How We Increased Organic Traffic by 65% Using Keyword Research Working Sessions

For many of us, there is no greater feeling than winning a new client. It might help you to grow your team, earn yourself a bonus, or achieve a promotion. All of which are great motivators and things to celebrate.

But for me, the reason why winning new business is so enjoyable, is because you’ve just earned the trust of someone else. You’ve connected with them. They’ve bought into your ideas, and now they’re relying on you to help them grow their business.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll be excited to get started. You’ll have poured your heart and soul into winning the new account. And you can now get to work putting into practice all the things you presented so well in the pitch.

For content writers, this might start with an in-depth keyword research piece. Taking your initial pitch data and expanding on it to form a content strategy.

But before you start, have you thought about inviting your new client to a working session to help with your keyword research?

It’s the kind of thing that might make you run for the hills — I would have, not so long ago — but it can be incredibly useful. We often forget that in our excitement to get started, our clients are excited, too. They often want to help, and you can use a working session as an opportunity to tap into their industry knowledge. After all, it’s the subject matter that they live every hour of every day.

In this blog, I’m going to show you why you should do a keyword research working session with your clients, and how it has helped us deliver 65% organic traffic growth for one of our clients with low Domain Authority.

Tried and tested keyword research

Let’s start with what keyword research usually looks like. This will be a great way to prepare for a working session with your new client, which we’ll come to next.

Now, there is already a library of fantastic resources available on Moz to help you with keyword research, each of which go into much more detail than I’m going to:

• Beginners Guide to Keyword Research

• This brilliant Whiteboard Friday from Cyrus Shepard

• A recent Daily SEO Fix on competitive keyword research

• Adriana Stein’s take on low search volume keywords (a personal favorite – especially for help with low domain authority sites!)

I would urge you to devour as much of this as possible. For the purposes of this blog, we’re going to assume that keyword research boils down to three simple things:

1. Keywords you want to rank for

2. Keywords you already rank for

3. Keywords your competitors rank for

To compile this information, we’ll use Moz’s Keyword Explorer (you can use whichever keyword research tool you’re most familiar with, but I find Moz’s tool particularly good for this process).

The example we’re going to use is a real-world example from a keyword research session I had with a client who sells packaging supplies. One of their most important products is cardboard boxes. So we’ll start with that as our initial keyword.

1. Keywords you want to rank for

So, with cardboard boxes as our initial seed keyword, what other relevant keywords can we uncover? Using Keyword Explorer’s keyword suggestions, we can instantly get a good idea of some of the highly relevant and well searched for related keywords.

At this stage, you’re ideally looking to pick out related themes as you scroll through. For example, we can instantly see that several keywords are related to moving. Perhaps that’s something we should investigate further. Secondarily, there are also a few references to size too (small and large), which we’re also going to make a note of.

Within just a few seconds we already have a couple of ideas we can use to help inform our content strategy. And you can keep going, picking out as many interesting keywords or topics as you can.

You can then use these keywords to start building out lists within Keyword Explorer, or export the data and work in spreadsheets if that’s your preferred method.

Remember, at this stage, we’re just looking to prepare for our working session with the client, not create a fully kitted out content strategy.

2. Keywords you already rank for

Unless you’re working with a client in a very unique position of launching a brand new website, you should be able to uncover lots of keyword opportunities simply by researching the keywords the website already ranks for. These are often some of your biggest opportunities to improve and grow traffic from.

A search for your website in Keyword Explorer will return a list of keywords with your ranking position included. You can then export this to excel and filter on keywords you would like to target. In our case, let’s take a look at how our client’s website ranks for terms related to cardboard boxes.

Now that’s interesting. While some of the keywords with the highest search volume were related to moving house, we can see that our client’s website predominantly ranks well for postage boxes. And the search intent behind those two topics is very different. So, we’ll be earmarking this as one to discuss with the client.

3. Keywords your competitors rank for

Possibly the most important part of keyword research is to check what your competitors are ranking well for, but you’re not. You can do this in Keyword Explorer simply by adding one or two domains to your search when searching by website:

And when we do this, we uncover another opportunity:

While there are lots of keywords related to cardboard boxes that are of interest to us, it is double walled cardboard boxes that stand out here. There are several variations and a good number of searches per month, so, that’s definitely one to discuss during the keyword research working session.

After some very quick keyword research, we’ve uncovered four potential topics we could discuss from our initial cardboard boxes seed keyword:

• Boxes for moving

• Boxes by size

• Postal boxes

• Double walled boxes

If we were doing this for real, we would have uncovered plenty more opportunities, too. And if you stop here, you can still have great success building out a content strategy and creating highly relevant, optimized content to target these keywords.

But as great as our SEO tools are for keyword research, they don’t always tell the full story. That’s where a working session with your client can help.

Keyword research working sessions

Working alongside your clients at this stage can feel a little daunting, and it can be hard to relinquish control. It’s your job, and you have the expertise and the instincts to be successful. You might be thinking that the last thing you need is the client demanding something you know will be near impossible to achieve before you’ve even got started.

But as mentioned above, we also need to appreciate that as good as keyword research tools are, they don’t show the full picture. Even cross-referencing against Search Console can leave us skeptical. And so, tapping into the knowledge your clients have might just lead to you discovering some great content ideas and keywords to target.

How to approach a keyword research working session

So, how do you go about approaching a keyword research working session yourself? Start by asking yourself a few simple questions:

Who should be involved?

Depending on the size of your client, you might have multiple contacts on their side. Think about who would be best placed to discuss the products in detail. The MD or CEO won’t need to come along. But someone like the Head of Marketing, along with a senior buyer would have all the knowledge you need.

And in your own team, do you need to invite several people or keep it small? It might depend on how big the client is, but to get the most out of your session, it might be best to keep the attendees at a minimum. This will be a decision for you, your circumstances and how best you work as a team.

How many sessions do you need?

Again, this depends on the specifics of your client and your scope of work. If you’re working on a small retainer, just one session will be enough. But if this is a big client with a sizeable retainer, perhaps you’re going to need a handful of sessions to cover various topics that you’ll be hoping to rank for.

What does your client need to prepare?

The best thing your clients can do is come prepared with detailed knowledge of their products and which products are most important for them. Which products provide the greatest profit margin? Which products are they struggling to get hold of due to issues in the supply chain? Which products are stacked up in the warehouse that they need to shift? As much information as possible.

What do you need to prepare?

You should prepare well, either by following the recommendations in this blog or by going through your own keyword research process. But beyond that, you also need to have an open mind. Let your client contribute their own thoughts and take it from there.

What happened at our own keyword research session?

In our example, we got talking about the different sizes of cardboard boxes available. The client explained it was a hugely important factor for their customers. No business wants to be shipping empty space in boxes that are too big for their products. And no business wants to be cramming products into boxes that aren’t big enough.

So we took a closer look at boxes by size and discovered there were plenty of low volume searches related to box dimensions. These are great keywords for us to be targeting, either on product pages or within facet navigation.

You might suggest the search volume is too low to care too much about. But you’re missing a big opportunity if you take that approach.

Remember, our client has a low Domain Authority. Competing for some of the top generic keywords is not going to happen overnight, so we’ll need to be clever in our keyword targeting. And as Adriana Stein notes in her brilliant blog on low search volume keywords:

“[For] low authority sites in competitive niches, it takes months (or maybe even years) to rank for a [highly competitive] keyword.

[…]

“Specific and niched keywords are exactly what accelerate your organic traffic growth and business revenue – even when you don’t have the domain authority, brand awareness, or resources of your more established competitors.”

So, with that advice in mind, in this example I was not concerned about seeing low search volume at this stage. Rather, I was quite excited about it. And then, as we were looking at these low volume dimensions, the client picked out an odd-looking keyword to me and noted: “Oh, that’s interesting.”

Interesting? I have to be honest, if I was browsing these keywords by myself, I’m really not sure I’d have picked this one out. To my untrained eye, it’s just a few unidentifiable numbers with low relevancy.

“That’s a FEFCO code.” My client told me.

A what?

