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,... [...]

Stephen Spencer says, “Along with technical SEO and links, high-quality, interesting, engaging content is one of the three main pillars of any successful SEO strategy. Traditional content strategies use blog posts, articles, images, and sometimes video as the main sources of content. And while those can be awesome for driving traffic and supporting your SEO efforts, podcasts are an often overlooked and underestimated medium. Podcasts can build your brand and drive direct traffic, while at the same time adding rich content to your site and supporting your link-building efforts. Of course,... [...]

Daniel Marks says, “It seems like every couple months (weeks?) there’s a new post predicting the end of SEO. But rather than proclaiming that SEO is already dead (it’s not), let’s look at 3 ways in which the SEO industry might eventually die and ways in which SEOs can prepare themselves. 1. New ads Google is constantly experimenting with new ad formats that actually provide a better user experience than organic results. The better the ads, the less traffic that will be captured by organic listings. What are some examples of when PPC ads provide a better UX than organic results?”. 3... [...]

Hermes Ma says, “Recently, I attended Baidu’s annual search conference for agency partners in Beijing. One of the premier search events in China for SEO professionals, the conference was hosted by engineers from Baidu’s core search and Webmaster Tools teams. The agenda covered Baidu’s eco-empowerment strategy, its Mobile Instant Page (MIP) project and a wrap-up of the 2016 algorithm updates. The event made it clear to me that 2016 was the year Baidu SEO came into its own. If you aren’t already investing in Baidu SEO, 2017 is your year to start. The eco-empowerment The concept of... [...]

Rand Fishkin says, “Friends and fellow SEOs, I just need a few minutes of your time. This is gonna be short and sweet. If you’re optimizing a page to rank well for a keyword or set of keywords, you probably use some sort of checklist to make sure you’re doing the right things. That might be through an SEO plug-in like Yoast or through Moz Pro’s On-Page Grader, or it might be just be a mental checklist. The problem is, there’s a crucial set of flaws in how I’ve seen a lot of marketers and SEOs approaching on-page SEO in the last few months, and I want to help. These... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Google may have made some tweaks to their algorithms this week on how they target link spam and other forms of spam. Google would not confirm or deny there was an algorithm change, but based on the signals I am tracking, there appears to have been an algorithm update that has hit those who undergo more aggressive link building. The update seems to have happened around February 1, 2017. It may have been a tweak to how Google Penguin detects and discounts spammy links, or it may be a totally new algorithm — we are unsure. But many of the folks within the “black hat”... [...]

Kevin Lee says, “Based on what I’ve seen across my diverse set of clients, and talking to others in the industry, I’m predicting 2017 will be another great year for paid search. One of the reasons is a bit unusual: a flight to quality online media driven in part by “fake news,” “Methbot” and advertisers’ realization that they prefer not to have their advertising associated with those sites, don’t want their advertising positioned with that content, and in some cases have ethical concerns about supporting the publishers. So, let’s look a bit further into this flight to quality.... [...]