• A piece of content’s quality is determined by the creator, or
• Quality content is content with a great headline, several images, easy-to-read, actionable, and other other specific attributes.

Once upon a time, we tried to define what makes content great at WordStream, my former company. We fell into the same trap as above, trying to define quality content based on attributes. We said great content is:

• Findable
• Shareable
• Usable
• Readable
• Memorable
• Quotable
• Actionable
• Reportable

All of these are important. But even if your content has all eight of those attributes, it still is most likely to go nowhere.

The definition of quality content should be based on outcomes, not biased views of your own work. Here’s one way to think about quality content that might put things in perspective.

What is “Quality Content”?

In the based-on-a-true-story movie Moneyball, baseball team manager Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt, finds himself in a frustrating meeting where his scouts are talking about potential free agents to add to the team lineup. The scouts evaluate players based on their athleticism, size, and speed. They also speak glowingly about one player because he’s clean cut, has a good face, and a good jaw. Beane asks his scouts an important question: “Can he hit?“

Many marketers look at content the same way the scouts were looking at the players. We’ve been trying to define content quality as a series of technical and aesthetic attributes: how our content is structured and formatted. How many times have you heard that long form is better than short form or vice versa?

Individuals, businesses, and brands are producing a ridiculously enormous amount of content every minute. But few are actually successful. If your content doesn’t succeed, does it matter if it included lots of pretty images, had perfect spelling and grammar, or used x number of words?

No.

Great baseball players come in all shapes and sizes. The same is true of quality content.
Quality content is successful content. Quality content achieves a goal. I.e., it drives traffic, Google search rankings, engagement, and/or conversions.

Performance is what matters for any content marketing strategy. Here’s how to create home run content for your marketing team.

Increase Your Chances of Picking the Right Topic

Anyone with a creative bone in their body will argue that content marketing strategy isn’t just about numbers. Creativity is art, after all.

The argument goes something along the lines of: “If content creation were just a science, then anybody could simply create quality content. Experience matters! Intuition matters! There are just certain intangibles that only creative content people can understand.”

Time to drop a truth bomb: No content marketer has a crystal ball. Nobody can look at a piece of content and predict its future any more accurately than I can.

You can’t say with 100 percent certainty, even if it is based on past experience, that a piece of content will succeed in the future. I’m always surprised when an article I worked really hard on goes nowhere and an article I didn’t spend much time on becomes a huge success.

You Can’t Find Unicorns Without Producing Lots of Donkeys

You can’t predict success. Another common misconception is that you can somehow convert increased effort or time on one piece of content into increased units of quality.

You have to produce and audition lots of ideas to find your next quality idea. Then you have to fully explore that topic once it has revealed itself. Here’s how to do that. Consider these factors when determining what content topics to invest your time in:

• Past unicorn content: What topics have performed well in the past?
• Topics your audience cares about: What’s your audience talking about on social?
• Topics you want to rank for: What keywords are you currently targeting?

Once you decide on a topic, create the content. Measure the results to determine if your content was a quality piece and react accordingly. Take the following steps to get closer to creating more unicorn content.

1. Produce and Audition Lots of Content: Content is a lot about throwing things at a wall and seeing what sticks. Consider past performance of similar topics in conjunction with the goals you have for this piece of content.
2. Measure User Engagement Rates: After publishing, measure engagement rates for your content. Use time and rate benchmarks to determine if it’s working.
3. Kill the Donkeys: If a piece of content isn’t performing, abandon ship. No use in continuing to promote something no one cares about.
4. Find the Unicorns and Sound the Unicorn Alert! If content is performing well, start promoting and maximizing your return—more on that later.

How do You Know if It’s Quality Content?

Everyone wants to create successful content. But what actually makes content successful?

User engagement rates.

Think about the systems that drive exposure and clicks to your content. Social media news feeds, search and social ads, and organic search listings. These systems all increasingly employ new machine learning based algorithms that reward higher engagement rates (such as click through rates and dwell time) with far greater exposure.

Perform an audit of your existing content based on engagement rates such as dwell time, conversion rates, click through rates, or traffic. (Read Curata’s comprehensive content audit guide for how to do this.) Look for the outliers—the content that does not just a little bit better, but three to five times better. Those are your unicorn content campaigns with unusually high user engagement. They are the types of content most likely to earn the approval of our algorithmic overlords.

