SEO
A Simple (But Complete) Guide
There’s much more to marketing your music than just promoting it to your fans.
Every band, solo artist, songwriter, producer, record label, venue, and promoter should have a firm grasp of the four Ps—product, price, promotion, and place (distribution)—if they want their music to succeed.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to use marketing to reach your music goals in seven steps.
But first, let’s address the basics.
For this, let’s adapt the AMA definition of marketing. Music marketing is the act and process of creating, sharing, delivering, and exchanging music offerings that have value to customers, fans, or partners.
So let’s break down this definition.
- Creating – Marketing is about creating music products (which you’re doing already).
- Communicating and sharing – Marketing is telling people about your music. “The best thing about doing something you love is sharing it with someone who loves it too.” – Eric Prydz
- Delivering – Marketing is about delivering music to fans and customers.
- Exchanging music offerings – Your music gives fans value; in exchange, they provide you with value by consuming or buying your music.
Accordingly to Spotify, of the 8 million people who have uploaded music to its platform, 5.4 million have published fewer than 10 songs. This data suggests that they may be new to music, approaching music as a side project, or not leveraging streaming.
Around 165,000 artists have released at least 10 songs, and 199,000 have had a gig or live concert.
Of these 165,000 to 199,000 artists, 25% earn more than $10,000 from Spotify streaming and $40,000 or more in total revenue.
Published on Spotify | Musician status | Number | Percentage |
---|---|---|---|
At least one song | New to music | 8 million | – |
Fewer than 10 songs | Hobbyist, side project | 5.4 million | 67.5% |
10 or more songs | Aspiring, not leveraging streaming or music career | 165,000 | 2% |
Earning over $10K from Spotify | Earners drawing streaming and concert income | 41,250 | 1% |
While this is how Spotify identifies musicians, you may identify yourself as a:
- Band.
- Solo artist.
- Songwriter/composer.
- Record producer.
- Music venue.
- Combination of the above.
No matter where you are in your music career, author Steven Pressfield sums up the artist’s way:
There is no worse feeling for a writer or any artist than to see their book, their film, their comedy, their music go out there and die. Or worse, go out into the world and nobody even knows they exist. I’ve experienced it more than once and it’s heartbreaking.
Follow these seven steps to nail your music marketing.
Step 1. Create or decide your product
All marketing starts with a product, even if it’s just one song.
In traditional marketing, you look out at the market, see how big it is, what it wants, and how your product is different.
But you can’t think of your product in the same way as a Tesla car or cornflakes.
The product comes from within for the artist or musician. You need to listen to your inner voice and figure out what you want to bring into the world.
Products
Here are some examples to help you understand what I mean by a “product.”
A song or album
You create a song; a single release is a product.
You have three or four demos sitting in Ableton; that’s an EP in the making.
The album you released last year to critical acclaim is a product—so is the proposed remix album you are considering.
A gig, DJ set, or tour
A one-off gig or DJ set is a product. Extend those gigs into a series, and you have a tour, which is another product.
Licensing
When Carly Paradis was commissioned to create the soundtrack for “The Rising” TV series, she created a product.
Caleb Murphy licensed a song to the TV series “Chicago Fire,” and over 76% of his music income came from sync licensing.
Get a synchronization license that allows someone to use your songs in commercials, videos, games, or even YouTube videos.
An exclusive sync license lets one party use your song, while a non-exclusive sync license lets an unlimited number of people use your music.
Merchandise
Different types of merchandise, such as clothing, vinyl, and CDs, are products.
Go to most concerts, and you’ll see T-shirts, hats, and other artist merchandising.
You don’t need a massive fanbase like New Order or Depeche Mode to sell merchandise. Spanish musician Henry Saiz sells a small collection of products on Bandcamp.
Record production
The production of a song or album is a product, whether you are paid a flat fee or negotiate a percentage of ongoing royalties.
Streaming
Music on streaming platforms, such as Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Spotify, is considered a product.
Session musician
A session musician is a person who plays music for a band, orchestra, etc., and is only needed to play a particular song or performance; a session is a product.
