As always, I wanted to show you what we have been working on and what it means to you ranking websites.

So hope you enjoy data… lots of scatter plots below. To all the true data/stats experts I definitely accept that I am not a statistician and these result may not pass the statistically significant test but some of the results have very clear/actionable learnings if you want to rank your site higher!

After reviewing Content Analyzers and Keyword Difficulty tools in two previous posts I wanted to open the door to other variables that could have a positive or negative effect on ranking for a given keyword.

We have collected a bunch of data again on the posts we analyzed before based on suggestions from you… so thanks!

The topics I will cover is information that is provided from various sites that I thought would be interesting to see how they may have influenced the ranking process. Included will be:

• Other Content Score – CognitiveSEO Content Score vs MarketMuse
• Competitors Domain Authority
• Own Domain Authority
• Trust Flow
• Headline Scoring Tools

All of these variables come into play after you have researched and selected a Keyword. So let’s see how much they say they really have.

Content Analyzer Score

A couple months ago I shared the data on Marketmuse (you can find that here) and how predictable it is on getting your content to rank by taking into consideration your competitors, the length of the article, and the words used in the article.  

Over the last little while, we wanted to test other tools to help us with ranking for our keywords so we have taken a look at a few other Content Analyzers, one being CognitiveSEO.

We have talked about Cognitive SEO a few weeks ago in terms of keyword difficulty and it was one of the tools that showed great predictability. If you missed that post, you can check it out here.

The result from this process was that CognitiveSEO in terms of the absolute score performed better than MarketMuse over the same data set (47% vs 38%). However, based on how much the correlation has moved based on the size of the data set I am hesitant to say option 1 is better than option 2.

BUT… the big takeaway is that with both tools there is a strong benefit to using a tool that helps you ensure you are covering the topics that their “content brains” (my name for them) suggest you use.

For a more robust tool set that allows you to more easily improve your article use MarketMuse but if you are just after a score then CognitiveSEO is a great option. The price of CognitiveSEO is also much easier to stomach for a portfolio builder vs agency.

Domain Authority – Competitors

This variable can be accessed from almost all keyword difficulty sites. For this analysis we used SECockpit and took the domain authority for the top 10 sites ranking for the keyword and the max domain authority.

Top 10 Competitors Average Domain Authority

The statistical correlation of a low average domain authority as a supplemental predictor to rank was a solid 24%. This is another big opportunity to add to your competitive advantages when it comes to ranking. Overall maintaining an average competitor domain authority under 60 out 100 seems to be the target.

Max Competitor Domain Authority

For the max competitor domain authority score most keywords have a max DA within 85 to 100 range. It seems consistent that at least one of the ranking sites has a high score and the statistical relationship represented was a weak 9%. This variable does not hold much weight  in my books as it is very inconsistent.

Website/Domain Characteristics

For these variables we took the domain’s authority and trust flow. This analysis disregards anything to do with the keyword or the article content therefore its results can be read into as much or as little as you want in terms of how it predicts ranking.

Opensite Explorer Domain Authority

Opensite Explorer by Moz provides a commonly used domain authority which is a rating on a scale of 1 out of 100 to show how authoritative your site is, and we used it to see how the authority for a website that an article is published on helps.

With a little under 10% correlation the result is not strong enough to conclude anything significant.

Majestic Trust Flow

Majestic trust flow provides a rating of legitimacy based on the quality of backlinks and we used this score to see if a higher trust flow would provide some boost in ranking ability.

With a weak statistical relevance of 15% the trust flow seems to hold some weight in the ranking process. This means that backlinks will help specific articles but they also seem to help the bottom line for all article in a tiny percentage.

Article Title Score

I recently came across the free CoSchedule headline analyzer tool early in the spring and was quite excited by its potential. However as I used it more often and conducted some research around it I became less enthused.

The tool is designed around click-through-rate and should still have an effect on ranking but with only a 10% correlation significance as a predictor of ranking this tool underwhelms currently based on its potential. I have found that using this tool has not helped my team in any way on creating more catchy titles so we have since stopped using it.

