Conductor C3 2019 - Scale Up Your SEO Without Losing Your Brand Voice by Slack
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At Conductor C3 2019 in NYC, Slack Senior Editor and Editor go through the process of scaling up SEO efforts without sacrificing brand voice.
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Conductor C3 2019 - Scale Up Your SEO Without Losing Your Brand Voice by Slack
- 1. LIMA AL-AZZEH Senior Editor, Slack AMANDA GARCIA Editor, Slack Scale Up Your SEO Without Losing Your Brand Voice
- 2. Agenda ● Evolution of a blog ● The pivoting challenge ● Strategy implementation ● Metrics, experimentation, and optimization ● Key takeaways #C3NY |@ivancouverite @AmandaGarcia70
- 3. Evolution of a blog ● Started out mostly word- of-mouth driven ● Brand was known for distinctive voice and tone, but our blog wasn’t specifically targeted towards acquisition #C3NY |@ivancouverite @AmandaGarcia70
- 4. Which meant we were ranking for terms like ... Naugles Tacos? Munchausen by proxy syndrome? #C3NY |@ivancouverite @AmandaGarcia70
- 6. Our pivoting challenge How do we scale content across audiences, maintain our signature brand voice and tone .... and practice good SEO? #C3NY |@ivancouverite @AmandaGarcia70
- 7. <Insert strategy here> #C3NY |@ivancouverite @AmandaGarcia70
- 8. Clear. Concise. Human. Tenets of Slack’s voice and tone #C3NY |@ivancouverite @AmandaGarcia70
- 9. Good news: Search is becoming more conversational #C3NY |@ivancouverite @AmandaGarcia70
- 10. As of 2018, 27 percent of the global online population is using voice search on mobile. *GlobalWebIndex Voice Search Report Search trend #1 #C3NY |@ivancouverite @AmandaGarcia70
- 11. “We are seeing that people are beginning to use more conversational search queries, which allow them to ask more pointed, specific, and personally relevant questions about the products and services they’re interested in.” *Sara Kleinberg, Think with Google Search trend #2: Rise in “for me” searches #C3NY |@ivancouverite @AmandaGarcia70
- 12. Step 1: Know thy audience ● Define your audiences and their interests ○ Perform qualitative research ■ Learn more about customers—what questions do they have that we can answer? What are their overarching informational needs? ○ Perform quantitative research ■ Keyword research and blog data review #C3NY |@ivancouverite @AmandaGarcia70
- 14. Step 2: Get your team in shape ● Train writers and editors to balance good SEO practices with conversational writing. ○ What kinds of words and phrases does your brand typically use and not use? ○ Don’t sound unnatural, don’t keyword stuff. ○ Create a style guide so content is in sync ○ Review quality repeatedly (we do it weekly) #C3NY |@ivancouverite @AmandaGarcia70
- 15. Step 3: Spread the content love ● Diversify content types and formats ○ What is the ultimate goal of each piece of content? ■ Brand promotion? Improving rankings? Conversions? ○ Listicles, data-driven reports, customer stories, user education and product education. ○ Will content still hold water 1, 2, 5 years from now? #C3NY |@ivancouverite @AmandaGarcia70
- 17. Step 4: Keep your content relevant ● Stick to core categories and themes ○ Keep it focused: No more than 5 overall ○ Go deep: Create topic clusters & tags for each keyword ○ Audit and optimize routinely: Don’t just audit and assess your keyword choices, look at how well you’re delivering on voice and tone. Be mindful of the whole reader experience. #C3NY |@ivancouverite @AmandaGarcia70
- 18. Setting expectations around metrics ● Keyword ranking for a specific piece is not instantaneous. ● Have a set of (reasonable) target metrics for SEO pieces relative to your blog’s output and performance #C3NY |@ivancouverite @AmandaGarcia70
- 19. Experiment, learn, optimize ● Conduct an audit of all your site content. ● Remember: A successful SEO experience is more than just getting people to the page, they have to get through the content too ● On the horizon: A/B testing on high-performing and low- performing content to see if there are ways to optimize accordingly. #C3NY |@ivancouverite @AmandaGarcia70
- 20. Good SEO only works with good design Are readers actually into this? ● Look at signals like bounce rate and scroll depth to see how far into an article people are reading ● Are there enough images/facts/focal points to encourage a reader to keep scrolling? ● Design-wise, have we created the premature illusion of completion? #C3NY |@ivancouverite @AmandaGarcia70
- 22. Key takeaways ● Practice patience ● Know thy audience and to thy audience be true ● SEO is everybody’s job ● Optimize for reader experience ● Rinse and repeat #C3NY |@ivancouverite @AmandaGarcia70
- 23. Lima Al-Azzeh is a senior editor on the content team at Slack. Outside of work, she enjoys cooking, reading, and contemplating how strange it is to write about oneself in third person. Amanda Garcia is an an editor on the content team at Slack, When she's not searching for the perfect emoji for a Slack message, she's packing her bags for her next travel adventure. #C3NY @ivancouv erite @Amanda Garcia70 Thank you! #C3NY |@ivancouverite @AmandaGarcia70
Editor's Notes
- Word of mouth among tech companies and outside of tech. Voice and tone = outside of industry norms (not business jargon), sounded like real people talking to real people, authoritative but down to earth Slack blog was on medium, used to tell general stories about people’s experiences at work, work in progress podcast (How people got into their careers, navigating career/ambiguity), now ranking for customer like the taco story
- Slack blog was on medium, used to tell general stories about people’s experiences at work, work in progress podcast (How people got into their careers, navigating career/ambiguity), now ranking for customer like the taco story
- Introduce SEO content within our brand voice and tone, while expanding to reach new audiences. Like, literally, all at the same time. Sure, nooooo problem!
