Posted by jennita

Over the past 9 years, I’ve probably attended hundreds of marketing conferences. In the early days, I was an attendee there to learn all the things. Then after I started at Moz, I attended them as “press” and I would write about the conference on the Moz blog and live-tweet and such. At some point along the way I began to speak at different events: first about SEO, then social media, now community, and all the marketing in between.

Mat Siltala and I answering questions in our session at SearchFest. Thanks Arnie Kuenn for the pic!

At every conference I attend, no matter what my role is, I try to walk away with one tactic, one idea, one thing I can take back to my team and test, or implement, or even just understand better. After so many events, though, it can be difficult. Certainly not because I know all the things, and not because the speakers aren’t giving out excellent advice — but because after so many events, it all starts to sound the same. It’s not the same, of course (except for those few times I’ve attended the same conference two years in a row and saw the exact same presentation from a couple folks. Yikes!).

As I mature as a marketer, I’m finding myself walking away from excellent events, not with one specific tactic or idea, but with an entire theme. And that the theme, the group of ideas and discussions, are what I really get out of the event.

For example, at MozCon 2015, the theme for me was “disruption.” Now, this wasn’t the actual theme of the conference, but the part that stuck out to me from many of the talks was the idea that you can disrupt your industry and, sometimes more importantly, yourself. Since then, the idea of disruption has constantly been top-of-mind. Asking things like how will this shake things up, how will this make a difference, why would we do this? Ronell Smith recently wrote about how brands can find their disruptive opportunity.

The theme of SearchFest for me

Today, a few days out of SearchFest 2016, I find myself excited about the theme of “continuous improvement” or “kaizen.” In fact, one of the sessions specifically called kaizen out, which was when it hit me like a ton of bricks. After the session, I had a discussion with Sha Menz, one of the speakers on the topic, and I realized then that this was my theme.

(I had to use the Google search for this because of the next section. It’ll make sense in a second, I swear.)

While kaizen began as a Japanese business philosophy of making continuous improvement, it’s now used often in production systems as a way of making positive changes on a regular basis, as to improve productivity.

It’s the idea that in order to get better, you need everyone working on a project to help make suggestions and improve the process all the time. Imagine doing this with your marketing and your team.

#1 is simply not enough

Our own Dr. Pete was the morning keynote at SearchFest this year. He dug into Google SERPs and helped us understand the importance and opportunities of index-generated answers. Pete made it very clear to everyone that if you want to jump the organic queue, you have to rank #0. Yea, that’s right. Being #1 simply isn’t good enough anymore.

But how do you even do that? Pete gave some specific tactics on how to find out which pages to optimize and what things to care about. Here are three ways Pete talked about getting incrementally better at ranking the ultimate #0:

1. Check to see if you have a featured snippet for a “who is,” “what is,” “how is” type of terms, then make sure it’s optimized the way you want it to show up. Below is my snippet, and although my Moz profile and personal blog rank #1 and #2, you can see that my Huffington Post author profile is pulling in #0. And it’s wrong! Yikes. I need to get in there and fix it. Then my next incremental step will be to get my Moz profile to rank #0 instead. 😀
   
2. Once you’ve cleaned up the content that’s already showing up in the snippets, find phrases that you’d like to bump yourself up to #0 for. For example, in this scenario, I searched for “what is mozcon” and our Eventbrite page gets the #0 spot, while we’re in the low, low spot of #1. Obviously this one is “okay,” but definitely not ideal. We want folks to get the full MozCon experience by coming to our site. We’ll start working on making incremental changes to the actual MozCon page in order to take over that top spot.
   

This one goes along with #2 above, but Pete gives you another easy way to determine which page on your site Google thinks is the best fit for a snippet. Use “site: + question.” For example:

(Hahaha, this result is obviously horrible, and we should fix that.)

To get the most out of Dr. Pete’s talk, be sure to check out his full presentation:

SEO for Answers: Ranking #0 from Peter Meyers

The Internet of things

Cindy Krum, one of my favorite mobile experts, piqued my interest when she started talking about “the Internet of things” and how that really was the same thing as “The SEO of things.” She was talking about how on mobile devices, you don’t just optimize for Google search, then boom you’re done. No, you have to think about Mobile SEO, Google Now, Google Local, App stores, iTunes, Google Play… and the list went on and on.

She hit this point home by not stressing about DOING ALL THE THINGS, but that by focusing on continuous incremental changes, it would lead to exponential growth (usually when you least expect it).

