MozCon is returning in-person to Seattle August 7-8, 2023 and this year, we’re excited to bring the Future of Search to our stage.
From networking with peers, hearing from industry leaders, and making new connections that can help grow your business or career, conferences offer so many benefits to attendees. You know that. Your peers know that. But how do you persuade the powers-that-be (aka your boss) that sending you is beneficial for your business?
Don’t worry, we’ve got a plan. (And if you want to skip ahead to the letter template, here it is!)
Business competition is fiercer than ever. Only those who are able to shift tactics with the changing tides of marketing will be able to come out on top. And that’s exactly what MozCon is going to help you do.
Covering everything a growing marketer needs (SEO, content, strategy, growth), MozCon delivers top-notch talks from hand-selected speakers over two days in August.
There's so much in store for you this year. Here’s just a sampling of what you can expect at this year’s MozCon:
Speakers and content
Our speakers are real practitioners and industry leaders. We work with them to ensure they deliver the best content and insights to the stage to set you up for a year of success. No sales pitches or talking heads here!
Networking
You work hard taking notes, learning new insights, and digesting all of that knowledge — that’s why we think you deserve a little fun. It's your chance to decompress with fellow attendees and make new friends in the industry. We host exciting evening networking events that add to the value you'll get from your day of education. Plus, our Birds of a Feather lunch tables allow you to connect with like-minded peers who share similar interests.
High-quality videos to share with your team
About a month or so after the conference, we release professionally edited videos of every presentation at the conference. Many of our ticket types include free access! Your colleagues won’t get to partake in the real-time experience(the #FOMO is real), but they will get a chance to learn everything you did.
Great food on site
We know that conference food isn’t typically worth mentioning, but MozCon is notorious for its cornucopia of tasty offerings.
You can expect two meals a day and loads of snacks from local Seattle vendors — in the past we’ve featured a smorgasbord from the likes of Trophy cupcakes, KuKuRuZa popcorn, Starbucks’ Seattle Reserve cold brew.
Discounts for current customers
Moz Pro, Moz Local, API, and STAT customers save big on their ticket cost, and there are discounts for groups of 10+ as well, so make sure to take advantage of savings where you can!
But of course, don’t take our word for it! There are some incredible resources available at your fingertips that tout the benefits of attending conferences:
2022 was my first MozCon! It was a great experience where I got to listen to thought leaders and peers on their individual approaches. The event spoiled us with awesome swag and great speakers while creating a safe space to facilitate deep discussions.
-Ray Martinez, Director of SEO - Archer Education
As a small business owner, attending MozCon was a big leap of faith for me (and a big investment!) I was so delighted to find there was a place for me at MozCon. The speakers were excellent- true experts who shared what doesn't work as compellingly as what DOES. My fellow attendees were accessible, kind, and generous with their knowledge. Most importantly, I left with a list of clear tangible strategies for growing my business this year. I learned so much- and I'm so glad I went.
-Marguerite Tacoma Real Estate Agent MoveToTacoma.com
There are lots of conferences that marketing and SEO professionals can attend. MozCon provides extreme value through its high-quality speakers, entertaining events, delicious meals and snacks, and networking opportunities. If you had to choose just one conference to attend, you won't go wrong choosing MozCon.
- Jarrod Galm, SEO Manager, Wealth Enhancement Group
I came to MozCon expecting a handful of great takeaways and maybe some new SEO techniques. Instead, I was blown away multiple times over, made great connections, and I'm sharing a deck of takeaways with my team.
- Carly Johansen, Content Marketing Manager, Oregon State University Ecampus
MozCon 2022 was fantastic! Every session I attended was jam-packed full of actionable insights from speakers who really know their stuff. I left feeling invigorated, inspired and excited to put the things I'd learned into action
-Eloise West, Senior Digital Marketing Strategist, Designzillas
This is my second in-person event (I went in 2019) and fourth overall. This is still a great conference even having more experience, and I noticed I pick up different things each time as my experience grows and I hear things in different ways. The networking opportunities are also invaluable, especially as I'm an in-house SEO with no team. I've learned a ton and have really grown as an SEO and heavily attribute a lot of that to MozCon.
-Lauren Huffman, SEO Manager, Lulu and Georgia
Need a little more to get your boss on board? Check out some videos from years past to get a taste for the caliber of our speakers.
Buy ticket, save money, get competitive marketing insights. Everyone wins!
MozCon is one unforgettable experience that lives and grows with you beyond just the days you spend attending the conference. And there's no time like the present to pitch MozCon to your boss. If they're still stuck on the "why", let them know about our subscriber or group pricing tiers — you’ll save hundreds of dollars when you do. Just think of all the Keurigs you could get for that communal kitchen!
Be sure to grab the letter template and make your case the easy way!
We love to talk about winning SEO tests, like those wonderful instances where you run an A/B test and you see positive impact. In today’s episode, though, Will is going to discuss the losing tests: those with negative results — or no results — where you couldn't prove an impact.
These test results are, in fact, where you can likely find the most valuable insights.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hi, Moz fans. My name is Will Critchlow. I'm the founder and CEO at SearchPilot. We run tons of SEO tests, and if you've ever seen me speak on one of these before or on a bigger stage, you have probably heard me talk about a lot of winning tests, those nice situations where you run an A/B test and you get an uplift and you get to celebrate. Today, we're going to be talking about losing tests. So these can be the negative ones or the ineffective changes, the ones where you just couldn't prove an impact in either direction.
So this is fundamentally that situation where you find an insight. It might be keyword research. It might be from technical auditing of the site, whatever it might be. You have a theory. You have a hypothesis or something that is going to benefit your website. You implement the change as a result, and you fall flat on your face. You fail spectacularly, and your test result data looks a little bit like this.
