You know GA4 is coming, and last week Dana took you through some of the top things to be aware of before making the transition to it. In this week’s episode, Ruth Burr Reedy discusses what a lot of marketers may not be thinking about enough: the people besides us who use Analytics data, and what they need to know about Google Analytics 4 in order to continue using Analytics data. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Howdy, Moz fans. I'm Ruth Burr Reedy. I am the CEO of UpBuild. We are a boutique digital marketing agency specializing in technical SEO, advanced web analytics, and whole-funnel digital marketing strategy. And today, I want to talk a little bit about Google Analytics 4. GA4 is here So as, hopefully, all of you by now know, Google Analytics 4 is here. It is the next generation of Google's Analytics tracking software. And what I think at this point, hopefully, most marketers at least know t...

Did Q1 and Q2 whip past you? They did for me, but the pace of life often seems to slow down a little in autumn, and I hope you’ll join me for a relaxed and studious look at interesting local search marketing developments from the third quarter of 2022. 1) A small harvest of review-related changes I’m grouping four different review-related developments under this heading. First, Joy Hawkins spotted a change to Google’s guidelines on prohibited and restricted content . As I’ve covered here exhaustively in my Moz column, there are lots of things a business can do to rectify a complaint in hopes of seeing an unhappy customer update their negative review to reflect an improved experience, but outright incentivization of negative review removal has now been declared out-of-bounds by Google. Second and rather related, Greg Gifford captured a good stat from Aaron Weiche ’s LocalU presentation that I’d not heard before: over ⅓ of negative experiences referenced in reviews mention comm...

Content marketing is an essential part of any SEO strategy. Without it, how are you going to attract customers looking for answers to their questions, and who are potentially in the market for your products or services? At Tao Digital Marketing , we've recently generated some great results for one of our clients operating in the business financial space, The Insolvency Experts , mainly by focusing on just one “cluster topic” that was a huge money maker for them. When looking at six month comparison stats (August 2021-January 2022 to February-July 2022), we've achieved the following: Leads: 95 to 460 (384%) Clicks: 4,503 to 23,013 (411%) Impressions: 856,683 to 2,033,355 (137%) Average position: 33.4 to 23.6 (increased almost 10 spots) This was mostly achieved by absolutely hammering one topic area: company liquidation. In this case study, we’re going to explain how we did this step by step, so that hopefully you can generate similar results for your own bus...

In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Dana brings you some details on the exciting new world of Google Analytics 4. Watch and learn how to talk about it when clients and coworkers are intimidated by the move. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Hi, my name is Dana DiTomaso. I'm President at Kick Point. And I am here today at MozCon 2022 to bring you some details on the exciting world of Google Analytics 4, which I know all of you are like, "Ugh, I don't want to learn about analytics," which is totally fair. I also did not want to learn about analytics. And then I kind of learned about it whether I liked it or not. And you should, too, unfortunately.  So I think the biggest thing about the move from Universal Analytics to GA4 is that people are like they log in and everything looks different. "I don't like it." And then they leave. And I agree the user interface in GA4 leaves a lo...

On August 25, Google started rolling out the Helpful Content Update , an ongoing effort to reward sites with “people-first” (i.e. not written specifically for SEO) content. MozCast measured rankings flux peaking at 92°F on August 26, which sounds relatively high, but this is what the two weeks on either side of the update looked like: The dotted blue line shows the 30-day average for the period prior to the start of the update, which came in at 87°F. Ranking flux actually peaked on August 23 above any day of the update rollout. To make matters worse, we had to remove August 8-9 from the 30-day average, because Google’s data center outage completely disrupted search results. Let me sum up: it’s a mess. I like to think I’m pretty good at handling messes, but this is like trying to find one particular drop of water in two weeks of rain during a summer-long storm. If you like messes, read on, but for the rest of you, I’ll tell you this — I found no clear evidence that this first iterat...

When someone regularly adds new content to their sites, they face an inevitable question: What happens to my older articles? The way blogging works is really unfair to your past work: It gets buried in archives, losing traffic and relevance. Is there a way to keep your content always up-to-date? Yes, but first let’s discuss the why. Why update your content? Keeping your content fresh and updated is more than overcoming the unfairness of your past work fading away. It's actually a legit marketing tactic that saves money and makes your users’ on-site experience smoother. So let’s dive into why updating old content is so important: 1. User experience The most obvious reason is that you want each of your site pages to be an effective entry landing page: Outdated content and broken links will likely result in bounces. These are lost leads and clients. 2. Search engine optimization When it comes to SEO, content updates offer quite a few advantages: Maintaining more consisten...