During the same session, Justin Briggs talked about some specific tactics you could do to enhance your mobile rankings and experience for visitors. Here are a few that he covered:

1. Figure out the traffic you’ve lost because of poor UX for mobile. Knowing which pages are losing the most traffic because of a mobile experience can help you figure out what to work on first.
   
2. I also really liked the idea of calculating the differences between mobile landing pages:
   
3. Thumbnails are super important when it comes to keeping engagement high on mobile. He offered these tips:
   • Increase saturation in thumbnails 20–30% to attract clicks
   • Slightly over-sharpen thumbnails to improve visual experience on small thumbnails
   • Repeat text elements from image/video title
   • Use faces and emotion to connect to visitors & entice clicks

Want more of Justin’s tips? Check out his full deck:

Mobile SEO: Closing the Mobile Search Strategy Gap from Justin Briggs

Kaizen-style marketing

Although Sha Menz and Jon Cooper specifically talked about kaizen-style link building, it really hit me at this point in the day that this is what we should all be striving for. I loved the idea of making continuous, incremental improvements to how you do marketing, including everyone on your team, and perhaps even the entire company.

Take a peek at Sha’s presentation, and take special notice at how she talks about striving to do better in everything we do, every time we do it.

Kaizen Link Building – Embracing Your Pursuit Of The Unattainable from Sha Menz

Imagine a world where your SEO, Social, Content, Branding, PPC, and PR teams worked together like a well-oiled machine. Because each and every person on the team was working toward the making continuous improvements of the greater goals, and not just their own small individual goals. And I know this exactly what I hope for within the Moz marketing team.

Bringing it all together

As I mentioned on Twitter during the conference last week, the biggest issue I have with multi-track events is that I have to miss some of the talks. I’m sure I missed a lot of really great information from some excellent speakers.

At the very end of the event, it was announced that SearchFest would be changing their name. Since the conference has expanded to be beyond just search, the new name, beginning in 2017, will be Engage.

I seriously had one of those “aha!” experiences when this was announced. It wasn’t because the word “engage” meant a lot to me — it was the idea of improving. It seemed to perfectly tie together my personal takeaway theme from SearchFest. And it has inspired me to be a better leader and marketer by working to continuously improve.

PS – If all else fails, do the chicken dance.
PPS – If you’re interested in seeing my deck from SearchFest, you can find it here.

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Posted by randfish

[Estimated read time: 8 minutes]

Back in February, we explored balancing keyword targeting with concept targeting. This time around we’re looking at using your knowledge of related topics and semantic connections in your on-page SEO processes. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand talks about applying those ideas in ways that will boost your ranking potential and inform your keyword research.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re chatting about using related topics and semantically connected keywords, not just for keyword research — although that is a potential use and application — but also for some of the on-page SEO processes that we run.

Now when I say “related topics and semantically connected keywords,” I’m not actually talking about the things that you would find through a traditional keyword research process. The idea here is not to say, “What other things are people searching for that I could target?”

This is really trying to define two different, unique kinds of use cases or extractions for keywords.

Those are: What are keywords (well, words and phrases overall), unique words and phrases that are used on more pages and paragraphs and phrases that contain the query you’re going after across the Web, and what are terms and phrases that are used by more pages that rank for that particular query?

This may sound a little technical, but it’s not too hard. Once I show you these examples, I think you’ll grasp it real quick.

Let’s say for example that I’m trying to target the word “food processor.” I’ve chosen that as a good keyword for me. It’s something that I want to rank for. I know that if I can rank for it, I’m going to do well. My keyword research is done.

At this point, I’m doing on-page SEO. I’m trying to make my page more relevant and my site more relevant. I’m trying to rank better for this, and it could be the case that using certain words and phrases on the page where I’m targeting “food processor” is very important.

Google might look at a page that’s ranking for “food processor” and say, “Gosh, it’s weird that this page doesn’t have this keyword, this keyword, this keyword on it. We would expect that a page that’s targeting ‘food processor’ should have these things.”

So I want to find two things. I want to find, in the top 10 or top 20 results that Google already has for “food processor,” what are words and phrases that are on those pages more frequently? And across the entire Web, the corpus of the whole Internet that Google crawls or at least the important parts of the Internet that Google crawls and indexes, what are words and phrases that are used more on those pages when the phrase “food processor” is present?

That’s what this chart is showing me. Essentially, these are things that are used more across the whole Web. These are things that are used more on pages that already rank for this term.

