Marcus Miller says, “Measuring your results is a critical component of any SEO campaign. There are many, many variables at play in an SEO campaign, so successful campaigns rely on a control system to ensure the work undertaken delivers results. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) act as this control system and allow you to identify what is working — and often, more importantly, provide the SEO with an early warning system if something is not moving the needle as expected. KPIs also provide a means to illustrate success to your clients (or company higher-ups if you’re in-house). Typical... [...]

Patrick Stox says, “Back in June, the AdWords Keyword Planner started displaying the same volume of searches for keywords that were similar. Search Engine Land reported on the anomalies and asked Google about it but didn’t receive a response at the time. Ginny Marvin speculated, and now an AdWords representative has confirmed, that this was caused by close variants. Many people and tools are overestimating search volume by adding together the results that AdWords Keyword Planner has already grouped, effectively doubling or tripling volume estimates. If you’re like me, you want to see... [...]

Pratik Dholakiya says, “Since their launch in 2009, rich snippets have served as a “sneak preview” of Google Search results, adding extra information to a search listing that helps searchers find exactly what they’re looking for. Depending on the page content, this extra information might include site navigation breadcrumbs, customer reviews, TV and movie information, event information, recipe information, product information and so on. By marking up webpages using vocabulary from schema.org, webmasters can help their sites become eligible to display rich snippets in search results.... [...]

On the Moz webswite, Alexandra Tachalova reports, “When it comes to brick-and-mortar storefronts, local businesses often struggle to compete with neighboring big brands. Statistics show that, even for a well-known local store that’s established a strong relationship with its customers and built a community through the years, having such a neighbor can be detrimental. But what about a newly opened business? Does it have any chance of competing with popular brands? My experience has led me to believe there’s only one way a locally owned business can overcome big competition: it... [...]

Brian Harnish says, “As most SEOs know, links are still extremely important to ranking highly in the Google search results. In fact, a recent study performed by Backlinko showed that “the number of domains linking to a page correlated with rankings more than any other factor.” Thus, it makes sense for most all large companies with a significant website presence to implement a regular link pruning schedule. At ymarketing, we call our process of link pruning “link remediation.” The normal way most sites handle a penalty is reactionary in nature. The SEO wakes up one day and finds the... [...]

Ronell Smith says, “In 2011 I wrote a post here on Moz. The title was “Wake Up SEOs, the New Google is Here.” In that post I presented some concepts that, in my personal opinion, we SEOs needed to pay attention to in order to follow the evolution of Google. Sure, I also presented a theory which ultimately proved incorrect; I was much too confident about things like rel=”author”, rel=”publisher”, and the potential decline of the Link Graph influence. However, the premises of that theory were substantially correct, and they remain correct five years later: 1.... [...]

Andrew Dennis says, “There is no formal education or pathway into link building. Most professional link builders are self-taught or learned from a mentor who taught themselves — so if you want to enter into the SEO field (or need to bolster your own site’s link profile), it often means trial and error. Due to the lack of formal education available, it’s vital that SEOs share their experience and expertise so we can learn and improve as an industry. Today, I’ll share my own experience to (hopefully) help you improve your link prospecting so you can find better sites that translate... [...]

Ronell Smith says, “Topic Trends, the latest feature added to Moz Content, allows marketers to quickly access a snapshot of the most popular and the most relevant content in any vertical. By accessing the content in the Content Search index, Topic Trends highlights the topics that were written about most frequently in the previous five days. Since the presidential election is the hottest thing going at the moment, it’s little surprise that election news is dominant”. Moz Content Gets More Robust with the Addition of Topic Trends MOZ  [...]

Tim Brown says, “A common question people pose to those in Search Engine Optimization is “Are there any new and big changes coming to the way that we should be on the lookout for?” In the Search Engine Optimization industry, we know there are some very common principles that will make for a more visibile site like technical markup, content marketing and link building, according to experts – but what is shaking things up this year? Well in 2016, Accellerated Mobile Pages from Google and Facebook instant articles are allowing publishers to create simplified versions of their content... [...]

Cyrus Shepard says, “Is it time to rewrite the SEO playbooks? For what seems like forever, SEOs have operated by a set of best practices that dictate how to best handle redirection of URLs. (This is the practice of pointing one URL to another. If you need a quick refresher, here’s a handy guide on HTTP status codes.) These tried and true old-school rules included: 1. 301 redirects result in around a 15% loss of PageRank. Matt Cutts confirmed this in 2013 when he explained that a 301 loses the exact same amount of PageRank as a link from one page to another. 2. 302s don’t pass PageRank.... [...]