Wednesday, August 9, 2023

Unlocking the Future of Tomorrow: MozCon 2023 Day Two Recap

Day two recap contributions written by Emilie Martin, Meghan Pahinui, Miriam Ellis, and Zach Edelstein.

We’re back for more insights from day two, the final day of MozCon 2023! Day two brought more speakers, more chances to fill up your bingo card, and more time to grab swag. Let’s get back to the future of search!

Back to the Future: What Lessons From Marketing History Can Tell Us About the Future – Andi Jarvis

Kicking off day two, where Andi is going, we don’t need roads. Andi started the final day of MozCon 2023 with his talk on what lessons the history of marketing can tell us about the future!

He assured us that people, not robots, still sit at the heart of marketing… cue a big sigh of relief! Andi explained the advantages that SEOs can gain by interacting directly with customers to come up with content ideas, as opposed to focusing purely on what Google is looking for. This is because Google is all about the user.

Andi outlined classic marketing strategies throughout history to highlight fundamentals that can be used by SEOs and content creators. More specifically, he describes ways in which the well-known ‘FAB’ can help your marketing efforts. FAB stands for features, advantages, and benefits. Andi puts a twist on the FAB strategy, though. When you are writing content in order to sell a product, he recommends flipping the order of these things so that your descriptions clearly outline your products:

  • Benefits

  • Advantages

  • Features

By doing this, you can ensure that your most important messaging is right up front. This also ties into Andi’s “don’t telegraph” advice. Make sure that you’re leveraging your brand voice & tone in all of your communications.

In this thorough and reassuring talk, Andi highlighted lots of ways in which marketing principles have not changed, despite the ability of AI and new marketing tech to make your more effective in your role.

Lower Your Sheilds: The Borg Are Here* (* Written By ChapGPT) – Dr. Pete Meyers

Our very own Dr. Pete Meyers set us up for success with his talk on the future of SEO as we know it. Last year, he spoke about how Google pushes us down the funnel. This year, Dr. Pete touched on how AI is disrupting search as we know it.

Dr. Pete’s hypothesis is that the strengths of AI chat responses in search results create new opportunities for SEOs, as opposed to replacing queries for which we were already optimizing.

According to Dr. Pete, AI struggles with YMYL searches and providing well-sourced and accurate facts. He ran through several examples of ChatGPT providing inaccurate quotes from business leaders and misleading financial information. When the answers you are looking for are not clearly sourced somewhere in its corpus of data, AI will essentially make things up and piece together plausible responses from different sources. Extremely dangerous!

AI excels at, well… getting weird. It can help you think in new ways because AI tools think differently than people do. Asking questions that are so specific that they may not have been asked before. Dr. Pete gave examples like generating recipe ideas using a specific set of ingredients. ChatGPT also has helped him get ideas for temporary page copy to use on a website mockup, way more interesting than lorem ipsum.

As Dr. Pete eloquently and succinctly put it, there are some problems that Google doesn’t have a solution for. Those are the instances where ChatGPT is the most useful right now.

How to Use Brand SEO to Future-Proof Your Online Visibility – Miracle Inameti-Archibong

Last year, Miracle spoke about accessibility using machine learning. This year, she showed us how to use brand SEO to future-proof our online visibility. Given the rapidly changing search algorithm, the emerging presence of AI, as well as the increasing cost of paid search advertising, Miracle emphasizes the importance of brand search.

Before diving into tips, Miracle outlines the challenges of brand SEO, which include difficulty to measure, ownership (needing to think more like marketers), and collaboration between teams.

Here are her quick-fire tips for a better brand SEO strategy:

  • Optimize your Knowledge panel. Make sure all of the information showing up here is accurate and up to date.

  • Dominate your brand SERP. It’s often assumed to be a given that you will rank well for your own brand searches, but this is not necessarily true. Miracle provided examples where popular brands don’t have visibility for some of their own terms.

  • Find your brand’s personality. Incorporate this into your top-of-funnel content strategy.

  • Collaborate with brand, product, CRM, social, and PR to align on your brand image and personality.

  • Build authority and trust through reviews, social strategy, and website UX.

This talk was a nice reminder of the new metric we launched on Monday, Brand Authority! Don’t forget to try it out yourself now with Moz Pro or the Moz API.

Build Better Backlinks for Local Brands – Amanda Jordan

Amanda gave us more insight into the world of local SEO. Last year, she focused on the future of local landing pages, and this year she brought us through how to build better backlinks for local brands.

Amanda started with the helpful reminder that links can either be relevant to your topic, or your location, but that, for local businesses, your location is also a topic! Her talk emphasized that learning to bucket links into categories can play a major role in your competitive local marketing strategy.

Amanda looked at categorized links (such as local links, topical links, citations, and more) for high-ranking HVAC brands across the top 50 US cities and found that a high number of backlinks didn’t automatically correlate to high rankings.

What Amanda discovered is that the highest performing pages had both the highest amount of local and topical links, rather than other types of links or just generic links in general:

Top ranking sites in Amanda's study had more topical and local links

To start to build a more local and more diversified backlink profile for local businesses, Amanda recommends:

  • Choosing competitors who are consistently eating your lunch (attracting your customers)

  • Using your favorite link analysis tool to uncover your competitors’ link profiles (Check out Moz Link Explorer for free right now!)

  • Categorizing your competitors’ backlinks by type - are they local, are they topical, are they citations, tool-based, something else? Set clear guidelines for how you want to categorize these links, and stick to them throughout your research so that your data has clear takeaways.

  • Identifying whether your top competitors are winning at a category of backlinks you’re not yet doing well with

  • Identifying your quality + local-focus link opportunities

  • Getting those links!

Memorably, Amanda noted that she’s seen local business websites earning top rankings that appear to stem from them having earned a single good link from a local news site. A little can go a long way in local search marketing. If you’re struggling with the task of categorizing a ton of competitors’ backlinks, Rickety Roo is in the process of developing a tool to help with this, and if you need to become awesome at the art of earning backlinks, check out The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building.

Rethink Your Industry Pages - They’re Not What You Think – Jason Dodge

Jason, one of our community speakers, graced the MozCon stage this year to talk to us about rethinking your industry pages. Industry-specific pages, or landing pages, aim to create relevance and rank for certain search terms within a particular industry.

Typically sales and marketing meet with internal sales to figure out ways to sell more of a certain product. However, the problem is that these conversations and strategy plans are out of touch with the actual customers buying the product. Jason believes there is a disconnect that happens here.

One challenge that B2B marketers and SEOs face is that Google is built for consumers. So, what are some tips for better industry pages that don’t miss their mark? Optimize for pain points, not industry! Jason ran through some examples of niche B2B pages that have been set up to target particular pain points and challenges that customers in these industries are facing.