Summary

Over the last few weeks I have rolled out a lot of informative articles about the analytical space around ranking. I have learned a lot and hope you have enjoyed the same with me. While there will never be an exact answer or solution to getting to the top of Google, I hope that you can see here that it takes a lot of effort and commitment to various factors but with the right approach and strategy you can try and get a step ahead of the field and be successful.

 

I am always interested in new tools or ones I have missed that may be useful to any part of the ranking process so feel free to share your tool that you feel gives you that competitive advantage and we can introduce it to our research team for further analysis in the future!

The “holy grail” we are chasing with our data analysis is being able to predictably rank an article in Google with certainty!

Our vision is being able to say… given a number of metrics for the keyword and article we can produce an article that ranks well in Google!

 

BEWARE!! – THIS POST HAS A LOT OF DATA!

If you don’t like data/statistics and geeking out on analysis I would recommend you skip this article!

 

I have previously talked about MarketMuse and it’s ability to suggest what keywords to focus on and which to use to add depth, all with the idea to create a better article that ranks predictably well in Google! (more…)

Over the last few months we have published a LOT of GREAT content for customers in all industries at ContentRefined.com

Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could say with statistically significant confidence what metrics an article needed to hit in order to perform well on Google?

See Inside Our Content Marketing Continuous Improvement Process! (more…)

Sometimes, especially when you are a little hard headed like me, you need to be hit on the head a few times with an idea to have it finally sink in.

This post is about how one of those ideas is now going to be seeing the light of day and the process I have followed to think through the opportunity and the execution plan for a new project/business.

Don’t want to read everything… the new project is a Done For You Content Marketing Service

Am I an Idiot for Sharing?

In the comments I would be VERY VERY interested in hearing people tear this plan apart!

But also since I am sharing so much info about my business plan so early in the process I would be interested in feedback on if that is either…

• Foolish – will it give competitors an edge

• Not Foolish – publicly sharing will help improve the idea and spread the word

Resisted This Idea – Or Maybe I am Just a Little Slow!

I have been being continually asked if, since I already have a team and process, can’t I just publish content onto someones money site for a fee?

I continually said NO WAY since I believed creating great content was a core process for any money site owner and thought people should do it for their own sites!

Conversations With Smart People Doing Big Things Changed My Mind:

However, what changed my mind was several discussions with people who are looking to rapidly scale their portfolio and taking the long time (which it does take) to build the internal processes/procedures and team to create great content consistently would slow them down.

Plus, there were others I talked to where their “core competency/offering” they needed to own was something else such as physical products, SAAS offering or even for someone building content sites their focus was on keyword research and monetization not on running a content team.

In short people needed a service that could act as their in house end-end content marketing team that could easily plug into newly acquired sites or existing businesses where the owners/managers wanted to focus on priorities other than content marketing!

The Vision & Introducing ContentRefined.com

Our new project is ContentRefined.com – Content Marketing Refined!

We will take care of all your content marketing needs from keyword research to post publishing and promotion.

We act as if we were your in house content marketing team.

Have a Look at ContentRefined.com

note – some limited and discounted beta testers are now welcome

Existing Competition vs Our Premium Plan

Currently the services offerings seem to be focused on producing content with little focus on driving the results for the business associated with that content. Many boutique content marketing agencies charge an incredible amount for publishing fairly basic content.

What I mean is most businesses come from a content first background and try to make the marketing portion of content marketing work. For us we come from the marketing side of content marketing and our core strengths are in the keyword research and promotion compared to our competition who want to focus on $/word.

With our extreme (as you will see below) focus on systematically verifying high quality articles we will be able to produce the best content but will crush our competition in terms of creating content that delivers results.

Content Marketing Companies:

• TextBroker Managed Service – Focused on selling $/word ($2,500 minimum for managed service)

• UpWork – Do it yourself option

• Content Refined – Marketing first content marketing service

Business Model

As always I like to share EVERYTHING and this post is a little different where normally I don’t like to share everything so early in the process but I believe that if I am not feeling a little uncomfortable I am probably not pushing hard enough. So to that end I have decided to share almost everything VERY early in the process!

