Khalid Saleh says, “Efforts to drive more traffic and rank better on search engines sometimes seem to be in conflict with those for increasing conversion rates for your website. But, as improved user experience becomes a stronger criterion for search engines, search engine optimization and conversion rate optimization are becoming a complementary, multistep process in marketing your business. Don’t sweat it: Your SEO efforts won’t ruin conversions on your site. And your CRO (conversion rate optimization) strategies won’t harm your findability, either. When setting your marketing plan,... [...]

Ronell Smith says, “Some of the best talks at MozCon each year come from the community speakers—those who’re able to make a pitch to grace the stage. This group enjoys the same privileges as the other speakers, including being able to deliver a keynote-style talk, and are always well-received by the audience. If you’re eager to be a member of this group, step right up. We’re now open for MozCon community speaker’s pitches. We’d be happy to have your best effort. The nuts & bolts: Submitting is as simple as filling out the form below Only submit one talk... [...]

Nate Dame says, “There are at least 200 ranking factors in Google’s algorithm (not to mention RankBrain), which means a thorough SEO audit could lead to dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of SEO tasks. Few companies have the budget or resources to complete every potential SEO to-do item — and doing so would be an incredible waste of time and resources anyway. Some SEO tasks are critical and cannot be ignored; others just aren’t worth your time. Prioritizing an SEO task list is crucial. Focus your resources on SEO work that is actually going to improve rankings, increase clicks and... [...]

Simon Penson says, “What will you learn from this post? How to get lots of Search Console data quickly and easily How to run a Python script And who can do it? Hopefully, it should be accessible to any beginner. Why do we use the API to get Search Console data? At Distilled, we often want to use Google Search Console data, but getting it from the interface is incredibly clunky: You’re limited to the top 1,000 queries You have to apply each filter one at a time The interface is slow And if you want to do this regularly, you have to repeat this process often. We can get around that by... [...]

Simon Penson says, “Incredible, isn’t it? Despite all the fanfare and pageantry that has followed content marketing over the last few years, fewer than 6% of marketers confidently claim to be executing content marketing strategies properly. It’s just one of a handful of eye-popping stats to come out of the State of Content Marketing Survey, a major new survey of senior UK marketers this month as part of a campaign to help create healthy debate around the misunderstood tactic. With more budget than ever before pouring into the approach (60% of those surveyed said they were opening the... [...]

Stefanie Flaxman says, “Whenever someone questions the importance of proofreading, my go-to response is: “Pubic relations is quite different from public relations.” We all sometimes make a typo that omits or changes a letter in a word. A typo like that is difficult to spot when the mistake is still an actual word (or words). Just last week, I wrote “head lice” instead of “headline.” Again, two completely different things. But I have an effective proofreading process that helps me find and correct errors before they are published. (Except, of course, when the error is a joke.) Do... [...]

Marie Haynes says, “It has now been six months since the launch of Penguin 4.0. In my opinion, Penguin 4.0 was awesome. It took ages for Google to release this update, but when they did, it was much more fair than previous versions of Penguin. Previous versions of Penguin would cause entire sites to be suppressed if the algorithm thought that you’d engaged in manipulative link building. Even if a site did a thorough link cleanup, the suppression would remain present until Google re-ran the Penguin algorithm and recognized your cleanup efforts. I saw many businesses that had looooooong... [...]

Eric Enge says, “The recent SMX West conference had many awesome sessions, and today I’m going to provide some compelling insights from “SEO and Social: A Match Made in Marketing Heaven.” One of the great things about this session is that all four speakers took a step back and provided fresh ideas on how to think about the integration of these two disciplines. Let’s dig in! Flexibility and a willingness to fail Leading off the session we had Maggie Malek, head of PR and social at MMI agency out of Houston. She walked us through a process for getting search and social to work together. If... [...]

Ronald Dod says, “Search engines help you get new readers, viewers, and listeners for your content, but all too often you yourself are the reason search engines hold your content back from prominent positions in their search results pages. Search engines want to show the world your content, but not if you’ve made mistakes that undermine the user experience and search engines’ guidelines. So give the search engines what they want by avoiding the following common mistakes that content creators make. 1. Short Content Google likes long-form content because it gives searchers enough... [...]

Andy Crestodina says, “It’s as if they live in different countries: Searchlandia and Socialstan. Search optimizers and social media marketers don’t get together a whole lot, at least not in the same piece of content. But there’s no reason they can’t peacefully coexist in one article, in one URL. Imagine. One topic, one message, united in quality, but with two separate and equally powerful sources of traffic: search and social. Is it possible? Can one post be optimized for both? Yes. And when it happens, the traffic is greater than the sum of its channels. Um. Actually, the traffic... [...]