Find Your Audience

The world of content discovery is a curious one, with real consequences for Amplified Publishing.

It is my contention that any creator has an obligation to understand their potential audience size and the route to capturing the attention of that audience.

It all starts with great art of course. Creating something beautiful, funny, smart or meaningful drives the creative impulse. But does the creator want to see their media reach the right folk? Should they alter their work to drive reach more effectively and calibrate their expectations? That has been the focus of much of my work and thoughts throughout the Amplified Publishing program.

There are multiple routes to finding audiences with digital content. To deliver content that can drive views on social platforms, creators need to think about what will stop folk in their tracks. Users scroll and their attention needs to be grabbed. Next creators need to consider what will drive loyalty, engagement and subscription. But for this note, I am going to focus exclusively on search. And that means concentrating on the web - the platform that is built for search.

Search is the primary way that any audience arrives at a website. Some traffic will be via scrolling down a home page - but that assumes you have built brand recognition and loyalty with a pace of content that makes your users want to check in to see updates. Brand recognition is a very long path. You may get some website visitors clicking through to your site from social media channels. This route was the way brands like Buzzfeed built their business, but over time platforms like Twitter and Facebook have reduced the traffic they drive to other media. The organic, that is to say, the unpaid reach of these channels has dropped massively. So, if you have a website, then you need to understand search. The way folk will come to you.

I’m qualified to talk on the web. I’ve been working on creating content for and about the web since around 1994. I grew up in simple times, editing print magazines and witnessed how the web and then search completely changed the cultural landscape. I now run a media business, focussing on the games market based in Bath and SEO (search engine optimisation) is a cornerstone of what we do. Over 100 million people come to our sites each year from Google.

Since its launch in 1998, Google has grown into the on-ramp for a huge chunk of content on the web. Google search captures intent and curiosity. There are other search engines - Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo - but for the sake of brevity, Google is my catch-all. When a user comes to Google they type a term for something they are looking for, from “Miami flights” to “drill music”. It could be anything. Then Google tries its best to bring back the best possible content from its spidered view of the entire web. The page Google returns is called the Search Engine Results Page (or SERP).

To understand and get the best from Google the creator needs two key insights. What is getting searched for and how to optimize opportunities to rank for it.

Search volumes are the technical term for how many times a specific term is typed into the text box of a search engine. Google kindly shares the scale of each of these queries. Partly to help content creators and business owners, but mostly to drive advertising sales around these terms. You can find out how many people are typing a specific phrase by setting up a free Google Ads account. Or more easily just Google Search a phrase like “search volume checker” and find one of the dozens of free simple tools.

Here are three random terms checked in Google UK. Pay attention to the blue lines. See how the “search volume checker” search is tiny. It’s a small market, but should be a big one. See how “Drill music” has dropped off (fashion's change) and “Miami flights” have taken off (dreams of travel post-pandemic).

Music came up early in the Amplified Publishing program with associate Louise Brailey from Crack Magazine. When I shared this data in 2021 she corroborated “ah, that’s why so many people read our drill stories”.

Let’s drill into music. And look at multiple genres, moving to global search. I’ve grabbed a list of house genres from MusicGenreList.

• House music

• Acid House

• Chicago House

• Deep House

• Diva House

• Dutch House

• Electro House

• Freestyle House

• French House

• Funky House

• Ghetto House

• Hardbag

• Hip House

• Italo House

• Latin House

• Minimal House

• Progressive House

• Rave Music

• Swing House

• Tech House

• Tribal House

• Tropical House

• UK Hard House

• US Garage

• Vocal House

Here are the top-ranked house music terms

What do we learn? Well first off people mostly search for the most generic term “house music”. But if you want to define your output and match the biggest search result then “deep house” is the genre to go for.

Now, you might say why be a slave to Google and search? Especially if the deep house anthem you are bashing out on Garage Band may struggle to rank in search? That’s a very fair point, but what Google shows us is the active interest and curiosity in the sub-genre. People are looking for it and that suggests demand.

what Google shows us is the active interest and curiosity in the sub-genre. People are looking for it and that suggests demand.

