Your website is the lifeblood of your business.

It’s how leads find you on search engines and how prospects learn about you to convert into customers.

Without great content and a people-first website, you can’t reasonably expect to do either.

So how do you know if you’re succeeding or not? And even if your website drives results, are you still leaving a lot on the table?

At Crowd Content, we hear anxieties like this all the time from business owners, content managers and website marketers.

“How can I improve my website content to finally get discovered on Google Search?”

So we decided to do something about it. Introducing SEO Clinics, brought to you by Crowd Content.

At an SEO Clinic, you’ll have the opportunity to receive live, real-time feedback about your website from content-marketing and SEO experts in an interactive, webinar-like environment—and it’s completely free of charge.

Not too shabby, eh? (Sorry, I’m Canadian. Also, sorry for saying “sorry.”)

So this begs the question: What now?

We’re stoked to announce our very first SEO Clinic with special guest Jeff Romero.

Jeff is the cofounder of the award-winning SEO & content agency Octiv Digital. He’s professionally audited and fixed websites for business of all sizes & types for over a decade, so he knows what it takes to optimize a website for Google Search to help you improve rankings, increase traffic and generate sales.

Okay. What Do I Do to Sign Up?

Submit your website here and sign up to join our live interactive webinar where Jeff will audit a select number of websites live, on the spot and in real-time.

Then join the SEO Clinic on Oct. 12th, 2 p.m. EDT / 11 a.m. PDT to see if your website is selected and learn helpful advice from watching live audits of other websites.

Who said good advice wasn’t free and readily available?

The post Supercharge Your Content: Introducing SEO Clinics appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

It’s that time of year again! (Actually, it’s happened multiple times this year now, but who’s counting?) An algorithm update from Google that impacts how webpages rank.

You’ll probably want to pay attention here because this update is a big one.

How you rank on Google Search directly influences how many people find your website and how many leads your business generates.

Google announced the Helpful Content update on Aug. 18, 2022, via a blog post by Danny Sullivan, a Public Liaison for Google Search.

The update began rolling out the following week. But the effects will be seen gradually as more data feeds the machine-learning algorithm over time (more on this below).

This is the first major Google update since the Broad Core update announced the previous May. Broad Core updates are major, reoccurring algorithm improvements by Google with wide, general scopes, so it’s hard to know or guess specific details.

But with the Aug. 2022 Helpful Content update, guess what? There are particular details about what it means and how to adjust for it to optimize your website’s performance.

Kind of….

So what is this all about? What’s changing with how Google evaluates websites from its Helpful Content update? How will it affect your website? And what are tips to improve your website after the Helpful Content update?

Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered to help you know how to optimize content for SEO and provide great experiences for your audience so your business can get ahead!

What Is Google’s Helpful Content Update?

Are you ready for this? Google’s Helpful Content update is about…helpful content.

As Google themselves explained from the above-referenced announcement, their goal is “to tackle content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people.”

In other words, trying to spray search engines with keyword-stuffed articles, instead of focusing on overall quality to actually answer users’ queries, isn’t wanted by Google.

So if you provide website content that’s helpful for search-engine users, then drink it down! If your content is written to game search-engine rankings, then send it back!

What’s the Backstory Behind Google’s Helpful Content Update?

Google’s motivation was to expand upon an early trial run from previous updates for product reviews. In 2021, their goal was to show more helpful reviews by customers of company products on SERPs (search-engine results pages), like what you would see in the below image from searching for gaming laptops, for example.

As Sullivan explained, the Helpful Content update expands on what Google’s learning from a previous update, to make product reviews more helpful, by applying this knowledge to content in general, including webpage content.

Google’s also implementing an additional iteration of the existing product reviews update at the same time as they roll out the Helpful Content update so the two can complement each other. In her initial analysis of Google’s Helpful Content update, SEO influencer Lily Ray breaks down the following example of how the Helpful Content update—as a complement to and extension of a reviews update—would reward well-written content.

Ray believes this article about tweezers secured the top organic spot on Google Search for its target keyterms after these updates because it sticks to best practices of E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trust), quality guidelines that suggest your content demonstrate topical expertise, come from an authoritative perspective and earn your audience’s trust.

Simply put, if you want your content to dominate search engines, care about your audience and put in the effort to write for people. Show that you’ve formed a researched opinion, illustrate that you can communicate your opinion and engage audiences with compelling writing.

What We Know About the Helpful Content Update So Far

Ok, let’s reel it in a bit!

We know the Google Helpful Content update extends beyond on-SERP reviews and even review articles to all types of content in general.

This means it can have a major impact on your website, affecting your lead-gen rates and website metrics.

But how? And what can you do about it?

Let’s start by figuring out how the Helpful Content update differs from other Google Search algorithm updates and what we know so far based on early effects & what Google is telling us.

How Does the Helpful Content Update Differ from Other Google Search Updates?

The Helpful Content Update is unique, there’s no way around it.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way. Most other unique updates are named things like Panda or Penguin—not really what you would call descriptive monikers.

Here, Google is clearly well-committed to pushing the message that this update is about something…something big. They’re on a mission to encourage content creators to make articles, blog posts and webpage copy as helpful and valuable to website visitors as possible.

In other words, it’s time to get on board and ditch the rushed, low-quality stuff you’ve been pumping out over the years.

But what specifically is unique this time around? Let’s compare this update to a broad core update.

As mentioned, the last time we had one of those was the Google Broad Core update of May 2022.

Again, a board core update refers to periodic updates Google Search makes to its algorithm that are expansive across the board, hitting at the “core” of main ranking factors the algorithm looks at, but not necessarily targeting any particular area in depth.

Because of this lack of deep specificity, Google doesn’t publicly release details about what has changed and what remains the same. And they always refer to the same set of high-level SEO guidelines as advice to website marketers about how to react.

Therefore, with core updates, it can be hard to diagnose how to improve details or what to fix. Effects can be scattered or inconsistent in a way that can balance out.

Take a look at this information below from Semrush about average ranking gains and losses by industry.

This graph shows that average gains and losses within almost all verticals balanced out following Google’s May 2022 Broad Core Update.

That means the effects were at least industry-agnostic, and the best practices moving forward involve the usual, like ensuring you’re following the best practices of E-A-T.

How are things different this time around with the Helpful Content update? Let’s take a look!

Early Effects of the Google Helpful Content Update

We’re not in Kansas anymore, that’s for sure.

The weeks following the launch of the Helpful Content update produced surprising and mixed early results. And the subsequent online commentary (i.e., “what’s really going on here?”) has sparked confusion, further distinguishing this update from the recent Broad Core update.

Many SEO analysts predicted that the Helpful Content update will be at least as impactful as Panda was—maybe even more so.

It felt like Armageddon was coming. But for now, things are still calm.

That doesn’t mean lots of websites are out of the woods yet though. Google is urging content creators to stay vigilant because this update is designed to self-adjust over time as it makes an ongoing impact.

We’ll deep dive into why and what that might look like further below in this post, but let’s start with the early data thus far.

Let’s look at the below data via Rank Ranger. It shows no statistically significant differences in average, across-the-board search-engine rankings between the weeks before and after the launch of the Helpful Content update.

And SEO company Sistrix observed no significant changes from the helpful Content update a week after the rollout, noting this was slightly unusual compared to broad core updates, where moderate changes are usually noticed within a few days.

So what’s the deal here? Is this all smoke and mirrors?

Not entirely. Sistrix did concede one example website that took a noticeable hit in rankings; the below image shows <foodandwine.com>’s visibility metrics nosedive.

And Ray highlighted websites with “‘meh’ content” in industries you might expect to see employ content mills, like health, dating, horoscopes, etc.

Most websites didn’t really see an impact, other than websites with unsurprisingly low-quality content.

Does this mean Armageddon was more like a Nah-mageddon?

Actually, maybe.

Google made a big deal about the Helpful Content update and were careful to position it more distinctly than a broad core update. It’s possible the Helpful Content update isn’t any more impactful than a pedestrian “spam update” and Google hyped it up as a public-relations stunt to encourage content marketers to take quality-control more seriously.

On the other hand, the Helpful Content update’s rollout will be gradual. In fact, it will be continuously gradual.

What does continuously gradual mean though? You might also ask, How will it impact my website?

Let’s unpack these questions by taking a look at what Google says—and at others’ interpretations of what Google’s saying….

What’s Google Saying About What the Helpful Content Update Means?

On the same day of the announcement, Google published guidelines for website-content creators to help them optimize their website for the Helpful Content update.

Their core recommendation is to focus on writing what’s known as “people-first content.” Write for the people who will read your content, not for search engines.

As Google says, write “content where visitors feel they’ve had a satisfying experience.”

They provide the following list of questions you should ask yourself before publishing any content on your website to ensure your content is the best that it can be for your readers:

1. Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if they came directly to you?
2. Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (for example, expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service, or visiting a place)?
3. Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?
4. After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?
5. Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they’ve had a satisfying experience?

Ultimately, Google’s goal is to reward webpage content that checks off the above criteria with better search rankings—and thus more website traffic!—while also explicitly saying content that doesn’t meet this criteria “won’t perform as well.”

How Google’s Helpful Content Update Impacts Search Rankings With Machine-Learning

How does this advice from Google translate to your day-to-day work? How can you apply these guidelines to improve your content for search engines?

SEO influencer Kevin Indig perfectly summarized a takeaway from each one of Google’s guidelines.

1. Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if they came directly to you?
   • Satisfy an existing demand and/or build an audience.
2. Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (for example, expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service, or visiting a place)?
   • Provide factually correct content.
3. Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?
   • Focus on a core topic.
4. After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?
   • Create original content.
5. Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they’ve had a satisfying experience?
   • Don’t force visitors to navigate back to the search-engine page to find their answer elsewhere.

What’s interesting is that Indig also highlighted a unique point from Google’s guidelines, that the Helpful Content update “introduces a new site-wide signal” to determine a sort of overall quality level.

In other words, even individual pieces of helpful content could underperform on search engines if your website has what Google describes as “relatively high amounts of unhelpful content overall.”

What the heck does that mean? You publish a well-researched & well-written post that satisfies user expectations and it doesn’t rank as well as it could because your website already has lots of bad content already?

