Article

What Does “Better” Really Mean?

Advertising Analytics Consumer Behavior Data Marketing Testing

April 22, 2024

For nearly seven years, I’ve used the following slide in presentations at industry events, at corporate trainings, in classes and with our internal team:

It’s one of my favorite slides. It combines three things I believe to be essential for success: (1) a relentless desire to improve; (2) an obsession with your audience and (3) a structured process designed to create surplus value for your organization/brand.

After years of using this slide, I thought it was self-explanatory and crystal-clear. Then, at an event a few weeks ago, someone asked me a question I had never thought of:

“So, we should create content that is 10x better – from which point of view? Google? The target audience? Our bosses/clients? We can’t make it better in the eyes of everyone.”

This is, undeniably, a marvelous question. It got me thinking – how much of what we (marketers) do from a content production & optimization standpoint is done for the search engine? How much is done for our egos? How much is done for our business (or our client’s business)? How much is done for the audience?

The “test” I’ve always used when evaluating content is a play on John Rawls’ famous “Veil of Ignorance”: Imagine that intermediaries (gatekeepers, search engines, etc.) don’t exist – so forget ranking factors, google updates, publication politics, censorship, core web vitals, all of it. In this reality, what is the content you would create to earn the attention of your target audience(s)?

Put another way: the only things worth doing are the things you’d do if Google didn’t exist.

If the only reason you’re writing that article about obscure topic X is because Google (or AHRefs, or SEMRush, or Moz) told you there’s 10,000 monthly searches for it and it has a low difficulty / high expected CTR (meaning you’ll be likely to rank highly + drive more clicks to your site), you’re doing it wrong.

If you are re-arranging content, or removing valuable information, or altering your user experience for the singular, express purpose of improving your Core Web Vitals score, you’re doing it wrong.

If your stated objective for an ongoing digital PR campaign is to secure links from third parties, with the goal of improving your link profile (and therefore, getting more clicks from organic search), you’re doing it wrong.

I can already hear the groaning from the SEO community: “Your rankings will tank!” “If you do this, your site will get crushed by the next update!” “The entire point is to get traffic!” “Google DOES exist, so you have to create content/optimize it for them!” (all of these are actual quotes, from actual practitioners, that I’ve noted over the last ~year).

My response to all of this: I don’t give a damn about any of those things. I care about results. Dollars-and-cents. Pounds-fucking-sterling. Drachmas, Liras, Euros, Rupees. Whatever. That’s the scoreboard. That’s where the action happens. The rest is just noise, bullshit and fireworks: all designed to hold your attention while providing nothing of substantive value.

Now that I’ve (probably) offended the entire SEO community, let’s unpack why – and what to do next.

Let’s Talk Principles:

Any action (or inaction) you take must be evaluated relative to your principles + objectives – and different people can have different operating principles. Here are mine:

Anything worth doing is worth doing brilliantly well.
If you do the same things as everyone else, you’ll get the same things as everyone else.
Get as close to people & profit as possible + evaluate from this point
It doesn’t matter how brilliant it is if only the wrong people read it.

It is from these principles that I approach content creation. You’ll notice there’s nothing in there about Google. There’s nothing in there about technical optimization. There’s nothing in there about SEO or SEM at all.

Principle #1: Anything Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Brilliantly Well

Perhaps the purest articulation of (1) comes from Lennox Hastie (the British-Australian chef), when he explained why his restaurant (Fire Door, if you’re interested) only has a single steak on the menu: “There’s heaps of steakhouses everywhere in Australia. If I was going to do a steak, I was only going to one steak. And it had to be the best one.”

Lennox Hastie’s approach to steak perfectly encapsulates my philosophy on content: if I’m going to write an article on a topic, I’m only going to write one, and my overriding objective is to make it the best damn article on that topic. There are only a handful of other people I’ve observed who do this with consistency: Mike Ryan from Smarter eCommerce, Aaron Orendorff (now at FERMAT – lucky them), Elizabeth Marsten (Tinuiti), Fred Vallaeys (Optmyzr), Aleyda Solis (Oranti), Lily Ray (Amsive Digital) all come to mind (and I’m sure are not the only ones).