Jason walked through the process of using keyword research tools to find long-tail keywords that correspond to pain points faced by B2B customers. You can use these terms to optimize your pages.

Additionally, Jason recommended reframing content for language and industry culture. Meaning your pages should be completely aligned with the language your customers are using. In his experience, Jason has found that getting SEOs in the room with possible customers and listening to their challenges is key in the content creation process. Pain points first, industry second, ignore volumes, and understand the customer!

Hiring the Perfect Agency: How to Avoid Getting Burned — Duane Brown

In his recent blog post, Duane wrote about how you can use Google Ads AI and machine learning to run better campaigns. In his MozCon talk, Duane shared that hiring is a valuable skill and emphasised identifying agencies that are the best fit for your business.

When you hire an agency, your goal is to make more money. If you can identify what you actually want help with, you can make sure your money is spent wisely. For example, maybe you’re interested in paid ads, exploring particular ad channels, or perhaps you’re looking to scale, diversify your business, optimize your funnel, or simply want to ideate.

Duane’s team built a DTC Brand Index. With this resource, you can see what other competitors are doing across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. If you’re looking to explore how your brand fares on the SERPs, be sure to check out our new metric, Brand Authority.

The marketing work you need done is the opportunity, and understanding what those opportunities are can make your life so much easier. Knowing the opportunity, makes it easier to look at the impact, and the key to impact is picking the right team. When hiring an agency, there are a number of questions you should consider asking them — see this resource for Duane’s document of all the questions he went through in his talk.

Duane ended his talk highlighting the importance of tracking your success so you can review what’s working, and what’s not working.

Dominating TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, and Amazon SERPs as Consumer Behavior Changes — Carrie Rose

Carrie shared her process for dominating all SERPs, not just Google. When brands are seeing that their traffic, bookings, and conversions are declining, it can be easy to blame a decline in demand. However, this isn’t always the case – in many situations it can be attributed to consumers searching elsewhere for what they need.

By launching PR and influencer marketing campaigns, Carrie and her team were able to increase traffic and gain links for her clients while also setting them up for success (and inventory sell outs.) She notes that although this was a PR, influencer, and advertising campaign, the strategy at its core was driven by SEO.

Carrie reminded us that it’s important to keep in mind that Google isn’t the first, or only, place people search and interact with content. She spoke about how, oftentimes, apps like TikTok and Instagram answer search queries faster and help people find what they want more efficiently. In Carrie’s opinion, customers and searchers want to hear real life experiences and other people's advice. They trust word-of-mouth recommendations which is something they may not find on Google, leading them to turn to short-form apps.

When exploring SERP domination beyond Google, it’s all about finding that sweet spot between what clients want to talk about, what the consumer cares about, and what the media wants and needs. So how do you achieve this? One way is to make sure you’re consistently tracking trends so you have the opportunity and awareness to “newsjack” (a term first coined by Carrie, her team at Rise at Seven, and their VP Will Hobson). Some tools to help with this include: Glimpse, Exploding Topics, Pinterest Trends, TikTok Keyword Insights, and TikTok Trending Hashtags

Carrie’s quick tips for ranking on TikTok include:

  1. Put your keywords in the the text on your video within the first 1-5 seconds

  2. Mention your keyword in the caption

  3. Use 3 to 6 hashtags – be sure you don’t go overboard and confuse the algorithm

Despite popular belief, Google isn’t scared of TikTok. Rather, short form video content may actually increase your visibility on the SERP. We’re seeing more and more TikTok videos being included directly in the SERPs.

Entities Are the Past: Search Is Going Multidimensional — Tom Anthony

Tom believes that entities are in the past, and that the future of search is going to be all about context. We are on the brink of a paradigm shift - search is about to enter a new era. Focusing on explicit context (rather than implicit), Tom covered 4 primary topics:

Keywords and Entities — Keywords are limited and don’t allow us to talk about structure of relationships. Entities allow us to start drawing relationships between terms through the use of schema. But, as search continues to evolve, and search habits change, how do we account for that? Before moving on to the second stop on his journey, Tom asked us to consider modern search habits and the idea of post-search browsing. We already perform a process of searching a keyword or phrase and then search through the results manually. We modify our search accordingly and the process continues.

Latent Spaces — Tom led us into the topic of latent spaces, or as he calls it, “the building blocks for the next era.” ChatGPT can help to revolutionze search, but is there a way to get the same impact without the chat part of the equation? The GPT (generative pre-trained transformer) part of the equation allows for the understanding of context by first understanding relationships. And these learning models are already having a huge impact on search.

Next Era — Search engines like Google are finding ways to “incentivize us to add more explicit contect to our searches.” For example, we now have the option within Google itself to click filter buttons below the search bar which then update our original search query. This leads to all new, often unique queries that mimic the post-search browsing process Tom outlined previously in his presentation. And with the rise of GPT models, he notes that structured markup has been superseded.

So now what? Tom offered a few predictions and tips for the future of search.

  • In time, structured markup will have reduced impact.

  • Be sure to feed the GPT algorithm with context-rich text.

  • Keyword research and entailment will become more important (i.e. inferring context & intent).

  • E-E-A-T will become even more important.

Mind the Gap: Bridging Generational Differences in SEO — Jes Scholz

Jes joined us this year to speak about bridging generational differences in SEO. Google is transforming from being just a search engine, to an ecosystem of experiences. Google Discover, Google Lens, YouTube Shorts, and Bard are all examples of the shift towards greater experiences for users online. Google is an online shop, a business directory, an aggregator, a map, a store, a place to shop.

Your job is not to optimize websites anymore, it’s to build a well-known, top rated and trusted brands. Google has moved beyond URL ranking factors, and instead grants visibility to entities in graphs, such as the Knowledge Graph. The best way to track if a brand is an entity is to query the brand name in the Google Knowledge Graph Search API daily and keep a record of the returned results.

Jes advises following three steps to explicitly establish your brand entity in the Knowledge Graph:

  1. Define a brand entity bio. Start with your name, your brand positioning, and unique selling proposition.

  2. Brandsplain your entity with schema markup. Everything you just said about your brand with on-page text, say it again through comprehensive schema markup. This brandsplaining of your entity to Google re-confirms its key attributes, and is a critical step to Google accepting that information as facts in the knowledge graph.

  3. Arrange more get togethers with Google. On average, an entity needs over 30 meaningful touchpoints to become Google’s friend.

Get more from Jes with her Whiteboard Friday on the fundamentals of crawling for SEO.

Drive Execution & Growth: SEO Audits in 2023... and Beyond — Aleyda Solis

Last year, Aleyda addressed her e-commerce SEO horror stories, and this year, she delved into her talk on driving execution and growth through SEO audits in 2023 and beyond. Auditing is at the core of our SEO process, and most SEOs have a hard time getting their recommendations implemented.