Now, this is actually quite an exaggerated case. A lot of the failures that we see are -2%, -3%, or just flat line, and those -2% and -3% type ones can be really hard to pick up without scientifically controlled testing, which is what we focus a lot of our time on, on really big websites. They can really add up. If you are continuously rolling out those little negative changes through the course of the year, it can really be a drag on your SEO program as a whole. But they can get lost. You roll out that change, and it can get lost in the noise, the seasonality, other sitewide changes, Google algorithm updates, things your competitors get up to. That's what we're trying to spot and avoid.
What can you learn?
So what can we learn from losing tests, and when can they benefit us as a business? Well, one of the, perhaps, counterintuitive benefits is the drop in effort that you might be asking of your engineering team. If you have all these ideas and previously you're asking your team to build all of them, but if you run tests and you find that some of your ideas were negative, some of them were ineffective and weren't going to benefit you, you're now only asking your product and engineering team to maintain the ones that turn out to have a positive SEO impact. We've seen that be up to an 80% drop in SEO tickets for engineering. So that's one business case right there.
But, of course, sometimes your tests look like this, and so actually the business case is about avoiding those negative impacts on your website.
Tactical examples
So I've got a couple of tactical examples that I thought would be good to run through that might be useful in your situations as well.
The first one is a case of removing SEO text. So we've seen many cases where think, say, a category page on an e-commerce website, for example. You've got a bunch of product listings, and then somewhere down at the bottom of the page, there's a bit of copy. Maybe it's in a div, seo_text. Maybe it's a really small font, gray, not exactly white on a white background, but clearly not designed for human eyes. We have run some experiments where we had situations like that, with pretty poor-quality text on category pages. We tested removing it and actually saw a statistically significant drop in organic visibility, which is a shame, because we know that this isn't high-quality text, we know it's not where Google wants us to be, and yet removing it was a bad idea.
One of the things we can learn from that is say, firstly, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. You can't just knee-jerk react to Google's PR and all these kinds of things and say, "Well, best practices say this. Let's just do it straightaway." You can't do that without testing because you might be hurting your website. But it does point to a direction of potential future improvement, because if having terrible text is better than no text, having good text might be even better. So one of the things that you benefit from with a losing test is you get to learn, and so you get to point the direction to some insights that might be positive for you in the future.
The other example I've got for you here, you might be wondering what on earth this is, and art is not my strong point. This is an Easter egg. Trust me, this is an Easter egg. We saw an example of a website, that operated across the whole of Europe, multiple different country/territory websites, testing adding seasonal offers. So in this case, it was about Easter travel, Easter breaks, Easter flights, those kinds of things. The keyword research had suggested that there was demand for this, that the audience is searching in this kind of way, and yet, adding those offers to the page was negative, and that was very surprising. What it turned out was going on here was that it was diluting the quality of that page for the things that were the bread and butter of those landing pages. So, yes, it was ranking better for some Easter travel-type related searches, but it was doing worse for the bulk of traffic of just trips to city name or whatever it might be, and the net impact was negative. That's the kind of thing you can only pick up by searching.
So I hope you've enjoyed this little journey into losing SEO tests and what we can learn from them. My name is Will Critchlow. I'm at SearchPilot. You can find me on Twitter, @willcritchlow. Look forward to chatting to you soon. Take care.
12 billion, 3 billion, 1 billion. That’s the number of searches made in some of the top alternative search engines monthly.
While Google still holds more than 80% of the market share, ignoring search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo can make you lose out on relevant traffic. So don’t limit yourself to Google’s algorithm as you plan the next year’s SEO strategy.
In order to grow in the digital economy, we have to diversify our efforts. What better way to do that than by making sure that you rank on all the top search engines relevant for your audience?
Generally, there’s two reasons why your audience would choose an alternative search engine over Google: geopolitical reasons and/or privacy concerns.
As such, I’ve categorized the search engines below by global market share and by data privacy.
Top alternative search engines by global market share
These are the engines you want to give extra consideration if you intend to expand internationally. They all have their own unique search algorithms that are in many ways as complex and developed as Google’s.
Why they matter and how to rank on them
If you’re like me a few years ago, a die-hard Apple fan remarkably repulsed by Microsoft’s products (I’ve now converted to the seamless team of PC), you might think prioritizing resources to optimize content for Bing or other engines is a waste of time. What I failed to consider then, and what you might be overlooking, is geographic segmentation.
Do you want to reach the American audience using voice search? Consider Bing.
Are you expanding into China? Check out Baidu.
Each search engine matters because of its unique user types. Regardless of how small that market share might look on a global scale, if there’s regional search volume from your target audience, it’s worth the optimization.
Bing Search, in combination with Yahoo, is without a doubt the strongest player after Google. Together, they have more than 10% of the global market share for desktop.
Now, some say that Bing’s market share will increase due to mergers and acquisitions, while others argue for its decline due to the death of Internet Explorer.
Still, all Microsoft browsers, such as Microsoft Edge Legacy and Chromium-based Microsoft Edge, have Bing as the default search engine, making Bing Search the natural choice for Microsoft product users. Yahoo, which is powered by Bing Search, is the default search engine for Mozilla’s browser Firefox, adding billions of impressions to Bing’s search results each year.
Although the algorithms differ, optimizing for Bing search results is not much different than optimizing for Google. With a bit of fine tuning, it’s more than possible to come up with a strategy that allows for high rankings on both.
To rank on Bing, and thus Yahoo, make sure to do the following:
1. List your business on Bing Places
Bing Places is the equivalent of Google My Business and is the fastest way to get your business ranking for local seo. Many even consider Bing Places to favor small business owners as Bing puts their information more prominently on display.
2. Upload an XML Sitemap using Bing’s Webmaster Tools
While the debate on how much sitemaps really do matter for Google SEO continues, uploading one with Bing’s Webmaster Tool for XML Sitemaps allows the algorithm to better categorize and manage your content, making it more visible and relevant to the search audience.