Your Unicorn content (content with unusually high user engagement rates) tends to:

1. Rank well in Google Search
2. Convert significantly better than donkey content
3. Drives tons of organic social media engagement
4. Does fantastically well in paid search
5. Does fantastically well in paid social media ads

Again, the relationship here isn’t coincidental. It’s because the Facebook Newsfeed algorithm, Relevancy Score in Facebook Ads, Quality Score in Google AdWords, and RankBrain for Organic Search, all use machine learning algorithms. They dramatically reward content boasting high user engagement with tremendous visibility and clicks within their platform.

You Found Quality Content: Now What?

Promoting a donkey won’t turn it into a unicorn. You’ll only waste time and money. Instead, focus all your efforts on promoting your powerful and valuable unicorns. When you find your unicorns, promote them on every channel to amplify their impact by 100 times or even 1,000 times and drive even more traffic, engagement, and leads.

Once you’ve found content that fits into all these categories, it’s time to start implementing a promotion strategy. The following tactics will help you leverage maximum value from your unicorn content:

• Repurpose it into other types of content: webinar, infographic, etc.
• Schedule it for a refresh
• Pitch similar content with backlinks to other websites
• Put some paid social behind it
• Ask for influencer quotes to add in
• Make it into an eBook

Content Marketing is About Output, not Input!

Content marketing strategy is an unfair game. If you want to win you need to stop relying on your gut. Your gut is really just your opinion and, by nature, biased. To really succeed, you need to look at unbiased statistics.

Stop looking at content attributes. Start looking at data to find your truly high-quality content. Start optimizing for engagement and you’ll find huge content wins.

When you find that super rare unicorn content, capitalize on it! Leverage the heck out of it on every channel to maximize your marketing ROI. And to create your own documented content marketing strategy, download Curata’s Content Marketing Pyramid: A Framework to Develop & Execute Your Content Marketing Strategy eBook.

Even if you know little to nothing about SEO, Google has made two things clear:

• It’s important that other websites link to yours. Since the beginning, links have helped Google figure out how to rank all the content that exists on the web.
• You need to publish relevant content. If you want people to link to you, you need great content. And it needs to match the intent of the person searching for the things you sell or know lots about.

But Google is evolving.

Welcome to the Machine Learning Era

While still incredibly important for SEO, links and great content aren’t enough to guarantee top rankings on their own. That’s because Google is increasingly using machine learning to determine how web pages rank in search results.

Since Google started relying more on machine learning to power its search results, one new thing has become clear to me: user engagement metrics are changing the way you should approach SEO.

Machine learning systems such as Google RankBrain reward high engagement with better visibility. So you should focus on two user engagement metrics if you want better rankings:

1. Increasing click-through rate (CTR): This is the percentage of people who click on your listing in the search results.
2. Increasing dwell time: This is how long visitors stay on your website after clicking through from search results.

Here’s a simple diagram to explain how machine learning works.

This explanation isn’t just based on opinion or speculation (or what Google has said publicly). It’s based on me running multiple experiments and analyzing the surprising results.

Prepare to have your mind blown! Here are eight crazy SEO experiments that will change how you think about SEO forever.

8. Higher CTR = Higher Search Rankings?

If you’re looking for signs of machine learning and RankBrain at work, look no further than our organic search click-through rate experiment.

This click curve, based on analysis of 1,000 keywords from the Google Search Console for the WordStream site, clearly illustrates the zero-sum nature of Google’s search results. In each period, the pages occupying the most prominent positions got more and more clicks, while the lower positions got less and less.

Heading forward, Google will reward pages that attract engagement with higher positions, and push down pages with low engagement.

7. Does CTR Impact Rankings?

Google says they don’t use CTR as a direct ranking factor. But that could also be interpreted as an implicit acknowledgement that CTR can indirectly influence your rankings.

We wanted to find out. For our next experiment, we tried to isolate the natural relationship between CTR and ranking by taking the difference between an observed organic search CTR minus the expected CTR.

This chart illustrates the difference between what I term “unicorns” and “donkeys.”

• Unicorns: Pages that beat the expected average organic CTR for a given position were far more likely to rank in the top four positions.
• Donkeys: Pages that failed to beat the expected organic search CTR were more likely to appear in positions 6–10.

The good news: increasing your engagement by three percent should help move you one position higher in organic position, on average.

6. What Happens When you Make a Headline More Clickable?

More people click on it. Duh!

In this experiment, we decided to change the title of one of our pages (“Guerrilla Marketing: 20+ Examples & Strategies to Stand Out”). It was ranking in eighth position and had a CTR of one percent. A total donkey!

