In a recent study , we found that our pillar pages are magnets for links, organic traffic, and newsletter subscribers — especially compared to regular blog posts. Here are the results that both types of SEO content generated over the course of a year: Do these results mean you should ditch your blog strategy in favor of pillar pages? Not exactly. Here’s the catch: You really can’t have one without the other, and it all comes down to content mapping. I’ll explain exactly what I mean in this article. What is a pillar page? A pillar page is a piece of content that comprehensively covers a broad topic. Pillar page — also sometimes referred to as hub and spoke — content weaves together a wide range of relevant subtopics (spokes), organizes them all in one place (hub), and effectively showcases your subject matter expertise for the broad topic. Pillar page content should be easy to navigate for readers looking to learn — at a high level — about a particular topic, but should also off...

Whether it’s a new year, new team or the same year, same team, it’s important to set yourself up for success. Every team has their own unique challenges when it comes to productivity and standardizing processes, but there are definitely a few steps you can take to mitigate them. Before launching into a new project, new year, or new process, be sure everyone on your team has the tool access they need and is ready to tackle any task that comes their way. To that end, here are seven steps to get your team ready for a productive year using the Moz suite of tools! 1. Verify who manages your account (and subscription) When it comes to ensuring things go smoothly, a critical step is knowing who manages, or owns, your Moz account. Account owners are able to manage subscriptions, add seated users, access invoices, update payment methods, and more. So why is this step one on our list? When it comes to team success, it’s imperative to know who to reach out to when there’s an issue. For exam...

Happy Friday, Moz fans! In today's Whiteboard Friday episode, Tom digs into his research on Apple’s moves in search, specifically their recent launch of what he believes is a search engine, how it works, and how they could possibly hope to compete with Google in the future. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Howdy, Moz fans. We're here today to talk about an Apple search engine. There have been rumors circulating for a couple of years now that Apple are building a search engine. I'm here to convince you I think they are building a search engine and I think they've already launched it. "Apple won't be building a search engine" But before we get into what does that look like, let's start off by talking about the common reasons people say, "Apple won't be building a search engine." The first is that we know that Google pay Apple something in the order of $18 bil...

Technology can be a conductor or a barrier. Everything we do to market local businesses is meant to culminate in a human encounter. When we get our part right (and external forces smile upon us), technology connects us. When we get our part wrong (or external forces impede us), technology can have the frustrating effect of sundering local brands from their customers, with everybody losing out on the deal. The modern phenomenon of local search exemplifies the concept of a “mixed blessing”. Loss of control over significant parts of the customer journey can be a source of legitimate stress for owners and marketers. Stress isn’t good for us, of course, and that’s why I’m hoping this message brings some welcome relief: control of the most important aspects of the consumer journeys remains strongly on your side, and you can thrive without the parts you have to give up. We’ve got data to back this up, thanks to Moz’s recent report, The Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior...

Even in the relentless news and noise of early 2023, you’ve probably heard about ChatGPT, the GPT-3-powered (technically, 3.5) chatbot that’s eerily able to simulate human-like responses. Consider, for example, this question and answer (created by GPT-3): Is ChatGPT a search engine? No, ChatGPT is not a search engine. It is an artificial intelligence chatbot that uses natural language processing to understand and respond to user input. That’s not bad, and it sounds like something an actual human would write.  GPT (Generative Pre-training Transformer) is a deep learning system that generates text based on predicting language patterns after being pre-trained with a large set of documents. For this post, I’ll be using OpenAI’s Playground with the “text-davinci-003” GPT-3 model, which can be programmed to produce shorter answers and is more reliable than the ChatGPT Beta. The current models are genuinely impressive, including parsing complex questions: How would you explain Chat...

Keyword cannibalization occurs when a website has too many similar keywords spread throughout the various pages on that site. This can harm the SEO potential of the pages involved, and can quite often go unnoticed for some time. When more than one page has the same, or a similar keyword target, those pages will then start to compete with each other, also creating confusion in the eyes of the search engine, resulting in a struggle to decide which page to rank for what term. Remember: a single URL can rank for multiple keywords, which is 100% fine. The problem of keyword cannibalization occurs when two or more separate URLs are all competing for the same keyword. To ensure that a website’s best content is ranking well, you should identify which of your pages are targeting the same keywords. You can then put together a strategy for monitoring and fixing these issues on a regular basis. In this Daily SEO Fix edition, we take you through what keyword cannibalization is, how to investig...

Recorded at SearchLove London in October — in the wake of three Google updates — Tom presents a different take on core updates in this Whiteboard Friday. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Happy Friday, Moz fans. So I'm here at SearchLove London recording this Whiteboard Friday. I don't know when it will reach you, but this is a bit of a different take on how to think about core updates. So obviously, I'm filming this in October. We've just had three updates back-to-back in quick succession. I think it's quite interesting that we had three updates and they were described in very different ways. So we had a helpful content update, a core update, and a product update or a product review update. It's interesting that sometimes Google talks about updates very specifically. So I think the best examples are things like HTTPS, or Core Web Vitals, page experience update, where they're ve...

Ready for a deep dive into 40+ common features found on Google Business Profiles (GBPs) and the New Merchant Experience (NMX)? Here we go! You may feel daunted by the fact that GBPs are major assets you rent from rather than owning because Google has always taken a crowdsourced approach to vital information that represents your company. You may also be disgruntled right now because you had gotten used to managing your listings in the historic Google Business Profile Manager dashboard, like this: And now Google has ousted you from the familiar dashboard and tossed you into the chilly, unfamiliar pool of in-SERP listings management which we’re calling the New Merchant Experience and which looks like this: You might rightly remark that major change was the last thing you needed right now as a local business owner or marketer. But, deep down, you know you’re going to have to get the hang of this sometime, and this column is here to help you with that. After all, with estimates as high...