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Gather 'Round the Campfire for the MozCon 2022 Day Three Recap!

If Camp MozCon has to come to an end, we wanted to send it off with a bang. After all, we have to get through the next 364 days before we get to do this again! So, in true MozCon style, we brought in the good coffee, handed out more Roger figurines, and cheered on our best pals as they took the stage. Now, we aren’t going to say we saved the best for last, but we have to admit that our camp counselors for day three were absolute powerhouses. Why Real Expertise is the Most Important Ranctor Factor of Them All — Lily Ray When it comes to E-A-T, there is no better person to look to than Lily. She kicked off the morning by reminding us that showing expertise to Google is paramount. But just because the word “expert” is in there, that doesn’t mean the tactics are overly complicated. Lily shared multiple examples of businesses that are ranking for very competitive/authoritative keywords, and her analysis of how these sites rose to the top. Throughout this analysis, she reminded us that ...

Ready for S'more? The MozCon 2022 Day Two Recap

Day two of Camp MozCon was everything we expected it to be: more networking, more marshmallows, and more brilliant presentations from the top minds in the industry. Speakers covered the SEO gamut — from research and content creation, to e-commerce, and more! Not only were the presentations chock-full of insights, but the storytelling had us feeling as though we were all sitting around the campfire. Everyone was dialed in and ready to turn insights into actions. More Than Pageviews: Evaluating Content Success & Correcting Content Failure — Dana DiTomaso Dana started the day by making us think: what is the best way to measure content success? And she didn’t just mean which KPIs should we measure, but also how we are going to track those KPIs. The example she talked about was pageviews, which sounds easy enough. The issue though, is that every time a tab is refreshed (even by tag hoarders) a pageview is tracked. This can very easily skew your data. To collect accurate data, Dana’...

Welcome, Happy Campers! The MozCon 2022 Day One Recap

Today, after three years, we gathered some of our best friends in the industry to kick off the biggest SEO party of the year in Seattle. That’s right, Camp MozCon is back in all of its real-life glory and we could not be more excited! Cue all of the fist bumps, Roger selfies, and snacks, because we are back in action! It wouldn’t be MozCon without the top minds in the industry sharing their findings, and we were not disappointed yesterday. They really brought the heat to the campfire. SERP Strategies — Andy Crestodina Andy is always a fan favorite as he combines analysis with strategy. This year he’s done the same as he walked us through his research on SERP pages. We all knew SERPs have changed a ton, but Andy — the professional SERP screenshotter he is — has collected visuals of multiple SERPs over the last few years. Not only was he hoarding this data, but he has been using it to his advantage. Andy walked us through his process of keyword research, and spoiler alert, it doesn’...

How Stacker.com Earned 1M+ Organic Monthly Visits Through Content Syndication [Case Study]

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Note: Amanda Milligan collaborated with Stacker’s SEO specialist, Sam Kaye, to create this case study. When a marketer is asked about the value of content syndication , they’ll typically list two main benefits: Increased brand awareness, as you’re reaching a wider audience. Improved engagement, as people can share and comment across multiple versions of the story. But one benefit of content syndication that marketers frequently overlook is the potential to improve a site’s SEO performance. While paid syndication (like press release distribution) can’t carry SEO value, developing strong content that’s appealing to publishers and their readers can generate massive amounts of link authority back to a publishing domain, and drive significant organic growth. But it’s difficult to test and implement a comprehensive syndication strategy, so there aren’t many resources about its SEO impact. In this case study, we: Outline the processes used by Stacker to syndicate content. ...

Freshness & SEO: An Underrated Concept

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During my time in search, there are certain ranking factors that I’ve changed my perspective on. For instance, after coming to Go Fish Digital and working on internal linking initiatives, I started to realize the power of internal links over time . By implementing internal links at scale, we were able to see consistent success. Freshness is another one of these factors. After working with a news organization and testing the learnings gained from that work on other sites, I started to see the immense power that content refreshes could produce. As a result, I think the entire SEO community has underrated this concept for quite some time. Let’s dig into why. Reviewing news sites This all started when we began to work with a large news publisher who was having trouble getting in Google’s Top Stories for highly competitive keywords. They were consistently finding that their content wasn’t able to get inclusion in this feature, and wanted to know why. Inclusion in “Top stories” We bega...

Planning for a Post-Local-Pack Possibility

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Local SEOs are accustomed to continuous change in the SERPs, but if S.2992, the American Innovation Online Choice Act , becomes law and prevents monopolies like Google from preferencing their own assets, we need to prepare for what could be the largest search overhaul we’ve ever seen.  This could be bigger than the day we saw 7-packs become 3-packs. It could be bigger than any of the major updates like Possum or Vicinity. We’re talking about major potential change and new opportunity for local businesses. Just how big might it be? That’s exactly what we’ll be looking at today! Stats and tests Per Moz’s most recent study by Dr. Peter J. Meyers , when we ran 1,000 search phrases through MozCast, half or which were localized to particular cities, 33% percent of our queries returned a local pack like this one in the SERPs: If S.2992 should become law, industry experts observe that local packs would likely be one of the widgets Google would be obliged to stop preferencing in their...

What Is Localism and How Does it Relate to Local SEO?

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Local search marketing is a form of publicity unlike any other because of its potential for creating positive social change. July 2022 is Independent Business Month and the perfect moment to reinvigorate our work as local SEOs by reflecting on the meaningful bigger picture to which we’re contributing. I’ve heard European social commentators say that you can’t publish books in America with the word “virtue” in their titles, but when an independent business owner opens their doors, it instigates a true virtuous cycle. When marketers have the honor of entering that cycle, we’re participating in something even more important than “traffic”, “conversions”, or “growth”; we’re contributing to the force for good known as localism .  It can be an outcome of continual work with analytics and statistics to slip into viewing everything as a numbers game, but in local, each of those numbers is a real individual, a neighbor with a story, with needs. This month, we have the opportunity to re-c...