I recently commented on a LinkedIn post about the power of LinkedIn as a content marketing platform. The gist of the post was that it is rapidly becoming the go-to platform for branded content marketing. I disagreed with the very premise of the post.
I get that LinkedIn has a lot of appeal as a central place to find people. My problem with LinkedIn is I can’t find content in the platform. As if to prove my point, I went looking for the post I commented on and couldn’t find it. After striking out with LinkedIn search, I searched in Google. No luck. I got a lot of results, but none of my numerous queries produced the result I was looking for. And I’m a power user of Google.
Contrast that to Wikipedia: not only is it easy to find content within the platform, Wikipedia articles are all over the first page in Google. You might wonder why this is. Well, some of it is about the content itself, as my colleague and friend Charles Chesnut showed in his maiden post on this platform: The Wikipedia test for content marketing. Beyond the content itself, a big reason for the success of Wikipedia content is findability. This is one of my laws of content strategy:
So why is content so easy to find in Wikipedia and hard to find in LinkedIn? I contend that the URL structure of the two platforms is a key reason. In particular, the semantics of the URLs plays a big part of how search engines index the content, and ultimately rank the content in their indices. LinkedIn’s URLs are organized the way the whole site is: by people’s names. Wikipedia’s URLs are organized primarily by topics.
When people are looking for content, more often than not, they search by topic. If you study search queries as I do for a living, this would become obvious fairly early on. Yes, people sometimes search for people, when they are looking for an expert on a topic they already know about. But if they are just getting into a field of study, they search by topic. The vast majority of queries are by people who are learning about things outside of their areas of expertise.
my research, about 80% of queries relevant to our audience are what we call informational queries: Composed of keywords about generic topics. About 15% of the queries we track are what we call navigational queries: composed of keywords about brands, people, and company names. About 5% of queries are transactional: composed of product names and model numbers. I’ve been tracking query trends for 10 years. Topics come and go, but these percentages don’t change much.
Besides the ranking bias search engines have for high-quality topical content, one reason Wikipedia dominates in search is its URL semantics are almost entirely based on topics. Search engines organize content in their indices by keywords. Keywords are grouped as sets of topics. When search engines crawl a site, they look at the URL structure to see how it lines up to their topical hierarchy in their indices.
I get that LinkedIn has a lot of appeal as a central place to find people. My problem with LinkedIn is I can’t find content in the platform. As if to prove my point, I went looking for the post I commented on and couldn’t find it. After striking out with LinkedIn search, I searched in Google. No luck. I got a lot of results, but none of my numerous queries produced the result I was looking for. And I’m a power user of Google.
Contrast that to Wikipedia: not only is it easy to find content within the platform, Wikipedia articles are all over the first page in Google. You might wonder why this is. Well, some of it is about the content itself, as my colleague and friend Charles Chesnut showed in his maiden post on this platform: The Wikipedia test for content marketing. Beyond the content itself, a big reason for the success of Wikipedia content is findability. This is one of my laws of content strategy:
So why is content so easy to find in Wikipedia and hard to find in LinkedIn? I contend that the URL structure of the two platforms is a key reason. In particular, the semantics of the URLs plays a big part of how search engines index the content, and ultimately rank the content in their indices. LinkedIn’s URLs are organized the way the whole site is: by people’s names. Wikipedia’s URLs are organized primarily by topics.
When people are looking for content, more often than not, they search by topic. If you study search queries as I do for a living, this would become obvious fairly early on. Yes, people sometimes search for people, when they are looking for an expert on a topic they already know about. But if they are just getting into a field of study, they search by topic. The vast majority of queries are by people who are learning about things outside of their areas of expertise.
my research, about 80% of queries relevant to our audience are what we call informational queries: Composed of keywords about generic topics. About 15% of the queries we track are what we call navigational queries: composed of keywords about brands, people, and company names. About 5% of queries are transactional: composed of product names and model numbers. I’ve been tracking query trends for 10 years. Topics come and go, but these percentages don’t change much.
Besides the ranking bias search engines have for high-quality topical content, one reason Wikipedia dominates in search is its URL semantics are almost entirely based on topics. Search engines organize content in their indices by keywords. Keywords are grouped as sets of topics. When search engines crawl a site, they look at the URL structure to see how it lines up to their topical hierarchy in their indices.
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