Ronell Smith says, “When the client asked to “go mute” during our monthly client call, there was no reason to sound the alarm. After all, being able to talk through what they’ve heard as a team, in private, was normal. But when the always-skeptical global marketing director said the COO (who has been in the room for the 10 minutes of analytics discussion) wants to take the discussion offline for a bit, but wants you to hold on, I knew things had likely gone off the rails. “Thanks for holding, you guys,” says the head of marketing upon taking the phone off mute... [...]

Jayson Demers says, “Your company’s reputation plays a large role in local organic search rankings. For example, if your company is listed in every major local business directory and you’re mentioned on local news sources regularly, and if great user reviews of your business dot the web, you’ll likely rank higher than if just the reverse occurs: You’re rarely mentioned and your reviews are poor. Every business gets a bad review now and then, and some businesses naturally have trouble attracting reviews from their customers. But, with local SEO becoming more important and more influential,... [...]

Simon Penson says, ““How do I know if my content campaign is going to work?” This question is the one I get asked more than any other at present, and for good reason; creating hit content, consistently, is one of the biggest challenges in marketing. I’m certainly not going to pretend that every piece of content I’ve ever been involved in has been a hit. In fact, the opposite is probably closer to the truth — but failure teaches you much more, and allows you to iterate faster. The result of that heartache and frustration is a process I want to share with you today, one that’s... [...]

Chance Hoggan says, “Many people who do business online spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out how to rise to the top of Google. They often become so obsessed with this goal, in fact, all other goals, like actually making money and keeping existing clients/customers happy, fall by the wayside. They go to sleep thinking about SEO. They dream about SEO. And they wake up thinking about SEO. These same SEO obsessed people often devote a large portion of their day reading forums, free ezines, blog posts, and so called “expert” articles. They take SEO webinars from “experts”... [...]

Cyrus Shepard says, “As SEOs, we well understand the value links contribute to ranking websites in search results. So much so, it’s something we study regularly here at Moz. At their most basic, links are counted as “votes” of popularity for search engines to rank websites. Beyond this, search engineers have long worked to extract a large number of signals from the simple link, including: Trustworthiness – Links from trusted sites may count as an endorsement Spamminess – Links from known spam sites may count against you Link Manipulation – Looking at signals such... [...]

Trevor Klein says, “I’m thrilled to announce the next in Moz’s series of beginner’s guides: The Beginner’s Guide to Content Marketing. Content marketing is a field full of challenges. Creating content that provides great value to your audience what we’ve come to call 10x content is difficult enough, but content marketers also regularly encounter skeptical employers and clients, diminutive budgets, and you guessed it a noted lack of time to get it all done. You’re not alone. You’re fighting the good fight, and we’re here to back you up. So is... [...]

Vivek Patel says, “SEO is no magic bullet. You need to understand its key elements before entering into an SEO campaign. The marketing industry is all about ideas and strategies. The options to promote brands are so diverse it can often overwhelm entrepreneurs. Moreover, each of these marketing platforms has its own advantages when it comes to helping your company to grow. That said, most startups can’t invest time and energy into all these marketing efforts due to budget constraints. Businesses, large and small, should always plan and budget their marketing activities in advance to... [...]

MOZ team says, “One thing we can all agree on: there’s a lot to think about when it comes to your SEO tasks. Even for the most organized among us, it can be really difficult to prioritize our to-dos and make sure we’re getting the highest return on them. In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand tackles the question that’s a constant subtext in every SEO’s mind“. How to Prioritize SEO Tasks & Invest in High-Value Work Items MOZ Blog  [...]

LokiAstari says, “Good news, everyone: November’s Mozscape index is here! And it’s arrived earlier than expected. Of late, we’ve faced some big challenges with the Mozscape index — and that’s hurt our customers and our data quality. I’m glad to say that we believe a lot of the troubles are now behind us and thatthis index, along with those to follow, will provide higher-quality, more relevant, and more useful link data. Here are some details about this index release: 144,950,855,587 (145 billion) URLs 4,693,987,064 (4 billion) subdomains 198,411,412 (198... [...]

David Mihm says, “When we launched Moz Local, I said at the time that one of the primary goals of our product team was to “help business owners and marketers trying to keep up with the frenetic pace of change in local search.” Today we take a major step forward towards that goal with the beta release of Moz Local Search Insights, the foundation for a holistic understanding of your local search presence. As we move into an app-centric world that’s even more dependent on structured, accurate location data than the mobile web, it’s getting harder to keep up with the disparate sources... [...]