Artists like Clare Uchima tour with artists like Harry Styles, Pet Shop Boys, Kate Tempest, and others as session musicians while having their own music and merchandising.
Legal stuff
Make sure you take care of your products’ copyrights, trademarks, and registrations. Talk to a lawyer, record label representative, and other musicians.
Here are some valuable resources and links:
After creating or deciding on your product, move on to the next step.
Step 2. Decide your pricing/income streams
Pricing is what people will pay for your product, and it should be linked to the real and perceived value of the product you offer.
For example, early birds pay a lower fee at this concert in Seattle.
You can differentiate product value by using tiered pricing, such as standard, premium, and VIP tickets.
In most cases, musicians work with third parties, and everyone shares revenue.
The 15/85 rule for concerts and gigs
A good rule of thumb for artists and concert tickets is the 15/85 rule.
That means 15% of the gig income is for you; 85% is spent on agents, the venue, promotion, travel, accommodation, and other musicians.
If you are an unknown or new band, many venues will work on a revenue share with you. You promote and sell tickets to your gig, and they get a cut and all the bar and drinks revenue.
Streaming pricing
Spotify determines the price per play or stream.
Here’s the estimated revenue for a band with 600,000 streams of its songs.
But remember, there are more streaming platforms than Spotify. You can use this calculator to work out your streaming income.
You may earn more if you release the edited version of a single or album for free on Spotify:
Then sell the extended versions on another platform such as Beatport:
Production
Producers’ fees can vary considerably, but these examples illustrate some common scenarios:
- Studio – $600 per day
- Mixing – $300 per song
- Mastering – $70 per song
- Production – $350 per song (plus royalties)
Merchandising
According to Spotify, the most popular types of merchandise across all music genres are:
- Vinyl
- Shirts
- CDs
- Other
- Hats
- Outerwear
- Accessories
Artists and labels can use Merchbar to sell more merchandise directly or through channels like Spotify, Instagram, YouTube, and their own websites.
Merchbar manages the products, orders, payments, deliveries, and returns. But you can sell merch on Spotify as well:
Alternatively, add your merchandise to Bandcamp.
Session musician
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, session musicians roughly earn these amounts:
- Median annual salary: $58,552 ($28.15/hour)
- Top 10% annual salary: $152,547 ($73.34/hour)
- Bottom 10% annual salary: $21,632 ($10.40/hour)
By now, you should know which products you can create and which prices and income streams they’re worth.
Now it’s time to set a goal.
Step 3. Set a goal
If you have a clear goal, you can structure your marketing efforts to reach that goal efficiently.
If you’ve published one song on Spotify and only have a few hundred listeners or followers, your goal may be to get 10,000 streams of your song.
That’s an achievable goal.
Or consider the 1,000 True Fans strategy: For example, you have 1,000 fans. Each fan spends $50 a year on your products. That equates to $50,000 revenue per annum.
But let’s say the goal is a mini tour of eight gigs.
So eight gigs x 500 tickets sold per gig x $20 per ticket = $80,000.
And 15% of that is $12,000. That’s fine for a solo artist or DJ, but remember that revenue is shared among band members.
If you’re one of the millions who have added fewer than 10 songs to Spotify, you may have other goals, such as:
- Securing one tour as a session musician with a band.
- Earning one commission for a soundtrack or video game.
- Booking four other musicians into your production studio per month.
You should have multiple goals when it comes to releasing and streaming your music because it will eventually grow your reputation and fan base in the long run. But don’t forget to have another product with a more immediate revenue stream.
What now?
Step 4. Choose the places to distribute your product
There are many places to distribute your music or product so that it can be played, heard, seen, and/or purchased.
Here’s an overview of key places to distribute each product type and links to relevant resources and guides.