And there are other discovery paths to music. Playlists in Spotify, recommendation algorithms or simply fame.

Yes… they all count. But the numbers don’t lie and they say the “deep house” sub-genre has the biggest potential for curious audience members. And if you want the fastest route to success as a journalist covering music across the genre or as an artist producing, then “deep house” it turns out is the sub-genre of choice.

Sometimes matching search to the language you use to search is less simple.

Throughout the Amplified Publishing program, I had the privilege of getting to know some of my cohort Fellows and understood the unique challenges they face in reaching their audiences. Jasmine Richards and her excellent work with Storymix presented a great example of how search can impact the creative and amplification process.

Storymix makes children’s books where the protagonists are people of colour. Jasmine’s self-stated ambition was “that if someone typed the phrase where to get/buy diverse kids books in Google that my site would come up on the first page.”

My mission then was to understand what type of phrases will get an audience to arrive at StoryMix. And match that with Jasmine’s cultural and artistic goals.

There’s a large body of opinion on language and a shifting environment when it comes to describing people of colour. And getting the message right can be difficult. When I quizzed Jasmine about the phrases that best represent the publishing output of Storymix in a perfect world, here are the terms she came up with…

• Underrepresented writers

• Minoritized writers

• Inclusive fiction

• Inclusion books

• Kids of colour

• Black authors

• Black writers

• British Asian authors

• Writers of colour

• Books featuring the global majority

• Diverse kids books

Talking to Jasmine, I learnt that baked into all this language is a tension in the discussion, with white as the default and the norm. Even the phrase diversity can be difficult. There are challenges around terms like BAME, that could be seen as bringing together too disparate a group. And there are issues around seeing publishing from the white point of view. If somebody was searching for books by white authors, with white protagonists then that to me would suggest racism. In case you’re wondering, I couldn’t resist double-checking the search volume for “white kids books”. There isn’t any, phew.

I looked at the search volume for Jasmine’s perfect phrases in the UK. It suggests a relatively small audience. So, the language that is optimal for communicating the proposition lacks the search volume.

Next, the exercise is to research a group of terms that could more accurately match the phrases the audience may use. This was a basket of phrases I settled on to research.

• Black children's books

• Asian children's books

• British Asian children's books

• Kids books with black characters

• Kids books with Asian characters

• Stories with black kids

• Books for black children

• Black children's books

• Black kids books

• Children's Books by Black Writers

• Children's Books by Black authors

• Black children's authors

• Black baby books

Here are the results I got…

There are clearly three best seats in the house for search. Here’s the tough news. Not one of these phrases appear anywhere across the Storymix website - Google links here for “black authors”, “black writers” and “black children’s books”. Search engines like Google want you to be purposeful and obvious, to answer user intent. If Storymix wants to rank on search then it needs to make the leap.

SEO is a huge industry, but the simplest steps are around language choices and linking texts.

The three target terms need to be included on the home page - ideally in the title of the page and the description. Not a single word needs to be removed and the intent does not need to change. The narrative and ambition can remain. Featuring the words on the page is a great start. The next step is to include the phrase as the anchor text on press releases and posts. Here’s a link to the Storymix site featuring black children’s books to get us started. There are a ton more steps Jasmine can take and in my ongoing work with Amplified Publishing I have committed to supporting her and sharing the progress. Want to learn more about SEO? Moz is a strong starting point with its beginner guide to SEO.

But, is the total reach for Storymix content limited to less than 15k searches per month on Google? My answer is no. The search is about active intent, curiosity and interest. It’s a good start to throw into the mix for market size, but only shows folk who actually believe that there could be books that represent their community available. It turns out that Storymix faces a bigger marketing challenge to reach its target audience… straight awareness of the concept.

In conclusion, I want to posit a theory. There is the world we prefer - where the language we choose describes our work. And the world we live in - where language is owned by the people and expressed through their keyboards. It’s easier to position our culture and entertainment than attempt to force fast change. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.