Video Transcription

Hi, everybody. Welcome. My name is Cyrus. Today the thing I want to talk about is how to use STAT to find SEO opportunities at scale, and I mean massive scale. 

Now a lot of you have probably heard of STAT. You may know that it has an excellent reputation. But it's possible you haven't actually used it or have a very good understanding of what it actually does. 

So that's what I'm going to try to cover today and explain how powerful it is at discovering SEO opportunities in ways that can inform content strategy, competitive analysis, and a lot more. 

What is STAT?

So STAT, the full name of STAT is actually STAT Search Analytics. On the surface, what a lot of people understand is that it is a rank tracker, tracking thousands of keywords at a time anywhere across the globe. But underneath the hood, it's actually a lot more than a rank tracker. It's a rank tracker. It's a competitive landscape tool. It's SERP analysis and intent. It allows you to do some pretty incredible things once you dig into the data.

Keyword attribution

So let me dig into a little bit about how it actually works. So like a lot of keyword rank trackers, you start with keywords. But one of the differences is all the different attributes that you can assign to each of your keywords. 

So first is very familiar, the market or the search engine. So you want Canadian English results or Canadian French results. Any market in the world that's available it's pretty much available for you to use in STAT. 

The second is location, which is a slightly different concept. So you can define ZIP Codes, cities, be as specific as you want. This is very important for multiple location businesses or if you're running an advertising campaign in a certain part of the country and you want to track very specific results. But you can define location very specifically for each of your keywords. 

Third is device, mobile or desktop, especially important with mobile-first indexing and increasing mobile results. But also tags, smart tags, and this is where the true power of STAT comes in, the ways that you can use smart tagging. 

Smart tagging

So you can tag your keywords in multiple ways, assigning multiple tags to slice them and dice them any way you want. 

So different ways that you can tag keywords in STAT is anything that's important to your business. For example, you can create keyword groups based on what's important to you. On Moz, we tag keywords with "SEO" in it or anything that's important to your business that you want to create a keyword cohort out of. Or location, like we were talking about, if you're running an advertising campaign in Indiana and you want to tag certain keywords that you're targeting there, something like that. Or all your Kansas city keywords or your London or Berlin keywords. 

Product categories. So if you sell multiple categories, you sell TVs, books, dresses, anything you want, you might want to tag all of those into a particular keyword category. Or attributes, such as a 55-inch television versus a 48-inch television, when you want to get very, very specific across your product line.

Also your brand. At Moz, we track everything with the word "Moz" in it, or Nike or Apple or whatever your brand is or if you have multiple brands. Basically, anything that's important to your business, any KPI that you measure, anything that's relevant to your marketing department or finance or anything else like that, you can tag, and that's where the true power comes in, because once you tag, you've created a keyword cohort or a group.

Share of voice

Then you can see your share of voice across that entire market using just that group. So if you want to track yourself against a very specific set of keywords, you can see your share of voice, share of voice meaning how much visibility you have in Google search results, and STAT will show you your exact competitors and how you rank among those.

Generally, you want to see yourself going up and to the right. But if you're not, you can see exactly who's beating you and where their movement is, and how you're doing for that specific keyword group, which is incredibly valuable when you're working on a particular set of keywords or a campaign. 

SERP features + intent

But my favorite part — and this is where the true power comes in, because it can inform your content strategy and this is where the SEO opportunities are actually at — is the analysis of SERP features and intent. Because what STAT will do is, out of the thousands of keywords that you put into it, it will analyze the entire SERP of each of those and it will collect all the SERP features that it finds and tell you exactly what you own and don't own and where your opportunities are.

So let's give an example that's a little more concrete. So let's say you track a bunch of keywords within a particular cohort and you see that most of the results have a featured snippet. STAT will show you exactly what you own and what you don't own. Now what's cool about this is you can click into what you don't own and you can see the exact featured snippets that your competitors own that you can actually create some content strategy around and try and go steal those.

A different way is images or news. So let's say that you notice that you're selling TVs or something like that and almost all the SERPs have images and you don't own any of them. So something like that can inform your content strategy, where you go to your team and you say, "Hey, folks, we need to create more images, or we need better structured data to get Google to show the images because this is the intent for this type of keyword, and we're simply not owning it in this way."

Same thing with news. If you notice a lot of news results and you're not a news organization but you're competing for these keywords, that can inform your content strategy and maybe you need to go after those news keywords or try something else. Video is another one. More and more SERPs have video results with video carousel and things like that. You can see exactly what you own and what you don't own.

A lot of times you're going to find that certain domains are beating you on those videos and that may inform, especially for the high volume keywords that you want to go after, you may want to be creating more video content for that. But it all depends on the SERP, and you're going to find different feature sets and different combinations for every keyword cohort that you do.

So what's important to you and what's important to track it's going to show up differently every time, but it's going to show you exactly where the opportunities are. FAQs are another thing, rich snippets sort of results. You may find that your competitors are all using FAQ markup. You're not using any. That could inform your SEO strategy, and you might start incorporating more FAQs because Google is obviously rewarding those in the SERPs and your competitors are gaining those and not you.

Other things, virtually any SERP feature that's trackable. You can find local results. Twitter boxes. You may find that for certain queries Google is surfacing Twitter results and maybe that means you need to be on Twitter more than you actually are right now and see who's ranking for those results instead of something that you're doing on-site.

Maybe it's you need to do more YouTube. It's not all necessarily on your site. But this will tell you where you need to invest those opportunities. Review stars, podcasts, and more. All of this will tell you what's important and where the opportunities are and where you're winning and losing and the exact keywords that you can go after if you want to win and the exact feature sets where your competitors are getting traffic and you aren't.

So I use STAT, I love it, every week. It's a great tool. If you want to try it out, I encourage you to do so. That's it for me. Thanks, everybody.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com. 

In case you didn't notice, Moz recently launched a shiny new SEO Q&A platform for all the world to see, explore, and use to learn about SEO.

Originally launched as a private feature for Pro members many years ago, the Q&A was opened for public — and search engine — viewing back in 2011.

In the years since, it grew to over 60,000 posts covering every SEO topic imaginable, and tens of millions of page views. For a long time, a significant portion of Moz's organic traffic came from the Q&A.

Sadly, though, as often happens, over time the Q&A saw serious neglect. As a result:

• The platform accumulated a ton of technical debt, making it nearly impossible to update

• Pages loaded so slowly many users gave up entirely

• Spam became more and more common

• Moderation tools were outdated, and couldn't keep up

For these reasons, two predictable things happened:

1. The Q&A became less useful and satisfying to users

2. Over time, traffic dropped significantly

So Moz had a choice: improve the Q&A immediately, or kill it.

