Nikki Gilliland says, “I recently wrote an article about Pizza Express’s new customer-service chatbot. My overall opinion was that it offers a fairly standard booking system via Facebook Messenger – nothing fancy, but practical enough. One issue I failed to mention is that the brand doesn’t appear to be doing much to promote it. Which is odd, as how are people meant to use it if they don’t know it exists in the first place? Here’s a bit more info on this issue and how brands can combat it. Discovering chatbots In order to access the Pizza Express chatbot, I typed @PizzaExpress... [...]

Brian Childs says, “SEO training classes provide a smart, accessible way to accelerate your knowledge of our industry’s best practices, tools, and processes. For several months we’ve offered three workshops on our SEO Training page that focused on core SEO capabilities like keyword research, competitor research, and site audits. Starting now in February 2017, we’re expanding these classes to include more topics and more opportunities to help your team deliver value faster. What’s changed about our SEO training classes? There are two major changes we’ve made to our... [...]

Sarah Lively says, “TL;DR Keyword-level data isn’t gone, it’s just harder to get to. By using Google Sheets to marry the data from Search Console and Google Analytics into a sheet, you’ll have your top keywords and landing page engagement metrics together (for free!). It’s not perfect keyword-level data, but in 7 steps you can see the keywords that drove clicks to a page and the organic engagement metrics for that page, all together in one place. The Google Analytics Add-on for Google Sheets will pull organic landing page engagement metrics, and the Search Analytics for Sheets Add-on... [...]

MOZ team says, “What’s the secret to earning site traffic from competitive keywords with decent search volume? The answer could be as easy as 1, 2, 3 — or more precisely, 2, 0, 1, 7. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand lets you in on a relatively straightforward tactic that can help you compete in a tough space using very fresh content”. The Keyword + Year Content/Rankings Hack MOZ  [...]

Sherry Bonelli says, “If you’ve followed SEO strategies for any length of time, you know one thing: SEO changes all the time. When it comes to local SEO, it’s more important than ever that you optimize your on-site and off-site SEO strategies for clients and customers who may be searching for your local business. Local competition is heating up, and if you’re not on top of your rankings, you can bet your competitors will be. Here are five solid local SEO tactics you can use this year to help your business rank higher for local search terms. 1. Title and meta description tags still matter Title... [...]

Wesley Parker says, “Long tail keywords are widely considered to be fundamental to search marketing success due to the low-cost traffic that they generate, however should this still be the case in 2017? This article is going to analyze data from case studies conducted by Clicteq and PPC Hero that suggests that long tail keywords are now almost obsolete when it comes to AdWords. For the sake of this article we are going to classify long tail keywords as being four-words-long or more, though there is some debate with people arguing that keywords that are three or more words long should be... [...]

Greg Sterling says, “In the past year, comScore has de-emphasized its search market share and mobile market share reports. Part of the reason is that the numbers don’t change that much anymore. In addition, for reasons that remain mysterious, the measurement firm has declined to present a consolidated view of the search marketplace that includes both desktop and mobile. Mobile search is now both larger and, in many respects, more important than desktop search. Across the board, desktop search queries are down vs. November. Google’s overall share remains basically stable at 63 percent... [...]

Ryan Shelley says, “When it comes to marketing your local business online, search is a great place to start. Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of working with a number of small to mid-size local businesses, helping them grow their reach and their revenue using SEO. One of the biggest hurdles we face when working with local clients is that they’ve been burned in the past by so-called “experts.” They’ve invested their hard-earned money only to see little, if any, return. This has led many local businesses to believe SEO is a scam or doesn’t work. My goal is to share a few local... [...]

Alexis Sanders says, “What is JSON-LD? JSON-LD stands for JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data, which consists of multi-dimensional arrays (think: list of attribute-value pairs). It is an implementation format for structuring data analogous to Microdata and RDFa. Typically, in terms of SEO, JSON-LD is implemented leveraging the Schema.org vocabulary, a joint effort by Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex in 2011 to create a unified structured data vocabulary for the web. (However, Bing and other search engines have not officially stated their support of JSON-LD implementations of Schema.org.) JSON-LD... [...]

Miriam Ellis says, “Your local SEO agency needs new clients in 2017. Your department needs to convince management to earmark robust resources for local SEM this year. What if the only thing standing in your way is presentation? In the 10+ years I’ve been consulting with local businesses, I’ve watched our industry grow to absorb an incredibly diverse set of disparate-seeming tasks. The breadth of the lingo alone is on the verge of becoming a dialect of its own. Here, supporting our Moz Local product, some of my internal communications with team members read like a code, packed with acronyms,... [...]