Posts

Internal Linking for Mobile-First & Mobile-Only Indexing

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Three years ago, I wrote a post for the Moz Blog advising how the latest news on mobile-first indexing would impact internal linking strategies, particularly for larger sites. “By now, you’ve probably heard as much as you can bear about mobile first indexing”, I joked in my introduction. Little did I know. Only now — in the summer of 2021 — are Google, supposedly, maybe, finalizing the rollout of mobile-first. Even as of August 2021, Google is still very much actively crawling sites with Googlebot desktop*. As with the recent delays to the Core Web Vitals rollout, the issue here for Google is that they can’t push changes which make their results worse. As Mike King pointed out back in March over at iPullRank, there’s still a big disparity between the mobile and desktop versions of the web, especially when it comes to links. I don’t need to persuade most SEOs that they should care about links, but I maybe do need to remind you that internal links are, for most pages, a much bigger...

The Top Skills to Look for When Hiring Your Next In-House SEO

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SEO is one of the most crucial digital marketing strategies, but it’s such an in-depth concept that it pays off in the long-term to work with a qualified professional. Putting it off or hiring the wrong person can waste time, energy, and resources (not to mention all the lost revenue and business opportunities). While there are as many SEO strategies as there are SEO experts, there are still essential skills that you should look for when hiring for your next in-house SEO expert. With that said, open a new Google Doc… it’s time to take notes! An overview of the SEO knowledge tree There are a lot more to SEO experts than meets the eye, but let’s start with a basic overview of what an SEO specialist should be proficient in. I’ll also note here that not all specialists have the same knowledge, and typically specialize in one area, but may know some parts of all of these subtopics: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. On-page SEO On-page SEO is exactly what you think it is:...

SEO and Google Discover

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In today’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Moz’s own SEO expert, Tom Capper, talks about the untapped organic traffic opportunity that is Google Discover.  Click on the whiteboard image above to open a larger version in a new tab! Video Transcription Happy Friday, Moz fans, and today's topic is going to be Google Discover.  Now this is a massive opportunity that I think a lot of sites have been sleeping on. It's been out for about three years now, and the sites that are taking it seriously, I've seen quite a few recently that are now getting more traffic from Google Discover than they are from organic. What is Google Discover?  So hopefully that gives you some kind of idea of what you're missing out on. But in case you have been sort of living under a rock, completely oblivious to this, this is what Google Discover is.  This is what it looks like. So basically, if you open up the Google app on Android or on iOS, you'll see, yes, there's a search b...

Data Visualization: Win Friends and Influence People with Accurate Data

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Marketers love graphs. Oftentimes, however, we visualize complex data in a way that can be unintentionally misleading. The graph trends upwards but is the data the right metric to be plotting ? Are we choosing data that genuinely conveys the state of play, or just information that supports our case? We have reams of data at our fingertips, and using that to support business cases or budget increases is paramount. How do you do this in a way that conveys truth to a less-knowledgeable audience? When presenting results to stakeholders, marketers will often find themselves talking to people who don't understand the metrics to the same degree. Let’s make smart choices in how we choose and display data. From cleansing data and choosing the right metrics, to visualizing them in a way that helps build support and omits bias. Winning friends with reporting Marketing reports are about communicating a message through data. Often that data can be fairly complicated — augmented by segments,...

Magento SEO: The Guide to Optimizing Magento Websites

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When it comes to e-commerce platforms, there are few that are more robust than Magento. Due to its power and customizability, Magento is still the go-to e-commerce platform for retailers. This is especially true for enterprise stores. Magento is utilized by many enterprise sites such as American Express, Ford, Puma, Xerox, and more. In 2019, it was estimated that Magento accounted for 30% of the e-commerce market share . Using BuiltWith data , we can see that 1.04% of the top 1 million sites utilize the platform, and Magento’s share of the market grows to 1.77% in the top 10,000 sites. If you’re an SEO working in the e-commerce space, it’s going to be important to learn how to work with Magento. Fortunately, there are a lot of really good things that Magento does out of the box from an SEO perspective. However, there are definitely some considerations you’ll need to take into account with any Magento site. What is Magento SEO? Magento SEO is a set of SEO adjustments that are uni...