“A FEFCO code. It’s what our customers ask us for every day. When you’re selling cardboard boxes, you’re talking in FEFCO codes.”

Bingo:

All of a sudden, we have a whole new bunch of incredibly relevant keywords for us to target. And not just relevant from an SEO perspective, but also in the language our client’s customers would understand.

I’m happy to admit that getting to this point would have been impossible on my own. I needed my client’s insight and knowledge of the industry to find these keywords.

So what about you? Have a think. Are you missing some hidden gem keywords?

Results

Working this way has resulted in an organic traffic increase of 65% year-on-year:

Beyond traffic acquisition, organic revenue has also increased significantly. Not only that, but our client also regularly updates us that they’re receiving inbound calls from potential new customers who have found them online.

The success in keyword targeting is perhaps best visualized with a look at their historical keyword rankings:

We started working with this client in 2020. And really, before 2021, there were only a handful of keywords in the top 10 according to Ahrefs data. That is now over 1,000. And best of all, because we’ve been working so closely with the client, we know we’re targeting the right keywords.

Additional benefits of working sessions with your clients

If you’re still not convinced, consider the additional benefits that this working session will bring:

• You’ll be able to build on the connection you’ve made during the pitch, to help you build a long-lasting working relationship for years.

• Your clients will be highly engaged and excited to work with you. And they’ll appreciate the time you’re taking to hear from them in detail.

• They’ll also get a front row seat to see how much hard work goes into your content strategy and planning from minute one, appreciating your expertise with the SEO tools you use.

• All of which helps to facilitate a team spirit and culture of working together, rather than lapsing into a confrontational client vs agency relationship should things go wrong (and we know with SEO, sometimes we can’t guarantee results!)

With all of the above in mind, by making a little extra effort to schedule a keyword research working session, you’re far more likely to retain clients over the long term.

Conclusion

The additional benefits alone should be reason enough to undertake a keyword research working session with your clients. And when it comes to optimizing low Domain Authority websites in competitive niches, any help you can get is valuable.

But more than that, you might just uncover a few hidden gems for content ideas. And that’s something that’s incredibly valuable whatever the budget you’re working with.

These sessions don’t replace your traditional keyword research. You should still do that, too. But this is a great way to supplement that research with evidence from those at the coalface.

And if you get just one great content idea that you hadn’t otherwise considered, it will be worth it.

How to Use Keywords to Combine the Power of SEO and Google Ads [Case Study]

Spongebob and Patrick. Batman and Robin. Tom and Jerry.

These iconic dynamic duos simply wouldn’t be the same by themselves, and you can think of SEO and PPC in the same way.

You may be thinking, “But, I always thought I needed to spend my money on one or the other!”

Well, friend, I’m here to let you in on a little secret: These two, when paired together, provide you with a digital marketing double whammy. A marketing strategy based only on SEO or PPC is truly “putting your eggs in one basket”. Any business that doesn’t diversify the way they get customers isn’t realizing its full potential.

Both SEO and PPC are used for a common goal — search engine marketing (SEM) — and neither would survive without targeted keywords. Since both strategies have user intent and search demand in mind, you can:

• Create an organic and paid strategy that surpasses your competitors and uses an optimized budget.

• Maximize efficient content production that can be used both for SEO and PPC.

• Expand brand SERP awareness by ranking both organic and paid.

• Inform SEO campaign with PPC data and vice-versa (SEOs have deep insights on search intent, while Paid traffic specialists understand how keywords convert).

• Achieve both short-term and long-term business goals.

When approached correctly, using SEO and PPC together can unlock significant opportunities for your brand, so let’s dig in!

A brief overview of SEO and PPC

Let’s take a quick look at the similarities and differences of these powerful strategies so you can better integrate both into your SEM strategies:

Main differences

Time to achieve goal

PPC provides more of a jump start, while SEO is similar to finding your life partner. SEO takes longer and is structure-based, whereas PPC is quick, focusing mainly on landing pages and click-through rates.

One important thing to mention here is that, even though PPC is faster in the beginning, it costs more in the long run. While advertising requires constant payments to sustain, SEO brings in returns long after content has been published, even if you simply just let it sit (though of course some sharing and promo always helps).

The best case scenario is to balance them both: use PPC to power up the engine, but let SEO be the fuel that consistently keeps the engine running.

Skills needed for task

You may think, “SEO is free”, and although it might be if you do it on your own, there's still a lot of blood, sweat, and tears that go into a successful SEO strategy. SEO skills typically include:

• Content writing

• Ability to use a CMS

• SEO tools know-how

• Keyword research

• SERP analysis

Think research, writing, design, editing, publishing, and promotion. Of course, if you hire an SEO strategist, it fast-forwards your plan because they’ve developed proven processes.

On the flip side, PPC requires skills such as:

• Copywriting

• Analytics and conversion tracking

• Keyword research

• SERP analysis

• Ability to use Google Ads platform

There’s a lot more to it than that, but those cover the majority of the overarching skills.

Calculating ROI

PPC ROI can be found by observing the CTR and conversion rate in comparison with number of sales. The goal should be that you get more sales than you pay in ad spend and campaign management. With tools like Google Data Studio that integrate with your CRM, it’s possible to automate PPC ROI calculation.

SEO ROI can be found by using a similar formula:

Gain from investment – cost of investment / cost of investment.

Keep in mind, for B2B lead-based businesses, SEO ROI tends to be much more complex than e-commerce. With B2B, you need to track the organic traffic of pages purposed for lead generation, like your contact or inquiry form’s success page, because there is no direct website sale.

Similarities

As mentioned above, both strategies mainly target the SERPs. As a result, the keyword process for both should ALWAYS have user intent in mind and consider search demand.

Long-tail keywords for SEO might look like:

• Tax software for small businesses

• Digital tax software for entrepreneurs

Meanwhile, PPC keywords are separated into four categories:

1. Phrase match – the ad is shown if there are different words before or after the keyword you’re targeting

2. Negative match – a word or words you don’t wish to target while running your ad

3. Broad match – a general phrase or word you’d like to target

4. Exact match – an exact word/phrase you’d like to target

Organic keywords for SEO are more critical inside the context of a webpage compared to PPC keywords that are more crucial inside the ad copy (though ideally, both should have the keywords in the copy that appears in the SERPs and on the page).

Ultimately, they both share a common goal: to attract relevant users to your website with the goal of turning them into customers.

How PPC and SEO work together to drive business growth through keywords

PPC can instantly unveil important keywords that can be transferred into your SEO strategy. For example, take AS Marketing’s very own client, Kindly, a B2B tech company based in Norway who sells various conversational AI tools for websites. With this project, we first focused on using organic keywords to build SEO content strategy. Then once content was published and started ranking, we regularly checked the same search terms within our Google Ads campaigns. This meant we could see the top keywords that our ads were appearing for in pretty much “real-time”, allowing us to combine this data so that we could create content that worked for both channels.

As a result of our collaboration, we achieved the following results:

• 312% organic traffic growth globally and 10X organic growth in Sweden, one of their key markets

• 5X increase in keywords ranked #1-10 in 11 months

• 107% increase in conversions

For a detailed overview of how this works, here’s our step-by-step guide to leverage this information.

Step 1: Bring the keyword data together

It’s all in the data friends. Seriously, fuse together SEO and PPC data in a spreadsheet, or even better, track ongoing efforts and data in Google Data Studio (for free!)

Here are the top metrics to jot down:

• Search Volume: how many times a word has been searched on a monthly basis.

• Competition: what others in your niche are ranking for.

• Cost Per Click: how much it costs when someone clicks your link.

• ROI: what is your average return on investment for both PPC and SEO.

• Organic Impressions: how many times a site is viewed in a search engine result page.

• Organic Clicks: how many people have seen your site via organic search and clicked on it.

• Organic CTR: this term goes hand in hand with the one above. Organic click-through rate pertains to the percentage of people that have clicked on your page when they’ve seen it in the search results.

• Organic Position: when you determine the organic position of a particular keyword, you can see which keywords are being ranked in Google’s top 100 results. This report also helps to gather useful competitor ranking data.

