Posted by Isla_McKetta

“How can I learn SEO?” is a deceptively simple question. The standard approach is to attempt to appeal to anyone who’s interested in SEO without any idea of your previous experience or the actual reasons you want to learn SEO. That’s fun. Especially the part about weeding through tons of information that might not even apply to what you want to learn.

So let’s fix that. This guide is written to help you choose your own SEO adventure. If you know very little about SEO and just want to learn enough to impress your CMO, start at the beginning and stop when you feel like you understand enough concepts. Or if you’ve been doing SEO for years but need a brush up on the latest tips and tricks before impressing a potential client or employer, there’s a path for you too. Be sure to follow the links. They refer you to resources that are much more in-depth than we could reproduce in one post.

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First choose your character

SEO Newbie

You may know what a title tag is, but you aren’t quite sure how to use it or why. The SEO Newbie could be a web developing hobbyist on the verge of a new obsession or someone looking for the next growing career path. Regardless, you have the most to learn (and the most to gain) from this adventure.

Start at the very beginning with What is SEO? and explore as many paths as you can. You might be surprised at the bits of information you pick up along the way. For a guided tour, follow the teal boxes. Don’t forget to bookmark this page so you can come back and learn more once you’ve absorbed each batch of info.

Veteran SEO

You were doing SEO back in the days of AltaVista, so you know all the things to know. Except maybe you took a break for a few years or decided to swap that black hat for a gray (or even white) one and need to know what’s the what with the major changes in the past few years.

Make a quick stop at the Algorithm Change History to catch up on the latest updates and penalties. After that, we’ll guide you through some of the topics that are more likely to have changed since you last checked. Just look for the purple boxes.

SEO-Curious Marketer

You’ve heard of SEO. You might even have worked with a few SEOs. Now you’re ready to dig in and understand what everyone’s talking about and how you can use all that new info to improve your marketing (and maybe level up your career at the same time).

Start with What is SEO? and look for shortcuts in orange boxes along the path to gather highlights. You can always dig deeper into any topic you find especially interesting.

Whichever path you choose, don’t worry, we’ll keep weaving you in and out of the sections that are relevant to your learning needs; just look for the color that’s relevant to your chosen character.

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Table of contents

For you table of contents types who like to read straight through rather than have someone set the path for you, here’s a quick look at what we’ll be covering:

1. What is SEO?
2. Building an SEO-friendly site
3. Content and related markup
4. On-site related topics
5. Link-related topics
6. Other optimization
7. Test your new skills
8. Celebrate your success
9. Other resources

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1. What is SEO?

First things first. It’s hard to learn the ins and outs of SEO (search engine optimization) before you even know what it is. In the following short video, Rand Fishkin (a.k.a. the Wizard of Moz) defines SEO as “The practice of increasing the quantity and quality of the traffic that you earn through the organic results in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.”

Watch it to understand the difference between paid search and organic search and a few basic things about improving click-throughs from search pages.

Ranking factors

A lot of different factors, from site speed to content quality, are important in SEO. These are, as far as anyone can tell, the factors that search engines use in determining whether or not to show your page to searchers. For a great intro to those elements and how they interact to affect your site’s overall ranking, check out Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors.

Why SEO?

That’s all nice, but if SEO is starting to seem like a lot of work, you probably want to understand whether SEO is even worth it. The short answer is that yes, SEO is worth it, but only if you want potential customers to be able to find your site when they’re searching on Google (or any other search engine).

Yes, search engines are crawling your site, but those crawlers aren’t as sophisticated as you might like. SEO gives you more control over how your site is represented in those search engine results pages. Good SEO can also improve how users experience your site. Learn more with Why Search Engine Marketing is Necessary.

About search engines

Who are these search engines anyway and why do we spend so much time worrying about how they see our sites? To get the best answer, let’s look at that question from two points of view: search engines and searchers.

How search engines operate

First, it’s important to understand how search engines crawl sites, build their indexes, and ultimately determine what’s relevant to a user’s query. Some of the specifics are trade secrets, but this section of the Beginner’s Guide to SEO offers a solid overview. And for an introduction to how Google ranks pages, watch this video:

As you’re learning about SEO, remember that not everything you read on the Internet should be treated as gospel. Here are some common myths and misconceptions about search engines.

The human side of search

Understanding how people use search engines is as crucial to SEO as understanding their needs is to marketing. Learn about classic search query patterns and how people scan search results here.

Search engine results pages

So far we’ve dropped a lot of phrases like “search results” and “search pages,” but what does any of that really mean? Search Engine Land does a great job of decoding the standard search engine results page (SERP). It’s a strong foundation for understanding why everyone is shooting to be in the top ten search results. But one thing you’ll find the more you get into SEO is that SERPs are rapidly evolving. Ads move, knowledge graphs appear (and disappear) and sometimes local search results invade. Dr. Pete takes you on a tour of how SERPs have changed and why ten blue links are probably a thing of the past in this article.

Penalties and algorithm updates

And then there’s the darker side of SEO, because once there’s a system, there’s someone trying to game that system. Spend more than a few minutes talking to anyone about SEO and you’ll hear something or other about black hat tactics like keyword stuffing and unnatural linking.

If you decide to use these tactics, you might soon become acquainted with search engine penalties. These algorithm updates, like Hummingbird and Penguin, are implemented by search engines at various intervals. The official word is that these updates improve user experience, but they can also be effective ways to penalize SEOs using spammy tactics. Learn more about Google’s algorithm updates. That page includes not only a full history of prior penalties, but it’s consistently refreshed when a new algorithm update is confirmed.

SEO veterans, you get to skip ahead of the class now to learn about the current state of page speed, mobile web development, and competitive research along with info on the best tools available today.

Analytics platforms (or how to measure SEO)

As you can see, a lot of work can go into SEO, but the results can be pretty incredible, too. To track your progress in topping the SERPs, make sure you’re using an analytics platform like Google Analytics or Omniture. You can get by with something like Rank Tracker to track rankings on keywords as a start, but eventually you’re going to want some of the data those more sophisticated tools offer.

Brain full? You’ve just learned everything a beginner needs to know about what SEO is. Go take a walk or get some coffee and let all that info soak in.

Before you go, save this bookmark.

SEO newbies, when you come back, you’ll be in exactly the right place to start putting some of your new knowledge into action by practicing how to build an SEO-friendly site.

SEO-curious marketers, you might not want to go to the trouble of actually building a site, but you’ll learn a lot by reading through the next section and the related materials.

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2. Building an SEO-friendly site

First of all, don’t freak out, you don’t have to build a totally new site to get something out of this section. But if you’re an SEO Newbie intent on making a career of this, you might want to set up a practice site to really get your hands dirty and learn everything you can.

About domains and URLs

Before you start worrying about site content and structure (aka the fun stuff), you have a real chance to set your site up for success by using a strong domain name and developing a URL structure that’s SEO and user friendly. This stuff can be hard to change later when you have hundreds (or thousands) of pages in place, so you’ll be glad you started out on the right foot.

Domains

While you’re decades too late to score “buy.com,” it’s never too late to find the right domain name for you. This resource will help you sort through the SEO dos and SEO don’ts of selecting a root domain and TLD (don’t worry, all is explained) that are memorable without being spammy. There’s even info on what to consider if you have to change your domain name.

Don’t skip the section on subdomains—it could save you from making some rookie duplicate content errors.

Anatomy of a URL

Oh the SEO havoc that can ensue when your URLs aren’t set up quite right. Learn what not to do.

Site structure

Woo-hoo! Now that you have a site, it’s time to think about how best to structure your site. Remember that you want to be thinking about both search engines and users as you set up that site. For example, that amazing Javascript menu you had designed might not be bot-friendly.

Things to think about at this point are that your content is indexable (that the crawlers can actually find it) and that you don’t have any orphaned pages. Learn more about those issues here.

Sitemaps

And then you’re going to need a sitemap. Sitemaps help search engines index your content and understand the relationships between pages. So where better to get advice on how to build and implement a sitemap than straight from Google.

