High fives and fist bumps for each and every person who took the time to submit pitches for this years’ community speaker spots! Our selection committee read, watched, and researched, whittling things down to a shortlist of top contenders and then read, watched, and researched some more to determine if a potential speaker and their talk would be a perfect fit for the MozCon stage. We take lots of things into account during our review, but ultimately there are three main factors that determine our final selections: Strength of the pitch (e.g., value, relevance to the audience, etc.) Can the content reasonably be delivered in the time allotted? Does it fit with overall programming and agenda? After much deliberation, we settled on seven (yes, we added a seventh) community speakers that we’re confident are going to be a great addition to the MozCon Stage. Grab a seat and see for yourself! Ready to meet your MozCon Community Speakers? Chris Long (he/him), VP of Marketing,...

SEO is unlike any other digital channel. It does not and cannot live in a silo, while something like a paid search program can be run by a single person with minimal help. From our experience, the biggest deficiency in SEO campaigns is not a lack of understanding of the craft, rather, it’s the roadblocks that occur during implementation and cross-team collaboration. Great ideas can be presented and discussed, but taking an idea from a whiteboard or a slide to actually living on a site where it can impact performance can be difficult. Whether in-house or on the agency side, blockers to success often come from internal site teams or long development queues. The key to making progress comes from two primary avenues: Advocating for SEO through exceptional knowledge of the channel as a whole Deep integration with internal teams to move projects along The departments that SEO impacts (and how to work with each) With a channel like SEO where progress is not solely achieved by on...

Back in August, we analyzed 10,000 SERPs and found that Google was rewriting 58% of the title tags we were able to track. In September, after some serious objections from the SEO community, Google released the following statement : Based on your feedback, we made changes to our system which means that title elements are now used around 87% of the time, rather than around 80% before. This immediately raises two questions. First, has the situation improved? Second, why the huge mismatch between our numbers (and similar numbers by others in the community)? Rewrites by the numbers We collected new data on March 2, 2022 from the MozCast 10,000-keyword tracking set. Here are the basic stats, which are very similar to what we found in August 2021: 84,639 page-one results 71,265 unique URLs 57,832 <title> tags 33,733 rewrites So, let’s compare the August 2021 rewrites to the March 2022 rewrites: Technically, the numbers did go down, but this probably isn’t the n...

Whether it’s participating in the latest challenge, using a trending TikTok sound, or putting your own spin on a viral recipe, we all know social media trends provide a great opportunity to spread brand awareness and grow your brand’s social media following. But they can also be utilized to boost search engine results, driving traffic and sales to your website. If taking advantage of social media trends in one way or another isn’t a part of your brand’s digital marketing strategy just yet, read on. This article will show why it’s important to jump on board and provide you with a list of actionable steps to ace the game. Examples of search results influenced by social media trends If we compile a list of social media trends from the last couple of years and search for their related terms on Google Trends, we can spot a recurring pattern — search results for related terms increasing at the time of their social media trends going viral. Let’s take a look at a few examples. Little Mo...

We’ve been re-optimizing Brafton's blog content consistently since 2018. It’s been one of the main SEO strategies we’ve used to increase our blog traffic from 20,000 to 200,000 monthly visitors over the last three years, and we’re continuing with this strategy into 2022 (and probably beyond). For the purpose of this study, we wanted to answer the question, “How well does content re-optimization work, and is it worth your time?” But first, let’s back up and get some definitions out of the way. What is content re-optimization? In its simplest form, content re-optimization is the process of updating existing content with new material in order to add value to the original piece. There are many ways content can be updated. Here are some methods we’ve used over the years: Adding new visual content, like an infographic, to an existing blog to appeal to readers who are more visual learners. Adding a video tutorial to help elaborate on a topic we’re covering. Replacing outdate...