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Friday, January 6, 2017

How to Kickstart an SEO Audit for Your Startup – Whiteboard Friday

Launching a startup is a huge task all on its own. While it can be a challenge to factor SEO into the mix, it’s an incredibly important consideration. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand shares a comprehensive plan to kick off your new SEO audit and grab a piece of that organic search pie from the get-go.

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Pro tip: For easy listening, this video is broken up into 9 chapters that correspond with the transcript below.

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Video Transcription

Hi, everyone down at StartCon. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Rand Fishkin. I’m the co-founder of Moz, and today I’m going to be talking to all of you and to Whiteboard Friday fans everywhere about how to kick-start an SEO audit for your startup.

So what I’ve done here is I’ve taken our classic SEO pyramid, sort of you’ve got to start with a strong base and work your way up. Well, I flipped it, because, in an audit scenario, we’re actually going to start from the bottom and work our way to the top. So I’ve inverted our pyramid. We’re going to start with crawling and accessibility, and we’re going to work all the way up to conversion.

Now, SEO in a startup setting can be challenging. I’m going to assume that your startup has already launched your website or your web content, your application, and that now you’ve just realized, “Wait, maybe we should do some of that SEO stuff.” And yes, you should. Let me make three big reasons, three big cases why you should.

Search traffic is among the highest percentage of all referral traffic on the web. So whereas social traffic sends approximately 5% to 6% of all the web’s referral traffic, search engines send about 28% or 29% of all the web’s referring traffic. This is data according to SimilarWeb who has a large clickstream panel that they look at.
Organic search traffic is more than 90% of all the clicks that go to search results. So 90% of the clicks are going to organic, 10% or actually less than 10% are going to the paid results. Companies around the world are spending $40, $50, $60 billion a year or more on Google’s paid search results alone. That organic stuff is a competitive advantage because it means low cost of customer acquisition. It tends to mean higher retention. It tends to mean higher conversion rates. Very, very attractive traffic.
Searches are a specific request from a user that says, “I want this thing and I want it right now.” That’s some of the most powerful traffic you can possibly be in front of on the web, and, as a result, the startups that can get their product, their service, their company, their brand in front of those searchers can have an outsized impact.

Now, we need to kick off this audit.

Crawling, indexing, and website structure

What I’ve essentially done here is taken sort of the top three things to be thinking about for each of these and detailed them for you. So when it comes to crawling and web structure, we want:

1. Everything on one sub and root domain.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen startups use blog.startup.com, or use startupblog.com. Or they blog only on Medium.com instead of blogging on their own site and using Medium as an additional network to amplify that content. Or they put everything on their app and their app is one page, and so Google can’t index anything except that one page. Generally, all of these are terrible ideas. If you can, keep everything in subfolders, or if you call them subdirectories, of your website. Don’t separate out your content on to multiple sites, and don’t build anything on somebody else’s site unless you’re also using it on your site and just referring back. You want to use Medium, that’s great. You want to use Facebook, great. You want to use LinkedIn Publishing, fantastic. Always have the “Here’s the link to the original” and point it to your website.

2. You can sign up for Google Search Console (it is free).

That will help you identify a lot of crawl errors and issues. If you work with a professional SEO, chances are they’re going to use a tool like OnPage.org or Screaming Frog or Moz’s Crawl. Those are all good too. They can provide a little bit more extra detail.

3. Eliminate duplicates, search URLs, and thin pages

One of the things that you will want to do, when you’re looking at your site, is eliminate duplicates, search URLs, meaning pages on your site that are essentially just search results — Google does not like your search results in their search results — and thin pages, pages that have very little content. You might think, “Oh, but they target some extra keywords for me.” Yeah, but Google considers your site as a whole. If you have thousands of pages with very thin content, they’re going to rank your other content lower, and that is not a good thing. You do not want that.