Internal links

Another vital way to show search engines what pages are most important/related (and to help humans navigate your content) is through internal links. You want enough links to show users what’s what, but not so many that it’s impossible to tell what’s really important/related. Read more about optimal link structure and passing ranking power.

Page speed

How long it takes a page on your site to load (page speed) mattered when we were all using desktops, but it’s crucial now that so much Internet traffic comes from mobile devices, plus it’s one factor in how pages get ranked. So whether you’re new to SEO or looking for new tricks, page speed might be a good place to start.

Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to get specific recommendations on how to speed up your site and then get crackin’.

Mobile web development

Speaking of mobile traffic, is your site mobile friendly? Learn about the difference between responsive designs and device-specific solutions on our mobile optimization page. You’ll also see a list of don’ts for mobile design (ever tried to close a pop-up on your iPhone?). This only gets more important the more mobile traffic you get (and want).

Phew! That was a lot of information, but once you’ve absorbed it all, you’ll have an excellent handle on site structure (which will save you a lot of trouble down the line). Bookmark this spot, then take a well-deserved break. We’ll start back here together when you’re ready.

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3. Content and related markup

Now that you have that site framework all set up, it’s time to get to the good stuff—populating it with content!

Competitor analysis

Before you write or post too much of your own content, you might want to see what’s working (and what isn’t) for your competitors. This analysis helps you identify those competitors and then understand what their links, rankings, and keywords look like. It’s important to update this research occasionally because your competition might change over time.

Veteran SEOs, you can skip straight ahead to Schema structured data unless you want a refresh on any other topics related to content.

SEO newbies, you’ll want a deep understanding of keyword research, SEO copywriting, and the other content-related topics in this section. Get yourself a coffee and then settle back in to learn a ton.

Marketers, this is your chance to learn all the basics for SEO-friendly content, so stick with us for a spell. You won’t need the same depth of understanding as someone who plans to do SEO for a living, so let your curiosity guide you as deep into any of these topics as you want to go.

Keyword research

You may feel like you just did keyword research in the last step, but it’s crucial enough that we’re going to dive a little deeper here. Understand the value of a particular keyword and see what kind of shot you have at ranking for it by reading Chapter 5 of the Beginner’s Guide to SEO.

SEO copywriting

We promised you’d get to actually create content and that time is finally here! Now that you have an understanding of the competitive landscape and the keywords you want to (and can) rank for, write away. Remember that while you’re really writing content for users, a few simple tips can help your content stand out to search engines too. Isn’t it nice when something does double duty?

On-page factors and meta data

For really search engine-friendly content, you’re going to want to make sure your meta data is all in order. That includes title tags, meta descriptions, and alt attributes.

Go the extra mile by incorporating Schema structured data into your content. This additional info gives search engines the data they need to include rich snippets (like review boxes) below your search results.

Veteran SEOs, it’s a good idea to skip ahead to on-site related topics now.

Newbies, your SEO education is not complete without a solid understanding of duplicate content, SEO for video, and how to measure success, so stick with this section until the end.

Marketers, duplicate content is something you’re going to hear a lot about and it doesn’t hurt to understand video SEO and how to measure success, so continue to read onward in this section.

Duplicate content

Duplicate content is the bane of a website. Even if you think you’ve done everything right with your content, there’s a chance that a dynamic URL or something else is surfacing that same content to crawlers more than once. Not only does Google fail to see the logic in “twice as much is twice as nice” but they might also penalize you for it. Navigate around the most common pitfalls.

SEO for video

Content doesn’t just mean words, but unfortunately, the crawlers aren’t (yet) sophisticated enough to parse things like images and video. If your alt attributes are in good shape, you’re covered for images, but there are some SEO tactics you need to incorporate if you’re using video on your site. The good news is that once your video SEO is in good shape, video content often gets better rankings than text.

Measuring success

So you’ve got all that content on your site, but how do you know if it’s actually helping your SEO? At the beginning is a good time to set yourself up to measure your success so you can establish a baseline. Learn more about what metrics you should be tracking and how.

Time for yet another well-earned break. Grab a nap if you can and then spend a day or so observing how these issues are handled by other sites on the web. For maximum learning, try practicing some of your newfound knowledge on a site you have access to.

Set your bookmarks before you go.

When you’re ready to continue learning SEO, Newbies should make a stop at on-site related topics to get familiar with Robots.txt and HTTPS.

Any veterans still hanging about might want to take a quick read through on-site related topics to see what might have changed with Robots.txt and to take in the latest wisdom on HTTPS.

Marketers, you get to sit that one out and head straight on over to link-related topics.

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4. On-site related topics

For the true SEO aficionado, there are some technical details that you must get right. We’ve all heard stories of people accidentally blocking their site from being crawled and then wondering where all the traffic is. To keep from being one of these, learn about Robots.txt: how it helps you get found and when blocking robots is not actually effective.

The other technical on-site topic you’ll want to master is the switching of your site from HTTP to HTTPS without slowing down your site or losing traffic. This is especially important since Google announced that HTTPS is a ranking factor.

See how far you’ve leveled up already by getting current on just those two topics? Bet you aren’t even tired yet.

Newbies, it’s time to dive straight into link-related topics.

Veterans, go check out guest blogging for a look at how that practice has changed.

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5. Link-related topics

You now know a lot about how to make your site SEO friendly. Now it’s time to look at how to bend the rest of the Internet to your SEO will. Don’t worry, this’ll be TAGFEE.

External links

External links are a fantastic way to show search engines that your site is credible and useful. They’re also a great way for users to find you by navigating from sites they already use. In short, they build your authority with humans and bots.

There are two effective ways to get more links from external sources: you can either earn them or build them. Chances are that you’ll get the best results by focusing on some combination of those two tactics.

Notice how we didn’t say “buy them”? Don’t buy links.

Guest blogging

One tried and true way to build external links is through guest blogging, although this tactic has evolved a lot in the past few years. What used to be an “I give you content, you give me a link” sort of exchange has given way to guest blogging with a purpose.

Veterans, go ahead and pop on over to conversion rate optimization unless you want a refresh on link-related topics like link nofollow and canonicalization.

Link quality

When you’re out there on the Internet trying to build links, be sure you’re looking for good quality links. Those are links that come from sites that are trustworthy, popular, and relevant to your content. For more information on factors search engines use to determine link value, read this page.

Anchor text

Anchor text is simply the text that’s used in a link whether it’s a link to a site or within that site. The implications of anchor text, though, reach farther because while keywords in anchor text can help your site rank for those words, it’s easy for keyword-stuffed anchor text to look spammy. Learn more about best practices for anchor text.

Nofollow

“Nofollow” is a designation you can apply to a link to keep it from passing any link equity (that’s kind of like the SEO equivalent of an up-vote). What might surprise you is that links don’t need to be “followed” to pass human authority. Even nofollowed links can help you build awareness and get more links. So when you’re linking to a site (or to other content on your site) think about whether that link leads to something you’re proud to be associated with.

HTTP status codes

Every Internet user eventually encounters a 404 error page, but that’s just one of the many HTTP status codes found on the web. Learn the difference between a 500 and a 503 along with some best practices for 404 pages here.

Redirection

One of the most useful HTTP status codes for SEOs is the 301 redirect which is used to tell search engines a page has permanently moved elsewhere (and passes a good share of link equity). Gather all the in-depth info you ever needed about 301s and other redirects.

Canonicalization

Perhaps because it’s one of the hardest SEO words to pronounce, canonicalization has a reputation for being complex. But the basic concept is simple: you have two (or more) pages that have similar content and canonicalization allows you to either combine those pages (using redirects) or indicate which version of the page you want search engines to treat as paramount. Read up on the details of using canonicalization to handle duplicate content.

You’ve now mastered so much SEO knowledge that you could teach the stuff (at least on a 101 level). If you’ve read and digested all the links along the way, you now know so much more about SEO than when you started.

But you’re so self-motivated that you want to know even more, don’t you?

Newbies, read closely through other optimization to refine your knowledge and apply those newly-minted optimization skills to even more aspects of the sites you’re working on.