I’ve done this with two examples — food processor and rainforest. Rainforest keywords in orange, food processor keywords in purple.

For example, you might see that the word “recipe” is used across the Web on lots of pages that contain “food processor,” which makes sense. Lots of recipes that call for a food processor have the word “recipe” on the page. But those aren’t necessarily the ones that rank very well. So it’s over here. It’s high up on the “Yes, used across the Web” but low down on “Used by pages that rank well.”

Is it important to use it on the page that I’m trying to target? Well, maybe. It depends on how comprehensive I’m trying to be. Maybe I should think about targeting that on a different page, these kinds of things.

Something like — let’s go over to our example for rainforest — a word like “temperate rainforest,” which are less popular and commonly used both on the Web and in the results that rank than the more commonly thought of “tropical rainforests.” So Washington State, for example, near Seattle has some temperate rainforests, where you get lots of rain, but you don’t think of them as traditional rainforests. They don’t have like thousands of creatures in them. They’re not all hot and wet like they are in Brazil or Costa Rica or those kinds of places. So “temperate,” less commonly used across the Web and less common in the ones that rank well.

But something like “Amazon,” very common in things that rank well and in the middle of pages that use it and don’t. Many pages that use rainforests don’t describe specifically the Amazon rainforest, but many do.

Got it. Now what?

So now you’ve got this concept. What do I do with these? Well, there are really two big things that you can do that are pretty awesome.

1. Use semantic connections AND related topics to boost ranking potential

So if I have a page that’s targeting rainforests, I want to think about: What are the topics and concepts, words and phrases that Google probably wants me to cover, that users and searchers probably also want me to cover? Those could be things like rainfall, ecosystem and biome, tropical, Amazon like we talked about. Maybe even a competing brand, like National Geographic, which is on here. It’s used on a lot of pages that rank well. Maybe Google has an association between rainforests and Nat Geo, and I should potentially reference them or link to them or talk about them, pull a photo from them, that kind of thing. Brazil.

These words, using them on the page can help me to be more relevant, more comprehensive, potentially more useful, and more high-quality. This is especially true for informational style searches, but potentially true for commercial searches too.

2. Use this to expand keyword research

Instead of just saying like, “Hey, I’m going to look for things that people also search for. I’m going to use Google suggest and related searches. I’m going to use KeywordTool.io, or I’m going to go Google AdWords and see what are the other high-volume searches.”

I might broaden my thinking to, “Huh, I wonder if things like ‘food processor recipes,’ or very specific things, like ‘pesto made with food processor,’ are interesting things for me to target additionally deeper in my site so I can build authority around all the topics and concepts that are related to the word ‘food processor.'”

Not every one of these semantic and related topics is going to be a good choice for you. That’s definitely the case. You have to use good judgment and the traditional metrics that you would use for keyword research — volume, difficulty, opportunity — to discover the right ones.

What’s kind of cool and one of the reasons I’m covering this, this week is that some tools have come out in the recent past, a bunch of NLP, Natural Language Processing tools, and APIs that let you do some cool stuff around this. Those include people like Alchemy, Sysomos, OpenCalais, and a number of others.

Then it’s also the case, and this is slightly self-promotional, but Moz Analytics [Moz Pro] recently released their Related Topics feature. So you can now go to the on-page section of Moz Pro and see a list of things. The Moz Pro one is going to be more like the stuff here. Think words and phrases that are used by pages that also already rank for the query you’re targeting. Then, in about a month, Keyword Explorer will be launching, which I’ve talked about a number of times, and that will have more of these things. It’s used on pages across the Web that also feature this.

But you can get this stuff currently through some of these tools. You can do your own analyses. There’s lots of code out there in code repositories that you can pull from the Web. So I encourage you to give this a try. We’ve seen some good results from people who are trying this stuff out, who are including these terms and phrases, and who are broadening their keyword research with it.

Look forward to your comments, and we’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by dudleycarr

[Estimated read time: 4 minutes]

Until now, I was confident that developing a software service had never been compared to assembling furniture from Ikea (no Google searches were done to prove this assertion).

Believe it or not, we unlocked this achievement while working on the Google My Business API. The piece of “furniture” we constructed? We built the recliner that allows you to sit back and have your locations automatically imported from Google My Business to Moz Local. And like most things built with tools meant for hands far smaller than the average human hand, we’re proud of the end result and excited to announce this amazing (and comfortable) feature today in Moz Local!