Thankfully, we choose to improve it.

Working with the fantastic team at NodeBB (highly recommended, by the way), we quickly spun up a new Q&A using our existing database, but with entirely modern technology on the front and backend.

Why this migration was challenging

We were under intense time constraints. What might normally take months, we needed to accomplish in a couple of weeks. This presented unique challenges from an SEO perspective.

The biggest challenge? Our entire URL structure needed to change. (If we had more time, we could have avoided this, but it was a luxury we didn't have.)

That meant we needed to migrate thousands of URLs that looked like this:

• Old: moz.com/community/q/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

• New: moz.com/community/q/topic/69872/how-long-will-it-take-to-reach-da-2

The migration also included all of Moz's user profiles, which number in the hundreds of thousands. To be fair, most of the user profiles aren't actually indexed.

Regardless, this was a huge migration!

The other potential red flag was that most of the Q&A would use client-side rendering — not considered a best SEO practice! We could've implemented a solution for server-side rendering, but again, we simply didn't have time. We were concerned Google would have trouble rendering the content, and this might tank our rankings (more on this later.)

How we executed the migration

To pull off this huge migration while minimizing the risk of traffic loss, we followed basic SEO site migration best practices, along with a few "special" extras for an added boost.

1. 301 redirect mapping

To put it simply, how you implement your 301 redirects is either going to make or break your migration implementation.

For us, this was actually the easiest, most straightforward part of the job, as we have a lot of experience with site migrations! (Does anyone remember seomoz.org?)

1. We made a list of every possible URL and URL path. It's amazing how many URLs and patterns you might miss. A good crawler is essential to help with this to make sure you don't forget anything. For Moz, we were able to accomplish this with data from Google Analytics, Search Console, and our own Moz Pro site crawl.

2. We mapped every URL to its corresponding URL on the new NodeBB platform. While we found many edge cases, this was relatively straightforward.

3. We made sure to redirect everything via 301. This is important because many platforms and developers may use 302s by default. While Google has told us that they pass PageRank equally through 302s and 301s, Google has also indicated that 301s are a stronger canonicalization signal.

Speaking of canonicalization, we also ran crawls of the new URL structures using the NodeBB platform. In instances where we found URL paths that didn't match our old patterns or we thought were extraneous, the NodeBB team was able to easily set up canonicalization patterns to avoid Google over-indexing our URLs.

2. Maximum sitemap management

A key part of our migration strategy was sitemap management. This involved two steps:

1. Old URLs: We already had sitemaps of all the old URLs in place. Importantly, we kept these sitemaps live and registered in Search Console. This way, Google would continue to crawl the old URLs and "see" the redirects.

Often, webmasters make the mistake of removing sitemaps too early, which may cause a decrease in crawl rate by Google. This means it could potentially take longer for Google to process the redirects.

Sitemaps aren't a perfect guarantee that Google will visit all your old URLs, but they do provide a hint. In fact, we still had several thousand URLs after several months that Google still hadn't visited, even with the sitemaps in place. Regardless, without the sitemaps of the old URLs, the issue could have taken much longer.

2. New URLs: Our old sitemaps were grouped into lists of 50,000 each — the maximum allowed by Google. There's some suggestion in the SEO community that grouping URLs into smaller sitemaps can actually improve crawling efficiency.

Fortunately, NodeBB allowed us to build smaller sitemaps by default, so that's exactly what we did. Instead of 2-3 sitemaps with tens of thousands of URLs, we now had 130 individual XML sitemaps, typically with no more than 500 URLs each.

3. Spam + cruft cleanup

As I mentioned earlier, the old Q&A had over 60,000 individual posts built up over 10 years.

Inevitably, a number of these posts were very low quality. We suspected both the low quality of the posts, along with poor user experience, could be causing Google to rank us lower.

Again, time constraints meant we couldn't do a full content pruning audit. Fortunately, NodeBB came to the rescue again (this is starting to sound like an advertorial — I swear it's not!) and ran all 60,000 posts through their spam plugin to remove the most obvious, low-quality offenders.

In total, we removed over 10,000 posts.

We did not redirect these URLs, and simply let them 404 after the migration. No one seemed to miss them.

FYI: another excellent resource on content pruning is this excellent webinar with Bernard Huang, Suganthan Mohanadasan, and Andy Chadwick.

4. Better internal linking & user experience

Even though we were porting over the same content and basic design, the migration presented a terrific opportunity to improve user experience. To accomplish this, we made two tiny tweaks to the overall UX:

1. Added breadcrumbs throughout the app

2. Added highly relevant "related questions" in the sidebar

The old Q&A had neither of these features. Users who landed on a question had no options to explore other questions. As a result, we suffered for years with a frustratingly high bounce rate and poor site engagement metrics.

Results: Before and after the migration

To be honest, I've never seen a migration quite like this. Having performed many migrations, I did my best to prepare everyone for the most likely scenario: be prepared for a 15-30% dip in traffic for 1-3 months while Google processes all the URLs.

In truth, nothing even close to that happened.

As you can see in the chart below, we actually saw an increase in traffic, nearly starting at day one.

In fact, in the two months after the migration, organic Google traffic to Q&A pages was up nearly 19% compared with traffic to all other pages.

What caused this immediate lift in traffic? Was it the improved sitemap coverage, the better internal linking, or something else?

We simply don't know for sure, but we do have a hint.

As soon as we launched the new Q&A, engagement numbers shot through the roof:

• Higher time on site

• Lower bounce rate

• More pages per session

In short, users seemed to be much happier and more engaged with the new experience.

Could the improved user engagement have helped rankings?

Again, we don't know. Google is rather tight-lipped about how it may or may not use user click signals for ranking purposes, but we do have our suspicions.

Moving to the future

We're still continuing to improve the Q&A experience. Most notably, we're working to prioritize speed improvements, especially in light of Google's work around Core Web Vitals.

Regardless, this was definitely a delightful migration where we didn't experience a traffic drop — not even for a single day!

Perhaps if you vastly improve your user experience, site architecture, and SEO best practices, migrations might actually lead to a quick net win.

Technical SEO work ensures that the time you’ve spent on on- and off-page SEO pays off — if a website can’t be crawled and indexed, the content on that site can’t rank no matter how high-quality or link-worthy it is. For that reason, SEO pros know that a comprehensive search marketing strategy should include periodic audits of a website’s technical health and its opportunities for improvement. But as you uncover these opportunities, how do you know which ones are most important? What information can you provide to your managers and web developers so that they know which issues deserve their time and attention?

