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Showing posts from March, 2020

Operating During COVID-19: Helpful Tips for Local Businesses

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Posted by MiriamEllis Local businesses know better than any other model what it means to fully participate in community life. You are the good neighbors who are there to serve, inspire, and sustain the people and traditions that make your town a unique and enjoyable place to call home. As we explore this topic of what local businesses can do during the COVID-19 pandemic, I want to honor all that you have always done to take care of your community as a local business owner or marketer. Thank you. In this article, you will find local SEO tips that could make a difference for your business in the coming weeks, innovative resources for support, advice from my own tight-knit community of some of the world’s best local SEOs, and some serious thinking about building a better local future. Adhere to all regulations First and foremost, start each day with a review of both local and national news to be sure you are complying with the evolving regulations for your city, county, and country.

Generating Local Content at Scale - Whiteboard Friday

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Posted by rjonesx. Building local pages in any amount can be a painful task. It's hard to strike the right mix of on-topic content, expertise, and location, and the temptation to take shortcuts has always been tempered by the fact that good, unique content is almost impossible to scale. In this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday, Russ Jones shares his favorite white-hat technique using natural language generation to create local pages to your heart's content. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Hey, folks, this is Russ Jones here with Moz again to talk to you about important search engine optimization issues. Today I'm going to talk about one of my favorite techniques, something that I invented several years ago for a particular client and has just become more and more and more important over the years.  Using natural language generation to create hyper-local content I call this using n

Help Your Community from Six Feet Away: Non-Marketing Tips from Mozzers

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Posted by morgan.mcmurray For the last few weeks, you’ve probably experienced an influx of emails from companies detailing how COVID-19 is affecting them and thus you, their customer. It's... a lot, isn't it? So today, we want to take a departure from the world of "how this affects us" and focus instead on actionable things we can all do to make things brighter for ourselves and our communities. This won't be your regularly scheduled programming — we won't be discussing SEO or marketing. Instead, we're sharing ideas and advice from the folks at Moz who've been finding ways to be helpers as we all navigate this new normal. Donate and shop For those who have steady income during this time of economic uncertainty, it’s more important than ever to support local businesses and charitable organizations. Many employers, Moz included, offer charitable donation matching to make use of as well. Food banks, shelters, and charities You can donate money or cal

How to Handle Temporarily Out-of-Stock Product Pages

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Posted by Dr-Pete The next few months are going to be uncharted territory for all of us, with serious challenges for both brick-and-mortar and online businesses. Many e-commerce sites are already facing a unique situation right now, and it looks something like this: These are hand sanitizer results from Staples.com, and this screenshot is just a portion of the first page. I'm not picking on Staples — this page is representative of a problem across every major e-retailer right now. While there are many ways to handle out-of-stock and discontinued items under normal conditions, this situation is very specific: Multiple similar items are out-of-stock at the same time Retailers may not know when they'll be back in stock These products may not stay back in stock for long Demand is high and continuing to rank is critical From an SEO standpoint, it's essential that these pages continue to rank, both for consumers and retailers, but in the short-term, the experience is al

You Can Now Take Moz Academy Courses for Free

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Posted by Roger-MozBot The well-being of our community — from our customers to our readers to our team members — is of the utmost importance to us here at Moz. The ongoing situation around the spread of COVID-19 is ever-changing. Many of you are experiencing the impact of this pandemic, and we want to address the difficulties you’re facing and acknowledge how you might be feeling. The state of the world and current events bring significant, often crushing, impact to businesses large and small. While it can be really hard to focus on work and on what is happening in the SEO industry during this difficult time, we also know that your work can’t stop. Whether you’re reading this as a small business owner concerned about your traffic, or an agency with clients who are hurting financially — we’re here to support you. Today through May 31, you’ll be able to access the courses in Moz Academy for free. Hopefully you can use this resource to level up your skills, learn a new discipline, or

Getting Smarter with SERPs - Whiteboard Friday

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Posted by rjonesx. Modern SERPs require modern understanding. National SERPs are a myth — these days, everything is local. And when we're basing important decisions on SERPs and ranking, using the highest quality data is key. Russ Jones explores the problem with SERPs, data quality, and existing solutions in this edition of Whiteboard Friday. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Hey, folks, this is Russ Jones here again with another exciting edition of Whiteboard Friday. Exciting might be an exaggeration, but it really is important to me because today we're going to talk about data quality. I know I harp on this a whole lot. It's just, as a data scientist, quality is really important to me. Here at Moz, we've made it a priority of the last several years, from improving the quality of our Domain Authority score, improving Spam Score, completely changing the way we identify the search volume

How to Query the Google Search Console API

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Posted by briangormanh If you’ve been an SEO for even a short time, you’re likely familiar with Google Search Console (GSC). It’s a valuable tool for getting information about your website and its performance in organic search. That said, it does have its limitations. In this article, you’ll learn how to get better-connected data out of Google Search Console as well as increase the size of your exports by 400%. Google Search Console limitations While GSC has a number of sections, we’ll be focusing on the “Performance” report. From the GSC dashboard, there are two ways you can access this report: Once inside the “Performance” report, data for queries and pages can be accessed: This reveals one of the issues with GSC: Query and page data is separated. In other words, if I want to see the queries a specific page is ranking for, I have to first click “Pages,” select the page, and then click “back” to “Queries.” It’s a very cumbersome experience. The other (two-part) issue is wit

A Beginner’s Guide to Ranking in Google Maps

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Posted by Alex_Ratynski For local businesses today, there are numerous different ways to market your brand online. The majority of your potential customers still use Google to find local businesses near them — businesses where they will spend their hard-earned money. In fact, 80% of searches with “local intent” result in a conversion. This begs the question: “What’s the best way to catch the attention of local searchers on Google?”  The answer: through Google Maps marketing. What is Google Maps marketing? Google Maps marketing is the process of optimizing the online presence of your brand in Google Maps, with the goal of increasing your brand’s online visibility. When you search a query on Google that has local intent, you often see something like this: Google Maps marketing utilizes a number of strategies and tactics to help your business become one of those three positions on local map packs. Why is marketing important for Google Maps? The reason every local business shoul