Aleyda presented seven actions to integrate within your SEO auditing process:

  1. Do a radical SEO audit prioritization with a high impact, solution-focused action plan, leveraging storytelling.

  2. Develop a parallel “SEO low-hanging fruit” framework to deliver “quick SEO wins” fast. Aleyda suggests taking a look at her SearchLove presentation for more SEO low-hanging fruit tips! She also did a deep dive on her low-hanging fruit SEO strategy on Whiteboard Friday a few months back.

  3. Set an SEO quality framework not only to catch, but also prevent bugs that will hold SEO execution back. Make sure to set a monitoring system to catch negative SEO configurations.

  4. Normalize forecasting based on different execution scenarios to kill amiguity and set expectations.

  5. Communicate “no SEO execution” tradeoffs toward goals, as well as the cost to get them with other channels. Show th decision makers what they can lose if they choose to neglect SEO.

  6. Normalize SEO testing to validate your hypothesis and win stakeholders’ support.

  7. Leverage AI or Edge SEO to accelerate execution in bureaucratic scenarios to prove value and get buy-in.

The Great Reset — Wil Reynolds

Wil got us to dig a little deeper in our keyword research after his talk at MozCon in 2022. This year, he closed out MozCon addressing the current transformational period the industry is going through. Wil has seen many an SEO reset, but let us know that SEO is defined by inflection points. The secret sauce to stay on top of SEO, is to know when these inflection points occur, and realise when to pivot.

Wil mentioned that before Google, there was a lot of friction in the sales process. Once Google came about, friction reduced. However, now we create so much content, that we’ve moved from one type of friction to another. Customers cannot find the content they want, because we are over-saturating the places in which they spend their time online.

We need to understand more about customers, which we can attempt to do through data analysis. Wil referenced Seer Interactive’s new tool ‘Supernova’, which combines campaign-based paid and organic search data, sign up to the waitlist here. He recommended creating your own Looker Dashboard, and looking at any trends in your data. Check out Seer Interactive’s dashboard and see if you have AI-driven search traffic hitting your website from tools like Bard, ChatGPT, Neeva, and more.

Wil addressed a number of instances he’s utilized ChatGPT, such as building code with no experience, crawling competitor links, looking at the Google Trends API, creating content, and more. For Wil, there are no more nos, because ChatGPT and other technology are simply allowing us to say yes more.

See you on the other side!

We ended the final day of MozCon 2023 partying it up at MoPOP. Did you sing karaoke? Dance to Lily Ray’s sick beats? Be sure to tweet (or X) us your favourite memory or photo you took over the last two days so we can all remember how much fun MozCon 2023 was.

The learning isn’t over yet, though! Be sure to pre-order the MozCon 2023 video bundle to recap on this year’s talks.

Safe travels to all, and best of luck trudging through the future of search. We’ve got this!

Read the day one MozCon 2023 recap.

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Tuesday, August 8, 2023

Blast Off Into the Future: MozCon 2023 Day One Recap

Day one recap contributors were Emilie Martin, Vickie Wu, and Zach Edelstein.

Today, we kicked off day one of MozCon 2023. That’s right - we’re back and better than ever!

We’re in a brand new venue this year, and we’re excited to experience it for the first time with all of you! Whether you joined us in person or via our live stream, we are so grateful to get back together again for another year of MozCon madness.

We hope day one helped set the scene for what the future of search is going to look like. Let’s recap yesterday’s talks.

Opening remarks + State of the Industry — Cheryl Draper

Setting the stage for what’s to come, Cheryl Draper kicks off MozCon 2023, laying out all the important details you’ll need to get through two jam-packed days! From seasoned speakers to our community speakers, Cheryl made sure to let us know what we’re in for this year. Cheryl is joined by fellow emcees Melissa Rae Brown and Cyrus Shepard.

Cheryl let us know the reason we chose the future of search as this year's theme. It has everything to do with Seattle! Very fitting, as Seattle is known as the city of the future and has future-related infrastructure, like the monorail and space needle. We wanted to imagine what the future would look like. A lot has changed since the last time we came together, and we’re forced to think more than ever about the future of search; think of machine learning, artificial intelligence, TikTok, and Google Analytics 4. Every time we log online, there’s something new to digest!

Make sure to take breaks, grab yourself some lunch, and stay hydrated! Remember to follow #MozCon on Twitter, or X, and get involved in the conversation over there.

Google’s Just Not That Into You: Intent Switches During Core Updates — Lily Ray

Acting as the conduit between us and impactful changes to the Google algorithm, Lily Ray returns to the MozCon stage with her thoughts on why your rankings may have changed during a core update. Following up on her 2022 talk on Why Real Expertise is the Most Important Ranking Factor of Them All, Lily delved deeper into Google algorithm intricacies.

Many SEOs have wondered why Lily and her team are so obsessed with core updates. Lily revealed her origin story starting with getting on the wrong side of Google’s 2012 Penguin update. Lily took her knowledge and experience over to the agency world and did things right, committing to helping businesses suffering from Google core updates.

If you’ve been impacted by a core update, to deal with your recovery, Lily recommends prioritizing fixing these issues:

  • Changes in user behavior — Lily used the example of the company ‘Playground’, battling with several other companies with the same name online.

  • World events and crises — Lily used the example of the keyword ‘masks’ and pages related to them. Previously, costume masks ranked on page one, but during COVID-19, medical face masks took the top spots instead.

  • Overhauls to search, like EEAT.

  • Relevancy shifts and Quality Deserves Freshness (QDF) — Before the July 2021 updates, if you searched for Steel Dragon, the results that showed up included a game and a hardware store. After the update, they started ranking the rock band, intent shifted, and Google started understanding more about user intent related to the keyword.

  • Intent switching — We’ve got the three classics, informational, transactional, and navigational. But we all know there are more than three search intents. Lily mentions buying products, fact-checking recipes, seeing pictures, looking at the news, watching a video, translating, and more. Lily emphasized creating content for each intent you think your users hold when searching. Be everywhere your customers can find you.

Intent shifts are inevitable, and patience is a virtue when it comes down to it. If you’re looking to see where you can find information on Google Core updates, you can see a list of them here.

You can catch Lily performing as our DJ at our closing party at MoPOP.

Why SEOs Need to Start Playing Offense Instead of Defense — Chris Long

Chris turned heads last year with his talk on Advanced On-Page Optimization, and he joined us this year to discuss how to shift to an offensive SEO mindset, helping you to prioritize key initiatives, get stakeholder buy-in, and navigate successful long-term SEO strategy.