Every website’s technical SEO situation is different, depending on platform, code base, history, and complexity. As the SEO Manager here at Moz, I use information from our Campaign tools to make recommendations about the urgency and predicted impact of our site’s technical SEO needs. Our devs use these insights to plan their sprints, making sure to prioritize the most pressing fixes and those that are most likely to move the SERP needle.

Book a walkthrough

The Site Crawl tools within Moz Pro can help you identify a wide variety of issues that may affect the crawling, indexing, and ranking of the content you’ve worked so hard to develop. In this series of Daily Fix videos, we’ll show you where to find those issues and, just as importantly, how to use the tools’ sorting, filtering, and CSV export functions to organize them by the impact they’ll have on your overall technical SEO health.

How do you prioritize your technical SEO work? Let us know which metrics mean the most to you and your website in the comments!

Prioritize Crawl Issues

Once the Moz crawler has finished its crawl of your website, the All Crawled Pages report will offer a full list of crawling, indexing, and content errors discovered during the process. With such comprehensive coverage, this list can be overwhelming!

Zac demonstrates how to filter and sort your full list of issues within your Moz Pro Campaign and using a CSV export, allowing you to focus on pages with the most issues or those with the highest Page Authority.

Analyze Crawl Depth of Important Pages

The Crawl Depth metric describes how many clicks it takes to get from your homepage to any other page within your site. Both search engines and users visit easy-to-reach pages more often, so it’s important that all pages with user value are quickly accessible.

Eli shows how to analyze your site’s architecture via crawl depth, so you can adjust your internal linking structure to ease access to your most important pages and save on valuable crawl budget.

Identify and Fix Duplicate Content

The Content Issues tool within Site Crawl provides a fast and easy way to identify potential duplicate content on your site, which can cause search engines to index and rank the wrong version of a page.

Jo uses the Duplicate Content feature to find pages that would benefit from canonicalization, redirection, or rewriting of content to avoid SERP confusion.

Prioritize Site Performance/CWV Improvements

As of June 2021, Google uses important site performance metrics called Core Web Vitals to inform its SERP rankings. Sites that load slowly or otherwise provide poor user experiences could get left behind in the wake of this newest algorithm update.

Using Moz’s robust Performance Metrics tool, Emilie shows how to audit your pages’ Core Web Vitals in bulk, saving you time and helping you understand where your site developers should concentrate their efforts.

Want to try the Moz Pro tool? First sign up for our 30 day free trial and then book a walkthrough with one of our onboarding specialists.

We would love to hear about your SEO goals and how we can help!

The keywords you target should be relevant to your business and have the ability to increase organic traffic and drive conversions. But how do you determine which keywords are going to be of value?

In these Daily SEO Fix videos, we show you how you can use Moz’s keyword metrics to help you evaluate how much of an impact ranking for certain keywords will have.

If you’d like some more tips on analyzing keyword metrics with Moz Pro, you can book a one-on-one walkthrough with a member of our onboarding team. It’s a free, personalized call which will show you how to get the most out of Moz Pro.

Using keyword metrics to analyze a list of keywords

In this video, Emilie shows you how to find out the average monthly volume, difficulty score, organic CTR, and priority within a keyword list.

You can use this information to examine the overall keyword metrics for a specific topic area and to pinpoint the most common SERP features.

Importing CSV to Keyword Explorer

Keyword research often involves collating data from a variety of sources. For example, you may be using a spreadsheet from a client alongside your own keyword research.

The data you have gathered can be pieced together to give you a clearer understanding of the value and relevance of your keywords.

Maddie shows you how to import a CSV of your own keywords into Moz Pro. You can use them to create a keyword list or you can track them in your campaign.

Keyword Explorer: Advanced Exporting Tips

Exporting a keyword list from Keyword Explorer will allow you to analyze your keyword data in a spreadsheet.

In this Daily SEO Fix, Emilie will explain how you can filter and export a CSV of your keyword list and show you what insights you can take from it.

Advanced Google Sheets Metrics Look Up

In this video, Jo shows you how to merge keyword data from Moz Pro with your existing keyword data.

This can be particularly helpful if you’re using a variety of data sources to research keyword opportunities. Adding all of your keywords to a single spreadsheet makes it easier to organize and analyze them.

So, today I have the pleasure of announcing a new open beta feature available to all Moz Pro subscribers: our new Performance Metrics suite.

The suite includes bulk analysis (on mobile and desktop), of the three Core Web Vitals metrics that are set to become part of Google’s Page Experience update next month. This is part of Moz’s dedication to technical SEO resources in 2021, along with our recently launched Technical SEO Certification, and some more features and content pieces that we’ll be able to share soon.

In this post, I’ll go through the background of Core Web Vitals, and how the new tools from Moz will help to spot, track, and fix page performance issues as they happen. But if you’re eager to just jump in and get started:

Sign up for Moz Pro to access the beta!

Already a Moz Pro customer? Log in to access the beta!

Hang on, Core Web … what now? Is this SEO?

Yes — if you care about organic rankings, you need to care about Core Web Vitals and performance metrics in general. As such, this is one of those pieces of technical understanding that is going to have to enter general SEO knowledge, just like its predecessors in mobile friendliness and HTTPS. Fortunately, it's not as daunting as it can at first seem.

Here’s a quick recap on the history of next month’s update:

• Sitespeed has factored into Google’s rankings since 2010.

• In May 2020, Google announced that three specific performance metrics, called “Core Web Vitals,” would be explicitly used to measure page experience. They later pushed back the effective date to May 2021, then again to summer 2021. The three new metrics are:

  • Largest Contentful Paint

  • Cumulative Layout Shift

  • First Input Delay

• To get a ranking boost, Google’s says that you’ll need to pass a threshold on all three metrics, as well as pass four other basic technical hygiene checks:

  • Mobile friendliness

  • HTTPS

  • Safe browsing

  • No intrusive interstitials

• This ranking boost might only apply on mobile.

• The three new Core Web Vitals performance metrics are measured using CrUX (Chrome User Experience) data, which means it’s being measured in the browsers of real Chrome users. Interestingly, it’s likely that pages without enough traffic to reach this threshold will miss out on any boost.

• As with Google’s previous efforts to shape the web (particularly with HTTPS and mobile friendliness), the initial impact may be minimal. However, past experience suggests it will ramp up significantly over the next 1-2 years.

So what is Moz doing about it?

