Last week, we shared a series of four short videos intended to help you accomplish some easy wins using Moz Pro: Your Daily SEO Fix: The Keyword Research Edition. Week Two (that's this week!) is focused on link building, identifying opportunities to take over SERP features, and doing that all-important competitive research.
This time around, we're using a mix of Open Site Explorer, Fresh Web Explorer, and Moz Pro. Open Site Explorer has some free capabilities, so if you'd like to follow along...
If you're a Moz Pro subscriber, crack open your campaigns and settle in. If you'd like to see what all the fuss is about without committing, you can dip your toes in with a free 30-day trial. And now that that's out of the way, let's get started!
Fix #1: Link building & brand building via unlinked mentions
"Moz" is an SEO software company, yes, but it's also Morissey's nickname and short for "Mozambique." All three of those things get mentioned around the web a bunch on any given day, but if we want to identify link building opportunities just to our site, it could get confusing quick. Luckily, Jordan's here to explain how to quickly find unlinked mentions of your site or brand using Open Site Explorer and keep those pesky Smiths references out of your results.
Fix #2: Prioritizing and organizing your link building efforts
Link building requires more than just finding opportunities, of course. April shows how you can prioritize your efforts by identifying the most valuable linking opportunities in Open Site Explorer, then dives into how you can cultivate a continuous stream of fresh related content ripe for a link-back with Fresh Web Explorer.
Fix #3: Ranking in position zero with SERP features in Moz Pro
If you have keywords that aren't ranking in the first few results pages, don't despair — there's hope yet. There are tons of opportunities to rank above the first organic result with the prevalence of SERP features. In this video, Ellie shows how you can identify keywords that need some love, track SERP feature opportunities for them, filter your keywords to show only those that surface certain SERP features, and more.
Fix #4: Gleaning insights from your competitors' backlink profiles
Remember April from Fix #2? She's back and ready to show you how to get the skinny on your competitors' juicy backlink profiles using both your Moz Pro campaign and Open Site Explorer.
One step beyond
That wraps up our latest week of fixes! We've got one last round coming at you next Thursday. As always, if you're curious and want to follow along, you can try it all out firsthand by taking a free trial of Moz Pro. We also offer several SEO bootcamp courses that can get you started on fundamentals if this whole SEO thing is pretty new to you.
If you're looking for some more meaty info on these topics, I've put together a short list of light reading for you:
- How to Prioritize Your Link Building Efforts & Opportunities - Whiteboard Friday - On par with some of the ideas in this post, Rand outlines how to simplify, streamline, and prioritize the link building process.
- How Long Does Link Building Take to Influence Rankings? - This case study sets a baseline for how long it may take for your link building efforts to bear fruit.
- Ranking #0: SEO for Answers - The inimitable Dr. Pete delves into everything Featured Snippet, from what they are, to why they're important, to how you can begin earning your own.
- Hunting Down SERP Features to Understand Intent & Drive Traffic - Next Level - Learn all about those mysterious beasts, SERP features, and how you can use your understanding of searcher intent to start winning more of them.
Thanks for reading along, friends, and we'll see you again for the last installment of the Daily SEO Fix series next week!
Hey all, thanks for tuning in for our second week! I loved all the fantastic suggestions you gave last week for what we ought to cover in future videos like these. Feel free to keep sending those my way — I'm keeping a list for next time. :)
Thanks Felicia - always great to get some more insight into the broader suite of Moz tools.
Thanks for taking the time to put this together, Felicia! I know I fall habit to using the same tools over and over when there are so many other amazing tools available at my fingertips so this was a great reminder.
Solid insight and good call on the fixes. We always try to implement #2 with prioritizing our link building efforts to start seeing success within a couple months or so for our clients. Also there is always things to learn by implementing #4 and studying a competitors backlink profile through Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs or, Majestic SEO That is actually how we have found some of the best, high DA, industry-specific backlinks for our clients and have their rankings improve greatly for them. Doing this type of research is key in my opinion for both saving time and being effective.