Keyword research & targeting

1. Make a big, broad list.

You could do this in Excel. You could do it in a Google Spreadsheet. You could do it in a tool like Keyword Explorer. I want you to use a bunch of different sources. I want you to look at keywords that your competitors are ranking for. You can find that from lots of different tools. You could use something like Keyword Explorer. You could use SEMrush. You could use KeyCompete. You could use SpyFu. There are lots and lots of tools that allow you to do this.I want you to also use the related and suggested search terms that come up when you search for the key terms and phrases you’re already targeting in Google. I want you to use semantically-connected terms and terms that are in the format of questions. A lot of folks like Answer The Public. Moz also has the filter in Keyword Explorer for queries that are in the form of questions. These will give you a big, big, broad list.

2. From there, you’re going to need some metrics:

You want volume, you can get that from Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool. You will have to either start an account and pay some money for some paid search ads. Otherwise, Google only shows you these terrible things. Or you’re going to have to use a third-party tool like a SEMrush or a Keyword Explorer.
You want difficulty, so you want to know how hard it will be to rank. That is not the same as the Competition Score that you get from AdWords. Competition in AdWords is just the competition in the paid search results. Not the same thing as how difficult it will be to rank in the organic search results.
You want to know click-through rate opportunity. If there are lots of ads above the fold, if there’s a knowledge graph, if there’s an answer box up top there, that’s going to drive clicks away from the organic results, and you need to know that before you choose to target a keyword.

3. Prioritize by the importance to you and to your company.

You’re going to use these metrics and you’re going to prioritize by the importance to you, to your company. You’re going to prioritize by the ease, the difficulty, and by the traffic, which is some function of the click-through rate opportunity and the volume, in order to choose right keywords for you. You’re going to prioritize that big list that you’ve got, and then you’re going to start targeting. We are going to create content that targets those searchers and serves them well.

Accessible content that delights searchers

Why do I say delight searchers here in this third section? Well, because content that merely serves your purposes, that ranks and maybe gets one or two percent of people to convert on your site, give you their email address or sign up for whatever it is you have to sign up for, a free trial, or a subscription to your software, that’s fine. But you’re probably going to be outranked by someone who does a fantastic job of serving searchers before putting their own interests into the mix. If you put your interest ahead of searcher’s interest, over time, someone else is going to take that traffic away from you and Google’s going to rank them first.

1. Don’t just serve your own interest, your own funnel.

Satisfy those searchers.

2. You can use low engagement metrics to identify poorly performing URLs.

So if you filter in your Google Analytics, your Omniture, whatever you’ve got, by pages that receive traffic from Google referrals and then you look at bounce rate, you look at time on site, you look at pages per visit, and you see pages that are very low on those metrics, well, that is going to tell you, you are not doing a great job of serving those searchers. Google will probably, over time, push you down, push your competitors up. That’s a bad thing.

We want content that is doing a great job of delighting searchers. It has to serve both their implicit and explicit query. The explicit part of the query, that’s usually obvious. The implicit part can be a, “What do they really want to do after that, once they have that answer?”

Keyword use & on-page optimization

Next, we’re going to take that content and we are going to optimize it for search engines and searchers. That means using keywords intelligently and doing some smart on-page optimization.

Now, classic SEO kinds of things, some of them no longer apply. The meta keywords tag, for example, that’s gone. We don’t need to do the same sort of every little variation of a keyword demands a different page that we used to do in the past. But things like…

1. Keyword use in the title, the URL, the meta description, the headline, and inside the content still matter.

What we should be doing nowadays, though, is taking all the keywords that share the same searcher intent, where the searcher is trying to essentially accomplish the same thing. Let’s say I’m a mobile phone directory and I have a bunch of reviews of mobile phone devices. “Best mobile phones, best cell phones, best smartphones, best smartphones 2016,” guess what? They all share the same searcher intent. I should have one page targeting all those keywords, not a separate one for each one.

2. All the keywords that share the same intent get one URL.

Snippet, markup, & schema

This is essentially where I’m trying to stand out from the pack in Google search results. If you’ve performed a search in the last five years, you know that it doesn’t just look like 10 blue links anymore. There are a lot more rich options for how your snippet, the search engine result position that you appear in, can look to searchers, and that can drive a lot more traffic.

1. Check out Schema.org.

So check out Schema.org and check out the types of results in your specific field or industry or that go with your content that could be met by schema that Google supports right now.

