9 Ways to Design Inclusive Content

Inclusivity is an important consideration for every business owner and content creator, and should be at the heart of your ongoing design efforts — not something you look at after a website or piece of content goes live.

Before we get to specific tips on creating this inclusive content, let’s go over key definitions and concepts.

What is inclusivity?

Inclusivity is about recognizing diversity. It ensures everyone can participate to the greatest possible extent. Other names for inclusivity include universal design and design for all.

Inclusivity addresses a wide range of issues, including:

• Accessibility for people with disabilities

• Access to and quality of internet connectivity, computer hardware, and computer software

• Computer literacy and skills

• Economic circumstances

• Education

• Geographic location

• Culture

• Age (older and younger people)

• Language

Understanding Usability, Accessibility, and Inclusivity

Usability

According to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international standards organization that publishes guidelines and recommendations for web technologies, “Usability is about designing products to be effective, efficient, and satisfying.”

Usability factors measure the functionality of a product or design and the design interface’s ease of use. They assess how easy it is for users to learn the basic tasks of the interface, how quickly users can perform tasks on the interface, and whether users can remember how to perform those tasks after time away from the interface. Usability factors also consider whether the design satisfies users, and if there are errors in the interface, how severe those errors are, and the ease of recovering from those errors.

Think about Google’s search page design. When it first launched, it received considerable backlash. This was an era when internet users wanted their own “home pages” or “web portals,” each presenting their favorite news and links when the browser launched. But what did these portals all have in common? A search box. The fact that this simple (some still say ugly) design eventually became the homepage for billions of internet users speaks to the value of simplicity and how it enables inclusivity.

Accessibility

Designing with accessibility in mind means more people will be able to use a product, regardless of their abilities.

According to W3C, “Accessibility addresses discriminatory aspects related to equivalent user experience for people with disabilities. Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can equally perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with websites and tools.”

In other words, all users, regardless of ability or circumstance, should be able to:

• Perceive all interface or document elements.

• Operate the controls easily and intuitively.

• Understand the content.

• Use different assistive technologies, devices, browsers, and operating systems to interact with the content.

For example, using high-contrast colors in an app doesn’t just help people who have low vision or color blindness, it also helps people who use their devices in bright sunlight. Similarly, while improvements to usability, like using simple language and intuitive design, may allow people with cognitive disabilities to use a product or service more productively, they are also beneficial for people who may be busy or distracted, who are learning the language, or even people with slower internet access, because simple and intuitive sites may be faster to load.

Additional resource:Accessibility Principles, W3C

Inclusivity

Inclusivity means representing people who have, until now, been underrepresented. Inclusivity issues affect people from specific populations within a community, as well as communities that have been denied the opportunity to participate fully in economic, social, or civic life.

Inclusive content should always recognize diversity in the functional needs and abilities of individuals. To make your content inclusive, think of peoples’ diverse abilities, ensuring your content can be accessed in a variety of ways.

Inclusive content should also encompass diversity in personal needs and experiences. We should all challenge ourselves to do better at including different communities, identities, races, ethnicities, backgrounds, abilities, cultures, and beliefs. We must take steps to avoid “othering” people. By ensuring that everyone feels welcome in our digital spaces, we can more accurately represent the world we live in.

Additional resource: What is Inclusivity?, Diversity for Social Impact

Why inclusivity is important

History has taught us about the struggles for equity and inclusion globally. Wars have been fought over human rights and the rights of enslaved peoples. Women have protested for suffrage. People of color have long fought for civil rights, and in recent years the Black Lives Matter movement has highlighted systemic inequalities and the need for social justice. The Gay Revolution has sought to achieve equal rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. Indigenous people have struggled to gain equality and receive meaningful reconciliation for the abuse and mistreatment suffered at the hands of governments. And the Disability Rights Movement has worked to change attitudes, promote integration, and ensure that all people, regardless of ability, have equal access to transportation, housing, education, and employment opportunities.

While educational systems do teach us about these issues, they often present them as discrete events that have little real connection to the “dominant” society. As a result, most people are not comfortable speaking or writing about them. We simply do not have the vocabulary.

By making empathy an essential part of inclusion, business owners and content creators can improve their audience communications, build trust, and grow networks. Meeting the functional needs of all users creates a better reputation and improved word-of-mouth in more communities.

Nine ways to design inclusive content

Inclusive design should always meet the needs of as many users as possible. Use the following inclusive digital content tips when creating websites, mobile apps, e-mail, and documents.

1. Assess points of bias in your content and design practices.

Does your content default to the pronoun “he,” or does it make equal use of “she” and “they”? Review your text content, stock photography, and illustrations. Look at both digital and printed materials aimed at internal and external audiences. Do they feature mostly white, male, straight, non-disabled people? If so, it’s time to switch up the terminology and create a new aesthetic – one with more diversity.

Additional resources:

Resources for Eliminating Bias in Design, UX Booth

The Bias Blind Spot and Unconscious Bias in Design, Interaction Design Foundation

2. Use clear, simple, and thoughtful language.

Review words through the lens of inclusivity. Identify and remove all instances of othering and ableism. This boils down to respect. Avoid collective terms and labels, such as “females” or “the blind,” that group individuals into a category that promotes objectification. Always remember an individual’s disability, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, or heritage is just a single facet of their unique and complex identity.

Disability

A disability is something that a person has. It is not who they are. Use “person with [a disability]” or “person who has [a disability].” Put the person at the forefront. For example, say “a person who is blind,” not “a blind person.”

Many people with disabilities prefer people-first language. However, there are also people with disabilities who prefer identity-first language, and it is important to respect this preference and give every person the self-determination to choose. Never correct someone who refers to themselves using identity-first language. For example, don’t correct or change the reference when someone calls themselves a “blind person” as opposed to “a person who is blind.”

Avoid any language that suggests pity or hopelessness, or that disempowers people with disabilities, such as “suffers” or “victim.” Avoid words like “brave” or “courageous,” as these words can belittle or trivialize people with disabilities.

Gender

The male-dominated cultures of North America and Europe have created a biased vocabulary that should be adjusted for inclusion. It is common, for example, to refer to groups of people as “guys,” even when the group includes both men and women. Adult women are often “girls,” but adult men are rarely “boys.” Then there are the outdated words and phrases that have become problematic, such as “manpower,” “man-hours,” “man the controls,” or “man up.” Substitute these terms with “workforce,” “hours,” “take the controls,” or “step up.”

What should you do if you’re not sure how to address someone? Use the gender-neutral pronouns they/them/their when meeting someone for the first time. Here’s an inclusive way to introduce yourself, “I refer to myself as (she/her), what pronouns do you prefer?” or “My pronouns are (they/them), what pronouns do you use?”

Race and ethnicity

Just like the vocabulary of gender, words associated with race, ethnicity, nationality, and heritage have been debated over vigorously in recent years. A central part of inclusion is adopting terms that are honest and respectful and being intolerant of terms that are disrespectful. Historic bias has permeated our culture, and as a result, problematic terminology once used to describe people who are not white has been applied to many different areas of life, including technology (whitelist/blacklist, master/slave devices). Always address people’s ethnicity, nationality, or heritage respectfully and without irony, racism, or satire.

Additional resources:

Diverse Abilities and Barriers, W3C

Inclusive Language Guidelines, APA

Gender Equality and Inclusivity, CSHA

3. Use responsive design that allows zoom and orientation changes.

Responsive design allows web content layouts to display well on many form factors, using “breakpoints” to define different widths. Sometimes app makers lock orientation or turn off the zoom ability. These are basic tools that we all need from time to time. Instead of disabling them, design apps to accommodate them.