Marketers, you’ve done a fabulous job powering through all these topics and there’s no doubt you can hold your own in the next SEO team meeting. To take your understanding of optimization even further, skim other optimization.
Or scoot on ahead and test your skills with the SEO Expert Quiz.

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6. Other optimization

There are many ways (beyond the basic SEO knowledge you’ve been accruing here) to give your site an optimization boost. Find (and fix) what’s keeping potential customers from converting with conversion rate optimization, get your storefronts found on the web with local SEO, and find out how to prep your site to show up in international SERPs with international SEO.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO)

If shoppers are abandoning their carts so fast you’re looking around for the tornado, your marketing funnel is acting more like a sieve and it’s time to plug some holes. Stop the bleeding with Paddy Moogan’s five-step framework for CRO. And keep on learning by keeping up with the latest CRO posts from the Moz Blog.

Local SEO

Even if you do most of your business in person at a local shop, customers are still trying to use the Internet to find you (and your hours, phone number, menu, etc.). Make sure they’re getting the right info (and finding you before they find your competitor across the street) by investing some time learning about local SEO. On that page you can also sign up for the Local 7-Pack, a monthly newsletter highlighting the top local SEO news you need to know. Or, watch for the latest local SEO developments on the Moz Blog.

International SEO

A global customer base is a good thing to have, but you want to use international SEO to make sure potential customers in the UK are finding your British shipping policies instead of your American ones. Master hreflang to direct Chinese customers to content using simplified Chinese characters while you send Taiwanese customers to content that uses the traditional characters they’re used to. And find out how your site structure and whether you’re using a country code top-level domain (ccTLD) (like “.uk”) affects your SEO and potential ranking in international SERPs.

SEO newbies, we really can’t call you newbies anymore. Congratulations! No one has read deeper into this blog post or learned more along the way than you have.

SEO veterans, you knew a lot of this already, but now you’re up to date on the latest tips, tricks, and techniques.

And SEO-curious marketers, if you’re still hanging around, bravo! You can safely add “speaks SEO” as a feather in your cap.

You’re all ready to test your skills against the experts and prove just how much you’ve learned, take the SEO Expert Quiz and brag about your score.

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7. Test your new skills

Feel like you’ve mastered SEO already? Take the New SEO Expert Quiz to see how you stack up.

8. You did it!

Congratulations! You’re well on your way to SEO mastery. Bask in that glow for a moment or two before moving on to your next project.

9. Other resources

The fun thing about a developing field like SEO is that the learning and adventure never end. Whether you’re looking for more advanced knowledge or just to learn in a different format, try Distilled U‘s interactive modules or Market Motive’s web-based classes. If you’re looking for a job in SEO, Carl Hendy might just have your roadmap.

Thanks for following along with this choose your own adventure version of how to learn SEO. Share your favorite resources and ask us about any topics we might have missed in the comments.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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Posted by Trevor-Klein

Content marketers hear regularly about how quality is far more important than quantity. You can publish a thousand blog posts in a year, but if only three of them are truly noteworthy, valuable, and share-worthy content—what Rand would call 10x content—then you’ve wasted quite a bit of time.

Here at Moz, we’ve published blog posts on a daily cadence since before almost any of us can remember. If you didn’t already know, Moz began as SEOmoz in 2004, and was little more than a blog where Rand fostered one of the earliest SEO communities. He offered a bit more background in a recent interview with Contently:

“It’s a habit that we’ve had since 2004, when I started the blog. It’s one of those things where I was writing every night. I think one of the big reasons that that worked so well in the pre-social-media era was because the Moz comments and the Moz blogs were like the Twitter or Facebook for our little communities.”

We’ve taken occasional days off for major holidays when we knew the traffic volume wouldn’t be there, but the guiding philosophy was that we published every day because that’s what our audience expected. If we stepped back from that schedule, we’d lose our street cred, our reliability, and a sizeable chunk of our audience, not to mention the opportunities for increased traffic.

It’s now quite easy to have those discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Quora, and other networks, making our old approach an outdated philosophy that was based more on fear of the unknown and a misguided assumption than on actual data.

This May and June, we decided to change that. We’re raising the bar, and we want to show you why.

It started with a tweet:

This week, Hubspot published 49 unique blogposts (or ~10/weekday). I wonder if they’ve tested various quantities and found that to be ideal?
— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) January 9, 2015

The ensuing discussion piqued the interest of Joe Chernov and Ginny Soskey at HubSpot, as they wondered what effects it might have to publish more or less frequently. We decided to collaborate on a pair of experiments to find out.

The setup

The experiments were simple: Set a benchmark of two “normal” weeks, then adjust the publishing volumes on each blog to (roughly) half the normal cadence for two weeks and double the normal cadence for two weeks.

One thing we should note from the get-go: We were always sure that Whiteboard Friday would continue to be a weekly tradition, so we didn’t alter the publishing schedule for those. This experiment altered the schedule from Monday-Thursday.

We closely monitored our blog traffic and engagement metrics, as well as subscriptions to our emailed blog newsletter. HubSpot ran their experiment first, allowing Moz to learn a few lessons from their experience before starting our own.

The results from HubSpot’s experiment were also published today; make sure you take a look.

The results

We had several central questions going into this experiment, and hypotheses for how each one would come out. There are six parts, and they’re laid out below as follows:

1. Effects of increased/decreased volume on overall traffic
2. Engagement thins as volume grows
3. Subscription slowdown
4. Community complaints/backlash
5. Trading quantity for quality

Important note: We know this is non-scientific. These results are intended to be directional, not definitive, and our takeaways—while they represent our best attempts at progress—are by no means perfect. We want this to be an ongoing discussion, so please chime in with your ideas in the comments!

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1. Effects of increased/decreased volume on overall traffic

Hypothesis

Publishing fewer posts each week will lead to a significant decrease in overall traffic to the blog. Publishing more posts each week will lead to a significant increase in overall traffic to the blog. These changes will be proportional to the decrease/increase in publishing volume.

Results

Let’s get the high-level overview before we dive into details. Traffic on the Moz Blog can obviously vary quite a bit depending on the traffic, but all things considered, it’s remarkably steady. Here are total daily unique pageviews to all pages on the blog so far in 2015:

Spikes and dips here and there, but we’re able to pull a pretty good benchmark from that data. Here’s what that benchmark looks like:

Average weekday uniques:	38,620
Average weekly uniques:	227,450

Now, here’s the traffic from the four weeks leading up to the reduced/increased publishing frequency, as well as the two weeks at half-cadence and the two weeks at double-cadence (I’ve also included a line for the average of 38,620):

There’s a bit of a difference. You can tell the traffic during half-cadence weeks was a little lower, and the traffic during double-cadence weeks appears a little higher. I’d take the numbers highlighted above in green over the ones in red any day of the week, but those curves show far smaller variation than we’d anticipated.

Here’s a look at weekly numbers:

That makes the dip a little clearer, but it’s hard to tell from that chart whether the loss in traffic is anything to be worried about.

Let’s dive a bit deeper into the two testing periods and see if we can’t pick apart something more interesting. You might notice from the above daily charts that the blog traffic follows a regular weekly pattern. It peaks on Tuesday and falls gradually throughout the rest of the week. That’s characteristic of our audience, which finds less and less time to read the blog as the week goes on. We wanted to take that variability into account when looking at each day during the testing period, and the following chart does just that.

It plots the traffic during the tests as a percent deviation from the average traffic on any given day of the week. So, the four Tuesdays that passed during the test are compared to our average Tuesday traffic, the four Wednesdays to the average Wednesday, and so on. Let’s take a look:

This is a more noteworthy difference. Dropping the publishing volume to half our normal cadence resulted in, on average, a 5.6% drop in unique pageviews from those daily averages.

That actually makes perfect sense when it’s put in context. Somewhere around 10-15% of our blog traffic comes from the most recent week’s worth of posts (the rest is to older posts). If we publish half as many posts in a given week, there are half as many new pages to view, so we might expect half as many unique pageviews to those newer posts.