Product | Key places to distribute product |
---|---|
Single or album | – Spotify – Apple Music – YouTube – SoundCloud – Bandcamp – Tunecore, CDBaby, or EmuBands to distribute music to 100/150 other places |
Gigs or concerts | – bandsintown.com – Google search (Bandsintown widget) – songkick.com – ticketmaster.com – livenation.com – Facebook Events – Spotify gig listing – Your website |
Merchandise | – Amazon for artists – Spotify – Merchbar – Bandcamp – Your website |
Licensing | – CD Baby music licensing service – YouTube Content ID – license to YouTube – Music licensing companies – musicbed.com – musicvine.com – audiojungle.net – freesound.org – pond5.com – soundsnap.com – mixkit.com – storyblocks.com – Personal networking with music supervisors – Networking with filmmakers – Networking with video game companies – Use a music licensing agent |
Production/session musician | – Personal networking – Google search results – Music production marketplaces such as SoundBetter and AirGigs – Booking platforms such as Encore and GigSalad |
Some of these places provide the ability to stream your music, list your gigs, and sell your merchandise, e.g., Spotify.
Next, you need to promote your products to reach your goals.
Step 5. Create promotional campaigns
Promotion is the tactics used to tell people about your product and encourage them to notice it and take action.
Your promotional campaign consists of pre-launch announcements, the launch, and post-launch activities.
Here’s how Vivrant launched its compilation album.
- March 2 – Announce album; save and preview track #1 using fan links
- March 4 – Launch track #1 on Spotify and link to all streams
- March 7 – Spotify playlist appearance
- March 9 – Announce track #2; preview on SoundCloud with partner and link to all streams
- March 11 – Launch track #2 and link to all streams
- March 17 – Announce track #3; preview on SoundCloud with partner and link to all streams
- March 18 – Launch track #3 and link to all streams
- March 24 – Announce track #4; preview on SoundCloud with partner and link to all streams
- March 24 – Spotify playlist appearance
- March 25 – Launch track #4 and link to all streams
- March 25 – Track #4 appears on an Apple Music playlist
- March 31 – Announce track #5; preview on SoundCloud with partner and link to all streams
- April 1 – Launch track #5 and link to all streams
- April 18 – Mixmag.com interview about the album
- April 20 – SoundCloud mix features album songs
- April 25 – Spotify playlist appearance
Planning for this event would have begun months before the first date mentioned above, and some larger venues plan events a year in advance.
Songkick provides the tools for artists, managers, venues, and booking agents to list and promote their live events and notify fans to promote pre-sales.
You can use tools like ToneDen to allow fans to pre-save or pre-add songs to their streaming platforms so that they can listen to or buy them on the release date.
Website
Your website should be the focus of your promotional efforts.
First, you’ll need a logo, color scheme, fonts, and photography.
Your best bet is on low-effort and low-cost website builders like Bandzoogle, Wix, or GeneratePress (customize the “Solo” template).
The website should have the following sections:
- Your music (or equipment)
- Previous and forthcoming gigs or events
- Press kit and images
- Videos
- Biography
- Contact form or “subscribe” button
Once you’re done with the website, you should make sure that it’s well optimized for both users and search engines. To do that, add the website to Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, which will analyze and monitor everything for you for free.
Search traffic
Depending on the type of musician and product you sell, you may want to develop content beyond these essentials.
For example, a mixing engineer or producer may want to communicate their experience or expertise by writing articles or guides to help secure a solo artist or band as a client.
And there’s quite a lot of content that can be covered. For example, this website has pages about home studio setup, DIY vocal booth, how to master a song, how to make an album, etc.
Its 1,000+ pages drive almost 80,000 monthly visits from Google:
King Tuts, a renowned music venue in Glasgow, generates nearly 10% of its search traffic from its artist profile pages.
So when fans search for a band, King Tuts shows up near the top of Google’s search results, promoting the venue, band, and ticket sales.
Email marketing
Your website and social channels should have a contact or subscription form to capture the email address of fans (or potential customers) who can receive advance notifications and news from you.
Email platforms, such as Mailchimp and ConvertKit, allow musicians to create a free-of-charge mailing list of 2,000 and 1,000 people, respectively.
Here’s an email from Liam Gallagher to pre-order tickets and an album months in advance of the release.
The first thing you see on Ushuaia’s website is a subscription form: “Subscribe to our newsletter to receive the most updated information on the DJs of the season.”
