How to Create Content That Earns Engagement, Trust, and Loyalty for Your Brand

Posted by ronell-smith

[Estimated read time: 17 minutes]

A couple of years back, I received a call from the CMO of a small but popular and growing startup about taking on the brand as a content strategist. While I was initially lukewarm to the idea, they were adamant about working together, feeling that I “could help them reach their goals.”

Before hanging up the phone, I asked him to email me the main priority for the onsite content:

"Engaging content (e.g., shares, likes, tweets, etc.)," she wrote.

I thought, I can do engaging.

I reasoned I’d stick with how-to information content, in-depth evergreen content, and maybe a few interviews. In the online marketing vertical, these are what I call "can’t miss elements" for brands looking to create onsite engagement.

But not long after I started working with the brand, I saw some problems that should have been red flags from the beginning:

• The type of content they wanted for the blog didn’t garner traffic
• The type of content that did garner traffic didn’t garner engagement
• When I talked to the CMO, her words were equally confusing: "Conversions are up, but we need to see engagement improve to continue the relationship."

I was confused.

Is there EVER a scenario where increased conversions was a negative?

Shortly thereafter, the relationship dissolved. The culprit wasn’t a lack of engaging content, though.

Engagement, alone, is a poor choice for a goal

This likely sounds familiar to folks reading this post. Maybe someone says, “We have a shiny new website, so now we need to blog."

The next question is "Who’s going to blog?"

Then, typically, the question after that is “What do we blog about?”

Someone always, and I do mean always, says, “About what we do. You know… stuff that will get folks talking about our brand.”

The next question and answer dooms us: “What’s the goal?”

• One blog/week
• To drive people to our website
• To increase conversions

Inevitably, the main goal for the content itself, though, is engagement.

The biggest problem brands have in the move to content marketing is creating engaging content.

Why do you think that is?

• Because it’s hard?
• Because they don’t have writers who can produce it?
• Because when they do produce it, folks still don’t engage with it?
• Because they’re marketing to the wrong audience?

Nope!

Creating engaging content is a nice-to-have, first-step goal. But as the client I talked about earlier found out, engagement alone isn’t going to move your brand forward in what is now a sea of content.

Engagement is a goal; it shouldn’t be the goal.

First, engagement simply means people noticed your content and interacted with it in some, typically small, way. That could mean a social share, leaving a comment, sharing a link, etc. And for those of us just starting on the content marketing journey, that’s nothing to sneeze at.

Where the problem comes is when we use engagement as an all-important Key Performance Indicator (KPI) of how your brand’s content is performing.

I think Avinash Kaushik, Google’s digital marketing evangelist, says about all there is to say about engagement with this quote, taken from his blog:

“Even as creating engaging experiences on the web is mandatory, the metric called Engagement is simply an excuse for an unwillingness to sit down and identify why a site exists. An excuse for an unwillingness to identify real metrics that measure if your web presence is productive. An excuse for taking a short cut…”

He goes further, saying the only people who use engagement as a metric are those who are too lazy to discern the real reason for being for their website.

They refuse to ask “Why does it exist?”

So they assign value to something that is all but impossible to measure in a tangible way.

My experience mirrors those comments. Engagement is an easy, feel-good metric used by brands who lack clear purpose for their content marketing.

My core problem with using engagement as a metric of significance is it’s hard to measure, next to impossible to sustain and, worst of all, easy to copy.

In five simple steps, competitors can kill your engagement strategy:

1. Visit your website and see which content is doing well: See the Facebook, Twitter ands Google Plus number, and that gets them to thinking...

   

2. They go to Google, do a site:search and see what your top-performing content is. Then they tell their copywriting staff to take this idea and expound upon it — more details, richer graphics, etc.
3. Then they use a tool such Open Site Explorer to view your site's backlinks to see who’s linking to them and what content is getting the most links.
4. They’ll reach out to those same brands and say, “We see you’re linking to this content. We created a similar post that has even more details." They’re likely to add the competitor's link, but they’re just as likely to unlink to your content.
5. Your stellar content piece is likely to take a tumble in the SERPs and your site will miss out on traffic.

All because you chased the wrong goal.

I'll add a huge "however" here: If you’re just starting out, OR if all you really truly care about is creating some potentially engaging content, you can do exactly what we outlined regarding the competition. You find a popular brand in your vertical and copy the content they’re creating, only you make it better: better written, better text, and you commit to outreach. I can tell you that of all the companies I’ve worked with and for — from mom and pop cupcake shops to, moving companies, fitness brands, apparel manufacturers and software companies — this is where the content creation process begins and, sadly, sometimes ends. So copy it. Use it. At least until you get better, see better, and know better what the audience wants.

But never hang your hat singularly on engagement.

What comes easily is just as easily taken.

Brand trust is essential for content marketing success

If engagement is a blind date, trust is going steady. It has to be in place before things get too serious.