That’s pageviews, though. What about sessions? Are fewer people visiting the blog in the first place due to our reduced publishing volume? Let’s find out:

That’s a bit more palatable. We lost 2.9% of our sessions that included visits to the blog during a two-week period when we cut our publishing volume in half. That’s close enough that, for a non-scientific study, we can pretty well call it negligible. The shift could easily have been caused by the particular pieces of content we published, not by the schedule on which we published them.

Another interesting thing to note about the chart showing deviations from daily averages: Doubling the publishing volume did, on average, absolutely nothing to the number of unique pageviews. The average increase in uniques from daily averages during the double-cadence period is just a bit over 3%. That suggests relative saturation; people don’t have time to invest in reading more than one Moz Blog post each day. (I’m not surprised; I barely have time to read more than one Moz Blog post each day!) 😉

It also emphasizes something we’ve known all along: Content marketing is a form of flywheel marketing. It takes quite a while to get it up to speed, but once it’s spinning, its massive inertia means that it isn’t easily affected by relatively small changes. It’ll keep going even if you step back and just watch for a short while.

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2. Engagement thins as volume grows

Hypothesis

The amount of total on-page engagement, in the form of thumbs up and comments on posts, will remain somewhat static, since people only have so much time. Reducing the blog frequency will cause engagement to approach saturation, and increasing the blog frequency will spread engagement more thinly.

Results

Moz’s primary two engagement metrics are built into each page on our blog: thumbs up and comments. This one played out more or less to our expectations.

We can get a good sense for engagement with these posts by looking at our internal 1Metric data. We’ve iterated on this metric since we talked about it in this post, but the basic concept is still the same—it’s a two-digit score calculated from several “ingredients,” including metrics for traffic, on-page engagement, and social engagement.

Here’s a peek at the data for the two testing periods, with the double-cadence period highlighted in green, and the half-cadence period highlighted in red.

Publish Date	Post Title	1Metric Score	Unique Pageviews
25-Jun	How Google May Use Searcher, Usage, & Clickstream Behavior to Impact Rankings – Whiteboard Friday	81	12,315
25-Jun	How to Rid Your Website of Six Common Google Analytics Headaches	56	7,445
25-Jun	How to Build Links in Person	36	5,045
24-Jun	What to See, Do, and More at MozCon 2015 in Seattle	9	2,585
24-Jun	The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics	80	15,152
23-Jun	Why ccTLDs Should Not Be an Automatic Choice for International Websites	11	2,259
23-Jun	Brainstorm and Execute Killer Content Ideas Your Audience Will Love	38	5,365
22-Jun	The Alleged $7.5 Billion Fraud in Online Advertising	85	44,212
19-Jun	How to Estimate the Total Volume and Value of Keywords in a Given Market or Niche – Whiteboard Friday	78	15,258
18-Jun	The Colossus Update: Waking The Giant	62	14,687
17-Jun	New Features in OSE’s Spam Score & the Mozscape API	10	1,901
17-Jun	How to Align Your Entire Company with Your Marketing Strategy	44	7,312
16-Jun	Dissecting and Surviving Google’s Local Snack Pack Results	15	2,663
15-Jun	Can You Rank in Google Without Links? New Data Says Slim Chance	81	15,909
15-Jun	Study: 300 Google Sitelinks Search Boxes – Triggers and Trip-Ups Analyzed	23	3,207
14-Jun	How to Choose a PPC Agency	14	2,947
12-Jun	Why We Can’t Do Keyword Research Like It’s 2010 – Whiteboard Friday	90	22,010
11-Jun	Eliminate Duplicate Content in Faceted Navigation with Ajax/JSON/JQuery	38	5,753
9-Jun	5 Spreadsheet Tips for Manual Link Audits	50	6,331
5-Jun	Should I Use Relative or Absolute URLs? – Whiteboard Friday	79	15,225
3-Jun	How to Generate Content Ideas Using Buzzsumo (and APIs)	50	10,486
1-Jun	Misuses of 4 Google Analytics Metrics Debunked	51	9,847

The 1Metric scores for the half-cadence period (in red) average almost 60, suggesting those posts performed better overall than those during the double-cadence period, which averaged a 1Metric score of 45. We know the traffic was lower during the half-cadence weeks, which suggests engagement must have been significantly higher to result in those scores, and vice-versa for the double-cadence weeks.

Taking a look at our on-page engagement metrics, we see that play out quite clearly:

The number of thumbs up and comments stayed relatively level during the half-cadence period, and fell sharply when there were twice as many posts as usual.

We’re incredibly lucky to have such an actively engaged community at Moz. The conversations that regularly happen in the comments—65 of them, on average—are easily one of my favorite parts of our site. We definitely have a “core” subset of our community that regularly takes the time to join in those discussions, and while the right post will tempt a far greater number of people to chime in, you can easily see patterns in the users who spend time in the comments. Those users, of course, only have a limited amount of time.

This is reflected in the data. When we published half as many posts, they still had time to comment on every one they wanted, so the number of comments left didn’t diminish. Then, when we published twice the number of posts we normally do, they didn’t spend twice as much time leaving comments; they were just pickier about which posts they commented on. The number of comments on each post stayed roughly the same.

The same goes for the thumbs.

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3. Subscription slowdown

The Moz Blog is available via an email subscription through FeedPress, linked to from a few different places on the site:

We wondered, what would happen to those subscriptions during the half-cadence period?

Hypothesis

With fewer opportunities to impress people with the quality of the blog’s content and earn a spot in their inboxes, subscriptions to the blog posts will drop significantly during the half-cadence period.

Results

As it turns out, there was minimal (if any) effect on email subscriptions. Check out the numbers for both periods below:

Here’s a view that’s a bit easier to digest, similar to the one for traffic in part 1 of this post. This shows daily deviations from the average number of new email subscriptions we get (about 34/day):

On the whole, this is a very uninteresting (and for that reason interesting!) result. Our subscription rate showed no noteworthy fluctuations during either of the two testing periods.

These numbers are based on the total number of subscribers, and with half as many emails going out during the half-cadence period, we can fairly confidently say that (since the total subscriber rate didn’t change) we didn’t get a decrease in unsubscribes during the half-cadence week, as we’d have seen an increase in the subscription rate. That’s a good sign: If people were fatigued by our rate of new emails already, we’d likely see a reduction in that fatigue during the half-cadence weeks, leading to less churn. No such reduction happened, so we’re comfortable continuing to send daily emails.

One important note is that we don’t send multiple emails each day, so during the double-cadence period we were sending daily digests of multiple posts. (Were we to send more than one each day, we might have expected a significant rise in unsubscribes. That’s something HubSpot was better able to track in their version of this experiment.)

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4. Community complaints / backlash

This was another primary concern of ours: If we skipped days on the editorial calendar, and didn’t publish a new post, would our community cry foul? Would we be failing to meet the expectations we’d developed among our readers?

Hypothesis

Having multiple days with no new post published in a relatively short period of time will lead to disappointment and outcry among the readership, which has grown to expect a new post every day.

Results

While we didn’t proactively ask our community if they noticed, we were watching social traffic specifically for word of there not being a blog post on one or more of the days we skipped during the half-cadence period. We figured we’d find a bunch of “hey, what gives?” Our community team is great at monitoring social media for mentions—even those that don’t specifically ping us with @Moz—and this is what we found:

A single post.

I guess @Moz is looking into only posting 3 blogs a week. It’s the most depressing A/B test I’ve ever come across.
— Ben Starling (@BeenStarling) June 4, 2015

That’s really it. Other than this one tweet—one that elicited a heartfelt “Awww!” from Roger—there wasn’t a single peep from anyone. Crickets. This hypothesis couldn’t be more busted.

We asked in our most recent reader survey how often people generally read the Moz Blog, and 17% of readers reported that they read it every day.

Even if we assume some statistical variance and that some of those responses were slight exaggerations of the truth (survey data is never squishy, right?), that’s still a sizeable number of people who—in theory—should have noticed we weren’t publishing as much as we usually do. And yet, only one person had a reaction strong enough that they posted their thoughts in a place we could find them.

