One of the biggest challenges in SEO is trying to convince your client or boss that the competition they face online may not match their legacy competitors and personal grudges. Big Earl across the street at Big Earl’s Widgets may be irritating and, sure, maybe he does have a “stupid, smug face,” but that doesn’t change the fact that WidgetShack.com is eating your lunch (and let’s not even talk about Amazon). To make matters worse, competitive analysis is time-consuming and tedious work, even if you do have access to the data. Today, after years of rethinking how competitive analysis should work (and, honestly, re-rethinking it on many occasions), I’m proud to announce the first step in expanding Moz’s competitive analysis toolkit — True Competitor. Try True Competitor What is True Competitor? Before I dive into the details, let’s take it out for a spin . Just enter your domain or subdomain and your locale (the beta supports English-language markets in the United States, Great Brit...

Did you ever turn in a school paper full of vague ramblings, hoping your teacher wouldn’t notice that you’d failed to read the assigned book? I admit, I once helped my little sister fulfill a required word count with analogies about “waves crashing against the rocks of adversity” when she, for some reason, overlooked reading The Communist Manifesto in high school. She got an A on her paper, but that isn’t the mark I’d give Google when there isn’t enough content to legitimately fill them local packs, Local Finders, and Maps. The presence of irrelevant listings in response to important local queries: Makes it unnecessarily difficult for searchers to find what they need Makes it harder for relevant businesses to compete Creates a false impression of bountiful local choice of resources, resulting in disappointing UX Today, we’ll look at some original data in an attempt to quantify the extent of this problem, and explore what Google and local businesses can do about...

In today’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Tom covers a more advanced SEO concept: crawl budget. Google has a finite amount of time it's willing to spend crawling your site, so if you’re having issues with indexation, this is a topic you should care about. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a larger version in a new tab! Video Transcription Happy Friday, Moz fans, and today's topic is crawl budget. I think it's worth saying right off the bat that this is somewhat of a more advanced topic or one that applies primarily to larger websites. I think even if that's not you, there is still a lot you can learn from this in terms of SEO theory that comes about when you're looking at some of the tactics you might employ or some of the diagnostics you might employ for a crawl budget. But in Google's own documentation they suggest that you should care about crawl budget if you have more than a million pages or more than 10,000 pages that are updated on a ...

From today, if you visit the Contact page of Moz.com to look up our office locations, you will see that we have included the following Statement of Land Acknowledgement with the permission of the Tribes, Nations, and Bands in whose homelands our teams live and work: We at Moz acknowledge that our offices in Seattle and Vancouver exist in the traditional, ancestral, current, and unceded lands of Tribes, Nations, and Bands including the dxʷdəwʔabš (Duwamish), suq̀wabš/dxʷəq̓ʷabš (Suquamish), bəqəlšuł (Muckleshoot), sdukʷalbixʷ (Snoqualmie), dxʷlilap (Tulalip), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), and Stz’uminus Peoples. We respect their sovereignty, their right to self-determination, and their sacred connection to the land and water. We offer our thanks to the Peoples, the land, and the water. We are deeply grateful to the many members of the Tribes, Nations, and Bands for the time they generously gave over the past y...

Note: This article was written with the help of  Tina Irizarry & RJ Wilson . A fundamental truth of working in SEO is that link building has become more difficult. As more and more people have devised questionable methods of link building, Google has become much more strict about what constitutes a quality link . Widget links? Try again .  Scholarship links? Considered “ a tricky situation .” Even the sacred guest post is now frowned upon. So, how is a website supposed to build links?  While there are still many completely valid ways to build high-quality links , digital PR is beginning to stand out from the rest of the pack. In early 2021, John Mueller infamously praised the efforts of digital PR , which helped further propel its status as a viable form of link building. Fortunately, our team at Go Fish Digital has a long history of running digital PR campaigns for our clients. Since we’ve developed some great internal processes over time, we wanted to sh...

In today's episode of Whiteboard Friday, Tom Capper walks you through a problem many SEOs have faced: cannibalization. What is it, how do you identify it, and how can you fix it? Watch to find out!  Click on the whiteboard image above to open a larger version in a new tab! Video Transcription Happy Friday, Moz fans, and today we're going to be talking about cannibalization, which here in the UK we spell like this: cannibalisation . With that out of the way, what do we mean by cannibalization? What is cannibalization? So this is basically where one site has two competing URLs and performs, we suspect, less well because of it. So maybe we think the site is splitting its equity between its two different URLs, or maybe Google is getting confused about which one to show. Or maybe Google considers it a duplicate content problem or something like that. One way or another, the site does less well as a result of having two URLs.  So I've got this imaginary SERP here ...

I recently dug into over 50,000 title tags to understand the impact of Google’s rewrite update . As an SEO, this naturally got me wondering how the update impacted Moz, specifically. So, this post will be a more focused examination of a site I have deep familiarity with, including three case studies where we managed to fix bad rewrites. As an author, I take titles pretty personally. Imagine if you wrote this masterpiece: … and then you ended up with a Google result that looked like this: Sure, Google didn’t do anything wrong here, and it’s not their fault that there’s an upper limit on what they can display, but it still feels like something was lost. It’s one thing to do a study across a neutral data set, but it’s quite another when you’re trying to understand the impact on your own site, including articles you spent hours, days, or weeks writing. Moz rewrites by the numbers I’m not going to dig deep into the methodology, but I collected the full set of ranking keywords from Mo...