Here are a few responsive design and accessibility guidelines:

• Use link text that describes the link destination.

• Write meaningful and descriptive alt text.

• Use semantic HTML – tags that clearly describe the purpose of page elements, such as <header>, <article>, <aside>, or <footer>.

• Instead of fixed or absolute font sizes, use relative units for font sizes, such as percentage units, viewport width, or viewport height.

• Label all buttons and fields.

Using responsive design and accessibility guidelines makes it easier for search engines to crawl and interpret websites. For example, sites with clear, descriptive headings – the same kinds of headings that also make navigation and comprehension easier for people for disabilities – are better optimized for search engines to do their work.

Because of this, Google rewards accessibility when ranking websites. In fact, their Webmaster Guidelines – which lay out the best practices that help Google to find, index, and rank your site – read very much like accessibility guidelines, and often correlate directly with the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

By using accessible design, you are simultaneously improving the on-page experience, making your content more accessible to users with disabilities, and facilitating the work of search engine bots who are busy crawling, indexing your site, and assessing link equity between pages – all of which help boost your SEO ranking.

Additional resources:

Responsive Design, Mozilla

How to Design a Large Scale Responsive Site, UX Booth

An Introduction to Accessibility and SEO, Moz

4. Take advantage of free resources.

Use freely available Microsoft, Apple, and Android accessibility attributes and accessibility test apps when developing documents, web content, or apps.

Testing is an integral part of developing accessible and inclusive digital content. Fortunately, tech companies have created a range of tools and resources to help ensure your documents, websites, and apps can be accessed easily by all users. For example, Microsoft Office applications – Word, PowerPoint, or Excel – have the Check Accessibility feature, which resides in the Review menu. From there, you can choose the ‘Check Accessibility’ button and follow the instructions to remove accessibility problems, rechecking as you go until all issues have been addressed.

Additional resources:

Design for Inclusivity, Microsoft Design

Accessibility for Developers, Apple

Developing for Accessibility, Google

9 Best WordPress Accessibility Plugins for 2022, HubSpot

5. Structure documents using headings.

Use simple, hierarchical headings to organize documents, web pages, or emails. This allows all users and their technology to interpret the main ideas of the content and find the information they’re looking for. Graphics should be secondary and should never contain critical information. Provide equivalent alternatives for any image that contains text.

Also be sure to include a link to the web version of any HTML message right on top, in case of e-mail client issues with layout or graphics. If you’re using HTML messages, then follow basic, semantic HTML best practices. E-mail is the only technology where tables for layout is still acceptable, but even there, CSS is now preferred.

Evaluate your content without graphics or with the graphics turned off. This will ensure your content can be accessed on low-fi devices, over bad connections, or through a screen reader.

Additional resources:

Web Accessibility – Headings, Yale University

Page Structure – Content Structure, W3C

6. Provide text alternatives for non-text elements, such as images and forms.

Use simple, descriptive language as alt text for images. If the image serves a specific function, the alt text should explain what that function is and describe the contents of the image. The goal is to ensure that everyone has access to the same information about the image.

If the image contains a chart or graph, the alt text should include the data. If you’re using a creative photo or a photo as an illustration, the alt text should describe the elements of the image in detail.

If the document or content includes images that are not important, are used for layout, or do not serve a specific function, use null alt text (alt=“”). This will keep them hidden from assistive technologies.

Labels for form fields and options are also areas where inclusion and accessibility should be addressed. Every field and button should have a label, written in plain language. If button labels have icons or images, the alt text should describe the function of the button, rather than its appearance.

When creating contact forms, label all fields visibly. Include formatting hints to reduce errors. If you use a placeholder, ensure that it stays visible.

Additional resources:

The Ins and Outs of Image Accessibility Standards, AudioEye

Alternative Text, Accessible Social

7. Take advantage of freely available accessibility checkers.

Check your content regularly to keep it inclusive and accessible. Every time you make changes to your website, you run a risk of making content inaccessible to people with disabilities. This is why ongoing monitoring is important. 

AudioEye, a digital accessibility platform, offers Active Monitoring to help site owners keep their content accessible and inclusive. It checks for accessibility issues every time a site visitor loads a new page, and also tests for new accessibility issues, gathering information across all users and pages, and then automatically fixes the majority of common errors. The platform displays all accessibility issues found and fixed in an Issue Reporting dashboard (pictured above), along with details on how these issues affect users with disabilities and how to fix unresolved issues that require manual intervention. You can start by trying AudioEye’s Accessibility Checker.

Additional resources:

Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools List, W3C

Testing and Checking Content, Accessible Social

8. Check your color scheme.

Assess the color scheme for contrast and distinction. White text on a black background is high contrast, while white text on a pale blue background is low contrast. Many people with visual disabilities rely on high color contrast to view digital content. And because visual acuity and the ability to distinguish colors also fade with age, high color contrast ensures older users can access your content.

Common color choices, such as buttons colored red and green, can make content inaccessible to people with color blindness, which affects 13 million Americans and 350 million people worldwide.

Additional resources:

What is Color Contrast and Why Does it Matter For Website Accessibility?, AudioEye

Deuteranopia – Red-Green Color Blindness, Colblindor

Color Contrast Checker, AudioEye

9. Make social media posts accessible.

Social media is used to convey messages or ideas quickly, usually in just a line or two of text, using a single image or a short video. To meet accessibility requirements for social media, ensure that all images and video clips are described in detail. Include voiceovers, narration, and song lyrics in the description. Don’t forget to include the emotion the subject may be trying to evoke. This also helps low-bandwidth users participate in social media. Please see an example below.

Assess the cast of your videos. Do they feature mostly white men? Look for ways to feature a broad cross-section of society, including different genders, people of different ethnicities, and people with disabilities.

Emojis make social media posts fun, but they can also pose problems for people who can’t see them. Because screen readers use words to describe the emoji, a series of smiley faces and hearts added in the middle of an Instagram caption becomes “grinning face, smiling face with smiling eyes, smiling face with heart-eyes, red heart, red heart, red heart.” Limit your emojis to two or three, and put them at the end of your text, so they don’t get in the way of the information in the post.

Hashtags are an essential part of social media posts: highlighting key words and phrases with # makes it easy for users to find posts. Making hashtags accessible is simple: capitalize the first letter of each word in the hashtag (also known as CamelCase). That helps screen readers separate the words correctly (#SuperBowl, not #SuperbOwl) and to say them as words, rather than as separate letters.

Additional resources:

How to Make Your Social Media Content More Accessible, Western Oregon University

6 Ways to Make Your Social Media Posts More Accessible, Flagship Social

Hashtags, Accessible Social

List of Emojis, Emojipedia

Designing inclusive content is an ongoing effort.

As you start applying these best practices, remember that building accessible, inclusive, and usable content takes dedication and continuous improvement. Ask your site visitors and customers for feedback on a regular basis. Pick the right tools to make your efforts more sustainable and effective.

Measuring Link Building

SEOs have powerful metrics at their disposal to measure the success of their strategies, such as Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA). But how best to use them? In today's Whiteboard Friday, Tom shows you how to think about these metrics as part of a holistic approach to your link building analysis. 