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5. Trading quantity for quality

This is a far more subjective hypothesis—we can’t even measure the results beyond our own opinions—but we found it quite interesting nonetheless.

Hypothesis

If we post fewer times per week, we’ll have more time and be better able to focus on the quality of the posts we do publish. If we publish more frequently, the quality of each post will suffer.

Results

As nice an idea as this was, it turned out to be a bit backwards. Publishing fewer posts did leave us with more time, but we didn’t end up using it to dive deeper into revisions of other posts or come up with additional feedback for our scheduled authors. The Moz Blog is written largely by authors outside our own company, and even though we had more time we could have used to recommend edits, the authors didn’t have any more time than they otherwise would have, and it wouldn’t have been fair for us to ask them for it anyway.

What we did do is spend more time on bigger, more innovative projects, and ended the two half-cadence weeks feeling significantly more productive.

We also noticed that part of the stress of an editorial calendar comes from the fact that an artificial schedule exists in the first place. Even with the reduction in volume, we felt significant pressure when a scheduled post wasn’t quite where we wanted it to be by the time it was supposed to be finished.

Because we ended up spending our time elsewhere, our experiment didn’t focus nearly as much on the comprehensiveness of the posts as the HubSpot experiment did. It ended up just being about volume and maintaining the quality bar for all the posts we published, regardless of their frequency.

Our productivity gains, though, made us begin to think even more carefully about where we were spending our time.

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Wrapping up

With some basic data clearly showing us that a day without a blog post isn’t the calamity we feared it may be, we’ve decided it’s time to raise the bar.

When a post that’s scheduled to be published on our blog just isn’t quite where we think it ought to be, we’ll no longer rush it through the editing process simply because of an artificial deadline. When a post falls through (that’s just the life of an editorial calendar), we’ll no longer scramble to find an option that’s “good enough” to fill the spot. If we don’t have a great replacement, we’ll simply take the day off.

It’s got us thinking hard about posts that provide truly great value—those 10x pieces of content that Rand mentioned in his Whiteboard Friday. Take a look at the traffic for Dr. Pete‘s post on title tags since it was published in March of 2014:

See all those tiny bumps of long-tail traffic? The post still consistently sees 3-4,000 uniques every week, and has just crossed over 300,000 all-time. That’s somewhere between 60-100x a post we’d call just fine.

60-100x.

Now, there’s just no way we can make every post garner that kind of traffic, but we can certainly take steps in that direction. If we published half as many posts, but they all performed more than twice as well, that’s a net win for us even despite the fact that the better posts will generally continue bringing traffic for a while to come.

Does this mean you’ll see fewer posts from Moz going forward? No. We might skip a day now and then, but rest assured that if we do, it’ll just be because we didn’t want to ask for your time until we thought we had something that was really worth it. =)

I’d love to hear what you all have to say in the comments, whether about methodology, takeaways, or suggestions for the future.

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Posted by David-Mihm

To all Moz Local fans in the UK, I’m excited to announce that your wait is over. As the sun rises “across the pond” this morning, Moz Local is officially live in the United Kingdom!

A bit of background

As many of you know, we released the US version of Moz Local in March 2014. After 12 months of terrific growth in the US, and a boatload of technical improvements and feature releases–especially for Enterprise customers–we released the Check Listing feature for a limited set of partner search engines and directories in the UK in April of this year.

Over 20,000 of you have checked your listings (or your clients’ listings) in the last 3-1/2 months. Those lookups have helped us refine and improve the background technology immensely (more on that below). We’ve been just as eager to release the fully-featured product as you’ve been to use it, and the technical pieces have finally fallen into place for us to do so.

How does it work?

The concept is the same as the US version of Moz Local: show you how accurately and completely your business is listed on the most important local search platforms and directories, and optimize and perfect as many of those business listings as we can on your behalf.

For customers specifically looking for you, accurate business listings are obviously important. For customers who might not know about you yet, they’re also among the most important factors for ranking in local searches on Google. Basically, the more times Google sees your name, address, phone, and website listed the same way on quality local websites, the more trust they have in your business, and the higher you’re likely to rank.

Moz Local is designed to help on both these fronts.

To use the product, you simply need to type a name and postcode at moz.com/local. We’ll then show you a list of the closest matching listings we found. We prioritize verified listing information that we find on Google or Facebook, and selecting one of those verified listings means we’ll be able to distribute it on your behalf.

Clicking on a result brings you to a full details report for that listing. We’ll show you how accurate and complete your listings are now, and where they could be after using our product.

Clicking the tabs beneath the Listing Score graphic will show you some of the incompletions and inconsistencies that publishing your listing with Moz Local will address.

For customers with hundreds or thousands of locations, bulk upload is also available using a modified version of your data from Google My Business–feel free to e-mail enterpriselocal@moz.com for more details.

Where do we distribute your data?

We’ve prioritized the most important commercial sites in the UK local search ecosystem, and made them the centerpieces of Moz Local. We’ll update your data directly on globally-important players Factual and Foursquare, and the UK-specific players CentralIndex, Thomson Local, and the Scoot network–which includes key directories like TouchLocal, The Independent, The Sun, The Mirror, The Daily Scotsman, and Wales Online.

We’ll be adding two more major destinations shortly, and for those of you who sign up before that time, your listings will be automatically distributed to the additional destinations when the integrations are complete.

How much does it cost?

The cost per listing is £84/year, which includes distribution to the sites mentioned above with unlimited updates throughout the year, monitoring of your progress over time, geographically- focused reporting, and the ability to find and close duplicate listings right from your Moz Local dashboard–all the great upgrades that my colleague Noam Chitayat blogged about here.

What’s next?

Well, as I mentioned just a couple paragraphs ago, we’ve got two additional destinations to which we’ll be sending your data in very short order. Once those integrations are complete, we’ll be just a few weeks away from releasing our biggest set of features since we launched. I look forward to sharing more about these features at BrightonSEO at the end of the summer!

For those of you around the world in Canada, Australia, and other countries, we know there’s plenty of demand for Moz Local overseas, and we’re working as quickly as we can to build additional relationships abroad. And to our friends in the UK, please let us know how we can continue to make the product even better!

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Posted by KelseyLibert

When it comes to job availability and security, the future looks bright for inbound marketers.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects that employment for marketing managers will grow by 13% between 2012 and 2022. Job security for marketing managers also looks positive according to the BLS, which cites that marketing employees are less likely to be laid off since marketing drives revenue for most businesses.

While the BLS provides growth estimates for managerial-level marketing roles, these projections don’t give much insight into the growth of digital marketing, specifically the disciplines within digital marketing. As we know, “marketing” can refer to a variety of different specializations and methodologies. Since digital marketing is still relatively new compared to other fields, there is not much comprehensive research on job growth and trends in our industry.

To gain a better understanding of the current state of digital marketing careers, Fractl teamed up with Moz to identify which skills and roles are the most in demand and which states have the greatest concentration of jobs.

Methodology

We analyzed 75,315 job listings posted on Indeed.com during June 2015 based on data gathered from job ads containing the following terms:

• “content marketing” or “content strategy”
• “SEO” or “search engine marketing”
• “social media marketing” or “social media management”
• “inbound marketing” or “digital marketing”
• “PPC” (pay-per-click)
• “Google Analytics”

We chose the above keywords based on their likelihood to return results that were marketing-focused roles (for example, just searching for “social media” may return a lot of jobs that are not primarily marketing focused, such as customer service). The occurrence of each of these terms in job listings was quantified and segmented by state. We then combined the job listing data with U.S. Census Bureau population estimates to calculate the jobs per capita for each keyword, giving us the states with the greatest concentration of jobs for a given search query.

Using the same data, we identified which job titles appeared most frequently. We used existing data from Indeed to determine job trends and average salaries. LinkedIn search results were also used to identify keyword growth in user profiles.

Marketing skills are in high demand, but talent is hard to find

As the marketing industry continues to evolve due to emerging technology and marketing platforms, marketers are expected to pick up new skills and broaden their knowledge more quickly than ever before. Many believe this rapid rate of change has caused a marketing skills gap, making it difficult to find candidates with the technical, creative, and business proficiencies needed to succeed in digital marketing.