3. Match keywords in your content
Check that the exact keyword match can be found in your page titles, meta descriptions and overall content. It’s known that the impact of on-page tactics as a ranking factor is much greater in Bing than Google.
4. Keep your social media profiles up to date
Go social! Bing considers your social media presence more than any other search engine. The Webmaster Guidelines specifically states that Bing considers social signals from third-party platforms to rank your content. Bing might even extract certain information directly from your Facebook company page to your Bing Places display.
5. Use high-quality images to enhance your content
Bing’s image search is much more advanced than Google’s. If you want your landing page to rank, add high-quality design assets to showcase your offerings. If you want your blog to rank, attach too-long-to-read infographics to highlight your points. Like the one above.
While it looks a lot like Google, its algorithm is different in many ways. Most prominent is the way Yandex indexes pages. Unlike Google’s almost continuous indexation, Yandex indexes pages sporadically. That means that you might have to wait around for a while before your site shows up on Yandex.
Despite this, it is still possible to rank on Yandex. You just need to have a bit more patience.
While waiting for your site to be indexed, take a look at the following:
1. Focus on tags over internal site structure
According to The Ultimate Guide to Yandex SEO, your header tag, title tag and slug are way more important than your internal site structure. In fact, it was only recently that Yandex started to support hreflang tags. Before that, Yandex only allowed the <head> hreflang implementation.
2. Consider search intent to rank
Some argue that Yandex meets search intent better than Google. The modern ICS score, which replaced the Thematic Index Citation, is determined by how relevant a site is to the query. Yandex uses its own version of expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-A-T) test to determine relevance.
3. Eliminate toxic links
Many do not know this, but Yandex was actually the first search engine to roll out a link-based algorithm. Already in 2005, 7 years before Google’s Penguin algorithm, Yandex introduced the Nepot filter, which specifically looked at the impact of toxic link exchanges and spam links.
While the site is available worldwide, the site predominantly favors simplified Chinese. So before taking any other steps, hire a native speaker to help you along the way. To win at global, you have to ditch translations.
Here’s a few steps to get your content ranking.
1. Localize your keywords and content appropriately
As with all multilingual SEO, you need to work with a native language expert to ensure proper keyword localization and content optimization. If your site experiences high bounce rates, Baidu will tank your rankings immediately. As with any search experience, localization matters.
2. Position relevant content and keywords to the top of the page
Baidu favors a completely opposite layout than the Westernized one. The sooner you get to the point the better. Therefore, it is important to position your keywords as early as possible in the text and introduce all relevant content already in the top of the page to rank.
3. Obtain a verification level and get certified
By registering and paying a small fee you can obtain a verification level to improve your domain authority and rankings on Baidu. If you want to secure top ratings, you can get certified and obtain an ICP license, which is much more difficult than getting verified.
Top alternative search engines by data privacy
While most of the search engines mentioned above are tied to big corporations or political forces, global initiatives are setting the stage for more privacy-focused search engines. Among these is DuckDuckGo, the forefront runner with over 130 billion searches processed since launch.
Why they matter and how to rank on them
In many ways, the movement is a response to Google’s invasiveness on privacy. Many are fed up with how they are capitalizing on personal data and controlling the narrative with targeted search.
From a micro perspective, documentaries such as The Great Hack shine a light on how global companies monetize on personal data. As a result, privacy-safe search engines continue to rise.
If you’re working for an innovative SaaS startup, there’s a high chance your ideal customer persona is using one of these search engines.
Let’s go through how you rank on DuckDuckGo and two alternative equivalents.
DuckDuckGo
Screenshot of duckduckgo.com, November 2022
DuckDuckGo aims to make your search experience as simple and true to its cause as possible, i.e. no tracking for personalized search results and filter bubbles. Instead it uses semantic search to determine search intent for your queries from over 400 sources.
Consequently, this attracts tech-savvy experts with a lower bounce rate. Once they commit to a search, they stay.
Here’s how to optimize for it:
1. Sharpen Your User Experience
UX continues to make an impact on SEO, not to mention for DuckDuckGo. Make your content easily scannable and stay away from intrusive pop ups that harm your users’ experience and ease of navigation.
2. Focus on High-Quality Backlinks
As with any SEO, high-quality backlinks play a huge role for ranking. If you already have a solid backlink profile from your Google strategy, you should be good to go. If your backlink profile has a high level of toxicity, do some cleansing.
3. Rethink Local SEO
Since there’s no location tracking available for searches, location-specific searches such as “services near me” don't work. If you like to rank for these types of searches, include a specific location in your keyword strategy. Otherwise, you won’t be able to optimize for local seo.
Startpage
Startpage could be my personal favorite among the alternative search engines. It basically is Google without the tracking.
And while many consider DuckDuckGo to be the forefront runner of the privacy-focused search movement, many forget how Startpage ‘blazed the trail in 2006’. Offering a search experience without IP recording or tracking back when it was more or less unheard of. Now, it is the common denominator among all privacy-safe search engines.
So, how do you rank in Startpage? Simple. You rank in Google.
SwissCows
There are many more privacy-safe alternatives to search engines than the two mentioned above. Perhaps one without equal is SwissCows - a search engine that prides itself on being the only family-friendly, privacy-safe semantic search engine available on the web.
This means that any intrusive search results, like adult entertainment or offensive content, is naturally censored from the search results. At the same time, they never store any data nor track user specific information.
SwissCows SERPs bring up organic results and paid ads directly from Bing so in order to rank in SwissCows, you need to rank in Bing. Just make sure to omit any content that’s not PG-13.
What do they all have in common?
In the end, none of these alternative search engines can replace Google. As an SEO, I’ll never advise starting out with anything other than a Google strategy.
