Dr. Peter J. Meyers says, “When we do keyword research, we tend to focus on discovery. We take a short list of keywords we think matter, brainstorm wildly, paste the resulting list into a dozen tools, paste the results back into Excel, and measure our success by how often our spreadsheet crashes. Then, we throw it all away when our tax attorney client tells us he only cares about ranking #1 for “taylor swift downloads,” because he heard that gets a lot of traffic. Maybe I’m exaggerating. Keyword discovery is a critical process, but what we’re left with at the end is a... [...]

Sarika Pariwal says, “Long-tail keywords can help even smaller and newer websites to “steal” traffic away from the big and established players. All it takes is some intelligent keyword research and content creation. So here’s a lowdown on the what, why, and how of long-tail keywords. What Keyword phrases that typically contain 3-4 or more words are known as long-tail keywords. They tend to show a more specific search intent on the part of the searcher, narrowing down the results to only the most appropriate. These keywords are less general than 1-2-word keywords (AKA “seed”... [...]

Trond Lyngbø says, “Imagine that you are in an auditorium, facing a large audience of your best customers. You’re getting ready to speak to them. You can say whatever you want, but there’s just one condition: As soon as you complete your first sentence, people can decide whether to stay inside and listen to the rest of your speech — or get up and leave. What will you tell them in those crucial first moments? This is a dilemma every business owner, blogger and content producer agonizes over every day. A visitor to your website decides within a few seconds if she is going to stick around... [...]

Aaron Agius says, “It’s a common misconception that SEO and content marketing are two mutually exclusive business strategies. They’re not. In a way, it used to be true — keyword-stuffing once helped pages get ranked well, even if the content wasn’t valuable. Now, that’s not the case. Search algorithms have succeeded at offering the valuable content that people are looking for — which is the main goal of content marketing. That’s why it’s now possible, and even fairly simple, to build a keyword-driven content strategy. 1. Identify the keywords that matter most. Determining... [...]

Lindsay Kolowich says, “Let’s get right down to it: The key to successful SEO is concentrating on long-tail keywords. Although these keywords get less traffic than more generic terms, they’re associated with more qualified traffic and users that are typically further down their path of intent. The good news is that choosing the right long-tail keywords for your website pages is actually a fairly simple process — one that’s made all the more simple and quick when you use the right tools to perform your keyword research. In this post, we’ll cover the nine best... [...]

Kate Morris says, “Growth. Revenue, visits, conversions. We all want to see growth. For many, focusing on a new set of potential customers in another market (international, for instance) is a source of growth. It can sometimes seem like an easy expansion. If your current target market is in the US, UK, or Australia, the other two look promising. Same language, same content — all you need is to set up a site for them and target it at them, right? International expansion is more complicated than that. The ease of expansion depends highly on your business, your resources, and your customers.... [...]

Sam Nemzer says, “A quantitative analysis of the claim that topics are more important than keywords. What’s more important: topics or keywords? This has been a major discussion point in SEO recently, nowhere more so than here on the Moz blog. Rand has given two Whiteboard Fridays in the last two months, and Moz’s new Related Topics feature in Moz Pro aims to help you to optimize your site for topics as well as keywords. The idea under discussion is that, since the Hummingbird algorithm update in 2013, Google is getting really good at understanding natural language. So much so, in fact,... [...]

MOZ team says, “It’s probably crossed your mind before. Should you optimize for your competitors’ branded keywords? How would you even go about it effectively? Well, in today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains some carefully strategic and smart ways to optimize for the keywords of a competitor — from determining their worthiness, to properly targeting your funnel, to using third-party hosted content for maximum amplification”. How to Optimize for Competitors’ Branded Keywords MOZ Blog  [...]

Shubhomita Bose says, “Valentine’s Day, one of the most eagerly awaited holidays of the year, is just around the corner. For many businesses, it’s also the busiest time of the year as the day of love is also the fourth-largest spending holiday. If your business offers Valentine’s Day goodies such as chocolates, cards and flowers, make sure you use “gift” as a keyword to market your products online. That’s because 40 percent of Valentine’s searches in 2015 used “gift” as a keyword, according to data put together by the Bing Ads Insights Team in the Valentine’s Day: Insights... [...]

Roy Hinkis says, “Last month Google made a big announcement, potentially signaling a game changer for search. Google is quietly rolling out app-only content indexing, even if that content isn’t actually hosted on the indexed app. So, what does that actually mean? The game-changing implication is that when you search Google from your phone or tablet, app-only content will “stream” directly to your mobile device — even if you don’t have the app installed. Thus, if I search for the key phrase “hotel tonight in Chicago,” I’ll see results from mobile apps that aren’t installed... [...]