• Paid CTR: paid click-through rate is the same as the organic click-through rate but for ads. It is the percentage of people that have clicked on your ad after viewing it.

• Conversions Data: is crucial in order to improve your content and messaging. A conversion is a point at which a recipient performs a certain action. It could be filling out a form or booking a call. Conversion data is commonly tracked in Google Analytics.

When you have everything laid out in front of you, it’s easier to spot patterns and recognize how both SEO and PPC efforts are panning out.

Step 2: Do keyword research

And now for the most important part of this entire process: the stage where you find keywords that can work both for PPC and SEO.

As you go through your keyword research process to find your SEO driven keywords, make sure you utilize Google Ads ‘Search Terms’ report. This part of Google Ads allows you to see search terms that have triggered your ads, making it easy to find “real-time” keywords. It also allows you to see what search terms are trending, so if you notice the same type of keywords keep appearing, it’s probably worthwhile to dig deeper into how you can utilize these keywords into your content strategy. Here’s an example of what to keep your eyes peeled for:

Throughout this process, you’ll also want to check items like:

• Understand each keyword’s customer journey stage: How close to buying are the users? Are they in the MoFu (middle of the funnel) or the ToFu (top of the funnel) stage? Understanding the funnel stage is important, because you wouldn’t want to send someone to a sales landing page if they’re just trying to understand the basics of a new concept.

• Gather more insights on search intent per each keyword: If PPC and SEO search intent matches, that’s a great case for a dual-purpose page! For instance, we noticed with Kindly that many users were searching for keywords related to their core product, a conversational AI chatbot. With this search intent match in mind, we used previously created SEO landing pages and also drove paid traffic to them in order to increase the amount of conversions and leads generated.

• Understand how well your content is performing for each query: Is the content good enough for those keywords? Do you need to strengthen examples, incorporate more images, or shorten the article?

• Create actions to improve SEO and PPC from the same keyword analysis: Which keywords have higher search demands and which have higher competition? Depending on your ad budget and authority ranking, you want to approach SEO and PPC accordingly.

• Check SERPs for keywords that rank both organically and with paid advertising with similar content: Is it helpful to rank both paid and organically? Should you focus your resources or create content that works for both? The answer here isn’t clear-cut. It depends on your strategy, target audience, competition for the keyword, and general business goals.

Step 3: Create content with the right format

How can we get the most bang for our buck here? By creating landing pages that work for both PPC and SEO with sections like this:

• Conversion hero header with organic- keyword-optimized H1.

• Section blocks that cover conversion elements but also answer key audience questions. This will ensure your text is broken up, easy to read, and efficient.

• People Also Ask ranking opportunities with a FAQ section at the bottom. Target long-tail keywords and craft valuable content to capture the audience that uses People Also Ask when searching.

One important caveat here is that this strategy won’t work for every keyword. This is why understanding search intent and reviewing SERPs is so important, because it’ll reveal where those content opportunities are. For example, if you find that SERPs are filled with blog article results and no ads for a certain keyword, you may consider only creating the blog article.

Going back to our client Kindly, we mentioned that we regularly checked PPC search terms against our SEO keywords and ensured we understood the user intent of every keyword. It became clear that PPC was driving MoFu and BoFu keywords, meaning users were pretty much ready to buy the product. In this scenario, we knew we needed a high converting landing page that was focused singularly for the purpose of PPC.

Some examples of high converting keywords were “AI Chatbot for my website”, “AI Chatbots for Lead Generation” and “AI Chatbot for ecommerce”. From this data, we knew we needed to create a landing page that accommodated different types of use cases, so we created a landing page with a dynamic headline that catered to all keywords.

That is just one scenario, and this strategy may not work for everyone, so it’s important to understand what your customer wants and when they want it. Then you can understand when to lean into your PPC or SEO strategy and at which point of the sales funnel.

Step 4: Implement & track your strategy

For aligned SEO and PPC synergy, keep these applications in mind:

1. Identify new keyword opportunities for both channels. Use the Moz keyword explorer tool to prioritize keywords that matter, outrank your competition, and research keywords that align with your business goals.

2. Optimize SEO efforts by targeting keywords with higher conversion rates. Keywords that have high search volume AND high conversion rates are the most likely to bring in the big bucks.

3. Improve PPC efforts by aligning ads with organic search intent. For instance, say you discover a specific keyword with a high conversion rate for your PPC campaign. With this data, you can easily incorporate that keyword into your content marketing strategy to strengthen your SEO efforts.

4. Reduce costs with PPC in the middle term by targeting favorable opportunities with SEO efforts. As you continue to grow through organic search, it’ll become easier to spot what works from what doesn’t and apply that to your PPC campaigns. For instance, specific copy that resonates with your audience on your website can be repurposed for PPC ad copy.

5. Boost usage data (page acquisition and interaction etc.) with PPC to gain more data and inform SEO efforts. By increasing traffic to your site through PPC, you can further analyze your SEO strategy and understand which content types are most interesting to your audience, which pages don’t resonate, and which pages are obtaining the most conversions.

6. Last but not least, actual conversion tracking is important!Event tracking allows us to see the impact from both SEO & PPC efforts. For example with Kindly, we set up tracking not only for the number of leads, but we also tracked micro conversions such as button clicks on the navigation. By doing this, we were able to see the process of the sales funnel and which awareness, consideration and conversion keywords triggered that process. Consequently, we could determine the best URLs for each PPC campaign. With this in mind, you can also optimize your website for all marketing purposes and notice where users drop off.

Merging your SEO & PPC keywords brings proven results

By taking the steps above, you can begin to merge your SEO & PPC strategies together and be more in tune with your sales funnel, i.e. generate more leads and sales. By keeping your marketing strategies as best friends, you can achieve great results such as in the images below:

SEO Results:

PPC Results:

Now, let’s crack on to the recap:

• Quickly discover high converting keywords from PPC and incorporate them into your SEO strategy

• Create content that converts both via organic and paid channels

• Improve brand SERP awareness (helloooo organic and paid traffic!)

• Align and combine your short-term and long-term business goals

And to extend on what I mentioned previously, ‘knowledge is power’ BUT it isn’t power until put into action.

Here are your actionable steps to slingshot your business forward by combining SEO and PPC:

1. Bring the keyword data together

2. Do your keyword research

3. Create content with the right format

4. Implement and track your strategy

Teamwork makes your dream work!

Gather 'Round the Campfire for the MozCon 2022 Day Three Recap!

If Camp MozCon has to come to an end, we wanted to send it off with a bang. After all, we have to get through the next 364 days before we get to do this again!

So, in true MozCon style, we brought in the good coffee, handed out more Roger figurines, and cheered on our best pals as they took the stage.

Now, we aren’t going to say we saved the best for last, but we have to admit that our camp counselors for day three were absolute powerhouses.

Why Real Expertise is the Most Important Ranctor Factor of Them All — Lily Ray

When it comes to E-A-T, there is no better person to look to than Lily. She kicked off the morning by reminding us that showing expertise to Google is paramount. But just because the word “expert” is in there, that doesn’t mean the tactics are overly complicated.

Lily shared multiple examples of businesses that are ranking for very competitive/authoritative keywords, and her analysis of how these sites rose to the top. Throughout this analysis, she reminded us that adding “E-A-T features” isn’t enough, and that our content actually has to be quality as well.

Some of the top websites noted in this session sported features like:

• Step-by-step guides

• Interactive content such as videos, quizzes, etc.

• First-hand experience

• Author bios

• Expert sources

• Qualified reviews

• Cost clarity

• Link to and accolades

As she often does, Lily mentioned (and showed examples) how E-A-T may work across the Google universe such as YouTube, Google Maps, Google News, and so on. With this in mind, it’s imperative that we continue to build our authority on and off of our sites.

Experts are entities... entities are a way for Google to identify information like people, places and things. @lilyraynyc#MozCon

— Jason Dodge (@dodgejd) July 13, 2022

You Need Audience Personas, Not Buyer Personas — Amanda Natividad

Buyer personas can be helpful, but only some of the time, for some of the people on your team. That’s why today Amanda schooled us on the audience personas, why they’re important, and how to create them.

