Posts

Moneyball is the Future of SEO — Whiteboard Friday

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Welcome back to Whiteboard Friday! First up in our fall season, Will Critchlow shows you how, much like the NBA, SEO is undergoing an analytic revolution — and how you can make the most of it. To hear more on this topic, and from our other amazing MozCon 2022 speakers, be sure to pre-order the video bundle !  Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Hi, Moz fans. Will Critchlow here, CEO at SearchPilot . I want to start today by talking about the NBA in 2001. This is what the shot chart looked like. So these are the 200 most commonly shot from locations in the NBA in 2001. So in professional basketball, you can see that they took a load of shots around the rim. These are the dunks and layups. They took a load of shots from outside the three-point line, and they took a lot of these mid-range shots, which are all the jump shots in between.  NBA analytic revolution Something happened in the subseq...

How to Use Chrome to View a Website as Googlebot

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Introduction to Googlebot spoofing In this article, I'll describe how and why to use Google Chrome (or Chrome Canary) to view a website as Googlebot. We'll set up a web browser specifically for Googlebot browsing. Using a user-agent browser extension is often close enough for SEO audits, but extra steps are needed to get as close as possible to emulating Googlebot. Skip to "How to set up your Googlebot browser" . Why should I view a website as Googlebot? For many years, us technical SEOs had it easy when auditing websites, with HTML and CSS being web design’s cornerstone languages. JavaScript was generally used for embellishments (such as small animations on a webpage). Increasingly, though, whole websites are being built with JavaScript. Originally, web servers sent complete websites (fully rendered HTML) to web browsers. These days, many websites are rendered client-side (in the web browser itself) – whether that's Chrome, Safari, or whatever browser a se...

Underused Tactics and Overlooked Metrics in E-Commerce

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There are plenty of impressive tactics or metrics that aren’t often discussed, not necessarily because they aren't important, but because it's easy to get locked into the rhythm of simply reporting on traffic and sales. To change things up, let's look into some other areas we can optimize to improve the organic performance of e-commerce websites, and some underrated but useful metrics that can help you report on that performance. Tactics to optimize and measure your e-commerce website performance Data scraping for SEO and analytics Data scraping is very useful when you want to retrieve, or scrape, elements from a page for further analysis or optimization. Most people know that you can scrape common webpage elements such as publication date, author name, or price, but what about more specific aspects of e-commerce websites, and what can we use them for? Product pages have unique attributes that you can scrape, such as “add to basket” type buttons or even product schema;...

Announcing the Local SEO Certification from Moz Academy

43% of people tasked with marketing local businesses say there just aren’t enough resources available to teach them local SEO . Today, Moz is debuting our Local SEO Certification program to fulfill this need. With this well-organized, engaging video course, you can learn at your own pace, take an exam, and earn a certificate and LinkedIn badge as proof of your achievement. As a contributor to the development of this new Moz Academy educational opportunity, I recommend it to: Enterprises and agencies that need to solidify or increase their local SEO skills to contribute to company growth. SEOs who need to advance their careers by expanding into the rapidly-growing world of local SEO. Local SEOs who want confirmation that they are current in best practices, or to dispel some of the worries of all-too-common imposter syndrome. Local business owners who know their companies can’t reach full potential without great local search marketing. The Moz Academy Local SEO Certificat...

Why Creating Competitor Link Gaps Is Just as Important as Closing Them

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In SEO and digital PR, there is a lot of discussion surrounding how and why brands need to close backlink gaps in order to rank high and be competitive in the SERPs. But what about tackling competitive SEO from the opposite direction by creating link gaps? In this post, I’ll share a framework that we use at JBH to help us create hyper-niche and relevant digital PR campaigns that will earn links on sites where our clients' competitors aren’t found, and highlight the strategic importance of creating these gaps for SEO success. What are link gaps, and how do we find them? On a very basic level, a link gap is the difference between the sites linking to multiple competitors, but not to you. It’s really easy to discover these sites by performing a link gap analysis (using a tool like Moz’s Link Intersect Tool ), comparing the backlinks you have to those of your competitors. At the end of your analysis, you’re left with a list of websites you should try and earn a link from — th...

Going International: 15 SEO Steps for a Successful Expansion

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Introduction Expanding your business internationally is an excellent way to grow and scale your company. However, deciding to enter foreign markets involves making several decisions and taking actions that establish your organic presence. This article will guide you through 15 SEO steps to follow that will allow you to conquer new markets successfully. Table of contents: Deciding to go international Domain best practices Content transcreation Technical considerations Off-page best practices Bonus: Different search engines Deciding to go international Globalization has made it easy for almost any business to expand its presence internationally. If you detect a great opportunity or a fair amount of traffic to your site from a specific country, it could be worthwhile to target this market more thoroughly. Nevertheless, entering a new market without solid preliminary research can lead to wasted time and resources. To prevent entering a market blindly, in-depth keyword resear...