Well, kind of, yeah…. In fact, that’s actually Google’s intention.

A disportionately high amount of unhelpful content shows your website isn’t optimally focused on a core topic and on providing holistic solutions to visitors’ queries.

Google wants helpful content to be associated with websites that have strong reputations in their field—that helps send trust signals to users.

How does Google do this? As Ray clarifies in a LinkedIn post, this site-wide signal is a “classifier” applied to websites by the Helpful Content Update that uses machine-learning to gradually assess the quality level of a website’s content.

This is what we mean by continuously gradual. The classifier will perpetually learn more about your site over time to feed more & better data to Google algorithms.

This is the message Google is trying to impart. Ray’s LinkedIn post was in response to a Twitter discussion between Sullivan and SEO consultant Glenn Gabe over whether the Helpful Content update has actually been as big of a deal as it was made out to be.

Sullivan clarified that the site-wide signals from the Helpful Content update were what made it unique and that impacts from the update would be “noticeable” over time, referring to Google documentation about improving SEO as guidance for webmasters.

Clearly Google is taking a stand and instructing us that, even if the effects have been underwhelming thus far, the impacts of the Google Helpful Content update could never end.

So if your website has lots of low-quality, unhelpful content from over the years, even if you haven’t seen a major hit yet from Google’s Helpful Content update, you still might over time.

How to Improve Old Content After the Helpful Content Update

Okay, so what’s the solution here? You can’t only focus on providing quality content moving forward; also audit your existing content by the same standards you apply to new content.

In fact, this might be the biggest takeaway from the Helpful Content update.

Let’s look at some simple steps to get you started.

Steps to Improve Old Content on SEO After a Google Update

1. Develop quality criteria around E-A-T
2. Create a database and audit existing content
3. Identify content decay
4. Update or redirect existing content

1. Develop Quality Criteria Around E-A-T

We mentioned E-A-T earlier, but it’s a strong foundation for developing criteria for grading content quality.

Ensure your content reflects expertise, is written authoritatively and establishes trust. To do this, refer to an E-A-T SEO checklist to hit all the right notes, like double-checking your old content is comprehensive, backed by reputable authors and reviewed by industry experts.

For a detailed list of criteria you can steal, feel free to thank SEO consultant Aleyda Solis.

<https://twitter.com/aleyda/status/1560550093941456896>

2. Create a Database and Audit Existing Content

Now that you have set standards to audit your old content, it’s time to start, well, auditing your content.

Looking at E-A-T standards is a great way to make subjective or qualitative qualifications. But sometimes real, hard data makes things a lot easier.

See what’s underperforming in Google Search Console to start by narrowing things down.

The SEO influencer known as Niche Site Lady on Twitter outlined a great process for deciding which website content to cut or update by looking at traffic data and cross-referencing organic clicks with impressions.

3. Identify Content Decay

Your audit can’t only include underperforming content in your audit. There might be warning signs for content already bringing in traffic too.

First, what is content decay?

It’s the process of traffic-generating content beginning to lose its traffic. In other words, things are on the downhill.

Common culprits of content decay usually include increased competition from other websites. But think about it, if your content were strong enough in the first place and fully helpful for your users, then in theory the risk from competition is low.

Pull reports from Google Analytics to identify content decay. Don’t rush to delete articles with decreasing traffic—they’re still generating traffic, after all—but study what else ranks for the same search queries to see what you’re missing, and then update your content accordingly.

4. Update or Redirect Existing Content

The ultimate question remains: Should I update my content or redirect it?

It can be a fine line. Sometimes it comes down to a judgment call. If your content topic is important for your audience, then it’s likely worth an update. Otherwise a redirect might be in order. Sometimes known as 301 redirects, referring to the relevant HTML-response status code “301,” a redirect enables you to depublish content by instructing web browsers to automatically send users elsewhere on your website.

So for anything that doesn’t make the cut, either update the content if it’s worth salvaging or if you have to remove it, set up a 301 redirect to send its website traffic to a better version of the content you have on your site.

If there’s not a direct match, map the old content at least to something as best you can. Remember, your goal is always to resolve user queries and satisfy audience expectations.

Let’s look at an example! Say you’re an ecommerce website that sells waterproof shoes.

You have a blog post about why waterproof shoes are worth the cost.

Now your traffic decreases after the Helpful Content update. You conduct a content-quality audit and suspect this “costs” article isn’t helping. There are lots of better-written content pieces on the same topic from other websites performing better on Google Search.

Maybe this other content goes into more detail on secondary keyterms, showing expertise by discussing not just benefits, but also price-point differences, the reasons behind what drives prices, why your shoes are versatile even when there’s no rain, the concept of waterproofing as an investment, the effects of waterproof technology on shoe aesthetics & comfort and so on.

Your article? It’s a listicle of basic benefits of waterproof shoes, essentially a front to target the primary keyword “cost.” But the content isn’t otherwise diverse, so the listicle just ends up floundering. In other words, it’s not as helpful as it could be.

Option #1. The article is worth saving to compete for the primary term about costs, so you add more unique information about why customers should spend more for waterproof shoes.

Option #2. Since it already has some traction for keyterms about “benefits,” you redirect the traffic to another post you have specifically about that topic.

Which option should you go with? This is where SEO is half-art and half-science. Sometimes it’s a guess—but always a researched, educated guess.

In this hypothetical scenario, if the destination page (about “benefits”) already ranks well for its target keyterms and the existing page (about “costs”) has previous activity about “benefits” from either Google Search Console or rank-tracking tools like Ahrefs or Semrush, then go Option #2 and 301-redirect the “costs” article to the “benefits” one.

But if you do go with the latter and redirect the page and “costs” remains a high-value target keyword, you can still write net-new content for it!

Otherwise, just go with Option #1 and update the existing content in the “costs” article.

Takeaways for Moving Forward With the Google Helpful Content Update

At a high level, what should content marketers consider moving forward after the Helpful Content update?

Google certainly doesn’t make your job easier, but you need to stay on top of tips and best practices to ensure your website traffic grows and your company can scale.

With the site-wide classifier from this update, the message from Google is simple: lackluster content on your site will drive down rankings and traffic over time (even if the update’s impact has been meandering thus far).

Perhaps the biggest takeaway is to pay special attention to optimizing legacy content on your website on top of what you’re doing with new content. Investing in subject-matter expert services can help you improve new & old content alike to crush those E-A-T requirements so you can start futureproofing your website for better sales.

The post Google’s Helpful Content Update: Everything You Need to Know appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Google implemented a “broad core update” to its search-engine algorithm on May 25, 2022, as announced by Danny Sullivan, a Public Liaison for Google Search.

Its full effects take a couple weeks to manifest because Google rolls out major updates gradually.

This is Google’s first broad core update in over six months since November, 2021.

An algorithm update is a big deal. It means Google is refining how its search engine interprets webpages, which impacts your company’s rankings, traffic and, subsequently, revenue.

It is hard to assess, let alone prepare for, a broad core update. Google doesn’t specify what the update is nor how it will affect your website metrics because broad core updates have wide scopes.

So what’s the deal? How will this Google algorithm update modify your website’s performance? How will website content play a role? And, ultimately, what does this mean for your business?

We’ll go over everything you need to know about Google’s May 2022 core update!

What Is a Broad Core Update?

Broad core updates represent an overall tweaking of the algorithm instead of a targeted effort.

Think of it in terms of car maintenance. An engine tuneup maintains overall performance but isn’t a particular fix meant to identify a specific problem.

Google’s broad core updates impact search-engine ranking factors across the board without addressing any one component in detail. That’s why Google calls them “broad.”

Past updates like Panda and Penguin were targeted, specifically looking at the quality of backlinks and content.

Other updates are more specific still. For example, Google Search adjusted how product reviews and spam impact relevant rankings in December & November, respectively, of 2021. 

But broad core updates? They change how the algorithm values a webpage in a more wide-ranging way. Who knows what could happen!

So then how in the heck are you supposed to respond to broad core updates?

You just need to ensure you’re nailing all the essential best practices. Know how to optimize content for SEO, provide great user experiences, have fast page speeds and build healthy backlinks!

What Happened in Previous Broad Core Updates?

We mentioned the most recent broad core update before this one was in November, 2021. But the June/July 2021 update is what actually takes the cake for the most website impact.

That’s because the update was so large, Google split its deployment into two, launching the first half of it in June and then finishing up in July. This was largely unprecedented.

Data analysts observed a lot of volatility for website performances across many industries as Google Search rolled out the June/July 2021 broad core update.

One analyst described it as “one of the largest core updates we’ve seen from Google yet.”

Will this May 2022 update have the same punch? How will it impact your company’s website? Importantly, how will it affect your business and what do you have to do? Let’s try to find out!

What Is Unique About This New Broad Core-Algorithm Update?

In a way, nothing. Or, at least nothing that the public can confirm.

Again, when it comes to broad core updates, Google never provides any specific details. All we know is these updates have the potential to significantly disrupt rankings on Google Search.

The SEO community had (correctly) speculated about an impending core update about a week before it happened, causing many to guess that data changes during that time were casualties.

But according to Search Engine Land, John Mueller, a Webmaster-Trends Analyst at Google, said that, “when we announce core updates, we start the rollout at that point, not beforehand.”

And broad core updates tend to be rolled out over time. So any noticeable differences in website traffic from late May into mid-June we can safely assume were influenced by this new update.

Takeaways From Google’s May 2022 Core Update

Let’s start by researching some of the data related to this broad core-algorithm update and what we can glean for brands and content marketers.

1. What Google Did Advise With the Update Announcement

As is typical, Google doesn’t provide any specific feedback, preemptive or otherwise, about how content marketers and website managers can prepare for or adjust to a broad core update.

In fact, Google tried to impart on many, “don’t try to fix the wrong things,” shortly before acknowledging that, for some, “there might not be anything to fix at all.”

But surely there must be some way to narrow down a particular takeaway and receive actionable advice from Google?!

Well, actually, kind of, yes.

Whenever Google announces a broad core update, as general advice, they always point to documentation for search-ranking best practices unchanged since 2019.

Here, Google explains that content marketers and SEO specialists can best spend their energy after a broad core update by “focusing on ensuring you’re offering the best content you can.”

