موز-moz

Google is constantly testing new design elements, but over the past few months they've been testing a change that, while it might seem small on the surface, represents a major philosophical shift. The screenshots in this post were all captured on live SERPs but appear to be tests and have not rolled out permanently. Here's an example of the basic change: Notice how each result (ads and organic) is wrapped in a container and visually separated on a gray background. These containers are called "cards" in Google's veacular, and they're important, but we'll get to that. Why should we care about a few borders and a background? Shift #1: Mobile-first design We've known for over two years that Goog...

Duplicate listings have been a plague to local search marketers since local search was a thing. When Moz Local first introduced duplicate closure in the fall of 2014, the goal was to address the horribly time-consuming task of finding and closing all those duplicate listings causing problems in Google, Bing, and various mapping platforms. Though we’ve consistently been making improvements to the tool’s performance (we’ll get into this later), the dashboard itself has remained largely unchanged. Not anymore. Today, we’re proud to aounce our brand new duplicate management dashboard for Moz Local: Here’s a rundown of the features you can look for in the Moz Local upgrade: New Duplicates Dashboa...

Let’s face it: SEO isn’t as black & white as most marketing chaels. In my opinion, to become a true professional requires a broad skill set. It’s not that a professional SEO needs to know the answer for everything; rather, it’s more important to have the skills to be able to find the answer. I’m really pleased with the results of various bits of training I’ve put together for successful juniors over the years, so I think it’s time to share. This is a Junior SEO task list designed to help new starters in the field get the right skills by doing hands-on jobs, and possibly to help find a specialism in SEO or digital marketing. How long should this take? Let’s ballpark at 60–90 days. Before anyt...

The Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Image courtesy of Mike Behnken on Flickr. The civics of local: Caring about your community From Golden Gate Park in San Francisco to Central Park in New York City, with all of the town greens, plazas, fountains, schools, and libraries in between, America’s lasting community resources stand as a testament to our civic-minded past. Town fathers, city boards, and citizens of former times dedicated themselves to enriching local life by creating public access to features that fostered identity, civic pride, and a higher standard of living. Mode cynics might look at today’s cityscapes and conclude that city plaers have forgotten the need for accessible hum...

Darren Shaw of Whitespark speaking at Mozcon Local The gentleman sitting across the table from me at a crowded lunch spot has what he sees as a workable business idea for a local business, a sound plan to get it off the ground, enough funds to weather the ups and downs of the current business climate in his area, and the determination to stick around long enough to be successful. However, what he doesn't have are the answers to three questions pertaining to content marketing for his small business: "What should I write about?" "How do I [rank higher in local SERPs?]" "Do I need to use social media? Will it help my brand?" My heart breaks a little as he looks down to pick at his salad. Not be...

[Estimated read time: 6 minutes] It's been almost two years (August 2014) since Google aounced that HTTPS was a ranking signal. Speculation ran rampant, as usual, with some suggesting there was little or no benefit to switching (and possibly significant risk) while others rushed to sell customers on making the HTTPS switch. Two years later, I believe the data speaks for itself — Google is fighting, and wiing, a long war. What's happened since? If you only consider the impact of Google's original HTTPS update, I understand your skepticism. Prior to the update, our 10,000-keyword tracking system (think of it as a laboratory for studying Google searches) showed that roughly 7% of page-1 Google ...

There's no shortage of advice on the Inteet. This holds especially true in digital marketing; after all, we’re the folks who came up with “content is king,” right? If we weren't the inventors, we clearly co-opted it. I’ve been wanting to write a piece that takes us back to the roots of digital marketing. A reminder of sorts; one that might serve to snap some marketers out of the mundane daze of their daily grunt work. I wanted to inspire a vacation from hanging out in the weeds, which unfortunately can be common for some digital marketing practitioners. Falling into tactics and routine processes without any deviation certainly feels like grunt work — something that marketing should never be....

[Estimated read time: 8 minutes] Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) are capable of radically disrupting the way we search for and consume information on the Inteet. The convergence of several trends and technologies has resulted in a new interface through which people will be able to interact with your business. This will have a dramatic impact — if your long-term marketing/business plan doesn't account for IPAs, you may be in the same boat as those people who said they didn't need a website in the early 2000s. Your website is an API to your business If we look to pre/early Inteet, then the primary interface to most businesses was the humble phone. Over the phone you could speak to a bus...

[Estimated read time: 9 minutes] Note: this post is based on a recent presentation I gave at LeaInbound Dublin. You can find the slides here. Mobile search as a topic has changed a lot over the past few years. When I first started looking at this, back in 2012, there was already a lot of discussion happening around the topic of mobile. And back then, the big question everyone was asking was, “what should my mobile strategy be?” Even then, things were shifting. At one of my early conference presentations on the topic, I made the point that we should stop thinking about a “mobile strategy” as different from our web strategy, because mobile technology was becoming simply another way to access t...

You know you're supposed to write scaable copy. But do you know why? On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.– Jakob Nielsen Nope, it's not just that. Although the tiny fraction of attention readers have for your content is always important to keep in mind. But instead of another "write for the F-patte reader" article, let's dig into the psychological underpiings of how readers process information. You'll lea ways to make your content more memorable and how not to disenfranchise any audience members who struggle with legibility, however unintentional. Don't worry; you don't have to immerse yourself in academic theo...