In addition, you can add links to your subscription form from your social media profiles using tools such as Linktree or ToneDen smart links.
Social media
If you haven’t done so already, set up the following social media accounts:
- SoundCloud
- Bandcamp
- YouTube
- TikTok
- Spotify
Of course, take into account your listeners. TikTok will likely be a waste of time if you have a predominantly older audience.
You or your team can use Canva’s templates to design images and videos and then publish them to your social media channels.
Press kit
An electronic press kit is a collection of information about you or your band, including your logo, photographs, contact details, social media links, and any other relevant content.
A press kit is great for music journalists who use it when writing articles or doing features about you.
The ideal place to store a press kit is on your website.
Spotify for artists
Spotify is built for artists, and you can use it to promote your songs, gigs, or merchandise.
- Add music to Spotify
- Pitch to playlist editors
- Add or manage your profile
- Add your gigs and events
- Add promo cards
- Add merchandise to Spotify
Wikipedia
Search for any artist or band and, in most cases, the top result is a Wikipedia page.
Getting a Wikipedia page is difficult for most businesses, but it should be easier for artists who already have some coverage and history.
Recommended reading: How to Create a Wikipedia Page (Step by Step)
Pitch to journalists
An essential part of promotion is to pitch products or stories to relevant journalists so that they can feature such content in their publications or websites.
For example, here’s a new musician featured in DJ Mag who played a live set from an abandoned concrete plant in Sweden.
This event was “pitched” to promote his new EP.
So how do you find journalists?
1. Find journalists
Use Ahrefs’ Content Explorer to identify journalists for your genre of music, e.g., rock.
Enter this search query:
“alternative rock” OR “alt rock” OR “indie rock” OR “stoner rock” OR “psych rock” OR “surf rock” OR “post rock”
You’ll then see a list of potential journalists to contact under the “Authors” tab.
Or you can find journalists who write about new music. I looked up the following query:
“track of the day” OR “track of the week” OR “new music roundup” OR “music roundup” OR “new music Friday”
Again, when you click the “Authors” tab, you can view journalists or bloggers who write about new music, their Twitter addresses, and how many followers they have.
In this example, I discovered Georgia Murphy had written 293 articles on her website about new songs and musicians. She shares them with her 43,171 Twitter followers.
2. Filter and export list
Filter your contact list by using the filters available and then export it.
3. Find email addresses
Use an email look-up service, such as Hunter, to identify the addresses of the journalists you found.
4. Pitch your idea
Here’s how to pitch your idea to a music journalist.
- Your idea doesn’t need to be as elaborate as a DJ set in a Swedish warehouse, but it does need to stand out.
- You should include links to your press kit with material about your “pitch.”
- Then do one email follow-up if you don’t get a response or deliver your idea to those who do respond.
Getting featured by journalists isn’t that easy, but the above should give you an idea of the process.
Playlists
Pitching playlists is another way to promote your music.
Use a service like Repost by SoundCloud to promote playlists to editors at Apple Music and other platforms like Tidal, Deezer, Beatport, and Amazon Music.
Or follow these steps to pitch a Spotify playlist:
Promote your songs with mixes
Promote your product well in advance of the release date by featuring the new song in a mix.
For example, this SoundCloud mix includes two new songs from Molo’s forthcoming EP and was published on SoundCloud less than 48 hours ago (as of when this article was written). Since then, there have been 1,481 plays and 45 reposts.
Pitch for placements
Caleb Murphy outlines the steps to pitch your songs for film and television placements to licensing agents.
- Register or log in at crucialmusic.com
- Submit a song (and instrumental version) you have performed, produced, engineered, mixed, and mastered
- Provide song details
- Repeat
Booking platforms and marketplaces
Specific booking platforms and marketplaces, such as SaladGig, Upwork, SoundBetter, and The Bash, are where you can find projects.