But when you are ready to branch out and extend your reach, give these alternatives a try. Analyze where your target audience hangs out and optimize thereafter.
Many of the privacy-focused search engines require little optimization as they pull their search results directly from other sources anyways. Simply do a quick check to see how you rank on each one.
And who knows, perhaps Microsoft will continue to steal more of the global search landscape. If that happens, you’ll be there — ranking in first position, ready to reap the rewards of your diversified efforts in an ever-changing search landscape.
MozCon is bringing the Future of Search to Seattle this August 7-8, and we’re excited to announce the return of our annual call for up-and-coming community speakers!
Every year, we take great pride in reserving space on our stage exclusively for new voices. Are you the person that everyone in your network looks to for digital marketing advice? Perhaps you’ve been honing your voice on podcasts or blogs, all the while dreaming of stepping onto the big stage to share your innovative ideas? Now’s your chance to submit your pitch for the opportunity to join industry leaders on the MozCon stage in front of 1,500 of your peers. (No pressure!)
Not sure what a community speaker is?
At MozCon, we have a speaker selection committee that identifies practitioners at the top of their professional field with a mean speaking game. But these spots are by invite only, and we know the community is bursting at the seams with hidden gems ready to share groundbreaking research, hot tips, and SEO tests that drive results.
Cue our MozCon community speaker program!
We’ve reserved two 15-minute community speaker slots throughout our conference for fresh faces to shine on the big stage. We encourage anyone in the SEO community to submit their best and most exciting presentation ideas for a chance to be selected as a community speaker at MozCon. Not only are these sessions incredibly well-received by our attendees, but they’re also a fantastic way to get your foot in the door when it comes to the SEO speaking circuit.
Interested in pitching your own idea? Read on for everything you need to know:
How to submit
To submit a pitch, fill out the community speaker submission form. Only submit one talk! We want the one you’re most passionate about. Talks must be related to digital marketing and be a topic you can cover in 15 minutes.
[Pro tip: Keep it actionable and be sure to include 3-5 key learning outcomes the audience will come away with from your session in the pitch.]
Submissions close on Tuesday, February 28th at 5pm PDT — no exceptions!
If chosen, you’ll be required to present your talk in person at MozCon in Seattle, WA on August 7-8, 2023. Incomplete submissions will not be considered, and all decisions are final. All speakers must adhere to the MozCon Code of Conduct.
If you submit a pitch, you’ll hear back from us regardless of your acceptance status, so please be patient until you hear back — we’ll work hard to make our decisions as quickly as we can! Please note that due to the volume of submissions we typically receive, we’re unable to provide specific feedback on individual applications.
What do speakers receive?
As a community speaker you will receive:
15 minutes on the MozCon stage for a keynote-style presentation
A free ticket to MozCon (we can issue a refund or transfer if you’ve already purchased yours)
Travel and accommodations during MozCon
Support and feedback as you build your final presentation deck to make sure you deliver the talk of your life on our stage.
And a few more surprises…
How we select our speakers
We have an internal committee of experienced Moz team members, speakers and subject matter experts that review every pitch. We analyze each topic to make sure there’s no overlap and to confirm that it’s a good fit for our audience and conference focus – for 2023, our content theme is The Future of Search.
Next, we look at the entirety of the pitch to help us get a comprehensive idea of what to expect from your talk on the MozCon stage and how it might be received by the audience. This is where links to previous decks, content, and videos of past presentations are helpful (but aren’t required).
Here’s how to make your pitch stand out:
Keep your pitch focused on digital marketing. SEO topics are great but we also love topics that compliment or sit adjacent to SEO. The more actionable the pitch, the better.
Be focused and concise. What value does your talk provide? We want to hear the actual takeaways our audience will be learning about and why it’s important — not just a vague reference to them. Remember, we receive a ton of pitches, so the more clearly you can explain the tactical steps and learning objectives for the audience, the better you’ll stand out.
Do your research! Review the topics presented at past MozCons, on the Moz Blog and in our Whiteboard Friday videos for a sense of what resonates with our audience— we’re looking for fresh, new presentations that round out our agenda to add to the stage.
No pitches will be evaluated in advance, so please don’t ask :)
Using social media to lobby your pitch won’t help. Instead, put your time and energy into the actual pitch itself!
Linking to a previous example of a slide deck or presentation isn’t required, but it does help the committee.
Leading up to MozCon
If your pitch is selected, the MozCon team is here to support you along the way. It’s our goal to make sure this is your best talk to date, whether it’s your first time under those bright stage lights or you’re a seasoned speaker who feels perfectly at home in front of a big crowd. We’ll answer any questions you may have and work with you to deliver a talk you’ll be proud of. Here are just a handful of ways that we’re here to help:
Topic refinement
Helping with your presentation title and description
Reviewing your presentation outlines and drafts
Providing plenty of tips around best practices — specifically with the MozCon stage and audience in mind
Comprehensive show guide
Being available to listen to you practice your talk
Reviewing your final deck
A full stage tour on the Sunday before MozCon to meet our A/V crew, see your presentation on the big screen, and get a feel for the show
An amazing 15-person A/V team to support your presentation every second it’s on the big screen and beyond
In this week’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Mozzer Meghan Pahinui takes you through the process we use to implement customer feedback, in the hopes that you can take it and apply it to your own content creation and maintenance strategies.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hey, Moz fans. Welcome back to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Meghan, and I'm on the Learning team here at Moz. Today, I'm going to talk to you about harnessing the power of feedback when it comes to content iteration.
So one of the projects that I contribute to in my position here is taking care of our customer help center, which we call the Help Hub. If you're not familiar with the Help Hub, this is where we house all of our how-to guides, tips and tricks, workflows, and troubleshooting guides for the Moz tools. I do encourage you to check it out if you have some time later or if you have questions about the tools.
