience and embarrassment of poor website housekeeping, and the uncomfortable truth that all content is findable and that is not always good news. Here’s the disturbing flip side of that coin: while all content may, ultimately, be findable, some of your best stuff is probably invisible and that, my friends, can knock you way, way, way down in the search rankings.

Whether you like it or not, Google has set loose a Panda in that nasty, over-stuffed garage you like to call a website. You may think it’s a carefully curated library of venerable thought leadership; the Panda is thinking it belongs on Hoarders.

That grumpy old panda is sick of being manipulated by low-quality content crammed full of keywords. It’s got a shiny new algorithm that, with each update, becomes less and less tolerant of “thin” content like press releases, greeting cards, song lyrics and discussions about online gaming. To that you could add three-year-old whitepapers, all of your campaign landing pages and the multiple copies of your CEO’s blog posts.

This once-fresh stuff is now falling off the relevance table as it ages, links to and from it expire, and the Panda pronounces it unworthy. This is what search engine experts lovingly call “dead content”. Now some marketers will slink off to a corner and try to figure out how to redirect the holiday party budget to some new content, but not you. You didn’t go into marketing to work harder; you went into marketing to be strategic about your laziness. Or maybe you didn’t, but you’re probably really, really busy. Let’s grab some paddles and defibrillate that dead content back to life.

First, let’s be realistic about how dead some of it is. You don’t need to be an SEO nerd to know that some content is never going to be relevant again; however, before you go killing off the pages altogether, remember that the Panda is watching and it doesn’t like dead ends. The best practice here is to do redirects. For example, pages for products that don’t exist anymore can redirect to their extant counterparts; blogs by executives who were perp-walked out in 2010 can redirect to related posts by their replacements. Old invitations to trade shows should drive back to the current listing, and so on.

If too many 301’s are slowing down your site, try some new messaging on dead content. For example, if a product or service is no longer available, put a friendly invitation (with a link) on the page to check out its replacement. This works for job postings you’ve filled and gross videos you’d rather pretend don’t exist.

Now it’s time to look at what’s left, and the good news is, it’s probably a lot more useful than you think. One of the key things the Panda is looking for is authority. The algorithm rewards quality content that is deemed to be authoritative based on links, shares and other indications that someone who is not your mother is reading your stuff. It also looks for engagement (mostly measured by time on page) and whether or not you’ve junked it up with ads.

So all those old white papers, fact sheets, FAQs and slide decks may, in fact, be very, very useful in terms of gaining the Panda’s favour and driving your organic rankings to the top of the heap. Your job is to do a bit of a makeover.

Start with your keywords. In most industries we don’t search the same way now that we did even a year ago. Terms have changed, jargon has evolved, products have come and gone, so it follows that what got people to this content in the first place, is probably not getting them there now. If you haven’t done any keyword research lately, this is step one.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then step one is reading up on keywords. I recommend HubSpot’s excellent post on the subject.

Armed with your new keywords, it’s time to tackle the content itself. Can you do a quick update, maybe find newer statistics, redo one of the graphics, tidy up some of the writing? This gives you New Content Karma, which pleases the Panda, and it has the added benefit of engaging a new crop of prospects or customers who may have missed it the first time around. Being very careful not to overdo it, make sure your content is optimized with some of the new keywords. The Panda is displeased by keyword “stuffing” so tread carefully and work the words in there nicely.

I would also pay some attention to your titles. Make sure the html tags are using the updated keywords too. No need, by the way, to put all this in a new url, in my view. Existing urls will have some ranking, even if it’s not as high as you’d like, but new pages are basically starting all over. Plus, fewer pages are easier to manage and you avoid cannibalizing your own content by keeping updates in one place. It should also drive your authority ranking a little higher when the Panda passes by.

Now I can hear you already: “Elizabeth, I barely have time to finish my undersea colouring book before lunch, how am I going to update and re-optimize hundreds of pages of content?” Dear friends, relax. This is why we have Skippy and The Freelancers.

Skippy, you will recall, is the generic name for underemployed marketing interns everywhere. They are a a perfect resource to throw at the tedious world of keyword research, simple page messages and generating site maps.

For re-optimizing your content, I think you’re best off going outside, unless you have a decent writer kicking about internally with nothing to do. You will recall that I’m always a little hesitant to outsource important stuff, but I think this is just the sort of thing lazy marketers can safely offload.

Next week we’ll look at why most of this is going to end up being pointless.

Interesting Things I Found This Week

Here come the year-end lists of just about everything. This one from Avi Dan in Forbes has the 25 most disruptive brands for the year. Uber, unsurprisingly, tops the list, but there are some interesting new names down toward the bottom that merit a look.

Not related to marketing in any way but still interesting is Slate’s list of the most overlooked books of the year.

BizMarketer is Elizabeth Williams
You can reach me at escwilliams@gmail.com
or follow me on Twitter @bizmkter