The Science of Virality: Coronavirus Edition

Imagine for a moment that you're a group of research scientists that helps the scientific community by providing software that helps discover new drugs to combat the world's most difficult diseases. The software you're using can accelerate the discovery of novel medications that improve lives on a massive scale.

When all of a sudden a pandemic breaks out.  

As all of the world’s major media outlets rush to publish every instance of hearsay and seize every eyeball scrolling through a feed, you realize there’s a gap between reality and what is on the news. The facts about this new virus aren't getting the proper scientific coverage that people deserve. The facts should be written in such a way that a layperson can understand and make sense of the true levels of risk and precautions to keep themselves safe.

Then it hits you: you have a responsibility to write about this new virus and disseminate it as broadly and as quickly as possible.

So you fire up the synapses, pull up a chair, and set ink to paper.  Your message is clear, the facts are referenced, and the language resonates with the audience.  It’s ready.

But, what now?

• How do you optimize the article so search engines will pick up the scent quickly and place it in front of the people that need it the most?
• When you post it on social media for distribution, what will give it the best chance of spreading quickly?

You’re overwhelmed. There are hundreds of variables to account for, and not enough time before the article has to go out.

This isn't a scenario Barry Bunin, Ph.D., the CEO of Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD) had to imagine, it's one he lived. Narrative SEO has been an SEO partner to CDD for a number of years and when Barry realized he had an obligation to offer his expertise to the public, we immediately deployed our Content Optimization Checklist to answer all the questions he had and to ensure that the content he created had the best chance at being read by those who needed it most.

Even for those of us who do this every single day, a checklist helps provides direction and clarity. It gives your content the best chance of getting into the right hands - at the right time - regardless of where the user lives.

Any content optimization checklist has to cover important digital marketing tasks:

• technical search engine optimization (SEO)
• content optimization
• social media formatting
• the tone of voice, and
• account for the human factors that elicit sharing.

With the understanding that content rarely goes viral, your primary goal above all else is to add value and answer the questions users are hungry for.

After intense research on how content marketers do their job, we created the following Content Optimization Checklist that Barry and CDD used for their COVID-19 pillar page and it covers the critical tasks required to maximize the audience reach of your blog post:

What is SERP in SEO? The best explanation comes from Wikipedia:

Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) are the pages displayed by search engines in response to a query by a user. The main component of the SERP is the listing of results that are returned by the search engine in response to a keyword query, although the pages may also contain other results such as advertisements.

There's magic in the SERP.

By analyzing the competitors that take up real estate on the first page of Google, we can look at similarities in the title tag, the meta descriptions, and the way that Google displays the title tags.

Google picks titles and can rearrange meta descriptions, so the competitor's web page might show a different title than the author’s original entry on the content management system.

So what we're looking for here is the commonality of words within the title - for example - the date in the title or repeating words like “Best” or “Versus”. If the first 10 results of Google have a similar and frequent word, we know we're onto something, and those same phrases can be used in the title of our new pillar, assuming they match the users' search intent and provide value to the reader.

The length of your URL is important and is a hotly debated topic in technical SEO circles. The standard industry recommendation is 60 characters or less.

By making it shorter and by keeping the focus keyword early in the title, we know that we can amplify the results on search engines. Long URL paths lead to problems with stop words and non-standard characters that hurt search visibility like apostrophes and quotation marks.

Being deliberate about the URL gives content the best chance at ranking well.

The length of your page title is also important. While long titles are okay, the rule is that it should compel the reader to click when they see the title.

The same rules that apply to the URL length apply to the title length, 60 characters or less, and with a strong keyword-focused early in the description.

Ask yourself? "Did I make it relevant to what the user is searching for?"

This doesn't mean a long title is out of the question, it should be as long as it needs to be to convey the meaning and the intent of the article.

Prime the user by matching the intent, and they’ll make the decision to consume the content.

The canonical link is the Internet's way of determining whether a piece of content is an original or a copy. You may have heard about something called a “duplicate content penalty”. There really is no such thing.

The problem with duplicate content is a search engine has to decide which webpage to give the keywords to, so if they have two pieces of content that are identical or similar enough to be the same piece of content, the algorithm has to decide which page to give the keywords to.

The canonical tag is the way it solves that problem. By self-referencing a link, linking the webpage to itself, it sends a signal to the search engine that this is not a copy.

Here’s what a canonical meta tag looks like:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/wordpress/seo-plugin/" />

Let's say that you wrote a content pillar about a frog and a million other websites copy that content and post it to their websites. The canonical link you set on your own page, along with the creation date of the webpage can be used as a signal to search engines that your article is the original. If you wrote it, it should own the keywords and the bulk of traffic for Frog queries.

Most modern content management systems like WordPress, HubSpot, Marketo, or Magento, provide a canonical field where the default typically sets the URL as self-referential.

If your CMS doesn't, make sure you add a canonical link in the head of your website. Yoast SEO plugin, Rank Math SEO, or any other well-established SEO plugin will allow you to add a canonical link when installed in a WordPress environment.