In a game of chess, you always want to be on the offensive so that you can control the board. But in SEO, we feel like we always have to be on defense. The best SEOs that Chris knows are constantly playing offense; they’re experimenting and looking at the future of search.

So how can SEOs play offense?

  • Identify new content opportunities — Chris suggests starting with a content gap analysis, which you can do with Moz Pro - but this is a little on the defensive side. To look at it offensively, we need to know what topical areas we need content for. For example, if we work with personal loans, we might look at all keywords to do with personal loans - we can now build content in this topical area.

  • Choosing which pages to optimize — The more advanced way of optimizing content involves finding which categories we need more visibility in. This works on sites with many different topical areas, for example, Macy's.

  • Technical SEO prioritization — First, evaluate the percentage of total pages experiencing technical issues, then evaluate issue type. Make sure to take your recommendations as close to the end as possible.

  • Get data for key initiatives — Getting buy-in is just as important as the SEO work, and one of Chris’ favorite ways to do this is by framing every content initiative as an opportunity cost. What is the opportunity cost of not creating a specific type of content?

  • Perform experiments — Chris’ experimentation process includes creating a hypothesis, implementing a testing framework, and measuring the results.

  • Chris noted that SEOs need to embrace AI— the SEOs playing offensive are implementing AI in their workflows. According to Chris’ online poll, approximately 72% of SEOs are already doing so, and Chris is confident that AI will enable us to become better creators.

A special announcement from Moz you’re not gonna want to miss!

We’re so delighted to share that Brand Authority is here! Melissa Rae Brown introduced our exciting new metric, available for Moz Pro and Moz API customers. Learn more about how you can use Brand Authority in Dr. Pete’s blog post – Introducing Brand Authority: Measuring the Unmeasurable.

SEO Co-Conspirators: Navigating Complex Systems — Jackie Chu

Jackie Chu discussed tips and tricks for growing organic traffic at scale in 2022 and came back this year to share how you can source and uncover allies, enlist your coworkers, and successfully navigate the political landscape to get your own SEO project prioritized.

The easiest way to get shut down as an SEO is to tell people you need to do things “for SEO”. Jackie has gotten really good at making sure what she needs to get done is taken seriously; she looks to the legal team, the business owner, and the engineering team in organizations to find her allies.

Spearhead your accessibility projects with your legal team. Accessibility issues are SEO issues. Web accessibility involves making sure your website and web content are usable for everyone and accommodates all accessibility issues. 4.5% of people are colorblind; that’s quite a lot of people to be excluding. Follow web content accessibility guidelines, and note 4 significant themes: your content needs to be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Jackie recommended checking out bit.ly/seo-access for a complete checklist of web accessibility guidelines.

Enlist the business owner. Identify who would care about your project’s success, tell them what they can get out of it, agree on who will drive what, and highlight the time to see the impact. Instead of saying something like, “We’ll fix broken links that will help SEO,” say, “We’ll fix broken links… to increase traffic and revenue to payments.” Getting buy-in from the business owner can help you scale your impact and build trust and relationships.

When working with your engineering team, ask yourself — is this a bug, or is it a feature? Most engineers want the company to be successful, and it’s important to set them up with accurate information. If it’s a bug, ask yourself if this is a confusing brand experience, if it’s impacting any customer, and if it’s impacting other channels (like SEM). Examples include; the page not rendering, content differences on mobile and desktop, blocking Google bot, rate limiting, and 500 errors.

Consider the previous three suggestions when attempting to find your allies at your company. If you learn how to package your SEO projects by framing other people’s motivations, you can start to get them prioritized.

Search Data at Scale — Daniel Waisberg

In his inaugural MozCon talk, Daniel set a precedent for equipping a room full of people with invaluable skills for managing data at scale, using Google Search Console bulk exports.

Daniel is super passionate about the Google Search Console bulk data exporting functionality. The first milestones of creating this product included asking stakeholders if they could create it, how they should do it, and getting the correct approval. The project moved swiftly to testing internally and eternally, then documentation was written, final tweaks made, and the product was launched!

To access the tool, head to Google Search Console, input your data and receive bulk exports daily for your website. You’ll see site impression, which is aggregated, and it is segmented by country, device type, and more. You can even drill down to specific pages.

To be more efficient in your data analysis, Daniel suggests focusing on planning and optimizing.

  • Plan your data pools to avoid surprises, and be smart about how you pull your data. If you have a large website, you can limit your data — N.B. set your expiration date to partition, not your table! Remember to pre-aggregate your data for analysis and set billing alerts and restrictions.

  • When focusing on optimization, limit the input scan, sample the data, and use approximate functions.

Daniel wants to make sure search data is available and useful at scale. He recommended SEOs focus on search, Google Search Console, and Google Trends. Check out Daniel’s training on bulk data exports here.

Beyond the Written Word: Future-Proofing Your Content Strategy by Leveraging Multimedia Formats — Azeem Ahmad

We were so happy to have Azeem, one of our fantastic Community Speakers, grace the stage (for the very first time!) Azeem talked us through how to future-proof your content strategy and stay ahead of the competition.

As marketers, we measure too much stuff. Azeem lets us know where we get it wrong; we know what users want, but we often don’t know how they want it. Throwing up blog pages doesn’t cut it anymore.

To go from basic to advanced in measuring data, Azeem recommends following these steps:

An image from Azeem's MozCon slide deck. Go from basic data analysis to advanced in three steps.

Azeem’s quick-fire tips for creating audio and video content include:

  • Weigh in on current events

  • Share ‘x things you didn’t know about’

  • Stitching

  • Day in the life

  • Morning routine

  • Software demos

  • Before and after

  • How we do ‘x’

  • FAQs

  • Viral hack tests

  • Mythbusting

  • How-to guides

  • Trending templates

Check out Azeem’s Whiteboard Friday to learn more about diversifying your content strategy.

From Fear to Forward Motion: Navigating the Future of Analytics with Confidence — Brie E. Anderson

After lunch, Brie entered the stage to remind us of the ever-looming topic of GA4. Just kidding, we’re all pulling up our socks to try and figure out how best to use this new set of analytics to make real business decisions. Brie mentioned that change is hard, but it’s also inevitable.

She guided us through the most important sections of GA4 and how we can put it to work:

  • Data stream is how information gets from your website to GA4.

  • Events are where you can see what you’re tracking, if it’s important, and if it’s working. This is key for documentation and to meeting your business, marketing, and personal goals.

  • You can mark any events of your choosing as Conversions with ease!

  • Audiences, while similar to UA, now have unique new features in GA4. For example, you can now add an audience trigger, which will create an event when someone becomes a member of that audience. Time-based audiences are also worthwhile trying out!

  • Data Settings — It’s best to speak to a privacy expert to see what’s right for you.

