MozCon is back in person for 2022! From networking with your peers to hearing from industry leaders, there are benefits a-plenty to attending conferences. You know that. Your peers know that. But how do you persuade the powers-that-be (aka your boss) that sending you is beneficial for your business? Don’t worry, we’ve got a plan. (And if you want to skip ahead to the letter template, here it is!) Copy the template How to make the case Business competition is fiercer than ever. Only those who are able to shift tactics with the changing tides of marketing will be able to come out on top. And that’s exactly what MozCon is going to help you do. Covering everything a growing marketer needs for a well-balanced marketing diet (SEO, content, strategy, growth), MozCon delivers top-notch talks from hand-selected speakers over three insightful days in July. There's so much in store for you this year. Here’s just a sampling of what you can expect at this year’s MozCon: Speakers and cont...

Have you been waiting on the edge of your seat for MozCon to start rolling out the lineup of speakers? Well, my friend, today’s the day so hold on tight! We’re thrilled to announce the first 15 extraordinary speakers that will be taking the MozCon 2022 stage in Seattle this July (in alphabetical order). Meet the speakers Amalia Fowler (she/her) Founder, Good AF Consulting @AmaliaEFowler Amalia is the Founder of Good AF Consulting, a Vancouver, BC consulting firm where she helps companies build great marketing teams. She's also a marketing instructor at the British Columbia Institute of Technology and creator of The Wholehearted Manager, a newsletter for people who believe in leading with their heart, and that all employees deserve a safe space to work. Amalia has been in search marketing for eight years, with her work focused on helping businesses understand marketing strategy, mentoring new marketers, building exceptional marketing teams and advocating for more ethical an...

We’re developing a brand-new SEO guide for you — The Professional’s Guide to SEO , designed as your next-step resource once you’re comfortable with the baseline provided by the Beginner’s Guide to SEO . When we think of link building, one of the first people we think of is our friend Paddy Moogan at Aira , the architect of the Beginner’s Guide to Link Building , MozCon alumni speaker , and industry thought leader. That’s why we’re jazzed to announce that the link building chapter of our upcoming Professional’s Guide to SEO is authored by none other than the fine folks at Aira. And today we’re sharing an excerpt of that very chapter. Dive in for a glimpse at our newest guide, and as always, give us a shout on Twitter if you have any thoughts or recommendations — we love hearing from you! Link Building & Link Earning Tactics Measuring link building In this section, we explore approaches to measuring links and understanding which ones may make the biggest difference to traffic ...

The promised page experience updates from Google that caused such a stir last year are far from being done, so Tom takes a look at where we are now and what happens next for the algorithm’s infamous Core Web Vitals. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Happy Friday, Moz fans, and welcome to another Whiteboard Friday. This week's video is about Core Web Vitals. Before you immediately pull that or pause the video, press Back, something like that, no, we haven't got stuck in time. This isn't a video from 2020. This is looking forwards. I'm not going to cover what the basic metrics are or how they work, that kind of thing in this video. There is a very good Whiteboard Friday about a year ago from Cyrus about all of those things, which hopefully will be linked below. What this video is going to be looking at is where we are now and what happens next, because the page experience updates from Google...

There are 3.5 billion searches on Google every day , and 84% of people use Google at least three times per day to search for information. When there is a search query on Google, Google Ads runs a quick auction to determine which ads will show for that search query, and what the ad positions should be. This ad auction is repeated every time an ad is eligible to appear for a search term out of the billions searched each day. To determine if an ad is eligible to be shown in the Google search results, and what the position of the ad will be, Google uses a value called Ad Rank. If an ad does not meet the Ad Rank thresholds, it will not be shown. Ad Rank also determines the CPC (cost per click) that the advertiser pays for a click on their ad. In this post, I cover the main factors that are used by Google to determine the Ad Rank of an ad during the auction, and what those factors mean for your ad strategy. Understanding the Google Ads auction How the Google Ads auction works When a u...