Feedback from our users suggests the majority are currently routinely getting these key metrics by querying URLs one at a time in Google’s Pagespeed Insights tool. This data is then difficult to aggregate, sort, filter, prioritize, and so on. Alternatively, they might use CrUX data (like the recently-launched Google Search Console report), but this only works if you’re working on pages that already get a lot of traffic, can’t be re-analyzed when you need it, and isn’t a controlled test. We wanted to deliver the tool that combined the metrics SEOs care about, identified potential fixes, and could analyze and track large quantities of pages. Based on this feedback, it was clear that there was a chance here to address all of these frustrations, and in doing so, to improve SEO practitioners’ day-to-day working lives before this summer.

Our initial beta is open to all Moz Pro subscribers, and can be found in the left hand navigation of Moz Pro, nested under the Campaigns’ Site Crawl tool.

We’ve taken the liberty of pre-populating 100 of your top pages by Page Authority with mobile and desktop performance data. But, you can also choose a list of pages to analyze from a variety of sources like top ranking pages, pages with other crawl issues, or all pages – currently up to a maximum of 6,000 pages per campaign per month.

More sources are coming soon, and what you select here will also affect the overview bar chart at the top of the page. You can then further refine the pages you wish to analyze by narrowing down with URL text, such as /blog.

What’s included in the beta?

Once you’ve selected your batch of URLs to analyze, you’ll be presented with a table like this one:

This data can be filtered and sorted. The “details” dropdown arrow in each row highlights key suggested fixes for that URL at quick glance.

If you click through to “View Report,” you can see more detailed information for each URL:

Note that we’re using Total Blocking Time as a proxy for First Input Delay. Google will be using “field data” as mentioned earlier in this post, whereas for scalability reasons we’re using Lighthouse “lab data,” like you see in Google Pagespeed Insights and other similar tools. It isn’t possible to measure First Input Delay in this context because there is no user to make an input, but Total Blocking Time is a good approximation.

These metrics can each be expanded to give more context on each metric, and what is considered a good or bad score:

And lastly, we’re providing some suggested areas of focus, which can be expanded to provide human-friendly explanations:

Why should I use Performance Metrics beta?

You might want to:

• Identify URLs that are likely to miss out on any Core Web Vitals ranking boost

• Identify URLs that are performing poorly

• Report on performance in bulk and identify the scale of any problems

• Prioritize accordingly

• Find out what to do about each issue

I’m confident Moz Pro is, by some margin, the easiest way to get this kind of data at scale.

To draw some quick comparisons with the current state of the market:

CSV download, more data, and continual improvement

However, all that doesn’t mean we’re done quite yet. We were eager to solve certain problems SEOs are facing before next month’s big rollout, but this is a beta, and the SEO significance of Core Web Vitals is likely to rise gradually for some time, so we do have a host of improvements already planned.

One particular enhancement I wanted to call out is a CSV export. As a long-time SEO data junkie, this is one of my most requested features for any tool like Moz to have. When I first made my Moz profile back in 2013, I listed “endless Excel use cases” as my favorite thing about SEO. I still have a soft spot for being able to manipulate and combine data to my heart’s content in a live environment. Even if you’re more onboard the recent Python SEO trend yourself, CSVs are still a great way to get data into that environment.

Beyond that, we’re also looking at features to track performance over time, and various UI enhancements to make sure the most actionable data is always surfaced.

Get started, and tell us what you think!

That said, this is a beta, which means half the point is to get your opinion on what should come next. You can get started here:

Sign up for Moz Pro to access the beta!

Already a Moz Pro customer? Log in to access the beta!

Let us know what you’d like to see added in the comments below.

One of the Moz onboarding team's goals is to make sure you’re getting the most out of your Moz Pro data. Most of the time, that will involve providing insight within the tool. But you can also get great insight from exported Moz Pro data.

To help ensure that you’re doing all you can to maximize the value of your exported data, we’ve created a handy collection of Daily SEO Fix videos. Remember, if you’d like to speak directly with a member of our onboarding team, you can book a personalized, one-on-one Moz Pro walkthrough.

What’s the most beneficial thing you’ve learned from your exported Moz Pro data? Let us know in the comments!

Filter ranking keywords by subfolders

How can I see ranking keywords for a specific subfolder of my site?

When analyzing your keywords, you may sometimes want to focus on the performance of a certain subfolder of your site.

In this video, Jo guides you through exporting a CSV of ranking keywords, and filtering to identify keywords for a specific subfolder.

This gives you the ability to focus on ranking keywords that are relevant to what you’re currently working on.

Filter and export popular keywords

How do I filter my keywords before I export them?

In this Daily Fix, Emilie takes us through filtering your keywords prior to export.

Filtering your keywords allows you to hone in on the keywords that you’re ranking highest for, in addition to keywords that have a high monthly volume and low difficulty score.

Export your rankings to a CSV

How can I export a CSV of my tracked keywords?

In this video, I show you how to export a CSV of your rankings keyword data.

Exporting a CSV from the rankings section of your Moz Pro Campaign allows you to see a detailed overview of how your tracked keywords are performing.

You can also filter these keywords by label to analyze a specific group of keywords.

Export title and description tags

How do I view all of my site’s page URLs, titles, and descriptions?

In this Daily Fix, Jo explains how to export a site’s page URLs, titles, and descriptions to a CSV with Moz Pro.

This is super helpful for a content audit, as it gives you a great overview of every page that we’ve been able to crawl on your site.

Export follow links from Link Explorer

How do I export a CSV of my followed links?

In this video, Maddie shows you how to export a CSV of your followed links.

It can be beneficial to view the links that are passing link equity through to your site and contributing to your Page Authority and Domain Authority.

By doing this, you can get a better idea of whether you need to work on building more followed links to your site.

In this week's episode of Whiteboard Friday, Moz Learn Team specialist, Meghan, walks through some handy (and hunger-inducing) analogies to help you answer these questions! 

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

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Meghan, and I'm part of the Learn Team here at Moz. Today we're going to talk a bit about duplicate content. 

So why are we talking about duplicate content?

Well, this is a pretty common issue, and it can often be a bit confusing. What is it? How is it determined? Why are certain pages on my site being flagged as duplicates of one another? And most importantly, how do I resolve it if I find that this is something that I want to tackle on my site? 

What is duplicate content?

So first off, what is duplicate content?

Essentially, duplicate content is content that appears in more than one place on the Internet. But this may not be as cut and dry as it seems. Content that is too similar, even if it isn't identical, may be considered duplicates of one another. 