2. Look at your keyword research for the types of results that already appear in your SERPs.

You should be taking a look in your keyword research at the types of results that already appear in your search engine result pages. So if you check out your keywords, you’re using a tool like Keyword Explorer, you can see here’s a distribution of search results that contain images, ones that contain news results, ones that contain recipe-rich snippets, ones that contain video, whatever it is, and then you can choose to do those.

3. Identify “answer box” opportunities.

15%, just about 15% of all search queries in Google today have an answer box of some kind. An answer box, meaning that featured snippet up at what we call result number 0, before the top 10, usually right after the ads. That can drive a tremendous amount more traffic. If you have answer box opportunities, you can take those from your competitors, or you can have your snippet appear in there. There’s a great presentation from Doctor Pete that you can check out on Moz or a Whiteboard Friday on that same topic as well.

Alternative formats & engines

Next, we want to think about non-Google sources of traffic or non-google.com web search sources of traffic. For example:

1. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.

YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, ahead of even Baidu, ahead of Bing, ahead of Yahoo. If you are doing video content, you should be thinking about YouTube. Even if you’re not doing video content, you should be checking YouTube’s search volume to see if lots of people are searching on YouTube for answers to the questions that your business could answer with video.

2. Consider alternative search formats like images, news, and apps.

You also want to consider alternative search formats, like images, news, and apps in lots of spaces. For example, in home decor and home repair, image search is very, very popular. Obviously, in spheres like politics and technology, news is very popular. For lots of kinds of queries, apps are very popular, particularly those ones that happen on mobile and have a clear app use or need around them.

3. Check out Google Maps if you’re in local.

If you are in the local space, you’re going to want to check out Google Maps, which can send a tremendous amount of traffic. Through there, you can use a tool like Moz Local or Yext for that.

4. Ecommerce should pay attention to engines like Amazon or Etsy.

If you’re in ecommerce and you’re selling a physical product, there might be engines like Amazon or Etsy, where you could and should be putting your product.

Links and amplification

Yes, links still matter. Yes, they are still critical for rankings. You will need a lot of links from good places that are editorially pointing to your content, to your website, in order to rank well.

You also want to earn other forms of amplification that will then lead to links. Social sharing is one of the big ones. Word of mouth is obviously a big one. Lots of forms of advertising can eventually lead to links through awareness and those sorts of things.

1. Before you ever create content, ask the question: Who will help amplify this and why?

If you don’t have a great answer to that question, and I mean a specific list of people or a specific list of outlets, you shouldn’t hit Publish. Go and do that work first and every piece of content that you create will have more success in terms of amplification and reach and link potential and the potential to earn an audience. And why are you creating content if no one’s going to see it? This isn’t a forest. You don’t need no trees falling.

2. You want to choose a link flywheel that’s going to earn you links over time.

There are a few different structures.

News and press tends to be a good structure that earn links over time in a flywheel sort of format.
Content marketing tends to be one.
Partnerships tend to be one.
Embedded content tends to be one.

These flywheels tend to encounter friction, and that’s where you use these smart hacks, like submissions to certain kinds of directories that are editorial and high-quality, or outreach on a one-to-one basis. But you don’t want to be doing these one-to-one kinds of hacky link building unless it’s in the service of a flywheel that’s going to move faster over time and grow your link profile while you’re asleep.

Conversion and funnel optimization

So you’ve done all this stuff to serve searchers well, to earn their trust and their traffic, and now we have to realize two things.

1. Conversion takes time and it takes a lot of visits.

In fact, WordStream, Larry Kim, did some great research showing that, over time, on a second or third or fourth visit, conversion rates move up by hundreds of percents versus that first visit.

Don’t expect that you’re going to rank for a keyword, drive someone to your site for the first time and convert them instantly. That rarely happens. Sometimes, but rarely. What’s generally going to happen is that you’re going to earn that click first, and then, over time, you’re going to earn them back again, maybe through social channels, maybe through amplification, through word of mouth, through type-in traffic, through a branded search, through another completely unrelated search. Then eventually, they’ll find their way back to you, and on the third or fourth or fifth visit, they will convert.

So we have to be thinking about: How can I delight people? How can I brand them? Then, eventually, I want to draw them back to my website and close the deal through my funnel. That’s what conversion optimization is when it works in the organic world.