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Happy Friday, Moz fans, and today's Whiteboard Friday is about measuring link building. So obviously this is a very big and very old topic in the SEO space, and it's one that Moz, as a company, is heavily invested in, right? Like Domain Authority and Page Authority are two very popular products of ours, which are commonly used for this exact purpose.

Now this isn't going to be advertorial, though. I could stand here and just say obviously these are the best metrics in the world and that kind of thing. That's not what I'm here to do. I'm here to give you a bit of nuance about how and when to use these metrics and how to think about them, and how to use them alongside other metrics as well, rather than just having one tool and saying it's a solution to all problems, which isn't necessarily fair.

Google's PageRank

So to do that, I'm actually going to start by going right back to 1998 and Google's PageRank model. Now I know that a lot has changed since 1998, both with the world and with Google. But this was Google's original way of thinking about links, and in a lot of ways it's still the best that we have to go on. A lot of current SEO best practices and dogma are still based on this original understanding, except there are a few things we've sort of picked up along the way that don't really have a basis in anything that Google has said or done, which is part of why I want to sort of point them out.

So PageRank originally was a way of using links to estimate the probability that a user is on a page, and that's already quite interesting, because that shows that this is a model that is about popularity. So when we talk about this now, we often talk about things like trust and authority and this kind of thing. I'm sure those are relevant, but it's worth remembering that originally this was just a way of estimating effectively the popularity of a page.

Note that I said of the page as well, not even the domain. So imagine a world where there's one page on the internet, which is Page A that I've labeled here. Now if there's one page on the internet, it's not that hard to estimate the chance that a random browser is on that page. It's a certainty they're on that page. If we introduce a second page, it's still not that hard, and we just assume it's going to be 50-50 and so on and so forth. 

Link probability

That's sort of the baseline probability that we have to work with. But then we can take a sort of bit of a tangent or a bit of a spice added to the situation when one page links to another, and that's obviously what we're actually interested in. So if A links to this second page and at the moment there are still only two pages on the internet, ignore these other boxes, they'll come in later, there are only two pages on the internet and A links to the second page.

We say that 0.85 times this probability is passed on. Now 0.85 is a fairly arbitrary sort of constant. It's one that comes from an old Google document. It probably isn't that exact value, but it's fine for illustrative purposes, and it's the best we've got to go on.

So, in this case, why have we said 0.85 by the way? Why haven't we said that all of the users on this page click through? Well, that's because we assume that some of them are going to go and do their own thing, stop browsing the internet, do something else. It turns out that this damping factor is quite important in a world where pages do actually link to each other in a big web rather than just one link in one direction.

So that's all well and good, right? What if we had a second link and introduced a third page to the internet? So this is still a very simplistic model. We've got an internet with three pages and two links, and the links only go in one direction.

This is very, very simple. But in this case we say we can't have both of these pages getting the full probability. No, the users aren't clicking through to both. They're clicking through to one of them. So that gets half of 0.85A. But then this one does too.

Again, in a more complex model, we might say, oh, one of these links is more likely to be clicked on, so it gets more probability or something like that. But in this simple version, we're saying it's split two ways. Now, in this case, we've already learned something interesting again, because by adding another link we've reduced the value of the existing links and that's something that we hardly ever think about in a link building context.

But that is sort of what we're thinking about when in technical SEO conversations we talk about not having too many links in the top nav and this kind of thing. We're trying to focus our strength where we most want it. Then, lastly, I promise the [indecipherable] will stop soon. Lastly, what if we had another jump in this system? Well, in this case, this 0.85, this damping happens again.

So 0.85 times 0.85 is about 0.72, so it's less. So basically it's 0.85 times this page above it, and so it's gotten even lower. This is why, as technical SEOs, sometimes we get caught up with things like chain redirects and this kind of thing, why we think that's important.

That's where that sort of dogma comes from. So I'm not going to go any further with this sort of simplified PageRank explanation. What I am trying to draw to your attention here is a few things. One is that there's a lot about the specifics of a page here that affects the value of these links, like the number of links that the page sent outwards and also things like what linked to the specific page.

Note that I didn't say anything about domains here. This could be on four different domains. It could be on one domain. We only talked about page specifics here. Google has been a little bit ambiguous over time in terms of how they think about pages versus domains. But broadly speaking, they say they care about pages, not domains. So that's interesting, right, because these could all be on the same domain conceivably and yet this page could potentially be a lot weaker and pass on a lot less strength than this one.

Metrics for link building

So that's interesting, and that's something we don't normally think about with link building. So if we bring this back on topic to what I said I was going to talk about, actual metrics for link building, there are a few qualities that we're looking for. 

Fast

Now what I haven't just talked about is these first two. We do want metrics that are fast. We want it to be available as quickly as possible so we can report to our client or our boss or that kind of thing and also just we're busy people. We don't want to waste our time. 

Ubiquitous

We want metrics that are ubiquitous, so when I do say to my boss, "Oh, I've got you a link which had DA 90," there's a good chance that he or she or they know what that means. Whereas if I say it had a Tom Capper score of 38B, they're going to say, "What are you talking about?" So I do need to use a metric that's reasonably well understood. 

Page & link specifics

But then there's this page and link level specifics that I just talked about. So if I think about a metric like Domain Authority, it does very well on these first two and it does okay on this third one, because it is trained on rankings to some degree, which is some of what this is determining.

So there's some benefit there. It does take into account some of this stuff, but ultimately it's a domain level metric. So it has to treat all the pages on one domain equally by definition. That produces some pros and cons. 

Using metrics together

So what I want to do is I want to put some metrics on a chart like this and suggest how you might use them alongside each other.

So I've got actual as the vertical axis here. So the closer it is to what we're actually trying to measure, which is Google's view of the value of the link basically, the further up it's going to be. But then I've also got this fast/slow sort of convenience metric. So a metric like Domain Authority is probably somewhere here. It's very fast.

It's very ubiquitous. But it's missing some of this nuance because it's a domain level metric and it's answering a slightly different question. DA is designed to answer the question, "How likely is a page on this domain, all things being equal, to rank well?" That's a slightly different question to how valuable is the link. But if I'm saying, oh, I want DA, but not necessarily domain level, you might say, "Oh, well, Moz has a metric for that and you should know and it's called Page Authority."

Well, yeah, that is a good candidate. So like most page level metrics in the industry, including Google's and including our own, Page Authority is initially informed by some domain level factors as well as page level factors. We've done correlation studies and this kind of thing.

It is a lot closer to measuring the value and ranking potential of a specific page than the Domain Authority is, as you would expect, because it's a more precise metric and it is capturing some of this nuance. But actually you can go a step further with this as well. Now Page Authority is a bit slower than Domain Authority because you have to wait for Moz to discover and crawl the page.

We do our best, but it's not instant. However, if you're willing to wait even longer than that, you could use a metric like referral traffic. Apologies for my absolutely awful writing there.

So with referral traffic, what we're interested in is how many people actually click through from the link that I built to my site. That's interesting because that's what Google was actually trying to measure in the first place. So if we can measure that, then we're getting pretty close to whatever they were aiming for.

So whatever sophistication they've built in, we're sort of capturing that nuance. Now that has some obvious drawbacks. One is that a lot of link building campaigns don't do very well on this metric, and you can draw your own conclusions about that. The other is that you're obviously going to have to wait quite some time for this data to become available, and even then there might be issues with the client's analytics or this kind of thing. Anyway, that's what I wanted to share with you today.