The ability to combine analytical thinking with creative execution is highly desirable and necessary in today’s marketing landscape. According to an article in The Guardian, “Companies will increasingly look for rounded individuals who can combine analytical rigor with the ability to apply this knowledge in a practical and creative context.” Being both detail-oriented and a big picture thinker is also a sought-after combination of attributes. A report by The Economist and Marketo found that “CMOs want people with the ability to grasp and manage the details (in data, technology, and marketing operations) combined with a view of the strategic big picture.”

But well-rounded marketers are hard to come by. In a study conducted by Bullhorn, 64% of recruiters reported a shortage of skilled candidates for available marketing roles. Wanted Analytics recently found that one of the biggest national talent shortages is for marketing manager roles, with only two available candidates per job opening.

Increase in marketers listing skills in content marketing, inbound marketing, and social media on LinkedIn profiles

While recruiter frustrations may indicate a shallow talent pool, LinkedIn tells a different story—the number of U.S.-based marketers who identify themselves as having digital marketing skills is on the rise. Using data tracked by Rand and LinkedIn, we found the following increases of marketing keywords within user profiles.

The number of profiles containing “content marketing” has seen the largest growth, with a 168% increase since 2013. “Social media” has also seen significant growth with a 137% increase. “Social media” appears on a significantly higher volume of profiles than the other keywords, with more than 2.2 million profiles containing some mention of social media. Although “SEO” has not seen as much growth as the other keywords, it still has the second-highest volume with it appearing in 630,717 profiles.

Why is there a growing number of people self-identifying as having the marketing skills recruiters want, yet recruiters think there is a lack of talent?

While there may be a lot of specialists out there, perhaps recruiters are struggling to fill marketing roles due to a lack of generalists or even a lack of specialists with surface-level knowledge of other areas of digital marketing (also known as a T-shaped marketer).

Popular job listings show a need for marketers to diversify their skill set

The data we gathered from LinkedIn confirm this, as the 20 most common digital marketing-related job titles being advertised call for a broad mix of skills.

It’s no wonder that marketing manager roles are hard to fill, considering the job ads are looking for proficiency in a wide range of marketing disciplines including social media marketing, SEO, PPC, content marketing, Google Analytics, and digital marketing. Even job descriptions for specialist roles tend to call for skills in other disciplines. A particular role such as SEO Specialist may call for several skills other than SEO, such as PPC, content marketing, and Google Analytics.

Taking a more granular look at job titles, the chart below shows the five most common titles for each search query. One might expect mostly specialist roles to appear here, but there is a high occurrence of generalist positions, such as Digital Marketing Manager and Marketing Manager.

Only one job title containing “SEO” cracked the top five. This indicates that SEO knowledge is a desirable skill within other roles, such as general digital marketing and development.

Recruiter was the third most common job title among job listings containing social media keywords, which suggests a need for social media skills in non-marketing roles.

Similar to what we saw with SEO job titles, only one job title specific to PPC (Paid Search Specialist) made it into the top job titles. PPC skills are becoming necessary for more general marketing roles, such as Marketing Manager and Digital Marketing Specialist.

Across all search queries, the most common jobs advertised call for a broad mix of skills. This tells us hiring managers are on the hunt for well-rounded candidates with a diverse range of marketing skills, as opposed to candidates with expertise in one area.

Marketers who cultivate diverse skill sets are better poised to gain an advantage over other job seekers, excel in their job role, and accelerate career growth. Jason Miller says it best in his piece about the new breed hybrid marketer:

Inbound job demand and growth: Most-wanted skills and fastest-growing jobs

Using data from Indeed, we identified which inbound skills have the highest demand and which jobs are seeing the most growth. Social media keywords claim the largest volume of results out of the terms we searched for during June 2015.

“Social media marketing” or “social media management” appeared the most frequently in the job postings we analyzed, with 46.7% containing these keywords. “PPC” returned the smallest number of results, with only 3.8% of listings containing this term.

Perhaps this is due to social media becoming a more necessary skill across many industries and not only a necessity for marketers (for example, social media’s role in customer service and recruitment). On the other hand, job roles calling for PPC or SEO skills are most likely marketing-focused. The prevalence of social media jobs also may indicate that social media has gained wide acceptance as a necessary part of a marketing strategy. Additionally, social media skills are less valuable compared to other marketing skills, making it cheaper to hire for these positions (we will explore this further in the average salaries section below).

Our search results also included a high volume of jobs containing “digital marketing” and “SEO” keywords, which made up 19.5% and 15.5% respectively. At 5.8%, “content marketing” had the lowest search volume after “PPC.”

Digital marketing, social media, and content marketing experienced the most job growth

While the number of job listings tells us which skills are most in demand today, looking at which jobs are seeing the most growth can give insight into shifting demands.

Digital marketing job listings have seen substantial growth since 2009, when it accounted for less than 0.1% of Indeed.com search results. In January 2015, this number had climbed to nearly 0.3%.

While social media marketing jobs have seen some uneven growth, as of January 2015 more than 0.1% of all job listings on Indeed.com contained the term “social media marketing” or “social media management.” This shows a significant upward trend considering this number was around 0.05% for most of 2014. It’s also worth noting that “social media” is currently ranked No. 10 on Indeed’s list of top job trends.

Despite its growth from 0.02% to nearly 0.09% of search volume in the last four years, “content marketing” does not make up a large volume of job postings compared to “digital marketing” or “social media.” In fact, “SEO” has seen a decrease in growth but still constitutes a higher percentage of job listings than content marketing.

SEO, PPC, and Google Analytics job growth has slowed down

On the other hand, search volume on Indeed has either decreased or plateaued for “SEO,” “PPC,” and “Google Analytics.”

As we see in the graph, the volume of “SEO job” listings peaked between 2011 and 2012. This is also around the time content marketing began gaining popularity, thanks to the Panda and Penguin updates. The decrease may be explained by companies moving their marketing budgets away from SEO and toward content or social media positions. However, “SEO” still has a significant amount of job listings, with it appearing in more than 0.2% of job listings on Indeed as of 2015.

“PPC” has seen the most staggered growth among all the search terms we analyzed, with its peak of nearly 0.1% happening between 2012 and 2013. As of January of this year, search volume was below 0.05% for “PPC.”

Despite a lack of growth, the need for this skill remains steady. Between 2008 and 2009, “Google Analytics” job ads saw a huge spike on Indeed. Since then, the search volume has tapered off and plateaued through January 2015.

Most valuable skills are SEO, digital marketing, and Google Analytics

So we know the number of social media, digital marketing, and content marketing jobs are on the rise. But which skills are worth the most? We looked at the average salaries based on keywords and estimates from Indeed and salaries listed in job ads.

Job titles containing “SEO” had an average salary of $102,000. Meanwhile, job titles containing “social media marketing” had an average salary of $51,000. Considering such a large percentage of the job listings we analyzed contained “social media” keywords, there is a much larger pool of jobs; therefore, a lot of entry level social media jobs or internships are probably bringing down the average salary.

Job titles containing “Google Analytics” had the second-highest average salary at $82,000, but this should be taken with a grain of salt considering “Google Analytics” will rarely appear as part of a job title. The chart below, which shows average salaries for jobs containing keywords anywhere in the listing as opposed to only in the title, gives a more accurate idea of how much “Google Analytics” job roles earn on average.

Looking at the average salaries based on keywords that appeared anywhere within the job listing (job title, job description, etc.) shows a slightly different picture. Based on this, jobs containing “digital marketing” or “inbound marketing” had the highest average salary of $84,000. “SEO” and “Google Analytics” are tied for second with $76,000 as the average salary.

“Social media marketing” takes the bottom spot with an average salary of $57,000. However, notice that there is a higher average salary for jobs that contain “social media” within the job listing as opposed to jobs that contain “social media” within the title. This suggests that social media skills may be more valuable when combined with other responsibilities and skills, whereas a strictly social media job, such as Social Media Manager or Social Media Specialist, does not earn as much.