In the strictest sense, trust is about how prospects and customers view your brand, how they view the people who represent your brand, what you stand for and how you make them feel.

(Image source)

While asking for prospects to trust your brand this much is definitely pushing it, brand trust is an imperative in today’s online marketplace.

When trust is in place, people come to see your brand as not simply a reliable option, but the reliable option; they feel good about association with it; and, most importantly, they seek out those interactions.

To get there, people need to see your brand and brand representative in lots of places, online and offline, to develop familiarity and form a positive association with the brand. (I call this positive ubiquity.)

That’s why making too big of a deal about onsite content is a mistake. It’s important. But, let’s be honest, if there are only three people reading your blog, your impact is going to be very limited. Wouldn’t you agree?

In addition to writing posts and sharing your brand’s content, you should also be sharing valuable content from other non-competing brands; engaging in meaningful online conversations surround your vertical; interviewing influencers in your space; and creating a presence that moves seamlessly between online and offline, social and content, human to human.

The fact of the matter, though, is that people respond best to people. Not words or images or fancy design. And as reluctant as you might be to have public faces for your brand, you need it to make your content marketing efforts work.

People are what lead prospects to build an affinity, not simply an association, with your brand. It’s akin to going from an encounter to being noticed.

Think...

• Apple and Steve Jobs
• All State Insurance and the Mayhem man
• Blendtec and its zany CEO (shown below)

(Image source)

Make this work for your brand.

Why not highlight SMEs inside the company?

Instead of simply forcing everyone to blog, find out what individual team members are good at and have a passion for, then allow them to express their creativity for the brand in their own way.

• Maybe another team member is passionate about radio. Why not have her do a podcast for the site, but also share it via iTunes, SoundCloud, or wherever else it makes sense to share it?
• Every office has the resident know-it-all. Why not create a Twitter handle and associated hashtag for this person, and allow them to spend 30 minutes a day online answering questions for the brand?
• Maybe you find that someone hates writing blogs, but is interested in theatre and would love doing vblogs for the site as well as posting them on YouTube or Wistia.

(Image source)

And while you’re building that brand affinity, people who aren’t even in the market for your product or service will take note, realizing that your brand cares.

You aren’t out for simply earning a dollar. You’re really helping people, even when those people aren’t likely to buy anything from you.

I know what you’re thinking: “Ronell, who has time or resources for that?”

My answer is, “You don’t have to do any of this. Really, you don’t.”

But I’ll add that if you do at least some of this, consistently, you will be more successful than you likely assume, in large part because most of the competition is unwilling to do it.

Whenever I hear people talking about how difficult it is to find success in content marketing, it reminds me of a quote from one of my favorite strength coaches.

One of his clients said, “Squatting hurts my knees.” After witnessing a demonstration of what the client called a squat, the coach said, “Squats don’t hurt your knees. What you're doing and calling squats hurts your knees.”

Content marketers are a lot like this, right? We throw ideas at the wall, then call what sticks a success.

We're better than this.

The path to content marketing success leads to loyalty

Typically, when we set out on this content marketing journey, we, as a team, set these arbitrary goals: We need X number of tweets, X number of Likes and shares on Facebook, Google Plus and so on.

A better way to do it was exposed by Buzzfeed.

Yes, that Buzzfeed.

The site might post an inordinate amount of dumb stuff, but has an amazing data science team. That team studied how content is shared across the web and uncovered some interesting findings.

Leading to what we now know as P.O.U.N.D.: the Process of Optimizing and Understanding Network Diffusion.

We tend to think that a Facebook Like leads to a Facebook Share, which leads to more Facebook Likes and Shares. And a tweet leads to more tweets, etc., etc., for the other social networks.

What they found is network diffusion doesn’t happen in a linear fashion.

Basically, people jump between social networks and links and back again. For example, a Facebook Like might lead to a Facebook Share that leads to a Twitter Share that bounces to a website via a link then back to Facebook as a Like or Share.

This petri dish-looking thing below is really is a graphic depiction of network diffusion, where the dark blue areas are Facebook, the light blue areas are Twitter and the white areas are links.

What Buzzfeed found is that they get links as a byproduct of network diffusion. They don’t need to optimize for links or make link building a focus. The lesson for them, as it should be for us, is that the more they optimize for network diffusion, the more links they're going to see.

This is not just fascinating; it’s instructive.

Instead of concerning ourselves with link building and outreach and hoping we get links, if we simply optimize our efforts at creating and sharing content, links naturally occur.

Previously, the thinking was to create a piece of content, then build links to it.

But now, with what we know about network diffusion, we’re going to focus on publishing all of our content to the right streams and to the right audience. We’re optimizing for which social streams move the fastest for the specific topic.

As a content marketer, this information should excite you, especially if your team is ready to commit to the right, and best, goal, which is content loyalty.