Essentially what I would suggest is that you use all of these metrics and some others that you could put yourself on this chart. So I'm interested to hear what metrics you would use and where you would draw them on this kind of a chart. I put these green lines in as sort of a guide because I think you could do prospecting in this first section, like before you've even built the link, and then initial reporting to the client.

Then this section would more be after the campaign, when you want to learn from it and think about what kind of links you would build in the future and whether you would do the same sort of thing again. But yeah, I'd love to hear your ideas. Thank you very much and Happy Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

The Link-Earning Stack Every SEO Should Strive For

Being an SEO, you can’t go a day without hearing about links: “Links are crucial!” or “Prioritize links!” or “Links are the nourishing lifeblood of the almighty algorithm!”

But for those of us who’ve taken the next step to actually figure out how to earn said links, we realize it’s not that straightforward.

It’s hard to sum up all of that in the tweets and LinkedIn posts that get shared about link earning, because the truth is, there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all link earning approach or vendor. You need a link earning “stack” that appropriately reflects the complexity of your marketing and content goals.

In an ideal world, here’s what that stack would look like. (Hat tip to Paul Zalewski, SVP of Marketing at Verblio, who gave me the idea for this breakdown!)

Passive link earning

Objective: Set up a foundation for link earning with lower effort over time

Content needed: A “linkable content” asset (this is key)

Promotion needed: Manual outreach and promotion to acquire the first one or two links, to help the page initially rank

Passive link earning is any content you can create that will naturally earn links over time without having to actively promote it on an ongoing basis. These pieces are designed to carry their weight in earning links without much active promotion (which is what separates it from the next category, post-specific link earning). They’re often not directly tied to your product or service, though if they are, that’s certainly a bonus.

When SEO teams can collaborate with content teams on creating “linkable content,” passive link earning magic can happen.

Some common examples of linkable content include:

• Statistics-based or definition-focused posts: People are always looking for stats to cite or definitions to link to.

• Tools or other interactive resources: If they’re useful, folks love to share them!

• “Best”/”Top” posts or annual reports: People like to reference lists they’re on or share lists that are interesting, valuable compilations.

Andy Crestodina at Orbit Media Studios is excellent at this strategy.

This post presents new data points around blogging, and it’s earned 2,761 linking domains! How? Because there are so many blog posts about blogging (meta) that want to include statistics relevant to the point they’re trying to make — and Andy is providing them.

Here’s an example of an Alexa blog post citing a data point from the Orbit Media piece:

If you want to dive into this link-earning type more, I recommend reaching out to either Andy or Alex Heinz, who I just saw give an awesome presentation on this very topic.

Targeted link earning

Objective: Help elevate a particular, valuable post in the SERPs

Content needed: N/A — the post you want to boost already exists

Promotion needed: Manual outreach and promotion to more niche sites

You write a piece of content and you know it’s killer, but you want an initial boost to elevate it on page one.

You probably want to build credibility to that page by earning a link or two that will help demonstrate its value.

This is post-specific link earning. It usually involves highly tailored outreach in which you pitch sites to link back to your post. While it’s often a pretty manual effort, even a couple of links can make a huge difference.

I’m going to use Golden Thread Tarot as an example. I do not work with or for them, so I can’t confirm they did any manual outreach. But this example still illustrates my point. Also, tarot reading is my newest obsession.

Their page on how to read tarot ranks in positions 1-3 for highly relevant terms:

This is a great example of a page that should be prioritized for targeted link earning so they can continue to maintain their positions. Why? Because people searching to learn more about reading tarot are the perfect potential customers for their tarot deck and app. Notice how the page has plenty of calls-to-action.

Obviously ranking for “money pages” won’t always be easy, especially for higher-volume terms with greater competition. But if you’re truly creating the best content in response to the searcher’s intent, a couple of links can give you a boost.

There is some overlap between targeted link earning and passive link earning, but the primary difference is that in the former, you’re designing a piece of content from scratch with the sole purpose of building links. The latter is link outreach you conduct in order to boost a page that’s important to your audience acquisition and conversions.

Site authority link earning

Objective: Improve the overall authority of your site/brand

Content Needed: Original reporting and/or newsworthy data

Promotion Needed: Pitching journalists or setting up syndication relationships

A rising tide lifts all boats. In this case, the boats are your specific pages of content, and the rising tide is your site’s domain authority.

If your site and brand are deemed authoritative, it increases the chances that your individual pieces of content will be considered authoritative, as well.

I’ll use one of our brand partners, Sidecar Health, as an example. We’ve been creating newsworthy stories on their behalf and distributing them through the Stacker newswire since December, and Sidecar Health’s domain authority has increased by four in a few months.

The strategy is to create top-of-the-funnel, newsworthy content that authoritative news publications would be interested in running. That way we can earn links/canonicals that demonstrate that the brand is producing valuable content.

Our first story for them was about rural hospital closures across the country. It earned 300+ pickups on sites like MSN, SFGate, The Houston Chronicle, and more.

When you earn this type of link equity to your site, you can then leverage internal linking to distribute that equity to pages that are important to your SEO goals. In using this strategy for just a few months, Sidecar Health has seen a 77% increase in keywords in positions 1-3 in the SERPs.

This type of link earning is often the missing piece for brands who have found that their on-site content is top-notch, but their traffic is plateauing anyway.

Niche link earning

Objective: Earn more relevant authority in your specific niche

Content Needed: Original reporting and/or newsworthy data

Promotion Needed: Pitching journalists or setting up syndication relationships

You can view niche link earning as a spinoff of site authority link earning. Niche link earning just focuses on a lower DA and higher relevance.

I’ve been talking a lot about authority in this piece, and for good reason: it’s one of the most important aspects and benefits of earning links.

But relevance is a piece of the puzzle as well. You don’t want to be earning links that have nothing to do with your brand, even if you’re taking a tangential approach mentioned in the previous section.

It’s good to supplement your general link earning strategy by ensuring you’re earning links from more relevant sites, that are specifically aligned with your brand offering.

To continue the Sidecar Health example, in addition to the links we’ve earned for them, their backlink profile includes links from sites like Verywell Health and Healthline as well as even more niche sites like Health Care Business Today and Electronic Health Reporter.

If you’re finding that you’re not naturally earning links from respected sites in your industry, it’s certainly worth trying to pitch them on your content or build syndication partnerships with them.

A well-rounded link earning strategy

Any one of these link-earning strategies can help move the needle for your organic growth, especially if you’re just getting started.

However, as you mature your program, you’ll need all of these strategies in order to grow sustainably and consistently. The trick becomes understanding how to implement these strategies — whether in-house or outsourcing. A common approach I see is having an internal team that focuses on post-specific and niche link earning while hiring outside help with passive and brand authority linking.

Whatever you try, remember to consistently check that you have your bases covered so you achieve the organic traffic growth you’re aiming for.

Protect the Hours of Operation on Your GBP from Unwanted Google Edits

Image credit: Bart Maguire

Over the next six months, Google is going to employ machine learning and AI to alter the hours of operation on twenty million Google Business Profiles as part of their project of creating a “self-updating map”. Some experts estimate that this is roughly one-fifth to one-sixth of all GBP listings, meaning the chances are strong that you or one or more of your clients could experience these edits.

Google has good reason for pursuing accuracy in their local index, but local business owners have even better reason to be on top of this announcement and proactively safeguard the validity of their own data. Today, we’ll show you what to do to take charge on these vital listings which, while they belong to Google, represent your business.