First and foremost, your audience doesn’t end at “people who will buy from you.” Your audience also includes people who may amplify you and people who may pay attention to you. And as it turns out, each of these audiences are looking to you for different types of content.

Each of these audiences has different motivations. They are also different in what they talk about and where they hang out. By understanding the way each of these audiences works, you’ll be able to create more effective marketing strategies.

Who are your amplifiers?

people with an influential platform, like brands in your niche, journalists, and influencers@amandanat#mozcon

— Greg Gifford (@GregGifford) July 13, 2022

Rabbit Holes: How Google Pushes Us Down The Funnel — Dr. Pete Meyers

As SEOs, we like to focus on the keywords that land toward the bottom of the funnel. This is because we know these keywords lead to more conversions and revenue. But as Dr. Pete would argue, there is far more to search than what happens between awareness and conversion. Apparently, Google would too, hence their article: “Decisions Decoded.”

In this talk, Dr. Pete focused on the Refine Search portion of the SERP. As he clicked on the refinements and interacted with the SERPs, he found himself further down the funnel. And if Google can make him do it, he figured they could make anyone do it — including our customers!

Dr. Pete argues that the majority of searches happen in the exploration and evaluation phase of decision-making. If we want to play in that game, we must allow users to go through this journey through our sites. This can be done by introducing the idea of the next step, creating more middle-of-the-funnel content, and by optimizing for Google’s search features.

Our site needs to be present at all stages of the funnel, not just at the bottom. If we rely on users to know what they want right away, we are alienating ourselves from potential profit.

Bottom and top of funnel are small part of the entire journey. When it's really all a Messy middle that is all about Exploration / Evaluation that at it's most basic is a widening / and narrowing process to get actionable info to take next steps.@dr_pete#MozCon

— Noah Learner (He/Him) (@noahlearner) July 13, 2022

Beyond the Button: Tests that Actually Move the Needle — Karen Hopper

We’ve all run a CRO test on button colors. But Karen urged us to go a step further and play with fire.

She taught us to be curious about what works for others, use the first-party data we have available, and monitor how certain users interact with our content. Then, using this data, she showed us how to create a meaningful hypothesis that included what we want to test, how we would test it, and what we expect to happen.

With all of these hypotheses, we then learned how to prioritize tests using expected impact, learning priority, and technical effort.

Now, we are ready to run the test! But in doing so, we need to understand the size of the audience necessary to prove the statistical significance and remember NOT to make any assumptions based on early data.

This talk was a bit of a math-heavy one, but definitely one we needed to remind us how to properly execute SEO testing strategies.

- Be inspired! Take screenshots of marketing you love from other industries
- Build your hypotheses. NEVER test w/o a hypothesis.
- Ruthlessly prioritize. You can't run every test.
- Evaluate & repeat!@nochillfilter#MozCon

— Ruth Burr Reedy (@ruthburr) July 13, 2022

Understanding Key Performance Factors: Using Data to Make Smart Decisions for Organic Search — Joe Hall

SEO is a marathon, not a sprint, right? Right, but here’s the thing — “even marathons have finish lines.”

Clients want to see results and we have to deliver them. In order to do this, we have to shift our focus from what is important to what is impactful.

Every domain has unique characteristics that search engines understand. These unique characteristics are measured by what Joe calls “key ranking factors.” Each site also has its own goals, which can be measured by KPIs.

Key performance factors and key performance indicators, when used together, can help you prioritize impactful changes. Joe showed us how to collect the data for these metrics and find their correlation using the CORREL function. Once we have this data, we’ll be able to identify the recommendations that are most correlated to the KPIs set out by the client.

And yes, correlation doesn’t equal causation, but as Joe aptly puts – it doesn’t rule out causation, either.

Pay attention to your key performance factors (KPFs):

-Number of backlinks
-Word count
-Internal link score:
-% of duplicate content
-Word count
-PageSpeed score
-Crawl errors@joehall#MozConpic.twitter.com/drXLS0ejch

— Moz (@Moz) July 13, 2022

Finding Your Way To SEO & Content Success: A Framework — Ross Simmonds

The king of content distribution is back and better than ever. Ross Simmonds taught us how to think like a media company so that we can stop halting at the word “content” and follow through with the “marketing” in content marketing. Doing so can show you up to 10x the pageviews.

The growth content framework Ross shared included four steps:

1. Research

2. Create

3. Distribute

4. Optimize

When we “think like a media company”, we need to think about distribution, development, finance, partnerships, and outreach.

A smart brand will distribute content in a way that keeps content relevant and hyped up for almost six months. We were reminded to tap into our owned channels, different niche opportunities, reframe the original content into a new format, and then to optimize for future success.

And here is the thing: Ross didn’t just tell us to do these things, he shared some of his secrets on how to make them scaleable too!

https://t.co/uU2VSLa96S + Zapier + Canva
to auto update visual content@TheCoolestCool
#MozCon

— Yosef Silver (@ysilver) July 13, 2022

Things I Learned from Sales Teams that Every SEO Should Know — Petra Kis-Herczegh

Getting buy-in isn’t usually a linear process, and it’s hardly ever an easy one. Petra shared with us her theory of the “buy-in-ish” cycle, which goes: fake buy-in, half results, lack of proof, repeat.

This makes sense when we think of how most people go about getting buy-in. In most situations, people start by asking for questions that have no answer other than “yes”.

Our new goal is to focus on getting to the next step, not necessarily focusing on a sweeping “yes”. When you seek buy-in, you should engage in healthy conflict and spend time understanding the concerns and objections from stakeholders. By understanding your audience, you will be able to speak their language when proposing solutions.

In the actual proposal, Petra reminds us, it’s massively important to use the language spoken by decision-makers. After all, we aren’t logical decision-makers, we are biased and emotional decision-makers. With that in mind, we must play to the feelings of your stakeholders to make them comfortable with our ideas.

Be skeptical of HOW we get to a yes with buy in. Yes without a commitment is worse than getting a NO.@chameleon_jrnl#MozCon

— Noah Learner (He/Him) (@noahlearner) July 13, 2022

The Untapped Power of Content Syndication — Amanda Milligan

We care about what’s happening nearby. Yet local media remains untapped as a distribution resource, despite the fact that they also have respectable DAs. This is a missed opportunity.

The easiest way to create local content at scale is to tap into local data sets like the Census, Zillow, or Tripadvisor. Using this data, you can create content — or even better — tools!

Amanda shared an example of using AAA’s data to create a gas price calculator that they shared with local publishers. Spoiler alert: the publishers were stoked.

Because Amanda works for Stacker Studios, she has the pleasure of working with tons of publishers, and was nice enough to share with us the five things publishers are looking for:

1. Employment & jobs trends

2. Rent & real estate trends

3. Trends in crime stats and rates

4. Ways to avoid scams

5. “News you can use” stories

“Localized content help you scale your link building efforts” @millanda#MozConpic.twitter.com/tMeR9kX7Bv

— Niki Mosier (@nikers85) July 13, 2022

Advanced On-Page Optimization — Chris Long

Chris turned a bunch of heads when he came out by claiming that we were in an on-page optimization rut. That’s because, eventually, most SEOs start to review old content and simply add a few keywords or internal links.

Chris covered the importance of making the shift from keyword-focused to entity-focused. To do this, you need to identify the most commonly used entities in top ranking content and ensure you’re mentioning them.

Another way to stay creative is to stay fresh. At Go Fish, they found that top sites were updating content as quickly as every eight minutes! To test the effect of this factor, they updated some of their pages’ titles, timestamps, and content (less than 5% of text) and immediately saw positive results.

If the data is outdated, why would Google trust that the content is trustworthy?

Chris covered five full strategies to become more creative with your on-page optimization, including a competitive research method that blew our minds. This session will definitely be one we rewatch.