After registering, follow these steps:
- Profile: write a bio describing how you’re different from others and can solve their problems
- Respond to inquiries quickly
- Follow up via email, call, or text
- Add a free gift or a guide with your quote
- Use anchor pricing to propose higher- and lower-price options
Spotify Marquee
Spotify Marquee is a paid service to help you promote your music to the right audience, increasing listeners and playlist adds.
Promote your concerts and gigs
To promote your events, concerts, and gigs on Facebook and Instagram, follow these steps using ToneDen:
- Events are pulled from your ticketing platform.
- An audience visiting specific music event pages is created.
- People interested in an event are targeted with an advert for that specific event.
Step 6. Measure and review
Let’s say your goal was to sell out tickets to eight venues. But you only secured four venues, and they are 50% full.
Most online platforms will provide you with audience statistics, e.g., followers, streams, ticket sales, orders, etc., that you can review.
Review the previous steps. Then discuss what did and didn’t work with your team or colleagues.
Step 7. Repeat
So let’s say you published your first song on Spotify, followed the above steps, then measured the results.
Now repeat the steps with your next product, which can be extending the first song into a full album.
Or you released an album and decided the next product is a nationwide tour.
Marketing is a continuous loop of going over product, price, goal, distribution, and promotion.
Use our music marketing campaign template
I’ve created this simple music marketing template with examples you can use as a guide. You can make your own copy here.
Product | Price | Goal | Place | Promote |
---|---|---|---|---|
Single or album release | $0 – $13.99 | Get published | – Spotify – SoundCloud – Apple Music – Bandcamp – Or use a distribution service like groover.co |
– Spotify – Social media – Email list – Playlist – Mixes – Advertising |
Live tour | $20 ticket revenue share | Get eight venues booked | – Venue #1 – Venue #2 – Venue #3 – Venue #4 – Venue #5 – Venue #6 – Venue #7 – Venue #8 – Etc |
– Create gig graphics and videos – Announce dates – Email list – Add venue links to the website – Work with the venue’s promotion staff – Social media – Advertising |
Merchandise | $25 per item | 500 units | – Your website – Your events – Amazon for artists – Spotify – Merchbar – Bandcamp – Google search engine |
– Email subscriber – Promo code – Use FOMO – Upsell – Advertising – Table at live events |
Licensing | License four songs | $10,000 per annum | – Licensing – CD Baby music licensing service – YouTube Content ID – Music licensing companies, such as Music Bed, Music Vine, etc – Personal networking with music supervisors – Networking with filmmakers – Networking with video game companies – Use a music licensing agent |
– Publish music on SoundBetter – Add music to other licensing sites – submithub.com – crucialmusic.com |
Record production | See price guide | Produce one band’s album | – Personal networking – Your website – Social media – Industry events – Various marketplaces and booking platforms |
– Publish your own productions and sounds – Collaborate with other artists and promote – Publish content frequently to the website and social media platforms – Tour (as a support act) – Search, find, and bid on booking platforms and marketplaces |
Final thoughts
Music marketing is a lot like any other marketing: start with your product, determine the pricing, set a goal, and use the suggested distribution channels and promotional methods to promote your product.
Follow these steps, and you’ll be well on your way to creating success for your music.
Got questions? Ping me on Twitter.
SEO
How to Revive an Old Blog Article for SEO
Quick question: What do you typically do with your old blog posts? Most likely, the answer is: Not much.
If that’s the case, you’re not alone. Many of us in SEO and content marketing tend to focus on continuously creating new content, rather than leveraging our existing blog posts.
However, here’s the reality—Google is becoming increasingly sophisticated in evaluating content quality, and we need to adapt accordingly. Just as it’s easier to encourage existing customers to make repeat purchases, updating old content on your website is a more efficient and sustainable strategy in the long run.
Ways to Optimize Older Content
Some of your old content might not be optimized for SEO very well, rank for irrelevant keywords, or drive no traffic at all. If the quality is still decent, however, you should be able to optimize it properly with little effort.
Refresh Content
If your blog post contains a specific year or mentions current events, it may become outdated over time. If the rest of the content is still relevant (like if it’s targeting an evergreen topic), simply updating the date might be all you need to do.
