SEO Salman's Blog

Posted by HeatherPhysioc As an industry, we talk a good game about collaboration, but the truth is it’s not really happening the way we tell our clients and bosses it happens. We stroll into new business pitches and make big claims about how “integrated” we are. We preach that our recommendations are better because we have a more “holistic” offering. But whether it’s across agencies working on the same client, different teams working within the same agency, or different teams in-house on the client side, collaboration is much harder to achieve in reality than we make it look on the outside. More often than not, experts get sucked into their respective silos, buried by the day-to-day task lists of their jobs, focusing on their own areas of expertise. Agencies write SEO scopes and PPC scopes separately, often without accounting for content resource needs to make the channels successful. Teams bring recommendations forward to their bosses that don’t have buy-in from their peers. We don’...

Posted by ChristopherHofman Currently, many businesses face challenging times and are moving their SEO budget to disciplines which offer quicker wins. But you can also create instant results with SEO, and it can be done on a small budget even when you are up against bigger players in your industry. In this blog post I will show you my framework to do SEO sprints. I will show you how you can use Google’s ability to index and rank faster to your advantage. Later, you will be presented with a case study, where we used SEO sprints for a chain of opticians. The result: an increase in bookings of vision tests of 73%. But first, let's have a look at the layout on page one of Google (for most queries). Google never took SEOs into account when designing for the user. As a result, their transformation over the last few years from the "10 blue links" format to "the portal" has pushed the organic results on page one down by several pixels . Today, the four Google Ads...

Posted by rjonesx. Building links is an incredibly common request of agencies and consultants, and some ways to go about it are far more advisable than others. Whether you're likely to be asked for this work or you're looking to hire someone for it, it's a good idea to have a few rules of thumb. In this classic Whiteboard Friday chock full of evergreen advice, Russ Jones breaks things down. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Hey, folks, welcome to another great Whiteboard Friday. I am Russ Jones, Principal Search Scientist here at Moz. I get to do a lot of great research, but I'll tell you, my first love in SEO is link building. The 10 years I spent before joining Moz, I worked at an agency and we did a lot of it, and I'll tell you, there's nothing more exciting than getting that great link. Now, today I'm going to focus a little bit more on the agency and consultant side. But o...

Posted by Dr-Pete On May 4, Google announced that they were rolling out a new Core Update. By May 7, it appeared that the dust had mostly settled. Here’s an 11-day view from MozCast: We measured relatively high volatility from May 4-6, with a peak of 112.6° on May 5. Note that the 30-day average temperature prior to May 4 was historically very high (89.3°). How does this compare to previous Core Updates? With the caveat that recent temperatures have been well above historical averages, the May 2020 Core Update was our second-hottest Core Update so far, coming in just below the August 2018 “Medic” update. Who “won” the May Core Update? It’s common to report winners and losers after a major update (and I’ve done it myself), but for a while now I’ve been concerned that these analyses only capture a small window of time. Whenever we compare two fixed points in time, we’re ignoring the natural volatility of search rankings and the inherent differences between keywords. This time ar...

Posted by Evan_Hall If you handed someone a blank sheet of paper and the only thing written on it was the page’s title, would they understand what the title meant? Would they have a clear idea of what the actual document might be about? If so, then congratulations! You just passed the Blank Sheet of Paper Test for page titles because your title was descriptive. The Blank Sheet of Paper Test (BSoPT) is an idea Ian Lurie has talked about a lot over the years, and recently on his new website . It’s a test to see if what you’ve written has meaning to someone who has never encountered your brand or content before. In Ian’s words, "Will this text, written on a blank sheet of paper, make sense to a stranger?" The Blank Sheet of Paper Test is about clarity without context. But what if we’re performing the BSoPT on a machine instead of a person? Does our thought experiment still apply? I think so. Machines can’t read—even sophisticated ones like Google and Bing. They can only gues...

Posted by Caroline-Forsey When I first joined HubSpot's blogging team in January 2018, I loved our writing process. Once a month, we all met in a conference room with a list of ideas on Google Docs which were pitched one-by-one (intricate, I know). The process was extremely creative, iterative, and collaborative. Of course, it was also often a matter of guess-and-check. Plus, brainstorming can be a bit of a selfish process. The ideas I pitched in those meetings, I pitched in part because I wanted to write them and because I was interested in them as a reader. I could only hope our audience would be interested as well. While we developed a pulse for understanding what our readers liked from reviewing top viewed posts from the past, our process didn't enable us to develop content that matched what our potential readers wanted from us. So, just a few months into 2018, our team pivoted and created a brand new SEO-driven content strategy to address our inability to move forward ...

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard Smart keyword research forms the basis of all successful SEO. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus Shepard shares the basics of a winning keyword research process that you can learn and master in a short amount of time. Bonus:  Be sure not to miss Cyrus's upcoming webinar,   Build a Winning Keyword Strategy: Start-to-Finish   on May 21, 2020 at 10am PST: Save my spot You'll walk through his keyword research process start-to-finish with real keywords, topics, and websites to create a complete keyword research strategy. It's a great follow-up to this Whiteboard Friday! Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to a very special edition of Whiteboard Friday, talking about keyword research today. Now keyword research, you know how important it is, and it forms the basis of all successful SEO. People who are good at keyword research and having a goo...