Testing out a new paid marketing channel is relatively easy. You can assign someone in-house, allocate some test budget, and pretty quickly quantify the return on your investment. Testing out SEO can be quite a bit trickier: Results often take time (more than six months) If results do materialize, they’re often hard to quantify or attribute to any one project It’s more than just a financial investment — you'll usually need product resources as well There are exceptions but most companies can’t say: "let's spend $10K on SEO over the next few months and see if there's potential there". You have to take a leap of faith, and weighing that leap of faith against very quantifiable, much more immediate projects isn't always easy. I've seen this issue firsthand, first as a consultant at Distilled, then working in-house on SEO at Etsy, SeatGeek, and now Course Hero. So, here's my attempt at a framework for investing in SEO: Should you invest in ...

A crucial aspect of improving your SEO performance is reporting. By reporting on what you’ve done, you can analyze the data you’ve collected, and learn from it.  In this Daily Fix series, we’ll show you how to create clear, insightful reports that you can easily share with relevant stakeholders. These reports cover all of the key elements of SEO, and can be customized to suit your needs.  If you’d like further assistance with creating custom reports, you can book a one-on-one walkthrough with a member of our Onboarding Team. We’ll guide you through how to create a personalized report that looks exactly like you want it to. Book a walkthrough How do I set up a custom report? Custom reports allow you to effectively communicate the SEO work you’ve been doing to clients, colleagues, or other stakeholders on a consistent basis. In this Daily Fix video, Kerry will show you how to set one up when tracking your site in Moz Pro. Reporting on rankings changes monthly Keeping...

I originally made this case back in January 2018, and it’s hard to believe that’s almost four years ago now. So much has happened since: the evolution of website platforms like Squarespace, Shopify, and Square/Weebly into full-blown digital operations hubs, the start of serious antitrust proceedings against Google and Facebook, and of course, a global pandemic.  But if anything, the case for historically search-oriented agencies to add or expand their email marketing offerings has only strengthened. Email remains an under-appreciated and under-addressed channel among digital agencies of all stripes, even as “social media management” seems to have become an almost table-stakes-level offering. Some of that prioritization of social media is understandable — social remains very much in-demand among small businesses . And yet, visibility and engagement for organic social media remains flat on Facebook and Twitter, and has started to decline on Instagram. Meanwhile, email open and en...

In part one of this series, we talked about how Google and the web in general were not really ready for the Page Experience Update — Google’s CrUX data covered too few websites, the vast majority of which were not hitting the required thresholds. That was why, I suggested, the update had been so delayed and watered down. In part two , we talked about the metrics themselves — their flimsiness, their arbitrariness, their openness to manipulation. This, too, I suggested, might be holding Google back. However, the proof is in the pudding. Are Core Web Vitals, taken individually or as a whole, correlated with rankings? If so, is that any more true than it was before the Page Experience Update? In this third and final post of this series, we’ll see what the data tells us about the relationship between Core Web Vitals metrics and organic ranking performance. Viewer discretion advised This is, at most, a correlation study. There are many mechanisms by which something can be correlated wit...

Your sales team has just asked you to hop on a call in 30 minutes with a new prospect, ClowdFyre. Not wanting to sound like an idiot, you pull up ClowdFyre.com and see the following: “ClowdFyre leverages the cloud to ignite blockchain synergies.” Cool, cool… hold on, there’s some sort of diagram. Surely, this will give you some insights: Or maybe not. I’m exaggerating, of course, but having lived through Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and whatever it is we’re doing now, sometimes this feels a little too close to the truth. Maybe the simpler truth is that we’re just running out of names and the world is changing too fast. So, how can you hope to quickly figure out what ClowdFyre is all about and sound like you did your homework? I’m going to present two real-world examples of how you can use Moz’s True Competitor research tool to solve this problem in under 10 minutes. Case #1: From Xero to hero Xero is a good example of a perfectly nice company with a perfectly uninformative name. Their tagli...

Search marketers can't get our important work implemented if we can't prove that it's worth the investment to our higher-ups.  With that in mind, Moz’s own SEO Manager, Kavi Kardos, is going to give you the numbers and the talking points you need to justify the return on investment of your SEO work. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a larger version in a new tab! Video Transcription Hi, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Kavi Kardos. I'm the SEO Manager here at Moz, which means I'm responsible for Moz.com's own SEO strategy and implementation along with the other SEO subject matter experts who you've seen many times before here on Whiteboard Friday. The ROI of SEO I'm going to talk to you today about the ROI of SEO, which is an important topic for website and business owners themselves to understand, but maybe even more important for the in-house and agency marketers who work on those websites to un...

Recently, after months of testing , Google pushed a full roll-out of indented results. These are groups of organic results from the same domain, such as this result on a search for “Halloween stores”: Just to make life confusing, indented results are different from expanded sitelinks (in the #1 ranking position), such as these on a search for “Spirit Halloween”: So, why should we care about indented results? To begin with, they seem to be appearing at a surprisingly high rate on page one. Here’s the prevalence since we started tracking them on MozCast (across 10,000 competitive keywords): For the 13 days for which we currently have data, the prevalence of indented results on page one Google SERPs in MozCast has been stable at around 40%. Since we often see new features roll out at single-digit percentages, this is a significant development. Note that the MozCast 10,000-keyword data set skews toward high-competition “head” terms and may not represent the entire universe of Google...

In the first post in this series, I talked about how relatively few URLs on the web are currently clearing the double-hurdle required for a maximum CWV (Core Web Vitals) ranking boost: Passing the threshold for all three CWV metrics Actually having CrUX data available so Google knows you’ve passed said thresholds For Google’s original rollout timeline in May, we would have had 9% of URLs clearing this bar. By August 2021, this had hit 14%. This alone may have been enough for Google to delay, downplay, and dilute their own update. But there’s another critical issue that I believe may have undermined Google’s ability to introduce Page Experience as a major ranking factor: flimsy metrics. Flimsy metrics It’s a challenging brief to capture the frustrations of millions of disparate users’ experiences with a handful of simple metrics. Perhaps an impossible one. In any case, Google’s choices are certainly not without their quirks. My principle charge is that many frustrating webs...