  • Product links — Do them!

  • Brie said, “The best and worst thing about GA4 is it’s customizable.” This is especially true for Reports.

  • A vital tool in Advertising to make use of is Conversion Paths, which help you see where in the funnel channels are falling.

As much as this change can feel daunting and isolating, Brie shared comforting words as her last sentiment. Us marketers, SEOs, business owners, etc. — we’re all going through it together! GA4 may not feel intuitive initially, but as long as you’re willing to embrace the mistakes along the way, it’ll all be worth it in the end. Brush up on your GA4 skills with the Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics.

Down the Mountain — Noah Learner

Noah spoke on the MozCon stage last year about how to break into new areas with topic maps and rejoined us this year to share his evergreen framework for optimizing your own career, which can be applied to any market. He laid out this repeatable process in four steps:

1) Go wide:

  • Create a strong skill set — This can look like working in an agency early on, signing up for sucky work, embracing errors, and finding ways to fuel your curiosity outside of work and within your circle of friends and family.

  • Critical thinking is the art of deciding what to do and when to do it. Find and use a decision-making process that works for you, and make improvements regularly!

2) Go deep:

  • Find your Ikigai (“reason for being”.) Uncover what ties all the things you love together.

  • Don’t be afraid to reach out to your heroes. A like, comment, DM, zoom call, and in-person conversation can take you far. Go into these conversations with the mindset of seeking as much wisdom as possible.

  • Join communities with the same types of people and passions. Can’t find them? Build your own!

3) Go big

  • Are you a writer? Start a blog. Prefer speaking? Host a podcast (and feature your heroes!). Learn how to speak and ask for what you want.

  • Overcome fears through therapy, box breathing, recording and revisiting wins, and remembering your purpose.

4) Give back

  • This is arguably the most important step! Your vulnerability and mentorship can make a world of difference for someone else.

This all started with Noah drawing his “Why.” From there, he put in the time and effort to get his flock down the mountain. Now it’s your turn to ask yourself: What’s my dream, and what would I sacrifice to get it?

The SERP Is Dead, Long Live the SERP — Tom Capper

Our very own Tom Capper, following up from his 2022 talk on non-catastrophic keyword research, addressed Google’s ever-changing SERP and looked at Google’s direction for the future.

The first major death of SEO was in 2003: Google Ads. In 2012, the knowledge graph killed SEO. In 2014, SEO killed Google. In 2020, “zero-click searches” killed SEO. Despite all of the “dead SEO’ instances in history, Tom mentions that interest in SEO is only growing.

Tom talked about the elephant in the room: SGE (Search Generative Experience.) Here are some interesting observations Tom made on how it’s performing:

  • SGE is appearing less and less, possibly to save costs.

  • There’s very little overlap with organic results, indicating that SGE ranking is likely not built on organic ranking.

  • “Follow Up” in the SGE is very similar to “People also ask,” and maps are often replicated in the SGE and below it. This points to SGE being built in a rush, with little consideration of redundant results and functionalities.

TLDR: SGE is often not appropriate and can even be wrong a lot of the time.

What happens next? You’ll be happy to hear that there are worthwhile opportunities that will hold up now and in the future for SEOs, businesses, and publishers alike. Tom advises to start investing efforts in Google Business Profiles, Google Shopping, and a human approach to content.

Headless SEO: I’m Sorry, But This Is Happening — Lidia Infante

Lidia joined us for her second year on the MozCon stage. Last year she presented us with tips on SEO gap analysis, but this year, she spoke about headless SEO.

If you’re not sure what ‘headless CMS’ is, it refers to a CMS that deals only with content, not the front-end experience of a website. This type of CMS allows you to post content anywhere — the web, apps, and more via API.

Given this definition of a headless CMS, what is different about headless SEO? Lidia described the pros and cons of a headless CMS for SEO. The downside is traditional CMS will allow you to use plugins like Yoast to help with your search optimization.

There are several advantages of using a headless CMS, including the ability to reuse content across apps and other platforms, as well as internationalization.

Lidia provided a checklist of 7 implementations you need to request from your development team to get started with your headless CMS:

  • Request all the key meta tags, including title, meta description, meta robots, viewports, and more.

  • Give your content editors a customizable URL slug.

  • Define your XML Sitemap setup. You will need to create a validation rule so that only 200 indexable canonical URLs get added. You will also need to define your preferred update frequency.

  • Make room for structured data. This is one of the most exciting aspects of headless SEO. For example, you can create a rule in your CMS that generates FAQ schema for the appropriate sections on your page.

  • Validate your headings’ hierarchy. This is key for accessibility.

  • Perform a parity audit. This means you will need to make sure that all JavaScript looks the same to users and Google.

Views on Views of Video SEO — Crystal Carter

Crystal is all about the visuals! In 2022, she presented us with her views on how to use visual search to your advantage, and this year, she brought her wealth of knowledge to the topic of video SEO. Crystal mentioned that video SERPs account for an average of 20% of untapped keyword opportunities; there has never been a better time to improve your video SEO.

Why is on-page video SEO important? Well, because users love video, and the prevalence of videos in the SERP is up 45% YoY! Crystal dove into the data and uncovered that Google’s addition of video content in its SERPs is largely connected to TikTok’s success. Google is using video to help drive competitive, strategic objectives.

Why is video SEO different from page optimization? Primarily because video content can appear in the SERPs in a variety of ways. Videos can even appear multiple times in the same SERP, in places like a recipe result, YouTube result, and webpage simultaneously.

How do we optimize on-page videos for SEO? Crystal dives into these three components of video SEO success:

  • Video content — Use high-quality file format and thumbnails. Optimize your content by using keywords in your script and making sure that you satisfy user intent.

  • Video platform — Use YouTube! This one is pretty simple, according to Crystal. YouTube has 48m pages ranking on the SERP right now, far above any competitor. Leveraging YouTube gives your content the best chance to rank. On a more technical level, video defaults on YouTube meet Google video indexing specs such as supported format and full video schema. Crucially, every YouTube video is indexed, so yours will be!

  • Video webpage — This page should meet all technical SEO foundations, as well as include a transcript. Additionally, make sure your images are always above the fold!

GA4 added a new Organic Video channel to help SEOs measure the performance of this content. There has never been a better time to grow your audience by embracing on-page video SEO.

The Evolution of Content & the Future of Our Industry — Ross Simmonds

Ross ended day one of MozCon with a bang, following up on his talk in 2022 on finding your way to SEO and content success. This year, he spoke on the evolution of content and the future of our industry as we know it – touching on the question of whether AI is actually coming for our jobs or not.

Ross takes down a common statement circulating in the marketing community: AI-written content will NEVER drive results. Ross’s approach is to use AI as a way to augment or supercharge your own skillset.

