People change jobs, move teams, and shift responsibilities all the time, and taking over toolsets can bring its own set of challenges. Whether you’re at a new company, in a new position, or expanding your responsibilities, ensuring that your Moz Pro subscription is set up correctly for your specific needs should be at the top of your to-do list.

Some of you may have inherited a whole account from a colleague or former teammate – they updated the login information and handed you the reins. For some of you, this may be the first time you’ve used Moz Pro after having just been added as a seat on a larger account. And some of you may have just been told your company has a subscription to this tool and you’ve been tasked with figuring out how to use it! Regardless of the situation, here are 10 steps to help you make sure your toolkit is properly calibrated. 

1. Understand what you’re working with

Before you can really understand if your Moz Pro account is set up correctly, you have to understand what Moz Pro is and how you’ll use it. Moz Pro is a complete SEO toolset that can help you implement and monitor the success of your SEO strategies. Whether you’re working on your own site, a client’s site, or a combination, the tools in the Moz Pro suite will help you be successful.

There are 2 primary tool segments in Moz Pro – Campaigns and research tools. Within Campaigns, you can gather data on your site’s rankings, page optimization, site crawl issues, and link metrics all in one place. Within a single Campaign, you can track one site and up to three competitors to benchmark key metrics and monitor your progress.

The research tools within the Moz Pro tool suite offer the ability to perform keyword, link, and competitive research throughout all the phases of your SEO strategy implementation. There are also additional research tools designed for on-off checks and client prospecting.

Tip: If you were not provided with an account for accessing Moz Pro, you can create a free community account and then request to be added as a seated user by the owner of your subscription. Don’t worry! We’ll cover this in the upcoming steps as well.

2. Verify you have access to manage your subscription

In our previous Next Level post, we talked about verifying the owner of your subscription, but it’s perhaps even more critical if you are taking over Moz access from another team member or from someone who is leaving (or has already left) your company. Nothing can stop a team in their tracks faster than an unexpected billing issue or inability to upgrade a subscription when you need higher limits.

Why is this step so important? Only the owner of a Moz Pro subscription can change subscription levels, purchase add-ons, add (or remove) seated users, and delete Campaigns. Without knowing who is in charge of your subscription, you may hit roadblocks along the way when trying to make adjustments to account for new clients or projects.

To verify you have access to manage your subscription, head to Account & Billing and make sure you can see the price, renewal date, and upgrade options for your subscription. If you are not seeing those options, this means that you are a seated user with shared access and will need to either transfer ownership to yourself, or ensure that they are still able to manage the subscription for you.

3. Add (or remove) seated users

As teams shift with new members joining and folks leaving, it’s key to make sure that the right people have access to the Moz tools. Check who currently has access to your toolset in the Manage Seats section of Account & Billing. From here, you can remove seated users and assign new seats. If you see a notice that you do not have a subscription for which to manage seats, this means you are a seated user on another subscription and will need to reach out to the owner to make any changes.

4. Check your email settings

If you’ve inherited your Moz account and subscription from someone else, it’s a good idea to take a moment and check your email settings. The person before you may have opted to not receive Campaign-related emails or they may have turned off email notifications for Q&A activity. You can check your email settings at any time from the Email Settings view of your Account & Billing section.

5. Update your community profile

Speaking of Q&A activity, now is a great time to make sure your Community Profile is up to date. If your account recently changed hands, your Community Profile on moz.com may still be under the previous owner’s name. Be sure to update this information before interacting in the Q&A forum so people know who you are!

Tip: If changing roles and responsibilities causes your Moz account to change hands often, you may opt to set your community profile as your company name so you can skip this step in the future! If you prefer to post and interact in the Q&A Forum under your own unique profile, you can set up a free community user account and add yourself as a seat on your main company subscription. 

6. Ask yourself: What are my goals?

Before we move forward into checking the rest of our settings, take a moment to ask yourself what you’re looking to achieve with your Moz Pro Campaigns. The answer to this question may change the settings you’ll be looking for in the next few steps.

Here are some examples of goals you may have:

• If you are looking to evaluate the crawlability of your entire site, you will need to make sure your Campaign is not set up to be restricted to a particular subdomain or subfolder (Don’t worry, we’ll cover how to look into that a little later).

• If you are wanting to monitor rankings for a client’s blog, you may need to have the Campaign set up to be restricted to their blog subfolder.

• If you’re looking to monitor the success of your link building efforts and how your backlink profile compares to your competitors, you’ll need to make sure you’ve identified the correct competitors to track

So, what ARE you looking to achieve? What goal do you have for each Campaign set up in your account?

7. Verify you’re following the right campaigns

While we’re talking about goals and Campaigns, let’s take a quick detour to check which Campaigns you’re following. Follow status for Campaigns is login-specific, which means that each seated user on a subscription can customize which Campaigns they receive email updates for. You can quickly check which Campaigns you’re set up to follow from the Manage Your Campaigns screen. On the right hand side there is a column titled Following which you can scan – any Campaigns with the checkbox checked are ones you are currently set to receive email updates for. Uncheck the boxes to unfollow them at any time or vice versa. This can come in handy when you’re jumping onto projects to help a teammate or taking over an existing client – just follow and unfollow Campaigns as necessary in order to stay up to date. 

8. Review your campaign settings

We’ve thought about goals, reviewed basic account settings, and investigated which Campaigns we’re following. Now it’s time to dive into Campaign settings and content. Each Campaign you set up (or already have set up) has its own settings for a variety of components. Let’s take a look at each one so you can make sure you have the data you need, where you need it.

General

First up are the general settings for your Campaign. Here you’ll find information about the basic setup which was implemented during the initial Campaign creation process.

Site Basics

Under site basics you’ll find your Campaign name and information about the website you’re tracking. This is also where you’ll see if you’re tracking all sites within your domain, a specific subfolder, or a specific subdomain.

Thinking back to your goals for your projects and clients, do these settings seem correct? Are you only tracking part of a site when you need to be tracking all sites within the domain? Or are you tracking a full site when your only focus is one subfolder?

Tip: The website and scope (i.e. whether you’re tracking a subfolder, subdomain, or all sites within a domain) of a Campaign cannot be changed after Campaign creation. If you need to update these settings you will need to create a new Campaign. Just be sure to chat with your team before removing or archiving any existing Campaigns.

Competitor Websites

The competitor websites you’re tracking in a Campaign can be changed at any time. Take a moment to review the ones currently being tracked – are they the right competitors based on your goals? Are they still your competitors or have they changed since the Campaign was initially created?

If you need help identifying your competitors, or verifying that these are the correct ones, Moz’s True Competitor tool can help you compare and evaluate sites competing for the same SERPs as your website. Additionally, the How to Do An SEO Competitor Analysis guide and SEO Competitive Analysis Certification can help you get a handle on discovering your competitors.

Rankings

Let’s move on to the rankings settings of your Campaign. There are two main sections to check out here: Tracked Search Engines and Brand Rules.

Tracked Search Engines

Your Search Engine Settings can be updated at any time but keep in mind that any changes you make won’t take effect until your next Campaign update and they will impact your overall rankings data. Since we won’t have historical data for search engines you weren’t initially tracking, you will not see data for them from before the changes were implemented.

There are lots of different ways you can set up your tracked search engines for your Campaign. Some people like to track Google, Google Mobile, Yahoo, and Bing for one country. Others prefer to track Google and Google Mobile for two different countries. And some prefer to track only Google or Google Mobile for four different countries in one Campaign. The possibilities are endless! However, it is generally recommended that you track rankings for the markets where you have an audience. If your business is in the United States and Great Britain, you probably don’t want to track rankings for Canada.

“But Meghan, what if I want to track rankings for multiple search engines for multiple countries?” I’m glad you asked! In this case, you may opt to set up additional Campaigns for the same site but with different sets of tracked search engines. Additionally, if you have specific subfolders or subdomains of your site for each country, you may want to consider restricting your Campaign to that area of your site as discussed in our General Settings section.

Brand Rules

Next, let’s make sure your brand rules are set up correctly. Brand rules help the tool identify and tag tracked keywords as branded so you are able to compare branded versus non-branded rankings and Search Visibility to better understand your site’s performance in the SERPs.

When evaluating your brand rules, be sure that any terms or names associated with your brand are included. Also consider terms that may slip through the cracks and be marked as “branded” when they are, in fact, not. For example, in my own Campaign I have a rule set to tag keywords containing “Moz” as branded and another rule to exclude keywords containing “mozilla” so any mozilla related keywords will not be marked as branded. It can also be helpful to include rules for specific products associated with your brand, as well.

Site Crawl

Up next is Site Crawl. In step 8 we’ll talk more about Site Crawl but in this step you can check your page crawl limit to make sure it is set high enough to capture your whole site in the crawl. The page crawl limit for your Campaign is the number of pages our crawler, Rogerbot, will attempt to crawl each week for your site. It will crawl pages within the scope of your Campaign up to the designated limit or until it can’t find any more pages it can crawl – whichever comes first.

If your crawl limit is not set high enough to capture your whole site, you may see irregularities in your crawl data, pages not being crawled that you expect to see in your crawl inventory, or fluctuations in issues found. This is because our crawler may find and crawl different pages based on how your internal linking structure changes or as pages are added and removed between crawls. It’s also a good idea to leave some extra room at the top end of your crawl limit to account for site growth and new content.

Traffic

Lastly, let’s just double check that the correct Google Analytics account and profile are selected for your Campaign. Within the last tab, Traffic, you can see this information and update it as needed.

9. Check your Site Crawl data

In the previous step we checked the page crawl limit for your Campaign and now we’re going to take a look at your crawl data itself to make sure everything looks to be in tip top shape.