Content that follows this principle goes farther, deeper, broader than anything else available. It doesn’t settle for following the best practices, or re-stating everything else on the first page of Google, or repackaging common knowledge with a few nuggets of insight – it goes orders of magnitude farther. It raises the bar so high the cost of following is prohibitive.

Want an example? Check out this article from Aaron Orendorf (“AO”). It’s 4,000+ words and 95 (!!!) pages. If you want to learn about landing pages for eCommerce, there is NOTHING on the internet more brilliant, insightful, inspirational or comprehensive than this (trust me, I’ve looked).

Quite candidly, this article could be a small fraction of its current size and still be better than 95%+ of the other content on this topic. But that AO was not content to just do that – the fact that he found 100+ screenshots, shared 10+ different frameworks, included dozens of actionable tips and put together an entire design class worth of knowledge – all for a single article, on a niche topic – is what makes all the difference.

Truly brilliant content is the product of expertise and obsession.

Anyone (and most machines) can write a-little-better-than-the-top-of-the-bell-curve content. Everyone can copy what’s already ranking. There are plenty of people out there who say things like, “Don’t spend 5 or 10 hours writing a banger post; just spend an hour, dip your toes in the pool of whatever-the-hell-it-is-we-dip-our-toes-in and see if it’s worth it.” I’m sure they mean well, but why?

If you’re going to write something, write something great. Or just don’t write. The internet is awash in mediocrity, and I have no interest or intention of adding to it.

And yes, I know this doesn’t scale. I know, at first glance, it makes no logical sense to spend 5, 10, 20+ hours writing a single article when that same time could be used to produce 10+ perfectly fine, same-as-everyone-else caliber pieces of content. The difference is that I’m not interested in being average; I want to set the bar at “remarkable”, then jack it up a few more pegs. The internet is full of meaty-part-of-the-bell-curve content – and when everyone looks and sounds the same, the opportunity is found going where they don’t: to the tails.

Principle #2: If You Do What Everyone Else Does, You’ll Get What Everyone Else Gets

SEOs and content marketers have created a tried-and-true recipe for ranking for just about anything:

Identify what content ranks in the top-5 / top-10 of the SERP
Analyze the commonalities for those high-ranking articles
Find the gaps + opportunities– what was missed, or where you have unique value
Create an article that replicates the ranking articles + includes the gap content
Sprinkle in some timely news, updated content, stats and/or links
Run it through ChatGPT to verify you’ve covered everything in (2) + (3)
Publish
Watch the GA4 numbers go up and to the right

The overwhelming majority of people who work in SEO and Content Marketing know this playbook – which has resulted in most ranking articles looking and sounding the same (with minor differences), and the ultimate winner (usually) decided by the reputation/authority of the publishing brand.

ChatGPT (and generative AI more generally) have only made this worse by reducing the effort required for (2) above – at least in the olden days (read: before ChatGPT), a person actually had to read and evaluate each ranking article. Today – it can be done with a few prompts and a few links.

Everything that follows step #2 above tends to be an exercise in marginal value creation – because most content marketers don’t have the deep, nuanced mastery of a topic to do more than that. Most marketers + agencies are evaluated based on the number of articles written, or the overall rankings, or organic traffic – so that’s what they solve for by whatever means necessary – even if that means diminishing the brand with middling content, adding no value to the lives of their target audience, reiterating what’s already muttered across the SERP, whatever.

If you’re wondering what that looks like, go over to ChatGPT, or Gemini, or Claude and prompt it with something along these lines:

I’m a [your job title] writing an article on the topic of [your core topic]. This article should be comprehensive and expert. The target audience is [target audience segment] who [challenge/pain point/objective]. This audience is expert on the topic, and as a result, expect unique, high-value, original content they can’t find elsewhere. Please provide an outline for this article, along with bullet points to include in each section.