This means providing:

• Original information, reporting, research or analysis;
• A substantial, complete or comprehensive description of the topic; and
• Insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious.

As a rule of thumb, if your site’s rankings increased, your content probably already exhibits these practices. Conversely, if your rankings dropped, you likely need to up your content game.

2. Focus on E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trust)

No, not food!

E-A-T is the acronym that Google uses to describe best practices for optimizing content to rank well on their search engine.

It stands for Expertise, Authority, Trust. Simply put, does your content a) demonstrate expertise in your field, b) come from a position of authority and c) compel readers to find you trustworthy?

Your goal as a website marketer responsible for online leads and digital sales should be to answer “yes” to all these questions. 

There is no concrete ranking factor in Google’s algorithm that represents E-A-T directly, but Google confirmed in 2019 that multiple ranking factors do encompass the principles of E-A-T.

And Google explicitly encourages focusing on E-A-T in their documentation mentioned above about core-algorithm updates.

We can therefore safely assume a connection between ranking drops from the May 2022 broad core update and content that underwhelms at exhibiting E-A-T.

In fact, content marketer Will James claimed that some victims of the core update lost ground on search engines because of their lack of E-A-T.

Because the update hurt rankings for generalist websites more than for specialist websites with a narrower scope of topics, James induced generalist websites were diluting their expertise. 

So, how can you guard against future performance setbacks of your website and optimize for E-A-T?

Follow a Google E-A-T checklist and ensure content is comprehensive; authoritative by focusing on a niche; written by reputable authors; and commentated on by experts where needed.

3. Volatility in Website Rankings Is Common After Broad Core Updates

If your website rankings bounced all over the place after the May 2022 Google broad core update, we can assure you that you are not alone.

It’s not uncommon after a broad core update for websites to see volatile rankings because Google rolls out their algorithm updates gradually.

It’s why these updates always take a couple of weeks to settle and why we saw volatility for multiple days following both the June/July 2021 update & the November 2021 update.

But so far, the May 2022 update had a briefer but more intense volatile period that has leveled out.

This is significant despite the leveling-out because the results could foretell potential long-term impacts yet to happen.

So what do we know?

From the two Semrush graphs below, all industries (except real estate) had slightly smaller ranges of rank volatility than from before—but also higher (or at least even) peak volatilities.

This consistency makes it difficult to pinpoint specific impacts by industry.

Couple the consistency with the intensity itself of the volatility and it’s more likely a stronger sign than of anything else that Google is both improving & expediting their rollouts of these updates.

For instance, take a look below at contrasting examples from industry pros about the same industry: healthcare.

Different results, but same vertical.

Could we attribute the lost rankings to a skew against non-English sites, as the commentary suggests is plausible? It’s possible, but then again, that factor isn’t consistent across industries.

What this all means is that the best practices moving forward are agnostic towards industry.

All industries need content and Google applies the same principles of content to all industries.

Implementations, messaging, use cases, etc., may differ—but the underlying principles to gauge value are the same.

Take a look at this last data set below:

Most industries (except some like Arts & Entertainment and Books & Literature) more or less saw high-level parity between average gains and average losses in search-engine rankings.

So what?

Well, this analysis reinforces the idea that valuable content with quality checks—including E-A-T but also branding guidelines to compel your audience—is both relevant and universal.

4. Which Search-Engine Features Had Definite Impacts?

Snippets! You love ’em? Well do we have great news for you!

That’s right, the May 2022 Google broad core update has definitively impacted multiple snippet types for SERPs, like FAQ snippets and featured snippets.

What has this looked like? And what will this impact mean for your company’s SEO?

The Impact on FAQ Snippets

Let’s start with FAQ snippets. Yes, those pesky little buggers that provide short, direct answers to variations of users’ queries underneath webpage listings on SERPs.

A fascinating result of the broad core update reported on by Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable is that FAQ snippets on SERPs have increased from 22% to 27% of queries.

That means FAQs are showing up on Google Search almost 23% more often than before. That’s huge!

Granted, the source data, from Rank Ranger, groups FAQ snippets and how-to snippets together.

But the conclusions have been validated externally, including by SEO expert and Search Engine Land columnist Glenn Gabe.

Gabe analyzed multiple case studies to observe that “Google [is] showing more search results with FAQ rich results.”

How is this significant?

Well, on one hand, FAQ results ostensibly enable Google to siphon clicks from your website (it’s another clickable element on the SERP for users to find an answer to their query, isn’t it?).

But they also empower your webpages to attract more clicks by adding credibility and expertise to your SERP listings themselves.

Plus, qualifying for FAQ appearances helps improve your main search rankings as a whole, since strong content for FAQ snippets could be what lifts your content to the top!

Make sure you mark up FAQ content with relevant structured data on your website.

And improve your content with information suitable for questions related to target keyterms. Do keyword research or even something as simple as analyzing “People Also Ask” questions.

The Impact on Featured Snippets

As for featured snippets? Recall the observation in the above-referenced tweet by SEO professional Lily Ray that there have been “massive fluctuations with featured snippets.”

Well, Gabe echoed those observations, noting a distinct “surge or drop in featured snippets” from the May 2022 broad core update.

That means all those information pieces at the top of SERPs above the traditional listings, including highlighted paragraphs, bullets, lists, tables or videos, have seen big gains or losses.

And that’s a big deal for a lot of businesses because featured snippets deliver relatively high proportions of organic traffic.

As Gabe elaborates, sites not “seen as high quality/relevant anymore can lose featured snippets when negatively impacted by a broad core update.”

So what should you do? Check your featured snippets; you can easily track them if you’re not already with tools like Ahrefs, Semrush or Google Search Console.

If you find you’ve lost any, you’ll know where and how to improve your content quality as a result of the May 2022 broad core update.

5. The Big Kahunas: What Won the May 2022 Update

Drumroll please! *Drumroll sounds* And the big winners of the May 2022 Google broad core-algorithm update are…videos, content specialization and search-intent matching!

Okay, that’s maybe not the sexiest sentence to read out loud, so let’s parse these out.

These analyses came from Malte Landwehr, Head of SEO at idealo, the largest ecommerce publishing platform in Germany, from cross-referencing data from Semrush and SISTRIX.

With this data, we see some fairly consistent and convincing conclusions about SEO after the broad core update in three areas that could inspire amazing content ideas for your business.

The Rise of Video (Again)!

We know, we know. Digital marketers have been hailing the “rise of video” for several years now.

In fact, we have to go that far back to get to when I first heard a now-former boss of mine proclaim to the audience at an industry seminar that “videos are the future—and they’re here!”

Just look at this sample SERP in the below image. Not a lot of diversity in the metatitles for these webpages that are themselves spread out over a few years, is there?

Of course, it all seems a bit silly.

Even that now-former boss of mine was mildly embarrassed by one of my then-colleagues who made an astute reflection in response. (Don’t worry—no one got fired!)

That reflection? Video isn’t always ideal because it’s often easier to quickly scan well-organized text, such as a blog post, for specific answers to a particular query.

But the medium wouldn’t hold back! TikTok has exploded the popularity of shorts, YouTube videos are well-structured with labeled sections and video-embedding is as effective as ever.

Landweher discovered that video websites improved their online visibility by a whopping 25% after the broad core update.

The takeaway? If you’re not already complementing your written content with videos, there is a huge missed opportunity for scaling your website traffic, lead volumes and your revenue.

Nobody Likes a Know-it-All! Show Why You’re the Best in What You Know

Remember the above comment about how the broad core update hurt generalist websites more than specialist websites with a narrower scope of topics?

This observation corresponds with Landweher’s take that websites like news publishers, “known for trying to rank for everything—lost on average 4% of their Google rankings.”

So what is the take here? You try to rank for lots of things and you’ll end up ranking for nothing. Know your niche and demonstrate your expertise there. Your organic metrics will reward you.

Content Is King? More Like Context Is King!

Back in the day, it was easy to pump out semi-relevant content about any given topic and win high search-engine rankings by covering these topics with broad details.

Encyclopedia- and database-style websites (think Wikipedia copycats, online dictionaries, song-lyric & stock-photo websites and the like), were masters at this.

As Landweher describes it, such sites “contain pages for virtually any topic that seems relevant based on term frequency-inverse document frequency[to retrieve content info from an index].”

What does this mean and why is it a problem?

Term frequency-inverse document frequency looks at the relationship between keyword volume and the degree to which keywords are spread out when search engines retrieve data

These websites were leveraging this method to rank for queries despite not going in depth to match more specific intentions behind the queries.

The free ride is over, as evidenced by the below data.

Landweher notes these sites “rarely match the [user’s] search intent.”

This means that generic content about a particular topic could rank well even if it didn’t specifically address a search query, but the May 2022 update is reigning this in.

So focusing on contextual relevance in your content, deemphasizing exact keyword-matching (especially keyword-stuffing!) and providing real value for a search query is key to success.

It’s actually simple. Ask yourself honestly: does your webpage’s content provide helpful value relevant to the page’s scope and reflective of typical queries that would lead visitors there?

If so, you’ve created what’s known as “search-intent matching,” where your content closely matches the intention of the search-engine user based on their query.

Time to watch your website’s organic traffic skyrocket!

Bottom Line? Quality Content Is the Name of the Game

If there’s one thing Google’s May 2022 broad core update is teaching us, it’s that the time to raise your quality standards for website content was…yesterday!

It’s no secret that Google’s own guidelines recommend following E-A-T best practices as evidenced by the results of this update rollout.

From intense ranking volatility and impacted snippets to more attention on videos, content specialization and search-intent mapping, publishing great content is a must for online visibility.

Investing in SEO content services can empower you to leverage subject-matter expertise and efficiently publish high-quality content on your website to start boosting your traffic.

And with time, you can say goodbye to broad-core anxiety for good!

The post Google’s May 2022 Core Update: What You Need to Know appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

There are a lot of moving parts involved, including having a talented group of 6,000+ writers, constantly improving content creation technology, and supporting clients with expert content creation advice.

And as marketers, we have to stay on top of the most recent trends and emerging technology as it relates to SEO and content marketing. 