When thinking about duplicate content, it's important to remember that it's not just about what human visitors see when they go to your site and compare two pages. It's also about what search engines and crawlers see when they access those pages. Since they can't see the rendered page, they typically go off of the source code of the page, and if that code is too similar, the crawler may think that it's looking at two versions of the same page. 

Imagine that you go to a bakery and there are two cupcakes in front of you that look almost identical. They don't have any signs. How do you know which one you want? That's what happens when a search engine encounters two pages that are too similar. 

This confusion between pieces of content can lead to things like ranking issues, because search engines may not be able to figure out which page they should rank or they may rank the incorrect page. Within the Moz tools, we have a 90% threshold for duplicate content, which means that any pages with code that is at least 90% the same will be flagged as duplicates of one another.

Solutions

So now that we've briefly covered what duplicate content is, what do we do about it? There are a few different ways that you can resolve duplicate content. 

301 redirects

First is the option to implement 301 redirects. This option would be similar to having a VHS copy of a movie, which maybe isn't so relevant anymore.

So you want to be sure to provide folks with the digital version that's streaming online. On your site, you can redirect older versions of pages to new, updated versions. This is relevant for issues with subdomain or protocol changes as well as content updates where you no longer want people to be able to access that older content.

Rel=canonicals

Next is the option to implement rel=canonicals on your page. Say you're at a bake sale and you have two types of cookies with you, sugar and chocolate chip. You consider your sugar cookies to be top-notch. So when folks ask you which one they should try, you point them to the sugar cookies even though they still have the option to try the chocolate chip.

On your site, this would be similar to having two items for sale that are different colors. You want human visitors to be able to see and access both colors, but you would use a canonical tag to tell crawlers which one is the more relevant page to rank. 

Meta noindex

You also have the option to mark pages as meta noindex.

For example, you may have two editions of your favorite book. You're going to read and reference that second edition because it's the newest and most relevant. But you still want to be able to read and access edition one should you need to. Meta noindex tags tell the crawler that they can still crawl that duplicate page, but they shouldn't include it in their index. This can help with duplicate content issues due to things like pagination. 

Add content

But what if you have two pages that really aren't duplicates of one another? They are about different topics, and they should be treated as separate pieces of content. Well, in this case, you may opt to add more content to each of these pages so it's less confusing to the crawler.

This would allow them to stand out from one another, and it would be similar to say adding sprinkles and a cherry to one cupcake and maybe a different color frosting to the other. 

Use Moz Pro to help identify and resolve duplicate content

If you ever need help identifying which pages on your site may be considered duplicates of one another, Moz Pro Site Crawl and On-Demand Crawl can help.

Within both of these tools, we'll flag which pages are considered duplicates of one another, and you can even export that data to CSV so you can analyze it outside of the tool. Just a little pro tip here. In the CSV export of that data, the duplicate content group will tell you which pages are considered duplicates of one another.

So any pages with the same duplicate content group number are part of the same group of duplicate pages. This is by no means an exhaustive list of the ways you can resolve duplicate content, but I do hope that it helps to point you in the right direction when it comes to tackling this issue. If you're interested in learning more about SEO fundamentals and strategy, be sure to check out the SEO Essentials Certification that's offered through the Moz Academy.

Thanks for watching.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

We all know that tactics that worked in 2020 won’t necessarily move the needle in 2021 as Core Web Vitals (CWV) and other signals shuffle to the front. We have to do better for our businesses and our clients.

I’m a data nerd at heart with lots of battle scars from 15 years in SEO. The idea of analyzing thousands of local SERPs sounded like too much fun to pass up. I found some surprising correlations, and just as importantly, built a methodology and data set that can be updated quarterly to show changes over time.

I analyzed 50,000+ SERPs in the retail banking sector so I could make sense of the massive shifts in rankings and search behaviors during the lockdown period. We have a lot of historical data for bank websites, so comparing pre/post COVID data would be easier than starting from scratch.

I’ll share how I did it below. But first, I want to share WHY I think sharing this type of research is so important for the SEO community.

Why validate SEO best practices with data?

It’s a great time to be an SEO. We have amazing tools and can gather more data than ever. We have thriving communities and excellent basic training materials.

Yet, we often see our craft distilled into overly-simplified “best practices” that are assumed to be universally true. But if there’s one universal truth in SEO, it’s that there are no universal truths. A best practice can be misinterpreted or outdated, leading to missed opportunities or outright harm to a business.

Using the increasing importance of CWV as an example, SEOs have an opportunity (and obligation) to separate fact from fiction. We need to know if, and by how much, CWV will impact rankings over time so we can prioritize our efforts.

We can elevate our SEO game individually and collectively by testing and validating best practices with research. It just takes a curious mind, the right tools, and a willingness to accept the results rather than force a narrative.

Failing to validate best practices is a liability for SEO practitioners and shows an unwillingness to challenge assumptions. In my experience, a lack of data can lead to a senior stakeholders’ opinions carrying more weight than an SEO expert’s recommendations.

Start by asking the right questions

Real insight comes from combining data from multiple sources to answer critical questions and ensure your strategies are backed by valid data. In my analysis of local banks, I started by listing the questions I wanted to know the answers to:

• What characteristics are shared by top-ranking local bank websites?
• Who are banks actually competing against in the SERPs? Is it primarily other banks?
• How do competitive SERPS change based on when/where/how users search?
• How can smaller, local businesses gain an edge over larger competitors from outside their region?
• How does SERP composition affect a bank’s ability to rank well for targeted keywords?
• How important are Core Web Vitals (CWV) for rankings? How does this change over time?

You could run this same analysis by replacing “banks” with other local business categories. The list of potential questions is endless so you can adjust them based on your needs.

Here’s an important reminder - be prepared to accept the answers even if they are inconclusive or contradictory to your assumptions. Data-driven SEOs have to avoid confirmation bias if we’re going to remain objective.

Here’s how I analyzed 50,000 search results in a few hours

I combined three of my favorite tools to analyze SERPs at scale and gather the data needed to answer my questions:

• STAT to generated ranking reports for select keywords
• Screaming Frog to crawl websites and gather technical SEO data
• Power BI to analyze the large data sets and create simple visualizations

Step 1: Determine your data needs

I used US Census Bureau data to identify all cities with populations over 100,000, because I wanted a representation of local bank SERPs across the country. My list ended up including 314 separate cities, but you could customize your list to suit your needs.

I also wanted to gather data for desktop and mobile searches to compare SERP differences between the device types.

Step 2: Identify your keywords

I chose “banks near me” and “banks in {city, st}” based on their strong local intent and high search volumes, compared to more specific keywords for banking services.