Get the fundamentals down and the level of everything you do will rise#MozCon@gofishchris

— SearchLab (@SearchLabAgency) July 13, 2022

Keyword Research for Thanks Instead of Ranks — Wil Reynolds

As he admitted in his presentation, the roots of what Wil presents will almost always be the same. He said it back in 2015, and he started off by saying the same thing again this year: “we have the power to influence what people find.”

It all comes down to customers, business, big data, and silos. If you want to be great, you have to overcome the things your competitors stop at. Your customers care about dollars, but when you report dollars, don’t just report on potential dollars. Dollars can be connected to opportunity costs, acquisition costs, and the like.

How we should always be thinking @wilreynolds#MozConpic.twitter.com/OWKBGkaiBg

— Ruth (@Ruth__Katz) July 13, 2022

Keyword research builds empathy and can be used to speak to multiple people in the room, but be careful with your automated analyses and outputs. Wil shared how the Google Pixel 6 solved a very real problem for his family: a camera that can capture multiple skin tones in one image without under/overexposure. However, he then went on to show us how he could use keyword research for photography to address the real issues of potential Pixel 6 users. As it turns out, these issues should actually be taken to most of the decision-makers in a business (think UX, design, and DE&I).

The biggest takeaways from this year's talk were to dig a little deeper, think about where you can add value, take the extra step and take every finding as a clue, and remember that “the limit to your greatness at work is how quickly you fold at your first no/can’t”.

SEOs know how to take ranking data and turn it into insights into our customers. Look at everything as a clue and it will change how you look at the SERPs.@wilreynolds#MozCon

— Ruth Burr Reedy (@ruthburr) July 13, 2022

This talk was filled to the brim with amazing insights, and we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface, so make sure you pick up the video bundle to see the full thing.

So long for now!

Well, campers, we hope you had as much fun as we did this year. It’s hard to put into words how much we missed hanging out with all of you, and we are so happy to have had the chance to do so the last few days.

This isn’t the end, though! We want to see what insights you grab during the replays and what things you put into action, and hopefully gather again next year for even more amazing learnings.

Happy camping!

---

Read all the MozCon 2022 daily recaps:

• Day One
• Day Two

Ready for S'more? The MozCon 2022 Day Two Recap

Day two of Camp MozCon was everything we expected it to be: more networking, more marshmallows, and more brilliant presentations from the top minds in the industry. Speakers covered the SEO gamut — from research and content creation, to e-commerce, and more!

Not only were the presentations chock-full of insights, but the storytelling had us feeling as though we were all sitting around the campfire. Everyone was dialed in and ready to turn insights into actions.

More Than Pageviews: Evaluating Content Success & Correcting Content Failure — Dana DiTomaso

Dana started the day by making us think: what is the best way to measure content success? And she didn’t just mean which KPIs should we measure, but also how we are going to track those KPIs.

The example she talked about was pageviews, which sounds easy enough. The issue though, is that every time a tab is refreshed (even by tag hoarders) a pageview is tracked. This can very easily skew your data.

To collect accurate data, Dana’s team used Data Studio connected to GA4, which uses events collected through Google Tag Manager. She did this by collecting the publish date, creating a custom formula that collects the publish date, and dividing the pageviews by day. Now the client can truly see how pages are performing without skewed data.

This wizardry was just the tip of the iceberg, though. Dana then went through how to measure whether people are reading your content, what percentage of people who actually see the CTA are clicking it, and more.

As always, Dana closed by reminding us to focus on what is important and ignore what isn’t. Don’t introduce doubt if you don’t have to.

woah - so smart... take the tab hoarders out of your data, cause they're driving down your conversion rate

via @danaditomaso#mozcon

— Greg Gifford (@GregGifford) July 12, 2022

Trash In, Garbage Out: A Guide to Non-Catastrophic Keyword Research — Tom Capper

Tom’s storytelling reminded us all too well of a situation we despise as SEO: clients focused on head terms. We’ve all had a client who just wants to rank for “flower delivery,” haven’t we? Our solution as SEOs is to create so-called exhaustive lists of metrics and keywords, but Tom argues this is just as useless.

Instead, Tom suggests:

1. Capture intent instead of keywords

2. Identify true opportunities for click traffic

3. Aim for accuracy (pick good tools)

Should you choose to skip these suggestions, it’s likely you’ll end up with overly-inflated and far-from-helpful data. Tom showed us an example of Google Ads data overestimating clicks by a factor of 18x, what happens when a keyword list reports volume data without organic CTR estimates, and that over 15% of searches every day are brand new.

Good keyword research:
1. Focus on quality not quantity
2. Don't assume rough volume and rank gives clicks
3. Don't take accuracy for granted
4. Something about a garbage truck not being a garbage truck@thcapper#MozCon

— James Wirth (@jameswirth) July 12, 2022

SEO in the Enterprise: Tips and Tricks for Growing Organic Traffic at Scale — Jackie Chu

It’s always a treat to learn from Jackie, and this year is no different. She walked us through how she works with enterprise teams to grow organic traffic. Anyone who has had this goal knows one thing - it takes a lot of convincing. Luckily for us, Jackie shared her solution for gaining buy-in.

First, she identifies the most impactful projects by asking these three questions:

1. Does it impact crawling/indexing?

2. Does it impact a lot of pages?

3. Is it strategically relevant?

After identifying potential projects, it’s time to prioritize them through forecasting and storytelling. Jackie shared her thoughts on three forecasting strategies: top-down, bottom-up, and competitive share forecasting, along with the pros and cons of each one, and how she uses the RICE framework to prioritize projects.

To keep people in your corner after they’ve worked with you, be sure to thank them! Not just privately, but in front of their bosses and colleagues as well. Overthinking and over communicating your wins ensures that the cross-functional teams you work with understand the impact they’ve had through working with you.

Rinse and repeat these 3 steps:

1. Identify the best SEO opportunity
2. Ruthlessly prioritize, forecast, and storytell to get buy-in
3. Share your wins to continue getting support@jackiecchu#MozCon

— Moz (@Moz) July 12, 2022

The Future of Local Landing Pages — Amanda Jordan

This is Amanda’s very first MozCon and she spent it rocking the stage talking about local landing pages. Notice the added adjective “landing”? Amanda told us that she sees each local page as a landing page that should convince users to do business with her clients, kind of like a page built for PPC users.

She believes that if a user gets to your local page, they are trying to complete a goal, and it’s up to us to provide the tools they need in order to do so.

The top features included on top local landing pages include:

• Local reviews

• Unique value propositions

• Coupons or conversion opportunities

• Awards and recognition

Aside from offering these tools, moving forward, local SEOs are going to need to pull data from their CRM to speak to the exact pain points of their customers, increase the use of local government statistics, and lean on user-generated content through surveys and polls.

"Users like getting to a page and feeling like they know something about the business AND that the business actually cares about them." @amandatjordan#MozCon

— Melina Beeston (@mkbeesto) July 12, 2022

How Marketing Data Intelligence Skyrocketed Our B2B Conversions — Tina Fleming

Tina took us down memory lane, and not necessarily in a good way. She reminded us of iOS 14 and the cookie-pocalypse, and how much that sent us spiraling. Tina used this example to assure us: it’s time for us to embrace being data-driven in order to create better user experiences (even when we feel like the data is impossible to collect).

And the best way to ensure you have data you can use is to collect your own! The first place this can be done is by using your CRM, but where the CRM falls off (i.e. unknown users) a data acquisition platform can pick up.

This data will then allow you to create personalized experiences for users. Tina even showed us the example of her company’s website, and how their homepage was optimized to speak directly to the user using the data they already had.

Lastly, Tina told us to focus on collecting the data we can’t collect using public data. If people are willing to share that information, they are much more likely to be sales qualified.

3 tools to get started with this methodology:
1.) CRM
2.) Data activation platform
3.) Personalization tool

Find the tools that work best for you & w/each other. @TinaInTheSun#MozCon

— Ruth Burr Reedy (@ruthburr) July 12, 2022

Achieve Accessibility Goals with Machine Learning — Miracle Inameti-Archibong

Asking for help in any situation is hard, which often means the ask isn’t brought to those who can help. For that reason, we feel so grateful to have Miracle at MozCon to remind our industry of the importance of site accessibility.

