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.... [...]

Greg Gifford says, “Maybe I should have used an image of me jumping on a soapbox, because I’m about to preach. Spring conference season is in full swing, and I’ve had my mind blown several times already — not from amazing presentations (although there were several), but from conversations with business owners and newbies in the marketing world. Case in point: At an automotive conference, I talked to a dealer who had deleted his dealership’s Facebook and Twitter accounts on the advice of his SEO provider. He said they told him it wasn’t good for him to have an open forum where customers... [...]

Will Scott says, “I have a confession to make: Penguin scared the daylights out of me. I hope those of you who have been around the industry for as many years as I have will join me in taking the first step to recovery: admitting our problem. In 2012, Penguin made once-easy and inexpensive link-building tactics for small businesses worthless — and in some cases, harmful. For a small handful of long-time clients, we had to undo years of work that had once supported their achievement of position one organic rankings (and more importantly, their acquisition of many, many leads). Sadly, getting... [...]

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,... [...]

Barry Levine says, “Talk for more than a few minutes to content publishers, and they’ll often bemoan the fact that few visitors reach their sites through the home page any more. The real action, they’ll say, is from “side door” visits directly to a specific story, via a link shared by social media, texting, email, or from a topic-centered search. This “death of the home page” wave became an accepted wisdom after mid-2014, when a leaked chart from The New York Times showed the steep plunge in that iconic newspaper’s home page visitors. But volume alone is only the tip of the... [...]

Liz Willits says, “Imagine the perfect blog post. Your perfect blog post brings thousands of people to your site. Your audience reads it from top to bottom, gives their love in the comments and shares it on their social media profiles. An industry expert links to it in one of their blog posts. And ultimately, you see a huge spike in revenue as it brings your website and business into the spotlight. But wait, there’s more! Months after you initially published your perfect blog post, it continues to draw website visits, shares and increased revenue. Why does your perfect blog post have such... [...]

Mona Elesseily says, “Recently, we’ve seen some fairly significant changes on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Right-rail ads have disappeared, and on mobile, we’re seeing more prominent placement of Google Shopping ad units. In this article, I’ll cover some upcoming trends in paid search and speculate on where the trends will lead. Though I refer mostly to Google, these predictions apply largely to all the major search engines. The only absolute certainty is that there will be more changes in the paid search landscape! 1. More “shopping” ad units Google Shopping has been... [...]

Business.com team says, “One-in-five mobile users rely on voice search to find information or control their device, according to a Global Web Index study. It makes sense considering that mobile usage frequently occurs in environments that make typing and looking at a screen difficult and even, in the case of driving in particular, downright dangerous. Younger users, who comprise the largest market segment for mobile use, are also more likely to find typing time-consuming, preferring instead to “talk to their phones” as an easier, faster, and more intuitive way to communicate. Indeed,... [...]

Barry Levine says, “There is one bright spot in Distil Network’s third annual report on bad bots, out this week: Human-generated internet traffic outnumbered bot traffic last year from the first time since 2013. So our carbon-based life form has retaken the lead online. But it’s downhill from there, according to “The 2016 Bad Bot Landscape Report: The Rise of Advanced Persistent Bots.” About 28 percent of all web traffic comes from non-malicious bots, the report said, plus the bad bots represent another 18 percent of the total. Good bots include search engine spiders, Facebook pulling... [...]

Mike Murray says, “SEO page titles cause their fair share of confusion among B2B and B2C content marketers. In the old days, it was easy to throw a bunch of words in there with commas and rank well for some of those keyword phrases. The SEO page title still carries weight, but other ranking variables matter as well. If the quality and quantity of inbound links had to go head to head with SEO page titles in a strange Internet game, the links would crush the titles. No one has a crystal ball about the degree of their influence. But over time my experience with many websites makes it clear... [...]