Posts

2021 Local SEO Holiday Success: A Ready Response for Each Customer

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First, let me pull up the best seat in the house for you: the local business owner or marketer who has weathered so much in the past two years. For your work of serving the public, you deserve the comfy chair by the fire, the celebratory cup of hot chocolate, while we chat about preparing to take good care of your customers in the upcoming holiday season. Thank you for how you’ve risen every day to countless challenges, kept communities supplied, and will even make some dreams come true when people give gifts to one another as expressions of love, hope, and generosity of spirit this winter. We can prepare your local business to be both popular and profitable in the 2021 holiday shopping season by identifying and answering six types of scenario-specific customer questions, and strategizing where to publicize the answers. Comfortable? Here we go! 1. Do you have [x]? It’s the most basic and obvious question at the start of every transaction, but the answer has become more complex in...

Prioritizing Technical SEO Fixes

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Faced with so many SEO tasks to worry about, how do you know which ones to prioritize? In today's episode of Whiteboard Friday, Ola takes you through the important technical SEO fixes that should be a the top of your audit list. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a larger version in a new tab! Video Transcription Hi, Moz fans. I'm Ola King. I work here at Moz, and I'm excited to join you today for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we'll be talking about prioritizing SEO fixes.  By now, you are probably already familiar with the concept of technical SEO, and if you aren't, there are a bunch of resources out there, including the Moz blog and other sites that you can check out. But technical SEO is probably the most important part of SEO because if you have the best content on the web, you have the most backlinks, if your site is not technically sound, then you might not be able to get the best results from all of your efforts. So your ...

The Death of Domain Diversity Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

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It’s common to hear SEOs discuss the “increasing dominance” of big brands in SEO, and how smaller companies just can’t break into the rankings like they used to. Google even put out a “domain diversity” algorithm update a couple of years ago to address the issue, and people like me have shown time and time again how metrics like branded search volume and domain authority — typically signs of a big, well-known company — are key predictors of search performance. This post, though, is to share some surprising data we’ve surfaced at Moz suggesting that, actually, right now is the best time in years to be an outsider in SEO. What is domain diversity? I think there are two appealing ways to define domain diversity, and we’ll look at data for both. Normally, “domain diversity” is used to refer to a greater number of unique sites appearing in a given SERP. For example, if you have three results from Pinterest and two from eBay on the first page, that is an example of very low domain div...

Are We There Yet? The State of the Web & Core Web Vitals [Part 1]

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No, please, do read on. This is a post about what has gone wrong with Core Web Vitals and where we stand now, but also why you still need to care. I also have some data along the way, showing how many sites are hitting the minimum level, both now and back at the original intended launch date. At the time of writing, it’s nearly a year and a half since Google told us that they were once again going to pull their usual trick: tell us something is a ranking factor in advance, so that we improve the web. To be fair, it’s quite a noble goal all told (albeit one they have a significant stake in). It’s a well trodden playbook at this point, too, most notably with “ mobilegeddon ” and HTTPS in recent years.  Both of those recent examples felt a little underwhelming when we hit zero-day, but the “Page Experience Update”, as Core Web Vitals’ rollout has been named, has felt not just underwhelming, but more than a little fumbled. This post is part of a 3-part series, where we’ll cover whe...

What if the Competition Is Wrong? How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Competitive Content Research

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Competitive research is a common and necessary task in any marketing landscape. This practice is particularly crucial in digital marketing because the ecosystem rapidly changes and brands constantly battle against each other for users across multiple platforms. In the ideal scenario, performing competitive content research illuminates where your brand’s online content falters compared to competitors. With this information, you can solder the frail links in your marketing strategy and try to usurp the competition with superior content. The results should improve your brand’s content authority, keyword rankings, and organic share of voice. However, competitive research rarely offers cut-and-dry wins. Your best practice acumen must be strong enough to scrounge for insights among multiple sources with varying content quality. You need to understand what content matters and what’s fluff. And ultimately, you have to know why some choices are more valuable and useful than others. All of t...

Intro to Python [Part 2]

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Want to use Python, but don't know where to begin? Britney and Pumpkin are here in their second episode as co-hosts with more great tips on how to get started!  Click on the whiteboard image above to open a larger version in a new tab! Video Transcription Hi, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm your host Britney Muller. I was previously Moz's Senior SEO Scientist, and now I am freelance consulting and building some data science programs on the side. This is my very special co-host, Pumpkin. You might remember her from the first Python episode. She's gotten quite a bit bigger. Quarantine was really good to her. She's very healthy and very sweet. I love her so, so much. This is my best buddy right here.  So we have been hard at work preparing Python 2.0 for you all, and we're so excited to show you what we put together. So let's just get started.  Why Python? All right. So we kind of went over this in the first Python ...

Reveal Your Rivals with True Competitor (Beta)

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One of the biggest challenges in SEO is trying to convince your client or boss that the competition they face online may not match their legacy competitors and personal grudges. Big Earl across the street at Big Earl’s Widgets may be irritating and, sure, maybe he does have a “stupid, smug face,” but that doesn’t change the fact that WidgetShack.com is eating your lunch (and let’s not even talk about Amazon). To make matters worse, competitive analysis is time-consuming and tedious work, even if you do have access to the data. Today, after years of rethinking how competitive analysis should work (and, honestly, re-rethinking it on many occasions), I’m proud to announce the first step in expanding Moz’s competitive analysis toolkit — True Competitor. Try True Competitor What is True Competitor? Before I dive into the details, let’s take it out for a spin . Just enter your domain or subdomain and your locale (the beta supports English-language markets in the United States, Great Brit...