Step 3: Generate a STAT import file in .csv format

Once you have your keywords and market list, it’s time to prepare the bulk upload for STAT. Use the template provided in the link to create a .csv file with the following fields:

• Project: The name of the new STAT project, or an existing project.
• Folder: The name of the new folder, or an existing folder. (This is an optional column that you can leave blank.)
• Site: The domain name for the site you want to track. Note, for our purposes you can enter any URL you want to track here. The Top 20 Report will include all ranking URLs for the target keywords even if they aren’t listed in your “Site” column.
• Keyword: The search query you’re adding.
• Tags: Enter as many keyword tags as you want, separated by commas. I used “city” and “near me” as tags to distinguish between the query types. (This is an optional column that you can leave blank.)
• Market: Specify the market (country and language) in which you would like to track the keyword. I used “US-en” for US English.
• Location: If you want to track the keyword in a specific location, specify the city, state, province, ZIP code, and/or postal code. I used the city and state list in “city, st” format.
• Device: Select whether you would like Desktop or Smartphone results. I selected both.

Each market, location, and device type will multiply the number of keywords you must track. I ended up with 1,256 keywords (314 markets X 2 keywords X 2 devices) in my import file.

Once your file is complete, you can import to STAT and begin tracking.

Step 4: Run a Top 20 Report in STAT for all keywords

STAT’s built-in Google SERP Top 20 Comparison report captures the top 20 organic results from each SERP at different intervals (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.) to look at changes over time. I did not need daily data so I simply let it run on two consecutive days and removed the data I did not need. I re-run the same report quarterly to track changes over time.

Watch the video below to learn how to set up this report! 

My 1,256 keywords generated over 25,000 rows of data per day. Each row is a different organic listing and includes the keyword, monthly search volume, rank (includes the local pack), base rank (does not include the local pack), https/http protocol of the ranking URL, the ranking URL, and your tags.

Here’s an example of the raw output in CSV format:

It’s easy to see how useful this data is by itself but it becomes even more powerful when we clean it up and start crawling the ranking URLs.

Step 5: Clean up and normalize your STAT URLs data

At this point you may have invested 1-2 hours in gathering the initial data. This step is a bit more time consuming, but data cleansing allows you to run more advanced analysis and uncover more useful insights in Screaming Frog.

Here are the changes I made to the STAT rankings data to prepare for the next steps in Screaming Frog and Power BI. You’ll end up with multiple columns of URLs. Each serves a purpose later.

1. Duplicate the Ranking URL column to a new column called Normalized URL.
2. Remove URL parameters from the Normalized URL fields by using Excel’s text to columns tool and separating by “?”. I deleted the new columns(s) containing the URL parameters because they were not helpful in my analysis.
3. Duplicate the new, clean Normalized URL column to a new column called TLD. Use the text to columns tool on the TLD column and separate by “/” to remove everything except the domain name and subdomains. Delete the new columns. I chose to keep the subdomains in my TLD column but you can remove them if it helps your analysis.
4. Finally, create one more column called Full URL that will eventually become the list of URLs that you’ll crawl in Screaming Frog. To generate the Full URL, simply use Excel’s concatenate function to combine the Protocol and Normalized URL columns. Your formula will look something like this: =concatenate(A1, “://”, C1) to include the “://” in a valid URL string.

The 25,000+ rows in my data set are well within Excel’s limitations, so I am able to manipulate the data easily in one place. You may need to use a database (I like BigQuery) as your data sets grow.

Step 6: Categorize your SERP results by website type

Skimming through the SERP results, it’s easy to see that banks are not the only type of website that rank for keywords with local search intent. Since one of my initial questions was SERP composition, I had to identify all of the different types of websites and label each one for further analysis.

This step is by far the most time consuming and insightful. I spent 3 hours categorizing the initial batch of 25,000+ URLs into one of the following categories:

• Institution (banks and credit union websites)
• Directory (aggregators, local business directories, etc.)
• Reviews (local and national sites like Yelp.com)
• Education (content about banks on .edu domains)
• Government (content about banks on .gov domains and municipal sites)
• Jobs (careers sites and job aggregators)
• News (local and national news sites with banking content)
• Food Banks (yes, plenty of food banks rank for “banks near me” keywords)
• Real Estate (commercial and residential real estate listings)
• Search Engines (ranked content belonging to a search engine)
• Social Media (ranked content on social media sites)
• Other (completely random results not related to any of the above)

Your local SERPs will likely contain many of these website types and other unrelated categories such as food banks. Speed up the process by sorting and filtering your TLD and Normalized URL columns to categorize multiple rows simultaneously. For example, all the yelp.com rankings can be categorized as “Reviews” with a quick copy/paste.

At this point, your rankings data set is complete and you are ready to begin crawling the top-ranking sites in your industry to see what they have in common.

Step 7: Crawl your target websites with Screaming Frog

My initial STAT data identified over 6,600 unique pages from local bank websites that ranked in the top 20 organic search results. This is far too many pages to evaluate manually. Enter Screaming Frog, a crawler that mimics Google’s web crawler and extracts tons of SEO data from websites.

I configured Screaming Frog to crawl each of the 6,600 ranking pages for a larger analysis of characteristics shared by top-ranking bank websites. Don’t just let SF loose though. Be sure to configure it properly to save time and avoid crawling unnecessary pages.

These settings ensure we’ll get all the info we need to answer our questions in one crawl:

List Mode: Paste in a de-duplicated Full URL list from your STAT data. In my case, this was 6,600+ URLs.

Database Storage Mode: It may be a bit slower than Memory (RAM) Storage, but saving your crawl results on your hard disk ensures you won’t lose your results if you make a mistake (like I have many times) and close your report before you finish analyzing the data.

Limit Crawl Depth: Set this to 0 (zero) so the spider will only crawl the URLs on your list without following internal links to other pages on those domains.

APIs: I highly recommend using the Pagespeed Insights Integration to pull Lighthouse speed metrics directly into your crawl data. If you have a Moz account with API access, you can also pull link and domain data from the Moz API with the built-in integration.

Once you have configured the spider, let it rip! It could take several minutes to several hours depending on how many URLs you’re crawling and your computer’s speed and memory constraints. Just be patient! You might try running larger crawls overnight or on an extra computer to avoid bogging your primary machine down.

Step 8: Export your Screaming Frog crawl data to Excel

Dumping your crawl data into Excel is remarkably easy.

Step 9: Join your data sets in Power BI

At this point, you should have two data sources in Excel: one for your STAT rankings data and another for your Screaming Frog crawl data. Our goal is to combine the two data sources to see how organic search rank may be influenced by on-page SEO elements and site performance. To do this, we must first merge the data.