Rewrite Old Blog Posts
When the content quality is low (you might have greatly improved your writing skills since you’ve written the post) but the potential is still there, there’s not much you can do apart from rewriting an old blog post completely.
This is not a waste—you’re saving time on brainstorming since the basic structure is already in place. Now, focus on improving the quality.
Delete Old Blog Posts
You might find a blog post that just seems unusable. Should you delete your old content? It depends. If it’s completely outdated, of low quality, and irrelevant to any valuable keywords for your website, it’s better to remove it.
Once you decide to delete the post, don’t forget to set up a 301 redirect to a related post or page, or to your homepage.
Promote Old Blog Posts
Sometimes all your content needs is a bit of promotion to start ranking and getting traffic again. Share it on your social media, link to it from a new post – do something to get it discoverable again to your audience. This can give it the boost it needs to attract organic links too.
Which Blog Posts Should You Update?
Deciding when to update or rewrite blog posts is a decision that relies on one important thing: a content audit.
Use your Google Analytics to find out which blog posts used to drive tons of traffic, but no longer have the same reach. You can also use Google Search Console to find out which of your blog posts have lost visibility in comparison to previous months. I have a guide on website analysis using Google Analytics and Google Search Console you can follow.
If you use keyword tracking tools like SE Ranking, you can also use the data it provides to come up with a list of blog posts that have dropped in the rankings.
Make data-driven decisions to identify which blog posts would benefit from these updates – i.e., which ones still have the chance to recover their keyword rankings and organic traffic.
With Google’s helpful content update, which emphasizes better user experiences, it’s crucial to ensure your content remains relevant, valuable, and up-to-date.
How To Update Old Blog Posts for SEO
Updating articles can be an involved process. Here are some tips and tactics to help you get it right.
Author’s Note: I have a Comprehensive On-Page SEO Checklist you might also be interested in following while you’re doing your content audit.
Conduct New Keyword Research
Updating your post without any guide won’t get you far. Always do your keyword research to understand how users are searching for your given topic.
Proper research can also show you relevant questions and sections that can be added to the blog post you’re updating or rewriting. Make sure to take a look at the People Also Ask (PAA) section that shows up when you search for your target keyword. Check out other websites like Answer The Public, Reddit, and Quora to see what users are looking for too.
Look for New Ranking Opportunities
When trying to revive an old blog post for SEO, keep an eye out for new SEO opportunities (e.g., AI Overview, featured snippets, and related search terms) that didn’t exist when you first wrote your blog post. Some of these features can be targeted by the new content you will add to your post, if you write with the aim to be eligible for it.
Rewrite Headlines and Meta Tags
If you want to attract new readers, consider updating your headlines and meta tags.
Your headlines and meta tags should fulfill these three things:
- Reflect the rewritten and new content you’ve added to the blog post.
- Be optimized for the new keywords it’s targeting (if any).
- Appeal to your target audience – who may have changed tastes from when the blog post was originally made.
Remember that your meta tags in particular act like a brief advertisement for your blog post, since this is what the user first sees when your blog post is shown in the search results page.
Take a look at your blog post’s click-through rate on Google Search Console – if it falls below 2%, it’s definitely time for new meta tags.
Replace Outdated Information and Statistics
Updating blog content with current studies and statistics enhances the relevance and credibility of your post. By providing up-to-date information, you help your audience make better, well-informed decisions, while also showing that your content is trustworthy.
Tighten or Expand Ideas
Your old content might be too short to provide real value to users – or you might have rambled on and on in your post. It’s important to evaluate whether you need to make your content more concise, or if you need to elaborate more.
Keep the following tips in mind as you refine your blog post’s ideas:
- Evaluate Helpfulness: Measure how well your content addresses your readers’ pain points. Aim to follow the E-E-A-T model (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
- Identify Missing Context: Consider whether your content needs more detail or clarification. View it from your audience’s perspective and ask if the information is complete, or if more information is needed.
- Interview Experts: Speak with industry experts or thought leaders to get fresh insights. This will help support your writing, and provide unique points that enhance the value of your content.