At a recent conference (RhodiumWeekend) a great presenter, very successful website portfolio manager and long-time reader of AuthorityWebsiteIncome (Daniel) showed a 1 page business model canvas that I really liked and had the opportunity to apply it here.

More Information About the Business Model Canvas – Click Here

Unfair / Competitive Advantage – Highly systematized business with talented/dedicated north American business manager providing a productized service that is nicely integrated into my existing audience and productized services AuthorityWebsiteIncome.com, LightningRank.com and BrandBuilders.io. Marketing focused first vs other content focused first content marketing services.

Key Variables to Validate

Following another of my favourite business books (LeanStartup) I have my list of variables/hypothesis to validate to determine how viable this business will be…

1. Demand at a premium price point will be solid – Mostly validated with initial beta testers
2. Cost of goods sold will be below my set target and variability will be reasonable – Mostly validated with initial beta testers

Next I have another set of variables to test and validate with the next round of beta-testers

3. We will be able to scale without losing margin

4. Customer acquisition costs will be known and stable

5. Churn rate for customers will be manageable

If you are interested in being a beta tester you can checkout the service here.

Team Structure

This aspect of setting up a project/business has been often overlooked by me and I have paid for it!

All my projects that have had the most success when it comes to running smoothly and realizing their full potential the most important part has been setting up the business consistent with EMyth Revisited.

Having a highly systematized business and with a clear structure on who sits in 3 key positions (Entrepreneur, Manager and Technician) has been the key for a project to realize its full potential.

For ContentRefined.com the team is clear…

• Entrepreneur – Jon

• Manager – Maddie

• Technician – Distributed Team

Maddie will be the key person for this business. For those of you used to interacting with the very organized Kelley from LightningRank.com Maddie will fill a similar role for ContentRefined.com

Maddie will be every clients favorite person! She manages the team and each clients orders. Whether it is a one-off question or detailed explanation as to why an article title was selected she is your go-to resource.

The Process & Procedures

Transparency on how we do our work is going to be key for our business and below is exactly the process that Maddie/I have developed to execute this business.

Process and Procedures

For any of my services I like to share everything I possibly can to show you how we are going to go about delivering on what we said we were.

Plus, for those that want to execute content marketing in house I hope that what we share below will be of some help!

Below is just a sampling of the procedures the team has in place.

Content Marketing – Management Procedures:

Writer Hiring & Firing Procedure

• Overview – Building up a “stable” of quality writers has taken a long time and could very likely be our bottleneck for growth. Maddie has done a fantastic job since she started of relentlessly hiring/firing writers to now have a team ready to grow ContentRefined.
• Tutorial – (link to cheap article writing tutorial)
• Tool – UpWork

• Procedure – Over the last couple of months I have gotten into the flow of hiring and firing writers on a weekly/ sometimes daily basis. This process has allowed me to develop a systematic procedure, which has enabled me to build up a team of dependable and talented native English writers. I have included the steps I take filter out writers below.
• It can be helpful to compare text using the best plagiarism checkers and a free online text comparison tool

Here is my procedure:

1. I post a writing job on Upwork

2. On upwork I generally post a job with the following specifications: 1. Writer for ____+ word article 2. Writer must be native English speaker 3. Looking for bids around 7.50/article

3. Once the Job Posting is posted on upwork, I hire 3-5 top applicants without an interview within the fist 24 hours What I look for in a Top applicant 1. Native English Speaker (only metric “required”) 2. Good cover letter 3. High job success score 4. The more hours worked, the better

4. I Assign each new hire 2 articles using the Writing Instructions Template that I created for new writers

5. Once articles are received, I review articles for quality assessment 1. Assess grammar and language capabilities 2. Copy and paste text of the article in Copyscape to make sure there is no plagiarism

6. Once quality has been assessed, I use my judgment in hiring/firing decisions If the article is full of grammar and punctuation issues, I will end the contract.If the language is way too simple and it doesn’t seem like the writer is completely fluent in English, I will end the contract

7. As soon as the new writer is on board I will assign them batches of articles continuously as articles are returned to me. Once writers are committed to you, you then have the responsibility of keeping them busy.

Writer Management and Articles

I mentioned above that once you have some writers that are committed to you, you then have the responsibility of keeping them busy. Let me elaborate on that.