Why is this happening and is this new?

Google is right in observing that the chaos of COVID-19 has affected the accuracy of their local business index. Updating GBP hours to reflect changes may not be at the top of the to-do lists of business owners struggling with so many challenges.

However, Google’s description of how they plan to alter business hours is raising some alarm, due to the peculiarity of their disclosed methods. Some processes are sound. For example, Google mentions use of Duplex to actually phone business owners directly to ask what their current open hours are, which makes excellent horse sense. Additionally, asking Local Guides to validate this information could also help if an owner is unreachable, for some reason, and the guides being tapped are civic-minded instead of just playing for points. All fine and good.

Where we get into murkier waters is in Google saying they will use the hours of other related local businesses to “predict” what the hours should be for the business you are marketing. The example they use is determining what the hours of Liam’s Lemonade Shop should be by looking at the hours of other nearby lemonade shops. In other words, if Larry’s Lemonade Emporium is open from 9-5, Google assumes that Liam’s Lemonade Shop shop should be, too, which will come as a surprise to him if he runs a late night citrus spot. I’m not the only one finding Google’s logic less than exemplary on this.

Another process Google mentions is that of deriving information from Street View, which I am dubious about, given that many places I visit via this service have not been updated in more than a year, and in some cases, in more than a decade:

If Google’s thinking is that harried business owners have not had the free time necessary to keep their hours updated throughout the past two years, then trying to glean this information from random snapshots in time of whenever a Google vehicle last passed through town seems like a rather fuzzy solution. The hours of your business in 2022 may be quite different from what they were a year ago, or five years ago.

If some of Google’s ways and means accompanying this big announcement have a familiar ring to them, it’s because what they are describing is not, in fact, totally new. Since the beginning of local search history, Google has crowdsourced information and implemented it in their listings, and all of that time, local SEOs and local business owners have been suggesting that this is not a good substitute for getting information directly from the companies Google is representing and monetizing via their system. We basically have to view this development from Google as an acknowledgement of three things:

1. Your listings belong to Google.

2. Google has never reached the level of direct local business owner engagement they actually need to maintain the quality of their index.

3. In the absence of this, they substitute crowdsourcing and technology in hopes of achieving enough accuracy to maintain a certain degree of public trust necessary to be able to keep monetizing SERPs and having them seen and used.

So, take a deep breath. This is the Google we already know, putting a high tech spin on a historic communications failure, but don’t overlook this announcement. It’s a strong message from the search engine that you have to stay on top of your own listings if you don’t want Google to completely take over and edit your data based on random information. Fortunately, there are specific things you can do to take charge!

How to proactively protect your GBP hours

Here’s a short list of your five best options for signaling to Google that, yes, you are staying on top of your own hours and don’t require assistance.

1. Be sure the hours of operation on your website are accurate. Google says this is one of the places they investigate.

2. Sorry for the pain-in-the-neck, but if you manage your listings manually, you now need to regularly check all of them to see if Google has altered their hours. I’d recommend checking at least every month (as if you don’t already have enough to do). Moz Local customers have a much easier option. Just check the Profile Suggestions section of your dashboard to see, at a glance, whether Google or anyone else is trying to edit your hours, even if you have hundreds of listings. Being alerted when data changes are suggested should provide so much peace of mind, and you can accept or reject edit suggestions. Whew!

3. Thirdly, take some time this week to edit your hours, even if the edit is small. For example, you could go into your listings today to set special hours for the winter holidays in advance, proving to Google that you are well aware of your own schedule and that your hours of operation are not neglected.

4. Remember our recent discussion of the QRG and how Google employs human quality raters to get a sense of your business from what others are saying about it? Be sure all of your local business listings across your local search ecosystem are up-to-date with correct hours (another thing Moz Local makes so much easier!) so that quality raters aren’t encountering complaints from customers who came to your business and found it closed when it was listed online as being open for business.

5. Finally, for brick-and-mortar brands, do step outside today and be sure the hours displayed on your windows, doors, and street level signage are accurate, just in case a Google Maps Car or a local guide is heading your way.

Google is telling us, yet again, that local business listings aren’t a set-and-forget asset

A local SEO myth that I see surfacing frequently is that you can build out your listings and then forget about them. This is simply not true! Ongoing, active management of all of your listings has always been essential for three core reasons:

1. Incorrect information on neglected listings has been proven to lead to negative reviews from inconvenienced customers, and negative reviews undermine conversions/transactions. If your real-world hours change and you don’t update your online listings across the local search ecosystem, customers will complain in reviews and the low-star rating they assign you will influence the impressions and actions of other potential customers. Meanwhile, remember that wrong hours in one place can then be distributed to multiple local business listing platforms and apps in the absence of active management. Customer care is the number one reason why you can’t neglect your listings.

2. It isn’t just Google which can decide they know better than you about key fields of your listing. Any member of the public, including competitors and spammers, can suggest edits to your profiles that you will be unaware of if you are not paying attention.

3. It’s an outdated perspective to view local business listings as static entities. Year-over-year, Google Business Profiles, in particular, are becoming increasingly interactive and transactional. Competitive local businesses must have a solid strategy for continuous management of photos, reviews, Q&A, messaging, bookings, shopping and more. Far from being a one-and-done scenario, listings management is central to local business operations.

Given that Google shows no signs of ceding total control of listings to business owners, your best strategy is to take as much charge as you can and be as proactive as possible in publishing dynamic information to your listings. With Google’s latest announcement fresh in all our minds, today might be a good day to check out Moz Local to simplify your local to-do list.

Blue Ocean SEO Strategy

If you're familiar with the blue ocean marketing strategy, you know that SEO is inherently a "red ocean" industry. With fierce competition to attain rankings, links, and authority, SEOs are constantly trying to one-up their competitors. In this environment, is there any hope for creating a "blue ocean" — innovating to avoid the choppy waters of the current market? 

In today's Whiteboard Friday, PJ Howland of Leaders.com suggests that a blue ocean SEO strategy is achievable through creating realistic content for your customers. Watch to learn more! 

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. Welcome back to another Whiteboard Friday. I am PJ Howland. I am the Head of SEO and Evergreen Content at leaders.com. So my background is kind of that sweet spot right in between if you've got SEO over here and content and editorial over here, that middle ground where SEO and editorial and content collide.

If you're familiar with that world, you know that we're dealing with thinner margins, we have fewer resources, and we have less clear direction. So this is the world we operate in. It's a place where we're trying to just get a little bit of an advantage over our competitors, and it's kind of created this fixed mindset of just trying to scrape by to just get a little bit of an advantage.

However, I think that there's a mindset that can really help break this mold to make sure that every single month is actually your best month ever. So it's the blue ocean SEO strategy. 

What is blue ocean strategy?

So what is blue ocean SEO strategy? Well, start with what blue ocean strategy is. 

Maybe you've read the book "Blue Ocean Strategy." Maybe you've heard the term thrown around. Maybe you haven't heard of it at all. Give me just one minute and I'll kind of explain this with a story. 

So back in the days when circuses were traveling the countryside, there were two predominant circuses, Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey, and they would spend lots of time, energy, and resources trying to one up each other.

They were producing who can have crazier stunts, who can have weirder clowns, who can have more eccentric animal tricks or whatever. It got to the point to where they were competing so hard with each other that they forgot what their customers really cared about. The sentiments of the day were that, hey, we don't want to see multiple rings. We don't like looking everywhere. Put it back down to one ring. We don't like the animal tricks. They're cruel. They're outdated. But these circuses were so fixed on competing with each other that both of them ended up losing out. 