If the response to that prompt is better, more comprehensive and/or more informative than what you can write on the topic, then you don’t know it well enough to write something remarkable – and that’s OK! All that means is that it is time to pull in true experts (SMEs, practitioners, etc.), do more research and/or find a new angle. Proceeding to create content where you can’t add true, unique value is just an exercise in action/activity, instead of an exercise in value creation.

Let me be clear: the standard content marketing playbook is a recipe for incremental evolution, not revolution. Every new #1 ranking is marginally better than the previous one, but none of them are remarkable. None of them provide the kind of massive, unique, can’t-find-it-anywhere-else value that makes your target audience giddy with excitement and overloaded with value. It’s just more “meh” in a world already awash with it.

All of this leads to a single, inescapable conclusion: the way most brands think about and evaluate their content marketing + SEO is fundamentally broken.

Principle #3: Get As Close To People & Profit As Possible

Rankings are bullshit & visits are vanity. There, I said it.

For as long as I can remember (and probably much longer than that), SEO has obsessed about three things:

Rankings
Search Volume
Traffic (Search Volume * Click Rate)

None of those things have intrinsic value. They are, at best, proxies for things that have some value, which themselves are proxies for what has real value (contribution dollars + clients/customers).

All of this leads to the billion-dollar question: why do we give a single damn about rankings? Who appointed search volume the north star for content production? Why are these two things core components in our evaluation framework for content?

Here’s the reality: the value of a #1 ranking in organic search has never been lower – between the ad explosion, the SGE rollout, never-ending SERP features and progressively more searches happening outside of Google, being #1 isn’t what it used to be.

Years ago, Rand Fishkin shared something that has stuck with me forever: it is better to have 100 ravenous, passionate, open-it-the-second-it-hits-my-inbox subscribers than it is to have 10,000 lukewarm ones. It’s better to get 100 passionate, relevant website visitors than 100,000 faceless, nameless ones. Quantity does not drive quality.

That perfectly encapsulates my approach to rankings + search volume: I don’t care how many people search for a given query. I care that the right people are searching for it, and I care that those people leave the article thinking, “That was SO MUCH better than anything else I’ve read on this topic.”

Quite candidly, many of my articles don’t rank for high-volume terms, and that’s intentional: most people searching for generic stuff like “paid search tips for 2024” aren’t my audience. They want an easy-to-digest SEL or mar-tech vendor article that they can skim and feel accomplished. Cool. There are plenty of those out there.

But if you want advanced Google Ads functionalities for lead generation (as an example) – something that’s beyond niche – you’ll find my article on the topic near the top of the SERP. And when you read it and compare it to the other high-ranking articles, you’ll notice that my article includes content that isn’t found in any of them. That’s an example of unique value.

In fact, a plurality of my site’s traffic comes from a combination of private group (slack communities, WhatsApp groups, LinkedIn groups, etc.) traffic and so-specific-someone-had-to-tell-them searches. And the people who come from those two sources sign up for my newsletter and submit inquiries at a rate that is 11x higher than generic searches, and those subscribers/inquiries produce ~8x higher value.

In short: those people create nearly 100x more value per visit, than a generic non-branded organic visitor. Add on the fact that it is more difficult, more cutthroat and more competitive to get those 1,000 generic visits than to get the 10 hyper-relevant ones – so why would I ever care about search volume?

My evaluation method for content centers on value created for my client or my business, not on rankings or clicks or whatever. The two examples above (inquiries + newsletter subscriptions) are prime examples of people + profit, which are the ONLY things that actually matter to successful organizations. Either you’re growing your audience + improving your financial health, or you’re not.

When everyone else zigs (search volume), zag (find the hidden gems they overlook).

Obsess about search VALUE, not search volume.