Massachusetts, New York, and California have the most career opportunities for inbound marketers

Looking for a new job? Maybe it’s time to pack your bags for Boston.

Massachusetts led the U.S. with the most jobs per capita for digital marketing, content marketing, SEO, and Google Analytics. New York took the top spot for social media jobs per capita, while Utah had the highest concentration of PPC jobs. California ranked in the top three for digital marketing, content marketing, social media, and Google Analytics. Illinois appeared in the top 10 for every term and usually ranked within the top five. Most of the states with the highest job concentrations are in the Northeast, West, and East Coast, with a few exceptions such as Illinois and Minnesota.

But you don’t necessarily have to move to a new state to increase the odds of landing an inbound marketing job. Some unexpected states also made the cut, with Connecticut and Vermont ranking within the top 10 for several keywords.

Job listings containing “digital marketing” or “inbound marketing” were most prevalent in Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, and California, which is most likely due to these states being home to major cities where marketing agencies and large brands are headquartered or have a presence. You will notice these four states make an appearance in the top 10 for every other search query and usually rank close to the top of the list.

More surprising to find in the top 10 were smaller states such as Connecticut and Vermont. Many major organizations are headquartered in Connecticut, which may be driving the state’s need for digital marketing talent. Vermont’s high-tech industry growth may explain its high concentration of digital marketing jobs.

Although content marketing jobs are growing, there are still a low volume overall of available jobs, as shown by the low jobs per capita compared to most of the other search queries. With more than three jobs per capita, Massachusetts and New York topped the list for the highest concentration of job listings containing “content marketing” or “content strategy.” California and Illinois rank in third and fourth with 2.8 and 2.1 jobs per capita respectively.

Again, Massachusetts and New York took the top spots, each with more than eight SEO jobs per capita. Utah took third place for the highest concentration of SEO jobs. Surprised to see Utah rank in the top 10? Its inclusion on this list and others may be due to its booming tech startup scene, which has earned the metropolitan areas of Salt Lake City, Provo, and Park City the nickname Silicon Slopes.

Compared to the other keywords, “social media” sees a much higher concentration of jobs. New York dominates the rankings with nearly 24 social media jobs per capita. The other top contenders of California, Massachusetts, and Illinois all have more than 15 social media jobs per capita.

The numbers at the bottom of this list can give you an idea of how prevalent social media jobs were compared to any other keyword we analyzed. Minnesota’s 12.1 jobs per capita, the lowest ranking state in the top 10 for social media, trumps even the highest ranking state for any other keyword (11.5 digital marketing jobs per capita in Massachusetts).

Due to its low overall number of available jobs, “PPC” sees the lowest jobs per capita out of all the search queries. Utah has the highest concentration of jobs with just two PPC jobs per 100,000 residents. It is also the only state in the top 10 to crack two jobs per capita.

Regionally, the Northeast and West dominate the rankings, with the exception of Illinois. Massachusetts and New York are tied for the most Google Analytics job postings, each with nearly five jobs per capita. At more than three jobs per 100,000 residents, California, Illinois, and Colorado round out the top five.

Overall, our findings indicate that none of the marketing disciplines we analyzed are dying career choices, but there is a need to become more than a one-trick pony—or else you’ll risk getting passed up for job opportunities. As the marketing industry evolves, there is a greater need for marketers who “wear many hats” and have competencies across different marketing disciplines. Marketers who develop diverse skill sets can gain a competitive advantage in the job market and achieve greater career growth.

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Posted by mark.isham

Any SEO professional knows that both site performance and user experience play an important role in search engine rankings and conversion rates. And just like there are great tools to help you find your search rank, research keywords, and track links, there are also excellent tools to help you improve your site performance. In this post, we will dive into one of the best free tools you can use to measure and improve your site performance: WebPageTest.

Do you know these questions?

There are several key questions an SEO professional should answer when it comes to improving the performance and user experience (UX) of your website:

• What is my Time To First Byte? Time to first byte (or TTFB) is a measure of how fast the network and webserver returned that first byte of data in the HTML file you requested. The lower this number the better, since it means the site responded quickly. TTFB is an important metric since it is the performance measure most strongly correlated with a page’s search ranking. A high TTFB can also indicate an underpowered web server.
• How quickly does my site render? Have you ever visited a page and then stared at a white screen waiting? Even if your site fully loads in only a few seconds, if the user isn’t seeing any progress they have a bad experience. Getting your site to render quickly can make your site “feel” faster than the competition. And speaking of competition…
• How does my site compare to my competitors? Having a fast site is always a plus, but knowing how fast your site loads relative to your competitors can give you an idea about where you spend your resources and attention.
• How does your site respond for mobile users? Sites are increasingly receiving the majority of their traffic from mobile users. When measuring your site performance, its critical you evaluate how well your site performs on mobile devices as well.
• How do I make my site faster and provide a better UX? Collecting data and metrics is great, but creating a plan of action is even better. In this and a follow up post, we will show you clear steps you can take to improve your site’s performance and UX.

Understanding the answers to these questions will help you speed up your site to improve your conversion rates and UX. Luckily the free tool WebPageTest can help you get there!

What does WebPageTest Do?

Created originally at AOL by Patrick Meenan in 2008 and now enjoying backing by prominent technology companies like Google, WebPageTest (WPT) is the swiss army knife for measuring your site’s performance. While WPT’s capabilities are vast (and sometimes overwhelming), with some guidance you will find that it can be indispensable to improving your site performance. And best of all, WPT is FREE and open sourced under the free BSD license!

At its most basic level, WPT measures how a particular web page loads. As the page loads, a number of useful metrics are captured, cataloged and then displayed in various charts and tables useful for spotting performance delays. These metrics and visuals can help us answer the important questions we listed above. You can also control many aspects of WPT’s analysis such as the platform to use (desktop vs mobile), browser of interest (Chrome, Firefox, IE, etc), and even the geographic location.

Actually this is an incredible simplification of all the available options and abilities: WPT can do much much more…so much so a book is already in the works. Still you can get great value with just some high level basics, so let’s dive in!

Testing your site with WebPageTest

Let’s walk through an example. Even if you are familiar with WebPageTest, you might want to skim. We are going to select some specific options to make sure that WebPageTest collects and measures all the data we need to answer our important performance and UX questions above.

To start go ahead and visit www.WebPageTest.org. It’s okay to load this URL on your browser of choice (the browser you visit the URL with is NOT the browser used to run the test, that all happens on the remote server in a controlled environment). If possible, try to use Chrome since some of the more advanced visual tools for displaying the result data work best on Chrome, but it’s not a big deal if you’d rather not.

You should now see a page like this:

Right away you see 2 interesting options:

• Test Location has a list of over 40 different regions around the world. Through its partnership program, WPT is physically running (for free) on servers located in all of those locations. When you enter a page URL for testing, the server at the location will load that URL locally with the browser you select. Truly wonderful, but of course, you get what you pay for: the speed and reliability of your tests may vary greatly from location to location. In addition, not all regions support the same testing options.
• Browser contains a number of different desktop and mobile browser configurations available for testing at that location. Note that unless otherwise specified, the mobile specific browser tests are actually running on actual mobile devices and not emulators. Patrick Meenan has a neat picture of one of these configurations on his blog (below).

Let’s go ahead and stick with the defaults (Dulles, VA and Chrome).