With that in mind, we’re proud to be sponsoring MarketMuse’s Content Strategy Collective event from June 22nd to June 24th.  

What Is It?

This is a virtual conference that aims to arm you with the knowledge you need to create a content strategy that drives results. 

Ever asked yourself what you should write about? How long should it be? What topics should you cover? What you should link to?

Yeah, us too.

This conference will help answer all of those questions and more.

Taking place over 3 days, you’ll get to connect with some of the best minds in marketing today. Some names you might recognize — Rand Fishkin, Andy Crestodina, Heidi Cohen — we could go on, but really, check out the list and prepare to be impressed.

How Are We Involved?

We think this event is really going to help marketers create better content, so we’re happy to be sponsoring the event to help make that happen. Creating comprehensive content is critical to both content marketing and SEO success these days, and this conference should be an amazing resource to help marketers do that. 

We’ll have a virtual “booth” set up where we’ll be sharing some great free resources and chatting to attendees.

On top of that, our own Rick Leach, a Senior Project Manager on our Enterprise Production team, will be hosting a workshop on how you can scale your content output while still properly optimizing your content for SEO.

How Can You Attend?

You’ve probably gotten the hang of virtual conferences over the last year or so, and this conference functions like most of them do. Just register at the main conference page and then sign onto the site on June 24th.

There are free passes available that will get you into many of the sessions, and standard passes that get you into workshops (like ours) start at $199. If you’re interested in a standard pass, be sure to reach out to your Crowd Content Customer Success Manager and we can help you with a discount.

We hope to see you there! 

The post We’re Sponsoring the Content Strategy Collective! appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

I’m excited that conference organizers are starting to pivot to remote arrangements. Many conferences are now being run virtually while still offering great learning and networking opportunities.

The first virtual show Crowd Content is participating in is SMX Next, happening on Tuesday, June 23^rd and Wednesday, June 24^th. I’ll be speaking on a topic dear to my heart – Success and Failures of Scaling SEO Content Programs.

Here’s why we’re excited about this show, and why I hope you’ll join us there (it’s free!).

Keeping Current With Search Industry Trends

One thing that’s constant in the SEO world is that it doesn’t slow down and it’s constantly changing. In the last few months there have been several major Google algorithm updates, for instance.

That’s why I think it’s so valuable to attend events like SMX Next. Their roster of speakers is always impressive and these folks know what’s working and what’s not with SEO. These are the sessions I’m most interested in for SMX Next:

·  Lessons From Past Google Algorithm Updates & Preparing For What’s Next – Barry Schwartz, SEO Editor, Search Engine Land

·  Six Fundamental SEO Truths to Live By – Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc.

·  Monitoring and Analyzing Search and Content Trends (in Crazy Times) – John Shehata, VP, Audience Development Strategy, Conde Nast

·  Digital Marketing Strategies for Uncertain Times – Christi Olson, Head of Evangelism, Microsoft

You can review the full list of sessions here. Which ones are you most interested in?

Bringing the Community Together

A big highlight of our year is getting out and meeting search marketing professionals at shows like SMX Next. The SMX shows are always very high-quality with amazing speakers and great social events and they tend to attract really great people. It’s a great place for us to catch up with existing clients and partners, as well as meet new ones.

SMX Next includes many virtual networking events and ways to connect with attendees. I’m excited to check those out and connect the community.

A Chance to Give Back

I’ve been fortunate enough to attend a number of SEO conferences over the years, and I always learn so much from the sessions. At SMX Next I have the opportunity to share some of my knowledge developed by working everyday with industry leading companies to help them build and refine their content creation processes.

My talk is called Success and Failures of Scaling SEO Content Programs. Having worked with hundreds of enterprise companies in designing content programs, I’ve seen things that worked really well and drove big results as well as things that… kinda did the opposite.

In preparing my talk I also spoke to our team of project managers that work on our clients’ content programs. They shared even more insights from their experience, so I feel confident in saying that we’re going to be able to share some advice that will help anyone attending improve their content creation process.

At the end of the day, content creation is just a part of SEO, but it’s what we live and breathe. I’m really excited to share what we’ve learned with the broader SEO community.

Hope to See You There

That wraps up why I’m excited for SMX Next. I’m certain there are some sessions that you’d find valuable (cough cough MINE cough cough) and the price is right (FREE!). I really encourage you to register and check them out.

These kinds of virtual events are going to be critical to keeping up to date and keeping our community connected. Hope to see you there.

The post Let’s Connect Virtually at SMX Next appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Here’s what you need to know about Google’s June 2019 Core update.

What Is a Core Update?

Core updates are an overall optimization of Google’s algorithm based on broad principles instead of a targeted update on any one particular element or ranking factor. They’re not “maintenance” work meant to fix a specific, identified problem.

Updates such as Panda or Penguin were targeted — specifically meant to target issues such as the quality of backlinks or content. The June core update may include some changes related to quality, but it wasn’t specifically geared toward that.

When releasing core updates Google always advises there isn’t anything you need to “fix” to recover lost rankings. Moreover, you just need to do all the essential SEO things well including writing great SEO content, providing great user experience, being mobile friendly, having fast page speeds, building healthy backlinks, and updating your site often.

Takeaways and Talking Points for Google’s June 2019 Core Update

Let’s start by looking over some of the expert talking points of this broad core algorithm update and what they mean for brands and content marketers.

1. Google Announced the Update

Google announced the update via Twitter a day ahead of time to give the SEO community a heads up. This is the first time news about an update was broken by Google and ahead of the game.

The benefit of the announcement is that brands could monitor their SEO performance and traffic immediately to understand how they were impacted instead of second guessing after traffic changed.

The takeaway is that, whether or not Google continues to notify the community of updates in the future, it’s important for content marketers to follow industry leaders and keep up with trends and news.

2. The Core Update Overlapped With the Diversity Update

The core update rolled out from June 3 through June 8. The diversity update(which aimed to show links from different domains in search results instead of showing many links from one domain) rolled out from June 4 through June 6.

The takeaway for brands is that paying attention to when traffic changes began is critical to understand which update might be impacting you. That lets you know what types of changes may be needed in the future.

3. The June Update Reverted Some of the March Update

Some of the March core updates seem to have been reverted with the June update, based on losers in March becoming winners in June.

The takeaway is that you can’t ride or die based on Google updates that occur a few times per year. You have to find what works for your audience and concentrate on delivering high-quality content that serves consumer needs.

4. Video Carousels Get More Action

The June 2019 update did more than shake up search traffic. It also caused some changes to the SERPs themselves, with more video carousels appearing on desktop following the update.

The takeaway here isn’t very specific. This does point to Google signaling the continued value increase for video, which is something all content marketers should consider in the image-and-media-based market today.

Winners and Losers From June’s Update

SEO data companies, including Search Engine Land, are able to provide specific lists of winners and losers of the Google June 2019 core update. But the consensus seems to be that:

• E-A-T content is still important to success in the SERPs
• Google continues to look for authority and authorship, especially in YMYL (your money, your life) arenas
• The June update did seem to target news sites with low-quality content or low-quality topics

ALSO – How Creating Content With E-A-T In Mind Can Help Future-Proof Your Site Against Algorithm Changes

Some Advice From the SEO Community in the Wake of June’s Core Update

1. Concentrate on E-A-T Content

Arren Wilkinson, the SEO Manager at 52fridays says, “It’s clear to me that the June 2019 update heavily penalized sites that are lacking in E-A-T. Of most of our client sites that seemed to suffer the most, all were lacking in expertise in their editorial content. These sites also suffered during the Medic update of 2019.”

In the wake of these broad core updates, Wilkinson says, “My best piece of advice would be to work solely on improving your E-A-T; get experts to contribute to your editorial content, get cited from experts in your niche, and be transparent with your users (explain how your site makes money, its business model, etc.).”

Marissa Ryan, a Managing Partner at VisualFizz, goes even further, stating that author bios for your blog posts should read like resumes. She notes that bios should prove “the writer’s expertise in your industry by linking to other projects, other writings and other brands.”

Ryan also says companies should avoid using one author for all content. “You should have multiple writers on your blog.”

This advice about authority and E-A-T content is important for all companies, but it’s especially critical for YMYL brands as Google is paying increasing attention to the quality and authority of that content.

2. Remember That Search Algorithms Constantly Evolve

Audrey Strasenburgh, SEO Strategist at FreeLogoServices, points out that brands gain and lose traffic based on different algorithm tweaks. Strasenburgh says, “The general consensus is that websites that were severely impacted during the March algorithm update saw marked increases in site visibility after the June update. FreeLogoServices, in particular, saw an increase in SERPs after the June update where we did not fare as well in March.”

The takeaway for online brands and marketers is that lost rankings can be found again, and sometimes it’s about consistently churning good content while the dust settles in the SERPs.

ALSO – Crash Course: How to Become an SEO Content Writer

3. Update Content to Reflect Search Intent and User Need

Victor Pan, the Principle Technical SEO at HubSpot, agrees that Google algorithm changes come and go and there’s no magic fix for companies that lose ranking when the search engine tweaks its processes.

“There’s no magic bullet for dealing with these core algorithm updates,” says Pan, “but what everyone can do is look at their content that lost visibility and traffic, look at the SERPS of those pages, empathize with the user’s need, based on device time, location, time of day or need state, what search features are showing up… and then update the content to address those gaps. Time and time again, the best content wins. One-and-done evergreen content is dead. Periodically updated evergreen content is the new norm.”

Ryan agrees, saying, “if your website hasn’t had any updates in a while (more than 6 months), you may have noticed a steep decline in organic traffic. Update your static pages, and make sure to contribute to your site at least once a week.”

The take-aways here are:

• Web pages can’t be left on the shelf to rot; you have to take them down and dust them off periodically
• Google is about serving the intent and need of the user, and it’s going to continue placing pages that meet those demands in the top ranks
• You can’t avoid analyzing the performance of your pages; if you don’t know which of your pages are performing well and which aren’t, you’re missing out on valuable knowledge that can help you create higher-ranking content going forward

4. Differentiate Your Pages

According to Ryan, pages on your site with similar content won’t all stand on Google.