From the Site Crawl section of your Campaign, verify that your site was able to be crawled. If you’re seeing an error message indicating that your site crawl failed it could mean that our crawler is being blocked by your server, your robots.txt file isn’t accessible, or that your Campaign is set up incorrectly. The error message provided should indicate the reason why the crawl failed; review the indicated reason and then have our crawler reattempt the crawl. For additional help regarding failed crawls, we have a great resource in our Help Hub all about troubleshooting issues with crawling your site.

Another area to check within Site Crawl is the number of pages successfully crawled. Your Site Crawl Overview will show a count of pages crawled after each crawl is completed. Is this count higher or lower than you would expect for your site? If the count is lower, this could indicate one of the following:

• Your page crawl limit for your Campaign is set too low – if this is the case, you can adjust this in your Campaign settings as we outlined earlier in this post.

• Your robots.txt file is blocking our crawler from areas of your site – review your robots.txt file to be sure that the correct areas are being blocked by our crawler or speak with your web developer about the current settings, if necessary.

• There is a 4xx or 5xx error stopping our crawler – if our crawler is receiving a 404 response for a key page or there is a server error coming from a set of pages this will keep our crawler from being able to move forward and crawl additional pages. You can review these errors in your Critical Crawler Issues section of Site Crawl.

There are plenty of other reasons you may see a lower page count than anticipated. If you need additional help investigating, we have a troubleshooting guide in our Help Hub which outlines a few other common issues. On the other side of the same coin, if the page count you’re seeing is much higher than you expect, it may indicate the following:

• Your robots.txt file isn’t correctly configured to block our crawler from certain sections of your site – review your robots.txt file to be sure that the correct areas are being blocked by our crawler or speak with your web developer about the current settings, if necessary.

• There is an issue with relative links causing crawler loops – review your site crawl issues to see if there are any unusually long URLs you’re not expecting such as https://mysite.com/home/produc…;

We have a few different guides which can help you investigate a high number of pages including our guide on page fluctuations and spikes in crawl issues. If everything looks good to go but you still need a bit of guidance on where to get started with all your Site Crawl data, be sure to check out our step-by-step workflow.

10. Check the Tracked Keywords (and how they’re labeled) in your Campaigns

Next, let’s take a look at your tracked keywords. From the Rankings section of your Campaign you can see a list of all the keywords you’re currently tracking. Verify that you’re tracking the correct keywords and add any that are missing. Just be sure to check in with any seated users to make sure it won’t interrupt their workflow to add them! Alternatively, you can create an all new Campaign with new keywords for your own project.

Finally, take some time to check that your keywords are labeled and segmented correctly (or at all!). If you’re not currently using labels in your Campaign, you’re missing out on the opportunity to compare rankings and Search Visibility for groups of keywords. There are an infinite number of ways you can segment your keyword data in Moz Pro using labels including (but of course not limited to):

• By sales funnel stage

• By product

• Branded versus non-branded

• Location or market

• Project

• Marketing campaign

Once your keywords are labeled, you have the option to filter by those labels to see metrics and rankings side by side. You can even create specific custom reports for different groups of keywords to be delivered right to your inbox on a regular basis.

Bonus! Enroll in Moz Academy

Whether you’re brand new to the Moz tools or just want to make sure you’re using every aspect of the tools to their full potential, Moz Academy offers free courses to help you learn the ins and outs of Moz Pro.

The first is How to Use Moz Pro which is an in-depth overview of all the primary tools included in your Moz Pro subscription. In this course you’ll learn about each aspect of the tools along with the metrics referenced in each.

The second is The Insider’s Guide to Moz Pro: Your 4-Week SEO Game Plan which combines videos, tasks, and additional resources to help you implement an SEO strategy with the Moz Pro tools.

If you’re looking to dive even deeper into theory and application, Moz Academy offers 5 different certifications which can help you add to your toolkit. These include SEO Essentials, Technical SEO, Keyword Research, Competitive Analysis, and Local SEO. Once a certification is completed, you’ll also receive a downloadable certificate and the opportunity to add a badge to your LinkedIn profile to show off your newly acquired skills.

We know that a picture is worth a thousand words and that Google is betting the house on a visual future, yet I’ve often struggled to find the exact image asset I want to illustrate the story of local businesses and local SEO. So, I decided to create my own asset, and today, I would like to offer the above painting to all of my colleagues in local search. Please, feel free to use it in your speaker decks, client pitches, articles, marketing materials, and any place else you would like to instantly convey the thriving spirit of economic localism which underpins the passion we have in common with our audiences and clients.

This impressionist painting is original, hand-done, by me (no AI) and I offer use of it as my valentine to all of my colleagues and to local business owners with affection and tremendous respect for all of your contributions to many communities. I hope it will add vivid storytelling power to your work! If you would like to credit me, my fine art website is at MiriamEllis.com.

According to 3M research, visual aids improve learning by 400% and humans process visual media 60,000 times faster than text. Meanwhile, Time’sTop 100 photos focus on the mighty power of imagery to make an emotional connection. But we’re at a funny moment in time with image content, because we could be on the verge of inundation. I’d like to look at this phenomenon with you today and consider how the local businesses you market can stand out in an increasingly-illustrated world.

Thinking about imagery at this moment in time

Local places matter to us. Petrus Christus knew it when he painted “A Goldsmith in His Shop” six hundred years ago (local SEOs might call it the Barbara Oliver Jewelry of its day!):

Van Gogh was just one of thousands of painters who have worked to capture the mood of local “cafe society” and – if they had mobile devices – what do you think these people would be writing in their Yelp reviews?

And Hopper’s “Nighthawks”, set in a Greenwich Village diner, has become one of the most-recognized paintings in American art history. Looking at it 80 years after it was painted, it evokes a feeling in me of the value of local businesses keeping the light on in hard times:

Point being: local businesses are so vibrant a component of culture that they inspire fine art. They are an integral part of the history of communities, towns, and cities, and they readily lend themselves to impactful visual representation.

It’s a topic for this moment in time, because we are poised between a past littered with bad stock photos and a future that could be made up of assembly line AI graphics. Some may argue that the availability of images for pennies or the capacity to command robots to produce pictures is democratizing, and I can respect that viewpoint, but I have also noticed that mass-produced art lacking in meaningful human intention can quickly become clutter, overlooked by the very people we are trying to reach.

And that’s a problem, because when we look at art that we find beautiful, blood flow to the brain increases by 10%. According to University College London, this is the same lift we get from seeing the face of a loved one, and I have to wonder, then, what it does to us to be subjected to imagery that we find dull, repetitive, and soulless. Andy Warhol may have seen beauty in Campbell’s soup, but how often do you gaze with joy at can labels in the grocery store, when every single tin on the shelves offers a picture?

What will search be like when every query ends up in a kind of supermarket aisle, full of visuals? In 2016, visual elements made up just 2% of mobile search results, but now they make up 36%. Google reps are very transparent about this, stating,

“We’re transforming the SERP into an endless stream of visual ideas.”

As an artist, I’m automatically intrigued by any visual medium, and am keeping both eyes on multisearch, visual search, and all the permutations of image search. Now is the time to consider how visual media will fare if we become oversaturated with it in the next few years.

Standing out amid visual clutter

The art of differentiation is always going to be a relevant question for SEOs and local SEOs. Right now, we know how much of a competitive advantage high quality visuals can give our clients. Google says that shoppers are 90% more likely to purchase from businesses with images in Maps and search. Large, high quality images can have a demonstrable impact on organic rankings and Google’s own documentation cites their impact on local rank. UGC-uploaded photos even impact Google review order. Early adopters will get early benefits, but diminishing returns can result once a practice that was formerly special becomes commonplace.

Right now, we haven’t yet reached peak images in local SEO. Expert and friend, Darren Shaw, recently offered an excellent Twitter thread on the 7 types of visuals every Google Business Profile needs, including brand identity shots, exterior and interior premise shots, staff photos, product/service photos, UGC, and review screenshots. It’s a list long enough to keep any business busy in 2023, and the truth is that so many local businesses haven’t even created listings yet, but I’d like to encourage you to begin thinking beyond the standards before they become givens.

If your plan is to use AI graphics to keep pace with competitors, you may end up looking just like them, and that’s in direct contrast to one of the core reasons independent local businesses are beloved: because they are different! Predictability may be what made fast food chains a success via the McDonaldization phenomenon, but uniqueness of products, services and experiences is the magic ingredient behind 3 in 4 customers shopping small and local. Doesn’t it stand to reason that your digital visual presentation could take its cues from this existing dynamic and dare to be different?

To that end, here are my five outside-the-box suggestions for visually differentiating the local businesses you market online from less creative competitors:

1. Hire a local artist to paint your business. Imagine how uncommon your Google Business Profile photo deck would look if it included glowing fine art featuring your store, your grounds, your staff, your inventory, and customers coming in for experiences with you. I guarantee that there is a good fine artist near you with the talent of capturing how your business is a vibrant part of the local community. Give your staff and your customers reasons to feel proud of where they work and shop.

2. Hire a creative professional photographer to make your business look intriguing. Joel Headley has already documented the lift in traffic, calls and other conversion metrics when stock photos are replaced by original images, and you need basic shots of the assets Darren Shaw mentions, but a talented art photographer could take this a step further by photographing aspects of your business in such a way that the public will want to come experience them personally.

3. Are you working in a vertical people constantly call “boring?” Would it lend itself to humor that could make your listings stand out? Consider hiring a local cartoonist to make your community laugh with you and remember your brand.

