CT No.205: Build website authority through audience research

In this week's light issue:

• In the final pre-order push for More than (key)Words!
• A thought starter for finding your company's path to creative idea approval
• Three content jobs: Probing the creative and editorial sides of content strategy
• Content tech links of the week: How users feel about social media and more
• Did you read? About the time a major consultancy mislabeled and misused its stock footage at the expense of (my) taxpayer dollars

In next week's heavy issue: braiding quality sourcing and trust signals into content development processes.

Coming March 31 (and yes, after a couple of delays, that's the final delivery date! I can see the light at the end of the editing and platform configuration tunnel): A course that will change how you think about audience research in just a few hours.

According to this week's big splashy research from SparkToro (itself a great audience research tool!), around 82% of referral traffic to long-tail websites arrives from keyword-based search engines.

No matter how you've felt about SEO in the past, your potential audience is typing keywords into search bars to find content like yours. The only difference between this behavior now and a decade ago is that the search engines are much smarter — and actively looking to prioritize higher quality content.

Do you know what language your audience is using? Do you know how to organize and position that keyword research to match your human-created, idea-rich content with your audience's needs?

More than (key)Words covers editorial-focused keyword research, step-by-step, to expand your toolkit and reach your audience. Get started right away by researching keywords that support your current content creation goals from the point of view of building useful authority, not just achieving rankings or traffic.

With this course, you will:

• Gain an understanding of why keywords are important and how they work within natural language processing algorithms
• Learn the tools and techniques to mine and organize keyword data usefully, empathetically, and practically to build an audience
• Understand where your website already has search authority that you might not know about
• Develop techniques to build audience via human-navigated knowledge graphs, rather than relying on flimsy software recommendations
• Complete your own keyword research exercise as you complete the course—on your own content, or using sample data

Best of all, More than (key)Words is relatively short (approximately 2.5 hours of videos plus exercises) and can be completed in 5 days—or at whatever pace you choose.

Use the promo code MTK60 to get the exclusive preorder pricing of $199, available only until March 31.

Content production thought starter

Creatively focused content jobs

This week's three jobs are not for the generalists or the "everything is content" people. These roles require skills far more specific than "content designer" or "content strategist." Check 'em out.

• Lead Copywriter, Strategy and Brand Voice for Rivian
• Manager, Editorial and Storytelling Creation for Hilton
• Executive Editor of the AI Editorial Board at Nota, a new tool for using AI in journalism

Content tech links of the week

• Lest you have any questions about your greatest potential for attracting traffic and referrals, check out this new super high-quality research from Sparktoro and Datos. Yes, I already linked it above. It's that good. Optimizing websites for search: still an important and necessary process.
• I finally read the HomeFresh piece on "how Google is killing independent sites like ours," and it's a doozy. To be fair, in addition to Google, we should also be blaming major media companies for abusing their brand authority and using spammy and deceptive tactics to boost affiliate revenue. It's shocking how brazen the Wirecutter copycatting is—but it's RealSimple doing Wirecutter without the quality reporting.
  
  Anyway, support independent publishing! And keep your fingers crossed that Google is better able to identify and penalize review deception.
• Similarly, Vox brings up a great point—that it is nearly impossible to have an independent creative career without constantly self-promoting on social media. But as in the article above, the blame should go as much to big tech as it does to publishers and media companies, who too heavily lean on creators' vanity metrics instead of using adapting their own PR, marketing, and sales departments for digital promotion. I've worked on both sides of the publishing equation, and it's complicated, but also: social media success does not always correlate with sales. It's deeply unfair to judge creators on the size of their online audiences.
• Link in Bio covers how to write better social media captions.
• How are social media users feeling about the platforms they use? Pretty good, actually. At least, they're feeling better than last year, according to Designing Tomorrow.
• Super happy to see this addressed in another source: Why website navigation matters for news SEO, from the cool cats at WTF is SEO?
• Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a new podcast co-created by Ben Whitelaw of the excellent newsletter on trust and safety in social media, Everything in Moderation.
• Sesame Street gets the Formats Unpacked treatment, via friends of The Content Technologist at Storythings.

The Content Technologist is a newsletter and consultancy based in Minneapolis, working with clients and collaborators around the world. The entire newsletter is written and edited by Deborah Carver, independent content strategy consultant, speaker, and educator.

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Cultural recommendations / personal social: Spotify | Instagram | Letterboxd

Did you read? is the assorted content at the very bottom of the email. Cultural recommendations, off-kilter thoughts, and quotes from foundational works of media theory we first read in college—all fair game for this section.

This week in automation whoopsies, the city of Minneapolis (where I live) paid global consultancy Accenture $950k to create a police recruitment campaign... and the resulting ad displayed footage of the rowhouses of Baltimore.

Now, Baltimore is a great city, but it looks very different than Minneapolis. Specifically, we don't have rowhouses. Baltimore does, and we know that because we've all watched The Wire.

The stock footage of the city was just mislabeled, says Accenture. Wow! What incompetence, says me. Why the city couldn't hire one of the many high-quality video ad agencies based in town is baffling. After all, Minneapolis is one of the top advertising cities in the U.S.

But instead the city hired behemoth Accenture and spent nearly a million dollars on a campaign that, though now corrected to depict MPLS, does not address the main barrier to recruitment: the fact that the MPD is under a consent decree from the federal government because of its long, globally recognized history of racist policing. Instead of addressing and overcoming complications, we get toxic positivity. But ideas aside...

Get your taxonomies correct, especially when labeling stock footage. In this day and age we shouldn't be farming out the taxonomy to the part-time college student or AI. Facts matter. Labels matter.