Posted by willcritchlow We're bringing back this slightly different-from-the-norm Whiteboard Friday, in which the fantastic Will Critchlow shares lessons from how kids search. Kids may search differently than adults, but there are some interesting insights from how they use Google that can help deepen our understanding of searchers in general. Comfort levels with particular search strategies, reading only the bold words, taking search suggestions and related searches as answers — there's a lot to dig into.  Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Hi, everyone. I'm Will Critchlow, founder and CEO of Distilled, and this week's Whiteboard Friday is a little bit different. I want to talk about some surprising and interesting and a few funny facts that I learnt when I was reading some research that Google did about how kids search for information. So this isn't super actionable. This is not about ta...

Posted by brian.ho Data visualization platforms have become a vital tool to help illustrate the success of a body of work. Painting a clear picture of your SEO efforts is as important as ever, whether you’re reporting out to clients or to internal stakeholders at your own company. More and more SEOs are turning to data visualization tools to do so — pulling in data from across multiple SEO tools, blending that data in unique ways, and helping to pull back the curtain on the mystery of SEO. Platforms like Tableau and Google Data Studio are becoming more commonplace in the SEO community as we seek better ways to communicate with our teams. We’ve heard from a number of folks in the Moz community that having a central dashboard to present data has streamlined their own reporting processes. It’s also made information more digestible for colleagues and clients, as they can see everything they need in one place. Thanks to the helpful feedback of many, many STAT customers, we’ve been hard ...

Posted by amandamilligan One of the best ways (and in my opinion, the best way) to earn top-quality links is to create your own studies, surveys, reports, etc., and pitch them to online publishers. This is what we do at Fractl, because it’s a tried-and-true way to elevate organic growth: Over the years, we’ve received a lot of questions about what results to expect. Sure, everyone wants links now, but where does the real growth come in, and how long does it take? And in either case, people want to know what wins they can report on to their superiors, even in the short-term. There are so many benefits to this combination of content marketing and digital PR, and I’ll walk through what you can realistically expect, and feature examples and data from our experience working with Porch.com. Short-term benefits It’s true that content marketing is an investment, which I’ll explain properly in the next section. But there are certainly short-term wins you can celebrate and report on, and...

Posted by Shannon-McGuirk We've all been there: you plan, launch, and eagerly await the many returns on a content campaign, only to be disappointed when it falls flat. But all is not lost: there are clever ways to give your failed campaigns a second chance at life and an opportunity to earn the links you missed out on the first time. In this popular Whiteboard Friday from 2018, MozCon speaker Shannon McGuirk graciously gives us a five-step plan for breathing new life into a dead content campaign. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Hi, Moz fans. Welcome to this edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Shannon McGuirk. I'm the Head of PR and Content at a UK-based digital marketing agency called Aira . Now, throughout my time, I've launched a number of creative content and digital PR campaigns, too many to mention. But the ones that really stick into my head are the campaign fails, the ones that go...

Posted by MiriamEllis Image credit: J.B. Hill What’s the good of a survey if it doesn’t result in at least a few surprises? I know my own eyebrows leapt skyward when the data first came in from the Moz State of the Local SEO Industry 2020 Survey and I saw that, in a break with tradition, participants had placed user-to-business proximity at a lowly third place in terms of influencing Google local pack rankings. Just a year ago, our respondents had voted it #1. If you’re feeling startled, too, here’s our chance to take a more granular look at the data and see if we can offer some useful theories for proximity’s drop in perceived dominance. First, a quick definition of user-to-business proximity What do local SEOs mean when they speak of user-to-business proximity? Imagine an Internet searcher is standing in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, looking on their phone, laptop or other device for “pizza”. Local SEOs observe that it’s more typical for Google to show that person Pasqu...

Posted by DaisyQ I hate to tell you, but Googling “blog topic ideas” is not going to give you the content you should be creating. Not all content is created equal. Letting the internet tell you what to blog about leads to mediocrity. Mediocrity is fine in some cases, like forcing yourself to show up at the gym at 5:00 p.m. when you’d much rather call it a day. But if you’re going to try and stand out in the very crowded search results page, you won’t stand a chance. The reality is, it’s hard The web is overrun with companies that have bigger budgets than you and can churn out content every day. Meanwhile, you’re lucky to get a blog post out once a month. Where you put your time can make or break your digital efforts. How do you compete? What content will grow your traffic month after month and year after year? If you’re going to put your time into creating and promoting a blog post, and hope to get results, you owe it to yourself to figure out what you’re best suited to blog abou...

Posted by morgan.mcmurray It's been a few years since we last asked you to tell us what you love (and don't love so much) about the Moz Blog, and since then our company, our industry, and our world have undergone massive shifts. With so much having changed, we wanted to be sure we're still living up to the high standards we set for this blog, and that we're still providing as valuable an experience as we can for you all. That's where you come in today. To help us serve you better, please consider going through the survey below, which asks about who you are, what challenges you face, and what you'd like to see more of on the Moz Blog. We'll publish the results along with our takeaways in a few weeks, and will use them to guide our work going forward. From all of us at Moz, thanks in advance for your time! TAKE THE SURVEY Sign up for The Moz Top 10 , a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncover...

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard There's a new ranking factor in town: Core Web Vitals. Expected in 2021, this Google-announced algorithm change has a few details you should be aware of. Cyrus Shepard dives in this week on Whiteboard Friday. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cyrus Shepard here at Moz. Today we're talking about the next official Google ranking factor — Core Web Vitals. Now what do I mean by official ranking factor? Google makes hundreds of changes a year. Every week they introduce new changes to their algorithm. Occasionally they announce ranking factor changes. They do this in particular when something is important or they want to encourage people, webmasters to make changes to their site beforehand. They do this for important things like HTTPS and other signals. So this is one they actually announced. It's co...

Posted by cheryldraper Wow! What a crazy ride MozCon has been this year. In case you missed it, we were able to double the number of attendees and include over 2,800 people. Not only were we able to include them, we were also able to see their families, pets, and home offices. It was an unusual experience for sure, but one we won’t be forgetting any time soon. As always, the speakers served up some flaming hot content (including an actual movie). We can’t wait to share some of these takeaways with you! Britney Muller — Accessible Machine Learning Workflows for SEOs Britney started off by assuring everyone that they absolutely can use machine learning. She knows this because she was able to teach her dad how to use it! Let’s jump right in. Basically, machine learning can be used for a lot of things. There's endless possibilities w/ #machinelearning : Some cool things: - AI-generated faces - Auto-excuse generator (need that) Leveraging for SEO: - Keyword research - ...