4. Maximize every opportunity for making your premises a green space. Connectivity with nature is increasingly cited as key to mental health. It’s why Trinity College Dublin has torn up its lawns and replacd them with wildflower patches, full of blooms and butterflies. Photograph the planted areas people can experience when they visit you, and be sure to highlight accessibility and areas for sitting and quiet contemplation as a break from shopping.

5. Consider the role of art at your place of business, be that paintings, photography, sculpture, community projects, music, and more. A grocery store can have a great soundtrack and a retail shop with wall space can double as a gallery or a social media hotspot. The more inviting your premises are, the more likely that customers are to want to photograph themselves there. Because every person is unique, that thing we call UGC can become a major asset, enabling you and your community to see how your business looks through the gaze of many.

My two-point perspective

On the one hand, convenience sells. Why open a cookbook, turn on a light switch, sweep your own floor, work hard on writing something, or mix your own colors for a hand-done painting when a robot can do it all for you? We’re all so fatigued, so why not take it easy? But the thing is…there is something about this perspective that’s really been bothering me lately, and I think I’ve figured out what it is. It sounds like the little voice in my head that would let me be monumentally lazy instead of struggling to do my best despite living with a chronic disability. That insidious voice that wants me to take it too easy instead of doing as much as I’m able to for myself, and that is reinforced by every marketed offer to take every load off my shoulders.

I suppose that because I’ve pushed back against this temptation for years and pushed myself to stay positive and creative in some very hard times, I am wary of this insidious voice being a driving force in society. I don’t think everything should always be as easy as possible, because I don’t believe humans produce great writing, art, music, movements, or anything of lasting value when shortcuts are prioritized over strenuous effort. Yes, we can increasingly choose to let machines do all the work for us, and even think for us, but my other perspective tells me what we may miss if we never do the hard work ourselves.

I’ve entered a number of juried art events over the years, and there is nothing quite like the thrill of walking into a big, buzzing exhibition grounds, searching the crowded walls for your painting, finding a blue ribbon hanging on it and seeing that little “sold” sticker on the accompanying card. You know exactly what you put into that piece, from ideation, to drafting, to completion, and there is such joy in realizing that someone else saw your work and chose it as the best in the show, or even as something to bring home into their personal space.

This is the sense of accomplishment I want local business owners and their marketers to feel when they are chosen because, instead of giving into low standards, they have brought the highest standards to bear in the creative presentation of their companies. When local businesses go the extra mile, it can be deeply felt in the quality of life enjoyed by their whole community. It’s a very good thing.

I hope you may find a use for my painting in your work, even if it’s only as a spark for your own ideas about being seen amid the clutter of an increasingly-automated visual web. Your inventiveness, intentions, and most of all, your uniqueness matter. Some say that life is an artform, so let’s close with a quote from Cézanne today, who said it so well:

“A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.”

No matter how artificially “intelligent” we make the bots, the emotions are all on our side, ready to connect us with the people we care for and serve.

MozCon is returning in-person to Seattle August 7-8, 2023 and this year, we’re excited to bring the Future of Search to our stage. 

From networking with peers, hearing from industry leaders, and making new connections that can help grow your business or career, conferences offer so many benefits to attendees. You know that. Your peers know that. But how do you persuade the powers-that-be (aka your boss) that sending you is beneficial for your business? 

Don’t worry, we’ve got a plan. (And if you want to skip ahead to the letter template, here it is!)

Get the Template

How to make the case

Business competition is fiercer than ever. Only those who are able to shift tactics with the changing tides of marketing will be able to come out on top. And that’s exactly what MozCon is going to help you do. 

Covering everything a growing marketer needs (SEO, content, strategy, growth), MozCon delivers top-notch talks from hand-selected speakers over two days in August. 

There’s so much in store for you this year. Here’s just a sampling of what you can expect at this year’s MozCon:

Speakers and content

Our speakers are real practitioners and industry leaders. We work with them to ensure they deliver the best content and insights to the stage to set you up for a year of success. No sales pitches or talking heads here!

Networking

You work hard taking notes, learning new insights, and digesting all of that knowledge — that’s why we think you deserve a little fun. It’s your chance to decompress with fellow attendees and make new friends in the industry. We host exciting evening networking events that add to the value you’ll get from your day of education. Plus, our Birds of a Feather lunch tables allow you to connect with like-minded peers who share similar interests.

High-quality videos to share with your team

About a month or so after the conference, we release professionally edited videos of every presentation at the conference. Many of our ticket types include free access! Your colleagues won’t get to partake in the real-time experience(the #FOMO is real), but they will get a chance to learn everything you did. 

Great food on site 

We know that conference food isn’t typically worth mentioning, but MozCon is notorious for its cornucopia of tasty offerings.  

You can expect two meals a day and loads of snacks from local Seattle vendors — in the past we’ve featured a smorgasbord from the likes of Trophy cupcakes, KuKuRuZa popcorn, Starbucks’ Seattle Reserve cold brew.

Discounts for current customers 

Moz Pro, Moz Local, API, and STAT customers save big on their ticket cost, and there are discounts for groups of 10+ as well, so make sure to take advantage of savings where you can!

But of course, don’t take our word for it! There are some incredible resources available at your fingertips that tout the benefits of attending conferences:

2022 was my first MozCon! It was a great experience where I got to listen to thought leaders and peers on their individual approaches. The event spoiled us with awesome swag and great speakers while creating a safe space to facilitate deep discussions.

-Ray Martinez, Director of SEO – Archer Education

As a small business owner, attending MozCon was a big leap of faith for me (and a big investment!) I was so delighted to find there was a place for me at MozCon. The speakers were excellent- true experts who shared what doesn’t work as compellingly as what DOES. My fellow attendees were accessible, kind, and generous with their knowledge. Most importantly, I left with a list of clear tangible strategies for growing my business this year. I learned so much- and I’m so glad I went.

-Marguerite  Tacoma Real Estate Agent  MoveToTacoma.com

There are lots of conferences that marketing and SEO professionals can attend. MozCon provides extreme value through its high-quality speakers, entertaining events, delicious meals and snacks, and networking opportunities. If you had to choose just one conference to attend, you won’t go wrong choosing MozCon.

 – Jarrod Galm, SEO Manager, Wealth Enhancement Group

I came to MozCon expecting a handful of great takeaways and maybe some new SEO techniques. Instead, I was blown away multiple times over, made great connections, and I’m sharing a deck of takeaways with my team.

– Carly Johansen, Content Marketing Manager, Oregon State University Ecampus

MozCon 2022 was fantastic! Every session I attended was jam-packed full of actionable insights from speakers who really know their stuff. I left feeling invigorated, inspired and excited to put the things I’d learned into action

-Eloise West,  Senior Digital Marketing Strategist, Designzillas

This is my second in-person event (I went in 2019) and fourth overall. This is still a great conference even having more experience, and I noticed I pick up different things each time as my experience grows and I hear things in different ways. The networking opportunities are also invaluable, especially as I’m an in-house SEO with no team. I’ve learned a ton and have really grown as an SEO and heavily attribute a lot of that to MozCon. 

-Lauren Huffman, SEO Manager, Lulu and Georgia

Need a little more to get your boss on board? Check out some videos from years past to get a taste for the caliber of our speakers. 

Buy ticket, save money, get competitive marketing insights. Everyone wins!

MozCon is one unforgettable experience that lives and grows with you beyond just the days you spend attending the conference. And there’s no time like the present to pitch MozCon to your boss. If they’re still stuck on the “why”, let them know about our subscriber or group pricing tiers — you’ll save hundreds of dollars when you do. Just think of all the Keurigs you could get for that communal kitchen! 

Be sure to grab the letter template and make your case the easy way!

Get the Template

We love to talk about winning SEO tests, like those wonderful instances where you run an A/B test and you see positive impact. In today’s episode, though, Will is going to discuss the losing tests: those with negative results — or no results — where you couldn’t prove an impact. 

These test results are, in fact, where you can likely find the most valuable insights.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hi, Moz fans. My name is Will Critchlow. I’m the founder and CEO at SearchPilot. We run tons of SEO tests, and if you’ve ever seen me speak on one of these before or on a bigger stage, you have probably heard me talk about a lot of winning tests, those nice situations where you run an A/B test and you get an uplift and you get to celebrate. Today, we’re going to be talking about losing tests. So these can be the negative ones or the ineffective changes, the ones where you just couldn’t prove an impact in either direction.

So this is fundamentally that situation where you find an insight. It might be keyword research. It might be from technical auditing of the site, whatever it might be. You have a theory. You have a hypothesis or something that is going to benefit your website. You implement the change as a result, and you fall flat on your face. You fail spectacularly, and your test result data looks a little bit like this.

Now, this is actually quite an exaggerated case. A lot of the failures that we see are -2%, -3%, or just flat line, and those -2% and -3% type ones can be really hard to pick up without scientifically controlled testing, which is what we focus a lot of our time on, on really big websites. They can really add up. If you are continuously rolling out those little negative changes through the course of the year, it can really be a drag on your SEO program as a whole. But they can get lost. You roll out that change, and it can get lost in the noise, the seasonality, other sitewide changes, Google algorithm updates, things your competitors get up to. That’s what we’re trying to spot and avoid.

What can you learn? 

So what can we learn from losing tests, and when can they benefit us as a business? Well, one of the, perhaps, counterintuitive benefits is the drop in effort that you might be asking of your engineering team. If you have all these ideas and previously you’re asking your team to build all of them, but if you run tests and you find that some of your ideas were negative, some of them were ineffective and weren’t going to benefit you, you’re now only asking your product and engineering team to maintain the ones that turn out to have a positive SEO impact. We’ve seen that be up to an 80% drop in SEO tickets for engineering. So that’s one business case right there.