If that’s not your goal, scrap your goal and adopt this one.

Content loyalty means you aren’t having to work so hard for your content. Your content is working for you.

• Folks are avid fans, actively seeking out each and every piece of content you create.
• Instead of you having to carry the load with sharing and promotion, these fans are sharing and promoting like crazy.
• Instead of worrying about what content to create, your fans, followers, prospects and customers are actively involved helping you via comments on the blog, questions and responses on social media, interactions with the help desk, and sundry other touch points whereby they interact with the brand.

"The shortest path to break through the noise and create a sustainable content strategy is to create content loyalty," says Moz's Matthew J. Brown, who is chief of product strategy and design.

It’s difficult but doable.

Parse.ly, an audience insight platform for digital publishers, found that 2.6 days is the median pageview peak for any single piece of content. Pageviews basically fall off a cliff shortly thereafter.

If you get 20% of your traffic from social, things are a little bit better: 3.2 days

But by and large your window is two to three days.

But the biggest takeaway from their research, which looked at hundreds of sites and billions of pageviews, showed that the average site sees only 11 percent of its visitors returning at least once in a 30-day period.

You heard right: 11%.

That number might sound low, and it is. But it highlights an opportunity.

If you can get that number up to 20%, you’re doing 2X better than the competition.

So how do you get there?

A content marketing playbook

Vulture.com conducted a study with Chartbeat to find what on-page content attributes led to content loyalty. They wanted to figure out what led readers to return to their site.

They found that if they could get their readers to return to the first page of their site 5 times, the readers would be what they term "loyal visitors" of their site, returning frequently to consume information.

In other words, five days was their core loyalty metric, and the primary starting place for the brand's content efforts.

They looked at factors ranging from text length to images and the number of ads on the page, and what they found was surprising and illuminating: For them, the key was the amount of text above the fold.

That is, loyal readers expected to consume a certain amount of content above-the-fold. (Click the link above for the details, which are quite interesting.)

Armed with this information, Vulture.com could focus on a targeted attribute that led to their 5X, loyal, readers.

Nothing is stopping you from doing the same.

Making content loyalty work for your brand

Your first step toward content loyalty, is to define your goal post (e.g., visits per an allotted amount of time), then optimize for the attributes that lead to that goal.

For your brand, it might be content length or number of ads or GIFs or videos.

The key is to dial in those attributes that are specific to your site, then continue to optimize for them.

You likely have some inkling of what content types help earn loyalty in your vertical, based on popularity and such. Same thing for content types. We know that for many industries, blogs, videos, infographics, and the like are the most shared and most linked to types of content.

Your brand can do the same, provided you have the heart and the patience to do so.

One of the reasons brands are struggling with content marketing is they aren’t giving it enough time. Create a program, set a plan, and let it run.

It’s not a 90 day thing.

"The sheer majority of brands will continue to crash and burn with their content creation and distribution efforts. Simply put, most brands resist telling a truly differentiated story, and even those that do tell one aren't consistent or patient enough to build loyal audiences over time," says Content Marketing Institute founder Joe Pulizzi.

If you’re willing to put in the work, though, you can have success.

The natural starting place is a content audit.

I know many of you cringe upon seeing that word. But you have to start somewhere, and the content audit is the best somewhere.

Besides, before you get started producing content, you need to know what you have and how well it’s performing.

If, like me, you’ve done content audits, you know they can be a time-consuming chore, especially when done from scratch.

Luckily, you don’t have to start from scratch.

Using the template found in Mike King's deck from Authority Rainmaker, you can get an excellent snapshot of the strongest-performing content on your site. Then you simply aggregate that data to see what’s resonating with your readers, what’s creating that network diffusion for your brand.

For example, you can find the most shares for various types of content, which can help you better discern what types of content you should be creating and sharing more of.

Once you have your content audit in hand, the next step you want to take, before execution on your new content strategy, is to calculate your ROI. This Content Marketing ROI Calculator from Siege Media allows you to plug in the costs associated with creation, including how many links and shares and loyal visitors, which makes it easier to make the case for your boss or your clients. This is a must-have when you’re trying to not only get buy-in but also get the time you need to execute your plan.

If your brand is like many of those I’ve worked with in the past, meaning you don’t have a wide base of content from which to pull a great deal of data from during the audit, I suggest using tool like BuzzSumo, which is a newcomer that has become very popular very fast in content marketing circles.

And for good reason.

It can help you get up and running really fast, and you can learn a great deal about how your content is performing along the way.

BuzzSumo allows you to view the social landscape across myriad topics for the entirety of your competitive landscape.

So, by the time you get started, you can have a complete list of targets and categories to optimize for, even if you don’t have a strong content inventory.

One of the coolest parts about working with Moz — aside from the Roger notepads and pens — is the great people who are always designing and creating tools for us to use, then share with the audience.