So, guided by a proven headline formula, we changed it to “20+ Jaw-Dropping Guerrilla Marketing Examples & Strategies.” Nothing else on the page changed—we didn’t add or edit any of the text, build any links, or add any images.

What happened?

Our retitled page jumped up to the fifth position in Google and the CTR increased to 4.2 percent.

And, oh yeah, organic traffic increased by 112 percent over five months!

Boosting your CTR is super valuable for SEO. In addition to getting more clicks, a higher CTR can help improve your rankings, which results in even more clicks.

5. Do Engagement Rates Impact Rankings?

You want searchers to stick around after they click on your result and land on your website. We know this is important because Google measures dwell time.

One big problem: we can’t measure dwell time—only Google can. So we have to look at other user engagement metrics such as time on site and bounce rate as a proxy for dwell time.

Our next experiment did just that, and we found some interesting results. Look at the “kinks” in these two graphs:

These graphs show that, on average, pages with lower bounce rates and higher time on site are more likely to appear in the top six organic search result positions. Pages with higher bounce rates and lower time on site, however, were more likely to rank seventh on the page, or lower.

4. Can We See the Impact of Time on Site on SEO?

Absolutely! And so can you.

We used the WordStream site for this experiment, looking at time on site and organic traffic before and after Google rolled out RankBrain. The results are stunning.

Before:

After:

Google figured out that some of our pages were ranking well, but had below average time on site. Those pages no longer rank or bring is nearly as much traffic.

This experiment really shows Google’s machine learning algorithms at work. Your traffic won’t vanish overnight. It will gradually disappear. If you have any pages with time on site that are below average, those are your most at risk pages.

3. How Does Google Pick Featured Snippets?

This is what a featured snippet looks like on Google:

But wait—why is Google using a featured snippet from a page only ranked in Position four (WordStream), instead of a page that ranks in Position one (Moz)?

To find out, I analyzed data for the 981 featured snippets WordStream has earned. As it turns out, content ranking as far back as Page seven of Google results can become a featured snippet:

Digging deeper into Google Analytics and Search Console data, it turns out featured snippets are not chosen based on traditional ranking factors, word count, or even where you rank.

Based on my analysis, featured snippets are awarded to pages that have an unusually high CTR and unusually high time on site.

2. Social Shares and Rankings: What’s the Real Relationship?

For years many people have wrongly assumed that one of Google’s ranking factors is the total number of social shares your content gets.

But there is a definite correlation between social shares and organic rankings. We ran an experiment to figure out the link. Here’s what we discovered:

Based on our analysis, it’s not about the total number of shares. It’s about how many people engaged with your content. High engagement rates correlate with high CTR, and vice versa.

My theory is that the same emotions that make people share content on social media also make people click on that content in search results. This is especially true for headlines with ridiculously high CTRs.

1. What’s the Relationship Between Engagement and Conversion Rates?

Getting people excited enough to click on your search result increases the odds that they will also ultimately convert (whether it’s completing a purchase, subscribing, completing a form, or taking some other type of conversion action).

We know this because we gathered and analyzed lots of data. Here’s just one example of what we discovered in multiple WordStream client accounts:

As this chart illustrates, on average, increasing your CTR by two times can boost your conversion rate by 50 percent.

If you have unicorn CTRs—20 or 25 percent—then your conversion rate will be around two percent. But if you have average or below average conversion rates—around one percent or less—you’ll also have average conversion rates.

See? Increasing your CTR increases your conversion rates. Pretty amazing!

What’s it All Mean for SEO?

User engagement is the new unicorn of ranking factors. Here are three key takeaways:

1. CTR impacts organic search ranking: If you want to reach a more prominent position in search results, you need to beat the expected CTR for that given position.
2. Dwell time impacts ranking: Dwell time validates the CTR and featured snippet eligibility. It can override other “traditional” ranking signals.
3. Machine learning is changing everything: It isn’t just Google search and SEO. Other machine learning systems reward high engagement. YouTube uses machine learning to recommend videos. AdWords ad targeting is entirely based on machine learning. Facebook uses it for its news feed and ad targeting. We’re living in a machine learning revolution.

For greater insight into just how well your SEO efforts are working, download The Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing Analytics & Metrics eBook.

Changes to Google search results pages have further obscured content organically, especially on competitive commercial searches. Meanwhile, paid search costs per click (CPCs) are at all-time highs in established markets.