Taking a step back, we looked at our fine construction and realized that there were a number of spare parts laying on the floor. We took those Google My Business API spare parts and built Moz Local’s new My Business Console. In furniture-speak, it’s like a nifty baby gate that actually allows adults to operate it without reading the instruction manual. In seriously-tell-me-what-this-thing-is terms, My Business Console gives you fine-grained bulk permission management for Google My Business.

Sync locations from Google My Business to Moz Local

Importing locations from Google My Business into Moz Local can now be done with a single click. This fancy feature replaces the CSV upload process that’s been a part of Moz Local since day one.

Although Moz Local has always accepted CSVs exported from Google My Business, the process was still quite manual and thus more cumbersome and error-prone than it needed to be.

Users can setup the import process via the Add Listings button in your Moz Local Dashboard starting today!

Moz Local’s new free tool, My Business Console!

My Business Console works with your Google My Business account and lets you, as a Google My Business owner, audit, add, and remove managers in bulk. For brands, agencies, and franchises that have hundreds of locations and dozens of GMB Business Accounts, permission management either gets in the way of collaboration or potentially exposes capabilities to people who shouldn’t have them.

Can’t wait? Check it out now!

Today, there are two ways within Google My Business to collaborate with others. You can add a person as a manager on the Business Account, giving them owner access to all locations in that account, or you can add the person as a manager on each location. The former provides a ton of power to whomever you add; the latter is mind-numbingly tedious to do.

With My Business Console, you can easily choose to audit/add/remove people in bulk, either at the Business Account level or at the Google My Business location level, allowing you to dial just the right level of sharing. Easy permission management, coupled with visibility across lots of locations and business accounts, should allow groups to better collaborate on location data.

Before we dive into how it works, a couple of really important things about My Business Console:

• First, it’s completely free now and forever for businesses small and large. Just like with our Check Listing functionality, we believe in providing important and accessible tools to help the Local community.
• Second, since this is a free tool, you do not need a Moz account. You simply log in with the Google account that you’d like to use to manage your locations.

So, how does it work?

First, you log in using your Google account from the My Business Console homepage.

There are two primary views: Locations and Managers. The “locations” view shows all of the locations that you have access to in Google My Business for your Google account.

Here you can quickly see which managers can modify a location:

To add or remove managers, you need to be the owner of a location. You can use the handy toggle to see exactly which locations those are:

Adding a user to two locations requires selecting the locations and then clicking the “Add” button:

The “managers” view shows all managers across all locations. This view is primarily to remove a person without having to find all of the locations containing that manager. Removing a person with a single click is necessary when that person leaves an organization.

Similar to location management, it’s easy to add and remove managers for your business accounts. Adding a manager to a business account will automatically give them access to all the locations under that account.

Try My Business Console out for yourself and let us know how we can make it even better:

No manual required!

Have more questions? Check out the FAQ.

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Posted by Alex-T

[Estimated read time: 12 minutes]

Each search query in Google is a demand signal for us digital marketers. If you know exactly what users are looking for, you can easily spot what they’re likely to buy.

From a common sense point of view, it’s quite logical to say that if users search for something more, they are able (and likely) to buy more. As it turns out, this correlation doesn’t work within digital marketing niches. The commercial potential of a certain digital marketing service is not in direct proportion to the search volume it receives. In other words:

In the digital marketing industry, popularity doesn’t influence salability.

In the four digital marketing niches analyzed, I discovered:

1. SEO is still the most desirable service and it has the highest chance of leading to conversion.
2. Users want to know more about social media and content marketing, but they’re not ready to pay for it.
3. Users who are searching for PPC are the most likely to be converted.

After digging further into this article, you’ll discover which digital marketing services are the best to sell and why. Armed with this data, you’ll inform your strategy and have a leg up on your competitors.

Are the digital marketing services you’re selling the ones users are ready to buy?

Nowadays, we see how the digital marketing sphere is moving more and more towards content marketing and social media marketing (SMM). Everybody talks about these services — I’m no exception here. Moreover, there are plenty of digital marketers who are confident that without social media you can’t rank properly in Google (I’m not one of them).

However, it’s true that SMM and content marketing are now more important than ever. I was recently browsing through some BrightonSEO speeches and noticed that a substantial proportion of those talks were about content, SMM, copywriting, and even PR. I noticed the same situation with SMX events and many others. SEO seems like it’s becoming less important.

