Posts

Use SEO to Fuel Your Brand's Community Flywheel

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I don’t typically wear jewelry. However, when I heard a friend rave about the ring and necklace he bought from Automic Gold , it piqued my interest. As I scrolled through the site, I found myself very engaged by the approachable content, fun styles, and lifestyle photos showing inclusive genders. After several site visits, I made a purchase. This experience is a prime example of how a brand can influence purchasing decisions through community marketing. No ad was seen. No ad was clicked. I not only became a customer, but I also became a fan of this brand—all driven by my friend’s recommendation alone. We live in an era of community marketing, and community marketing is built through brand stories. Performance marketing efforts are still a fundamental component of marketing, but they become far more effective with a personal endorsement from a friend. After all, social proof is one of the most powerful marketing engines. In fact, according to a Nielsen Harris Poll study , 82% of Ameri...

5 Ways to Get More with Less Through Link Building — Whiteboard Friday

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As we enter 2023, several businesses are being squeezed because of rising costs. Customers are simultaneously struggling to cope with their living costs, which in turn affects companies and what products they can sell, so agencies and in-house teams come under more pressure to get more results, with limited budgets.  In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Paddy walks through a few tactics to meet those needs by getting more (from less) when it comes to your link building efforts. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Hi, Moz fans. Welcome to Whiteboard Friday. I'm Paddy Moogan. I'm the CEO of Aira. Today we're going to talk about link building, and we're going to talk about five tactics to get more from less with your link building. Before we go into those, I'm going to set some context about what we mean by more from less. So at the moment in the world, in the UK, and in the US, lots of businesses...

2022 YouTube and Video SERP Result Changes

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When you think of video results on Google in 2022 (and video optimization), you might think of something that looks like this (from a search for “flag football”): In mid-October, we noticed a drop in this type of video result, and that drop became dramatic by late-October. Did Google remove these video results or was our system broken? As it turns out, neither — video results have split into at least three distinct types (depending on how you count). (1) Video packs (simple & complex) The example above is pretty simple, with the exception of “Key Moments” (which debuted in 2019 ), but even the familiar video packs can get pretty complex. Here’s one from a search for the artist Gustav Klimt: All three of the videos here have Key Moments, including a pre-expanded section for the top video with thumbnails for each of the moments. Some specific SERPs also have minor variations, such as the “Trailers & clips” feature on this search for “Lion King”: Video packs are still o...

Sneak Peek: The MozCon 2023 Speaker Line-Up

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The year may slowly be wrapping up but we’ve got an extra special, early gift to share before you log off that laptop and put away your favorite travel mug. We’re thrilled to announce the first 19 extraordinary speakers that will be taking the MozCon 2023 stage in Seattle this coming August (in alphabetical order). Snag your Super Early Bird tickets! Meet the speakers Amanda Jordan (she/her) Director of Digital Strategy, RicketyRoo @amandatjordan | @ricketyroo Amanda is passionate about helping complex, large businesses improve their local visibility. Her background includes working with clients in the legal, health, financial, and home services industries. Andi Jarvis (he/him) Strategy Director, Eximo Marketing @andijarvis | @EximoMarketing Andi is the Founder and Strategy Director of Eximo Marketing, a marketing strategy consultancy based in the UK. Eximo works with established manufacturers who want to grow their business via direct to consumer. Andi also hosts the...

SEO Gap Analysis — Whiteboard Friday

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Ranking on Google is not ranking in a vacuum. Ranking is outranking your competitors. When you've got very limited space on the first page of the SERPs, you need to be doing better than your competitors.  In today's Whiteboard Friday, Lidia Infante shows you her recommended strategies for successful SEO gap analysis.  Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to a new edition of Whiteboard Fridays. My name is Lidia Infante, and I'm the Senior SEO Manager at sanity.io. Today, I'm going to be talking to you about SEO gap analysis, and yes, I know it's a very unsexy topic, but bear with me because it's worth it. SEO gap analysis takes us to the first principles of what we do in SEO because ranking on Google is not ranking in a vacuum. Ranking is outranking your competitors. You've got a very limited space on the first page of the SERPs, and you need to be doin...

Local Pack Header Specificity Vanishes while Local Packs Downtrend

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In July of this year, Dr. Peter J. Meyers and I published a report analyzing an element of Google’s local results we termed “local pack headers” . About a month after publication, members of the local SEO community, like Colan Nielsen , began noticing that the extraordinary diversity of headings we had captured had suddenly diminished: Today, I’m doing a quick follow-up to the manual portion of our earlier study in an effort to quantify and illustrate this abrupt alteration. A total sea change in local pack headers Between July and November of 2022, 83% of our previously-queried local pack headers underwent a complete transformation of nomenclature. Only 17% of the local pack headers were still worded the same way in autumn as they had been in the summertime. Here is a small set of examples: In our manual analysis of 60 queries in July, we encountered 40 unique local pack headers - a tremendous variety. Now, all specificity is gone. For all of our queries, headings have been redu...

4 Common Mistakes E-commerce Websites Make Using JavaScript

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Despite the resources they can invest in web development, large e-commerce websites still struggle with SEO-friendly ways of using JavaScript. And, even when 98% of all websites use JavaScript , it’s still common that Google has problems indexing pages using JavaScript. While it's okay to use it on your website in general, remember that JavaScript requires extra computing resources to be processed into HTML code understandable by bots. At the same time, new JavaScript frameworks and technologies are constantly arising. To give your JavaScript pages the best chance of indexing, you'll need to learn how to optimize it for the sake of your website's visibility in the SERPs. Why is unoptimized JavaScript dangerous for your e-commerce? By leaving JavaScript unoptimized, you risk your content not getting crawled and indexed by Google. And in the e-commerce industry, that translates to losing significant revenue, because products are impossible to find via search engines. It...