For a while now, we’ve been privileged to play with something called One Metric.

Created by our audience and data teams, it allows us to weight social sharing, traffic and links and on-page attention, and reader engagement to create a more organic content score that ensures we’re looking at the entire picture.

Earlier this year, Moz released Moz Content, which is basically One Metric plus 10 and times one million.

With Moz Content, you can crawl your site, then integrate the various bits of information, including content types, your author performance, your social sharing, your links, etc. Even better, you can create, track, and save multiple content audits, making it possible to see how well your content is doing over time, and with ease.

The goal is to make that first step when performing a content audit much easier.

Even better, using the newly created Moz Context API, you're able to extract the most relevant topics for your site. It can tell you what topics and what keywords are the most relevant for your site and across the web.

This allows you to create a topic inventory for your site.

Let’s say, based on performance, visitors are engaging with these content types and topics most on your site. That way you don’t have to guess about what content to create.

You can then focus on optimizing for creating and sharing the right content in the right places for the right audience, instead of blindly creating content with the hope that it performs optimally.

Maybe my favorite feature, and the one that I can see many brands using most to position themselves favorably against the competition, is the Content Search feature. It allows you to see topics — -your topics — across the web, enabling you to harness information on what’s getting the most shares, what’s gaining social traction, what’s resonating with your audience.

With this view, you’re getting a bird’s-eye view across the web, so you can see what’s working for the competition, what they’re having success with and what, maybe, you should consider trying.

Full disclosure: Since Moz Content is new, I still rely on BuzzSumo for getting a quick, easy, and clean snapshot at the topical level, then use Moz Content to get a deeper look at the content landscape I'm hoping to track, whether for myself or for a client or prospect. And because both platforms offer a level of free service, I'd suggest using them in tandem, especially at first, to get a feel for which has the features better suited for your needs.

Take your content marketing to the next level

Hopefully, you have a better sense of how to be successful, in addition to having a more in-depth understanding of what it takes to attain long-term success in content marketing. The overall goal for this post, however, was to make it clear that, with regard to the content you create, share and promote, loyalty is THE goal, not a goal.

Remember, content is meant to support your marketing efforts; it should not define them. If the content you create can draw readers to your site consistently, your team can then set about ensuring that the various messaging needed to call attention to or sell additional products are in place, even as you further optimize the content to increase views and viewers.

By making content loyalty your goal, you make it palatable that more of your brand's goals are attainable.

What are your thoughts? Do you think loyalty is the right goal for your content?

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Moz Local Industry Report: Who's Winning Wireless Searches?

Posted by Dr-Pete

Summary: We analyzed 5 mobile phone buyer searches on Google across 5,000 cities (25,000 total markets) to find the winners and losers in both organic and local pack results. Best Buy dominated organic results and performed well in local searches. Sprint won the local pack results, but disappeared from organic entirely. Carriers Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T all performed well, but none covered more than 30% of local search markets.

The wireless industry in the United States is both massive and competitive. According to an IDC report, over 184 million mobile phones were shipped to US customers in 2014, with an estimated 191 million in 2015. The vast majority of consumers, even in 2015, report browsing products online but purchasing in-store (73%, according to PWC's annual report). This trend may be even more dramatic in the wireless industry, where experts suggest that upwards of 9 out of 10 of all mobile phone purchases in the US still happen in a brick-and-mortar store.

In a competitive environment where most people research phones online but buy them in-store, ranking well in Google search results, especially local results, is critical. Local results can lead consumers not only to one brand over another, but to specific store locations in their area, surfacing store addresses, phone numbers, and operating hours.

For example, here’s a local 3-pack from a search for “mobile phone store” in the Seattle area:

Local packs in 2016 not only contain rich information, including directions, reviews, location, phone, and store hours, but they appear at or near the top of organic results and occupy a large amount of screen real-estate.

This report takes a Google’s-eye view of the mobile phone market in the United States. We ran thousands of searches to determine who were the big winners in both organic and local Google results, who were the losers, and where big brands had gaps.

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Report methodology

For this study, we tracked 5 wireless industry phrases on page 1 of Google.com across the 5,000 largest cities in the contiguous 48 states (according to census data), measuring both organic and local pack results. The five searches used in the final study were:

• "phone store"
• "mobile phone store"
• "cell phone store"
• "wireless store"
• "buy cell phone"

We deliberately chose keywords that were likely to return both organic and local pack results. Based on initial analyses, we discarded product-specific keywords, like "buy iPhone 6," because those didn’t typically return local results. Interestingly, searches containing "smartphone" also generally failed to display local results.

Finally, we threw out "phone shop," because, even searching US locations on Google.com, that phrase tended to return UK-based results. Data was combined across the five keywords, with organic and local results analyzed separately.

