Miriam Ellis says, “Your local SEO agency needs new clients in 2017. Your department needs to convince management to earmark robust resources for local SEM this year. What if the only thing standing in your way is presentation? In the 10+ years I’ve been consulting with local businesses, I’ve watched our industry grow to absorb an incredibly diverse set of disparate-seeming tasks. The breadth of the lingo alone is on the verge of becoming a dialect of its own. Here, supporting our Moz Local product, some of my internal communications with team members read like a code, packed with acronyms,... [...]

Stephen Spencer says, “Along with technical SEO and links, high-quality, interesting, engaging content is one of the three main pillars of any successful SEO strategy. Traditional content strategies use blog posts, articles, images, and sometimes video as the main sources of content. And while those can be awesome for driving traffic and supporting your SEO efforts, podcasts are an often overlooked and underestimated medium. Podcasts can build your brand and drive direct traffic, while at the same time adding rich content to your site and supporting your link-building efforts. Of course,... [...]

Daniel Marks says, “It seems like every couple months (weeks?) there’s a new post predicting the end of SEO. But rather than proclaiming that SEO is already dead (it’s not), let’s look at 3 ways in which the SEO industry might eventually die and ways in which SEOs can prepare themselves. 1. New ads Google is constantly experimenting with new ad formats that actually provide a better user experience than organic results. The better the ads, the less traffic that will be captured by organic listings. What are some examples of when PPC ads provide a better UX than organic results?”. 3... [...]

Hermes Ma says, “Recently, I attended Baidu’s annual search conference for agency partners in Beijing. One of the premier search events in China for SEO professionals, the conference was hosted by engineers from Baidu’s core search and Webmaster Tools teams. The agenda covered Baidu’s eco-empowerment strategy, its Mobile Instant Page (MIP) project and a wrap-up of the 2016 algorithm updates. The event made it clear to me that 2016 was the year Baidu SEO came into its own. If you aren’t already investing in Baidu SEO, 2017 is your year to start. The eco-empowerment The concept of... [...]

Rand Fishkin says, “Friends and fellow SEOs, I just need a few minutes of your time. This is gonna be short and sweet. If you’re optimizing a page to rank well for a keyword or set of keywords, you probably use some sort of checklist to make sure you’re doing the right things. That might be through an SEO plug-in like Yoast or through Moz Pro’s On-Page Grader, or it might be just be a mental checklist. The problem is, there’s a crucial set of flaws in how I’ve seen a lot of marketers and SEOs approaching on-page SEO in the last few months, and I want to help. These... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Google may have made some tweaks to their algorithms this week on how they target link spam and other forms of spam. Google would not confirm or deny there was an algorithm change, but based on the signals I am tracking, there appears to have been an algorithm update that has hit those who undergo more aggressive link building. The update seems to have happened around February 1, 2017. It may have been a tweak to how Google Penguin detects and discounts spammy links, or it may be a totally new algorithm — we are unsure. But many of the folks within the “black hat”... [...]

Kevin Lee says, “Based on what I’ve seen across my diverse set of clients, and talking to others in the industry, I’m predicting 2017 will be another great year for paid search. One of the reasons is a bit unusual: a flight to quality online media driven in part by “fake news,” “Methbot” and advertisers’ realization that they prefer not to have their advertising associated with those sites, don’t want their advertising positioned with that content, and in some cases have ethical concerns about supporting the publishers. So, let’s look a bit further into this flight to quality.... [...]

Brian Smith says, “Last year, Google introduced local search ads and promoted pins to wring a few extra dollars out of Maps. By extra, I mean potentially an additional $1.5 billion in 2017 alone. Maps inherently have local intent; local intent has a high likelihood for conversion. No surprises there. But ads run counter to a quality user experience. We as advertisers can perform all the mental gymnastics we want, but the truth is, ads are a nuisance. Especially on maps. When you’re looking for a location, the last thing you want to see is a map resembling a pincushion or a shotgun’s... [...]

MOZ team says, “You’ve got top-performing content on your site that does really well. Maybe it’s highly converting, maybe it garners the most qualified traffic — but it’s just sitting there gathering dust. Isn’t there something else you can do with content that’s clearly proven its worth? As it turns out, there is! In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Moz’s resident SEO and Content Architect, Britney Muller, shares three easy steps for identifying, repurposing, and republishing your top content to juice every drop of goodness out of it”. Refurbishing... [...]

Jacob Baadsgaard says, “Optimizing for local search is important, but if you aren’t optimizing for mobile, you’re going to miss out on your most important source of local traffic. For years, Google has been improving the relevance of local search, from its “Pigeon Update” to Promoted Pins. And since there are more searches on mobile than desktop, it’s no wonder that Google has put a big emphasis on mobile-friendliness in its ranking algorithms. Taken together, that means that Google is putting a high priority on mobile local search — and so should you. The fact of the matter is,... [...]