Old Model: We crave “more” and “new” content. We need new contain to sustain our traffic.
New Model: We can get more from less content by keeping our content alive

Old Thinking: Publish, Spike and flatline
New Thinking: Publish and grow SEO ranking and traffic as your content evolves

I’ve found new found respect for Google Search in the last week. If you’ve been following my blog or Listly you’ll know I’ve been exploring how to express the marketing or business value of Listly. I love this aspect of being in a Startup.

In the past month Shyam, my Listly co-founder,  Skype messaged me maybe 20 times over the six weeks to say “Google this ..”, “Google that …”. He was sharing his enthusiasm for Listly’s SEO results. My takeaway: We are killing SEO, but I wasn’t quite getting the why or the “So What”. It was all going in, but I wasn’t connecting the dots.

With Startups and life, sometimes you inch forward slowly, then suddenly you make huge bounds. Today was leap day. I searched for some short keywords on Google today. Listly is on Page 1 of Google from every search and these weren’t obscure search terms.

I guess some of the reason I’d not focussed on the SEO value of Listly was our percentage of traffic from SEO was low. When I compared Listly to Pinterest, I realized we’re doing great. I began to rethink the significance of the SEO results. Our SEO %age is only low because our “Social Share” traffic is so high. I’m not complaining.

Try any of these searches ten searches.

The total effort by Shyam or I to achieve these search result was zero. Now I’m searching from Canada (and I did log out of Google to unbias the results). Do you see the same?

To save you time and to preserve the moment as SEO results are far from static, I highlighted these searches as images.

How did we do this? Did we leverage an SEO expert? No, we leveraged a team of experts. We out-crowdsourced your SEO to a very smart crowd – The Listly Community. Yes, they are your lists. You get the benefits from creating your lists. You get brand exposure. So how does that work?

The secret juice comes from Structured Data.

• The Structured format of Listly Lists
• Google’s aggregation of all the social sharing and voting.
• Constant attention from the crowd tweaks the ranking of each list over time.
• Also items get added slowly over time to keep the list fresh and current
• The slow changing content of each list keeps bringing Google back to recrawl the list
• The slow changing nature of the lists is totally valid.

There are no black-hat SEO tricks in our toolbag.

Fact: Less interesting lists change less and get crawled less. So SEO attention is not automatic. SEO / SEM comes from the crowd validating and extending your list over time.

Fact: Google’s search enginge team will continue to evolve and refine their algorithms. They always will. That’s the Search Business /SEO Guru Dance. Every move has a counter move. It’s a game that never ends.

Listly gives Google, highly concentrated structure data. That is what we do. That is our mission – To add structure to the web. We are not playing a game. We are replacing dumb text with smart lists.

We separate raw content from rendered pages. This pays dividends as these SEO results prove. We’re not tweaking of freaking the system. We simply let the crowd prioritize and refine the content. We render the content on demand using the latest techniques in SEO and we infuse the crowd ratings. Listly outperforms static content. It’s a highly adaptive approach. It’s simply an unfair contest.

Listly also adds a longevity effect. Your content will be found on by search engines and on Listly for much longer than a regular post could attract the traffic by itself. It is a real case of synergy in action. 1 + 1 = 3,4 or sometimes 5

That’s only half the story.

The content can be indexed both on Listly and via any embedded post that references the list. This is perfectly valid. Listly tracks metrics for each embedded URL and for the list page on Listly. The pages work together to multiply the brand exposures you experience. Google does not index the full list on each blog post, just the top crowd-ranked content.

The metrics and views on Listly won’t be featured in your analytics. That multiplier effect only becomes visible when you take a bigger picture. When you examine the full life cycle and roadmap of your content. Listly lets your content travel, but let’s Google aggregate the results. Density and deduplication at the same time.

Listly doesn’t just send traffic to your site. Listly gives you brand exposure on Listly.

• Listly is a Social Brand Multiplier.
• Listly is a Content Marketing Multiplier
• Listly is an Exposure Multiplier.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Why not make your own list, share it with the crowd. Then watch and track your SEO rankings. I’d love to hear what you find. I’d love to share the monitoring process with you.

We have an insane amount of data inside Listly – we only surface a fraction of that meta data at this point – I think the correct term is Para Data.

So what’s on your mind? What’s stopping you from commenting? From asking a question? What’s stopping you removing the Vulcan invisibility cloak that all Lurkers wear. We don’t bite. In fact were really quite friendly.

Find me on Twitter as @nickKellet if that’s more your thing.

Image Credit: jeffmikels

This post is one of a collection of 10 posts that explore the value of Lists or more specifically the value of Listly. These post are being released one per working day between Monday the 19th of March and Friday 27th March 2012

Nick Kellet (143 Posts)

Nick is co-founder the social curation platform Listly, that combines crowdsourcing, content curation and embedable lists to drive high-level community engagement, live inside your blog posts. Connect with Nick on Twitter · Linkedin, Facebook and G+ and follow his writing via his other guest posts and on his blogs at NickKellet.com and blog.list.ly