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Top 5 organic brands (by markets)

If we treat each of these 25,000 searches (5 keywords X 5,000 cities) as a potential market, we can get a sense of how well any given company is covering the total US marketplace. For this analysis, we’ll treat multiple listings on a single page of search results as one "market." The question is just whether any given brand is represented in that market (not where or how often).

Here were the top 5 brands, by total markets:

Big-box retailer Best Buy and online retailer Newegg led the organic winners, followed by mobile carriers AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. The Top 10 were rounded out by (in order): Walmart, Wirefly, Cricket Wireless, and Boost Mobile.

Surprisingly, Sprint was nowhere to be found in our organic data, showing just one listing (and that one was on a sub-domain). Keep in mind that this study looked only at page-one results. Used phone resellers, including Gazelle (#11), Glyde (#12), and Swappa (#16) made a strong showing in the top 20.

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Top 5 organic brands (by clicks)

The "market" analysis doesn’t account for the varying impact of different ranking positions and the populations of the 5,000 cities in this study. So, we did a second, more complex analysis. If we take a shallow click-through curve (see below), where the #1 position gets the most clicks and then click-through rate (CTR) trails off, and then we multiply each of those CTRs by the city’s population, we can get a proxy for total click volume.

Obviously, not everyone alive is running these searches, and we’re going to cheat and assume clicks total 100% (they don’t, in reality), so instead of looking at total counts, we’ll rely on percentage of total click share. Here were the top 5 by click share:

Adjusting for CTR and population, Best Buy held onto the top spot, and most of the top 5 was the same. The notable exception was AT&T, which fell to #8. Digging deeper into the data, this appears to be a function of CTR. On average, AT&T’s rankings are appearing lower on page 1 than the rest of the top 5. Cricket Wireless moved up from #8 to round out the top 5.

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Top 5 local brands (by markets)

Now, let’s look at just the local pack results for those same 25,000 markets. Keep in mind that local packs did not occur in all markets, and there are a maximum of 3 sites in any local pack (compared with up to 10 organic listings). Here were the top 5 local winners:

Sprint, nowhere to be seen in our organic data, led the pack in local results. Other major wireless companies rounded out the top 5. Best Buy maintained a strong position at #6, but organic leader Newegg.com fell completely out of the local results, having no physical storefronts.

Clearly, the biggest disconnect between the organic and local data here was Sprint — taking the #1 spot for local, but disappearing completely from organic rankings. Newegg flipped that around, dominating organic but having no local presence. This was a direct and obvious result of having no physical locations.

Another big difference between organic and local was Apple.com. Apple naturally has a strong presence for product-specific (i.e. iPhone) queries, but ranked #47 in our organic results for general phone-buying searches, appearing in only 95 (of 25,000) markets. Apple stores, however, ranked #8 in local markets.

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Top 5 local brands (by clicks)

Like organic, we can apply our click share analysis to local pack rankings. The Top 5 local domains, weighted by CTR and population, looked like this:

Other than some position shuffling, the Top 5 were the same as the simpler local-pack analysis. T-Mobile took the top spot from Sprint when adjusted by CTR and population. It looks as if the major brands were distributed pretty well across a variety of populations and ranking positions.

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Top 5 overall winners (by clicks)

What if we combine the organic and local totals, using the click share data across all markets? Here are the winners of the combined data:

Verizon and Best Buy were in close competition for the top spot, with T-Mobile just behind. Best Buy’s #6 spot in our local analysis was easily boosted by their #1 spot in organic, making the big box store a strong overall contender. AT&T squeaked into the top 5, hampered a bit by their #8 position in organic search. Cricket Wireless rounded out the top 5.

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Winners, losers, and takeaways

Best Buy dominated our organic winners and took an impressive #2 overall, performing well in local searches. This matches Best Buy’s leading spot in real-world mobile phone sales, an advantage enhanced by representing multiple brands and carriers under one roof. Best Buy’s performance is even more impressive given that they have considerably fewer total locations than most of the major carriers.

Sprint was the biggest winner in local results, given their relatively small retail footprint compared to other major carriers. Publicly-reported location data shows Sprint having half or less of the locations that each of Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T operate, which makes their local dominance even more impressive. Sprint’s recent acquisition of as many as 1,700 Radio Shack storefronts could double their retail locations and make them a force to be reckoned with in local search. Sprint does, however, need to address their complete absence from organic results for general mobile keywords.

Mega-carriers Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T performed well in overall results, as expected given their marketing budgets and massive retail footprints. Verizon struggled somewhat in local rankings, relative to other carriers, bolstered in the overall standings by their strong organic presence. AT&T had the opposite problem — they had a strong local presence, but trailed a bit in organic once CTR was taken into account. It appears AT&T has room for improvement in their ranking positions for general mobile phone terms.

AT&T can count a second win in their column. As of 2014, they own Cricket Wireless, who was our #4 overall winner and had a top 5 position in both of our click share analyses (organic and local). Cricket’s dominant position is undoubtedly good for revenue, although it can be argued that both their organic and local search share represent a branding challenge for AT&T.