It's good to see these tools within Moz and how to use them. I tend to use Moz for specific things, forgetting it CAN and should be used for much more. So thanks for these last two posts!
That's awesome to hear, Randall, I'm glad you liked them! I know what you mean about using it for specific things; I started out at Moz on the Help Team and after getting to know the tools inside and out, I can attest to how easy it is to miss certain capabilities. :]
Hey thanks for this Felicia, I will be showing the staff to help them with there SEO. These videos are also very good tutorial videos.
With link building I like to check what links the competitors have using different tools making sure I get the best possible information. Then what I do is try and get them links and if them links are not eligible for me to retrieve then I will go and find links with either the same or better than link juice. Always make sure you remember when getting links that your trust flow and citation flow need to be as close together as possible. Citation Flow is how many links are being sent to your site. Trust flow is the trust of the sites that are linking to the current site. These are then rated out of 100. A good rating really is anything above 10 or 15/100.
Great points, Cory! I love the suggestion of using different tools. Especially when it comes to link indexes, every tool is different and will provide slightly different information, so triangulating that from several sources really gives you the best picture. :)
Hello @Felicia,
I read this post, and find very informative, Today I got the information about new google Algorithm which is name "Google Fred Update" This update hits the low content site.. so Many Site Dropped Traffic..
I am victim of Google Fred update , my website is dropped traffic from 10 march 2017.
Hi,
Good post. I have two questions:
1. I've been trying to find some concrete information on how important links are for SEO these days. I'm not an IT person but have a quantitative background and am familiar with coding. I've read the research paper that the Google founders wrote many years ago on PageRank and it appears that inbound links were crucial to organic ranking at the time. Is this still the case? Google claims to use many other factors these days to determine where a site should rank but I suspect inbound links (and therefore PageRank) are still crucial.
2. For a new business (a physical business in my case), at what point should I start actively cultivating links? For example. my wife and I are still creating content and establishing a client base and I'm thinking that we don't have much to offer as yet if we were to approach third parties in order to cultivate inbound links. Any thoughts/advice?
Hi Ray, great questions! :)
For #1, there's always some debate on just how much a single factor might matter, but Google employees have stated that their top 3 factors are content, links, and RankBrain. We're also due for an update on our Search Ranking Factors Survey that runs every two years, but it's a good way to get a read on how factors might be weighted and where to focus: https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors
For both #1 and #2, there's a pretty interesting mini-case study here about how long link building might take to begin influencing rankings -- it's a solid read and might give you some ideas on when to begin and what to expect! Also, depending on what kind of business you're working on, there's a great post here that could inspire a few new ways to build your site some links. :)
Hope that helps a bit — and my thanks to you, as you've given me some great ideas about which topics we might want to cover on the blog in the future!
Very nice article on SEO
Hey..thanks for the information. We have just started our deals & discounts website and have been following Moz and Neil Patel for SEO. It has been quite useful information from both till now and we are slowly growing our website presence. Please keep on writing awesome content for people who are starting with their website and need help for SEO.
I was looking to hire SEO companies for my website, I've reached this page from google search and looking like I can learn advanced SEO from here. But I can't understanding from where I'll start reading.
Hey there! :) If you're looking for SEO agencies to help you out, we do have a list of recommended companies here. If you're looking to learn more about SEO, definitely check out the Learn SEO section of our site, and you can also browse through the Basic SEO and Advanced SEO categories of the blog. :) Hope that helps a bit — I'd be happy to suggest resources around anything specific you're curious about, too!
After addicted to the Pro Moz subscriptions, what i liked the most is the "Create Alert" option (as shown in video 2) which helps me to find mentions of any term on the web. Truly awesome !
Hey Nitinravale, that's awesome to hear! I love the alerts too; they keep me up-to-date on where and how the Moz Blog's being mentioned online. Glad you liked it!
Thanks. We will definately try out Moz tools very soon