We all start somewhere. For you, it's your very first day of SEO. Or, more precisely—for the sake of this guide—your first seven days of SEO. If you do any kind of web marketing, you know that business and website owners frequently ask for SEO advice. Answering can be difficult because, short of hiring a professional, it's hard to explain to absolute beginners where to start. For example, what do you tell the small manufacturing business owner who wants to learn the SEO ropes but doesn't have a year or two to master the finer details? The best answer has always been " read the Beginner's Guide to SEO ." And that's a great answer. For over a decade, the Beginner's Guide has served as a solid and frequently updated resource for those looking to cover the basics, mixing in-depth theory with practical application. I've personally referred people to it literally hundreds of times. To which the busy business owner replies, "That sounds great...

Many SEOs think of keyword research as a very basic part of SEO, which can actually be a problem. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Tom explains some of the common mistakes SEOs make when doing keyword research that are easy to fix, many of which come from metrics like search volume, click-through rate, and difficulty. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Happy Friday, Moz fans, and today I'm going to be talking to you about metrics, but specifically metrics for keyword research. Now I think this is a very fundamental part of SEO. A lot of people think of it as a very basic part of SEO, which can be a problem sometimes. I think often this might be the very first task you're asked to do in your SEO career. But I think there are some common sort of mistakes or misunderstandings within keyword research that are quite easy to fix, and a lot of it comes from metrics. So these are the three metrics I want to ta...

TikTok has quickly become a viral sensation, with millions of users across the globe spending hours scrolling through the app's endless supply of videos. But for marketers, TikTok's greatest asset lies in its algorithm. In the first chapter of this series, we dug into the search behavior on TikTok and why it should matter to SEOs . In this article, we are going to cover the ins and outs of the TikTok algorithm, and how to leverage it to get more users looking at your brand’s content. The principles behind the TikTok algorithm Before we dig into the algorithm’s ranking factors, a bit of background. In 2020, TikTok’s CEO Kevin Mayer published a manifesto on the importance of transparency for tech companies, especially when it comes to their content algorithms. Mayer committed to being more open than its competitors, indirectly challenging Meta and Google. Luckily for us marketers, TikTok has kept its promise and has some solid documentation on how their algorithm works . In...

Image credit: Stanley Zimny I like nothing better than using this annual local SEO holiday column as a greeting card with messages of good cheer, great strategy, and healthy profit penned inside. With economists caroling “ austere ” and “ scary ” in their predictions for 2022’s 4th quarter shopping season, however, it’s not easy to be jolly. Doomsayers’ dirges have their point, but we’re in this together, and here’s my own ditty for courage, set to the chorus of Jingle Bells : Local foot traffic is Up now 20% News is good in the neighborhood If basics are your bent Big brands (particularly those that trade in the trends of electronics) are not expecting a banner year for people buying new TVs or surveillance technology. Yet, if what your local business offers is help with basic needs and modest comforts, 2022’s holiday sales can be decent, if not a phenomenal spree. Let’s look at a solid strategy for stocking what folks want and communicating that you’re here to serve. Food,...

The level of trust users have in your brand’s expertise is an important component when vying for that #1 spot, but Google has been ambiguous about what E-A-T (expertise-authoritativeness-trustworthiness) actually is, and how it plays into your SERP rankings. In today’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Lily Ray discusses the ways in which you can prove that all important “E” – expertise. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Hi, there. My name is Lily Ray, and today we're going to be talking about E-A-T — expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. We're particularly going to be focusing on the E component, expertise.  What is E-A-T? So just to take a step back, E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. It comes directly from Google's Quality Rater Guidelines , which is a document that they use to train human search quality evaluators that they use to conduct tests tho...

Is it testworthy, or is it untestworthy? There’s a fine line between optimizations and experiments. Testing something is an exercise in curiosity, whereas optimizing a thing is an act of certainty. If we know the outcome of a given activity before we perform that activity, we’re in optimization territory. For example, if you’ve discovered a load of orphaned pages, then the act of internally linking to those pages is highly likely to result in a positive outcome. We can deem this scenario, “untestworthy” (yes, I know that’s actually a word). But, as we’ll discuss here, SEO includes a vast array of activities where the outcomes of our work are either uncertain or difficult to predict. Think about the last time you experienced a site migration. Were you certain that the new site would perform better than the original? This might be a scenario that we’ll deem, “testworthy.” In short, a testworthy activity is one where we don’t know the ending until we measure our outcomes with data. M...