David Mihm says, “When we launched Moz Local, I said at the time that one of the primary goals of our product team was to “help business owners and marketers trying to keep up with the frenetic pace of change in local search.” Today we take a major step forward towards that goal with the beta release of Moz Local Search Insights, the foundation for a holistic understanding of your local search presence. As we move into an app-centric world that’s even more dependent on structured, accurate location data than the mobile web, it’s getting harder to keep up with the disparate sources... [...]

Neil Patel says, “As you obsess over link profiles and link-building to boost SEO, another form of search marketing has been quietly rising in importance. It’s not complicated. It’s not technical. And technically, it’s not even about search optimization. It’s about brand signals. Brand signals are becoming one of the foremost ways that a business builds trust and visibility on the web. Content marketers are the ones responsible for pushing their preferred brands to grow trust and authority. Some of the main categories that comprise brand signals include: Mentions on the web –... [...]

Casey Meraz says, “”Local SEO is just too hard.” Those were the first words of a conversation I had earlier this week coming from a potential client we’ll call “Luke.” Luke had been working on building his own local SEO presence internally for his dental office for over a year and had not seen the results he expected in a popular top 100 US city. We talked about citations, his trouble getting reviews, and how hard it was for him to get links. He told me he had followed the best practices but had not seen the kind of #1 ranking results he was looking for. Luke... [...]

Miriam Ellis says, “Earlier this month, I was standing on an 8,000’ pinnacle of the Sierra mountain range at the precise moment when winter arrived. A few miles and minutes back down the highway, it had been golden fall with aspens, oaks, and big leaf maples in peak color. Then the sky darkened, showering hail. Right before my eyes, hail turned to snow, wildly whirling, salting the evergreens into obscurity. Winter had come. It’s a rare, exhilarating thing to witness patient Nature change in the blink of an eye, but returning to work from my time in the mountains, I met with another... [...]

Benjamin Estes says, “SEO is not something that is done. SEO is a way of doing things that encompasses many teams and initiatives. This is especially true for large organizations with well-established and potentially siloed teams. Most marketing disciplines have concrete inputs and outputs. Consider the following examples, which may seem trite at first: PPC results in visibility in search results. Email marketing results in visibility in the inbox of folks on your mailing list. Content strategy results in marketing content on your site. But this isn’t really the case for SEO. Can... [...]

Lori Goldberg says, “The term SEO, which was allegedly first used in 1997, has long been used to describe a webmaster’s ability to edit a website’s design and code to favorably influence its rank on search engines.  SEO strategies have included back-linking, title tags, page architecture, site maps and introduced us to a style of writing content that emphasizes keywords. These strategies have largely belonged to webmasters and programmers. Despite significant changes in search algorithms and user-friendly web design tools (ie; WordPress, Drupal, Squarespace), many core elements of what... [...]

MOZ team says, “It’s no secret that Google keeps a lot of secrets. From keyword data to link data to traffic data (and surely more), there’s a lot that we could benefit from — if they’d only share it! Since that’s not likely to happen anytime soon, Rand takes us through various ways to access that all-important data in this week’s Whiteboard Friday“. Recovering the Data Google Has Hidden Away – Whiteboard Friday MOZ Blog  [...]

Kelsey Libert says, “Some content is designed to “go viral,” while other times a piece of content intended to stay among friends takes the Internet by storm. But whether planned or unplanned, rapidly-shared content has several commonalities. One of the key factors is that the content creates a strong emotional response in viewers. Through our research on viral emotions, we’ve found that certain emotions are better than others at driving people to view and share content. In other words, creating the right emotional response is extremely important to getting your content widely shared.... [...]

Anna Korolekh says, “When I joined the PSD2HTML team in November 2014, the site had been suffering from a manual penalty related to spammy backlinks for over a year. They’d tried everything to promote a recovery, but nothing worked. They were ready to admit defeat. The penalty resulted in the loss of over 80% of their organic traffic. The story of how this happened is very interesting. PSD2HTML was one of the first companies to market PSD to HTML conversions in 2005. At the peak of their success, they transitioned to an SEO company. In 2013, our relationship with a well-known agency... [...]

Joy Hawkins says, “Local SEO can be confusing for those businesses that don’t have a physical store for customers to walk into. Unlike businesses with a brick-and-mortar storefront, service-area businesses (or SABs) go out to meet with their customers, as opposed to their customers coming to see them. This often results in them servicing multiple cities, which can be problematic—the #1 ranking factor in local SEO is the physical address of the business. In addition, business owners are also usually concerned about privacy, as many of them use their home address and can’t utilize some... [...]