If you have access to a Windows PC, the free version of Power BI is powerful enough to get you started. Begin by loading your two data sources into a new project using the Get Data wizard.

Once your data sets are loaded, it’s time to make the magic happen by creating relationships in your data to unlock correlations between rankings and site characteristics. To combine your data in Power BI, create a many-to-many relationship between your STAT Full URL and Screaming Frog Original URL fields. 

If you are new to BI tools and data visualization, don’t worry! There are lots of helpful tutorials and videos just a quick search away. At this point, it’s really hard to break anything and you can experiment with lots of ways to analyze your data and share insights with many types of charts and graphs.

I should note that Power BI is my preferred data visualization tool but you may be able to use Tableau or some equally powerful. Google Data Studio was not an option for this analysis because it only allows for left outer joins of the multiple data sources and does not support “many-to-many” relationships. It’s a technical way of saying Data Studio isn’t flexible enough to create the data relationships that we need.

Step 10: Analyze and visualize!

Power BI’s built-in visualizations allow you to quickly summarize and present data. This is where we can start analyzing the data to answer the questions we came up with earlier.

Results — what did we learn?

Here are a couple examples of the insights gleaned from merging our rankings and crawl data. Spoiler alert — CWV doesn’t strongly impact organic rankings….yet!

Who are banks actually competing against in the SERPs? Is it primarily other banks?

On desktops, about 67% of organic search results belong to financial institutions (banks and credit unions) with heavy competition from reviews sites (7%) and online directories (22%). This information helps shape our SEO strategies for banks by exposing opportunities to monitor and maintain listings in relevant directories and reviews sites.

Okay, now let’s mash up our data sources to see how the distribution of website categories varies by rank on desktop devices. Suddenly, we can see that financial institutions actually occupy the majority of the top 3 results while reviews sites and directories are more prevalent in positions 4-10.

How important are Core Web Vitals (CWV) for rankings? How does this change over time?

Site performance and site speed are hot topics in SEO and will only become more important as CWV becomes a ranking signal in May this year. We can begin to understand the relationships between site speed and rankings by comparing STAT rankings and Pagespeed Insights data from Screaming Frog reports.

As of January 2021, sites with higher Lighthouse Performance Scores (i.e. they load faster) tend to rank better than sites with lower scores. This could help justify investments in site speed and site performance.

Some CWV elements correlate more closely with better rankings and others are more scattered. This isn’t to say CWV aren’t important or meaningful, but rather it’s a starting point for further analysis after May.

So what? What can we learn from this type of analysis?

Separately, STAT and Screaming Frog are incredibly powerful SEO tools. The data they provide are useful if you happen to be an SEO but the ability to merge data and extract relationships will multiply your value in any organization that values data, and acts on insights.

Besides validating some generally accepted SEO knowledge with data (“faster sites are rewarded with better rankings”), better use of relational data can also help us avoid spending valuable time on less important tactics (“improve Cumulative Layout Shift at all costs!”).

Of course, correlation does not imply causation, and aggregated data does not guarantee an outcome for individual sites. But if you’re a bank marketing professional responsible for customer acquisition from organic channels, you’ll need to bring this type of data to your stakeholders to justify increased investments in SEO.

By sharing the tools and methodology, I hope others will take it further by building and contributing their additional findings to the SEO community. What other datasets can we combine to deepen our understanding of SERPs on a larger scale? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

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Video Transcription

Hi. I'm Zoe from Moz's Learning Team. Today I'm going to be showing you how to use STAT to identify featured snippet opportunities. If you're not familiar with STAT, it's a ranking tool which is very good at pulling big data.

What's a featured snippet? 



For those of you that might not know what a featured snippet is, it's one of those answer boxes that appear at the top of a search results page. It's the result that shows up directly beneath the ads after the search is performed. So, for example, if you did a search for something like "Is coffee good for you," you're going to see an answer box saying, "Recent studies found that coffee drinkers are less likely to die from some of the leading causes of death."

Websites that have URLs ranked in the featured snippet often experience heightened brand visibility and the majority of available traffic from the associated keyword. Where do you start if you want to become a part of that featured snippet box? How do you target those opportunities? Well, the first step here is keyword research.

1. Upload keywords to STAT and filter

You want to discover keywords that you can start monitoring optimizing for. Ideally, you want to find keywords that you rank on page one for that also have a featured snippet. STAT's keywords tab is a great place to start with this. In this feature, you can upload a bunch of keywords, and once you've allowed some time for the data to gather, you can really dig into what keywords you have that are triggering answer boxes and what opportunities there are.

There's an extremely useful feature in STAT where you can filter a table of keywords to show earned SERP features and specifically answers. You can filter for specific answer subtypes too. STAT currently parse lists, paragraphs, tables, carousels, and videos.

So you can check out all of these. You should also filter for keywords specifically on page one. So do that. Filter the "Rank" column to show results ranking between one and 10. Once you have found all of those keywords, there's a really smart, useful way of collecting them all together, and that's by putting them into a dynamic tag.

2. Create a dynamic tag

This lets you group those keywords together and label them. You could call this tag featured snippet opportunities for example. The magic of putting the keywords into that dynamic tag is that it acts like a smart playlist. These fancy segments automatically populate each day with keywords that match the specific criteria you set for them, making it quick and easy to see which of your keywords are featured snippet opportunities.

Being able to segment keywords into these dynamic tags is what makes STAT so much more valuable. Being able to create reports in granular keyword levels is powerful stuff.

3. Check the data set over time

Okay, so what is the next step to prioritize your featured snippet opportunities by the highest potential ROI keywords? It's usually much easier to take a featured snippet or to steal one if you're also on page  one.

Taking a look at STAT's SERP Features tab can help out here. There's a nifty graph which allows you to see how answer boxes appear if your keywords have changed over time. Using this will help you to access opportunity. You can then start pulling out and comparing some of that data and digging into things like average monthly search volume, current featured snippet URLs, and the featured snippet type.

Is it a paragraph, a list, or a table? Is there any markup? What's your rank? How does the page look in general? You might want to start investigating which long-tail keywords you could potentially optimize your site for. There are a couple of reports you can pull in STAT which can definitely help you in this research.

4. Set up reports

The People Also Ask report will show you questions and their rank within the box as well as the URL sourced in each answer. It's worth taking a look at the Related Searches report as well to see related search queries offered by Google which users may also be searching. Once you've identified long-tail keywords you want to track and keep an eye on, you can copy and paste those keywords into Google Keyword Planner or even back into STAT.