But, of course, sometimes your tests look like this, and so actually the business case is about avoiding those negative impacts on your website. 

Tactical examples

So I’ve got a couple of tactical examples that I thought would be good to run through that might be useful in your situations as well.

The first one is a case of removing SEO text. So we’ve seen many cases where think, say, a category page on an e-commerce website, for example. You’ve got a bunch of product listings, and then somewhere down at the bottom of the page, there’s a bit of copy. Maybe it’s in a div, seo_text. Maybe it’s a really small font, gray, not exactly white on a white background, but clearly not designed for human eyes. We have run some experiments where we had situations like that, with pretty poor-quality text on category pages. We tested removing it and actually saw a statistically significant drop in organic visibility, which is a shame, because we know that this isn’t high-quality text, we know it’s not where Google wants us to be, and yet removing it was a bad idea.

One of the things we can learn from that is say, firstly, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. You can’t just knee-jerk react to Google’s PR and all these kinds of things and say, “Well, best practices say this. Let’s just do it straightaway.” You can’t do that without testing because you might be hurting your website. But it does point to a direction of potential future improvement, because if having terrible text is better than no text, having good text might be even better. So one of the things that you benefit from with a losing test is you get to learn, and so you get to point the direction to some insights that might be positive for you in the future.

The other example I’ve got for you here, you might be wondering what on earth this is, and art is not my strong point. This is an Easter egg. Trust me, this is an Easter egg. We saw an example of a website, that operated across the whole of Europe, multiple different country/territory websites, testing adding seasonal offers. So in this case, it was about Easter travel, Easter breaks, Easter flights, those kinds of things. The keyword research had suggested that there was demand for this, that the audience is searching in this kind of way, and yet, adding those offers to the page was negative, and that was very surprising. What it turned out was going on here was that it was diluting the quality of that page for the things that were the bread and butter of those landing pages. So, yes, it was ranking better for some Easter travel-type related searches, but it was doing worse for the bulk of traffic of just trips to city name or whatever it might be, and the net impact was negative. That’s the kind of thing you can only pick up by searching.

So I hope you’ve enjoyed this little journey into losing SEO tests and what we can learn from them. My name is Will Critchlow. I’m at SearchPilot. You can find me on Twitter, @willcritchlow. Look forward to chatting to you soon. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

12 billion, 3 billion, 1 billion. That’s the number of searches made in some of the top alternative search engines monthly.

While Google still holds more than 80% of the market share, ignoring search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo can make you lose out on relevant traffic. So don’t limit yourself to Google’s algorithm as you plan the next year’s SEO strategy.

In order to grow in the digital economy, we have to diversify our efforts. What better way to do that than by making sure that you rank on all the top search engines relevant for your audience?

Generally, there’s two reasons why your audience would choose an alternative search engine over Google: geopolitical reasons and/or privacy concerns.

As such, I’ve categorized the search engines below by global market share and by data privacy.

Top alternative search engines by global market share

When analyzing the global desktop market share of search engines throughout the last decade, there are a few small but mighty search engines that stand out. These are:

1) Bing

2) Yahoo

3) Yandex

4) DuckDuckGo

5) Baidu

These are the engines you want to give extra consideration if you intend to expand internationally. They all have their own unique search algorithms that are in many ways as complex and developed as Google’s.

Why they matter and how to rank on them

If you’re like me a few years ago, a die-hard Apple fan remarkably repulsed by Microsoft’s products (I’ve now converted to the seamless team of PC), you might think prioritizing resources to optimize content for Bing or other engines is a waste of time. What I failed to consider then, and what you might be overlooking, is geographic segmentation.

Do you want to reach the American audience using voice search? Consider Bing.

Are you expanding into China? Check out Baidu.

Each search engine matters because of its unique user types. Regardless of how small that market share might look on a global scale, if there’s regional search volume from your target audience, it’s worth the optimization.

Let’s go through them one by one.

Bing and Yahoo

Since 2018, Yahoo is exclusively powered by Bing Search. So as long as you rank in Bing, you’ll rank in Yahoo.

Bing Search, in combination with Yahoo, is without a doubt the strongest player after Google. Together, they have more than 10% of the global market share for desktop.

Now, some say that Bing’s market share will increase due to mergers and acquisitions, while others argue for its decline due to the death of Internet Explorer.

Still, all Microsoft browsers, such as Microsoft Edge Legacy and Chromium-based Microsoft Edge, have Bing as the default search engine, making Bing Search the natural choice for Microsoft product users. Yahoo, which is powered by Bing Search, is the default search engine for Mozilla’s browser Firefox, adding billions of impressions to Bing’s search results each year.

If we look at the United States alone, Microsoft sites own over 18% of the market share.

This is much due to their partnership with Amazon, where all voice-activated searches on Amazon Echo and Alexa are made with Bing Search.

Microsoft also pushes Bing further by offering easy rewards for searches and more advanced image search capabilities than Google.

Although the algorithms differ, optimizing for Bing search results is not much different than optimizing for Google. With a bit of fine tuning, it’s more than possible to come up with a strategy that allows for high rankings on both.

To rank on Bing, and thus Yahoo, make sure to do the following:

1. List your business on Bing Places

Bing Places is the equivalent of Google My Business and is the fastest way to get your business ranking for local seo. Many even consider Bing Places to favor small business owners as Bing puts their information more prominently on display.

2. Upload an XML Sitemap using Bing’s Webmaster Tools

While the debate on how much sitemaps really do matter for Google SEO continues, uploading one with Bing’s Webmaster Tool for XML Sitemaps allows the algorithm to better categorize and manage your content, making it more visible and relevant to the search audience.

3. Match keywords in your content

Check that the exact keyword match can be found in your page titles, meta descriptions and overall content. It’s known that the impact of on-page tactics as a ranking factor is much greater in Bing than Google.

4. Keep your social media profiles up to date

Go social! Bing considers your social media presence more than any other search engine. The Webmaster Guidelines specifically states that Bing considers social signals from third-party platforms to rank your content. Bing might even extract certain information directly from your Facebook company page to your Bing Places display.

5. Use high-quality images to enhance your content

Bing’s image search is much more advanced than Google’s. If you want your landing page to rank, add high-quality design assets to showcase your offerings. If you want your blog to rank, attach too-long-to-read infographics to highlight your points. Like the one above.

Yandex

Second to Bing is Yandex, having a total of 1.5% of the market share in global desktop search.

While it looks a lot like Google, its algorithm is different in many ways. Most prominent is the way Yandex indexes pages. Unlike Google’s almost continuous indexation, Yandex indexes pages sporadically. That means that you might have to wait around for a while before your site shows up on Yandex.

Despite this, it is still possible to rank on Yandex. You just need to have a bit more patience.

While waiting for your site to be indexed, take a look at the following:

1. Focus on tags over internal site structure

According to The Ultimate Guide to Yandex SEO, your header tag, title tag and slug are way more important than your internal site structure. In fact, it was only recently that Yandex started to support hreflang tags. Before that, Yandex only allowed the <head> hreflang implementation.

2. Consider search intent to rank

Some argue that Yandex meets search intent better than Google. The modern ICS score, which replaced the Thematic Index Citation, is determined by how relevant a site is to the query. Yandex uses its own version of expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-A-T) test to determine relevance.

3. Eliminate toxic links

Many do not know this, but Yandex was actually the first search engine to roll out a link-based algorithm. Already in 2005, 7 years before Google’s Penguin algorithm, Yandex introduced the Nepot filter, which specifically looked at the impact of toxic link exchanges and spam links.

Baidu

With over 3 billion searches daily, Baidu is the Google of China. If you want to do business in China, it’s the place to be.

While the site is available worldwide, the site predominantly favors simplified Chinese. So before taking any other steps, hire a native speaker to help you along the way. To win at global, you have to ditch translations.

Here’s a few steps to get your content ranking.

1. Localize your keywords and content appropriately

As with all multilingual SEO, you need to work with a native language expert to ensure proper keyword localization and content optimization. If your site experiences high bounce rates, Baidu will tank your rankings immediately. As with any search experience, localization matters.

2. Position relevant content and keywords to the top of the page

Baidu favors a completely opposite layout than the Westernized one. The sooner you get to the point the better. Therefore, it is important to position your keywords as early as possible in the text and introduce all relevant content already in the top of the page to rank.

3. Obtain a verification level and get certified

By registering and paying a small fee you can obtain a verification level to improve your domain authority and rankings on Baidu. If you want to secure top ratings, you can get certified and obtain an ICP license, which is much more difficult than getting verified.

Top alternative search engines by data privacy

While most of the search engines mentioned above are tied to big corporations or political forces, global initiatives are setting the stage for more privacy-focused search engines. Among these is DuckDuckGo, the forefront runner with over 130 billion searches processed since launch.

Why they matter and how to rank on them

In many ways, the movement is a response to Google’s invasiveness on privacy. Many are fed up with how they are capitalizing on personal data and controlling the narrative with targeted search.

On a macro scale, the European Union continues to protect data privacy with strict GDPR regulations and the California Consumer Privacy Act indicates similar trends for Americans.

From a micro perspective, documentaries such as The Great Hack shine a light on how global companies monetize on personal data. As a result, privacy-safe search engines continue to rise.

If you’re working for an innovative SaaS startup, there’s a high chance your ideal customer persona is using one of these search engines.

Let’s go through how you rank on DuckDuckGo and two alternative equivalents.

DuckDuckGo

Screenshot of duckduckgo.com, November 2022

DuckDuckGo aims to make your search experience as simple and true to its cause as possible, i.e. no tracking for personalized search results and filter bubbles. Instead it uses semantic search to determine search intent for your queries from over 400 sources.