But what about market demand? “What are our potential clients really interested in purchasing?” I asked myself. I conducted a study to find out.

User search behavior in SEO, PPC, SMM, and content marketing niches

I analyzed 4 digital marketing niches: SEO, PPC, content marketing, and SMM.

Why did I choose these niches? They represent the top four services offered in the US digital marketing industry. Recently, I conducted a survey regarding the current state of digital marketing agencies’ services, costs, and payment models. Among the insights that I gained, I determined the most and least popular digital marketing services that agencies are selling today.

Top digital agency services offered in the US market.

However, this data was gathered solely from service providers, including agencies and freelancers. After considering these results further, I came to the conclusion that they don’t necessarily correlate with what clients want to buy. This all-important factor is completely missing from the data.

It was time to do some research on market demand via the most accessible information I could get: search queries.

Over 112,800 search queries were analyzed.

Because I’m experienced in keyword research, it was an easy task for me. I took the top four services offered in the US and created lists of keywords that are related to SEO, SMM, PPC, and content marketing. These keywords were mostly collected with the help of Serpstat and SEMrush. After I created a final list, I used Google Keyword Planner, which provided me with the most accurate cost-per-click and search volume metrics. In the following graphic, you can see sums of search volumes of queries concerning these niches:

To figure out how the popularity of a niche influences its commercial potential, I divided all queries related to these four niches into two groups – general queries and those that are agency-related. I put search queries in the “agency-related” category if they had any kind of commercial interest, e.g. if they included words like “fees,” “costs,” “prices,” “consultant,” “service,” “company,” “agency,” etc.

Agency-related queries spot the cases when users are ready to buy a service, while general queries are simply informational queries.

This distribution reflects the balance between what users are looking for versus what they are ready to buy, so here are my top hints:

1. SEO is still the most desirable service and it has the highest chance of leading to conversion.

SEO is a leading niche that attracts the highest search interest, as well as the most potentially commercial queries. If you’re already selling SEO services, don’t stop. And if you aren’t, perhaps you should start.

2. Users want to know more about social media and content marketing, but they’re not ready to pay for it.

The social media niche attracts a lot of searchers, but they’re less likely to pay for it. Although content marketing generates quite high search volumes, users aren’t likely to pay for it, either, as only four percent of queries are commercial.

3. Users who are searching for PPC are the most likely to be converted.

PPC, on the contrary, attracts less searchers; as we can judge from the sum of its search volumes, PPC is 10 times less popular than SEO. Nevertheless, it enjoys a higher frequency of agency-related keywords than the content marketing niche, and about 10 percent of its agency-related queries are likely to result in the purchase of PPC management services.

I also took a look at the most searchable and the most expensive keywords connected with these four niches and compared them. I assumed that they wouldn’t correlate. Market demand is represented by search volumes, which means that the most searchable keywords are the queries a lot of people use.

However, the most expensive keywords mirror the most competitive niches, which have a really limited audience of potential clients. In order to determine if I was correct, I compared the top five most searchable and most expensive keywords in each of the four niches.

The most expensive keywords show low search volumes.

By looking at the table below, you can see that my hypothesis was absolutely correct. The higher the suggested bid, the lower the number of searchers.

The average search volumes of the top five most expensive keywords for each investigated niche do not exceed 100 searches.

	Average Suggested Bid	Average Search Volume
SEO	$91.5	100
PPC	$87.74	40
Content Marketing	$84.96	36
Social Media	$107.4	28

Average search volume and suggested bid for the top 5 most expensive keywords

The opposite trend was revealed for the most searchable keywords, where the average suggested bid is less than $20 USD, but the average search volume exceeds 5,000 searchers.

	Average Suggested Bid	Average Search Volume
SEO	$16	27,460
PPC	$18.2	5,340
Content Marketing	$15.2	26,640
Social Media	$6.8	27,980

Average search volumes and suggested bids for the top 5 most searchable keywords

Based on this data, it’s obvious that you’ll pay less for keywords that have a larger search volume. Those keywords are informational search terms, rather than commercial ones.

8 facts about the most searchable and most expensive keywords

In the following diagrams you can see the top five most popular keywords and their search volumes in Google US, as well as the top five most expensive keywords and suggested bids.

SEO niche

Fact 1: A lot of people choose to deal with SEO issues themselves — at least, they try to with the help of special tools.