Organic reach in social media? It’s pretty much dead. Half of all content gets zero shares, and less than 0.1 percent is shared more than 1,000 times.

Additionally, the typical internet marketing conversion rate is less than one percent.

How Content Marketing Doesn’t (Usually) Work

How does content marketing actually work? Many people’s content marketing strategy basically consists of a three-step process:

1. Create new content.
2. Share your content on social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.).
3. People buy your stuff.

Nope. This almost never happens. (For a content marketing strategy that actually works, try a documented plan such as the Content Marketing Pyramid.)

Most content goes nowhere. The consumer purchase journey isn’t a straight line—and it takes time.

So is there a more reliable way to increase leads and sales with content?

Social Media Advertising To The Rescue!

Now it’s time for the good news! Social media advertising provides the most scalable content promotion and is proven to turn visitors into leads and customers.

And the best part? You don’t need a huge ad budget.

A better, more realistic process for content marketing with promotion looks like this:

1. Create: Produce content and share it on social media.
2. Amplify: Selectively promote your top content on social media.
3. Tag: Build your remarketing audience by tagging site visitors with a cookie.
4. Filter: Apply behavioral and demographic filters on your audience.
5. Remarketing: Remarket to your audience with display ads, social ads, and Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) to promote offers.
6. Convert: Capture qualified leads or sale.
7. Repeat.

Promotion is sorely overlooked from many content marketers’ priority list—it’s actually the lowest priority according to a recent study of 1000+ marketers. For marketers who take promotion more seriously, The Ultimate List of Content Promotion Tools is a godsend.

You can use the following ten Twitter and Facebook advertising hacks as a catalyst to get more eyeballs on your content, or as an accelerant to create an even larger traffic explosion.

1. Improve Your Quality Score

Quality Score is the metric Google uses to rate the quality and relevance of your keywords and PPC ads, and influences your cost-per-click. Facebook calls their version a “Relevancy Score”:

While Twitter’s is called a “Quality Adjusted Bid”:

Whatever it’s called, Quality Score is a crucial metric. The way to increase Twitter and Facebook Quality Scores is to increase post engagement rates.

A high Quality Score is great: you get a higher ad impression share for the same budget at a lower cost per engagement. On the flip side, a low Quality Score sucks: you get a low ad impression share and a high cost per engagement.

How do you increase engagement rates? Promote your best content—your unicorns (the top 1-3 percent of content that performs better than everything else) rather than your donkeys (the bottom 97 percent of your content).

To figure out if your content is a unicorn or donkey, test it out.

• Post lots of stuff (organically) to Twitter and use Twitter Analytics to see which content gets the most engagement.
• Post your top stuff from Twitter organically to LinkedIn and Facebook. Again, track which posts get the most traction.
• Pay to promote the unicorns on Facebook and Twitter.

The key to paid social media advertising is to be picky. Cast a narrow net and maximize those engagement rates.

2. Increase Engagement With Audience Targeting

Targeting all your fans isn’t precise; it’s lazy and wastes a lot of money.

Your fans aren’t a homogenous blob. They all have different incomes, interests, values, and preferences.

For example, by targeting fans of Donald Trump, people with social media marketing job titles, NRA members, and the hashtag #NeverHillary (and excluding Democrats, fans of Hillary Clinton, and the hashtag #neverTrump), this tweet for an Inc. article I wrote got ten times higher engagement:

Keyword targeting and other audience targeting methods helps turn average ads into unicorns.

3. Generate Free Clicks From Paid Social Media Advertising

On Twitter, tweet engagements are the most popular type of ad campaign. Why? I have no idea. You have to pay for every user engagement (whether someone views your profile, expands your image, expands your tweet from the tweet stream, or clicks on a hashtag).

If you’re doing this, you need to stop—now. It’s a giant waste of money and offers the worst ROI.

Instead, pay only for the thing that matters most to your business, whether it’s clicks to your website, app installs, followers, leads, or actual video views.

For example, when you run a Twitter followers campaign, you pay only when someone follows you. But your tweet promoting one of your unicorn pieces of content will also get a ton of impressions, retweets, replies, mentions, likes, and visits to your website. All for the low, low cost of $0.

4. Promote Unicorn Video Ads!

Would you believe you can get thousands of video views at a cost of just $0.02 per view?

