Lindsay Kolowich says, “Let’s get right down to it: The key to successful SEO is concentrating on long-tail keywords. Although these keywords get less traffic than more generic terms, they’re associated with more qualified traffic and users that are typically further down their path of intent. The good news is that choosing the right long-tail keywords for your website pages is actually a fairly simple process — one that’s made all the more simple and quick when you use the right tools to perform your keyword research. In this post, we’ll cover the nine best... [...]

Rachel Lindteigen says, “If you have customers, then yes, customer service is a big key to your content marketing success. If you don’t have (or want) customers, then it probably doesn’t matter. However, I don’t know of many successful businesses without customers, do you? So how does customer service fit into the overall content marketing mix? Why does it matter, and more importantly, what do you need to do about it in order to succeed? The customer experience — good and bad Think for a moment about a great customer service experience you had. What did you do? Did you tell someone... [...]

Laura Lippay says, “Do you know anyone who is visually impaired? Maybe they have low vision or color blindness, or are fully blind. Think about how they use the Internet. Close your eyes, or at least squint really hard, and try to find today’s news or interact with your friends on Facebook. It’s a challenge many of us don’t think about every day, but some of what we do in SEO can affect the experience that people with visual impairments have when visiting a page. Accessibility and the Internet Visually impaired Internet users are able to navigate and use the web using screen readers... [...]

Kate Morris says, “Growth. Revenue, visits, conversions. We all want to see growth. For many, focusing on a new set of potential customers in another market (international, for instance) is a source of growth. It can sometimes seem like an easy expansion. If your current target market is in the US, UK, or Australia, the other two look promising. Same language, same content — all you need is to set up a site for them and target it at them, right? International expansion is more complicated than that. The ease of expansion depends highly on your business, your resources, and your customers.... [...]

Greg Gifford says, “Maybe I should have used an image of me jumping on a soapbox, because I’m about to preach. Spring conference season is in full swing, and I’ve had my mind blown several times already — not from amazing presentations (although there were several), but from conversations with business owners and newbies in the marketing world. Case in point: At an automotive conference, I talked to a dealer who had deleted his dealership’s Facebook and Twitter accounts on the advice of his SEO provider. He said they told him it wasn’t good for him to have an open forum where customers... [...]

Will Scott says, “I have a confession to make: Penguin scared the daylights out of me. I hope those of you who have been around the industry for as many years as I have will join me in taking the first step to recovery: admitting our problem. In 2012, Penguin made once-easy and inexpensive link-building tactics for small businesses worthless — and in some cases, harmful. For a small handful of long-time clients, we had to undo years of work that had once supported their achievement of position one organic rankings (and more importantly, their acquisition of many, many leads). Sadly, getting... [...]

Sam Nemzer says, “A quantitative analysis of the claim that topics are more important than keywords. What’s more important: topics or keywords? This has been a major discussion point in SEO recently, nowhere more so than here on the Moz blog. Rand has given two Whiteboard Fridays in the last two months, and Moz’s new Related Topics feature in Moz Pro aims to help you to optimize your site for topics as well as keywords. The idea under discussion is that, since the Hummingbird algorithm update in 2013, Google is getting really good at understanding natural language. So much so, in fact,... [...]

Barry Levine says, “Talk for more than a few minutes to content publishers, and they’ll often bemoan the fact that few visitors reach their sites through the home page any more. The real action, they’ll say, is from “side door” visits directly to a specific story, via a link shared by social media, texting, email, or from a topic-centered search. This “death of the home page” wave became an accepted wisdom after mid-2014, when a leaked chart from The New York Times showed the steep plunge in that iconic newspaper’s home page visitors. But volume alone is only the tip of the... [...]

Liz Willits says, “Imagine the perfect blog post. Your perfect blog post brings thousands of people to your site. Your audience reads it from top to bottom, gives their love in the comments and shares it on their social media profiles. An industry expert links to it in one of their blog posts. And ultimately, you see a huge spike in revenue as it brings your website and business into the spotlight. But wait, there’s more! Months after you initially published your perfect blog post, it continues to draw website visits, shares and increased revenue. Why does your perfect blog post have such... [...]

Mona Elesseily says, “Recently, we’ve seen some fairly significant changes on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Right-rail ads have disappeared, and on mobile, we’re seeing more prominent placement of Google Shopping ad units. In this article, I’ll cover some upcoming trends in paid search and speculate on where the trends will lead. Though I refer mostly to Google, these predictions apply largely to all the major search engines. The only absolute certainty is that there will be more changes in the paid search landscape! 1. More “shopping” ad units Google Shopping has been... [...]