Jeff Coyle Talks Topical Authority With Enterprise Marketer

MarketMuse Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer Jeff Coyle recently sat down with Pamela Muldoon at Enterprise Marketer for a podcast where he talks about how marketers can gain topical authority, and common mistakes that can sabotage efforts at high-ranking content.

You can view the podcast here, and we’ve written up some highlights below for those of you who prefer the TL;DR route.

First, Coyle explains what MarketMuse does. We’re a company that’s built a content strategy platform that lets writers and strategists build topical authority and determine what to write (or which content to update) next. We have a patent on our topic modeling technology that examines content and assesses quality.

Our Content Advisory Team provides strategic guidance on complex content challenges. We help draw the right audience with high-quality comprehensive content, while also addressing technical and optimization issues, to maximize your content ROI.

“We can look at your content inventory and say, you’ve written a lot about this concept but you have some gaps here that are telling the story that you aren’t actually an expert [on your focus topic],” Coyle said in the podcast.

“So fill those gaps, take advantage of those strengths, speak to the right personas and user intent profiles with your content. Answer the right questions that [your users] want to know. It’s going to make your content package more authoritative.”

When asked how MarketMuse provides value for content marketers who already have high-ranking, authoritative content, Coyle explained that MarketMuse lets them determine what’s next.

“How are you going to use that for your next piece? What topics are adjacent or nearby that you can also gain market share on?”

Long-tail and variant keyword targeting doesn’t work as well as it used to, due to changes implemented by the Hummingbird algorithm that allowed for more sophisticated semantic analysis. Taking the place of this kind of narrow targeting is creating topically authoritative content that allows you to rank for terms you didn’t even think to target because your content is so deep that it covers all bases.

“You may have the best content out there, well now I’m going to give you the path to building truly WOW content… Also, you’ll get to a situation where your content or content items are performing in organic search not just for the terms you mention, but for words you didn’t mention that are semantically related.”

“You’re going to, naturally, if you’re a really great writer and have the best content out there, you’re going to rank for tens of thousands or thousands of terms, and those term pools are going to tell a story of what you really are about.”

As a tech-enabled service, MarketMuse makes easy work of the jobs marketers either find cumbersome (think content inventory) or extremely difficult to predict (content briefs and optimizing multiple forms of content).

At its most basic version, the software lets marketers create and optimize content in an efficient, data-driven manner. But take it to the next level, and you can ensure that everything from your ‘About Us’ page to your product descriptions are optimized for search and user intent.

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