Consequently, this attracts tech-savvy experts with a lower bounce rate. Once they commit to a search, they stay.

Here’s how to optimize for it:

1. Sharpen Your User Experience

UX continues to make an impact on SEO, not to mention for DuckDuckGo. Make your content easily scannable and stay away from intrusive pop ups that harm your users’ experience and ease of navigation.

2. Focus on High-Quality Backlinks

As with any SEO, high-quality backlinks play a huge role for ranking. If you already have a solid backlink profile from your Google strategy, you should be good to go. If your backlink profile has a high level of toxicity, do some cleansing.

3. Rethink Local SEO

Since there’s no location tracking available for searches, location-specific searches such as “services near me” don’t work. If you like to rank for these types of searches, include a specific location in your keyword strategy. Otherwise, you won’t be able to optimize for local seo.

Startpage

Startpage could be my personal favorite among the alternative search engines. It basically is Google without the tracking.

And while many consider DuckDuckGo to be the forefront runner of the privacy-focused search movement, many forget how Startpage ‘blazed the trail in 2006’. Offering a search experience without IP recording or tracking back when it was more or less unheard of. Now, it is the common denominator among all privacy-safe search engines.

So, how do you rank in Startpage? Simple. You rank in Google.

SwissCows

There are many more privacy-safe alternatives to search engines than the two mentioned above. Perhaps one without equal is SwissCows – a search engine that prides itself on being the only family-friendly, privacy-safe semantic search engine available on the web.

This means that any intrusive search results, like adult entertainment or offensive content, is naturally censored from the search results. At the same time, they never store any data nor track user specific information.

SwissCows SERPs bring up organic results and paid ads directly from Bing so in order to rank in SwissCows, you need to rank in Bing. Just make sure to omit any content that’s not PG-13.

What do they all have in common?

In the end, none of these alternative search engines can replace Google. As an SEO, I’ll never advise starting out with anything other than a Google strategy.

But when you are ready to branch out and extend your reach, give these alternatives a try. Analyze where your target audience hangs out and optimize thereafter.

Many of the privacy-focused search engines require little optimization as they pull their search results directly from other sources anyways. Simply do a quick check to see how you rank on each one.

And who knows, perhaps Microsoft will continue to steal more of the global search landscape. If that happens, you’ll be there — ranking in first position, ready to reap the rewards of your diversified efforts in an ever-changing search landscape.

MozCon is bringing the Future of Search to Seattle this August 7-8, and we’re excited to announce the return of our annual call for up-and-coming community speakers!

Every year, we take great pride in reserving space on our stage exclusively for new voices. Are you the person that everyone in your network looks to for digital marketing advice? Perhaps you’ve been honing your voice on podcasts or blogs, all the while dreaming of stepping onto the big stage to share your innovative ideas? Now’s your chance to submit your pitch for the opportunity to join industry leaders on the MozCon stage in front of 1,500 of your peers. (No pressure!)

Not sure what a community speaker is?

At MozCon, we have a speaker selection committee that identifies practitioners at the top of their professional field with a mean speaking game. But these spots are by invite only, and we know the community is bursting at the seams with hidden gems ready to share groundbreaking research, hot tips, and SEO tests that drive results.

Cue our MozCon community speaker program!

We’ve reserved two 15-minute community speaker slots throughout our conference for fresh faces to shine on the big stage. We encourage anyone in the SEO community to submit their best and most exciting presentation ideas for a chance to be selected as a community speaker at MozCon. Not only are these sessions incredibly well-received by our attendees, but they’re also a fantastic way to get your foot in the door when it comes to the SEO speaking circuit.

Interested in pitching your own idea? Read on for everything you need to know:

How to submit

To submit a pitch, fill out the community speaker submission form. Only submit one talk! We want the one you’re most passionate about. Talks must be related to digital marketing and be a topic you can cover in 15 minutes.

[Pro tip: Keep it actionable and be sure to include 3-5 key learning outcomes the audience will come away with from your session in the pitch.]

Submissions close on Tuesday, February 28th at 5pm PDT — no exceptions!

If chosen, you’ll be required to present your talk in person at MozCon in Seattle, WA on August 7-8, 2023. Incomplete submissions will not be considered, and all decisions are final. All speakers must adhere to the MozCon Code of Conduct.

Submit my pitch!

If you submit a pitch, you’ll hear back from us regardless of your acceptance status, so please be patient until you hear back — we’ll work hard to make our decisions as quickly as we can! Please note that due to the volume of submissions we typically receive, we’re unable to provide specific feedback on individual applications.

What do speakers receive?

As a community speaker you will receive:

• 15 minutes on the MozCon stage for a keynote-style presentation

• A free ticket to MozCon (we can issue a refund or transfer if you’ve already purchased yours)

• Travel and accommodations during MozCon

• Support and feedback as you build your final presentation deck to make sure you deliver the talk of your life on our stage.

• And a few more surprises…

How we select our speakers

We have an internal committee of experienced Moz team members, speakers and subject matter experts that review every pitch. We analyze each topic to make sure there’s no overlap and to confirm that it’s a good fit for our audience and conference focus – for 2023, our content theme is The Future of Search.

Next, we look at the entirety of the pitch to help us get a comprehensive idea of what to expect from your talk on the MozCon stage and how it might be received by the audience. This is where links to previous decks, content, and videos of past presentations are helpful (but aren’t required).

Here’s how to make your pitch stand out:

• Keep your pitch focused on digital marketing. SEO topics are great but we also love topics that compliment or sit adjacent to SEO. The more actionable the pitch, the better.

• Be focused and concise. What value does your talk provide? We want to hear the actual takeaways our audience will be learning about and why it’s important — not just a vague reference to them. Remember, we receive a ton of pitches, so the more clearly you can explain the tactical steps and learning objectives for the audience, the better you’ll stand out.

• Do your research! Review the topics presented at past MozCons, on the Moz Blog and in our Whiteboard Friday videos for a sense of what resonates with our audience— we’re looking for fresh, new presentations that round out our agenda to add to the stage.

• Brush up on how to prepare for speaking.

• No pitches will be evaluated in advance, so please don’t ask 🙂

• Using social media to lobby your pitch won’t help. Instead, put your time and energy into the actual pitch itself!

• Linking to a previous example of a slide deck or presentation isn’t required, but it does help the committee.

Leading up to MozCon

If your pitch is selected, the MozCon team is here to support you along the way. It’s our goal to make sure this is your best talk to date, whether it’s your first time under those bright stage lights or you’re a seasoned speaker who feels perfectly at home in front of a big crowd. We’ll answer any questions you may have and work with you to deliver a talk you’ll be proud of. Here are just a handful of ways that we’re here to help:

• Topic refinement

• Helping with your presentation title and description

• Reviewing your presentation outlines and drafts

• Providing plenty of tips around best practices — specifically with the MozCon stage and audience in mind

• Comprehensive show guide

• Being available to listen to you practice your talk

• Reviewing your final deck

• A full stage tour on the Sunday before MozCon to meet our A/V crew, see your presentation on the big screen, and get a feel for the show

• An amazing 15-person A/V team to support your presentation every second it’s on the big screen and beyond

We’ve got our fingers crossed for you. Good luck!

Submit my pitch!

In this week’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Mozzer Meghan Pahinui takes you through the process we use to implement customer feedback, in the hopes that you can take it and apply it to your own content creation and maintenance strategies.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. Welcome back to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Meghan, and I’m on the Learning team here at Moz. Today, I’m going to talk to you about harnessing the power of feedback when it comes to content iteration.

So one of the projects that I contribute to in my position here is taking care of our customer help center, which we call the Help Hub. If you’re not familiar with the Help Hub, this is where we house all of our how-to guides, tips and tricks, workflows, and troubleshooting guides for the Moz tools. I do encourage you to check it out if you have some time later or if you have questions about the tools.

A key part of maintaining the Help Hub includes gathering, monitoring, and implementing customer feedback, and this is a crucial component for us. Why is that? Well, because we want to be sure that we’re providing quality, helpful content to our customers. In addition, this process allows our customers to find answers to their questions quickly and easily at any time. It does take some of the lift of our Help team as well by reducing the number of tickets that they receive asking these very questions. So I’m going to go ahead and take you through the process that we use to implement customer feedback, in hopes that you can take it and apply it to your own content creation and maintenance strategies.

Gather data

So what is the first step? Well, first, we gather data, because we don’t know what feedback people have if we don’t ask for it, right? So if you are familiar with the Moz Help Hub, you may have seen our surveys that are at the bottom of all of our articles. Here, we ask if the article was helpful, and we do this with a series of emojis that indicate if it met their needs or not. If the customer indicates that it did not, they do have the option to enter a comment letting us know why.

When it comes to gathering data on your own content, you may opt to add a survey like this, or there are plenty of other ways that you can start to gather data to work with. So if you have a social media presence, you can start keeping track of feedback there or ask your followers directly for insight into what they find most helpful and least helpful about your content. Or you can send a survey out via email, ask your customer service team for feedback, look at customer emails and tickets to see what questions the customers may be asking, which you’re not currently answering on your site. We do that as well. We work closely with our Help team to ensure that everything that we can answer is answered in the Help Hub.

Analyze

So once you have that data to work with, it’s time to analyze it. So we review both vote counts, meaning helpful versus not helpful, as well as comments here at Moz. When comments are left, we look to see if there’s an opportunity to implement a change in that guide based on the feedback. Additionally, if we’re seeing a trend in votes for a particular page or section, we will take a look at how we can improve or reword, update the content to better serve the customer.