A key part of maintaining the Help Hub includes gathering, monitoring, and implementing customer feedback, and this is a crucial component for us. Why is that? Well, because we want to be sure that we're providing quality, helpful content to our customers. In addition, this process allows our customers to find answers to their questions quickly and easily at any time. It does take some of the lift of our Help team as well by reducing the number of tickets that they receive asking these very questions. So I'm going to go ahead and take you through the process that we use to implement customer feedback, in hopes that you can take it and apply it to your own content creation and maintenance strategies.
Gather data
So what is the first step? Well, first, we gather data, because we don't know what feedback people have if we don't ask for it, right? So if you are familiar with the Moz Help Hub, you may have seen our surveys that are at the bottom of all of our articles. Here, we ask if the article was helpful, and we do this with a series of emojis that indicate if it met their needs or not. If the customer indicates that it did not, they do have the option to enter a comment letting us know why.
When it comes to gathering data on your own content, you may opt to add a survey like this, or there are plenty of other ways that you can start to gather data to work with. So if you have a social media presence, you can start keeping track of feedback there or ask your followers directly for insight into what they find most helpful and least helpful about your content. Or you can send a survey out via email, ask your customer service team for feedback, look at customer emails and tickets to see what questions the customers may be asking, which you're not currently answering on your site. We do that as well. We work closely with our Help team to ensure that everything that we can answer is answered in the Help Hub.
Analyze
So once you have that data to work with, it's time to analyze it. So we review both vote counts, meaning helpful versus not helpful, as well as comments here at Moz. When comments are left, we look to see if there's an opportunity to implement a change in that guide based on the feedback. Additionally, if we're seeing a trend in votes for a particular page or section, we will take a look at how we can improve or reword, update the content to better serve the customer.
One thing to keep in mind during this step, however, is that not all feedback you receive will be actionable, and that's okay. A few questions that I like to ask myself when looking at feedback for an article are: Was the customer on the right page to find their answer? If not, how did they get to this page? Is there an opportunity to help them find their way to the correct page, whether that's through links or additional resources, etc.? Is there a question that I can answer on this page, or should this question have its own dedicated page? Sometimes we end up writing whole new guides based on feedback that we get from customers. What was the customer trying to achieve? How did this guide fall short in helping them achieve that goal?
Implement change
So now that we've identified areas for improvement, it's time to implement changes to that content. So this may be as simple as adding an FAQ to answer a specific question or as involved as writing a new workflow or troubleshooting guide, as I mentioned previously. Just as an example, some specific things, some specific changes that we implemented based on customer feedback include adding quick links to all of our pages for easier navigation, creating separate pages for each of our keyword metrics, and building out multiple workflows based on questions that customers have asked.
This step in the process may look different depending on the type of content that you create and the type of feedback that you receive. For example, if you primarily work in creating video content and you receive feedback that customers wish the videos had subtitles, you may opt to implement those on past videos as well as any that you release moving forward. However, if you have a blog or a newsletter or some other type of long-form content, it may not make sense to use resources to update older pieces of content. Instead, you may opt to start implementing those changes in your content moving forward. It may be a combination of those. Maybe you have some really popular articles that can be updated from the past and start implementing those changes in your content moving forward.
Track results
So after implementing your changes, you want to be sure to track your results. We track our votes and survey responses regularly to help monitor for update opportunities and to see if the responses have changed for that particular piece of content.
Finally, we start the cycle all over again, gathering more data, analyzing it, implementing changes, and then tracking the results.
Implementing this process here at Moz has allowed us to see a correlation between changes that we've made to the Help Hub content and the number of helpful votes that we receive. We treat this part of our content library as a living document that is always evolving to not only account for tool changes but also to take into account customer feedback. Gathering feedback on your content can help to identify trends in what your customers are engaging with and how you can further improve your offerings moving forward. That's key. You want to always be improving.
It can also help to identify resources that may need updating or ideas for future content. For example, if you have a blog post about how to bake a cake and your readers are commenting that they don't know how to pick the right kind of pan for the recipe, there may be an opportunity to publish a new blog post about the best types of cake pans. Or if you publish help guides, like myself, if a customer says they couldn't find the answer to their question in that article, there may be an opportunity to look into questions like the ones that we outlined earlier in our analyze step. What are they trying to achieve? How did they end up on this page? How can I help them to reach their goal?
I hope that you found this helpful and that you're ready to get out there and start harnessing the power of feedback. Thank you so much, Moz fans. We'll see you next time.
We’re back with another SEO recap with Tom Capper! As you’ve probably noticed, ChatGPT has taken the search world by storm. But does GPT-3 mean the end of SEO as we know it, or are there ways to incorporate the AI model into our daily work?
Tom tries to tackle this question by demonstrating how he plans to use ChatGPT, along with other natural language processing systems, in his own work.
Be sure to check out the commentary on ChatGPT from our other Moz subject matter experts, Dr. Pete Meyers and Miriam Ellis:
Hello, I'm Tom Capper from Moz, and today I want to talk about how I'm going to use ChatGPT and NLP, natural language processing apps in general in my day-to-day SEO tasks. This has been a big topic recently. I've seen a lot of people tweeting about this. Some people saying SEO is dead. This is the beginning of the end. As always, I think that's maybe a bit too dramatic, but there are some big ways that this can be useful and that this will affect SEOs in their industry I think.
The first question I want to ask is, "Can we use this instead of Google? Are people going to start using NLP-powered assistants instead of search engines in a big way?"
So just being meta here, I asked ChatGPT to write a song about Google's search results being ruined by an influx of AI content. This is obviously something that Google themselves is really concerned about, right? They talked about it with the helpful content update. Now I think the fact that we can be concerned about AI content ruining search results suggests there might be some problem with an AI-powered search engine, right?
