Daniel Marks says, “Different channels have different user intents. On one end of the funnel are channels like Facebook and Snapchat that are great fillers of the empty space in our lives. This makes them well-suited for top-of-funnel brand advertising because you aren’t looking for something specific and are therefore more receptive to brand messaging (though you can certainly use Facebook for direct marketing purposes). BuzzFeed, for example, has done a great job of tailoring their Snapchat content to the intent of the channel — it’s about immediate gratification, not driving... [...]

Chris Goddard says, “One of the biggest takeaways from SearchFest in Portland earlier this year was the rapidly rising importance of semantic search and structured data — in particular Schema.org. And while implementing Schema used to require a lot of changes to your site’s markup, the JSON-LD format has created a great alternative to adding microdata to a page with minimal code. What was even more exciting was the idea that you could use Google Tag Manager to insert JSON-LD into a page, allowing you to add Schema markup to your site without having to touch the site’s code directly... [...]

Ruth Burr Reedy says, “On February 17th, sports news and opinion blog SB Nation posted a longform story titled “Who is Daniel Holtzclaw?” The story, which took a sympathetic viewpoint on convicted rapist Daniel Holtzclaw, sparked a huge amount of controversy among SB Nation readers and garnered the blog a great deal of media attention. It took less than 24 hours for SB Nation to pull the piece, calling it “a complete failure.” In the aftermath, SB Nation’s parent company, Vox Media, convened a panel of editors and journalists to investigate how a piece taking such a controversial... [...]

MOZ team says, “Whether you manage a single local listing or hundreds, the consistency of your NAP data across the web can either help grow your business, or serve as a barrier to customer discovery. With answers for business owners, SEOs dabbling in local search, and those at enterprise-level searching for a broad solution, Moz Local’s George Freitag stars in this week’s Whiteboard Friday covering all the boons and secrets of listing accuracy (give him a warm welcome, folks!)”. Why Listing Accuracy is Important – Whiteboard Friday MOZ  [...]

MOZ team says, “We’ve been pitched a blog post about hoverboards. While hoverboards are pretty cool and I’d like to own one, our business and our blog have absolutely nothing to do with hoverboards. Why did we get pitched a post about hoverboards? Most likely because the person pitching the post saw we have a decent domain authority and they wanted to get a piece of it by getting a backlink from us. I’m sure their blog post on hoverboards would have been very interesting, but it likely would have caused our audience of B2B marketing professionals to scratch their heads in confusion”. Why... [...]

Miriam Ellis says, “Coworking office spaces have existed for more than a decade around the globe, and I consider it a testament to their growing popularity for start-ups and agencies that I’ve been seeing an increasing number of questions about them in recent times at places like the Moz Q&A forum and elsewhere. The burning question on everybody’s mind is: do coworking locations meet or fall afoul of the official Guidelines for Representing Your Business On Google? This article attempts to provide the most thorough possible answer to this important question. Google isn’t always... [...]

Rand Fishkin says, “It’s been 5 weeks since Keyword Explorer’s launch and in that time, more than 75,000 folks have tried out what is, in my opinion, the best keyword research tool on the market. And that’s just a sampling of the many, many kind pieces of feedback we’ve received the last few weeks (OK, there’s even more than that… it just keeps on going). But today, we’re upgrading it further with three of the most requested features since launch. Keyword volume is now international Since launch day, KW Explorer has only had support for US volume,... [...]

Tyler Murray says, “It’s been a busy quarter for the Moz Content team, and we’re excited to share the results of our hard work! During the first few months after launch, we focused most of our energy on improving the Content Audit workflow with a few stability- and speed-related updates sprinkled in. This quarter we’ve had the opportunity to explore exciting ideas that create unique insights for you, our awesome users! These are the first (but definitely not the last) round of innovative additions for the year. I want to see these updates in action! One of the more challenging aspects... [...]

Dominic Woodman says, “What do you do when Excel fails? Maybe you have more than a millions row of data. Perhaps you’ve tried to filter a large dataset with a VLOOKUP and Excel has decided to lay down and die. Excel is a fantastic tool, but that doesn’t mean it’s what we should use for everything. What should you use? The traditional answer is SQL, but setting up a SQL server if you haven’t done it and you’re not technical is a challenge. The free interfaces for working with it are typically very visually busy and not intuitive for those looking to get started quickly. Enter... [...]

MOZ team says, “Picture this: You discover that your site is ranking for a keyword you’ve been targeting. Cause for celebration, right? But what if that ranking page is irrelevant, wrong, or simply not the best choice? This situation is more common than you might think, and results in a good deal of frustration for SEOs. Rand shows you how to cope when you find that your valuable queries are sending traffic to the wrong URLs in today’s Whiteboard Friday”. What to Do When the Wrong Page Ranks for Your Keyword(s) – Whiteboard Friday MOZ  [...]