How to Identify Content Marketing in Search Engine Results

 How to Identify Content Marketing in Search Engine Results

When looking for reviews and guides, make sure you're not reading someone who has a vested interest in you purchasing their product.

GOOGLE RESULTS ARE EVEN LESS USEFUL THAN BEFORE. It's all my fault.

Okay, not completely. Until recently, I worked full-time for a software company, where I wrote articles aimed at ranking high in Google results, where they would receive millions of clicks. 

 This is becoming more common in your search results. It's called content marketing, and it falls somewhere between editorial content on sites like this one and outright advertising. Content marketing at its best combines a certain amount of useful information with something that serves specific marketing goals. At its worst, content marketing allows marketers to rank blatant sales pitches high in search results while also ruining your day.

Whether you realize it or not, you are probably constantly interacting with search-based content marketing. Here's how to spot it and evaluate it critically.

 How Does Content Marketing Look?

For the most part, content marketing is intended to resemble the editorial content found on a blog or the website of a mainstream publication. The main distinction is that it is hosted on a company's website.

For example, if you search for "the best Slack alternatives," one of the top results is on the blog of an otherwise unknown company that offers a Slack alternative that you should open in Incognito mode. And, wouldn't you know it, ProofHub considers its own app to be the best Slack alternative. 

 There's nothing particularly dishonest about this—if you look closely, you'll notice that the list is hosted on ProofHub's own website. However, if you're not paying attention—and most internet users aren't—easy it's to believe you're viewing a neutral publication.

This type of content marketing can push results from neutral publications lower in search results, which is part of the point and, in some cases, a way to suppress criticism. After all, most people click the top result of a search without thinking, so there's a lot of incentive to control that position.

Not all product marketing is so obviously self-serving or deceptive. Many people in the industry, I know, work hard to ensure that their information is transparent, reliable, and useful. But it's still important to understand why you're reading what you're reading. 

Pay Attention to the Website You're On It may seem obvious, but the simplest way to identify content marketing in search results is to pay attention to the website you're on—or, if you're on a social network, whose account you're viewing. 

 In most cases, content marketing takes place on the website of the product being sold. So, if you Googled "the best lawn mowers," check to see if you're on the website or social media handle of a company that sells lawn mowers, a lawn care service, or any other industry that's closely related. When looking for a specific piece of information, it's easy to skip past the header of whatever website you're on and just scroll to the article. You must exercise caution.

Here are a few quick tips for identifying and possibly avoiding content marketing:

 1. Take note of the name of the website you're visiting. Most of us have a few websites in which we have faith. Before you do anything else, try to click on those links. If that fails, take note of the website you're visiting when you click.

2. Observe the top bar of the website. In general, there are no links to a Pricing or Features page on blogs or media outlets. If you notice those things above an article, you're most likely looking at content marketing.

3. If an article suggests a product, make sure you're on the product's website. This may appear to be self-evident, but it isn't. I can't tell you how many times I did this while working in product marketing—thinking I was reading a neutral review of a product only to realize I was on their website.

 4. Examine the homepage of the website you're on. Is this a news outlet or a blog devoted to disseminating information? Is it a business attempting to sell you something? In any case, it's a good idea to know what you're looking at. If you're not sure, try a web search for the name of the website you're visiting. 

 Again, this all appears to be simple because it is. But in today's internet, where we all click search results and Twitter links without thinking, it's surprisingly easy to read a post on a company's website without realizing it.

Why Is There Content Marketing?

You may be wondering why this type of content appears in search engines at all. Why don't businesses simply run advertisements to promote their products? The short answer is that ads are expensive, whereas writers are not.

Google's page-rank algorithm was created in the 1990s, when the majority of content on the internet was created by hobbyists or academics. It's reasonable to assume that information was uploaded by people who wanted to help. Sure, there were some ads at the top of search results, but we all learned to ignore them and find the information we needed. 

Things have gotten a little more complicated. Many businesses continue to pay for advertisements, but many have discovered that there are less expensive ways to get traffic. The search results below the ads receive as many, if not more, clicks than the ads at the top. This is referred to as a "organic" search result in the marketing industry, and it basically refers to any search result that isn't an ad.

As a result, businesses are now working hard to figure out what kinds of things Google is more likely to rank high in search results—a skill known as search engine optimization. With the right strategy, this can be a much less expensive way to get traffic than paying for ads on Google or other websites. 

 There are numerous tricks that businesses can use to obtain these types of organic search results, and businesses hire people who are far smarter than me to implement those strategies. Those experts hire writers who are just as smart as me to write high-ranking articles. Most of the articles I wrote as a content marketer make me proud. I attempted to create content that was both useful and entertaining. That's what I'm still trying to do. Many content marketers are guilty of doing the same thing.

 The Reddit Workaround

It is not, however, for everyone. Search results are becoming increasingly difficult to navigate as bad actors become more adept at ranking highly. It's aggravating.

People are catching on and devising workarounds. One popular trick is to add the word "Reddit" to Google queries—for example, instead of typing "best vacuum cleaner," type "best vacuum cleaner Reddit."

Reddit users have historically been hostile to anything resembling marketing. This means that interactions on the site are (possibly) more likely to be genuine conversations between actual humans with opinions. The results will not be organized, but I find them to be far more useful. (Advance Publications, which owns WIRED publisher Condé Nast,

(Advance Publications, which owns Condé Nast, which publishes WIRED, is a Reddit shareholder.)

 Knowledge Is Might

Understanding a piece of media's economic motivation can help you think critically about it. Product placement, for example, is no longer subtle. Viewers are aware of what's going on because TV characters have been endorsing products for decades. This isn't to say that product placement isn't effective—companies are still paying millions for their products to appear. However, being aware of product placement allows everyone to be a little more critical. I'd like to see a similar level of understanding surrounding content marketing.

 Knowledge Is Might

I'm not bringing this up to pass moral judgment or to say that content marketing is bad. Because every business must find a way to make money, the website you're currently viewing contains advertising and calls for you to subscribe to WIRED. It's simply useful to keep all of these incentives in mind when consuming any type of media, because context matters.