No, AI powered is maybe the wrong term because, obviously, Google themselves are at some degree AI powered, but I mean pure, AI-written results. So for example, I stole this from a tweet and I've credited the account below, but if you ask it, "What is the fastest marine mammal," the fastest marine mammal is the peregrine falcon. That is not a mammal.
Then it mentions the sailfish, which is not a mammal, and marlin, which is not a mammal. This is a particularly bad result. Whereas if I google this, great, that is an example of a fast mammal. We're at least on the right track. Similarly, if I'm looking for a specific article on a specific web page, I've searched Atlantic article about the declining quality of search results, and even though clearly, if you look at the other information that it surfaces, clearly this has consumed some kind of selection of web pages, it's refusing to acknowledge that here.
Whereas obviously, if I google that, very easy. I can find what I'm looking for straightaway. So yeah, maybe I'm not going to just replace Google with ChatGPT just yet. What about writing copy though? What about I'm fed up of having to manually write blog posts about content that I want to rank for or that I think my audience want to hear about?
So I'm just going to outsource it to a robot. Well, here's an example. "Write a blog post about the future of NLP in SEO." Now, at first glance, this looks okay. But actually, when you look a little bit closer, it's a bluff. It's vapid. It doesn't really use any concrete examples.
It doesn't really read the room. It doesn't talk about sort of how our industry might be affected more broadly. It just uses some quick tactical examples. It's not the worst article you could find. I'm sure if you pulled a teenager off the street who knew nothing about this and asked them to write about it, they would probably produce something worse than this.
But on the other hand, if you saw an article on the Moz blog or on another industry credible source, you'd expect something better than this. So yeah, I don't think that we're going to be using ChatGPT as our copywriter right away, but there may be some nuance, which I'll get to in just a bit. What about writing descriptions though?
I thought this was pretty good. "Write a meta description for my Moz blog post about SEO predictions in 2023." Now I could do a lot better with the query here. I could tell it what my post is going to be about for starters so that it could write a more specific description. But this is already quite good. It's the right length for a meta description. It covers the bases.
It's inviting people to click. It makes it sound exciting. This is pretty good. Now you'd obviously want a human to review these for the factual issues we talked about before. But I think a human plus the AI is going to be more effective here than just the human or at least more time efficient. So that's a potential use case.
What about ideating copy? So I said that the pure ChatGPT written blog post wasn't great. But one thing I could do is get it to give me a list of subtopics or subheadings that I might want to include in my own post. So here, although it is not the best blog post in the world, it has covered some topics that I might not have thought about.
So I might want to include those in my own post. So instead of asking it "write a blog post about the future of NLP in SEO," I could say, "Write a bullet point list of ways NLP might affect SEO." Then I could steal some of those, if I hadn't thought of them myself, as potential topics that my own ideation had missed. Similarly you could use that as a copywriter's brief or something like that, again in addition to human participation.
My favorite use case so far though is coding. So personally, I'm not a developer by trade, but often, like many SEOs, I have to interact with SQL, with JavaScript, with Excel, and these kinds of things. That often results in a lot of googling from first principles for someone less experienced in those areas.
Even experienced coders often find themselves falling back to Stack Overflow and this kind of thing. So here's an example. "Write an SQL query that extracts all the rows from table2 where column A also exists as a row in table1." So that's quite complex. I've not really made an effort to make that query very easy to understand, but the result is actually pretty good.
It's a working piece of SQL with an explanation below. This is much quicker than me figuring this out from first principles, and I can take that myself and work it into something good. So again, this is AI plus human rather than just AI or just human being the most effective. I could get a lot of value out of this, and I definitely will. I think in the future, rather than starting by going to Stack Overflow or googling something where I hope to see a Stack Overflow result, I think I would start just by asking here and then work from there.
That's all. So that's how I think I'm going to be using ChatGPT in my day-to-day SEO tasks. I'd love to hear what you've got planned. Let me know. Thanks.
In a recent study, we found that our pillar pages are magnets for links, organic traffic, and newsletter subscribers — especially compared to regular blog posts. Here are the results that both types of SEO content generated over the course of a year:
Do these results mean you should ditch your blog strategy in favor of pillar pages? Not exactly.
Here’s the catch: You really can’t have one without the other, and it all comes down to content mapping. I’ll explain exactly what I mean in this article.
What is a pillar page?
A pillar page is a piece of content that comprehensively covers a broad topic. Pillar page — also sometimes referred to as hub and spoke — content weaves together a wide range of relevant subtopics (spokes), organizes them all in one place (hub), and effectively showcases your subject matter expertise for the broad topic.
Pillar page content should be easy to navigate for readers looking to learn — at a high level — about a particular topic, but should also offer relevant resources for them to dive deeper.
Example of related resources found on a pillar page.
It’s kind of like the choose-your-own-adventure of content marketing.
Topical authority: why it’s important
When it comes to content creation for SEO and digital marketing, you don’t want to create content around any old topic. Instead, you want to reinforce your brand’s topical authority with every new piece of content you create (be it a blog, a pillar page, an eBook, etc.).
Let’s put it this way: If you’re in the business of selling mechanical keyboards, it doesn’t make sense to publish a blog article about the best recipes for a summer BBQ. Unless you’re recommending that your customers grill and eat their mechanical keyboards, which is (highly) unlikely.
Instead, it’s more helpful to your brand — and your audience — if you cover topics related to mechanical keyboards, like:
What is a mechanical keyboard?
Mechanical keyboards vs. regular keyboards.
Custom mechanical keyboards.
How to transition to a mechanical keyboard.
Pros and cons of a mechanical keyboard.
By covering as many topics related to mechanical keyboards as possible, you’re building a foundation of informational content that tells search engines: “Hey, I know a lot about mechanical keyboards!”