She reminded us that some of the tasks that we find to be “less important” for SEO are actually extremely important for site users. For instance, one-third of all images have questionable or repetitive alt text — despite the fact that we know how to monitor alt text, and how to change it for the better.

To be sure you aren’t contributing to the problem, Miracle equipped us all with the pillars of an accessibility audit. Your website should be:

1. Perceivable

2. Operable

3. Understandable

4. Robust

She also shared tools that help you with this audit, and demonstrated why using a screen reader yourself to assess your content is the best way to understand how your content will be consumed by a user who needs one.

When your website isn’t accessible, you are preventing people with disabilities from becoming independent. Content organization matters. Alt text matters. Don’t skip these things because they seem like “lower priority” or “not important” #mozcon

— Angie Carson (@Swinging4Mars) July 12, 2022

How True Leaders Transform a Marketing Department into a Dream Team — Paxton Gray

You’re a badass marketer, which means you have likely — will likely — be asked to lead a team of marketers. Here’s the thing, though: our job changes every day, and there are very few resources to become educated on that job.

Due to this lack of education, once you become a part of the marketing leadership team, the fear of failure can become real. To overcome that fear, focus on clear, attainable goals. This may require you to dig a bit deeper than you’re used to and ask more questions, but it will help you to not just find more happiness in your role, but to help your clients more as well.

Once you have a clear focus to work toward, it’s time to close the feedback loop. Identify everyone involved with your campaigns and ensure they have access to all of the data. Doing so allows your team to work together more cohesively.

Lastly, remove the barriers to beneficial risk-taking by openly sharing the burden of campaign outcomes. Let your team know you are there with them, and you’re not going to let them fall.

People on a team function as vectors. As leaders, our job is to get those vectors aligned and pointing the same way. @PaxtonMGray#MozCon

— Ruth Burr Reedy (@ruthburr) July 12, 2022

Myths, Misconceptions, & Mistakes (Lessons Learned from a Decade in Digital PR) — Hannah Smith

Hannah used this talk to review some of the things she has said over the years. The first thing: “you don’t need luck, you just need to work really hard.” Which sounded nice, but she has come to realize that much of her success can be attributed to luck.

Hannah found that she just tended to downplay the role of luck, as she was afraid it made her appear as though she didn’t know what she was doing. She then reviewed a mistake she made which was simply stopping at “study what worked.” Instead, she admits the saying should have finished with “and find out why it worked.”

When it comes to PR, ask yourself these six questions:

1. What stories were told in the pieces?

2. Did the coverage of the piece feed into something else that was happening in the news cycle?

3. Were there waves of coverage that led to the success of the piece?

4. What emotions did this story invoke?

5. What vertices covered the story?

6. Did the piece get coverage in multiple countries?

She then closed by sharing a piece of misinformation she has been fueling: that it’s normal to be wildly successful. It’s not. Hannah assured us that only 10% of the pieces she’s been part of have generated notable results.

Humans are great at spotting patterns. We're less great at figuring out whether or not patterns are meaningful. @hannah_bo_banna#MozCon

— Ruth Burr Reedy (@ruthburr) July 12, 2022

E-Commerce SEO Horror Stories: How to Tackle the Most Common Issues at Scale and Avoid an SEO Nightmare — Aleyda Solis

Aleyda brought so much energy to the stage as she spoke about e-commerce SEO. No matter the amount of tools we have access to as e-commerce SEOs, it’s still true that our job is really hard, which makes it very easy to overlook detrimental mistakes.

The first mistake Aleyda covered was allowing any and all internal search results to be indexable. This can create duplicate or thin content, and an overall poor user experience that will hurt your bottom line. While this is scary, the solution isn’t terribly complex, you could just canonicalize or 301 redirect these links to relevant facet pages.

Another mistake she discussed was poor unique descriptive content on product pages. The consequence of this mistake can be hundreds or even thousands of “crawled, not indexed” pages in Search Console. Google marks these pages as duplicate or thin content and therefore deem them unworthy of indexing.

To combat this problem you will want to add unique images, use descriptive language in your copy, incentivize reviews on product pages, and use structured data. By putting this effort in, Google will recognize that the product is unique and reward the page by indexing it. Alternatively, you may not want to index each page, instead you may want to focus on those facet pages.

These are just two of the issues Aleyda covered in her talk, but if we tried to cover all seven as in-depth as she was able to, we would be here all day. If you want to see all seven horror stories and how to defeat them, pick up the video bundle and watch her talk. Believe us, it’s worth it for this talk alone.

Anybody in e-commerce taking notes? This is the second person to talk about cannibalization on your sites. @aleyda bringing the brutal truth! #MozCon

— Jason Dodge (@dodgejd) July 12, 2022

There is still one day left!

Can you believe MozCon is two-thirds of the way complete? We certainly can’t, but we aren’t letting anyone leave camp without enough new skills to fill their vest. Come back for day three to learn more about SEO, marketing, and growth.

Welcome, Happy Campers! The MozCon 2022 Day One Recap

Today, after three years, we gathered some of our best friends in the industry to kick off the biggest SEO party of the year in Seattle. That’s right, Camp MozCon is back in all of its real-life glory and we could not be more excited! Cue all of the fist bumps, Roger selfies, and snacks, because we are back in action!

It wouldn’t be MozCon without the top minds in the industry sharing their findings, and we were not disappointed yesterday. They really brought the heat to the campfire.

SERP Strategies — Andy Crestodina

Andy is always a fan favorite as he combines analysis with strategy. This year he’s done the same as he walked us through his research on SERP pages.

We all knew SERPs have changed a ton, but Andy — the professional SERP screenshotter he is — has collected visuals of multiple SERPs over the last few years. Not only was he hoarding this data, but he has been using it to his advantage.

Andy walked us through his process of keyword research, and spoiler alert, it doesn’t just end with “difficulty, volume, CTR.”

The process he uses:

1. Keyword research

2. SERP analysis

3. Optimize for the searcher experience within: SERP features, Directories, Marketplaces, Associations

We're always searching for one of two types of intent: queries with a dollar sign (transactional) or a question mark (informational).@crestodina#MozCon

— James Wirth (@jameswirth) July 11, 2022

Search What You See: Visual Search Tactics, Tools, and Optimizations — Crystal Carter

Crystal broke down visual search in a new way, explaining to us that “Visual Search turns our camera into a tool for understanding the world.” She then explained the difference between image search/optimization and visual search/optimization – contrary to popular belief, they’re not interchangeable! Image optimization is about making sure images can be returned for text queries. Visual optimization ensures visual queries can return necessary answers for the searcher.

If you want to start understanding what entities you have available to you, use your camera roll as a dataset. Google allows you to upload your images and will organize them into entities for you. Google also relies on your branding to match your business to photos uploaded by you and your customers. They are looking at your logos and color schemes and the images uploaded to the internet to see if they can match them.

Places you need to think of your visual search opportunities in real life (IRL):

• Sponsorships

• Merch and uniforms

• Well placed logos in your facility

• Photo op corners (ya know, 100% that pic)

The wonderful @CrystalontheWeb starting her talk sharing it all about visual search 👏 “visual search turns your camera into a tool to understand and explore the world” #mozconpic.twitter.com/CDSZoXEUdY

— Aleyda Solis 🇺🇦 (@aleyda) July 11, 2022

Unlocking the Hidden Potential of Product Listing Pages — Areej AbuAli

In her research, Areej found that 60% of organic revenue came from product listing pages. This is interesting because as SEOs, we tend to focus on site-wide changes as opposed to identifying parts of a site that have the biggest impact. This doesn’t just apply to e-commerce, though, real estate sites have product listing pages.

Break things down into building blocks. For example, in e-commerce, the three main building blocks are:

1. Content

2. Tech

3. Filters

She showed us how she went through an entire process of identifying a tech issue, doing the research, creating a workflow, sending in a ticket and getting it implemented without any breaks.

Now, while we were all excited for her, she then admitted that there was no impact of the change on the organic revenue.