One thing to keep in mind during this step, however, is that not all feedback you receive will be actionable, and that’s okay. A few questions that I like to ask myself when looking at feedback for an article are: Was the customer on the right page to find their answer? If not, how did they get to this page? Is there an opportunity to help them find their way to the correct page, whether that’s through links or additional resources, etc.? Is there a question that I can answer on this page, or should this question have its own dedicated page? Sometimes we end up writing whole new guides based on feedback that we get from customers. What was the customer trying to achieve? How did this guide fall short in helping them achieve that goal?

Implement change

So now that we’ve identified areas for improvement, it’s time to implement changes to that content. So this may be as simple as adding an FAQ to answer a specific question or as involved as writing a new workflow or troubleshooting guide, as I mentioned previously. Just as an example, some specific things, some specific changes that we implemented based on customer feedback include adding quick links to all of our pages for easier navigation, creating separate pages for each of our keyword metrics, and building out multiple workflows based on questions that customers have asked.

This step in the process may look different depending on the type of content that you create and the type of feedback that you receive. For example, if you primarily work in creating video content and you receive feedback that customers wish the videos had subtitles, you may opt to implement those on past videos as well as any that you release moving forward. However, if you have a blog or a newsletter or some other type of long-form content, it may not make sense to use resources to update older pieces of content. Instead, you may opt to start implementing those changes in your content moving forward. It may be a combination of those. Maybe you have some really popular articles that can be updated from the past and start implementing those changes in your content moving forward.

Track results

So after implementing your changes, you want to be sure to track your results. We track our votes and survey responses regularly to help monitor for update opportunities and to see if the responses have changed for that particular piece of content.

Finally, we start the cycle all over again, gathering more data, analyzing it, implementing changes, and then tracking the results.

Implementing this process here at Moz has allowed us to see a correlation between changes that we’ve made to the Help Hub content and the number of helpful votes that we receive. We treat this part of our content library as a living document that is always evolving to not only account for tool changes but also to take into account customer feedback. Gathering feedback on your content can help to identify trends in what your customers are engaging with and how you can further improve your offerings moving forward. That’s key. You want to always be improving.

It can also help to identify resources that may need updating or ideas for future content. For example, if you have a blog post about how to bake a cake and your readers are commenting that they don’t know how to pick the right kind of pan for the recipe, there may be an opportunity to publish a new blog post about the best types of cake pans. Or if you publish help guides, like myself, if a customer says they couldn’t find the answer to their question in that article, there may be an opportunity to look into questions like the ones that we outlined earlier in our analyze step. What are they trying to achieve? How did they end up on this page? How can I help them to reach their goal?

I hope that you found this helpful and that you’re ready to get out there and start harnessing the power of feedback. Thank you so much, Moz fans. We’ll see you next time.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

We’re back with another SEO recap with Tom Capper! As you’ve probably noticed, ChatGPT has taken the search world by storm. But does GPT-3 mean the end of SEO as we know it, or are there ways to incorporate the AI model into our daily work?

Tom tries to tackle this question by demonstrating how he plans to use ChatGPT, along with other natural language processing systems, in his own work.

Be sure to check out the commentary on ChatGPT from our other Moz subject matter experts, Dr. Pete Meyers and Miriam Ellis:

• ChatGPT Won’t Replace Google Search (Yet)

• 5 Times ChatGPT Steered Me Wrong in Local SEO

Video Transcription

Hello, I’m Tom Capper from Moz, and today I want to talk about how I’m going to use ChatGPT and NLP, natural language processing apps in general in my day-to-day SEO tasks. This has been a big topic recently. I’ve seen a lot of people tweeting about this. Some people saying SEO is dead. This is the beginning of the end. As always, I think that’s maybe a bit too dramatic, but there are some big ways that this can be useful and that this will affect SEOs in their industry I think.

The first question I want to ask is, “Can we use this instead of Google? Are people going to start using NLP-powered assistants instead of search engines in a big way?”

So just being meta here, I asked ChatGPT to write a song about Google’s search results being ruined by an influx of AI content. This is obviously something that Google themselves is really concerned about, right? They talked about it with the helpful content update. Now I think the fact that we can be concerned about AI content ruining search results suggests there might be some problem with an AI-powered search engine, right?

No, AI powered is maybe the wrong term because, obviously, Google themselves are at some degree AI powered, but I mean pure, AI-written results. So for example, I stole this from a tweet and I’ve credited the account below, but if you ask it, “What is the fastest marine mammal,” the fastest marine mammal is the peregrine falcon. That is not a mammal.

Then it mentions the sailfish, which is not a mammal, and marlin, which is not a mammal. This is a particularly bad result. Whereas if I google this, great, that is an example of a fast mammal. We’re at least on the right track. Similarly, if I’m looking for a specific article on a specific web page, I’ve searched Atlantic article about the declining quality of search results, and even though clearly, if you look at the other information that it surfaces, clearly this has consumed some kind of selection of web pages, it’s refusing to acknowledge that here.

Whereas obviously, if I google that, very easy. I can find what I’m looking for straightaway. So yeah, maybe I’m not going to just replace Google with ChatGPT just yet. What about writing copy though? What about I’m fed up of having to manually write blog posts about content that I want to rank for or that I think my audience want to hear about?

So I’m just going to outsource it to a robot. Well, here’s an example. “Write a blog post about the future of NLP in SEO.” Now, at first glance, this looks okay. But actually, when you look a little bit closer, it’s a bluff. It’s vapid. It doesn’t really use any concrete examples.

It doesn’t really read the room. It doesn’t talk about sort of how our industry might be affected more broadly. It just uses some quick tactical examples. It’s not the worst article you could find. I’m sure if you pulled a teenager off the street who knew nothing about this and asked them to write about it, they would probably produce something worse than this.

But on the other hand, if you saw an article on the Moz blog or on another industry credible source, you’d expect something better than this. So yeah, I don’t think that we’re going to be using ChatGPT as our copywriter right away, but there may be some nuance, which I’ll get to in just a bit. What about writing descriptions though?

I thought this was pretty good. “Write a meta description for my Moz blog post about SEO predictions in 2023.” Now I could do a lot better with the query here. I could tell it what my post is going to be about for starters so that it could write a more specific description. But this is already quite good. It’s the right length for a meta description. It covers the bases.

It’s inviting people to click. It makes it sound exciting. This is pretty good. Now you’d obviously want a human to review these for the factual issues we talked about before. But I think a human plus the AI is going to be more effective here than just the human or at least more time efficient. So that’s a potential use case.

What about ideating copy? So I said that the pure ChatGPT written blog post wasn’t great. But one thing I could do is get it to give me a list of subtopics or subheadings that I might want to include in my own post. So here, although it is not the best blog post in the world, it has covered some topics that I might not have thought about.

So I might want to include those in my own post. So instead of asking it “write a blog post about the future of NLP in SEO,” I could say, “Write a bullet point list of ways NLP might affect SEO.” Then I could steal some of those, if I hadn’t thought of them myself, as potential topics that my own ideation had missed. Similarly you could use that as a copywriter’s brief or something like that, again in addition to human participation.

My favorite use case so far though is coding. So personally, I’m not a developer by trade, but often, like many SEOs, I have to interact with SQL, with JavaScript, with Excel, and these kinds of things. That often results in a lot of googling from first principles for someone less experienced in those areas.

Even experienced coders often find themselves falling back to Stack Overflow and this kind of thing. So here’s an example. “Write an SQL query that extracts all the rows from table2 where column A also exists as a row in table1.” So that’s quite complex. I’ve not really made an effort to make that query very easy to understand, but the result is actually pretty good.

It’s a working piece of SQL with an explanation below. This is much quicker than me figuring this out from first principles, and I can take that myself and work it into something good. So again, this is AI plus human rather than just AI or just human being the most effective. I could get a lot of value out of this, and I definitely will. I think in the future, rather than starting by going to Stack Overflow or googling something where I hope to see a Stack Overflow result, I think I would start just by asking here and then work from there.

That’s all. So that’s how I think I’m going to be using ChatGPT in my day-to-day SEO tasks. I’d love to hear what you’ve got planned. Let me know. Thanks.

In a recent study, we found that our pillar pages are magnets for links, organic traffic, and newsletter subscribers — especially compared to regular blog posts. Here are the results that both types of SEO content generated over the course of a year:

Do these results mean you should ditch your blog strategy in favor of pillar pages? Not exactly.

Here’s the catch: You really can’t have one without the other, and it all comes down to content mapping. I’ll explain exactly what I mean in this article.

What is a pillar page?

A pillar page is a piece of content that comprehensively covers a broad topic. Pillar page — also sometimes referred to as hub and spoke — content weaves together a wide range of relevant subtopics (spokes), organizes them all in one place (hub), and effectively showcases your subject matter expertise for the broad topic.

Pillar page content should be easy to navigate for readers looking to learn — at a high level — about a particular topic, but should also offer relevant resources for them to dive deeper. 

It’s kind of like the choose-your-own-adventure of content marketing.

Topical authority: why it’s important

When it comes to content creation for SEO and digital marketing, you don’t want to create content around any old topic. Instead, you want to reinforce your brand’s topical authority with every new piece of content you create (be it a blog, a pillar page, an eBook, etc.).

Let’s put it this way: If you’re in the business of selling mechanical keyboards, it doesn’t make sense to publish a blog article about the best recipes for a summer BBQ. Unless you’re recommending that your customers grill and eat their mechanical keyboards, which is (highly) unlikely.

Instead, it’s more helpful to your brand — and your audience — if you cover topics related to mechanical keyboards, like:

• What is a mechanical keyboard?

• Mechanical keyboards vs. regular keyboards.

• Custom mechanical keyboards.