And the more content you have that starts to rank for important search terms related to mechanical keyboards, the more likely searchers will see you as an authority on the subject. Ideally, they will start coming back to your content when they need to learn more about this specific topic.
Pillar pages + blogs = a match made in content marketing heaven
A well-executed and organized pillar page is one of the best ways to showcase to your audience (and search engines) that you have topical authority in a specific area. Blog posts help you achieve topical authority by allowing you to cover a wide range of relevant subtopics in great detail, and pillar pages organize all of that content into a nice, user-friendly package.
Let’s take a look at this tactic in action.
We built our content marketing guide as a pillar page, which allowed us to cover a slew of subtopics related to the broader topic of content marketing, all in one piece of collateral.
All of these subtopics are organized into sections on the page, with a hyperlinked table of contents at the top to allow readers to pick and choose exactly what they’d like to learn about:
Then, throughout the page, we offer readers the opportunity to go deeper and learn more about each subtopic by linking to relevant blog content:
What is content mapping?
A pillar page is a great tactic if you’ve got a lot of existing blog content all focused on a particular parent topic. It’s one of our favorite ways at Brafton to repurpose and repromote our blogs.
But you can also create a pillar page with all brand-new content — it’ll just take more research, planning, and production time to complete.
Enter: content mapping.
Content mapping is the process of assessing your target audience, understanding what they are trying to achieve, and helping them along that journey with branded educational and commercial content. Its scope can span the entirety of your content marketing strategy or a single piece of pillar page content.
Why content mapping matters in content marketing
The planning (or content mapping) of a pillar page is just as important as the research done to choose the correct keyword to target for your business.
Pillar pages are kind of like the books of the marketing world. If you were an expert birder, for example, you wouldn’t set out to write a book about bird-watching without doing any research. Especially if you’ve spent a lot of time writing and publishing articles about bird-watching on your blog. You’d want to understand a few things before starting that book, like:
Which of my blog posts generated the most interest from new and returning readers? (i.e. pages with the most new and returning visitors, as seen in your web analytics tool).
Which blogs kept readers coming back for more? (i.e. pages with the most newsletter subscriptions, or the best newsletter subscription rates).
Which blogs did my industry peers find most useful? (i.e. pages with the greatest number of high-quality referring domains and backlinks).
These questions can be answered by looking through your web analytics tools, such as Google Analytics and Moz Pro.
Example of content analysis by top linking domains.
You’d also want to understand what the competition looks like before you spend dozens of hours writing thousands of words to fill a book.
You’d want to answer questions, like:
What do my competitors’ books on bird-watching look like? (i.e. the types of bird-watching subtopics the page 1 results cover).
What does Google think searchers want to see when they search for bird-watching? (i.e. the types of content that are found on page 1 for your target keyword — and surprise! it might not be books).
How long and detailed are my competitors’ books? (i.e. the level of complexity and comprehensiveness of the content ranking on page 1).
These questions can be answered by manually reviewing relevant SERPs and utilizing TF-IDF tools like Clearscope or MarketMuse to understand the breadth of subtopics and types of content ranking on the first page.
Example of manual SERP inspection.Example of TF-IDF content analysis.
Once you understand which of your content performs best and which content Google and other search engines prefer to rank highly for your target keyword, you can start piecing together a plan for your pillar page.
A note about internal linking
Before we dive into the how-to portion of this piece, we should also acknowledge the importance of internal linking to this whole process.
And I’m not just talking about throwing in a link to a related product/service at the end of the page and calling it a day. The internal linking structure of your pillar page is literally the glue that holds the whole thing together. It helps readers easily navigate to related resources to continue learning from your brand. And it helps search engines understand the relationship between your pillar page content and the additional content you’re highlighting on the page.
But when it comes to internal linking, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.
Including too many internal links throughout your content can cause a frustrating user experience or look spammy, so use caution and make sure the only internal linking you do on the page is extremely relevant to the parent topic.
If you’re unsure whether or not you’ve got too many internal links on the page, you can run it through Moz’s On-Page Grader tool, which automatically counts the number of links on your page and flags if you’ve got too many.
Tip:Keep in mind that this tool will count ALL links found on the page, including those in your main navigation and footer, so the “Too Many Links” warning could be a false positive.
As Moz explains: Google recommends you don’t go over 100 internal links per page, because it can dilute the SEO value sent from the pillar page to the linked pages, and it can also make it more challenging for users and crawlers to navigate all of the content.
Two data-led ways to map out content for a pillar page
There are a couple of different ways to approach the construction of this type of content, but they each rely on organic search data to lead the way.
1. Planning a pillar page and related resources (all from scratch)
Let’s pretend you don’t have any prior content created about a particular topic. You’re basically starting from scratch. Let’s also assume the topic you’ve selected is both core and commercially valuable to your business, and that your domain realistically has a chance of ranking on page 1 for that keyword.
Let’s say you’re a pet food company and one of your main products is cat dental treats. Once you’ve determined that this is the exact keyword you want to target (“cat dental treats”), it’s time to start your research.
Step 1: Manually inspect SERP to understand searcher intent
First, we’ll start by manually inspecting the first SERP for this keyword, and answering the following questions:
What types of content are on the first page of results?
Why are people searching for “cat dental treats”?
By answering these two questions in our SERP analysis, we’ll make sure that our plan for creating a pillar page to rank actually makes sense and it’s what searchers want to see on the SERP. We’ll also better understand all the reasons behind why someone might search this keyword (and we can then address those reasons in the content we create).
So let’s answer these questions:
Question 1: What types of content are on the first page of results?
Answer 1: The first SERP includes a variety of product ads, a People Also Ask section, and a selection of organic blogs and product pages.
Types of content found on the SERP for “cat dental treats.”
Question 2: Why are people searching for “cat dental treats”?