Go ahead and expand the Advanced Settings section and you’ll see something like this:

Some comments here:

• Connection is the simulated connection speed. Doesn’t matter too much unless you’re doing advanced testing. Just keep the default of Cable 5/1 for now.
• Number of tests: as the name implies this controls the number of repeat tests to run. This is very important as the Internet can suffer frequent spikes and jitter in response times based on network congestion (see our earlier post on HTTP/2). To get a reliable result, its best to run multiple samples and have WPT automatically choose the median result. We recommend at least three tests, more if you have the time to wait.
• Repeat View specifies if each test should load the page just once (with the browser cache cleared), or once with the cache cleared and again with the cache primed. Why does this matter? Whenever your browser visits a URL for the first time, there is almost always a large number of images, JavaScript files and other resources that must first be downloaded by the browser to be used by that page. Once the browser has all these files, it will (depending on the server settings) cache them locally on your device for each subsequent page loaded from that website. This explains why the first page you visit almost always loads slower then subsequent pages on the same website. We recommend setting First View and Repeat View here so you can measure both the first experience for your new users and the ongoing experience for your repeat visitors.
• Capture Video: One of the coolest features of WPT. This allows you to visually see what your users would see on that device in that location. I’ll dive into this more below, but for now just make sure it’s checked.
• For now leave the rest of the options blank, and you can ignore the other tabs.

Go ahead and enter your site URL and hit Start Test. It’ll usually take 30-60 seconds to get a result, depending on the options you selected and how deep the work queue is. If you find it taking an inordinately long time, try repeating the test from a different location.

Let’s now look at the results.

WebPageTest Results

Upon completion you’ll see a lot of data returned, much more then I can cover in this post. Let’s stick to the highlights for now.

First, at the top you’ll see some metrics on the overall page load time itself, for example:

As I mentioned above, this is the median result after 3 runs. You’ll also see a breakout of the first page load (no caching by the browser) vs. the repeat page load (browser is now caching some resources). You should almost always expect the repeat view to be faster then the first view. If not, you have some caching problems and should try free tools like PageSpeed Insights and Zoompf to diagnose why your caching is not properly configured.

There’s a lot to digest in these numbers, so let’s stick to the highlights:

1. First Byte: This is the Time-to-first-byte metric we are looking for! As you’ll see below, the HTML document is usually a small sliver of the overall time – it’s all the images, JavaScript files, etc. that take most of the time to load. You want a number no more than about 200-400 ms. See our earlier article about optimizing Time to First Byte for recommendations on how to improve this value.
2. Start Render: This is the point visually where you start seeing something other then a blank white page staring back at you. This also directly maps to a number that we want for our questions above.
3. Document Complete: This is the point where the webpage has loaded up all the initial components of the HTML DOM and you can start interacting with the page (scrolling and such). You may still see images and other background parts of the page continue to “pop in” on the page after this, though. This number is helpful for developers, but less important from an SEO/UX perspective.
4. Fully Loaded: This is the point at which everything is done loading. All images, all tracking beacons, everything. Many websites intentionally design for a faster document complete time (time you can interact with the page) at the expense of a slower fully loaded time (e.g. load the “extra stuff” in the background while the user is interacting with the page). There are raging debates over whether this is a good practice or not, I’ll steer clear of those and simply say “do what’s best for your users”. Again, this is a number that is helpful for developers, but less important from an SEO/UX perspective.
5. Speed Index: This is a metric specific to WPT averaging when the visual elements of the page load. This attempts to solve a growing discrepancy between the values above and what the user perceives as “fast”. The math behind how it is calculated is kind of cool, and you can learn more about it here. The smaller the number, the faster and more completely you page loads.

These metrics help us answer some of our questions above. We will also see how to easily compare your metrics to your competitor.

Waterfall Charts

One place WPT really shines is its waterfall charts. Put simply, a waterfall chart is a graph of what resources were loaded by your browser to render a webpage, with the horizontal axis charting increasing time and the vertical axis representing the in-order sequence of loaded resources from top to bottom. In addition, each line in the chart is color coded to capture the various loading and rendering activities performed by your browser to load that resource.

For example:

Waterfall charts are valuable for identifying bottlenecks causing your page to load slowly. A simple frame of reference is that is that wider the chart, the slower your page loads, and the taller the chart, the more resources that it loads. There is a ton of information packed into a waterfall chart, and interpreting a waterfall is a big topic with a lot of nuances. So much so that we’re going to dive into this topic in much more detail in our next post. Stay tuned.

Seeing how your site loads

If waterfall charts are the “killer app” of WPT, its performance videos are the killer upgrade. By selecting that Capture Video checkbox when you started your test earlier, WebPageTest captured a filmstrip showing exactly what your user would see if loading your website using the test parameters you provided. This is extremely valuable if, for example, you don’t happen to be working in Singapore on a Nexus 7, but would still like to see what your users there experience.

To access your video, click the Summary tab on your test result, then scroll down and click the Watch Video link on the far right column next to the Test Result you want to view.

You’ll then see something similar to this:

Remember those metrics that are important? If you site has a slow TTFB, you see a big delay before anything happens. The video also helps show you your start render time. This really helps provide some context: 750ms might sound fast, but being able to visualize it really drives home what your users are experiencing.

WPT’s video of your page load in itself is a great way to share with others exactly what your users are seeing. It is also a phenomenal tool to help build the case internally for performance optimization if you aren’t happy with the results. But can we do more?

Comparing against your competitors (and yourself)

Yes you can! WPT’s video capabilities go further, and that’s where it gets really interesting: you can also generate side by side videos of your site versus your competition!

To do so, repeat the steps above to generate a new test, but now using the URL of your competitor. Run your test and then click Test History. You’ll see something like this:

Click compare on the 2 tests of interest and you’ll see a cool side by side filmstrip like this:

Scrolling left and right will show a visual comparison of how the 2 pages loaded relative to each other. The gold boxes indicate when visual change occurred on the site getting loaded. Scroll down and you’ll see an overlay showing where in the waterfall chart the visual images loaded. Click the Create Video button and you’ll see a cool side by side animation like this.

This is a fantastic way of visualizing how your users see you versus your competition. In fact, you can compare up to 9 simultaneous videos, as we whimsically did some time back in this video:

But what about testing for mobile? While you can run 2 separate WPT analyses for your site using a desktop and mobile device, this is rather clunky. You have to switch back and forth comparing results. I am a big fan of using the comparing options, but to test my site using multiple different devices. This allows you to leverage all the great features above, like side-by-side video loading, and quickly see problems. Is your mobile site loading faster than your desktop site? It should, and if not, you should investigate why.

Getting even more from WebPageTest

I could spend hours going over all the advanced features of WebPageTest, and in fact Patrick Meenan has done just that in several of his great presentations and videos, but I wanted to wrap this up with a few of the more particularly noteworthy features for the SEO focused performance optimizer:

• Private Instances: If WPT is loading too slowly for you, or your geographic needs are very specific, consider hosting a private instance on your own servers. WPT is open source and free to use under the free BSD license. There are many great resources to help you here, including Google’s documentation and Patrick’s presentation.
• API: Most if not all the data exposed in the WPT web interface is also accessible via Restful API. If you’d like to show this data internally in your own format, this is the way to go.
• Single Point of Failure (SPOF) Testing: What happens to your site if a key partner is down? Find out with the SPOF testing option. Simply list the host name(s) you want to simulate downtime with via the SPOF tab when launching a test, and see how poorly your site performs when a key resource fails to load. You may be horribly surprised. Even “fast” sites can load in 20+ seconds if a key advertising partner is offline. In fact, this feature is so useful we will explore using SPOF testing in our next post.
• TCP Dumps: If your network engineers are debugging a truly thorny problem, additional logging is available via TCP Dumps. Especially useful for debugging server-side problems. Skip to timecode 15:50 here to learn more.

Next Time: Diagnosing performance problems with WebPageTest

WebPageTest is an indispensable tool for finding and debugging front-end performance problems, and a faster site leads to better user engagement and improved search rank. By default, WPT exposes a number of key metrics that are critical to SEO professionals and their understanding of their site’s performance and UX. I hope this overview provided a basic foundation for you to start diving in and using WebPageTest to optimize your own website speed.

While we have answered nearly all the important questions listed at the start of this post, we left one largely unanswered: What do I do to make my site faster and improve the UX? To answer this question, we need to go beyond just looking at the data WPT presents us, and instead go deeper and review the data to diagnose your performance bottlenecks. This includes not only using some of the more advanced features of WPT like the SPOF testing, but also reviewing the waterfall charts and using tools like our free performance report tool to analyze what is slowing down your website and learn what you can do to improve your performance. We will do all that and more in our next post.

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