Principle #4: Brilliant Content Only Matters If It Is Read By The Right People

At the end of the day, the ultimate objective of any content strategy is to get remarkable content into the hands of people who are ready, willing and able to do something positive with it – whether that’s decision-makers, potential hires, customers, clients, referral partners, whatever.

In most content marketing / SEO circles, distribution is Google’s job – which is why the playbook I mentioned above exists: it is designed to off-load the lion’s share of distribution work to Google or Microsoft. That’s the point of targeting keywords with relatively high search volumes & expected click-through rates: to get traffic.

Mathematically, it makes perfect sense. It’s also staggeringly wrong.

Once you’ve written something remarkable, you (not Google, not Meta, not LinkedIn, not the media, not your network) are responsible for distributing it. It isn’t Google’s job to get your article into the hands, hearts and minds of relevant people – it’s your job.

There are three core points I want to make on this topic:

Audience understanding is essential.
Adopt a “dialing for dollars” mentality
Distribution is perpetual.

Point #1: Audience Understanding

That starts with understanding WHERE relevant conversations are happening and WHO is participating in them – then ensure your article is shared there.

If you’re not sure where to get started, go sign up for SparkToro (no, I have zero affiliation with them – I just love the platform). Type in the topic. Put in high-ranking articles. Find the gems:

Each one of these sections contains absolute gold for content distribution. These are the places where your target audience is getting information – and thus, where you can add value. If you’re not proactively distributing your content in these areas, you’re abdicating your responsibility.

Take, for instance, the social media “hidden gems” section:

Long before you press “publish”, you should be following each of these accounts on social AND engaging with them – drop informative nuggets. Share helpful resources. Participate in the conversation. Tease your article.

Then, when your article drops, DM, email, Slack Message those people and ask them to read and share it if they find it valuable. If they don’t, ask for feedback – what was missing? Why didn’t they find it valuable? How could it be improved? Actively listen to their feedback and incorporate it, then re-share it again.

If there are trade/industry publications that reference other articles on the topic (you can discover these through Moz/AHREFS), reach out to the reporter/author directly. Share your article and (most importantly) WHY it merits inclusion in their existing article:

Good afternoon [name]:

I think your article entitled [title] is absolutely fantastic – it’s been incredibly helpful and valuable to me, and I’m sure to the many others who have read it.

I noticed you referenced several other resources in that article, all of which are quite useful, including: [link, link, link]. I wanted to share my most recent article on this topic with you, which includes detailed content on the following topics that have not been discussed on those articles, but which I’m sure you agree would be valuable and pertinent to your readers:

[Point]

If you believe, as I do, that your audience would benefit from this content, I’d greatly appreciate it if you’d include a link to this article alongside your existing links.

Finally, if there’s anything you feel I could improve in this article, please let me know – my overriding objective is to continually improve my work and add more value to our community.

Thanks

[Your Name]

Customize each one (yeah, it takes time and effort). Set aside 20-30 minutes every week to send them out.

For the podcasts and YouTube channels (also included in the SS above), reach out to each host with a personalized note linking your article/the value you provide to their audience/show. When you are invited on the show, talk about your work and reference your article IN THE CONTEXT of the topic – don’t be overly promotional, but be clear – “If this is a topic that’s interesting to you, I’ve recently published a detailed article on the topic. You can access it at [mysite.com/[showname]]. This requires you to create a unique redirect, but that gives you DATA on which shows are generating high-quality traffic, which, over time, allows you to more to reach the high-quality audiences, and avoid spending time on efforts that produce low-quality, low-value visitors.

Point #2: The Dialing For Dollars Mentality

I’m not going to lie to you: doing the work in Point #1 is a sisyphean exercise. It’s miserable. You’ll send out 100 emails/messages, and maybe hear back from 10 – and half (or more) of those 10 will be rejections.

The reality is that 90% of authors will give up at or before sending 100 outreach messages.

95% will give up before or at sending 500.

