The Moz Blog

A Beginner’s Guide to Ranking in Google Maps

The majority of your potential customers still use Google to find local businesses near them. In fact, 80% of searches with “local intent” result in a conversion. This begs the question: “What’s the best way to catch the attention of local searchers on Google?” The answer: through Google Maps marketing.

Content Expansion: From Prompt to Paragraph to Published Page

Expert content isn't out of reach. In this Whiteboard Friday, Russ Jones arms you with the tools and processes to expand your content all the way from prompt to paragraph to published piece

We Need to Talk About Google's “People Also Ask”: A Finance Case Study

The team at iProspect started noticing that YMYL queries that should return local (UK) content in Google's "People Also Ask" results actually have a heavy influence from the US. They decided to analyze over 1,000 of the most-searched-for keywords in the finance industry to see how much of an issue this actually is.

Crawled — Currently Not Indexed: A Coverage Status Guide

Within Google's Index Coverage report, there are many different statuses that provide webmasters with information about how Google is handling their site content. While many of the statuses provide some context around Google’s crawling and indexation decisions, one remains unclear: “Crawled — currently not indexed”. This post will help you identify some of the most common reasons this mysterious status might be affecting your website, and how to address them.

Defense Against the Dark Arts: Why Negative SEO Matters, Even if Rankings Are Unaffected

Negative SEO can hurt your website and your work in search, even when your rankings are unaffected by it. Russ Jones dives into what negative SEO is, what it can affect beyond rankings, and tips on how to fight it.

Benchmark for Success: What Your Vertical Can Achieve With Content Marketing

Domenica D'Ottavio of Fractl shows how businesses across seven niches can set realistic expectations for their link-building content, based on insights from over 600 projects Fractl has produced and promoted in the last five years.

Heart, Ear, Eye, Mind, Mouth: Local SEO Exercises for Your Least Technical Clients

Instead of signaling via SEO, CTR, USPs, and GMB, let’s relax with clients by relating successful local search marketing practices to experiences people at any level of technical proficiency already understand.

2020 Google Search Survey: How Much Do Users Trust Their Search Results?

As a result of Google’s dedication to combating misinformation and fake news, we could reasonably expect searchers to agree that Google has improved in its ability to surface credible and trusted content. But does the average searcher actually feel that way? Path Interactive conducted a survey to find out how users feel about the information they encounter in Google’s organic results.

The Rules of Link Building - Best of Whiteboard Friday

Are you building links the right way? Or are you still subscribing to outdated practices? Britney Muller clarifies which link building tactics still matter and which are a waste of time (or downright harmful) in one of our favorite classic Whiteboard Fridays.

How Low Can #1 Go? (2020 Edition)

If it seems like the #1 organic result keeps getting pushed down farther and farther, that's because it is. We explore the Y-position of 10,000 SERPs to see how things have changed since our 2013 study.

Are H1 Tags Necessary for Ranking? [SEO Experiment]

In earlier days of search marketing, SEOs often heard the same two best practices repeated so many times it became implanted in our brains: Wrap the title of your page in H1 tags and use only one H1 tag per page. Despite assertions from one of Google's most trusted authorities that sites "can do perfectly fine with no H1 tags or with five H1 tags", many SEOs didn't believe it. So of course, we decided to test it scientifically.

Spot Zero is Gone — Here's What We Know After 30 Days

A month out from Google eliminating position zero, what's changed? PJ Howland of 97th Floor investigates the data and shares key takeaways, from vastly different CTR to the impact of PAAs and beyond.