“Brands, especially eCommerce brands, found that many of their product pages became unindexed from Google.” says Ryan. “This is because of Google’s canonical push, which means that if Google determined several pages on your website were too similar, they would only index one of those pages and consider it the canonical version of all the other pages that were very similar. If this happened to you, update your individual product/service pages to be completely unique and give lots of info about the product/service. Then, push to the Google search console for a recrawl.”

5. Ensure Your Site Supports Strong User Experience for Desktop and Mobile

Michael Zima, Co-Founder of Zima Media, LLC, wraps it all up by returning to the need to support the user.

“We have to remember that Google’s mission is to make the information of the world available in one click,” says Zima. “Now more than ever, your website content has to solve the searcher’s intent, visiting your website has to be a pleasure with a modern experience and everything has to be blazing fast since the mass rollout of the Google mobile-first indexing. We know Google is prioritizing the mobile version of your website for both searchers coming from either mobile devices or desktop computers as implied by the mobile-first name.”

Zima likens well-performing sites to Swiss army knives, unfolding with many utilities for the user. To accomplish that, he says, “We see more and more success by creating a reliable pillar webpage to bring more qualified clicks from Google by creating a meaningful piece of content instead of sprinting and creating several weaker and shorter pages.”

The post Google’s June 2019 Core Update: What You Need to Know appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

The 19th annual VIATEC Awards recognize technology companies based in Victoria, BC that are excelling in their spaces and contributing to the growth of the tech industry in the region.

The Scale-Up of the Year award is focused on highlighting established companies in the Greater Victoria tech scene that are rapidly scaling operations and revenue.

“I’m thrilled to be recognized as a finalist for the Scale-Up of the Year award,” said Crowd Content CEO Clayton Lainsbury. “We did a ton of work in 2018 to drive 48% revenue growth compared to 2017, and it’s really rewarding to be recognized by our peers for those results. We’ve been active in the VIATEC community since Crowd Content was founded in 2010. We support their goal of growing the tech industry in Victoria, and it’s just a tremendous honour to have them recognize us with this nomination.”

Asked to comment on what was most interesting about his firm’s scale up, Lainsbury stated it’s that the growth has been diversified. “I think the best part of our growth in 2018 was that you can chalk it up to many different factors. Our self-serve marketplace brought on a lot of new clients and added some great new features that helped clients scale their content creation. On the enterprise side of our business, we started working with multiple Fortune 500 companies and saw year-over-year revenue growth of 230%. I’m really proud of these accomplishments, and I’m even prouder that every member of our team contributed to them.”

About Crowd Content: Crowd Content is a content creation company based in Victoria, BC that helps brands and agencies create online marketing content at scale. The company is backed by well-known angel investors including Todd Dunlop (founder of Neverblue Media and RingPartner) and James DeGreef (founder of GenoLogics and Tectoria Venture Partners). For more information, visit www.crowdcontent.com.

The post Crowd Content Selected as a Finalist for VIATEC’s Scale-Up of the Year Award appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

The company states that its enterprise content program was a strong contributor to the growth, posting a 230% year-over-year revenue increase in 2018. Crowd Content’s enterprise program includes fully managed content creation services powered by the company’s proprietary platform. An experienced in-house project management team and a workforce of 6,000+ professional writers and editors rounds out the service, enabling Crowd Content to deliver publish-ready content at scale to clients.

“As a company, we made several important strides in 2018, but I’m especially excited about the rapid growth in our enterprise division,” said Clayton Lainsbury, Crowd Content CEO. “We’ve built a great team headed by our Director of Enterprise Production, Lisa Rohner, and they’ve done an amazing job servicing and retaining the world’s most prominent brands.”

Lainsbury added that he’s happy to see such a diverse range of clients succeeding with the enterprise program. “We’re working with major retailers, comparison shopping sites, marketing agencies, publishers and other types of businesses. Each of these clients has unique content requirements, and our flexible technology has been a big plus in helping us deliver custom solutions, which in turn produce better results.”

About Crowd Content: Crowd Content is a content creation company based in Victoria, BC that helps brands and agencies create online marketing content at scale. The company is backed by well-known angel investors including Todd Dunlop (founder of Neverblue Media and RingPartner) and James DeGreef (founder of GenoLogics and Tectoria Venture Partners). For more information, visit www.crowdcontent.com.

The post Crowd Content Announces 48% Revenue Growth in 2018 appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Although there’s been plenty of speculation over this latest core algorithm update by Google, with SEOs reporting significant ranking improvements and drops, we still don’t have a ton of clarity around the update.

Even its name has been a source of confusion. Is it actually Florida 2?

The short answer? No.

The long answer? You’ll find out below, along with a more detailed look at what’s going on here.

What is the March Google Algorithm update all about?

Google confirmed through Twitter that they released a “broad core algorithm update,” as they do several times each year.

A broad core update means that Google is not targeting a specific signal, tactic or niche; in fact, it often means it isn’t targeting anything. Broad updates are simply improvements in the overall algorithm for the purpose of better matching search queries to the best search results.

In plain and simple terms, these updates generally are an optimization of the existing process to ensure that great content that satisfies searcher intent continues to take its place at on the first page.

The update was confirmed to have started on March 12th, according to Danny Sullivan, Google’s public Search Liaison.

So why was it referred to as Florida 2?

Search Engine Land has a detailed article explaining this, but here’s a quick synopsis.

Florida 1 — also called Florida — was a significant update made in the early 2000s. It was the first major Google algorithm update, and it ensured the spammy tactics of the previous decade such as leveraging keyword-stuffed affiliate sites to rank for high-volume search terms and then linking to your actual site were no longer contributing to overall high search rankings.

This update left brands, agencies and consultants of the day scrambling to adjust SEO tactics in a major way. Ultimately, the change was for the best as it pushed brands to create higher-quality websites that had a clear focus on creating valuable content.

Florida laid the groundwork for other hard-hitting updates; ones that would impact the remainder of those aforementioned “spammy” websites.

The original Florida update launched in November, 2003 just before PubCon Florida in Orlando — hence the moniker “Florida.”

The March Core Algorithm Update also happened right around a PubCon event in Florida, so people decided to christen it as a sequel. WebMasterWorld.com was the first to refer to this update as Google Florida Update 2 as forum members discussed what impacts they were seeing.

To be clear, though, the two Florida updates are not necessarily related other than both launching when PubCon events were taking place in down South. Florida 1 targeted a specific tactic of using affiliate sites to rank for high-volume search terms and then funneling traffic back to the main site. Florida 2 is a core algorithm update and likely extends well beyond targeting just one tactic.

How does this impact my website?

While we’re still waiting for clarity around the overall impact of the update, we’re watching two things — what Google is reporting and what the experts are saying.

Google shared via Twitter that all sites should remain focused on creating great content. Outside of this recommendation, the search engine has yet to share what exactly this broad update impacts.

Anecdotally, we’re seeing many of our clients benefiting from these changes. They’re mostly focused on creating high-quality, informative content, so that does suggest this update rewards better content.

Who is the update impacting?

Members of the SEO community have been abuzz about websites focused on creating E-A-T content and how they’ve been impacted most.

E-A-T stands for:

• Expertise
• Authority
• Trustworthiness

At this point, discussion suggests that the update has impacted websites that host a lot of this type of informative content, with a particular focus on health sectors.

Further discussions indicate that sites with this type of content are being rewarded in search results, which might be coming at the detriment of sites with less informative content.

Here’s what we’re seeing…

Many SEOs are reporting it seems Google has updated how its algorithm looks at informational keywords as the primary focus. This has impacted many media pages including Complex, Everyday Health, Variety and more.

In SEO-speak, informational keywords are search terms where a user is looking for a specific bit of information. Think of informational as specific and focused — for example, “weather in London” or “alcohol percentage on Fat Tug Beer” as compared to “get play tickets in London” or “buy Canadian beer.” They’re more about learning something than making a transaction.

If you have a site that has a lot of content relating to these informational type keywords, you may have been impacted by this update.

Are you seeing this? Something else? Let us know in the comments.

What are SEO experts saying?

While we’re still waiting for more details on this update, we’re also looking to the experts for their feedback on the March update. Many are just speculating at this time, but it’s important to consider what they’re seeing through their lens.

Here is a collection of insights from several experts who are sharing their initial feedback on this latest update.

Notable SEO expert Mordy Oberstein has shared that many websites took a significant hit or increase in visibility, while failing to initially understand why. When looking at data from March 12 to March 18, some websites actually recovered within a few days. Mordy’s observation shares that this is too preliminary to determine what the actual impact of the update is, though it seems to be less significant when compared to the “Medic Update” from August, 2018.

Marie Haynes, an influencer in the SEO space, shared her thoughts within 48 hours of the update.

Dr. Pete Meyers, Marketing Scientist at Moz, echos Oberstein’s findings around the improvement of some websites that experienced significant declines in search rankings in the months leading up to this update:

WebMasterWorld had plenty of expert forum discussion on the change, with members reporting both positive and negative updates.

One discussion shared:

Based on previous observations these type of Core updates usually take a week+- to fully deployed. Most niches will be affected to varying degrees throughout the week with some days being more pronounced than others.

During the rollout of the update, some days will be up and some days will be down but I find if you have a large initial jump or drop that will be how your site comes out at the end, though it will be not as pronounced.

Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable and a self-proclaimed SEO geek is trying to gather SEO experts’ experiences with this update by asking them to take this survey and share what impacts they’ve seen.

Hopefully, he’ll share his results soon and we can all better understand the impact of this update.

Barry shares:

It is important to check your analytics, Google Search Console, ranking data, etc and see how your sites were impacted on or after March 12th. That is when you may or may not see changes, negative or positive changes.

As you can see, there’s a lot of discussion around this update among the experts, but we’re still trying to learn more and understand the update better.

In closing…

One thing we do know for certain — the update made on March 12 had a significant impact for many brands.

While Google has referred to this as a broad update in that it’s not made to target a specific signal or niche it’s interesting to note that their only advice was to focus on creating great content. That is a bit vague, but knowing that Google is focused on giving searchers the best possible content that best solves their needs, it seems that creating amazing SEO content is the best way to safeguard yourself against future algorithm updates.  