- Use Better Examples: Examples help simplify complex concepts. Add new examples or improve existing ones to strengthen your points.
- Add New Sections if Needed: If your content lacks depth or misses a key point, add new sections to cover these areas more thoroughly.
- Remove Fluff: Every sentence should contribute to the overall narrative. Eliminate unnecessary content to make your post more concise.
- Revise Listicles: Update listicle items based on SEO recommendations and content quality. Add or remove headings to stay competitive with higher-ranking posts.
Improve Visuals and Other Media
No doubt that there are tons of old graphics and photos in your blog posts that can be improved with the tools we have today. Make sure all of the visuals used in your content are appealing and high quality.
Update Internal and External Links
Are your internal and external links up to date? They need to be for your SEO and user experience. Outdated links can lead to broken pages or irrelevant content, frustrating readers and hurting your site’s performance.
You need to check for any broken links on your old blog posts, and update them ASAP. Updating your old blog posts can also lead to new opportunities to link internally to other blog posts and pages, which may not have been available when the post was originally published.
Optimize for Conversions
When updating content, the ultimate goal is often to increase conversions. However, your conversion goals may have changed over the years.
So here’s what you need to check in your updated blog post. First, does the call-to-action (CTA) still link to the products or services you want to promote? If not, update it to direct readers to the current solution or offer.
Second, consider where you can use different conversion strategies. Don’t just add a CTA at the end of the post.
Last, make sure that the blog post leverages product-led content. It’s going to help you mention your products and services in a way that feels natural, without being too pushy. Being subtle can be a high ROI tactic for updated posts.
Key Takeaway
Reviving old blog articles for SEO is a powerful strategy that can breathe new life into your content and boost your website’s visibility. Instead of solely focusing on creating new posts, taking the time to refresh existing content can yield impressive results, both in terms of traffic and conversions.
By implementing these strategies, you can transform old blog posts into valuable resources that attract new readers and retain existing ones. So, roll up your sleeves, dive into your archives, and start updating your content today—your audience and search rankings will thank you!
SEO
How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages
The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.
Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.
What Is Compressibility?
In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.
TL/DR Of Compression
Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.
This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:
- Identify Patterns:
A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases - Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size. - Shorter References Use Less Bits:
The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.
A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.
Research Paper About Detecting Spam
This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.
Marc Najork
One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.
Dennis Fetterly
Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.
Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.
Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis
Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.
Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.
Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:
“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”
The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.
They write:
“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.
…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”
High Compressibility Correlates To Spam
The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.
Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.
The researchers concluded:
“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”
But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:
“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.
Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:
95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.
More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”
The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.
Insight Into Quality Rankings
The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.
The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.
The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.
This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:
“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.
For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”
So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.
Combining Multiple Signals
The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.
The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:
“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”
These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:
“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”
Key Insight:
Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.
What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.
Takeaways
We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.
Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:
- Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
- Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
- Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
- In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
- When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
- Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
- Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.
Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:
Detecting spam web pages through content analysis
Featured Image by Shutterstock/pathdoc
SEO
New Google Trends SEO Documentation
Google Search Central published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to use it for search marketing. This guide serves as an easy to understand introduction for newcomers and a helpful refresher for experienced search marketers and publishers.
The new guide has six sections:
- About Google Trends
- Tutorial on monitoring trends
- How to do keyword research with the tool
- How to prioritize content with Trends data
- How to use Google Trends for competitor research
- How to use Google Trends for analyzing brand awareness and sentiment
The section about monitoring trends advises there are two kinds of rising trends, general and specific trends, which can be useful for developing content to publish on a site.
Using the Explore tool, you can leave the search box empty and view the current rising trends worldwide or use a drop down menu to focus on trends in a specific country. Users can further filter rising trends by time periods, categories and the type of search. The results show rising trends by topic and by keywords.
To search for specific trends users just need to enter the specific queries and then filter them by country, time, categories and type of search.
The section called Content Calendar describes how to use Google Trends to understand which content topics to prioritize.
Google explains:
“Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.”
Read the new Google Trends documentation:
Get started with Google Trends
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero
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