MozCon is heading back to Seattle this July, and we’re excited to announce the return of our annual call for up-and-coming community speakers! Every year, we take great pride in reserving space on our stage for new voices. Are you the person that everyone in your network looks to for digital marketing advice? Perhaps you’ve been honing your voice on podcasts or blogs, all the while dreaming of stepping onto the big stage to share your innovative ideas? Now’s your chance to submit your pitch for the opportunity to join industry leaders on the MozCon stage in front of 1,500 of your peers. (No pressure!) Not sure what a community speaker is? At MozCon, we have a speaker selection committee that identifies practitioners at the top of their professional field with a mean speaking game. But these sessions are by invite only, and we know the community is bursting at the seams with hidden gems ready to share groundbreaking research, hot tips, and SEO tests that drive results. Cue our MozCo...

When rolling out an SEO strategy, an important step is to establish goals you’re able to report on regularly. With Custom Reports in Moz Pro , you have the ability to set up automatic reports to send to key stakeholders regarding the goals you are seeking to achieve. In the previous Daily Fix edition we talked through the basics of creating reports. This time, we’ll dive deeper into some specific use cases that may help you and your team better relay critical information regarding your SEO goals and objectives. Use Case: Rankings Opportunities Staying on top of rankings opportunities and how your site stacks up against your competitor may be a critical piece in your SEO strategic puzzle. In this video, Varad will walk through how you can further supplement the existing Rankings Opportunities template. This report will offer ongoing insight into possible opportunities to tackle next. Use Case: Competitive Analysis Setting up a competitive analysis report can help you answer ...

Back in December of 2021, Google launched a redesigned version of Top Stories on desktop that got relatively little notice. At first glance, it appeared that Google introduced a two-column design, such as this Top Stories pack for “Nerf”: Over time, SEOs spotted a rarer but more interesting variety, the 7-pack. Here’s one for “snow” (a topic very much on my mind in Chicago as I’m writing this post): Beyond the redesign itself, this 7-pack occupies a huge amount of screen real-estate, especially compared to previous Top Stories lists and carousels that were limited to three stories. Should we panic yet? It’s easy to focus on the most extreme examples, but how often is this 7-pack variety actually occurring? Across the MozCast 10,000-keyword daily tracking set on February 3rd, we captured 2,121 page-one SERPs with Top Stories. Here’s the breakdown by story count: In our data set, the 7-pack is pretty rare (<1%), with a bit under half (44%) of Top Stories packs containing four...

If you want to serve local business owners, allying your company with their deepest needs matters. Recently, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance provided a valuable opportunity to hear directly from localism advocates and elected officials about small business owners’ goals and obstacles. If your brand is marketing software or other services to this largest sector of American commerce, I highly recommend setting aside an hour this week to watch the whole recording (embedded at the end of this post).  Today, I’ll briefly recap the information from this event that stood out to me as most illuminating, in hopes that you will be able to evaluate these messages to help you find common cause with clients and customers.  The present state of local economics in the U.S. ILSR’s co-director, Stacy Mitchell , began the webinar by remarking that, just a decade ago, it was not common to hear much political talk surrounding small businesses versus monopolies, but that this is ch...

Maximizing the value in your keyword data is crucial if you're a brand trying to rank on the forever-changing SERPs. With that in mind, Moz Learning and Development Specialist Zoe Pegler walks you through the key features in STAT Search Analytics that will help you glean extra (and important) insights from that data.  Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Hi and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Zoe. I work in the Learning team here at Moz, and my focus is on developing educational materials and resources to promote understanding of our STAT tool. Today, we're going to take a look at how you can use STAT to surface additional insights in your keyword data. Looking for value in your keyword data is important if you're a brand trying to stay visible and on top of the forever-changing SERPs. Looking for those additional insights is paramount to making informed SEO decisions....

Because of its broad field, SEO has many touch points with a variety of different marketing channels. As other channels' operations influence SEO, both directly and indirectly, it’s essential to deploy an integrated marketing approach in which each channel supports the other, in order to optimize marketing efforts and enhance your brand’s user experience. This article provides you with a number of different actionable tips for combining SEO with the marketing channels listed below, that will not only save you time, resources, and money, but will lead to even better results for your team and company: SEA Affiliate PR Social Media Email UX/UI Content Search Engine Advertising (SEA) Both SEO and Search Engine Advertising (SEA) are keyword-driven processes that focus on ensuring a website reaches the top positions of the search engine results page (SERP). While SEO is a slower process that focuses on organic positions with long-term results, SEA is a much faster appr...