In the SEO niche, the most searchable keywords are general queries like “SEO” and “search engine optimization.” Also, a lot of users search for “SEO tools,” which is the fourth most searchable query. The search volumes of these keywords indicate that a lot of users would rather deal with SEO issues on their own, and that they’re looking for professional SEO tools. It’s no secret that new analytic tools are released every day to compete for rule of their respective marketing niches. On the other hand, quite a lot of users search Google for “SEO company,” which is the fifth most searchable query, and that indicates they’re eager to delegate SEO problems to paid professionals.

Fact 2: “SEO strategy template,” with a CPC of $120.28, is used by Google to promote AdWords.

As for the top five most expensive SEO keywords, I found they’re quite a curious set. The most expensive SEO-related keyword is “SEO strategy template,” which costs $120.28. This is a consulting query, so why has it become so expensive?

To find it out, I analyzed this query with the help of SEMrush’s Keywords Analytics tool. The results were eye-popping to me. The most mind-blowing thing here is Google’s actions. It turns out that Google itself is paying for this keyword to appear in paid search.

What’s even more interesting: Google is also paying for “SEO strategy template” to show the Adwords page in paid results. This would seem to prove that not all rules apply to everyone: we have to maintain the relevancy of landing pages and keywords for pages appearing in Google ads… but Google may not be subject to those restrictions. A campaign’s quality score is based on CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience. It’s obvious that users searching for “SEO strategy template” have no interest in using Google AdWords!

Keyword ads history for “SEO strategy template”

PPC niche

Fact 1: Users don’t want to deal with PPC on their own.

It’s worth noting that the top five most expensive keywords are agency related. They are “PPC management agency,” “top PPC companies,” and “pay per click management service.”

Fact 2: The majority of the top five most expensive PPC keywords are agency-related search terms.

As we’ve already discovered, the PPC niche isn’t the most searchable digital marketing topic; remember, it receives 10 times less searchers than SEO. Nevertheless, it receives a rather large proportion of agency-related queries. Ironically, people are ready to spend their time running SEO on their own in order to make it “free.” But when it comes to ads campaigns, they prefer to find an agency or consultant.

Social media marketing niche

Fact 1: SMM education is getting popular.

In the social media marketing niche, all of the most searchable keywords are also general queries, like “social media” or “social media definition.” Also, almost all of the top five most expensive keywords for SMM are connected with education in the SMM sphere, namely obtaining a masters degree and online courses: “MBA in social media marketing,” “social media masters,” “masters in social media marketing,” and “online social media marketing course.”

Fact 2: Users have realized that managing social media also requires a strategy.

The query “What is social media strategy” appeared in the top five most expensive SMM-related keywords. I’m sure we can qualify this query as consultancy-related. There’s a high probability that users who are searching for an SMM strategy are willing to hire an expert to master their SMM channels.

Content marketing niche

Fact 1: Contently is the ultimate leader.

In the content marketing niche, there’s a brand search query in the top five most searchable keywords — “Contently” — which is a great example of how a company that provides content marketing software can achieve a wide presence in their niche. Also, one of the most searchable queries is “content management system.” I would say that such queries are likely to lead users to purchase professional content marketing services.

Fact 2: The most expensive keywords are related to content management tools.

The content marketing niche, unlike the other digital marketing niches I’ve analyzed, has a strong correlation between market demand and PPC rates. All of the most expensive keywords are also connected with content management systems: “content management system database,” “Drupal content management system,” “what does a content management system do,” and the niche query “healthcare content management.”

Obviously, many people are struggling to organize their content strategies and processes and are looking for a proper management system. The high prices for these keywords are in direct response to market demand.

Best SEO and PPC companies according to Google US

“That’s all interesting,” I thought, “but how does the situation look from the point of view of a potential client who’s unaware of what’s going on in the market?”

Let’s suppose that this potential client is a perfectionist and they want to buy services from the very best company. They would ask Google “what are the best SEO and PPC companies?”, so I did as well.

Hint: I bet you’ve never heard of a majority of them.

I analyzed Google’s SERPs for the queries “best SEO company” and “best PPC company” and chose agency domains that appeared in the first 10 results for each of these SERPs. You can see the results in the following graphics.

For the query “best SEO company,” agency domains that appeared in the first 10 results were Highervisibility.com, Boostability.com, Pagetraffic.com, and Outspokenmedia.com. I used SEMrush to analyze the organic search visibility these domains received from December 2013 to October 2015.