Then who should come along? This new player, Cirque du Soleil. Now, if you've been to a Cirque du Soleil show, you probably know where I'm going with this. It's unlike a traditional circus. In fact, it's unlike anything else out there. But what they did do is they took what worked and excluded what didn't work from a traditional circus. So they cut out the cruel animal acts. They also kept in the clowns and the acrobats, because those were working in the traditional circus, and they brought in this kind of third heat of this theater element, this fine theater experience.

If you've been to a Cirque show, you know what I'm talking about. There's definitely a narrative there. So what they've done is they've created a blue ocean. They've created a world where there really is no direct apples-to-apples competitors. 

Now, Cirque du Soleil isn't the only player out there who's done this. We could talk about iTunes. What were your options before iTunes? Netflix, same thing. Before Netflix was on the scene, where were you watching your stuff? Airbnb. You see where I'm going with this, that all three of these businesses or products launch, there really wasn't anything out there. It was a true blue ocean. 

Blue ocean SEO

So how do we get that from an SEO perspective?

Well, we need to start by realizing where SEO is right now. So SEO is a fixed mindset game. Inherently it is a red ocean strategy. If you don't believe me, let me illustrate it this way. You have this situation where you've got a keyword.

You look at your competitor and you see, hey, they've got 100 links. You say, "Big deal. I'll get 200 links." Their site speed score is 80. I'm going to make it 90. We're going to have 90. They write 1,500 words. You see where I'm going with this. We write 2,500 words. That's not blue ocean thinking. That is fixed, red ocean, fierce competition mindset thinking, but it's where a lot of SEOs find themselves. Heck, I've been there. That is essentially skyscraper content.

It's skyscraper article building. Hey, there's been a place for that, but at its core it really is red ocean, fixed mindset thinking. So how do we get over that? How do we as SEOs, digital marketers, content marketers, how do we get over the fact that we're playing a red ocean game? 

Start with the customer

Well, it starts with the customer.

So picture this. Picture you're sitting down with a customer, except you're not a marketer anymore. You maybe work on the fulfillment or service or product side. You sit down with them and you say, "Hey, we are enhancing our product, our service, our fulfillment. What is going to make it a better solution for you?" Just picture a great conversation where they're going back and forth with you.

You collect valuable insight, and at the end, you produce a better product and that customer is grateful for it. Now picture that same customer except swap out yourself as a product marketer and now you're a marketer marketer. You're talking about your SEO strategy and you say, "Hey, so what we do is we look at the competitors and we add more words. We see the links that they build and we add more links. What do you think of that? How does that benefit you?"

The customer is going to look at you and say, "That doesn't help me at all. That's not what I asked for. That's not what I want. That's not the deal of how businesses work. You're here to make my world easier." Truth be told, when we add more words to a page, sometimes we're just making more words out there. Do you know what I mean? It's something that the customers don't want to deal with.

Set your writers up for success

So we live in this reality though, where as SEOs, as editorial professionals, as content marketers, we're in this place where we're tasked with almost an impossible task. How do we deliver exceptional content when the people producing that, maybe it's an SEO, maybe it's a writer, aren't necessarily the subject matter experts?

So it starts with what you give the writer or the SEO to actually begin this project. So I have found so many people start with they just say, "Hey, here's the keyword. Go for it. We're trying to rank for this. Just get that piece of content out." Inevitably, you will produce a skyscraper piece of content with that. That sets everyone up for failure.

Nobody wins when all you do is start off with a keyword. Instead what I have found is it really takes detailed write-ups that begin with interviews with subject matter experts. My outlines that I produce with my team, I've never seen one under two pages. Most of them are between three to five pages that we produce for these individual topics. That all has to come from your own insight with like your team. I can't really produce what your customer wants. That's something I invite you to figure out on your own. However, I have found that customers, no matter what industry you're in, I don't care if it's B2B, B2C, I don't care if you're selling SaaS, or if you've got an e-commerce platform, whatever, the person that says, "Yes, I want to buy that," is always a person.

People want reality

Ten times out of ten you're dealing with people. So what do people want? People want reality. They want authenticity. So there are three things that I think can help anyone, regardless of the industry that you're in, boost up your content. When I'm talking about content, that could be articles. It could blog posts. It could be landing pages. It could be white papers, whatever. The point is that people want reality. 

1. Stories

So here's how I've been able to find really good delivery methods for this. Stories. My world is a lot more article focused, but we try to start every article with a story. People love that.

I find a much higher time on page when we lead out with stories. I know what you're thinking. It's like, "Well, Wikipedia is someone we're competing against, and they don't start with a story. Nobody starts with a story." Okay, decide if you want to be a red ocean player or a blue ocean player. 

2. Advice

The next thing is advice. Now, again, going back to the reality of it is that we're dealing with situations where we've got writers who aren't subject matter experts.

That's okay. Nobody is in trouble for that reality of the situation. But it does matter that you seek that advice out. So schedule interviews with subject matter experts. Buy your team a book. Have a book club within your organization. Make sure that you're building expertise within your group.

3. Examples

Finally, examples. People want reality. They want authenticity. If you have customer data, if you have case studies, I don't think you should be gating all of that necessarily. There's a great use case to be made for just letting that stuff out there. People want to see real examples happening in the wild. 

How to measure success

So you come up with this blue ocean strategy that only you can produce, because you should know your customer better than me, and you want to figure out how to measure it.

Well, if you've been doing content marketing for more than, I don't know, the last 30 minutes, you know that there's a big gap between the first piece of content produced and the dollars in the pocket of the organization. There's a lot that happens in between there. So how do you actually make sure that you can come through on this with proper measurement? I have found that time on page is the first thing that goes up.

So before we kind of rolled out this with leaders.com, we were seeing average time on page between 3.5 to 4 minutes. Not good, not bad. Fine, whatever. But after rolling this out, we're seeing average time on page of between 5.5 to 6.5 minutes. I have pages that are almost 3,000 words in length that actually get read.

We have articles that have average time on page of eight minutes or higher, and that's a really validating thing. I believe that after time on page goes up, then you can start seeing if your rankings and traffic go up. Now you can see right here there's no tinfoil hat. I'm not making a direct insinuation that there is a correlation between time on page and the rankings that Google is going to hand out to you.

What I am saying is that good content gets noticed, and when it gets noticed, you're going to see those links come in. You see how this works. We're starting backwards. Like a lot of the times we lead off with saying, "I want more links." But in reality, is that really going to serve us? I would rather play a game where links come as a byproduct of good content. So what's really the takeaway here?

I think it's a mindset takeaway. In my organization, we've buried skyscraper content. It's dead. It's in the ground. Now it doesn't mean we don't look at competitors. Obviously, that would be silly not to do. We're in SEO.

However, I think that if you want to really transition to a blue ocean, limitless mindset, there has to be some kind of reality check where you say, "Hey, at some point I'm not going to be listening to the competitors for every little word that I write on my web page." Thanks for watching the video today. I look forward to hearing your comments. For anyone that's done this type of shift in the organization, look forward to engaging with you in a good discussion in the comments below.

