Danielle Launders says, “At MozCon Local we came, we learned, and now we share! We invited 16 speakers to dive into all aspects of local marketing and SEO in 13 keynote-style presentations and one Q&A panel with local search experts. Throughout the day we dove into such topics as link building, citation sources, reviews, industry trends, and more. Ready to level up your local marketing skills? Feel free to jump ahead: Let’s go! I’m ready for my bundle For those that attended this year’s event, you may want to double-check your inbox: There’s a special email waiting for... [...]

Darren Shaw says, “Since its inception in 2008, David Mihm has been running the Local Search Ranking Factors survey. It is the go-to resource for helping businesses and digital marketers understand what drives local search results and what they should focus on to increase their rankings. This year, David is focusing on his new company, Tidings, a genius service that automatically generates perfectly branded newsletters by pulling in the content from your Facebook page and leading content sources in your industry. While he will certainly still be connected to the local search industry, he’s... [...]

Ronell Smith says, “In all my years of SEO consulting, I’ve seen many clients with wild misconceptions about XML sitemaps. They’re a powerful tool, for sure — but like any power tool, a little training and background on how all the bits work goes a long ways. Indexation Probably the most common misconception is that the XML sitemap helps get your pages indexed. The first thing we’ve got to get straight is this: Google does not index your pages just because you asked nicely. Google indexes pages because (a) they found them and crawled them, and (b) they consider them good enough quality... [...]

MOZ team says, “How are you gleaning your competitive insights? We’ve got a ton of resources and tools at our disposal, and one of the best ways to learn what’s working for your rivals and how you can build your own success on top of those insights is via the top pages report. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand goes over how each data source can provide unique value and which questions you should be asking to get more out of that data”. How to Use Your Competition’s “Top Pages” Data to Bolster Your SEO Efforts MOZ  [...]

Ronell Smith says, “Some of the best talks at MozCon each year come from the community speakers—those who’re able to make a pitch to grace the stage. This group enjoys the same privileges as the other speakers, including being able to deliver a keynote-style talk, and are always well-received by the audience. If you’re eager to be a member of this group, step right up. We’re now open for MozCon community speaker’s pitches. We’d be happy to have your best effort. The nuts & bolts: Submitting is as simple as filling out the form below Only submit one talk... [...]

Simon Penson says, “What will you learn from this post? How to get lots of Search Console data quickly and easily How to run a Python script And who can do it? Hopefully, it should be accessible to any beginner. Why do we use the API to get Search Console data? At Distilled, we often want to use Google Search Console data, but getting it from the interface is incredibly clunky: You’re limited to the top 1,000 queries You have to apply each filter one at a time The interface is slow And if you want to do this regularly, you have to repeat this process often. We can get around that by... [...]

Simon Penson says, “Incredible, isn’t it? Despite all the fanfare and pageantry that has followed content marketing over the last few years, fewer than 6% of marketers confidently claim to be executing content marketing strategies properly. It’s just one of a handful of eye-popping stats to come out of the State of Content Marketing Survey, a major new survey of senior UK marketers this month as part of a campaign to help create healthy debate around the misunderstood tactic. With more budget than ever before pouring into the approach (60% of those surveyed said they were opening the... [...]

Marie Haynes says, “It has now been six months since the launch of Penguin 4.0. In my opinion, Penguin 4.0 was awesome. It took ages for Google to release this update, but when they did, it was much more fair than previous versions of Penguin. Previous versions of Penguin would cause entire sites to be suppressed if the algorithm thought that you’d engaged in manipulative link building. Even if a site did a thorough link cleanup, the suppression would remain present until Google re-ran the Penguin algorithm and recognized your cleanup efforts. I saw many businesses that had looooooong... [...]

MOZ team says, “By now, most people who follow SEO are familiar with structured data, the Schema.org vocabulary, and rich snippets. Even those who know very little about SEO appreciate the benefits of adding structured data to their websites, namely that they might be able to get rich snippets in search results. Of course, the main benefit of structured data is that it helps search engines better understand your content, which in turn helps them rank it more appropriately in search results. But we’re not here to discuss the what and why about structured data; there are plenty of other... [...]

MOZ team says, “Even if you know — deep down in your heart of hearts — how important SEO is, it’s hard to prioritize when you have less than 3 hours a month to devote to it. But there’s still a way to include the bare minimum, even if you run on a tight schedule. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers a minimum viable SEO strategy to give those with limited time a plan going forward”. Minimum Viable SEO: If You Only Have a Few Minutes Each Week… Do This MOZ  [...]