That way you can see what the rankings, search volume, and CPC look like. You can use one of those smart dynamic tags in STAT to group and label them again as you start optimizing on the keywords you think will be valuable to your site. Once you've identified and optimized your site, you'll want to keep careful watch over your hard work, so monitor.

5. Set up and monitor alerts

I recommend setting up alerts for this. STAT lets you do this so you'll be notified any time your ranking goes up or down for your featured snippet target keywords, meaning you're not going to miss seeing an opportunity. I hope this has been helpful and you're feeling more prepared to try some of this.

If you already have a STAT subscription and want to get even more familiar with the tool features, think about taking the STAT Fundamentals Certification course. Have a great day, and thank you for watching this edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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

Video Transcription

Hi. Welcome to Whiteboard Friday. I'm going to be talking through the journey that you embark upon when you notice a sudden change in traffic to a particular page on your site. In our case, this was a sudden and consistent increase, which may on the face of it look great.

You may perceive that this is exactly what you and your clients have been striving for. But as we know, traffic funneling into your site isn't the end of the story. You're also going to want that traffic to convert. But also, when something like this happens, there can be other lessons that you can learn and potentially apply to other pages and areas of your site.

I'm Jo. I'm the Learning Team Manager here at Moz. We create all the course material that you'll see on the Moz Academy. This is where you can advance your SEO education and earn your SEO Essentials Certification. We also write the documentation for how to use the Moz tools, and this is where our story begins.

What's driving the spike? 

Over the summer, we noticed a fairly drastic increase in visitors to a particular MozBar help page. We wanted to go beyond trying to understand why we're getting that traffic and turn this into an opportunity to support our company goals. 

So when you see something like this happen, your first question might reasonably be: Why? Why are we getting this traffic? What has changed? What has caused this? And also, what do we already know from the metrics we're collecting? 

What do we know?

On the Moz Learning Team, we track top-level metrics monthly, including unique visitors. We also collect visitor sentiment through the "Feedback" button on the page. And we also collect reporting every month in our Moz Pro campaign, using Keyword Explorer and Link Explorer as handy research tools in our toolkit.

So first of all, we had a dig into the monthly metrics on a more granular level. We looked at the cadence of the traffic in Google Analytics to see if this was a sudden spike or a consistent trend over time. 

Now before you can be totally confident in the quality of your Google Analytics data, you may want to clear up and filter that data. You can learn all about this in the SEO Essentials Certification. With this course, we take you through our SEO methodology, which helps you to approach SEO strategically. This is made up of five sections: research, audit, optimize, amplify, and iterate. Reporting sits in the fifth section of the methodology, which is iterate. Within that, we break it down into awareness metrics, on-site activity, and the all important conversions. The lessons in the SEO Essentials Certification take you through this in much more detail, and you can download the SEO report card when you purchase this course.

So back to what we saw in Google Analytics, we noticed an upward trend that also reflected the pattern followed by our previous traffic trends. We saw these scallop shapes, which nicely line up with the weekdays and the weekends. You may be used to seeing a different shape depending on your industry. 

We also looked at referral data in Google Analytics and compared this to what we saw before the spike. We also looked at how traffic was entering and exiting that page through Google Analytics, and we had a dig around in Google Trends to see if we could identify any related topics taking off. I'm tracking the help section of the moz.com domain in my Moz Pro campaign, and I have this connected to Google Analytics. This pulls in the overall visits and landing pages. This is the data that you'll see in the acquisition section of Google Analytics. 

So while my team is focused primarily on one area of moz.com, this gives me an idea of where this page sits as a percentage of search traffic in relation to other landing pages. 

Now this is where it all starts to come together. Under the rankings tab in my Moz Pro campaign, I can now see the landing page data cross-referenced with my tracked keywords and their rankings. So I can also see search volume and estimated visits for each tracked keyword. We also entered the MozBar URL into Keyword Explorer to review the ranking keywords for that URL, and then added these keywords to my existing campaign to track them over time.

We know that SEO and SEO reporting is iterative. So by building out your tracked keywords in this way, this will help you to fill in the blanks as to which keywords are sending traffic to your site. 

We also saw some interesting data from the "Visitor Satisfaction" button. This is the thumbs up or thumbs down option that you can select on this page and generally indicates if the content was helpful or not.

We saw that there were a lot more people responding that this content was indeed helpful. So this is not only positive for my team and I, but it's also informative. It gave us a really good idea that the content on this page was generally matching the intent of the visitors. So we looked at all of this together, and we drew some conclusions.

It didn't seem like this visitor traffic was coming from one particular source or campaign that we could reasonably attribute this to. It looked like it was reflecting our previous traffic trends, just a lot more of it. So it's probably quite important now to explain a bit more about the page that we are investigating.

The page is about MozBar. It's an overview of how to use our free Chrome extension. Now it would also be remiss of me not to mention the fact that we have had a massive shift this year in terms of changes to our lives and businesses due to COVID-19, which has had a massive impact on how people spend their time, how businesses are run, and many, many other areas of our lives.

So after we looked at data for that page, in addition to all the other reporting metrics, we took a step back and we thought, "Well, what is this page about, and how has this shift impacted demand for these types of tools?" Because of these two things, nothing else really standing out as a flag to indicate a single event and this global change, we started to lean towards this being part of an increase in demand for free tools.

MozBar is a free extension that sits at the top of your Chrome browser, and it displays link metrics for your pages that you visit on the web. It's also got some other handy features, like the ability to highlight different types of links, so it can show you internal or external links on a page, and to check your on-page elements, and so on. So with all of this information we collected, we're now circling around understanding what caused this.

What do we do with the traffic?



The trick for us wasn't just to figure out why this was happening or why it happened, but to turn this into some kind of positive action. So what we decided to do was to test driving traffic directly from these pages or this particular page to our key Moz initiatives. So this would be our personalized, one-to-one walkthroughs of the Moz Pro tool and the Moz Pro free trial.

This was a quick edit for my team. We could add those in there fairly quickly to test this out. We already know that this page is doing a standup job of helping people to understand how to use MozBar, so let's see if they are interested in our other SEO tools. We added length to this page to help people identify what to do next once they've given MozBar a go.

And what we found out was that we are indeed seeing people taking us up on this offer, and they are clicking through to have a chat with our excellent Onboarding Team and also to check out the Moz Pro 30-day free trial. So with this relatively small amount of effort from my team we've now started to collect data on visitor behavior that can better inform future decisions and future projects.

Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope that this helps.

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