Ryan Stewart says, “In my 28 years on this planet, I’ve come to accept two things as fact:The sun rises every morning.Marketers screw everything up.Because of fact No. 2, I had to stop selling SEO.Why? Here’s an interaction I used to have five times a day.*Phone rings*Me: “This is Ryan Stewart with WEBRIS. How can I help you?”Caller: “I’m looking for SEO for [domain.com]. I want to rank for [keyword terms x, y, and z]. Can you guys handle that?”“.Why I Stopped Selling SEO Services and You Should, TooMOZ Blog [...]

Rand Fishkin says, “It’s a near-universal experience for consultants and in-house SEOs who’ve worked on numerous organic search campaigns. The first 3–6 months (longer if the site is very large or complex) of any SEO effort is almost always exclusively dedicated to fixing mistakes, improving existing issues, tweaking and tuning the sub-optimal, and generally closing the gap between what exists now and current best practices.The beautiful part of SEO is that, once completed, these efforts can have ongoing and compounding benefits for months or years to come. The newly accessible... [...]

Trenton Greener says, “Google Analytics (GA) is a phenomenal tool that most of us, including myself, use in a very limited capacity. It’s not that we don’t want to use all of the functionality of this great product, but that we’re unaware of the potential opportunities available to us as marketers. Often times, when we do find that new and exciting feature, it astounds and astonishes us; I often find myself consumed by the possibilities. That’s how it felt when I first found GA’s “Data Import” feature. I had no idea that I could load not only my AdWords data... [...]

MOZ team says, “A concept we’ve covered regularly is what we call flywheel marketing, where the organic traffic, shares, and links you get from publishing one piece of content makes it easier for later pieces to see some success. One of the key pieces of that flywheel is the ability to get those social shares, and based on a recent study, we’re ready to admit it: We were completely wrong about that key piece.In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains why, and that the real value may lie in engagement“.Using Social Media as Your Primary (or Only) Link Building Tactic... [...]

Ronell Smith says, “In 2009 Fletcher Cleaves was a top high school football prospect ready for the next level, eager to do in college what he’d done in high school: rack up yards as a running back. But before Cleaves could realize his dream of playing at the next level, a texting, distracted driver plowed into the car he was driving, forever changing his life’s trajectory.Today, Cleaves, paralyzed from the chest down as a result of the accident, serves as a tragic reminder of something as seemingly harmless as texting and driving can alter lives. It’s impossible to watch... [...]

Russ Jones says, “As much as we like to debate content vs. links, sometimes great content just seems to dominate. I don’t mean to say that great content doesn’t get great links, or that the purposes of creating great content is not to get links, but simply that some content on the web seems to shine through the SERPs.Content might not be king, but it has lot of sway in Google’s kingdom.After sifting through tons of SERP data to find million dollar answer boxes (answer box results that rank at the top for keywords driving millions of dollars in traffic), I decided to dig... [...]

Jeremy Gottlieb says, “Have you ever wanted to automate pulling data from a web page—such as building a Twitter audience—and wanted a way to magically make all of the Twitter handles from the web page appear in your Google Sheet, but didn’t know how? If learning Python isn’t your cup of tea, using a few formulas in Google Sheets will allow you to easily and quickly scrape data from a URL that, were you to do so manually, could take hours.For Windows users, Niels Bosma’s amazing SEO plug-in for Excel is an option that could also be used for this purpose, but if you analyze data... [...]

MOZ team says, “Last month, Rand made a surprise virtual appearance at Full Stack Marketing, part of the Turing Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. He presented a special edition Whiteboard Friday to the audience, and the folks at Stipso who hosted the festival were kind enough to let us share it with you, as well.Amplifying content to the right audiences is tricky business. It’s easy to hope people will find you organically—particularly if you have really great tools to share—but most of the time, it just doesn’t work out that way. In today’s special-edition Whiteboard... [...]

Marta Turek says, “If you feel like your workweek is structured around meetings—like all you’re doing is preparing for and attending meetings, talking about and reporting on your work rather than sitting and doing it—then you’ve reached a point of frustration where you need to regain control of your time.There are two sides to meetings: not attending them if they’re unnecessary, and when running a meeting, ensuring that it’s purposeful, on-point, and driving a specific outcome. If the meeting lacks purpose and has no desired outcome, what’s the point?Today’s... [...]

Dr. Peter J. Meyers says, “The Google landscape is constantly changing. Two years ago, I created the Mega-SERP, and within days it was already outdated. This time, we’ve set out to create a more permanent glossary of Google features – a reference that we’ll update as the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) change.If your focus is on organic SEO, why should you care about the wider world of Google features? Put simply, because rich SERP features are no longer the exception to the rule. Across 10,000 keywords tracked daily by the MozCast project, this is what we saw as of September... [...]