Ben Davis says, “It’s as traditional (and as enjoyable) as Cliff Richard’s Mistletoe and Wine. Yes, we’re getting in there early with our annual trends roundups, beginning with SEO. We’ll be featuring annual digests from many other digital channels over the coming weeks, as well as looking forward to 2016 with a few sage predictions. So, what was most noteworthy about SEO in 2015? Google’s Quality Rater guidelines  Andrew Girdwood, media innovations director, Digitas LBi There was no shortage of talking points for SEO in 2015; a reminder that this is a discipline... [...]

Ian Watson says, “Some say the only constant thing in this world is change — and that seems to go double for the online marketing and SEO industry. At times this can seem daunting and sometimes insurmountable, but some have found ways to embrace the ambiguity and even thrive on it. Their paths and techniques may all differ slightly, but a commonality exists among them. That commonality is the utilization of data, mainly via API-driven custom tools and dashboards. APIs like Salesforce’s Chatter, Facebook’s Graph, and our very own Mozscape all allow for massive amounts of useful data... [...]

Russ Jones says, “Google Keyword Planner data at one point or another, especially while doing keyword research, the reality is that the data is often untrustworthy and should be viewed with great skepticism. Whether you plan to use it to help build a paid search campaign or determine which content to write, there are huge caveats to the numbers presented as Average Search Volume. Today, I want to walk through a number of the “gotchas” in Google Keyword Planner data so you can do better keyword research and make smarter decisions for you or your clients’ sites. Dirty secret... [...]

Craig Bradford says, “Well-researched personas can be a useful tool for marketers, but to do it correctly takes time. But what if you don’t have extra time? Using a mix of Followerwonk, Twitter, and the AIchemy language API, it’s possible to do top-level persona research very quickly. I’ve built a Python script that can help you answer two important questions about your target audience: What are the most common domains that my audience visits and spend time on? (Where should I be trying to get mentions/links/PR) What topics are they interested in or reading on those sites? (What content... [...]

MOZ team says, “Where do you host your content? Is it on your own site, or on third-party platforms like Medium and LinkedIn? If you’re not yet thinking about the ramifications of using hosted blog platforms for your content versus your own site, now’s your chance to start. In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand explores the boons and pitfalls of using outside websites to distribute and share your content“. How to Use Hosted Blog Platforms for SEO & Content Distribution MOZ Blog  [...]

Jennifer Slegg says, “For many SEOs, a glimpse at the Google’s Search Quality Rater’s Guidelines is akin to looking into Google’s ranking algorithm. While they don’t give the secret sauce to rank number one on Google, they do offer some incredible insight into what Google views as quality – and not-so-quality – and the types of pages they want to serve at the top of their search results. Last week, Google made the unprecedented move of releasing the entire Search Quality Rater’s Guidelines, following an analysis of a leaked copy obtained by The SEM Post. While Google released... [...]

Gianluca Fiorelli says, “Whenever Google announces something as important as a new algorithm, I always try to hold off on writing about it immediately, to let the dust settle, digest the news and the posts that talk about it, investigate, and then, finally, draw conclusions. I did so in the case of Hummingbird. I do it now for RankBrain. In the case of RankBrain, this is even more correct, because — let’s be honest — we know next to nothing about how RankBrain works. The only things that Google has said publicly are in the video Bloomberg published and the few things unnamed Googlers... [...]

Paddy Moogan says, “Content marketing is hard. The problem is that the process looks easy. You brainstorm some ideas, choose one that you like, design and build it, do some outreach and you get traffic, links and social shares. Job done. It’s a bit like link building, where someone may say, “Just build great content and the links will come.” Unfortunately, it’s very rarely that straightforward. Yes, sometimes you can get lucky and something will fly with little effort. But anyone that says that content marketing is easy has probably never done it over and over again.... [...]

Jay Leary says, “Stating the obvious here, but content is a massively important part of any inbound marketing campaign. The problem that most of us run into — and I know this well from years of SEO consulting with publishers — is that even “good” content can fade from view without a share, link, or conversion. Engaging an audience isn’t as simple as clicking “publish.” So, how do we avoid making phantom content a habit? For Moz, timely data has been a big part of the answer. Over the years, we’ve built internal tools like1Metric to guide our work.... [...]

Christopher Jan Benitez says, “In the world of post-Penguins and post-Pandas, the phrase “SEO automation” sounds taboo. It is easy to think of this term as “black hat” when tools like SeNukeXcr and XRumer help webmasters build hundreds of backlinks and attract thousands of visitors with a few clicks of a button. You do not have to do the legwork for building links and drive traffic because these tools will do the laborious work for you. In essence, this is the idea of what SEO automation does – taking away the guesswork from intricate SEO tactics to produce results. However,... [...]