Only 1% will ever send 1,000 or more outreach messages.

And the Venn diagram of the 1% above and the top-1% of most-cited/most-referenced authors is pretty much a circle.

As miserable as it is, it’s a numbers game. The more research you do, the more connections you make, the more outreach you send, the more places you share, the greater your probability of getting your article/content/video/whatever seen by the right people.

I know this isn’t a common thing in marketing, but it is in sales. To share a personal anecdote: in college, I worked in Advancement for a summer. Our job was to cold call alumni for small-dollar (read: sub $1,000) donations. We’d get lists of 1,000+ alumni, previous donors, friends of the College, etc. and have to call through each one. It was god awful, right up until it wasn’t. I hated it at first.

But I broke it into manageable chunks, with clear, attainable goals:

For every 1,000 calls, the goal was to get $10,000 in donations. 75%+ of calls are voicemails, invalid or rejects – fine. Mark them all down to $0. Some would call back, and a few would even donate, but I never counted on them. Of the ~250 calls where I get in touch with a person, about half (125) would just not be interested or willing to donate, for whatever reason. Not everyone wants to give more money while they’re still paying back their student loans, and not everyone had fun in college. Fine.

So that left 125 conversations – out of an original 1,000 – where all I had to do was convince them to donate $100 or more to beat my goal by 25%. Many of these people had previously given $500, $1,000, etc. Most of them had just forgotten to donate, or moved, or didn’t think the College needed the money (spoiler alert: small liberal arts colleges ALWAYS need the money). So, even among those 125, I just needed to convince half, knowing that many would give $250, $500 or more.

When I broke it down like that – and recognized that I just needed to win 1-in-17 – things got easier. The rejections felt smaller. It was just a numbers game.

The same is true with distribution: it’s a numbers game. Especially starting out, you’ll be rejected by 9 out of every 10 people. But that’s OK.

Keep going. Keep researching. Keep emailing. Keep messaging. Keep posting.

And since (unlike younger me) you aren’t working in a job where you have to send 1,000+ messages a week, you can afford to block out 1 hour a day and send 15, 20 messages during that time. Do it every day. After a month, that’s 300+ messages sent (15 messages a day * 20 working days).

One step, one message, one link at a time – and over that time, you’ll get so much better. Your response rates will soar – and so will the number of relevant people reading your content.

Point #3: Distribution is Perpetual

I think the single-biggest mistake I see in content is under-distribution – something I wrote about a few months ago (here). Too many marketers just don’t repurpose, re-share and re-distribute their content, expecting Google, Meta & Microsoft to do it for them.

To Repurpose a classic Glengarry Glen Ross quote: Always Be Distributing

Take your article and turn it into:

Social Posts
Infographics
YouTube Videos
Carousels
Email Newsletters
Twitter Threads
Reddit Responses
Quora Answers
TikTok / IG Explainer Videos
Slack Community Posts
LinkedIn Group Content

Continue to promote your OLD work – not just the new stuff. It doesn’t matter if you wrote the article in 2022 or 2023 or 2017 – if the content is still right & relevant, DISTRIBUTE IT. Share it.

And if it isn’t, update it and re-share it.

If you’re interested in learning more about this, Ross Simmonds published his first book “Create Once, Distribute Forever” – I bought it (and copies for our team) the day it went live on Amazon, and I highly recommend it.

I know much of this flies in the face of the traditional content marketing / SEO wisdom – and I don’t care. I’m not interested in doing what everyone else does, because I have no interest in getting what everyone else gets.

I’d rather write a handful of so-good-you-can’t-wait-to-share-them articles than 100 mediocre ones – even if the mediocre ones bring me more traffic in the short run – because I know those articles are the ones that will elevate my brand & my agency over the long term.

Create the content you’re proud to share – not the content that makes your reports look good.

And if your stakeholders/clients don’t think that’s a great idea, send them this article.

Until next time,

-Sam

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