• How to transition to a mechanical keyboard.

• Pros and cons of a mechanical keyboard.

By covering as many topics related to mechanical keyboards as possible, you’re building a foundation of informational content that tells search engines: “Hey, I know a lot about mechanical keyboards!”

And the more content you have that starts to rank for important search terms related to mechanical keyboards, the more likely searchers will see you as an authority on the subject. Ideally, they will start coming back to your content when they need to learn more about this specific topic.

Pillar pages + blogs = a match made in content marketing heaven

A well-executed and organized pillar page is one of the best ways to showcase to your audience (and search engines) that you have topical authority in a specific area. Blog posts help you achieve topical authority by allowing you to cover a wide range of relevant subtopics in great detail, and pillar pages organize all of that content into a nice, user-friendly package.

Let’s take a look at this tactic in action.

We built our content marketing guide as a pillar page, which allowed us to cover a slew of subtopics related to the broader topic of content marketing, all in one piece of collateral. 

All of these subtopics are organized into sections on the page, with a hyperlinked table of contents at the top to allow readers to pick and choose exactly what they’d like to learn about:

Then, throughout the page, we offer readers the opportunity to go deeper and learn more about each subtopic by linking to relevant blog content:

What is content mapping?

A pillar page is a great tactic if you’ve got a lot of existing blog content all focused on a particular parent topic. It’s one of our favorite ways at Brafton to repurpose and repromote our blogs.

But you can also create a pillar page with all brand-new content — it’ll just take more research, planning, and production time to complete.

Enter: content mapping.

Content mapping is the process of assessing your target audience, understanding what they are trying to achieve, and helping them along that journey with branded educational and commercial content. Its scope can span the entirety of your content marketing strategy or a single piece of pillar page content.

Why content mapping matters in content marketing

The planning (or content mapping) of a pillar page is just as important as the research done to choose the correct keyword to target for your business.

Pillar pages are kind of like the books of the marketing world. If you were an expert birder, for example, you wouldn’t set out to write a book about bird-watching without doing any research. Especially if you’ve spent a lot of time writing and publishing articles about bird-watching on your blog. You’d want to understand a few things before starting that book, like:

1. Which of my blog posts generated the most interest from new and returning readers? (i.e. pages with the most new and returning visitors, as seen in your web analytics tool).

2. Which blogs kept readers coming back for more? (i.e. pages with the most newsletter subscriptions, or the best newsletter subscription rates).

3. Which blogs did my industry peers find most useful? (i.e. pages with the greatest number of high-quality referring domains and backlinks).

These questions can be answered by looking through your web analytics tools, such as Google Analytics and Moz Pro.

You’d also want to understand what the competition looks like before you spend dozens of hours writing thousands of words to fill a book.

You’d want to answer questions, like:

1. What do my competitors’ books on bird-watching look like? (i.e. the types of bird-watching subtopics the page 1 results cover).

2. What does Google think searchers want to see when they search for bird-watching? (i.e. the types of content that are found on page 1 for your target keyword — and surprise! it might not be books).

3. How long and detailed are my competitors’ books? (i.e. the level of complexity and comprehensiveness of the content ranking on page 1).

These questions can be answered by manually reviewing relevant SERPs and utilizing TF-IDF tools like Clearscope or MarketMuse to understand the breadth of subtopics and types of content ranking on the first page.

Once you understand which of your content performs best and which content Google and other search engines prefer to rank highly for your target keyword, you can start piecing together a plan for your pillar page.

A note about internal linking

Before we dive into the how-to portion of this piece, we should also acknowledge the importance of internal linking to this whole process.

And I’m not just talking about throwing in a link to a related product/service at the end of the page and calling it a day. The internal linking structure of your pillar page is literally the glue that holds the whole thing together. It helps readers easily navigate to related resources to continue learning from your brand. And it helps search engines understand the relationship between your pillar page content and the additional content you’re highlighting on the page.

But when it comes to internal linking, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

Including too many internal links throughout your content can cause a frustrating user experience or look spammy, so use caution and make sure the only internal linking you do on the page is extremely relevant to the parent topic.

If you’re unsure whether or not you’ve got too many internal links on the page, you can run it through Moz’s On-Page Grader tool, which automatically counts the number of links on your page and flags if you’ve got too many.

Tip: Keep in mind that this tool will count ALL links found on the page, including those in your main navigation and footer, so the “Too Many Links” warning could be a false positive.

As Moz explains: Google recommends you don’t go over 100 internal links per page, because it can dilute the SEO value sent from the pillar page to the linked pages, and it can also make it more challenging for users and crawlers to navigate all of the content.

Two data-led ways to map out content for a pillar page

There are a couple of different ways to approach the construction of this type of content, but they each rely on organic search data to lead the way.

1. Planning a pillar page and related resources (all from scratch)

Let’s pretend you don’t have any prior content created about a particular topic. You’re basically starting from scratch. Let’s also assume the topic you’ve selected is both core and commercially valuable to your business, and that your domain realistically has a chance of ranking on page 1 for that keyword.

Let’s say you’re a pet food company and one of your main products is cat dental treats. Once you’ve determined that this is the exact keyword you want to target (“cat dental treats”), it’s time to start your research.

Step 1: Manually inspect SERP to understand searcher intent

First, we’ll start by manually inspecting the first SERP for this keyword, and answering the following questions:

1. What types of content are on the first page of results?

2. Why are people searching for “cat dental treats”?

By answering these two questions in our SERP analysis, we’ll make sure that our plan for creating a pillar page to rank actually makes sense and it’s what searchers want to see on the SERP. We’ll also better understand all the reasons behind why someone might search this keyword (and we can then address those reasons in the content we create).

So let’s answer these questions:

Question 1: What types of content are on the first page of results?

Answer 1: The first SERP includes a variety of product ads, a People Also Ask section, and a selection of organic blogs and product pages.

Question 2: Why are people searching for “cat dental treats”?

Answer 2: From a quick analysis of the SERP, we can deduce that people want to know why and how cat dental treats are important to a cat’s health, and they also want to know which cat dental treats work best. Perhaps most importantly, it’s highly likely that they plan to purchase cat dental treats for their furry companion(s) in the near future.

Step 2: Select related keyword ideas for blog content

Since you don’t just want to create a pillar page for just the primary keyword, you also want to pinpoint a selection of related subtopics to be written as blog content.

For this part of the process, head over to your keyword research tool, plug in your target keyword and (with an eye for topics that you’re well-suited to cover), jot down a list of keywords and phrases.

Here’s our list of potential blog topics:

• Best cat dental treats.

• How do cat dental treats work?

• What to look for in cat dental treats.

• Do cat dental treats work?

• Can cat dental treats replace brushing?

• Vet recommended cat dental treats.

• Grain-free cat dental treats.

Step 3: Choose subtopics to cover in your pillar page content

Next, you’ll want to review the subtopics mentioned in the top ranking results. While this process can be done manually (by clicking into each result on the SERP and jotting down the topics mentioned), a TF-IDF tool like MarketMuse makes this part of the process much quicker:

These TF-IDF tools analyze the top 10-20 results for your target keyword and automatically present the common subtopics mentioned in each piece. This gives you a very good understanding of what you’ll also need to cover in your piece to compete for a top-ranking spot.

Here’s the list of subtopics we’ll want to cover in this pillar page, based on our MarketMuse data:

• Cat dental treats.

• Clean teeth.

• Purina dentalife.

• Feline greenies.

• Fresh breath.

• Natural ingredients.

• Veterinary oral health council.

• Best cat dental treats.

• Artificial flavors.

• Cats dental health.

Step 4: Create your outline and plan content

Now it’s time to connect the dots from your research. The best way to do this is to start by structuring your pillar page outline, and then going back in and filling in the areas where you want to create supporting blog content.

Here’s an example of what the end result might look like:

H1: The Complete Guide to Cat Dental Treats: For a Fresh-Breath Feline Friend

H2: What are cat dental treats and how do they work?

• Topics to cover: Cat dental treats
• Blog post to support section:
  Title: How Cat Dental Treats Work (& Why Your Kitty Needs Them)
  Keyword: how do cat dental treats work

H2: What are the benefits of cat dental treats?

• Topics to cover: Clean teeth, fresh breath
• Blog post to support section:
  Title: Do Cat Dental Treats Really Work? (Here’s What The Experts Say)
  Keyword: do cat dental treats work

H2: Are cat dental treats an acceptable alternative to brushing?

• Topics to cover: Cats dental health
• Blog post to support section:
  Title: Cat Dental Treats Vs Brushing: Everything You Need To Know
  Keyword: can cat dental treats replace brushing

H2: Do vets recommend using cat dental treats?

• Topics to cover: Veterinary oral health council
• Blog post to support section:
  Title: Vets Recommend Using Cat Dental Treats — Here’s Why
  Keyword: vet recommended cat dental treats

H2: The best cat dental treats to try

• Topics to cover: Purina dentalife, Feline greenies, natural ingredients, artificial flavors.
• Blog post to support section:
  Title: 5 Of The Best Cat Dental Treats & Why We Love Them
  Keyword: best cat dental treats
• Blog post #2 to support section:
  Title: What To Look For In Cat Dental Treats
  Keyword: what to look for in cat dental treats

Creating an outline for a pillar page isn’t easy, but once laid out, it helps us understand the content that needs to be produced to bring the whole thing to life.