No single major carrier dominated market coverage in local pack results. Of the 25,000 markets we studied, 21,143 displayed local packs. Sprint ranked in local packs in about 1/3 of available markets, AT&T and T-Mobile ranked in just under 30%, and Verizon ranked in roughly 20%. Given their retail footprints and marketing budgets, all of the major carriers have significant room for improvement in their local rankings.

Even as the competitive landscape in the wireless industry shifts, Google’s local search landscape will continue to evolve. Google's current local 3-packs have only been in full effect since August of 2015, and the search giant is constantly experimenting with new formats and features. No one carrier or reseller dominates the entire picture, and all of them will have to fight hard for organic and local search share in the foreseeable future.

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How & Why to Build a Basic Gantt Chart for Almost Any Project

Posted by noahlemas

[Estimated read time: 13 minutes]

I had planned on writing about losslessness, about accurate reproduction. I’ve always found it strange that at just about the same time that true losslessness became widely available cheaply, we suddenly seemed to care less about fidelity than ever before. So I had wanted to discuss the Internet’s imminent future, almost undoubtedly VR-based and highly resolution-dependent, and how that vision is slightly at odds with its history of relegating virtually everything to simple, low-resolution, compressed formats.

With the path to writing such a post research and time-intensive, deadline-bound, and rife with potential rabbit holes that could very well result in me unintentionally plumbing the depths of the Internet, I began framing it as though it were typical proposed work — which, for me, means organizing a basic Gantt chart. It’s something I do to frame the projects included in client engagements, beginning even during the proposal stage.

Remind me again what a Gantt chart is...

A Gantt chart is a rather simple matrix of a project’s activities and its associated start dates and deadlines. You’ve seen them but perhaps not known they had a name (activities on the left, activity duration on the right):
Given the rise of agile project management within the technology and software industries in recent years, the humble Gantt chart is often forgotten about, mainly because a Gantt chart rarely meets the highly adaptive needs of more complicated projects (like software product development). But the same simplicity that has doomed it in complex spaces is also what makes it so easy to create and share in relation to the organization of simpler projects.

A Gantt chart is an assurance that we have a plan

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”
– Benjamin Franklin

Clients want only two things: the first is a plan, the second results. In our industry, the results (or sometimes lack thereof) get the focus, with the plan usually an implicit conceptual agreement from the outset. If we don’t have a tangible plan from the outset, though, results will be largely arbitrary.

During the pitch/proposal stage, the reported results are usually case studies from our past work. Supplementing such case studies with a customized Gantt chart can illustrate to the prospective client that we’ve put more than cursory thought into the work we’re proposing and planning, and the results that we’re hoping to achieve.

It took me trial and error in both conventional client services and business development roles to learn that our agency work is often incomplete without a Gantt chart. I now find myself using them increasingly. Here, for example, is a very generic example of a simple Gantt chart framing a very basic SEO site audit:

Aren’t Gantt charts only needed in project management & sales?

"The sales department is not the whole company but the whole company better be the sales department."
– Philip Kotler

Treating sales as somebody else’s duty is a common mistake that we make in search. If we are client-facing in any capacity, though, we should be considering things, both in scope and out (often we can’t help but think of the out-of-scope anyway), that could provide clients the best possible results. That is to say that since finding and presenting opportunities to clients is an important aspect of growing both client results and agency business, then we all really are in sales.

In fact, we are all working not just in sales, but also in project management. Realizing that and capitalizing on it wherever possible is an additional means of “getting closer to the customer.” Embracing the humble Gantt chart helps us to better organize projects by providing the needed framework in a standardized format that translates across roles, companies, or even industries. Gantt charts help us speak the “language” of project management, organization, sales, and business in general.

Gantt charts are part of the common language of business

“It seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think.”
– David Ogilvy

As a general rule of thumb, the bigger or more sophisticated the client, the higher the chance that a Gantt chart will be an important part of planning and winning the business, and the greater the chances that our point of contact frames work like a typical project manager.

Successfully navigating the proposal process is almost always a product of communicating in the common language. Gantt charts, then, are not only another means of speaking the common language but, as Vince Lombardi once famously said, of acting “like you’ve been there before.”

As with any other industry or interest, speaking the common language can be the only way to ensure that a wide variety of people within an organization can understand exactly what it is that we’re proposing.

A Gantt chart can also meet the expectations of legal & procurement

“Any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy is indistinguishable from molasses.”
– Unknown

In business development, the unfortunate reality is that a “verbal yes” (especially with a bigger client) is nothing but permission to proceed to the legal and/or procurement departments, where many a business development director has been maddeningly frustrated, and where important initiatives, unfortunately, can go to die a slow and painful death.