In a world that is so hyper-fixated on content and whether or not AI can replace the process of creating it, Ross explains the need for marketers to embrace the full content growth framework to stand out while being able to incorporate AI to supercharge the process. Here are the key areas in which Ross recommends using AI tools to evolve your content:

Research – Tools like ChatGPT can help summarize and analyze large documents for you to use as research for your new content.

Create – Use AI to reverse engineer great content, and help you determine what performs well.

You can also use a keyword research tool like Moz Pro to export a list of keyword suggestions and then feed that file into ChatGPT to help you come up with content ideas!

Distribute – Create once, distribute forever! Using AI, you can take a piece of content you’ve created and summarize or repurpose it. Use ChatGPT to create tweets based on your content and similar Tweets that you’ve made before.

Optimize – Upload a piece of content and have ChatGPT make recommendations on SEO optimizations.

Ross’ final takeaway is that if you are hesitant to embrace AI, embrace experiments. Find ways to test these tools not to replace your marketing strategy but to enhance it.

Catch more from Ross in his Whiteboard Friday: How Content Is Evolving Thanks to AI.

On to day two!

The first day of MozCon 2023 provided many insights, and it seems that the unintentional theme of the day was getting SEO buy-in! Glad to hear we’re all on the same page; we need to be in order to keep up with the future of search.

We launched our new metric, Brand Authority - have you checked your own Brand Authority score yet? Let us know your archetype on X.

We hope you enjoyed happy hour on the summit terrace and are now ready for another day of MozCon magic!

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Monday, August 7, 2023

Introducing Brand Authority: Measuring the Unmeasurable

We all recognize the power of brands, but too often the value of brand building is reduced to hand-waving and wishful thinking. Today, Moz makes the power of brand measurable.

Starting today, you’ll find something new in our Domain Overview tool: a Brand AuthorityTM score for your domain (or any domain you choose to analyze):

Screenshot of the Moz Domain Overview tool showing the Brand Authority score for a website

You’ll also see a new visualization – a four-quadrant grid – that compares your Brand Authority and Domain Authority to your closest online competitors. Here’s an example for electric car maker Lucid Motors:

Screenshot comparing your Brand Authority and Domain Authority score to your competitors on a four-quadrant grid

It’s easy to see how Lucid stacks up to their closest search competitors and where they might need to build more authority. Lastly (for now), we’re launching a new API endpoint for API customers to access Brand Authority directly.

What is Brand Authority?

Brand Authority is a (1-100) score developed by Moz that measures a domain’s total brand strength. Where Domain Authority measures your ability to rank on search engines, Brand Authority measures your broader influence across marketing channels.

Why Brand Authority?

We know that brands matter, online and in the broader world. We see the influence of brands on search results, even if the details of that influence can be hard to pin down. Consider this illustration from Google’s own Quality Rater Guidelines:

Screenshot comparing your Brand Authority and Domain Authority score to your competitors on a four-quadrant grid



When someone in 2023 searches for “apple,” Google knows that they probably mean Apple the company (i.e., the “dominant interpretation” or “dominant intent”). Even if Apple.com didn’t get their SEO quite right or hadn’t built quite enough link equity, people expect it to come up first.

We also know that Google understands real-world entities and tries to represent them in search, which might include Knowledge Graph results and other rich search result features. Google’s job is to model the real world, and brands are a huge part of that world.

The problem is that while we all intuitively understand what a “brand” is and have our own idea of which brands are important, we often resort to hand-waving when it comes to measuring brand strength. At best, we’re limited by our own biases and influences.

How does it all work?

When someone goes to Google and searches for “apple,” or “apple store,” or “apple customer service,” they already have knowledge of and exposure to the Apple brand. Likewise, if they search for terms like “iPad,” or “MacBook,” or “AirPods Pro,” they’ve been influenced by the Apple brand even if they never used the word “apple.”

Brand Authority uses two core Moz strengths: (1) Our deep knowledge of search results and rich search features, and (2) Our massive database of search volume information. Using Google’s rich results and brand signals, we can detect a wide variety of brand terms to understand how often people are looking for that brand and compute a score.

What can you do with it?

Anytime you need to connect a website to a brand and understand its broader influence, you can use Brand Authority. A few key use cases include:

(1) Strength and gap analysis

Brand Authority can help you better assess your strength as a brand and identify opportunities for improvement. Super-optimizing your website could result in diminishing returns (and poor ROI) if no one knows who you are. On the other hand, if you’re a more well-known brand but are lagging online, investing in your SEO and content efforts might be money much better spent than more offline advertising.

(2) Assessing brand value/potential

From sales prospects to M&A targets to reputation management clients, Brand Authority allows you to measure a brand’s broader strength and influence and help determine if they’re a good opportunity for you. Many underperforming sites might be built by solid brands with ample room for growth, while some seemingly strong sites could be built around virtually unknown companies, creating challenges to broader marketing efforts.

(3) Measuring impact of digital PR

While everyone hopes to get authority-passing links from their digital PR efforts, a big part of the PR game is the viral power of the mentions themselves. Brand Authority provides PR agencies with a quick and easy way to illustrate the broader impact of PR campaigns by measuring the actual word-of-mouth influence of the brands that pick up your stories.

By making the concept of brand concrete, we hope that Brand Authority opens up new opportunities for marketers, even beyond SEO. We look forward to seeing how you put Brand Authority to work as the metrics and tools evolve, and we’d love to hear your stories.

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Friday, August 4, 2023

Site Architecture Optimization for Seasonality — Whiteboard Friday

Areej discusses site architecture optimization for seasonality in this edition of Whiteboard Friday. The key focus is on asking yourself when your business’s peak periods occur and strategically planning before, during, and after those periods.

Digital whiteboard showing tips for site architecture optimization for seasonality, including what to do before peak, during peak and after peak.

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

Video Transcription

Hey, everyone. I'm Areej AbuAli. I'm the founder of Crawlina, an independent SEO consultancy, and I am here today to talk to you all about site architecture optimization for seasonality, with a focus on e-commerce websites.

What is Seasonal SEO?

An image showing what seasonal SEO is

Seasonal SEO is this concept of driving conversions during a period of increased interest.

Now, it could be one of many reasons. It could be event-based. It could be time-based. It could be because of a product. So some examples that come to mind when they're event-based is let's say it's Valentine's Day or it's Mother's Day or Father's Day. When it comes to a specific time period, it could be because it's the end of the year or it's January or it's summer.

Then, when it's product-based, it's usually around this concept of a new product launch, like the new iPhone, or the new MacBook, or so forth.

