Posts

How to Identify Whether Your Increased Traffic Is Spam

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Traffic has spiked — hallelujah! This is what you’ve been working towards! Pause: before you start celebrating, it’s good to do your due diligence and make sure that glorious, spiked blue line under “All Users” is in fact genuine users visiting the site, and not spam. The checklist to determine whether or not increased traffic is spam is not too difficult to follow. You’ll probably know in 10 minutes whether it’s time to do a celebratory dance, or if you need to solve a problem. Either way, today you’re going to do something valuable. Before taking action on that pesky spam traffic, be sure to read this article in full. It’s important that spam traffic is identified from multiple indicators . Identify spam traffic by checking suspiciously high (or low) metrics in Google Analytics There are four core metrics that can point toward spam traffic: Average Session Duration Bounce Rate Pages/Session New Users These Google Analytics metrics are incredibly useful for SEO and...

You Can Go Your Own Way: How to Get Things Done When You’re the Only SEO

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If you’re an SEO like me, you probably spent at least a year or two at an agency where you worked with other experienced SEOs. On large teams, there’s always someone to learn from, bounce ideas off of, or to help finish projects on time. But what happens when the SEO team is just you? This is the question I had when, after several years agency-side, I moved in-house to be the first and only SEO the organization ever had. More than three years later, I’m still a team of one. I had to figure out how to accomplish my goals without the built-in support of an established team, and although there are challenges, being the only SEO is an opportunity to flex your knowledge, develop the practices that will bring the organization into the digital age, and maybe even grow your own team. Here’s how I get things done, and hopefully some of these practices will be helpful for you as well! How and why some organizations start with just one SEO Many “legacy” organizations are going through a digi...

Core Web Vitals: Finding Common Ground Between SEOs and Developers

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Working with developers to align on technical and SEO priorities is a challenge faced by many in-house SEOs, and by SEO agencies offering recommendations. How do we start conversations and support initiatives that get developers and SEOs all working towards the same goal? Is Core Web Vitals the common ground we need? In this conversation with Moz Developer, Lucas Rasmussen, we explore his recent project aimed at improving our A/B testing experience and how it overlapped with Core Web Vitals. Question: What is your role at Moz? Lucas:  I’m a Web Developer at Moz. I manage the Moz website and content management system (CMS). Question: What was the main objective of your recent Cloudflare project? Lucas:  I started a project based around making an A/B testing suite for the Moz website that focused on improving split test results and a better more consistent visitor experience. The problem we had to solve was to run client side A/B tests without a different customer/page ex...

8 Q1 Local Search Developments You Need to Know About

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A constant stream of developments and issues are the simple building blocks that shape our dynamic local search environment but the task of keeping up with the ongoing news can be complex when you’ve already got plenty to do. The first quarter of 2022 brought us some new opportunities (and a few problems) which you might have missed due to general busy-ness. Today’s column is a quick roundup of interesting happenings that merit your awareness for the sake of the local businesses you market. 1. Google really wants local businesses to discover Pointy First time ever seeing this "Help customers find products they need" module inside the Google Business Profile dashboard. @rustybrick pic.twitter.com/2zWbpI0qvT — Colan Nielsen (@ColanNielsen) January 25, 2022 Colan Nielsen spotted Google advertising free access to Pointy, right in the Google Business Profile dashboard. The time is right to get clients thinking about multiple ways to vend, and the Pointy system couldn’t be ...

Announcing Our MozCon 2022 Community Speakers!

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High fives and fist bumps for each and every person who took the time to submit pitches for this years’ community speaker spots! Our selection committee read, watched, and researched, whittling things down to a shortlist of top contenders and then read, watched, and researched some more to determine if a potential speaker and their talk would be a perfect fit for the MozCon stage. We take lots of things into account during our review, but ultimately there are three main factors that determine our final selections: Strength of the pitch (e.g., value, relevance to the audience, etc.) Can the content reasonably be delivered in the time allotted? Does it fit with overall programming and agenda? After much deliberation, we settled on seven (yes, we added a seventh) community speakers that we’re confident are going to be a great addition to the MozCon Stage. Grab a seat and see for yourself! Ready to meet your MozCon Community Speakers? Chris Long (he/him), VP of Marketing,...

Navigating through Departments: The Key to Making Impactful Changes in SEO

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SEO is unlike any other digital channel. It does not and cannot live in a silo, while something like a paid search program can be run by a single person with minimal help. From our experience, the biggest deficiency in SEO campaigns is not a lack of understanding of the craft, rather, it’s the roadblocks that occur during implementation and cross-team collaboration. Great ideas can be presented and discussed, but taking an idea from a whiteboard or a slide to actually living on a site where it can impact performance can be difficult. Whether in-house or on the agency side, blockers to success often come from internal site teams or long development queues. The key to making progress comes from two primary avenues: Advocating for SEO through exceptional knowledge of the channel as a whole Deep integration with internal teams to move projects along The departments that SEO impacts (and how to work with each) With a channel like SEO where progress is not solely achieved by on...

Title Tag Rewrites: 7 Months Later

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Back in August, we analyzed 10,000 SERPs and found that Google was rewriting 58% of the title tags we were able to track. In September, after some serious objections from the SEO community, Google released the following statement : Based on your feedback, we made changes to our system which means that title elements are now used around 87% of the time, rather than around 80% before. This immediately raises two questions. First, has the situation improved? Second, why the huge mismatch between our numbers (and similar numbers by others in the community)? Rewrites by the numbers We collected new data on March 2, 2022 from the MozCast 10,000-keyword tracking set. Here are the basic stats, which are very similar to what we found in August 2021: 84,639 page-one results 71,265 unique URLs 57,832 <title> tags 33,733 rewrites So, let’s compare the August 2021 rewrites to the March 2022 rewrites: Technically, the numbers did go down, but this probably isn’t the n...