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©2013 | BrightEdge Technologies
Creating Content for Humans Or, knowing when not to optimize
Holland Dauterive | SEO Manager @ ModCloth
For those of you who don't know who ModCloth is -- we are a social shopping women’s clothing site. But we’re also more than just that. We’re a community, a creator of content, and we let the
customer guide the conversation.
ModCloth: Company Overview
§ We were founded by high school sweethearts – Susan Gregg Koger and Eric Koger
§ Started in a dorm room at Carnegie Mellon, we are now located in 3 cities, and have nearly 400 employees
§ We use our community in all aspects of our business – from merchandising to buying to marketing
§ 1/3 traffic comes back more than once per day
ModCloth: Company Overview
§ Why Do We Care About Content? § Crowdsourcing: External Relationships that Guide Content § Creation: Internal Partnerships that Get Content Created § Curation: Humans vs. Spiders - how does SEO fit in?
Agenda: The Content Relationship Cycle
Why Do We Care About Content?
§ We create content to: 1) Sell Stuff
Content and Conversation
§ We create content to: 2) Figure Out What to Sell
Content and Conversation
§ We create content to: 2) Figure Out What to Sell
Content and Conversation
§ We create content to: 2) Figure Out What to Sell
Content and Conversation
§ We create content to: 2) Figure Out What to Sell
Content and Conversation
§ We create content to: 2) Figure Out What to Sell
Content and Conversation
Crowdsourcing: External Relationships and Content
Talking to the People Who Use the Site
§ User Experience Research Team
Talking to the People Who Use the Site
The end result: site is first and foremost designed for the users (instead of the creative team…or
SEO)
Creation: Internal Partnerships and Content Optimization
§ Luck: ModCloth knew SEO was important § The teams just didn’t know was SEO was…
§ Training: My first order of business was to train our writers, product team and UX designers on SEO 101 § This is ongoing § Found the most success in creating ‘best practice’ guides for all
involved teams
§ Whiskey: Sometimes required for the execution of SEO § Training is great, but relationships are what gets SEO done
Luck, Training, and Whiskey
§ Most teams are willing to try SEO once – the key is to provide them with visual feedback that demonstrates the impact of optimizations
§ One of the best tools for doing this is BrightEdge § Easy to create test groups § Instant trended graphs that quickly demonstrate success
Graphs!
Humans vs. Spiders
§ We’ve all heard it – create for customers not for spiders
§ What if we really did that? § How do we decide what content to create? § Am I trying to put myself out of work?
Content for Humans vs. Search Engines
§ Don’t just write about tangentially-related topics because they have high keyword volume
§ What are people asking customer care about? § Common questions are great content ideas § Help increase you visibility and decreases workload for the
customer care team
§ What are people posting about on Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest…? § This can guide both content as well as your merchants
Know What to Create
Example: we’ve gotten a lot of feedback across all our social channels and customer care regarding Plus Sizes
Know What to Create
When we started digging into the data what we found was pretty astonishing:
More U.S. women report wearing a size 16 dress than a size 2 and 0 combined. 57% of U.S. women wear at least some clothing in sizes 16 and above.
§ The Results: We created an entire section and product team dedicated to plus-size fashion
Know What to Create
§ Not only was it great in terms of revenue, it finally allowed us to create targeted landing pages and content that help us rank on high-volume Plus terms.
§ Just because you have content doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be better off once it’s SEO optimized § If the content sounds off-brand or inauthentic because of
optimizations, users won’t interact with it
Know When Not to Optimize
Optimized G+ Post: 6 likes 0 comments or shares
Typical G+ Post: 16 likes 4 comments 6 shares
§ Technically, good writing and good content IS optimized content § Writers tend to be wary of SEO optimizations because they’ve
seen over-optimized copy. § Using the BrightEdge Recommendation tool, we can easily
identify over-optimizations on our pages
Know When Not to Optimize
§ We took this over-optimized copy on the dresses page and revised it § The results § copywriters were happier with the end results and were open
to rolling our copy on all pages § Rankings improved during the critical holiday season
Know When Not to Optimize
So, in conclusion…
CROWDSOURCE Let your customer tell
you what to create
CREATE CURATE
CROWDSOURCE
CREATE Write the content, buy
the merchandise, create the landing pages
CURATE Optimize – or not –
consider the intent of the content and how you
expect your customer to interact with it
CROWDSOURCE Let your customer tell you what
to create
CREATE CURATE
CROWDSOURCE
CREATE Write the content, buy the
merchandise, create the landing pages
CURATE Optimize – or not – consider the intent
of the content and how you expect your customer to interact with it
Thank You! Any Questions?
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