I stumbled into emphasizing Gantt charts entirely by accident. In researching a promising prospective client, I found a page on their site that outlined a case study from an entirely unrelated field. In one of the page’s images was a Gantt chart with redacted identifying details. On a lark, I included a rudimentary timeline that I thought represented something close to a Gantt chart. That process made me better understand the work that I was proposing, and I’ve been using Gantt charts since.

Not only did I win the business that time by implementing a Gantt chart, I have also won other accounts simply by knowing the audience, in so doing acting as though every last member is a project manager. A Gantt chart certainly isn’t a magic key to legal and procurement, but it’s a relatively small, subtle addition that can have a disproportionately strong impact.

Internal client teams expect, want, or need Gantt charts

“Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.”
– Alexander Graham Bell

Assume for a moment that we did “get ink,” that we won a contract with a sophisticated client without a project plan or Gantt chart. In such a case, the internal team(s) will probably put together their own project plan and/or Gantt chart as a baseline reference point and as part of beginning to allocate resources.

When we hand this brand new account over to our client services team, would we prefer that they receive the Gantt chart that we carefully constructed and agreed on during the proposal process? Or would we prefer that the work be defined and framed by the people who had to hire our agency to consult on the work in the first place? Which is our most realistic path to being able to deliver the framed work and meet the goals of the campaign(s)?

Gantt charts help agency-side teams, too

“Of all the things I’ve done, the most vital is coordinating the talents of those who work for us and pointing them toward a certain goal.”
– Walt Disney

The handover and kickoff can be phenomenally easy and well organized when we prepare an easily relatable and understandable Gantt chart to every member of our team (and our client’s). The handover is then as simple as sharing file permissions with the teams of our agency and our new client.

The typical handover to your client services should be smooth and easy, accompanied by a well-outlined plan. Often, though, handovers to client services can be a cluster of questions to which nobody really knows the exact answer(s). A basic Gantt chart goes a long way toward an orderly, sensible, smooth handover, something that only instills further confidence in the new client’s team. The Gantt chart serves as a great means of bridging the gap between what was promised by sales and what will be delivered by client services.

Competitors use Gantt charts, too

“Even if you are on the right track, you will get run over if you just sit there.”
– Will Rogers

Experienced as we are, we all know that clients and prospects respond almost viscerally to reports on competition, especially where their competition is clearly beating them.

On that note, you know who uses project plans? Some of your competitors. If all else in a proposal is equal (and you’d be shocked at how often that happens), the planning can be the tie-breaker, both because it implies sophistication and because, as noted above, it is much more likely to be converted into a contract/SOW that breezes through legal and procurement.

How to make a Gantt chart for that article about fidelity vs. connectivity

Okay, now it’s time to dig in and and to actually put together a top-level outline of the article’s components, which include in this case preparation, research, writing, and editing. An outline is the best place to start building our Gantt chart.

In this case, we’ve created a 23-step outline (details below) for writing that article on "Fidelity vs. Connectivity." Now, let’s make a Gantt chart of it...

Make a Gantt chart easily from a Trello board

To make a basic Gantt chart using Trello, frame a Trello board. I've created one called “Interesting Article Idea,” with a list; in this case, “Fidelity Vs. Connectivity” :
Next, fill out the related cards (which in this case consist of the 23 outline steps noted above) below the Fidelity vs. Connectivity list to include specific activities:

It’s a card list of how the article progresses and in what order. It’s still not ready to be a Gantt chart, but it’s close. In order to build our Gantt chart, define start dates and due dates for each card related to its associated activity, starting with what we anticipate to be the first, in this case “Research the history of ‘high fidelity’”:
When you hover over that card, you’ll see a small pencil icon. Click that edit/pencil icon to open an expanded menu of options. Then click “Change Due Date,” from which the following calendar menu will appear:
Click on the appropriate “due date” from the calendar (I’ve chosen a March 11 due date for this card, as we can see) and save changes, at which point our edited card will look like this (minus the giant red arrow, of course):

At that point, the card has a due date but no start date. In order to add a start date, go back to the card list and click on the March 11 due date (where the red arrow above is pointing), at which point we will have an this expanded menu:
Adding the start date here can be a bit elusive only because there is no “button” to do so. Instead, click on “Edit the description” (red arrow above) in order to open the following window:

In order to establish the start date, add it to the description window, using the format below (in this example a start date of March 7, 2016):

Repeat this process for all remaining 22 cards and you’ll end up with a card list like this:

What you’ll need to make a basic Gantt chart

I prefer to use Ganttify, integrating a Trello board, largely out of habit. Ganttify also provides compatibility with Basecamp or even, yes it’s true, Google Calendar, so there are certainly other options if you’re not a Trello user. A rather impressive Gantt chart can also be built in Excel (for our spreadsheet-obsessed colleagues). Point is, there is no shortage of options for making free Gantt charts.