Because SEMrush only reports on traffic based on keywords, I decided to add Similarweb and watch organic search visits for these domains for the year 2015. Actually, I discovered absolutely non-positive trends — you can see this in the graphic below.

The following digital agencies appeared in the first 10 results in Google’s SERP for the query “best PPC company”: Jumfly.com, Wordstream.com, and Straightnorth.com. For these domains, I analyzed data concerning their paid search visibility with the help of SEMrush. In the following graphic, you can see the results:

For more detailed data for 2015, I created a Paid Search Visits report for these domains with the help of SimilarWeb.

As you can see, the majority of the best SEO and PPC companies according to Google are not the ones you might expect. Google’s ranking algorithms, despite constantly being improved and moving increasingly towards human-centered logic, are still far from perfect.

View the complete infographic here.

SEO, PPC, content marketing, and SMM thrashed out

Now that we’ve discovered the current market demand for the most popular digital agency services, you can use this data to better understand your potential clients and create more effective strategies.

Here’s a short recap to help kick off the conversation in the comments. The major findings are as follows:

1. High search volumes for certain topics don’t always mirror high-converting niches. You should always further investigate this correlation. (Note: You can easily apply this to any market’s landscape research, not just the digital marketing industry.)
2. SMM and content marketing are relatively new spheres, and they enjoy very high search volumes compared to PPC and SEO. But be aware that SMM and content marketing receive less commercial queries that are likely to be converted.
3. I have no idea why, but SMM education has become an extremely competitive niche. In fact, there are more experts who are ready to provide SMM courses than those who want to receive SMM education. If you want to sell SMM training courses, be prepared to enter into a highly competitive market!
4. As for content marketing, content management services are now competing against content management systems; so far, Contently is winning this battle.

Do you have any other thoughts, questions, or ideas? I’m super excited to hear them — sound off in the comments!

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Posted by jon.white

SEO is changing. We can no longer rely on keyword targeting alone to optimize our content. Whether we should focus on topics or keywords is a debate in progress. But figuring out which topics can influence the SERP is, at best, a manual process; at worst, it’s a timesuck that can take hours out of your day.

Want the quick run-down? Tori explains it all in this brief 1:39 minute video, complete with snazzy music.

Can’t wait to dive in? Already an avid Moz Pro user? Head to the Keyword Rankings section of any campaign and get started.

Not a Moz Pro subscriber? You can satisfy your curiosity with a free trial, too:

Try it for 30 days!

TL;DR

Today we’ve launched a new feature in Moz Pro that can help you make sense of how search engines understand topics and phrases. You can use this data to build deeper content, improve your topical coverage, find keyword ideas, and generally better understand the SERP. It uses machine learning and topic modeling to mine related topics from the SERPs. We see this as another step on the journey to help marketers better understand the complex world of SEO in 2016.

Pandas, Hummingbirds, and the relationship between keywords and pages

We’ve all noticed that SEO has become a lot more complex in the last few years. When Google started to figure out the meaning of words and phrases, simple keyword usage alone no longer guaranteed us results. Then Hummingbird spread its wings, and now in some cases, pages in the SERP don’t contain the keyword at all. Utter chaos, right?

Panda made sure we put effort and research into our content. And while it’s still a good idea to ensure your target keywords appear in key parts of your page, the simple on-page optimization of the past can no longer move the rankings needle on its own.

Related Topics is a new feature in Moz Pro that helps you understand how phrases and topics influence the SERP, allowing you to broaden your content and build out pages instead of devoting yourself to time-consuming (and let’s be real, sort of boring) research. As of today, Moz Pro is one of the few places you can get this kind of data.

That all sounds well and good. But how do we get insight into how Google understands the relationship between topics? Well, it turns out they give us a handy clue: the SERP itself.

Related Topics examines all of the pages that rank in the top 20 for a given keyword. Using machine learning and topic modeling, it figures out which unique sets of terms and phrases those pages include. It then removes the topics that your page already talks about and presents the resulting list, along with the ranking URLs. Armed with this mighty list, you can now understand which topics have influence in the SERP and decide whether to integrate these into your own pages and content. It lives within the Page Optimization feature in Moz Pro, which you can now get to by clicking the “Optimize” next to any keyword in the ranking table.

While it’s impossible to say for sure that including topics in your page will result in a higher ranking (that ol’ correlation versus causation thing), we do know that pages that rank well are already including these topics in their content. If you’re looking to diversify and broaden your page’s subject coverage to try and win more authority, Related Topics is the place to start. Bonus points: it’s also quite likely that including coverage of these topics will improve the user’s experience of your content.