My process is simple:

1. I have a content management spreadsheet, which helps me manage my writers and my content.
2. When I get a new order from a client, I try and do as much keyword research and title creation as possible so that can send off the article(s) ASAP to my writer in the form of a “batch” order (this also works with one off articles but I like to keep them busy and committed to me as I know they will be working for other clients if I give them one article at a time)
3. I have a template and instructions for the different kinds of articles that I generally need created I
4. fill out the instructions and specifications on the template which will include specific keywords that will need to be used in the post
5. Once I send the batch of articles to my writer, I let them know their timeline (for this service I like to give 2 weeks to make sure we’re getting really good quality content)
6. Once I get the article(s), I pay my writer right away, and send them the next “batch” of articles. Busy writers are happy writers!

Client Onboarding & Communication

Google Forms and and Google Sheets are amazing resources and also an integral part of the onboarding process for new clients for this service. I have been finding success with the following procedure:

1. If a new client is ready for onboarding I will send them the “Onboarding Details Form” if not already completed (this will prompt the client to answer important questions that will reduce the back and forth communication later down the line)
2. The form will generate a sheet that will come to me with all of the detail specifications of the order
3. Once I get the specifications, I create an “Order Tracking sheet” for the client and share it with them. Click here  for the template!
4. This sheet will allow the client to see where things are. Whether it’s still with the writer, in QC/editing or with the publisher etc..
5. Once the posts are on Draft mode on the client’s site, I communicate to the client that it is ready for review. From here I let the client decide when we are to publish the article(s) to the live site.

Content Marketing – Execution Procedures:

Keyword Research and Article Title Creation

• Overview – Many services in this space do not have a keyword research focus

• Tutorial – See below – more in-depth post coming soon

• Tool – SECockpit

• Procedure – Shared Here

Keyword research is probably the most difficult part of this process. If the Client doesn’t give you any specifications, it might also take a long time to do it well as you’ll have to read through their site to see if they already have content around words of interest. This can take a long time! To make it easier on me, I’ve trained up a couple of my best Virtual Assistants for this task. Below is the step-by-step guide I send them to make sure I’m getting the best titles and the best keywords

Step:	Action:
1	Log into the Keyword Research Platform of choice. (lately this has been SECockpit)
2	Plug in their “Seed” Keyword (*Seed keywords are simply general keywords you can plug into keyword research tools to find more specific, long-tail keywords)
3	Make sure that the filters on the seed keyword search include appended prepended and words in between, (Note – this is one of the big strengths of SECockpit and its ability to generate more keyword ideas within the tool)
4	Once the seed Keyword has loaded all of its associated the long tail keywords, look for the following metricsMonthly Search Volume : Over 1000Competitiveness: 30 and underOr for very low competition with some lower traffic o Traffic > 100 o Competitiveness < 20
5	Once a Long Tail Keyword that meets the metrics has been identified click on the long tail keyword to view the Analytics (SERP competition)
6	On this page look at the competitors for this long tail keyword
7	Check to see if the top 10 articles ranking for this long tail keyword are similar to the company site trying to rank for the keyword (if all ecommerce and your site is a content site that is not a great sign)
8	Check the Page Authority, the Domain Authority and the Linking. Ideally a good Long Tail Keyword would have results with both PA and DA under 20. Example of a good tableExample of a bad table:
9	If competitors are in the same league as your site, and SERP table looks good, create a Post Title with that Long Tail Keyword included within the title (ideally at the start of the title). Copyblogger has great resources for creating great headlines.
10	Once Post title is created, add the new title to the Content Management Sheet

Writing Instructions

I mentioned above that I have article templates that I like to send out to writers to provide them with a “shell” of what the article is expected to look like. The more guidance they have, the better and more accurate to expectations the article is going to be!

NOTE – This level of guidance only applies after the writer has been on boarded.

For this service we offer 5 different types of articles. Click on each for the template!