Thanks for stopping by today. See you on the next Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

12 Actionable Steps to Drive Newsletter Growth with SEO Content

At Brafton, we’ve found our newsletter subscribers to be our best, most engaged audience. These are our people. They live and breathe content marketing, just as we do. Some even partner with us to create and execute awesome content marketing campaigns for their brands.

Over the last two and a half years, we’ve placed a significant emphasis on growing this subscriber base, and we’ve achieved a 170% increase (and counting!) across 84 countries.

Newsletter subscriptions coming from organic search traffic.

If you’re reading this article, you’re probably looking for ways to grow your newsletter list, too.

SEO blog content has been the foundation for our growth. How does it work? Simple: We create blog content that ranks highly in search, and we make it super easy (and tempting) for readers to subscribe to our newsletter once they visit our blog.

While the concept seems straightforward, the effort is anything but.

Read on to learn how to get users from your website onto your newsletter list, and why email marketing and SEO work so well together.

Part 1: Attracting potential subscribers to your site

The first part of this newsletter growth process is actually getting your potential newsletter subscribers to your website. Here are 5 solid strategies for doing just that:

1. Keyword research

Our blog has been around since April 2010. We’ve published over 7,500 articles in those 12 years.

That’s a lot of content.

But it wasn’t until we rolled out a data-led keyword research and content creation strategy in 2018 that we started seeing significant traction with organic traffic growth:

I won’t go into detail about the strategy we used to get there (you can read about it here), but I will wax poetic about the importance of keyword research and topic selection if you’re looking to grow your blog — and your newsletter subscriber list as a result.

Keyword selection is crucial.

If you don’t choose the right topics to write about, you won’t rank highly in search results. And if you’re not showing up in search, no one is going to come to your website to read your content — or to subscribe to read more from your brand.

2. Great content writing

Great content is your foot in the door with your next potential newsletter subscriber. In an ideal scenario, they come to your site, they read your content, they’re incredibly impressed, and they happily enter their email address to get more of the same from your brand directly into their inbox.

Writing great content not only gets you to appear more often in search and improves your organic visibility, but it’s also the best way to convince a reader to sign up for your newsletter.

What do I mean when I say “write great content?” Well, there’s a creative and scientific element to this part of the process, and we do it because it works:

Using the briefing process we developed, and an extremely talented pool of in-house writers, we’re able to create content that comprehensively covers all potential subtopics and answers all potential questions a searcher might have about the target keyword. In effect, we attempt to use data to create the most comprehensive content on the web for each topic we choose to cover.

This keeps us competitive and ranking well in SERPs, which means more chances for a searcher to land on our blog and subscribe to our newsletter.

3. Content reoptimization

Sometimes the content we create gets old. It becomes outdated and stale, or new competitors create better content than ours and start outranking us.

Reoptimizing a piece of content helps us attract more potential newsletter subscribers to our blog in two main ways:

1. By reoptimizing the blog content, we improve our ranking for our target keyword and, as a result, we start getting more clicks to the page for the targeted audience searching that term.

2. By improving the comprehensiveness of the piece by covering more topics, we rank for a larger number of variant keywords and then drive more clicks to the page.

Here’s the data from a blog post that was underperforming before we did a reoptimization on March 30, 2021, and what newsletter subscription goal completions looked like after the reoptimization, year-over-year:

An increase in newsletter subscription goal completions YoY from a content reoptimization.

Even though the increase in total subscriptions here is relatively small, this was just for a single blog post. Imagine doing this for 50 blog posts a year. At scale, it can make an impact.

4. Audio/visuals in blog content

Some people are just more visual learners than others. They prefer eye-catching infographics and video tutorials over hundreds of words of straight-up written content. And I’m not just saying this without any actual data to back up my claim.

We’ve consistently found that blogs with infographics drive more clicks to our site (compared to blogs that do not feature infographics).

Even though our blogs with infographics make up just ~3% of all of our blog pages, they generate 25% of all the clicks to our blog pages and 21% of all the impressions generated by blogs in search:

They also have a higher CTR (2.0% vs 1.6%) and a better average keyword position (22.4 vs 30.2):

Finally, they tend to generate more backlinks organically:

Blog post: The Anatomy of a Marketing Ideation Workshop (Infographic)

How does this impact our newsletter list growth?

These pages drive more clicks, rank better in search and get linked back to more often. All of these results drive a bigger audience of potential newsletter subscribers to our website to read our content and click “Subscribe.”

5. Pillar pages

When it comes to attracting an organic search audience that is highly likely to subscribe to our newsletter, one of the top strategies we’ve rolled out in the last year is our pillar page strategy.

Over the course of 2021, we published five of these long-form guides. They’re a cross between a blog post and a landing page — and they are search-targeted.

Example of a pillar page targeting the keyword “what is content creation.”

Compared to our blog content, users coming to the site to view these pages tend to bounce less, view more pages per session and subscribe to our newsletter at a higher rate (1.11% vs 0.38%):

I’m not recommending you completely ditch your blog strategy for pillar pages, but they are a great supplemental way to generate more newsletter subscribers per page.

Part 2: Improving on-site newsletter conversion (CRO)

We’ve discussed plenty of ways to improve the content on the page to attract more visitors from organic search. But what happens once they get there? How do we actually get visitors to convert from first-time readers to weekly email subscribers?

Enter: Conversion rate optimization!

CRO is all about finding ways to get site visitors from reading your blog in their browser to receiving your content directly in their inbox. (Which is the ultimate goal, of course). Read on for four on-page elements that’ll likely improve your newsletter subscription conversion rates:

6. Pop-up form

There’s a reason why nearly every site you visit on the web has an annoying pop-up form asking you to subscribe to their newsletter. It’s because it works.

There was a time when our blog didn’t have a pop-up form (back around 2017). We decided to run a test and added the first iteration of our pop-up form, which looked like this:

Here are the results we saw:

• Daily subscriptions without pop-up: 1.59

• Daily subscriptions with pop-up: 8.32

• Change: +532%

We happily kept that pop-up form in its place and never looked back.

In the years since we originally implemented the pop-up, we’ve modified how it behaves so that it’s more likely to capture a form fill. We:

• Redesigned the pop-up to be slightly more clear in terms of what the user is signing up for.

• Adjusted the timing on the pop-up. It used to come up too soon for the reader to make any real judgment on whether they might want to subscribe. We decided to go with 30 seconds, as this time is enough for the user to get the flavor of the post, but still retains most of the users (as we found they start to drop off after 45 seconds).

These may seem like small modifications, but cumulatively they improve the chances that we’re serving the pop-up form at the exact right time for a reader.

We’ve also learned over the years that the more ways website visitors have to subscribe to our newsletter, the better. Here are 3 more elements that we’ve included on-page to drive up our subscription rate:

7. Sticky sidebar

This is one of my favorite CTA elements and I think it really personalizes the experience for the reader on a blog. The sticky sidebar follows you down the page as you read, and the “Subscribe” CTA is always present on the screen. It’s not overly distracting, but it does make it super easy for the reader to subscribe at any time (even if they’ve closed the pop-up form).

There was a period when we removed this sidebar from our blog pages and our newsletter conversion rate plummeted. It ticked back up once we added the sidebar back to the page. Lesson learned!

8. Inline subscribe CTA

We started embedding a CTA directly into each blog post. Its design is meant to not be too interruptive, but it’s present as yet another way for users to subscribe.

This inline CTA is included once per blog post, around 50% down the page. We intentionally do not place it too close to the end of the article. This improves our chances of catching someone once they’ve read a significant portion of the content but won’t be missed if they don’t finish reading the entire piece.