How can I use this data to get ahead?

1. Experiment with including different topics and content to build authority

Adding topically similar content to your page can help Google understand what that page is about, establishing yourself as an authority on those topics.

I’m a fan of Tim Ferris and his productivity hack blog, fourhourworkweek.com. Let’s take this article on speed reading. Looks like the page is optimized pretty well for the target keyword and has a decent link profile and PA. Now, let’s look at some other topics that have influence on the SERP.

Here I can see a couple of variations I might want to play around with, but a couple in particular catch my eye. I notice the topic “reading comprehension” seems influential (it’s included in 3 of the top 5 ranking pages), and it’s not syntactically related — this is a topic I might not have discovered manually by looking at variations of the target keyword. I also see “subvocalization” being influential. This is a term I might not be familiar with, but using Related Topics, I can drill into the actual URLs mentioning that topic, learn about it, and get some inspiration for how I could build out my content to include it.

This is a particularly interesting case, as “speed reading” has a somewhat reasonable search volume of 9,900 (from Keyword Planner). In contrast, “reading comprehension” has a search volume of 18,100. If I can integrate it well, I have an opportunity to broaden my audience.

2) Avoid thin content and go deeper

You’ve got to pacify the Panda. If you’re looking for ways to expand on thin content, go deeper or broader on an existing page, or convert shorter content to long-form, using Related Topics suggestions can give you inspiration for subject-matter expansion. Multiple studies have shown that deeper and more topically relevant content correlates with better ranking performance.

In the example below, I have a page about Product Management Events, if I wanted to make it broader I might do a deep dive on the subject of Product Design, or even talk about some of the branded topics that were discovered.

3) Save time on topical, competitive, and SERP research

This can be especially helpful when you’re wearing many hats, and tackling a new domain you’re not as familiar with. Using Related Topics — and especially researching the ranking pages they appear on — can give you a head start for topic-appropriate language to use, or inspiration for areas to research.

At Moz, we all think we’re experts on the housing market since we watched “The Big Short.” But challenge us to write about the more technical terms and we might struggle! Here’s another example using a US real estate blog recommended by our own in-house real estate guru Tim Ellis.

Let’s say we want to understand a bit more about the SERP for the keyword “real estate forecast,” and perform some industry research on terminology. Here are some topics that have influence:

I notice there are a few technical terms in here that I’m not familiar with, and if I want to learn more I can jump right into the ranking URLs that contain the topic and research them instead of trying to manually pull them out of the SERP.

4) Keyword Ideas

The list of topical suggestions also double as suggestions for other keywords to target, or as seed keywords for keyword research (we have some new keyword research tools coming very soon).

How does it actually work? (Tech jargon alert!)

Wondering how Related Topics knows just which content is on the page? Well, we use Moz’s proprietary Context API, which also powers other tools around here (such as Moz Content). Here are a few words from Dr. Matt Peters (Moz’s Chief Data Scientist) on how it works:

Moz’s topic modeling algorithm extracts relevant keyword phrases from English language web pages. We use natural language processing algorithms to analyze the page content and create a list of candidate topics. Then, a machine learning model assigns each candidate phrase a relevance score and ranks them from most-to-least relevant. The relevance score is a combination of traditional information retrieval techniques like term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) and language modeling, syntactic and semantic signals such as part of speech tags, and graph-based features. The resulting lists of highly relevant topics and relevance scores are used in both Moz Analytics and Moz Content.

As mentioned above, Related Topics takes the top 20 ranking pages on the SERP, extracts topics from them using the Context API, and then applies a series of filters and rules to show topics that we think are relevant. We exclude topics we find on any URLs that you rank with for the keyword. During feature development, we were faced with a choice: show topics that occur more frequently, but show less of them; or show more topics with varying ranges of frequency. We decided that our customers prefer having more data, and often we find gems near the bottom of the list. For this reason we went with the “more data” option. You might find the odd strange suggestion in there, but we think that’s outweighed by having more data to choose from.

See it in action!

Want to take it for a spin? If you’re already a Moz Pro subscriber (hey, pal!), head to your Keyword Rankings section in any Moz Pro campaign and hit the “Optimize Keyword” button.

Curious but not ready to commit? Check it out with a 30-day free trial:

Try it for 30 days!

As always, we want your feedback / comments / experiences in the comments below!

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