The Main Question to Ask

The question that you always have to make sure you ask when you work on any new website is this question of, "When are our peak periods?" It's very, very important for us to not assume when the peak periods are, that you actually ask that and to bear it in mind in our SEO strategy.

So the way I like to kind of split it is this concept of what happens before peak, what happens during peak, and then what happens after peak, and this is what we'll walk through now one after the other.

Before Peak

Image showing what you should do before the peak, i.e., benchmark, plan, and go live.

So let's start with before peak. It's this idea of splitting everything into what we benchmark first and then what we plan and then what happens when we go live.

Benchmarking Phase

Image showing how to benchmark before peak.

So when we talk about benchmarking, the first question we usually ask is, "How did you perform last peak?" It's important for us to take a step back to make sure that we have benchmark data in place to understand what was our traffic like, what was our revenue like, how many leads did come through, because in order for us to, down the line, be able to assess and understand what happened in this peak period.

Forget all about your typical type of monthly reports. Peak reporting tends to be very, very different. It focuses on actual KPIs that matter to the business, and it compares you with this peak in comparison with a previous peak period. The second question is, "What is the opportunity this peak?" So for this specific peak that's coming up, you are usually expected to do some form of forecasting of what the traffic and revenue is going to look like.

We can do that based on current rankings, based on seasonal search volume. Then, off the back of that, we can have our forecasted traffic and our predicted revenue uplift. Sharing that beforehand is very important so that stakeholders can be onboard and everyone is aware of what to expect and what's coming next.

Planning Phase

Image showing how to plan before peak.

Then, when it comes to the planning phase of your before-peak period, this is usually where you're going to spend a lot of the time.

Now, it's really, really important that we don't leave this to the last minute. This is usually at least a quarter in advance of a peak period coming up. So the first thing is making sure all your reporting is set up, have those automated dashboards in place so that they're able to curate that data as you go. Seasonal page updates, now it could be one of many things. Of course, the homepage will probably get some updates.

Your product landing pages, your PLPs and your product detail pages, in a lot of cases, some of these pages might have been forgotten for a while since they haven't been touched since the last seasonality. Then, of course, ensuring how we're internally linking between those. Now, your navigation is a hero when it comes to that, and it's very, very important for us to ensure that we're internally linking between our PLPs and our PDPs and our supporting content assets and our supporting blog assets.

Then, when it comes to the content updates that you need to be doing, evergreen is your friend. It's very, very important for us to rely on pages that already have authority as opposed to creating new pages from scratch, making sure that we don't forget about our meta tags and updating the different dates, depending on where we are in the year. But also stick to what worked before as opposed to trying to create something from scratch every time.

Tech checks are very important. A lot of times, with seasonal pages, depending on if they're an event page or a product page, then it might be that we kind of forget something that's blocked or something that's not indexed or something that's not crawlable. So ensuring that there is a plan in advance when you are about to go live for all of these pages to be crawlable and indexable by Google.

Then, finally, having an out-of-stock plan is really, really important. Let's make sure that we do not 404 pages just like that when they are temporarily out of stock, and let's make sure that we actually have a plan in place and we are liaising with different teams to ensure that we know when is something about to go out of stock and what needs to be done at that point.

Going Live

Image showing what to do before going live.

Then, when it's time for go live, you probably, by that point, have your go-live checklist ready to go, making sure that everything is crawlable, everything is indexable, what needs to be in the navigation is there, your pages can actually be found. Then just take a breath. It's really, really important at that point. It's usually been at least a month or two or four prior, especially if this was a big seasonal page for you or a big seasonal period for you to ensure that you kind of step back.

Before peak is usually where most of the work is done.

During Peak

Image showing what to do during peak

So then, during peak, this can be an event that lasts a day. It can be something that lasts a week, or it can be the whole of Q4, for example. So it's very, very dependent on which specific peak period you're working on. But make sure you're monitoring your data as you go, right? So that data benchmarking that we did up here is very, very important, because at that point, we know how we performed the last time around.

So keep on top of these numbers and know, "Have we reached our target yet? Our prediction for revenue uplift, are we there at this point, or are we still quite behind?" Make sure that you're checking on the tech the whole time. Is out-of-stock going to become a problem soon? Should we make sure that we make any amendments to some of our pages?

Are all of our products live? Is everything crawlable? Is everything indexable? Also, just make sure you're updating stakeholders as you go. Especially if it's a longer period than expected, then don't wait for them to come up to you and say, "Oh, have we hit our targets yet?" or, "What are the numbers looking like?" It's very, very important with some of those reporting automated setup that we had in the first place, just make them really transparent and make them very, very easy for stakeholders to be able to access.

After Peak

Image showing what to do after peak

After-peak period, it's kind of all about communication at that point. You're probably going to get a lot of questions, and SEO is just one channel. Your organic traffic and your organic revenue is just one channel amongst many more. It's going to be very, very important for the business as a whole to communicate how it went, which channels hit target, which ones didn't.

Whether it's good news or it's bad news, it's very, very important to be as transparent and open as possible about what the data looks like and what some of our learnings are. Now, something I always encourage is doing a retrospective action plan. Now, this is a meeting that will most probably include a lot of different stakeholders from different teams.

But the important thing is to kind of talk about what went well, what didn't go so well, and what are the actions that we're going to take off the back of that. There might be some things that went really well that we want to make sure that we continue doing for our next peak periods. But there might be others that were quite a bit of a challenge, for example, a miscommunication with the tech team, or a problem with a content piece that wasn't updated, or something along those lines.

With those, we want to make sure that we have a plan put forward of how we avoid this happening the next time around. This is also usually the best time to plan for next peak and ask for any additional resources that you might potentially need. Let's say you need a dedicated dev the next time around, or let's say you want more content resource, for example. This is usually the best time to put a case study forward of this is what happened this peak period, and we want to ensure that we perform and do even better the next time around.

So, yeah, with this, I hope it kind of gives an easy way for us to have SEO strategies moving forward, especially with a focus on seasonal peak periods and how we can handle those for e-commerce or also for other sites in general. Thank you so much for joining.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Tuesday, August 1, 2023

Twitter’s Brand Equity: 17 Years & 12 Million Keywords

On July 24, Elon Musk made the surprise announcement that Twitter would be rebranding as ‘X’, with a new logo and brand identity arriving quickly after that announcement. Shortly after, X.com started redirecting (302) to Twitter.com.

Any experienced SEO knows how perilous a major site migration can be, and Twitter.com has been accumulating authority for 17 years. Here are a couple of stats from Moz’s Domain Overview tool:

Screenshot of stats from Moz’s Domain Overview tool

Those are numbers most sites could only envy, with nearly 12M ranking keywords on Google.com alone. Over time, X.com could recover many or most of the non-branded rankings, but what about the equity in searches for the Twitter brand?