• Buyer’s Guide List Post (great guide at incomeaddon.com)

• Review Article

• List Post Article

• How to Article (shareable version coming soon)

• Blog Post (shareable version coming soon)

Editor Quality Control Checks

• Overview – This is an area we have put a lot of effort into… how do you systematically verify that your content will be world class at scale? Our answer is to combine the traditional writer-editor model with additional tools to help systematize the process. We are leveraging several new tools

• Content Marketing Tools

• • CopyScape – Verify the content is unique
  • Grammarly – Verify the content is grammaticaly correct
  • Hemmingway – Verify the content meets our target reading difficulty/level
  • MarketMuze – Verify the content is covered in depth
  • Editor – Using the tools above and their normal process ensures our content is consistently of extremely high quality

My procedure is the following:

• One I get the articles back, I send them off to the editor who does a full quality control check on the article

• I have created an SOP around this to make sure that this is done effectively and consistently every single time

These are the instructions I will send my editor to ensure consistency:

Step:	Action:
1	When editor receives the article from the writer, the editor does a very quick review
2	Once the article has gone through it’s preliminary review, the editor must log into http://www.copyscape.com/
3	Once on on copyscape.com the editor must copy and paste sections of the article one by one into the text box and check for plagirism
4	If the text comes back with results on copyscape, the Editor must notify the Portfolio Manager immediately, and notify which sections were plagiarized
5	If no plagiarism is found, Editor must got to app.grammarly.com and paste the entire article in the text box
6	Grammarly will suggest grammar edits. Editor is to go through the Grammarly suggestions and edit text where he or she see fit
7	Once the text has been edited, Editor must open their Hemingway editor and paste the edited text in the text box
8	The editor will click on the sidebar and check “edit” to get a report of the article Enter your text here… Enter your text here…
9	Once the editor has pasted the text and clicked Edit, the editor much check that the word count matches the requested amount and that the “readability” of the article is a grade 5-8 level.
10	Once all the metrics are met, the Editor must take the edited text and create a new word document titles “ArticleTitle_Edited” Example ”bestworksocks_Edited”
11	Now that the article is unqiue, grammatically correct and verified to be readable the article goes through MarketMuse to ensure the article covers the topic in more depth than any competitor article (Neil Patel has a great article on using MarketMuse here)
12	Once the new edited version has been made, the editor must send the final edited copy back to the portfolio manager and update the Content Management sheet (Sheet 3) with the date of completion

Custom Graphic Creation

With the Content Refined Service, we also add value to your article by making sure that the graphic design piece is nailed down. I actually have a virtual graphic designer who does this for me. I’ll simply send off your headings and top to this designer and I’ll receive custom headings with cool images to go with your article!

Example Image

Publishing Instructions

Once the editor is done with the article, they will send it back to the manager. The content manager will review the edited article to make sure it reads well and then send it to the publisher to be published on the site. The article can stay in draft mode until the client has reviewed and given us the green light to publish!

Summary – ContentRefined.com

Anytime we start mapping out a new process it can be a very fun process and this is no different, below is an image taken Saturday night at 10pm as I was working on mapping out the new model.

This new project will be Maddie’s #1 focus and I will continue to push it to become the best/only service online that can deliver and promote high quality content consistently!

If interested in being involved in the next round of beta-testing there are a select number of spots open at discounted pricing but you will be able to signup for a wait list when we get sold-out. Checkout ContentRefined.com.

Have a Look at ContentRefined.com

The main purpose of this post is to put myself out there revealing an uncomfortable amount of what should be proprietary data to get feedback on the model and idea. So please…

• Checkout ContentRefined.com
• Tear my strategy for sharing so much and the plan behind content refined apart in the comments below

Getting high quality articles written for a very low cost is a key strength for my online business. In this article and for the first time I share exactly how I get high quality articles created cheaply. Websites having good content has always been important and is only getting more important according to this Matt Cutts interview.

If you are looking for a complete done for you content marketing solution for any of your businesses I highly recommend checking out ContentRefined.com.

Content Refined provides a complete end-end content marketing service from Keyword Research to Content Publishing!

[thrive_link color=’blue’ link=’http://www.contentrefined.com/’ target=’_blank’ size=’medium’ align=’aligncenter’]Complete Content Marketing Solution![/thrive_link]

(more…)