Here is our list of content to create (based on our outline):

1. Pillar page: The Complete Guide to Cat Dental Treats: For a Fresh-Breath Feline Friend

2. Blog #1: How Cat Dental Treats Work (& Why Your Kitty Needs Them)

3. Blog #2: Do Cat Dental Treats Really Work? (Here’s What The Experts Say)

4. Blog #3: Cat Dental Treats Vs Brushing: Everything You Need To Know

5. Blog #4: Vets Recommend Using Cat Dental Treats — Here’s Why

6. Blog #5: 5 Of The Best Cat Dental Treats & Why We Love Them

7. Blog #6: What To Look For In Cat Dental Treats

The best way to tackle this list of content is to create and publish the six blog posts first, then once they are live, you can write the pillar page content, placing hyperlinks to the supporting blog posts directly in the copy.

2. Planning a pillar page from top performing content

For this next method, let’s say you already have a ton of published content about a particular topic, and you’d like to reuse and repromote that content within a pillar page dedicated to that topic.

All of the steps in the previous process apply, but for Step 2 (Select Related Keyword Ideas for Blog Content), do the following:

First, you’ll want to understand which of your existing pieces generates the most interest from your audience. Let’s use our web analytics data for this. In this example, we’ll look at Google Search Console data because it shows the actual search performance of our website content.

Let’s use the topic of “content creation” as our desired pillar page keyword. Search for the query in Google Search Console (choose the “Queries containing” option): 

Pull all of the pages currently generating impressions and clicks from terms containing your topic, placing those with the highest clicks and impressions at the top of your list. Here’s what this might look like: 

As you can see, most of the content we’ve created that also ranks for keywords containing “content creation” is blog content. These will be highly useful as related resources on our pillar page.

Now, go back to your TF-IDF tool and select the subtopics related to “content creation” that you want to cover in your pillar page. Example:

• Social media content

• Content creation tool

• Content creators

• Content strategy

• Content creation process

Finally, map your existing blog content to those “content creation” subtopics. The initial mapping may look something like this:

You may not be able to map each blog perfectly to the subtopic you’re covering in your pillar page, but that’s  OK. What’s important is that you’re providing readers with relevant content (where applicable) and that content, as you’ve seen in your Search Console data, is already proven to perform well with your organic search audience.

Pillar page planning templates and resources

Pillar pages take an incredible amount of time and planning to execute, but they are worth every penny.

Here’s an example of the success we saw after producing one of our more recent pillar pages, “How to Rank on Google:”

Here’s a template of the outline used to bring the page to life (and you can use it for your own pillar page). Just make a copy and off you go. Good luck!

Whether it’s a new year, new team or the same year, same team, it’s important to set yourself up for success. Every team has their own unique challenges when it comes to productivity and standardizing processes, but there are definitely a few steps you can take to mitigate them.

Before launching into a new project, new year, or new process, be sure everyone on your team has the tool access they need and is ready to tackle any task that comes their way. To that end, here are seven steps to get your team ready for a productive year using the Moz suite of tools!

1. Verify who manages your account (and subscription)

When it comes to ensuring things go smoothly, a critical step is knowing who manages, or owns, your Moz account. Account owners are able to manage subscriptions, add seated users, access invoices, update payment methods, and more.

So why is this step one on our list? When it comes to team success, it’s imperative to know who to reach out to when there’s an issue. For example, if you need to upgrade your subscription level or purchase add-ons, you will need to know who on your team is able to take care of those changes. Or, if you have a new team member who needs to be onboarded with the Moz tools, the account owner will need to add them as a seated user on your account.

Touch base with your team and verify who has owner access to your Moz subscription. If you’re not sure if you have owner access or not, log into your Moz account and head to Account and Billing. If you are the subscription owner, you’ll see your Moz Pro subscription, along with pricing and renewal date, listed under Moz Pro.

From the Account & Billing section of your account, if you do not see the price and renewal date for the subscription and you see Shared Subscriptions as a view option, this indicates you are a seated user on the account and do not have access to subscription management or seated user management.

2. Add seats to your account

Ensuring your team has access to the tools they need is imperative when it comes to setting them up for success. Adding seated users to your subscription allows them to customize the types of emails they receive, which Campaigns they follow, interact in the Q&A forum, and sign up for Moz Academy courses. All around, it’s a great idea for each person to have their own login and tool access.

Once you know who is managing your Moz Pro subscription, be sure to add your teammates as seated users. Only the owner of the account can add seated users, so if you’re not in charge of your subscription, be sure to reach out to the owner to get those teammates added. Additionally, if you don’t already have one in place, this would be a great time to define a process for requesting the addition and removal of seated users from your account.

You can add seated users to your subscription at any time via the Manage Seats section of Account & Billing.

3. Check your subscription limits

It’s a good idea to get in the habit of regularly checking your subscription limits. Are you close to maxing out your tracked keywords limit? Are you making more Link Explorer queries? Or maybe you’re nearing the top end of your Campaign limit? By keeping an eye on your subscription limits and how you’re using them, you can stay on top of your team’s needs throughout the year. That way, when it’s time to onboard a new client or do a deep dive into competitive research, you’re not scrambling to make changes to your subscription.

A quick reminder here: only the owner of the account can upgrade and/or purchase add-ons for your subscription. Just like with adding seats, this would be the perfect time to outline a procedure for requesting and implementing subscription changes that accounts for necessary budget approval timelines.

To check your subscription limits for your Moz Pro Campaigns, head to the Manage Your Campaigns screen. Your limits (also known as allowances), and how much you’re using of each, will be noted at the top of the page.

4. Follow (or unfollow) campaigns

Sharing a subscription with multiple team members may mean having multiple Campaigns. And Campaigns may be set up for different clients, markets, or tasks based on your team’s responsibilities and projects. When it comes to staying productive and keeping on task, you may opt to adjust which Campaigns you get emails for each week. Your current project may not require you to stay up to speed with your colleague’s client rankings, or you may be jumping in to help out with site audits of a high-value client while a teammate is out of the office. Regardless of the situation, be sure you and your team are taking advantage of the ability to customize which Campaigns you follow and, as a result, receive emails for.

In Moz Pro, following a Campaign means you will receive insight and update emails from the tool on a regular basis. You can follow and unfollow Campaigns from either the Manage Your Campaigns screen or from your Campaign Settings. From the Manage Your Campaigns screen, use the checkbox in the last column titled Following to change your settings. Or from within Campaign Settings, use the checkbox under General > Site Basics.

You can update your follow status at any time, which can allow for flexibility around projects and clients. Additionally, follow status is login specific which means each seated user can pick and choose which Campaigns to follow based on their needs.

5. Automate reporting

Whether you regularly send updates to clients, need to keep key stakeholders informed, or you just want to stay on top of important initiatives, you likely send reports regularly. Rather than taking the time to manually generate a new report every week or month, why not automate the process? Using Moz Pro’s Custom Reports feature can help you to streamline your reporting and send updates to whoever you choose on the regular.

Depending on your team’s needs and the projects you’re working on, you may opt to set up team-specific or task-specific reports:

• Team-specific reports may include overviews of various aspects of a Campaign such as the Dashboard view, Site Crawl Overview, and Rankings Overview to give a birds-eye view of the overall health of a client’s site. You can then set this up to send directly to your client, other members of your team, or your boss so they can stay up to speed.

• Task-specific reports take a deeper dive into a particular area of your Campaign. For example, you may be focused on improving a client’s crawlability or improving their rankings for a subset of keywords and decide to set up reports specific to those areas.

Regardless of the type of report you need to send, the Custom Report builder in Moz Pro will tell you how to get it set up and scheduled for regular delivery, right to the inboxes of the interested parties. You can choose a report template or build a report from scratch to make sure your report includes everything you need. You can even check out our Daily SEO Fix series for additional ideas, just in case you’re looking for a little extra guidance.

6. Enroll team members in free Moz Academy courses

Have new team members who aren’t familiar with the Moz tools? Or do you need a reminder about the metrics and functionalities of the tools? We’ve got you covered. Moz Academy offers two free tool-specific courses to help you get off on the right foot (or regain your footing if you just need a quick refresh).

The first is How to Use Moz Pro which is an in-depth overview of all the primary tools included in your Moz Pro subscription. Learn all about how to use Moz tools so you can hit the ground running. It includes detailed information about each aspect of the tools along with the metrics included and lessons to practice what you’ve learned.

The second is The Insider’s Guide to Moz Pro: Your 4-Week SEO Game Plan which combines videos, tasks, and additional resources to help you implement an SEO strategy with the Moz Pro tools.

Both of these courses are fully on-demand, instructor-led, and self-paced. You can refer back to these lessons over and over in case you have a “how do I do that again?” moment, and they both offer additional learning resources throughout.

7. Get Certified!

Nothing can help a team be more productive and successful quite like being on the same page regarding processes and task management. And being up to speed on best practices, tips and tricks, and practical application is a critical component of that. It’s almost like the table of contents to the book of strategy — it gets you all to the right place where you can get down to business!

Moz Academy offers five different certifications, which can help get your team acquainted with various aspects of SEO strategy and implementation. We offer certifications in SEO Essentials, Technical SEO, Keyword Research, Competitive Analysis, and Local SEO. If you have the budget for team development, these courses can help make sure everyone on your team is ready to tackle any task. Once a certification is completed, you also receive a downloadable certificate and the opportunity to add a badge to your LinkedIn profile to show off your newly acquired skills.

Conclusion

Ensuring you and your team have the access and knowledge they need to be productive will help minimize hiccups throughout the year. By performing these steps up front, you’ll be able to onboard clients, perform research, and accomplish more in less time. After all, success is when preparation meets opportunity.

And with that, you’re ready to hit the ground running with your Moz account for any and all SEO projects you have coming up. If you’re looking to learn even more, don’t forget to keep an eye on the Moz Tools category of the Moz Blog for future Next Level posts as well as the Daily SEO Fix series.