Shoppers who view videos are more likely to remember you, and buy from you. Quick tips for success:

• Promote videos that have performed the best (i.e., driven the most engagement) on your website, YouTube, or elsewhere.
• Make sure people can understand your video without hearing it— an amazing 85 percent of Facebook videos are watched without sound, according to Digiday.
• Make it memorable, try to keep it short, and target the right audience.

Bonus: video ad campaigns increase relevancy score by two points!

5. Score Huge Wins With Custom Audiences

True story: a while back I wrote an article asking: Do Twitter Ads Work? To promote the article on Twitter, I used their tailored audiences feature to target key influencers.

The very same day, Business Insider asked for permission to publish the story. So I promoted that version of the article to influencers using tailored audiences.

An hour later, a Fox News producer emailed me. Look where I found myself:

The awesome power of custom audiences resulted in additional live interviews with major news outlets including the BBC; 250 high-value press pickups and links, massive brand exposure, 100,000 visits to the WordStream site, and a new business relationship with Facebook.

This is just one example of identity-based marketing using social media advertising. Whether it’s Twitter’s tailored audiences or Facebook’s custom audiences, this opens a ton of new and exciting advertising use cases!

6. Promote Your Content On More Social Platforms

Medium, Hacker News, Reddit, Digg, and LinkedIn Pulse all send you massive amounts of traffic. It’s important to post content to each that’s appropriate to the audience.

Post content on Medium or LinkedIn. New content is fine, but repurposing existing content is a better strategy because it gives a whole new audience the chance to discover and consume your existing content.

Again, use social media advertising as either a catalyst or an accelerant to get hundreds, thousands, or even millions of views you otherwise wouldn’t have. It might even open you up to syndication opportunities—I’ve had posts syndicated to New York Observer and Time Magazine.

You can also promote existing content on sites like Hacker News, Reddit, or Digg. Getting upvotes can create valuable exposure that sends tons of traffic to your existing content.

For a minimal investment, you can get serious exposure and traffic!

7. Hacking RankBrain for Insanely Awesome SEO

Google is using an AI machine learning system called RankBrain to understand and interpret long-tail queries, especially on queries Google has never seen before—an estimated 15 percent of all queries.

I believe Google is examining user engagement metrics (such as click-through rates, bounce rates, dwell time, and conversion rates) as a way—in part, to rank pages that have earned very few or no links.

Even if user engagement metrics aren’t part of the core ranking algorithm, getting really high organic CTRs and conversion rates has its own great rewards:

• More clicks and conversions.
• Better organic search rankings.
• Even more clicks and conversions.

For example, research found a 19 percent lift in paid search conversion volume and a 10 percent improvement in cost per action (CPA) with exposure to Facebook ads for the financial services company Experian.

Use social media advertising to build brand recognition and double your organic search clickthrough and conversion rates!

8. Social Media Remarketing

Social media remarketing, on average, boosts engagement by three times and doubles conversion rates, while cutting your costs by a third. Make the most of it!

Use social media remarketing to push your hard offers, such as sign-ups, consultations, and downloads.

9. Combine Everything With Super Remarketing

Super remarketing is the awesome combination of remarketing, demographics, behaviors, and high engagement content. Here’s how and why it works.

• Behavior and interest targeting: These are the people interested in your stuff.
• Remarketing: These are the people who have recently checked out your stuff.
• Demographic targeting: These are the people who can afford to buy your stuff.

If you target paid social media advertising to a narrow audience that meets all three criteria using your high engagement unicorns—the result?

10. Combine Paid Search & Social Media Advertising

For our final, and most advanced hack of them all, we combine social media advertising with PPC search ads on Google using Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA).

RLSA is incredibly powerful. You can target customized search ads specifically to people who have recently visited your site when they search on Google. It increases click-through and conversion rates by three times and reduces cost-per-click by a third.

There’s one problem. By definition, RLSA doesn’t target people who are unfamiliar with your brand. This is where social media advertising comes in: it helps more people become familiar with your brand.

Social media advertising is a cheap way to start the process of biasing people towards you. While they may not need what you’re selling now, later, when the need arises, people are much more likely to do a branded search for your stuff, or click on you during an unbranded search because they remember your compelling content.

If your content marketing efforts are struggling, these ridiculously powerful Twitter and Facebook advertising hacks will turn your content donkeys into unicorns! Looking for another awesome hack to supercharge your content ROI? Social curation enables more consistent content publication, supports your created content strategy, and helps you keep track of your favorite information. Download The Ultimate Guide to Content Curation eBook below.