Posts

Should You Make the Move? An SEO’s Journey from Agency to In-House

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I’ve heard over and over from fellow SEOs that they just “fell into” the industry and didn’t know much about it beforehand. Well, I am no exception. I searched far and wide for a marketing job prior to graduating college in 2018, but it was my sister who introduced me to the concept of SEO. She suggested I apply to the agency she worked at, so I quickly started Googling to learn more about the concept. After my brief research and a few interviews, I found myself at a large digital marketing agency. I loved working at the agency with its fast-paced work day and continuous opportunities to learn, but after nearly three years of working with clients, managing roadmaps, and compiling deliverables, I was ready for a change. I know many people who left agencies to work in-house, and I wanted to know what the other side looked like. Now, as I write this piece, I find myself at a high-growth media holding company, still driving SEO strategy, but with all of my focus on a single brand. With t...

A Little Irish Wisdom for Your Local SEO

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Happy Saint Patrick’s Day to the Moz community! We’re always looking for new ways to set our readers and customers up for success, and today, we’re going to take a look at the inspiring tale of how a whole nation has built a path to real human progress for its people, with takeaways that can be applied to your own business and community. A first century well spent Last year, the Republic of Ireland turned 100, and according to author Dan Henry , the Irish have accomplished all of the following in their first century: Living longer and easier — death rates have been halved due to vaccinations for major diseases of the 20th century. Eating and being healthier — there is a strong focus on local foods, eating more plant-based foods, and Irish residents are entitled to health care. Creating better lives for women and children — the maternal death rate in Ireland in 2019 was zero, and all Irish children are entitled not only to health care, but to an educational system that ha...

How to Prep Your SEO Strategy for a New Website

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How to Prep Your SEO Strategy for a New Website From web development to branding and design, there are plenty of moving parts when launching a new website, but your SEO strategy shouldn’t be an afterthought. In fact, your SEO strategy should be one of the primary considerations before you even start your website. To take things a step further, the best case scenario would be that your website structure is fully built based on the SEO strategy you already have in place. Doing this from the get-go saves lots of headaches for things like web development, content formatting and design, URL structures, and more. So instead of fighting to make your website SEO-ready later on (which, trust me, is always an uphill battle), start with this holistic SEO checklist for new websites and save yourself valuable time and resources, and experience the beauty of good SEO (i.e. revenue) in a fraction of the time. Why is SEO valuable for new websites? New websites are like infants. They can’t compre...

SEO & Core Algorithms: How to Address, Analyze, and Affect

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Core algorithm updates can be the bane of an SEO’s existence. The number of unknowns coming out of an update keeps people on their feet, as Google seemingly sits back and watches them scramble to address the changes. Given how cryptic Google typically is about core updates — and even regular updates, for that matter — it can often seem like we’re at the mercy of the algorithm, with no legitimate measures of our own to employ. Google itself has even stated repeatedly that website owners shouldn’t view updates as something they are fighting against. With all that said, do we just throw our hands up in defeat? The answer is no — there are ample tactics at our disposal, but as with anything in SEO, it’s a more nuanced, longer-term play. Throughout this article, we’ll explore how to address, analyze, and affect the outcomes of core algorithm updates. How to address Google core algorithm updates First and foremost, it’s important that we properly calibrate how we think about core algor...

NEW SEO Competitive Analysis Certification: Build a Strategy to Take On the Competition

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We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again – our community continues to blow us away with eagerness to learn and hunger for new content. Your feedback and interest in new certifications and coursework through Moz Academy has been super helpful in guiding the development of our learning resources. In assessing the topic area for our next certification, it struck us just how darned competitive SEO feels these days. Competitive research and analysis still feel like an uphill battle – wouldn’t it be nice if an SEO just had a competitive roadmap to follow? It sure would. And now, it’s here! We’re so excited to announce the launch of our brand-new SEO Competitive Analysis Certification. It joins the SEO Essentials Certification and Technical SEO Certification in our Moz Academy course catalog, focused on getting you certified in competitive analysis and research. Let’s get started! What’s included in the SEO Competitive Analysis Certification? The SEO Competitive Analysis Certificat...

How to Ace Your Marketing Interview Project Proposal

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It’s a great time to be a marketer. LinkedIn reported a 63% increase in marketing jobs, and the Great Resignation has led more marketers and SEOs to look for better work opportunities, benefits, and of course, pay. To help companies better evaluate job candidates, marketing interviews typically include a “take-home assignment.” You’re given a prompt and asked to do a short presentation. This is your chance to showcase how you approach problems and how you communicate your solution to key stakeholders. In this guide, I’ll walk you through the steps that I took to create a marketing pitch and ace this part of my interview, which landed me my current job as an SEO specialist. Ask the hiring manager thoughtful questions First off, congratulations on making it to this stage of the hiring process! Now it’s time to really show them what you got. When you receive your prompt, read it over and jot down questions that come to mind. Sometimes, prompts are vague on purpose to see whether or ...

Commercial vs. Functional vs. Emotional: A Case Study on Page Title SEO Testing

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My dad used to tell me that the one thing you invest in for your car is the tires. I had a habit of asking the garage for the cheapest tires they had, but my dad would say “that rubber is the only thing between you and the road”. He had a point, and today I invest in those tires to get me to my destination safer. There’s a similar trap that search marketers and SEOs can easily fall into. In our fast-paced day-to-day lives, we can often underestimate the power of copy, even though, like my tires and the road, it’s the only thing between our business and our customers. Much like my tires, if you don’t invest in it, you’re in for a bad time. To that end, I’ve used SEO Testing to trial different copy types in product page titles, and want to share the results of that test. The hypothesis Customers are more likely to click organic search engine results featuring content that is commercially focused, using language like “free” or “best value”. Every good test starts with a hypothesis...