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Creating Content for Humans Or, knowing when not to optimize

Holland Dauterive | SEO Manager @ ModCloth

For those of you who don't know who ModCloth is -- we are a social shopping women’s clothing site. But we’re also more than just that. We’re a community, a creator of content, and we let the

customer guide the conversation.

ModCloth: Company Overview

§  We were founded by high school sweethearts – Susan Gregg Koger and Eric Koger

§  Started in a dorm room at Carnegie Mellon, we are now located in 3 cities, and have nearly 400 employees

§  We use our community in all aspects of our business – from merchandising to buying to marketing

§  1/3 traffic comes back more than once per day

ModCloth: Company Overview

§  Why Do We Care About Content? §  Crowdsourcing: External Relationships that Guide Content §  Creation: Internal Partnerships that Get Content Created §  Curation: Humans vs. Spiders - how does SEO fit in?

Agenda: The Content Relationship Cycle

Why Do We Care About Content?

§  We create content to: 1) Sell Stuff

Content and Conversation

§  We create content to: 2) Figure Out What to Sell

Content and Conversation

§  We create content to: 2) Figure Out What to Sell

Content and Conversation

§  We create content to: 2) Figure Out What to Sell

Content and Conversation

§  We create content to: 2) Figure Out What to Sell

Content and Conversation

§  We create content to: 2) Figure Out What to Sell

Content and Conversation

Crowdsourcing: External Relationships and Content

Talking to the People Who Use the Site

§  User Experience Research Team

Talking to the People Who Use the Site

The end result: site is first and foremost designed for the users (instead of the creative team…or

SEO)

Creation: Internal Partnerships and Content Optimization

§  Luck: ModCloth knew SEO was important §  The teams just didn’t know was SEO was…

§  Training: My first order of business was to train our writers, product team and UX designers on SEO 101 §  This is ongoing §  Found the most success in creating ‘best practice’ guides for all

involved teams

§  Whiskey: Sometimes required for the execution of SEO §  Training is great, but relationships are what gets SEO done

Luck, Training, and Whiskey

§  Most teams are willing to try SEO once – the key is to provide them with visual feedback that demonstrates the impact of optimizations

§  One of the best tools for doing this is BrightEdge §  Easy to create test groups §  Instant trended graphs that quickly demonstrate success

Graphs!

Humans vs. Spiders

§  We’ve all heard it – create for customers not for spiders

§  What if we really did that? §  How do we decide what content to create? §  Am I trying to put myself out of work?

Content for Humans vs. Search Engines

§  Don’t just write about tangentially-related topics because they have high keyword volume

§  What are people asking customer care about? §  Common questions are great content ideas §  Help increase you visibility and decreases workload for the

customer care team

§  What are people posting about on Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest…? §  This can guide both content as well as your merchants

Know What to Create

Example: we’ve gotten a lot of feedback across all our social channels and customer care regarding Plus Sizes

Know What to Create

When we started digging into the data what we found was pretty astonishing:

More U.S. women report wearing a size 16 dress than a size 2 and 0 combined. 57% of U.S. women wear at least some clothing in sizes 16 and above.

§  The Results: We created an entire section and product team dedicated to plus-size fashion

Know What to Create

§  Not only was it great in terms of revenue, it finally allowed us to create targeted landing pages and content that help us rank on high-volume Plus terms.

§  Just because you have content doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be better off once it’s SEO optimized §  If the content sounds off-brand or inauthentic because of

optimizations, users won’t interact with it

Know When Not to Optimize

Optimized G+ Post: 6 likes 0 comments or shares

Typical G+ Post: 16 likes 4 comments 6 shares

§  Technically, good writing and good content IS optimized content §  Writers tend to be wary of SEO optimizations because they’ve

seen over-optimized copy. §  Using the BrightEdge Recommendation tool, we can easily

identify over-optimizations on our pages

Know When Not to Optimize

§  We took this over-optimized copy on the dresses page and revised it §  The results §  copywriters were happier with the end results and were open

to rolling our copy on all pages §  Rankings improved during the critical holiday season

Know When Not to Optimize

So, in conclusion…

CROWDSOURCE Let your customer tell

you what to create

CREATE CURATE

CROWDSOURCE

CREATE Write the content, buy

the merchandise, create the landing pages

CURATE Optimize – or not –

consider the intent of the content and how you

expect your customer to interact with it

CROWDSOURCE Let your customer tell you what

to create

CREATE CURATE

CROWDSOURCE

CREATE Write the content, buy the

merchandise, create the landing pages

CURATE Optimize – or not – consider the intent

of the content and how you expect your customer to interact with it

Thank You! Any Questions?