Answer 2: From a quick analysis of the SERP, we can deduce that people want to know why and how cat dental treats are important to a cat’s health, and they also want to know which cat dental treats work best. Perhaps most importantly, it’s highly likely that they plan to purchase cat dental treats for their furry companion(s) in the near future.
Step 2: Select related keyword ideas for blog content
Since you don’t just want to create a pillar page for just the primary keyword, you also want to pinpoint a selection of related subtopics to be written as blog content.
For this part of the process, head over to your keyword research tool, plug in your target keyword and (with an eye for topics that you’re well-suited to cover), jot down a list of keywords and phrases.
Here’s our list of potential blog topics:
Best cat dental treats.
How do cat dental treats work?
What to look for in cat dental treats.
Do cat dental treats work?
Can cat dental treats replace brushing?
Vet recommended cat dental treats.
Grain-free cat dental treats.
Step 3: Choose subtopics to cover in your pillar page content
Next, you’ll want to review the subtopics mentioned in the top ranking results. While this process can be done manually (by clicking into each result on the SERP and jotting down the topics mentioned), a TF-IDF tool like MarketMuse makes this part of the process much quicker:
These TF-IDF tools analyze the top 10-20 results for your target keyword and automatically present the common subtopics mentioned in each piece. This gives you a very good understanding of what you’ll also need to cover in your piece to compete for a top-ranking spot.
Here’s the list of subtopics we’ll want to cover in this pillar page, based on our MarketMuse data:
Cat dental treats.
Clean teeth.
Purina dentalife.
Feline greenies.
Fresh breath.
Natural ingredients.
Veterinary oral health council.
Best cat dental treats.
Artificial flavors.
Cats dental health.
Step 4: Create your outline and plan content
Now it’s time to connect the dots from your research. The best way to do this is to start by structuring your pillar page outline, and then going back in and filling in the areas where you want to create supporting blog content.
Here’s an example of what the end result might look like:
H1: The Complete Guide to Cat Dental Treats: For a Fresh-Breath Feline Friend
H2: What are cat dental treats and how do they work?
Topics to cover: Cat dental treats
Blog post to support section:
Title: How Cat Dental Treats Work (& Why Your Kitty Needs Them) Keyword: how do cat dental treats work
H2: What are the benefits of cat dental treats?
Topics to cover: Clean teeth, fresh breath
Blog post to support section:
Title: Do Cat Dental Treats Really Work? (Here’s What The Experts Say) Keyword: do cat dental treats work
H2: Are cat dental treats an acceptable alternative to brushing?
Topics to cover: Cats dental health
Blog post to support section:
Title: Cat Dental Treats Vs Brushing: Everything You Need To Know Keyword: can cat dental treats replace brushing
H2: Do vets recommend using cat dental treats?
Topics to cover: Veterinary oral health council
Blog post to support section:
Title: Vets Recommend Using Cat Dental Treats — Here’s Why Keyword: vet recommended cat dental treats
Blog post to support section:
Title: 5 Of The Best Cat Dental Treats & Why We Love Them Keyword: best cat dental treats
Blog post #2 to support section:
Title: What To Look For In Cat Dental Treats Keyword: what to look for in cat dental treats
Creating an outline for a pillar page isn’t easy, but once laid out, it helps us understand the content that needs to be produced to bring the whole thing to life.
Here is our list of content to create (based on our outline):
Pillar page: The Complete Guide to Cat Dental Treats: For a Fresh-Breath Feline Friend
Blog #1: How Cat Dental Treats Work (& Why Your Kitty Needs Them)
Blog #2: Do Cat Dental Treats Really Work? (Here’s What The Experts Say)
Blog #3: Cat Dental Treats Vs Brushing: Everything You Need To Know
Blog #4: Vets Recommend Using Cat Dental Treats — Here’s Why
Blog #5: 5 Of The Best Cat Dental Treats & Why We Love Them
Blog #6: What To Look For In Cat Dental Treats
The best way to tackle this list of content is to create and publish the six blog posts first, then once they are live, you can write the pillar page content, placing hyperlinks to the supporting blog posts directly in the copy.
2. Planning a pillar page from top performing content
For this next method, let’s say you already have a ton of published content about a particular topic, and you’d like to reuse and repromote that content within a pillar page dedicated to that topic.
All of the steps in the previous process apply, but for Step 2 (Select Related Keyword Ideas for Blog Content), do the following:
First, you’ll want to understand which of your existing pieces generates the most interest from your audience. Let’s use our web analytics data for this. In this example, we’ll look at Google Search Console data because it shows the actual search performance of our website content.
Let’s use the topic of “content creation” as our desired pillar page keyword. Search for the query in Google Search Console (choose the “Queries containing” option):
Pull all of the pages currently generating impressions and clicks from terms containing your topic, placing those with the highest clicks and impressions at the top of your list. Here’s what this might look like:
As you can see, most of the content we’ve created that also ranks for keywords containing “content creation” is blog content. These will be highly useful as related resources on our pillar page.
Now, go back to your TF-IDF tool and select the subtopics related to “content creation” that you want to cover in your pillar page. Example:
Social media content
Content creation tool
Content creators
Content strategy
Content creation process
Finally, map your existing blog content to those “content creation” subtopics. The initial mapping may look something like this:
You may not be able to map each blog perfectly to the subtopic you’re covering in your pillar page, but that’s OK. What’s important is that you’re providing readers with relevant content (where applicable) and that content, as you’ve seen in your Search Console data, is already proven to perform well with your organic search audience.
Pillar page planning templates and resources
Pillar pages take an incredible amount of time and planning to execute, but they are worth every penny.
Here’s an example of the success we saw after producing one of our more recent pillar pages, “How to Rank on Google:”
Growth of referring domains and links to the page since its launch in April 2022.
Here’s a template of the outline used to bring the page to life (and you can use it for your own pillar page). Just make a copy and off you go. Good luck!