9. Dedicated newsletter sign-up page + nav link

As a final on-site CRO element, we launched a dedicated landing page to promote our newsletter:

Like any good conversion landing page, it succinctly (and persuasively, we hope) explains what subscribers get by entering their contact information.

And if they’re not yet convinced, we’ve included a sampling of some of our best blog content for them to peruse before they make the final decision to subscribe:

Every single element on this page is geared toward prompting users to fill out the form.

We use this landing page as a standalone promotional tool both on site and through external channels (paid and organic alike).

• We advertise the page on Google and social platforms.

• We share a link to this page in our email marketing — so friends of subscribers can easily subscribe.

• We even give it a prominent spot in our main navigation:

You may think it’s not worth it to add a “Subscribe” button to your main navigation — it’s pretty important real estate, after all — but it will get you more newsletter subscribers organically as users land on and navigate through your site.

And people do actually navigate to this page and subscribe this way. Since launching the page in January 2021, it accounted for 17.64% of our total on-site newsletter goal completions (in 2021) with a whopping 24.12% conversion rate.

All the on-site elements I’ve covered may seem like tiny, insignificant changes but they 1) took significant research, analysis and effort to implement, and 2) they worked.

Since adding these elements in 2021, we have doubled our newsletter subscription conversion rate:

Small changes can yield big results — and every new newsletter subscriber makes a difference.

Part 3: Enhancing subscriber engagement

Now that we’ve looked at ways to grow your subscriber list and improve your subscription conversion rate, I want to switch gears and talk about what happens once someone does subscribe — and how content is invaluable to and inseparable from newsletter marketing.

Content is what fuels newsletter marketing. You cannot have one without the other. Sure, you can technically run a newsletter that solely shares external sources, but without some sort of original content to include in the email, you’re not going to retain subscribers for very long.

As I mentioned earlier, our newsletter audience is our best, most engaged audience. We hear time and time again about how much they like the content we produce. We like to reward them with even more great content.

Here are the primary ways we’ve kept our newsletter audience engaged with content:

10. Downloadable content & webinars

By offering different types of content, like downloadable assets (eBooks and white papers) and live-streamed webinars and workshops, we’re giving our audience more ways to connect with our brand.

They can dive deeper into a specific topic in their own time with a white paper, or get their real-time questions answered with a webinar or workshop.

From a marketing results perspective, we can see which contacts are most engaged with the content we’re offering by tracking email click-through rate, downloads and webinar sign-ups. It also gives us important insights into which topics and formats work best to improve user experience, and we can double down on those content types in the future.

11. Surveys

One of my favorite ways we’ve connected with our newsletter audience over the years is through surveys.

We ask them questions like:

• What types of content marketing resources do you want more of?

• What’s your favorite area of content marketing to learn about?

• How do you rate your skill level with content marketing (and other areas of marketing)?

• What are your favorite hobbies outside of content marketing?

The feedback they provide is invaluable to our marketing efforts. It’s one of the best ways to know exactly what our newsletter audience wants from us.

If you’re ever unsure about what your audience thinks of your newsletter, or where you might be lacking, a survey is arguably your best resource for those answers. And it doesn’t need to be a complex multi-question survey either — it can be a simple “How are we doing?” button you include in each send.

12. New layout for better user experience

We’ve also changed the look and feel of our weekly newsletter over the years. And we continually work to improve the user experience with these design updates.

Our newest iteration from 2021 contains a variety of sections based on what we’ve found to be most useful for our audience:

• A roundup of recently published blog posts.

• A rotating featured content section where we can promote our latest infographic, job opening or employee spotlight.

• A visual CTA to promote an eBook download or a webinar registration.

My favorite sections of our newsletter are:

Recommended reading

Here, we share industry-related content from other brands in the space. Even if we didn’t create the content ourselves, we want to provide these additional resources to help our audience stay ahead of the content marketing curve. The hope is that they get everything they need (content marketing-wise) from our newsletter, and keep opening up our emails week after week.

Subscribe CTA: “Did you get this email from a friend?”

This section links out to our newsletter subscribe landing page. It’s here to help folks subscribe to our newsletter if it’s been forwarded to them from a friend. People forward emails all the time, and this way, we’ve built in an easy way to encourage new readers to subscribe to our content. It’s a CTA that doesn’t change week to week, so it doesn’t take any effort to maintain, but it’s there to organically generate more newsletter subscribers.

And it does: We’ve found that 10% of people who subscribe via email do so on this page coming from the newsletter.

When determining the best newsletter content and layout for your brand, it’s always most important to do what works best for your audience. You may not achieve the perfect newsletter format right out of the gate, but over time, and by gathering feedback (via surveys or organically through email replies), you’ll get closer to giving them exactly what they want.

When I talk about enhancing newsletter engagement, our goal has always been the same: Be the best possible content marketing resource for our audience. As a result, we’ll get their attention and their loyalty, and possibly even their referral to a friend or colleague — and that helps us continue to grow our subscriber base.

Conclusion

Newsletter marketing has been at the core of Brafton’s marketing strategy for many years now, and we’ve found time and time again that there is plenty of reason to reinvest our efforts into this growth.

I hope the methods I’ve shared have inspired you with plenty of ways to grow your own newsletter list.

Because once you’ve got those readers subscribed, you’ll be unstoppable.

Daily SEO Fix: Competitive Keyword Research

Competitive keyword research is a crucial part of any SEO strategy. It’s vitally important to understand what your competitors are ranking for, so that you can identify the most relevant keywords in your niche or industry.

But before you begin your quest to find new keywords, you need to know exactly who your competitors really are. You might have some idea of who your closest competitors are, but on closer inspection, they may be different. Finding out which sites appear most often alongside your own can give you a fantastic insight into who you're competing against for valuable keywords.

Moz Pro’s competitive research tools allow you to find out exactly who your competitors are, what keywords they rank for and what their top performing content is. You can then use this information to create high-quality content that can compete against what your competitors have published, and get you more traffic to your site.

In the following videos, some of our best and brightest Mozzers will show you what you need to do to get the most out of these tools.

If you’d like to get more details on how you can use Moz Pro’s Competitive Research tools to your advantage, you can book a 1:1 walkthrough with a member of our onboarding team below.

Book a walkthrough

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Identify your true competitors using True Competitor

Our True Competitor feature gives you the ability to pinpoint your closest SEO competitors. By inputting your domain or subdomain, you can see who your top 25 competitors in the search results are.

In this video, Hannah walks you through the steps you need to take to find your true competitors.

Find a competitors top ranking keywords using Explore by Site

Explore by Site lets you check the ranking keywords for multiple competitor domains, subdomains or exact pages.

Not only can you see what each competitor ranks for individually, but also any shared ranking keywords between the sites.

Our onboarding specialist, Varad, shows you what you need to do to get this data.

Find Important Keywords to Improve On with Keyword Gap

Some of the keywords your competitors rank for may be more relevant than others. To find out which ones are the best to target, head to the Keywords to Improve section of Keyword Gap.

In this video, Rachel from the onboarding team shows you how to identify the best keyword opportunities.

Identify Competitors Top Content, URLs and Keywords using Keyword Gap

While creating unique content is something you want to strive for, it’s no harm to look at what your competitors are doing and to use that as inspiration.

In this Daily Fix, Christy highlights how you can pick out a competitor’s top keywords and content in Moz Pro.