Also worth noting: the Gantt chart is NOT a complete project plan, but instead merely a part of one. The Gantt chart organizes the “what” and “when” aspects of a project plan but largely doesn’t touch on the “why” or “who” aspects. A Gantt chart, then, can exist without a project plan, but a project plan usually cannot exist without Gantt charts. For the purposes of this post, we’re concerned only with the Gantt chart... and a very basic one at that; we’re stepping into the project management world as relative novices. By design, our sample Gantt chart here will be as simple as possible.

At this point, with your Trello board complete, you are ready to head over to Ganttify:

We’re working from Trello here, obviously. Click the Trello button and you’ll be taken to the following screen:
Allow Ganttify access to your Trello board by clicking the “Allow” button; you’ll be taken swiftly to the Trello/Ganttify dashboard:

And there it is waiting for you... automatically created from the existing Trello board you made earlier. Click on “Interesting Article Idea” and you’ll be served this pop-out window:

You did it; that’s a Gantt chart! It needs a little refining, of course, but you’ve created a usable Gantt chart. Perhaps the best part about the Gantt chart you’ve just created is the fact that you can simply adjust any of the “activities” on the timeline of the Gantt chart and the associated changes will be automatically reflected in the original Trello board. Let’s have a look at how this works:

Drag to increase the width of the first “activity” (red arrow above) and you’ll will see this change directly on the Gantt chart:

That change on the Gantt change then becomes part of the parameters of the original Trello board (requiring no changes to the underlying Trello board; Ganttify and Trello are essentially working together):
Changing all or part of your Gantt chart, then, changes the underlying Trello board (and vice-versa). Using the same process, you can easily change the activities back to the original dates. This means that changes are then automatically shared with collaborators (assuming we’ve shared our Trello board with other team members).

Exporting the Gantt chart to a format of your choosing means you can insert it into any document in the appropriate file type. To export, click the print icon (indicated by the red arrow below):

From the pop-out window above, click the print icon in the upper left corner. That will result in the following option window:

I’ve added the red arrow here to remind you that the cleanest possible outcome is a result of condensing the timeline to show only the dates relevant to the project (especially important when planning longer, more complicated projects).

Export to your preferred format by clicking “print.” The resulting JPG for our for our simplified example project looks like this:By this point, you’ll have a Trello board built out, a working version of a Gantt chart, and the knowledge/ability to edit in one place, with those edits reflected across platforms and immediately available to collaborators. You’ll be ready to insert your newly created file wherever you need it. It really is that simple! Of course, time and practice will provide for more detailed and complex, in-depth Gantt charts, but this is a great place to start.

We’ve started here with a very simplified Gantt chart but, as you begin to use them, you can add layers of depth and make them increasingly advanced. As you’ve seen, building basic Gantt charts is simpler (and perhaps more useful) than it at first might have seemed.

To summarize the process:

1. Outline the project.
2. Frame the associated Trello board.
3. Define the start and end dates of each activity.
4. Allow Ganttify access to the Trello board.
5. Export from Ganttify to your preferred file format.
6. Insert the newly created file into a proposal, business case, report, etc.

Regardless of your role, or whether you are agency-side or client-side, organizing work and communicating timelines via Gantt charts provides a necessary baseline for just about any project. When you build Gantt charts from shared resources like Trello, Basecamp, or Google Calendar, you also encourage efficient collaboration by ensuring that everyone on your internal teams, and those of your clients, start from “the same page.” Framing your work in Gantt charts improves your ability to organize, communicate, and collaborate, all of which increases efficiency and allows you to, as we say at Distilled, “work smarter, not harder.”

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Seguimos optimizando la Web para móviles

Obtener respuestas adecuadas y relevantes no debería depender del dispositivo que se utiliza. Deberías recibir la mejor respuesta posible independientemente de si usas un teléfono, un ordenador o una tablet. El año pasado, empezamos a utilizar la optimización para móviles como una señal para la clasificación en las búsquedas para móviles. 

Hoy, anunciamos que a partir de mayo empezaremos a implementar una actualización en los resultados de búsqueda para móviles, que dará más importancia a esta señal para que los usuarios puedan encontrar todavía más páginas relevantes y optimizadas para móviles.

Si necesitas asistencia para un sitio web optimizado para móviles, es recomendable que realices la prueba de optimización para móviles y consultes la Guía para móviles dirigida a webmasters. Ambos recursos ofrecen información sobre cómo mejorar los sitios web para móviles. Además, recuerda que el objetivo de las consultas de búsqueda sigue siendo una señal muy importante. Por lo tanto, aunque una página con contenido de alta calidad no esté optimizada para móviles, puede tener una buena clasificación si ofrece contenido relevante e interesante.

Si tienes alguna pregunta, accede al Foro de Ayuda para Webmasters.


Escrito por Klemen Kloboves, Software Engineer, Publicado por Javier Pérez equipo de calidad de búsqueda

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