The post Florida 2? What’s Google’s March Core Algorithm Update Really All About? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

The company shared that both its enterprise content division, which provides some of the world’s largest brands with fully-managed content creation services, and its self-service platform, which lets marketers connect directly with with over 6,000 professional writers, contributed to this growth.

While both divisions saw substantial growth, CEO Clayton Lainsbury highlighted that significant platform upgrades currently being beta tested by select clients have enabled publishers to scale their content in a big way on the self-service platform.

“We’re moving several key power features from our enterprise division to our self-service platform,” stated Lainsbury. “Traditionally, these tools were used only by our in-house managed services team. Now, self-service clients have direct access to these tools and it’s helping them scale their content creation efforts similar to what we’ve been doing in-house on the enterprise side.”

One of these features lets customers create structured templates and converts them to a content editor that writers work within. It allows customers to create highly detailed content at scale because each field within the template can be accompanied with specific instructions, character counts, word counts and SEO requirements. The system performs automatic quality checks to ensure all requirements are met before writers submit the work to the client.  

Lainsbury also highlighted Crowd Content’s bulk upload tool which lets clients order hundreds of content items in minutes, as well as a robust API that lets publishers instantly publish content to their content management systems. “Across these three tools, we’re able to provide publishers a solution that lets them order large volumes of content, ensure their requirements are met and then instantly publish it to their site. I’m not aware of another content service that can offer that.”

When asked to quantify how this helps publishers, Lainsbury shared that one client was able to publish over 2,500 posts in less than a year across multiple properties. “We’re seeing small publishers scale up in big ways using our ecosystem, and I’m excited to bring these new features to all our clients very soon.”

About Crowd Content: Crowd Content is a content creation company based in Victoria, BC that helps brands and agencies create online marketing content at scale. The company is backed by well-known angel investors including Todd Dunlop (founder of Neverblue Media and RingPartner) and James DeGreef (founder of GenoLogics and Tectoria Venture Partners). For more information, visit www.crowdcontent.com.

The post Crowd Content Achieves 138% Revenue Growth in January 2019 Due to Powerful New Platform Features appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

During the period from October 1, 2018 to November 30, 2018, the company generated 90% more revenue than during the same period in 2017. On top of that, during September of 2018, Crowd Content generated 147% revenue growth over September of 2017.

Through its proprietary content creation platform, Crowd Content operates a self-serve marketplace and provides fully managed services for enterprise customers with large-scale projects. “We’ve seen growth this year from both business units,” stated Crowd Content CEO, Clayton Lainsbury. “It’s a good feeling when you have two well-developed revenue streams working effectively. We’re even seeing some customers leverage both self-serve and managed services, which is great.” Lainsbury indicates the revenue split between self-serve and managed services for 2018 is approximately 50%.

Crowd Content credits its underlying technology platform for much of its success. In a recent press release, the company shared it has achieved industry-leading turnaround metrics and quality ratings due to several proprietary features that competing platforms or marketplaces lack, including a gamification algorithm that increases the performance of writers and editors working through Crowd Content.

About Crowd Content: Crowd Content is a content creation company based in Victoria, BC that helps brands and agencies create online marketing content at scale. The company is backed by well-known angel investors including Todd Dunlop (founder of Neverblue Media and RingPartner) and James DeGreef (founder of GenoLogics and Tectoria Venture Partners). For more information, visit www.crowdcontent.com.

Media Contact:
Eric Hoppe
Director of Marketing
Crowd Content Media
eric@crowdcontent.com

The post Crowd Content Media Reports 90% Year-Over-Year Revenue Growth appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Perhaps most impressive, Crowd Content has reported that the average turnaround time for a 432-word content order is only one hour.

The company also shared that the average rating from customers per order is 4.15 out of a possible 5.0.

These numbers were taken from a sample of the latest 300,000 orders to move through the company’s proprietary content marketplace.

“It’s exciting to share these numbers,” said Crowd Content CEO, Clayton Lainsbury. “Based on our own research, we believe this to be the fastest turnaround time for custom content creation on the Web. More importantly, though, we’re able to do it without sacrificing quality. The fact that our customer ratings remain high across such a large sample of orders shows that the content is matching and exceeding customer expectations.”

Aside from a meticulous selection process when accepting new writers, Lainsbury attributes a mature gamified technology platform to the above-average performance. “From day one, we’ve leveraged technology and gamification to improve the experience at Crowd Content. The platform is designed to maximize performance in key areas like speed, quality and reliability. For clients, this results in faster turnaround times, higher-quality content and fewer missed deadlines.”

When asked if these performance metrics are translating to financial success, Lainsbury indicated that the company saw 85% revenue growth in Q3 2018 over the same period in 2017. “We’re performing in areas that make a difference for customers, and that makes it easy for them to stay with us. When you combine that with our recent investments in customer acquisition, it sets a foundation for growth that we expect to continue into and throughout 2019.”

About Crowd Content: Crowd Content is a content creation company based in Victoria, BC that helps brands and agencies create online marketing content at scale. The company is backed by well-known angel investors including Todd Dunlop (founder of Neverblue Media and RingPartner) and James DeGreef (founder of GenoLogics and Tectoria Venture Partners). For more information, visit www.crowdcontent.com.

The post Content Marketplace Crowd Content Achieves Industry-Leading Performance Metrics through Gamification appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

“We’re very excited to see another strong financial year to follow up from the 57% revenue growth we saw in 2016,” said Clayton Lainsbury, Crowd Content’s Founder and CEO. “Topline revenue was driven by sharp increases in enterprise business after acquiring several new Fortune 500 customers.”

The content creation company has been able to penetrate a retail segment where its services are desperately needed. Customers such as Bloomingdale’s, Michaels and 3M, to name a few, use Crowd Content to create compelling content at scale for their product pages. These large brands often have hundreds of thousands of SKUs, making it impossible for in-house teams to write, review and manage product copy on a consistent basis. Crowd Content’s enterprise service lets these brands offload those tasks and focus on their core competencies.

“Two things we’ve learned are that the world’s best brands can’t waste time managing content and can’t afford to publish subpar content,” stated Lainsbury. “Customer retention has been exceptionally high because our focus is on delivering publish-ready content. For customers, this means they save time and money by not having to review, edit and revise content before it goes live. It also means they can trust that published content is accurate and designed to sell their products.”

Lainsbury credits the company’s mature technology and refined production process for the success in attracting and retaining large accounts. “For the past two years, we’ve made it our goal to be the best at helping brands create publish-ready content at scale,” he said. “It’s really been a team effort from our development and production teams. They’ve built the platform to handle the volume while adding key layers of quality review throughout the process. It all comes together to create a smart content engine that works for both writers and customers.”

In a recent press release, Lainsbury stated that with its production capabilities running at full speed, Crowd Content will be investing more resources into sales and marketing for 2018. Considering the company has been primarily focused on R&D to this point and hasn’t had a formal marketing effort in place, it expects to see growth increase as customer acquisition campaigns are implemented.

About Crowd Content: Crowd Content is a content creation company based in Victoria, BC that helps brands and agencies create online marketing content at scale. The company is backed by well-known angel investors including Todd Dunlop (founder of Neverblue Media and RingPartner) and James DeGreef (founder of GenoLogics and Tectoria Venture Partners). For more information, visit www.crowdcontent.com.

The post Content Marketing Startup Crowd Content Reports Double Digit Revenue Growth for 2017 appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

With more than 10 years of experience in digital marketing, Hoppe fills an important gap on the Crowd Content team. With six of those years spent as a key player at competing content firm Constant Content, Hoppe brings a relatively large amount of experience and insight in an industry that, while growing quickly, is still young.

“The first thing you notice about Eric is his passion for the content space,” said Crowd Content founder and CEO, Clayton Lainsbury. “It’s contagious. That energy combined with his analytical approach and digital marketing expertise makes him a valuable asset to our company. We’re lucky to have him in a leadership position as we continue to expand.”

When asked about joining Crowd Content, Hoppe stated, “I’ve always admired Crowd Content for its intuitive platform and its unmatched commitment to producing quality content. The word ‘quality’ gets tossed around a lot in this space. But with Crowd Content, you can truly see they’ve put the R&D resources into building a world-class platform, ensuring clients get an exceptional experience and quality content that performs. It’s exciting to be a part of that.”

Up until this point, Crowd Content has primarily relied on word of mouth and organic search traffic to attract new customers. Hoppe will be the first dedicated marketing leader in the company. “The development of our technology and production process has always been top priority, and that’s where we’ve put our resources,” said Lainsbury. “We really feel that now those two components are the best in the industry, so we’ll be investing more into sales and marketing for 2018.”

Despite not having a formal marketing effort in place previously, Crowd Content managed to grow revenues year-over-year by an average of 57% in 2016 and 2017. By shifting its strategy to customer acquisition, Lainsbury expects to surpass that rate by the end of 2018.

About Crowd Content: Crowd Content is a content creation company based in Victoria, BC that helps brands and agencies create online marketing content at scale. The company is backed by well-known angel investors including Todd Dunlop (founder of Neverblue Media and RingPartner) and James DeGreef (founder of GenoLogics and Tectoria Venture Partners). For more information, visit www.crowdcontent.com.

The post Crowd Content Media Hires Industry Expert Eric Hoppe as Director of Marketing appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Writing product copy for large eCommerce companies is one of Crowd Content’s specialties, and we do it a lot. In fact, we’ve written over 100,000 product descriptions to date. You learn a lot when you do something 100,000 times, so we’re joining forces with SEMrush to share what we’ve learned.

Join us on December 7th at 9am PST to hear about what leading eCommerce companies are doing in regards to:

1. Keyword research
2. Duplicate content issues
3. Prioritizing content projects
4. Mapping keywords to content based on intent
5. Using templates to create keywords en masse
6. Product description length
7. Writing style

[ctt template=”4″ link=”3Z74r” via=”no” nofollow=”yes”][WEBINAR] Sprucing up your eCommerce site? Join us on Thursday, December 7 to learn how the experts do it. [/ctt]

Crowd Content CEO Clayton Lainsbury will deliver a quick presentation exploring all these topics, and we’ll then have an open roundtable discussion with several eCommerce experts:

• Paul Lovell – Head of Search at Pricesearcher
• Mike McManus – Digital Marketing Specialist at Marketing Labs
• Greg Shuey – Managing Partner at Stryde eCommerce Marketing
• Rick Dickson – Director of Content and Data Governance at Office Depot

This experienced group will discuss the industry best practices covered in the presentation and will also answer questions from the audience.

