The Moz Blog

How to Forecast Seasonal Keyword Traffic with Google Insights and Python Scripts

A while back, I went to a Distilled meetup here in NYC. SEER Interactive's Mark Lavoritano did some cool slides on the seasonality of keywords. Basically, his presentation made the point that you should not only think about which keywords you want to rank for but also WHEN they are most valuable.

The 2 User Metrics That Matter for SEO

There's been a lot of talk lately about whether user data from analytics is a ranking factor. I argue that Google and Bing don't need to tap into analytics - they have 2 powerful user metrics in their own log data: (1) CTR and (2) Dwell Time.

Meet Mozzers at #SMX West 2012

Conferences are always a great way to get out and meet the SEOmoz community. Luckily we have SMX West coming up next week and quite a few Mozzers will be attending, speaking, live blogging and tweeting. We want to get a chance to meet as many of you as possible so I forced everyone to decide on a schedule so you’ll know where to find us! Before I get into talkin...

What To Charge for SEO and Inbound Marketing Services

There's always a great deal of interest on SEOmoz and other blogs around trying to pin down what the "going rate" is for SEO, Inbound marketing and other related agency services, and what most firms charge for those services.

Buying Links is Shallow, Short-Term Thinking. Buying Blogs? Now that's a Strategy.

I've been running an experiment with some dark-hatted links for several months, consistently hoping Google will catch them and remove their value. So far... Nothing. Well, except top 3 rankings for all the anchor text pointed at those pages. Google's webspam team has all the incentive, brainpower and money in the world, yet their bets seem to be centered firmly on Google+ and the...

The New SEO Process (Quit Being Kanye)

The responsibilities of SEO practitioners have changed to include far more of the digital ecosystem, yet for so many, much of the SEO process remains the same. Currently there are several segments of SEO strategy seen as optional that are actually absolutely imperative to the success of an SEO campaign, as well as to the synergy of other initiatives within the marketing mix. In other words, SEO must adopt and adapt in order to be taken seriously and command the type of influence required to drive change. As it stands, SEO looks to disrupt the symphony (or cacophony) that is a brand’s marketing mix. Let’s discuss a new process that allows SEO to improve the effectiveness of all digital marketing channels – not just inbound.

Monitor Which Social Networks Your Visitors are Logged Into With Google Analytics

Recently Mat Clayton from Mixcloud provided a great snippet of Javascript that could be used to record whether visitors to your site were logged into Facebook or not. I extend that idea to present similar code for Twitter and Google+ and then wrap it all up in Google Analytics goodness. Using this code you can monitor which social networks your website visitors are logged into.

Broken Link Building Guide: From Noob to Novice

Today's post is about broken link building. It's been a popular topic in the industry, but I also noticed that SEOmoz didn't have a lot on the subject, so I thought it would be nice to write a kick-ass piece for the large SEOmoz community. Now, on to the post.

Help with Nomenclature for Links & Brand Mentions

Hey gang - short blog post on a topic our product and marketing teams have been noodling around. As many of you know, we've got our Linkscape index, which is crawled, processed and served out on a monthly basis (there's a new index about every 30 days). We also have a newer datasource, Blogscape, aka Freshscape (which is currently undergoing some repairs in Labs) which crawls a few mi...

Roles & Responsibilities of a Web Marketing Team

This week we talk about how the different roles and responsibilities of a web marketing team. What does it take to have a successful marketing team that will take your brand to the next level? What metrics should your team measure? Your marketing team will go through a few different stages while your company grows and this video walks you through those steps.

Be Careful Using AdWords for Keyword Research

For the past decade, most of us in the field of search have relied on Google's AdWords data (either in the public tool, the API or the tools inside AdWords accounts). It's the best source we've got, but many marketers may not realize that sadly, the numbers and queries may not always match up to what's actually happening on Google's search engine. I'll illustrate ...

Have You Seen This Google Analytics Bug?

If you use Google Analytics then this bug hyper inflates all your metrics and causes you to make sub optimal marketing decisions. I was recently checking my bounce rates like every analyst does now days and was shocked when I saw my home page with an 83.95% bounce rate. It’s not a blog either it’s a B2B site offering various services which made no sense at all. Put your detective hat on and guess what, you’ve got a bug.