Posts

Fifteen Years Is a Long Time in SEO

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Posted by willcritchlow I’ve been in an introspective mood lately. Earlier this year (15 years after starting Distilled in 2005), we spun out a new company called SearchPilot to focus on our SEO A/B testing and meta-CMS technology (previously known as Distilled ODN), and merged the consulting and conferences part of the business with Brainlabs . I’m now CEO of SearchPilot (which is primarily owned by the shareholders of Distilled), and am also SEO Partner at Brainlabs, so… I’m sorry everyone, but I’m very much staying in the SEO industry. As such, it feels a bit like the end of a chapter for me rather than the end of the book, but it has still had me looking back over what’s changed and what hasn’t over the last 15 years I’ve been in the industry. I can’t lay claim to being one of the first generation of SEO experts, but having been building websites since around 1996 and having seen the growth of Google from the beginning, I feel like maybe I’m second generation, and maybe I hav...

Desktop, Mobile, or Voice? (D) All of the Above — Best of Whiteboard Friday

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Posted by Dr-Pete Needless to say, we're facing more and more complexity in our everyday work, and the answers to our questions are about as clear as mud. In the wake of the 2018 mobile-first index, and since more searchers are home and not on-the-go, we're left wondering where to focus our optimization efforts. Is desktop the most important? Is mobile? What about the voice phenomenon that's now become part of our day-to-day lives? As with most things, the most important factor is to consider your audience. People aren't siloed to a single device — your optimization strategy shouldn't be, either. In this informative Whiteboard Friday, Dr. Pete soothes our fears about a multi-platform world and highlights the necessity of optimizing for a journey rather than a touchpoint. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Hey, everybody. It's Dr. Pete here from Moz. I am the Marketing Scientist ...

The MozCon Virtual Video Bundle Is Here (Plus, Our 2019 Videos are FREE!)

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Posted by cheryldraper This year's MozCon was unlike any other. In the midst of a global pandemic, we pivoted from planning our traditional 1,600-plus in-person shindig to an online conference that ended up bigger and more well-attended than anything we'd done before. MozCon Virtual was a delightful journey into the unknown. Just a few of the practical lessons we learned: How to collect, assemble, and ship high-quality at-home filming kits to our speakers  How to reimagine online networking (they weren't held over delicious entrees at lunch, but our Birds of a Feather virtual sessions were a big hit!) How to get the most out of an online conference  while also caring for your needs and being aware of Zoom fatigue And while it may have felt a little different this year, with 21 industry experts covering topics all the way from easy-to-implement machine learning to effective content promotion to crafting a keyword strategy that accounts for a world in crisis, MozCo...

Adjusting Paid Campaigns During a Recession

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Posted by ryanmoothart Our world changed dramatically in March of 2020 as a new viral threat to our livelihoods took hold in the United States and around the world. Here in the US (at the time of writing this post), COVID-19 has not relented Some industries have been more heavily affected than others. For example, travel and tourism businesses have been hurting far more than many other industries due to social distancing guidelines and stay-at-home orders. However, all businesses should re-evaluate their planned budgets for paid search and other paid digital campaigns for the next 12 to 24 months. Hopefully, this pandemic cedes faster than that and the economy comes out of our pending depression more rapidly at some point next year. But since nobody can know for sure when that will happen, it’s better to be safe and plan accordingly. Ask yourself the following questions: What assumptions did you make about your priorities heading into 2020? How has the global pandemic and economi...

Using the Flowchart Method for Diagnosing Ranking Drops — Best of Whiteboard Friday

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Posted by KameronJenkins Being able to pinpoint the reason for a ranking drop is one of our most perennial and potentially frustrating tasks as SEOs, especially in 2020 . There are an unknowable number of factors that go into ranking these days, but luckily the methodology for diagnosing those fluctuations is readily at hand. In this popular Whiteboard Friday, the wonderful Kameron Jenkins shows us a structured way to diagnose ranking drops using a flowchart method and critical thinking. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Hey, everyone. Welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins. I am the new SEO Wordsmith here at Moz, and I'm so excited to be here. Before this, I worked at an agency for about six and a half years. I worked in the SEO department, and really a common thing we encountered was a client's rankings dropped. What do we do? This flowchart was kin...

Daily SEO Fix: Investigate Changes in Your Rankings with Moz Pro

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Posted by Ola.King As members of the Moz onboarding team — which gives one-on-one walkthroughs of Moz products to over 500 customers a month — we have our finger on the pulse of what people are asking for when it comes to SEO. We’re here to help you uncover the relevant Moz Pro features for your business. We know that somewhere along the journey of improving your website and drumming up more traffic (and hopefully conversions), you’ll want to track rankings for your target keywords. Perhaps you started by noticing a traffic drop on your website. Or maybe you’re actively adapting your business in response to new challenges as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. You’ll ultimately want to know how your page rankings were affected, and start to explore what you can do next. In this series of Daily SEO Fix videos, the Moz onboarding team takes you through workflows using the Moz Pro tools. We help you coast through your rankings analysis to gain some actionable insights, from tracking ...