If you’d like to hear what these experts advice and get your questions answered, make sure you register for the webinar on SEMrush’s site.

The post [WEBINAR] Crowd Content & SEMRush: Learn the Secret to Creating Killer Product Descriptions appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Today, we have good news. We just released a new feature that lets self-serve clients have any existing content edited and proofread by professional editors on the Crowd Content platform.

The feature is easy to use, and the way you place an order for editing and proofreading services is similar to the way you already place writing orders.

How to Order Editing and Proofreading Services for Existing Content

Create Order

Hover on the “down arrow” of the green Create Order button in your Crowd Content client account. You’ll notice there is a new order type listed in the dropdown menu called Editing & Proofreading.

Click Editing & Proofreading to continue.

Add Existing Content

At the top of this order form, select a Folder for the order. On the next step, use the tools to add the existing content that you would like edited.

You can add your existing content in three ways:

Text

Copy and paste your content into the text area provided. When done, click Upload Text.

Upload

If you have a doc or docx file, use the Upload tab to upload your file. After you have selected your file, click Upload File.

HTML

This option is for adding content with HTML. Copy and paste your HTML into the text area provided. When done, click Upload HTML.

Note: If you would like to add formatted content, please use the Upload or HTML options. Using the Text option will omit any formatting.

After uploading the content, you will see a preview of the content you have added. Review to ensure the content has been added properly. You can also review the word count at this point.

Enter Instructions for Editor

Just like when you place a writing order, you can provide instructions and extra information to the editor to guide him or her so that the finished product meets your needs.

Different clients have different goals when having their existing content edited and proofread. Because of this, focus on providing clear and concise instruction to your editor so that he or she understands exactly what you’re looking for.

Fill out as many of the supporting fields as possible. These fields, like Publish URL, Example URL(s) and the Advanced Options, ensure that you and your editor are on the same page.

Select a Word Count Range

The order form will automatically suggest a word count range based on the content you have already added. However, if you’d like to adjust that word count, you can do so here.

In this section, you can also select which editor(s) will have access to your order.

You have three options: Open, Team, or Direct.

Open

The order is available to all qualified editors. The first editor who decides to claim the job will be the one to review your content.

Team

The order is only available to editors you have placed on a Team that you created in the “Writers” section of your account before you placed the order.

Direct

The order is only available to a single editor that you select.

If you haven’t worked with an editor before or have not arranged anything with your Customer Success Manager, we recommend selecting Open. All editors in the pool have passed a thorough application and test specific to editing and proofreading, so your content will be in good hands.

Place Your Order

Review your information, click Place Order, and you’re done!

What Happens Next?

Your order will be available to the editor(s) you selected.

If you selected Open or Team, the first qualified editor interested in the job will claim it. If you selected Direct, it will go directly to that editor.

The editor will then review the content for correct spelling, grammar and formatting and anything else you listed in your instructions.

The editor will correct any issues found and submit the content back to you for final review and acceptance.

At this time, you will have the option to accept the content or send it back for revision. If you send it back for revision, the editor will revise based on your feedback and then submit it back to you for review. This workflow will continue until you are satisfied with the content.

Feedback?

We hope this new editing and proofreading feature will help you improve any existing content that you may need a second set of eyes on. If you have questions or feedback, please don’t hesitate to contact your Customer Success Manager or the support team.

The post Editing and Proofreading Services for Existing Content Now Available appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

With more than 20 years of experience in consumer research and brand marketing for global brands such as Smirnoff, Jose Cuervo, and Baileys, Rohner brings a wealth of experience to the young and growing company. Specifically, over the last ten years, she managed the production of high-volume content creation programs for top  retailers such as Cooking.com, Williams-Sonoma, and Staples, where she was responsible for delivering thousands of publish-ready content pieces.

“Anyone who sits down with Lisa for five minutes realizes she was born and bred for this role,” said Crowd Content CEO, Clayton Lainsbury. “When it comes to quality assurance and content production in general, there is no replacement for experience. That’s what Lisa brings. She understands that great content turns shoppers into customers. More importantly, she knows how to deliver that content at scale to brands and retailers.”

Rohner saw promise in Crowd Content when she compared it to other companies in the space. “I’ve been in this business for a long time, and Crowd Content impressed me straightaway as it doesn’t operate on the ‘good enough’ principle,” stated Rohner. “Its dedication to becoming a best-in-class enterprise content platform makes it clear that this company will become the leader in the managed content space.”

Based in the New York City area, the addition of Rohner also adds an East Coast presence to the Victoria, BC based Crowd Content. This announcement comes shortly after Crowd Content released its first half earnings for 2016, where it reported 44% revenue growth over the same period in 2015, crediting much of its growth to increased enterprise business.

About Crowd Content: Crowd Content is a content creation company based in Victoria, BC that helps brands and agencies create online marketing content at scale. The company is backed by well-known angel investors including Todd Dunlop (founder of Neverblue Media and RingPartner) and James DeGreef (founder of GenoLogics and Tectoria Venture Partners). For more information, visit www.crowdcontent.com.

The post Crowd Content Media Appoints Industry Veteran as Director of QA and Production appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Crowd Content reported top line revenue growth of 44% for the first half of 2016 over the same period in 2015. They also report that prepaid revenue (payments by customers for services in advance) has risen by the same percentage, indicating that revenue growth for the remainder of 2016 should continue.

Crowd Content’s founder and CEO, Clayton Lainsbury, says the growth is a combination of their self-serve platform’s outstanding performance and a new influx of enterprise business. “It’s exciting to see the growth come from two parts of our business. On one hand, we have our self-serve marketplace where customers can interact with and hire content creators all on their own, with our easy-to-use platform. This marketplace helps thousands of customers create content on virtually any topic — and it happens quickly, with the average turnaround time for a 360-word document only one hour. On the other hand, we’ve also grown the enterprise side of our business where we help retailers and hyper-localized companies manage high-volume projects, creating a thousand or more pieces of content per week.”

Crowd Content attributes their unique, gamified approach and proprietary technology as drivers for all aspects of the business. By rewarding content creators for positive results (like high ratings and quick turnaround times) and by keeping the process fun and engaging (through game-like concepts such as leveling up, bonuses and status), Crowd Content is able to motivate its workforce on a higher level than platforms that rely on pay only for motivation.

These results come shortly after Crowd Content was recognized as a finalist for “Emerging Technology Company of the Year” and “Employee of the Year” (Matt Martin) at the 2016 VIATeC Technology Awards. In the second half of 2016, Crowd Content plans to continue focusing on growing its enterprise business and anticipates further growth into 2017.

About Crowd Content: Crowd Content is a content creation company based in Victoria, BC that helps brands and agencies create online marketing content at scale. The company is backed by well-known angel investors including Todd Dunlop (founder of Neverblue Media and RingPartner) and James DeGreef (founder of GenoLogics and Tectoria Venture Partners). For more information, visit www.crowdcontent.com.

The post Crowd Content Media Releases First Half Results for 2016 appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

This year from September 8th to 11th, join Crowd Content at the premier event celebrating the very best content marketers in the industry.

If you’re a marketing or PR professional that creates or manages content for their company, this is the most valuable networking and learning opportunity you’ll attend all year!

At Content Marketing World 2014, the Cleveland Convention Center in Cleveland Ohio will be bustling with over 1,700 professional marketers from around the world. You’ll have the opportunity to network with the brightest and most creative professionals in the industry, take part in hands-on practice labs specific to your industry and much more.

At the end of the event, you’ll be ready to implement a rock star content marketing strategy that will impress and inspire the leaders in your company.

Find out how to crush the competition with killer content and use strategic content marketing to drive success in your business.

Whether you’re new to content marketing or a seasoned professional, you’ll find the learning and networking opportunities at Content Marketing World to be invaluable.

Walk away with actionable tactics and strategies you’ll want to put in place immediately in your organization to achieve content marketing success!

While you’ll have access to powerful workshops and industry-specific labs over the course of the weekend, you’ll also have the opportunity to kick back and relax over some great music and food at CONTENTFest!

What is CONTENTFest?

Crowd Content is excited to announce that we’re sponsoring this exclusive entertaining event, where you can indulge in delicious eats, great music and a jam-packed evening of fun!

Drop in to CONTENTFest Tuesday, September 9th at the Jacobs Pavillion later that evening to network with other content marketers in a laid-back and fun setting!

Arrive in your dancing shoes and join us on the dance floor as we rock out to a world-class DJ, followed by live performances from Welshly Arms, a rock/blues band, and Northeast Ohio – arguably the greatest Beatles tribute band around! If you’re feeling hungry, you’ll find food trucks for every appetite serving some of the best chow in Cleveland!

Are you planning to attend Content Marketing World this year? If so, we’d love to hear from you! If you haven’t purchased your badge yet, there’s still time left to get in on the world’s biggest and best content marketing event ever!

We hope to see you there!

The post Crowd Content Teams Up with CMWorld to Bring You CONTENTFest! appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

We’ve taken this feedback and infused it into the brand new Crowd Content – a robust and intuitive content creation platform.

The new platform replaces the old one and offers more control managing content orders, greater ability managing your freelance writers, and, overall, is a lot easier to use.

A full tutorial of the new Crowd Content is below. If you don’t have a Crowd Content client account yet, we suggest you create one and check it out. It’s free to sign up and look around.

Dashboard

Your new Dashboard makes it easy and quick to see what’s happening with your recent content orders.

Recent Activity

Easily view recent activity on your account. We’ve added intuitive icons that tell you when orders are placed, picked up by writers, dropped by writers, or ready for review. Simply hover over an activity item to see quick actions you can perform for that order.

Order Status Shortcuts

Just above your recent activity, we list all orders you currently have for each status. Just click on a status, like “Ready” for example, to see all orders that currently have that status.

Easy Access to Create Orders and Add Funds

You’ll notice that the green Create Order and Add Funds buttons are shown in the same place on every page. This makes it easy to find these commonly used actions, saving you time and frustration.