Brand search: It’s complicated

According to our data, there are 8.4 Million searches a month in the United States just for the word “twitter” (and that’s probably a conservative estimate), but brand search goes far deeper than that. Consider the Google result for just the letters “tw”:

Image showing Google result for just the letters “tw”:

Not only does Twitter rank #1 for just “tw”, but Google is sending strong brand signals, including expanded sitelinks and a Knowledge Graph entry. While many possible sites and searches begin with “tw”, Google has determined that Twitter.com is — in their own lingo — the dominant interpretation. This is impressive even by large-brand standards.

Something unique to social networks is that people also pair other search phrases with the network’s name. So, we see many searches for prominent figures and brands, such as:

  • “Taylor Swift Twitter”

  • “Tom Holland Twitter”

  • “Fortnite Twitter”

  • “Netflix Twitter”

  • “NFL Twitter”

We also see brand-like signals for topics paired with the word “Twitter”, prominent Twitter personalities (even without the brand name), inquiries like “Twitter search” and “Twitter login”, and official spinoffs, like “Tweetdeck.” Even popular memes can return brand-like signals.

In addition, Twitter qualifies for a unique, carousel-style format like the one below:

Image showing Twitter's unique carousel-style format


This kind of prime real estate on Google results may carry over to the X brand, but that is entirely at Google’s discretion and may depend on the strength of the new brand.

Quantifying Twitter’s brand power

Across the approximately 12 Million search queries Twitter ranked for in Moz’s data, we examined just the ones that received 150+ searches per month and where Twitter ranked on page one, which left us with about 600,000 unique queries.

We analyzed those 600K queries for brand signals and ended up with 10,149 search queries. While this may not seem like a lot compared to 12 Million, it represents a massive influence of the Twitter brand. All told, these 10K queries drive over 18 Million searches per month.

The problem for ‘X’ is that the vast majority of these brand-like searches reference Twitter or associated brand terms (like “tweet” and “Tweetdeck”) directly. To recapture this search volume and traffic long-term, ‘X’ will have to reach a level of brand awareness where searchers are actively looking for terms like “Taylor Swift X” and “Fortnite X’.

The confusing history of X.com

X.com currently ranks for no keywords in our databases, due to a number of long-term issues. It doesn’t take a lot of math to tell you that this drives zero brand searches. This situation will undoubtedly change, but X.com faces another challenge — it has been used to house a number of sites (with multiple owners) and also has redirected to Musk’s wider brand portfolio. To understand X.com’s more than 25-year history, you really need to see it.

The early years (1995–2000)

Using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, we can capture a bit of this confusing history. The X.com domain was originally owned by Dave Weinstein, who launched the site in 1995 or 1996, in pretty typical mid-1990s fashion:

Image showing the original domain of X.com



Sadly, the list of stuff that Rob Walker might want is lost to the sands of time.

In 1999, Elon Musk bought the domain for the first time (he would later re-buy it from eBay). Here’s a screenshot from early 2000 of the original X.com online banking site:

Screenshot of April 1999 of the original X.com online banking site



Until the recent rebranding of Twitter to ‘X’, this 2000-era site was the only one to ever house the X.com brand as originally envisioned.

The PayPal years (2000–2011)

Due to a rocky period at PayPal after the merger of X.com and Confinity, the X.com brand gave way to various PayPal brands. In the spring of 2000, the site was briefly rebranded as “X-Finance” and then “X-PayPal” (shown below):

screenshot of X-Paypal interface from the year 2000

By the fall of 2000, Musk was ousted as CEO at PayPal, and this site was rebranded as just “PayPal” in early 2001. This persisted for a while, with X.com eventually redirecting to the PayPal site. The ‘X’ brand was nowhere to be seen at this point.

In late 2007, X.com was resurrected as PayPal Labs (captured here in 2008):

Screenshot of PayPal Labs

PayPal Labs persisted for a while, followed by a handful of PayPal experiments, including this “X.com blog” that appears to have nothing to do with the ‘X’ brand (screen shot from July 2009):

Screenshot of X.com blog posts from June and July of 2009

These appear to be the only two posts the X.com blog ever had, until it was replaced in spring of 2010 with the PayPal-X Developer Network (not to be confused with X-PayPal):

Screenshot of PayPal-X Developer Network

In summer of 2011, this site was replaced by a new joint venture of eBay (which had acquired PayPal in 2002), PayPal, and Magento called “X-commerce”.

X.com[merce] (2011–2014)

X.commerce, a play on the X.com domain, housed “a new venture in commerce” that sought to integrate the eBay, PayPal, and Magento developer communities:

Screenshot of X.commerce

X.commerce went through a number of iterations, surviving until February of 2014. At that point, eBay seems to have given up on the X.commerce venture and redirected X.com directly to eBay’s corporate site (ebayinc.com).

The Boring hat (2017–2023)

In July of 2017, Elon Musk repurchased X.com and replaced the home-page with just the letter ‘x’. Soon after, X.com redirected to The Boring Company, but not to the home-page — to a page to buy a hat:

Image showing the page for The Boring Company

Roughly a year later, this was replaced by an under construction page reminiscent of the late 1990s, while living unironically in 2018:

Screenshot of the page stating it was 'under construction'

This page soon returned to the letter ‘x’ on a white background. Note that the basic ‘x’ page contained no HTML source code at all nor any clues about the nature of the ‘X’ brand or website. It was literally just one character. This persisted until July of 2023, when X.com was 302-redirected to Twitter.com, which is its current status as of this writing.

The long, uncertain road ahead

The strange history of X.com — regardless of my personal feelings — is an SEO and branding nightmare. X.com has been used and abused by various owners and has spent years just being the letter ‘x’ on a white page, with absolutely no clues as to the brand’s purpose.

During this time, X.com has built roughly zero online brand equity and ranks for nothing. Temporarily redirecting to Twitter.com is a short-term solution, and presumably Twitter.com itself will permanently redirect to X.com at some point. I have no knowledge of Musk’s plans — this is the only reasonable way for X.com to become the permanent home of the ‘X’ brand.

At that point, X.com risks losing a substantial portion of the 10,149 Twitter-branded search queries and 18 Million searches per month previously discussed. Reclaiming those searches and the resulting traffic is not just an SEO task, but will require building the ‘X’ brand in the minds of consumers to the point that they routinely search for celebrities, brands, and topics combined with ‘X’ or X-related terms.

The long-term success of X.com is anyone’s guess, but as the ‘X’ brand is moved to X.com, I predict — based on my experiences with even moderately difficult similar transitions — a substantial loss of search traffic for at least 3-6 months. Given the power of the current Twitter brand and the long, strange history of X.com, losses could easily last over a year.

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