The moral of the story? It’s worth diving deep into the one opportunity that delivers value, but you’ve got to dive deep and deliver solutions with cross functionality. Because it’s not as effective to address one of the building blocks when you could address them all effectively.

Areej also hit on a TON of other stuff in her 250 slides, so you may wanna snag that MozCon video package.

Don't just look at search volume. Of course "dress" has 800x the volume of "long sleeve maxi dress," but we both know which one's going to convert. Assess oppty by what will lead to users converting.@areej_abuali#MozCon

— Ruth Burr Reedy (@ruthburr) July 11, 2022

Get Your Local SEO Recipe Right with Content & Schema — Emily Brady

Have you ever wondered how you can create unique content for each of your location pages? We have, too. That’s why we were so happy to have Emily, one of our amazing Community Speakers, grace the stage (for the very first time!) and share her recipe for unique content and schema.

The recipe requires the following ingredients:

• Hyper-local content

• Attributes

• Staff bios

• Hours

• Address & phone number

• Photos

• Reviews

• Inventory

• Nearby locations

• Specials & coupons

• FAQs

• Departments & services

Once the ingredients are in place, schema can be used to help provide context to the content you’ve been able to create. For instance, use person schema for your staff bio and place mark-up for your attribute.

Sometimes, the difference between you and the competitor is the time you are willing to take in order to implement the hard things. Hard work is truly unique.

Do your landing pages have the right amount of the right ingredients?

You need unique value content, y'all@plotboilers#mozcon

— Greg Gifford (@GregGifford) July 11, 2022

SEO Gap Analysis: Leverage Your Competitor’s Performance — Lidia Infante

Lidia started off by reminding us that ranking is as easy, or as hard, as doing better than our competitors. She then broke SEO down into three main pillars: content, tech, and links.

As you think of how you can do better than your competitor, you have to identify which pillar(s) they’re executing better than you. But how do you do that? Well, first, you must identify who your true competitors are based on the keywords of which you’d like to rank.

Once you’ve identified your competitors, you can move into benchmarking their content metrics, brand metrics, and tech SEO metrics. You can compare these metrics to your metrics in order to identify your opportunities for improvement.

Now, go improve! As Lidia said, there is no growth without execution.

Ranking is as easy (or as hard) as doing better than your competitors. @LidiaInfanteM#MozConpic.twitter.com/FM9oDr46ec

— Moz (@Moz) July 11, 2022

The Future of Link Building: What Got Us Here, Won’t Get Us There — Paddy Moogan

The fundamentals don’t change that often. In fact, 10 years ago Paddy went on stage and shared 35 link building ideas in 35 minutes. As he reviewed his epic talk from a decade ago, he found that over 20 of them are still “good” ideas. This just enforced the idea that the fundamentals of what we do as SEOs, don’t really change that often. Major core updates, they don’t “just happen” that often. But sometimes, they do.

Based on the changes that have come about the last 10 years, Paddy has decided that outreach alone isn’t a sustainable strategy. Aria found that SEOs spend about 3 hours to build a link, if you’re down 10,000 links.. Well, that’s a lot of hours. If you stop putting time in, you stop getting results. So, what’s the other option?

Paddy talked about creating a link building strategy that outlasts you. The biggest difference here is pivoting from focusing on who can link to you, to thinking about who is doing business with you.

This strategy focuses on four things:

• Audience (who are they)

• Pain points (what do they struggle with)

• Solutions (what can you offer)

• Keywords (what can you rank for)

When you string these things together you force relevancy. And relevancy, friends, is what we are aiming for.

Why we should stop relying so much on linkbuilding outreach:

“We shouldn’t be sleepwalking into another Penguin [update], because Google might not make it as obvious next time” - @paddymoogan#mozcon

BRAVO! 👏🏽 pic.twitter.com/0QbaABaXnd

— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) July 11, 2022

How to Capitalize on the Link Potential of a Research Report — Debbie Chu

As Debbie, our second amazing Community Speaker of the day, started to scour the pages for some of the keywords she wanted to rank for, she noticed they all had one thing in common: they linked to research reports. After uncovering this, Debbie went all in with research reports.

She came up with a process for creating these research reports:

1. Come up with the story by looking at the products, features, and related topics.

2. Do research and identify any gaps of opportunities.

3. Score your ideas using HOT: Headlines, Other Teams (like PR, data, etc.), and Timeliness.

4. Gather data from multiple sources.

5. Analyze data and find the newsworthy stats.

After going through this process, all that is left is to create the content and reach out to the appropriate people. For example, if you find that Seattle is the best city for working from home, reach out to Seattle associations, as they may want to share your findings.

Use the HOT score (1-10 for each area) to grade research ideas:

H - what would potential Headlines say?
O - what do Other teams think?
T - how Timely is this idea?@justdebbb#mozcon

— Greg Gifford (@GregGifford) July 11, 2022

Breaking into new areas with Topic Maps — Noah Learner

As most of you know, Noah nailed it last year with his presentation on using Google Data Studio to find opportunities in the keywords you currently rank for. But this year, Noah wanted to tackle finding opportunities for businesses who don’t rank for a ton of keywords.

He started by looking at the source: how they’re getting their data. He found things like the fact that Knowledge Panels point to Wikipedia more times than not. Google has documentation on how autocomplete works, and in it, Google cites that it’s pulling data from Google Trends — which has an API.

So naturally, as the curious guy he is, Noah found a way to use the API to map all of the related terms into a Google Sheet. From there, he removed irrelevant terms, pulled in keyword metrics using his favorite keyword tools API, and ran the cycle again for each related term.

The best part: he provided all the documentation you need to create this yourself!

With this tool, you’re able to make decisions based on client goals, high search volume, your ability to rank, and high transaction value. Then refer back to the clusters and find opportunities for internal linking.

But most importantly, Noah closed with a piece of advice he received from the late Hamlet Batista: give, give, give to others, any time you can.

SEOs love spreadsheets, but lots of people don't. Building a tool, think about how people who don't think like you might want to see/use data@noahlearner#MozCon

— Ruth Burr Reedy (@ruthburr) July 11, 2022

Building Remote Culture that Feels Like a Culture — Ruth Burr Reedy

The pandemic left marks that are likely to stand the test of time, and one of them is working from home. It’s awesome, but it’s also super hard to do well as a business. When we’re all distributed, there are far fewer built-in opportunities for connection.

We were super lucky to have Ruth come talk to us as someone who has managed remote teams over the last six years. She started by challenging managers to ask themselves, “what do we want it to feel like when you work here?” and to ask employees, “what does it actually feel like to work here?”

Once you know what feeling you want to create, you need to figure out when and where you can create that feeling remotely. This should start as early as onboarding. Have employees meet each other during onboarding, create an agenda for your new hires, etc.

The most important part of managing remote teams is having a concrete way to measure whether or not the work is getting done.

“If you don’t have a way to tell if work is getting done, that’s not remote work’s problem.” @ruthburr#mozconpic.twitter.com/3DqjG1mdLb

— Yosef Silver (@ysilver) July 11, 2022

Moneyball is the Future of SEO — Will Critchlow

If something was *almost* as hard as the thing, but it was worth just as much as the easy thing, which would you choose?

With SEO testing, we can focus on tested on-site changes, brand new content, lets skip the untested, hopeful stuff. Create a hypothesis and test both the control and the variant. Run the test and analyze your data.

Will shared a ton of tactics they’ve tested multiple times, and some of these tactics include things like moving hidden content out of an accordion, using pop ups, changing SERP appearance, using structured data, and so on.

Will assured us that we are able to run these tests ourselves, and encouraged us to do so! Even if we can't have the tests 100% controlled or thought out, because in site testing Bing found that website experiments tend to bring rare but large wins.

So, as Dr. Pete would say, “run your own tests.”

You could almost hear everyone go "woah" in their heads when @willcritchlow finally made the connection from basketball to SEO testing by showing that the midrange shots weren't worth taking... #mozcon

— Greg Gifford (@GregGifford) July 11, 2022

On to day two!

Phew, can you believe that was just day one? Neither can we!