Featured Blog Posts

We’re starting to publish more and more great content at our blog, Crowd Content Resources. On your Dashboard, we list the 4 most recent blog posts to keep you updated on content marketing trends, how-tos, and Crowd Content updates.

Notification Menu

A new feature we’ve added is the Notification Menu. You can view this menu by clicking on the small “notepad” to the right of your account balance.

The Notification Menu keeps you up to date on all happenings with your account. For example, we’ll add new notifications when you receive messages from writers or when orders become ready for review.

Help Menu – Your Client Account Manager

Click the “question mark” icon that is next to the Notification Menu to view your dedicated Client Account Manager’s contact info.

All clients at Crowd Content get a dedicated Client Account Manager regardless of how big or small you are. Use your account manager to help with system support or to give guidance on content strategy.

My Account Menu

In the top right of your screen, you’ll see your profile image or a default image if you haven’t added a profile image. Click this image to view your My Account Menu.

You can manage your account and navigate to important areas of the website from this menu. Here is a list of the menu items described:

• Edit Image (hover over image) – allows you to add a new profile image or crop your existing one
• Add Funds – allows you to add funds to your account
• Account Information – allows you to update your contact information
• Deposit History – shows you the funding history on your account
• Low Funds Notification – allows you to set a low funds threshold. If your account balance falls below this amount, we will send you an email notification
• Change Password – allows you to change the password on your account
• FAQ – brings you to the frequently asked questions from Crowd Content clients
• App Directory – allows you to install apps and connect your Crowd Content account to partner services
• Sign Out – safely signs you out of Crowd Content

Writer Management – Profile Images and Pen Names

One of the biggest upgrades to the new Crowd Content platform is the way you see and work with your writers.

For every writer you interact with, you now see their profile image and their Pen Name. You can also hover over a writer’s image anytime you see it to bring up a mini writer profile.

When viewing the writer’s profile, you can see his or her rating (from 1 to 4 stars) and perform the following key tasks:

• Blacklist Writer – blacklisting a writer means that the writer will no longer have access to any new orders you post
• Send Direct Order to Writer – this automatically takes you to a new order form with the writer pre-selected. The new order will then be sent directly to this writer.

My Content – A Comprehensive Order Management Tool

In the old Crowd Content, you had My Orders – an area that simply listed your orders. In the new Crowd Content, you have My Content – a tool that not only lists your orders, but allows you to perform advanced filtering actions and organize your content into folders.

Quick Actions Give You More Control

Hover over any order to see available actions for that order. Quickly Copy, Edit, Pause or Delete an Order. Or view the History of that order to date.

Progress Indicator

Easily see how much progress your writer has made on your order. The percentage shown is based on the number of words written by your writer as a percentage of the maximum word count you specified for the order.

Note: the progress indicator is replaced with the rating you gave the writer for that order once the order is Completed.

Colored Status Labels

We make it easy for you to know what’s happening with each order by listing colored status labels. As you use Crowd Content, you become familiar with the colors and know quickly what status each order is in.

Robust Filtering Options

The filtering options here are flat out amazing. Filter by:

• Status – see only orders in a certain status, like “Ready” for example
• Folder – see only orders in a certain folder
• Quality – see only orders placed at a certain Quality Level
• Writer – see only orders from one or multiple writers
• Rating – see only orders you gave a certain rating to. For example, view all Completed orders that you rated as Excellent. Then use those writers for future work.
• Date – see only orders from a certain date range

You can also combine any of the above filters together to mine deeper into your content. To clear all filters, simply click the refresh icon to the right of the date range filter.

Batch Controls Save You Time

Click the check boxes to the left of the orders to perform batch controls. Current batch controls available are Accept, Delete, and Pause.

Drag and Drop to Organize Content into Folders

Want to move a content order to another folder? Easy! Just hover to the left of the check box on any order and then click and drag the order to a folder on the left.

Condensed View for Power Users

Are you managing a lot of content? We make it easy for power users to get the job done. Click the button with 4 lines on it to the right of “Display” in the top right.

This brings up a condensed view that lets you see more orders at one time. Despite the view being condensed, you don’t lose any functionality. Simply click the “gear” symbol to the right of any order to access all available actions for that order.

Chat with Your Writer – Communication Is Key to Project Success

We’ve made it easy to communicate with your writers by offering an instant messaging feature. Chat with your writer while you review his first draft and let him know what you think. This feature also helps when one side needs to clarify the instructions, limiting needed revisions and saving you valuable time.

Projects Are Now Called Folders

A small change made on the new platform is that Projects are now called Folders. Folders behave in the same way that Projects did on the old platform – they are simply a way for you to organize your content orders.

If you have several websites, or have a large website with several sections, you can create a folder for each website or section.

If you’re an agency, create a folder for each of your clients.

Advanced Order Management – Even More Control!

As you may have noticed, a big theme built into the new Crowd Content is maximizing control over your ordering and management processes.

After placing an order, enjoy the following tools that give you full control with every content order you place:

• Edit Orders – this is a huge upgrade over the old platform. You can now edit an order provided that it is still in Placed status. Edit an order to change the word count, title, instructions, or anything else. The only thing you can’t edit as of now is the Content Type (from Custom to Tweets to Facebook Posts).
• Pause Orders – this is another new feature. You can now pause an order. This simply puts the order on hold without deleting it. You can then unpause the order when you’re ready to put it live again. Note: if you pause an order that is “Being Written”, the order will not be paused unless/if the current writer drops the order.
• Copy Orders – click Copy if you want to create an order with similar details as a previous order. By clicking Copy, an order form will appear with the exact same details and instructions as the order you clicked Copy from. You can then make any changes you want and place the order as a new order.
• View History – clicking History will show you the status history of the order. For example, it will show you when the order was placed, picked up by a writer, dropped by a writer, ready for review, and completed. This can help when trouble shooting an order.
• Delete Orders – you can delete any order that is still in Placed status.

A More Sophisticated Content Ordering Form

The new order form is still very similar to the previous order form, but offers a few key advantages.

Content Type – Now Order Tweets or Facebook Posts!

Before, there was no specific Content Type for Tweets or Facebook Posts. You had to request a large word count range and then ask the writer to create as many Tweets or Facebook Posts as they could within the word count. This was confusing and lacked quality control; character counts were not monitored.

In the new Crowd Content, we’ve introduced the Content Type. You now have the following content types to choose from:

• Custom – this is exactly what we offered before. If you want a blog post, product description, article, page for your website, or any type of content other than Tweets or Facebook posts, choose Custom.
• Tweets – choose this type if you want Tweets for your Twitter campaigns. When writers are working on Tweets, all character counts are monitored and are guaranteed to be between 15 and 140 characters.
• Facebook Posts – choose this type if you want Facebook Posts for your Facebook page. When writers are working on Facebook Posts, all character counts are monitored and are guaranteed to be between 100 and 300 characters.

Order Type – Open to Crowd or Direct with Writer

The new order form makes it easy to send orders directly to your preferred writer.

Choose Open Order if you want to make your order available to all qualified writers (based on your order criteria).

Choose Direct Order if you want to place your order directly with a preferred writer. A dropdown menu will appear to your right with the images and names of writers you have previously worked with.

More Control over Processing Time

If you have an order that requires a lot of research or extra work, you can now give your writer extra time. Simply open the Advanced Options and then adjust the Processing Time.

App Directory – Your Workflow Just Got More Efficient

We’re happy to announce the launch of the Crowd Content App Directory! We’ve partnered with some pretty big names to connect your content with services you already use.

After installing an app on your Crowd Content account, you can use it by going to the Tools and Apps tab of any Completed order. From here, you can use your apps to send completed content to partner services.

Currently, the App Directory has the following apps:

ShopWriters (Shopify)

Shopify has everything you need to create your own ecommerce store. ShopWriters is an app that is built directly into your Shopify admin panel. To use this app, you need to have a Shopify account.

The ShopWriters App allows you to:

• Order content for Product Descriptions or Blog Posts from your Shopify admin panel
• Automatically publish completed content to your store (no copying or pasting!)
• Manage thousands of Product Descriptions with ease (no spreadsheets!)

WordPress

WordPress is free web software that allows you to create a beautiful website or blog. Connect your Crowd Content account to your WordPress website or blog to:

• Automatically send completed content to your blog or website (no more copying or pasting!)
• Set content to draft status or to publish instantly
• Manage multiple blogs or websites by connecting multiple WordPress accounts

Constant Contact

Constant Contact helps small organizations grow their businesses by providing email, event, and other online marketing tools. Use the Constant Contact App to:

• Send completed content directly to your Constant Contact account
• Create a new email campaign for your completed content

MailChimp

MailChimp makes it easy for marketers to send email newsletters, manage subscriber lists, and track campaign performance. Use the MailChimp App to:

• Send completed content directly to your MailChimp account
• Create a new email campaign for your completed content

HootSuite

HootSuite is a leading social media dashboard that helps you manage and measure your social networks.

Crowd Content is fully integrated with your HootSuite account. After connecting your Crowd Content account with your HootSuite account, you will be able to place, review, and accept Crowd Content orders from within your HootSuite Dashboard!

Use the HootSuite App to:

• Automatically send completed Tweets, Facebook Posts, or other content to your HootSuite Dashboard
• Send completed content to streams like Twitter, Facebook and WordPress from your HootSuite Dashboard

My Schedules – Automating the Content Creation Process

Looking to automate your content creation process? Is the scheduling tools built into Crowd Content.

To create a new schedule, simply create an order and enable the schedule for that order. Then, to view and manage existing schedules, click on My Schedules in the main header.

To learn more about scheduling orders and to learn best practices for using the scheduler, please read Automating Content Creation: 5 Best Practices for Using Schedules.

Thank You, Clients and Writers!

We want to send a huge thank you to all of our clients and writers. We couldn’t have put this amazing content creation platform together without your feedback and support. We truly feel that a positive content community is coming together around Crowd Content and we’re just happy to be a part of it.

As always, if you see any bugs or have feedback about the new platform, please contact support or your friendly Client Account Manager. Thanks!

The post Crowd Content Releases Powerful Content Marketing Platform for Businesses appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.