Michael O'Neill

The Content Marketing Weekly is your go-to resource for all things, you guessed it, content + marketing. This week’s edition dispels the myth that boring industries aren’t cut out for engaging web content, highlights the latest commentary on SEO as it stands today and presents a brand new tool that Facebook is using for paid ads.

Don’t you just love Fridays?

Tangential Content Earns More Links and Social Shares in Boring Industries [New Research]

Say it with me: “You are not your readers.”

Too often, executives believe their industry is too boring or that their product isn’t all that groundbreaking. And so they waste their marketing budgets on writing sales content that only internal stakeholders read, because, again, it’s boring and dense and no one loves you.

However, in this article from Moz, we see how content marketing is, in essence, a diversion from heavily branded, overly promotional content that doesn’t work. Using “tangential content,” or non-branded, indirectly related topics, you achieve higher top-of-funnel awareness, increase link-building potential, resonate emotionally with an audience and craft a diverse archive of collateral.

A study of 835 marketing campaigns revealed tangential content generated 77 percent more social shares and 30 percent more media mentions, on average, than branded content.

Tangential concepts aren’t meant to speak to bottom-of-the-funnel sales leads, so you can cast a wider net by writing on topics that are actually of interest to a general, less niche audience.

A common example is the “unboxing” videos. Warehouses, retailers and logistics companies have hopped on this YouTube phenomenon because it allows them to be topical, trendy and still somewhat relevant to their services – who cares if it’s not a direct correlation.

Read the rest here.

13 SEO Experts Share Their Tips for Newbies

There’s nothing better than free tips, especially when you’re starting out.

So here are some from around the industry:

  • Read a ton, but rely on your own SEO experiments.
  • Go to conferences and listen.
  • Become proficient in JavaScript, HTML and other browser/developer tools.
  • Optimize your landing pages for goodness sake.
  • SEO in competitive markets can take a looooong time.
  • Know your baseline performance metrics and set clear future goals.
  • Trust your analytics.
  • Know that your job is likely to change, in some fashion, each year.
  • Snippets can do so much for you – optimize your metadata.
  • Focus first on being an authority on a single concept.

There are plenty more, so read the full article here.

Facebook’s Dynamic Creative Can Generate up to 6,250 Versions of an Ad

Let’s face it. Conversion rate optimization can be a tough cookie to crack. It’s arduous, often repetitive work that not many people have experience in.

But Facebook is potentially making your paid social ad efforts all the more easy with its newest product rollout.

Marketing Land spotlights Facebook’s latest ad generation tool, dynamic creative, which runs through Facebook Ads Messenger and Power Editor. How it works is that you add 30 assets to dynamic creative, which breaks down into:

  • 10 images or videos.
  • Five headlines.
  • Five captions.
  • Five text descriptions.
  • Five CTAs.

Dynamic creative then generates 6,250 unique combinations of your ad and serves only the best mix to users based on which ads are likely to be most successful.

This feature automates the conversion rate process and enables you to (hopefully) reduce your CPC.

Find out the rest here.

SEO Ranking Factors in 2017: What’s Important and What’s Not

Speak to any digital strategist or analytics wizard and they’ll likely talk about SEO ranking factors as if they’ve got breaking news. But at its core, the key considerations Google funnels into its algorithms have largely been the same the last few years, with a few tweaks here and there.

That being said, SEO is a moving target when we’re talking about highly competitive search terms, building out new web pages, targeting commercial decision-makers and keeping pace with the latest social media platforms (social is a prominent ranking signal, after all).

Search Engine Land compiled findings from SMX East, an SEO/SEM event, and provided a bit more context on their implementation.


Some of the most important ranking factors, according to panelists at the event, were:

It’s important to note that certain industries have different ranking factors, so fixed, generalized SEO is a thing of the past. Factors that may not be as important anymore are:

  • Keywords in titles (only 48 percent of position 1 results had keywords in title tags).
  • More words ≠ better rankings (but more relevant words do).

Read all the rest here.

Another Friday in the bag. Now go home and rethink your digital strategy.