- Company awareness and product demand grew tremendously among customers of all sizes. More support to increase scope of content so that it plays a more strategic part in raising awareness among potential prospects. Company and product demand grew to the point where we were actively serving huge enterprise companies in addition to smaller customers still using our free and paid plans. Content now needed to raise more awareness among potential customers looking for solutions our company could offer
- How do we reconcile this with being visible in search??
- Word of mouth among tech companies and outside of tech. Voice and tone = outside of industry norms (not business jargon), sounded like real people talking to real people, authoritative but down to earth. Using contractions, philosophy around how you communicate. SEO content doesn’t have to mean dry content. Slack blog was on medium, used to tell general stories about people’s experiences at work, work in progress podcast (How people got into their careers, navigating career/ambiguity), now ranking for customer like the taco story
- Alexa, Google Home, Siri https://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2018/08/28/okay-google-voice-search-technology-and-the-rise-of-voice-commerce/#37dec8514e29
- Search is becoming increasingly conversational, but also personal People don’t want to just learn about a product or service, they’re increasingly looking for advice This makes finding key terms a little more nuanced and a little more challenging, but the results are potentially so much more relevant https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/consumer-insights/natural-language-searches/
- What kind of audience are you trying to cater to? Qualitative research: Met with product marketing managers, performed internal research, and reached out to front-line sales teams to learn more about our customers and what kinds of questions customers are asking, what are their informational needs. Quantitative research: Took a deep dive into keyword research, looked through blog data to see what has performed well when it comes to unique page views, bounce rates, time on site, and conversions with readers signing up for Slack. Word association Framing content around questions that a reader would ask with the keyword included...
- If I was someone typing in this keyword what questions would I be asking “People also ask” Google feature
- This comes down to understanding your voice and tone and getting really specific about how to deploy it alongside good SEO Getting buy-in from writers and some editors of the value of SEO, it’s not constrictive, it’s a positive set of guidelines, if there’s no outreach/promotion strategy, organic search is really all that’s available I always tell people it’s google’s world, we all just live in it. So if you can’t find your stuff on Google search, you’re [insert favorite expletive]
- Our goal is to cater to everyone from the middle manager trying to navigate their day-to-day job and lead their teams to the senior-level executive who’s figuring out how to scale their organization to meet the needs of the company 5-10 years from now. People learn in different ways (visually)
- As you can see we have a variety of content formats like ultimate guides, how to’s, and listicle that all hit on the common theme of “collaboration” in various ways.
- No more than 5 themes/categories: Keep your main themes or categories contained and specific, useful for reader experience. Don’t want to change, but an audit every few years is important. Past 10 themes/categories is useless. Go deep: Explore the topic from multiple angles and long-tail keywords to see what resonates with readers (then optimize from there), what are the most common questions your content can answer, which topics resonate most with readers? Gets you closer to their intent/needs
- Reasonable target metrics: SEO isn’t a magic wand you can wave and get immediate results, projections over time, it takes at least 3 months to index, once it’s indexed how long do you wait to see if it’s reasonably performed? How do you continue learning/building from benchmarks? It could take anywhere from three to six months or longer before an article with a specific keyword target is within striking distance of Page 1 Google search results due to numerous factors. Laying the foundation and understanding attribution How much organic search traffic is coming to your SEO articles vs. other traffic such as social or paid? Metrics can include: unique page views, time on site, click through rate, bounce rate, and keyword ranking/movement using a tool like Conductor. Regular reporting and auditing can be weekly/monthly How much organic search traffic is coming to your SEO articles vs. other traffic? Create a dashboard to keep track of metrics for each piece and conduct regular reporting. What is the measure of success for a piece of content? Is it simply traffic, is it conversions, is it virality/brand awareness, what have you.
- Perform A/B testing after a certain time period, such as attaching various headlines, images, and social copy to articles.
- One thing we’re experimenting with right now is where to put ad modules in the copy This can help us understand how successful our content is on a granular level: is the content formatted in a readable way? Have we accidentally created a design that signals the end of an article prematurely? One of our next steps is to use Optimizely to understand how people interact with/consume our content.
- With the right combination of measurement, experimentation, and optimization, you’ll feel like Doc Brown cracking the secret to time travel, but for SEO.
- Now’s probably a good time to take up meditating.