Now remember, what our speakers just shared with you is extremely valuable, but only if you put it into action! Take a second and write down one thing you can put into action next week.

Day one may be in the books, but we are so hype to see what today’s speakers bring to the picnic table.

How Stacker.com Earned 1M+ Organic Monthly Visits Through Content Syndication [Case Study]

Note: Amanda Milligan collaborated with Stacker’s SEO specialist, Sam Kaye, to create this case study.

When a marketer is asked about the value of content syndication, they’ll typically list two main benefits:

1. Increased brand awareness, as you’re reaching a wider audience.

2. Improved engagement, as people can share and comment across multiple versions of the story.

But one benefit of content syndication that marketers frequently overlook is the potential to improve a site’s SEO performance.

While paid syndication (like press release distribution) can’t carry SEO value, developing strong content that’s appealing to publishers and their readers can generate massive amounts of link authority back to a publishing domain, and drive significant organic growth.

But it’s difficult to test and implement a comprehensive syndication strategy, so there aren’t many resources about its SEO impact.

In this case study, we:

• Outline the processes used by Stacker to syndicate content.

• Look into organic results on Stacker.com as a result of content syndication efforts.

• Discuss how content syndication can be used as part of a long-term organic growth strategy.

The content creation and distribution methods used for Stacker.com are the same as those used for Stacker Studio brand partners, making Stacker.com’s organic success an excellent case study for the long-term effectiveness for content syndication strategies.

The evidence of syndication’s impact

Before digging into how syndication works for SEO, let’s begin by proving that content syndication works.

Stacker.com has no proactive digital PR or backlinking strategies. Our growth strategy has been utilizing content syndication as a model to reach new audiences and drive valuable domain authority. The result has been Stacker accumulating 20K “dofollowed” referring domains and over one million unique backlinks over the last four years.

Organic traffic growth

Organic traffic: Google Search Console

Over a period of 16 months, Stacker.com saw a significant acceleration in organic growth, increasing by approximately 500% — from fewer than 10K organic entries per day to more than 50K entries per day. (Our site used to be TheStacker.com, and you can see the exponential growth on that domain as well before migrating to Stacker.com.)

Backlinks

Backlinks: Google Search Console

Backlinks that appear on pages including rel=canonical tags are processed and valued by search engines, as evidenced by the 8M+ links created by this method & identified in Search Console. The majority of these links are in-text dofollows from syndicated article pickups with rel=canonical tags. This is an excellent indicator that Google is crawling and valuing these links.

Backlinks: Moz Pro (domain-wide)

Backlinks created via content syndication are also being picked up by Moz Pro and other third-party reporting tools.

Moz Pro reports a steady growth in the number of referring domains that correlates well with GSC link reporting metrics:

Moz: individual links

In addition to tracking account-wide backlinking growth, Moz also picks up individual instances of links created via content syndication, such as these syndicated SFGate pickups.

Domain Authority: Moz Pro

This accumulation of link authority over time has allowed Stacker to increase our Moz Pro Domain Authority score from 56 to 59 over the past year:

Organic performance: Summary

In 2021 alone, Stacker.com saw a 500% increase in referring domains, a 380% increase in organic traffic, and an improvement in domain authority from 56 to 59 due in large part to our content syndication efforts.

These long-term trends of organic growth, paired with the fact that syndicated links are being picked up by both Google Search Console and Moz Pro, are a clear indication that content syndication is an effective way to drive organic traffic.

How content syndication improves SEO authority

Stacker’s syndication approach provides link authority in two ways: in-text dofollow backlinks and rel=canonical tags.

An in-text backlink acts as a signal of source attribution, telling search engines that a particular piece of data or content has been taken from another source. A canonical tag does the same thing, except that it attributes the entire article, not just a piece of it, back to the original publisher. Both are signals of source attribution, and both indicate that a publisher trusts your content enough to feature and share the article on their website.

When a piece of Stacker content is syndicated (re-published in its original form on another publisher’s site), the syndicated version includes a rel=canonical tag back to the publishers’ hosted version, as well as an in-text dofollow backlink in the content intro:

Example rel=canonical tag from a syndicated piece

Example of an in-text, dofollow backlink attributing authorship in a syndicated piece

When a Stacker article is rewritten instead of syndicated, (e.g., a publisher creates a locally-focused variant using Stacker source data), we request a backlink citing us as the original provider of the study.

Owned syndication vs. earned syndication

In the same way the industry talks about owned and earned media, you can think of two types of syndication as “owned syndication” and “earned syndication.”

Owned syndication involves reposting an article on multiple platforms by you. An example of this would be publishing an article on your blog and then republishing it on Medium, LinkedIn, and other accounts you run. While this might increase the number of people that see your article, the likelihood of driving organic traffic from these strategies reliably or at scale is virtually nil.

Earned syndication involves the approval from another publisher that your content is valuable to their audience, so this type of syndication is harder to achieve. However, in addition to reaching a wider audience than with owned syndication, you get the authority signal of having your content hosted on another publisher’s domain. (Someone decided your content was worth republishing in full, and what’s a greater sign of trust than that?)

Why isn’t everyone doing this?

Because it’s not easy. For the first few years of our existence, Stacker did nothing but build publisher relationships and master the art of newsworthy content. Getting content pickups at scale requires building trust with large news publishers, as well as a large volume of content news publishers find uniquely interesting and relevant. Content syndication is built upon a foundation of content quality, publisher trust, and the technical capability to share content at scale, and these three components can take years to develop.

Stacker journalists are committed to understanding the coverage needs of local news organizations and investing in stories that can drive meaningful value for their audiences. After five years of working with publishing partners, we’ve studied the data on pickups and audience reach to uncover insights into what stories can be most useful.

We landed on some key earned syndication tenets:

Contextualization is key

Any type of publisher you come across will have their core editorial calendar established with key topics they know their audience cares about. They’re not looking for outsiders to contribute to the heart of their publication, so don’t approach it that way. Instead, explore topics they typically cover and perhaps even particular stories they’ve run and ask yourself: What other perspective can I add to this story to contextualize it? Perhaps a historical angle or other comparison

Data always helps

Some publishers don’t have access to data analysts, or if they do, they’re working on a ton of other projects and it’s hard to scale data-focused content. If you’re able to provide stories based on data that’s been distilled and presented with clear insights, many publishers would appreciate that. Additionally, just knowing your content is backed by data rather than opinion makes it easier to vet (and trust).

Help publishers reach their goals

Our direct line of communication with multiple publishers, both local and national, has led to fascinating conversations around their goals. To sum it up, every publisher has unique focus areas when it comes to audience acquisition and engagement. Some are focused on converting users to subscription while others are focused on pageviews or time on site. Explore their site, see how they monetize, and consider how your content can help them meet these goals.

Let’s look at an example story Stacker created.

This piece uses Major League Baseball data to determine the most successful postseason teams. With data being the basis for the ranking, publishers don’t have to worry about the validity of the order, which is a major advantage in vetting.

This story offers original analysis in a way that can complement the local coverage of news organizations. While a sports beat writer might focus on the area team’s history, current team performance, or other local and newsy aspects of the story—this story offers contextual data analysis that can work for a variety of news organizations to augment their boots-on-the-ground reporting.

All in all, the article earned more than 300 publisher pickups and more than 100,000 story impressions. That’s an incredible amount of payoff for one piece of content, and earned syndication is the vehicle that made it possible.

The syndication takeaway

Like so many other SEO tactics, not all syndication is created equal. Potential clients have often asked me how Stacker is different from services like press release distribution platforms, with which they didn’t see SEO results.

Well, when you have sponsored or nofollow links, it’s never going to be the same as earned syndication. Getting white hat content pickups with consistency is difficult — it requires both top-tier content and the attention of journalists.

So my advice? Consider whether there are high-authority publications in your niche. Study what they publish and ask yourself:

• Do you already publish content that they’d love?

• Can you make some tweaks to already existing content to better fit their editorial style?

• Can you create original research/reports that would interest their audience?

• Would getting brand awareness with their audience help us improve your brand reach?

If the answer is yes to at least two of these questions, consider content syndication as a strategy.