FAQ

Okay. We’re through this very, very basic audit process. A few frequently asked questions that I always get from startups:

A. “Should I get a consultant, an agency, or should I do it in-house?”

If you know that SEO is going to be a long-term, competitive advantage that you continue to invest in and it’s going to be something you need to do for the life of your company, you should go in-house as soon as possible.
If, however, it’s (SEO) more like a nice-to-have and it’s a helpful marketing channel, but it’s not a core competency and you’re not going to build the company’s marketing strategy around it, consultant or agency can work just fine. And there are some great ones, by the way.

B. PPC versus SEO.

Paid search is easy to invest in. It is high-cost, but it’s fast to get started. For this reason, it’s incredibly competitive, and it tends to be the case that people are bidding at or very close to their maximum ROI to spend ratio, meaning, unless, you have an incredible business model that’s way better than all your competitors, there’s not usually a lot of competitive advantages to be earned in return on investment or in cost of customer acquisition to lifetime value ratio in PPC.
SEO, on the other hand, takes a long time. It’s a lot of investment. This is often a six-month or a year process before you start earning big returns, and, therefore, very few people invest in it strategically. It is a much bigger competitive advantage.

C. I get this from a lot of folks, especially in the technical world. “Can’t Google just figure this all out?”

No, they absolutely cannot. If you ignore these things and choose not to invest strategically and specifically in SEO, Google will not just figure it out. That has never happened to anyone who has made SEO a true competitive advantage in their startup, in their company’s marketing channels. It’s just not how it works.

D. “Does social media impact SEO?”

The answer is yes, but indirectly. When you do good things on social, they can lead to good links. They can lead to good engagement on your site, which is certainly a positive signal for Google, and they can lead to word of mouth, which can result in branded searches and more clickstream traffic to your site, and all these sorts of things that Google can see. But if you think that buying a bunch of likes or a bunch of tweets on Fiverr is going to help your page rank higher, yeah, you’re in for, well, five dollars of pain. Fiverr is quite cheap.

All right, everyone. Thank you so much for having me on StartCon. Thanks for watching me on Whiteboard Friday. And I hope to see you around Moz and maybe down in Australia sometime in the near future. Take care.

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Thursday, January 5, 2017

40 Essential Social Media Marketing Statistics for 2017

As we start a new year, here is a look back at the world of social media. Keep these statistics in mind as you create your social media plan for 2017!

Social Media Marketing Statistics 2017

Social Media Demographic Statistics

1. 75% of male internet users are on Facebook as well as 83% of female internet users.

2. 32% of teenagers consider Instagram to be the most important social network.

3. Female internet users are more likely to use Instagram than men, at 38% vs. 26%.

4. 29% of internet users with college degrees use Twitter, compared to 20% with high school degrees or less.

5. 81% of millennials check Twitter at least once per day.

6. Most Instagram users are between 18-29 years old, about six-in-ten online adults.

7. 22% of the world’s total population uses Facebook.

Social Media Statistics

8. LinkedIn boasts more than 450 million user profiles.

9. On any given day, Snapchat reaches 41% of 18 to 34-year-olds in the US.

10. YouTube overall, and even YouTube on mobile alone, reaches more 18-34 and 18-49 year-olds than any cable network in the U.S.

Social Media Usage Statistics

Facebook marketing statistics

1. Facebook continues to be the most widely used social media platform, with 79% of American internet users. Based on total population, (not just internet users) 68% of U.S. adults are on Facebook.

2. Instagram receives the silver medal with 32% of users, Pinterest coming in a close third with 31%, and LinkedIn and Twitter at 29% and 24% respectively.

3. 76% of Facebook users visited the site daily during 2016, with over 1.6 billion daily visitors, compared to 70% of daily usage in 2015.

4. The average LinkedIn user spends 17 minutes on the site per month.

5. 51% of Instagram users access the platform daily, and 35% say they look at the platform several times per day.

6. Almost 80% of time spent on social media platforms happens on mobile.

Social Media Business Statistics

1. Instagram earns $595 million in mobile ad revenue per year, a rapidly increasing number.

2. Despite news of layoffs and executives leaving the company, Twitter’s revenue is up 8% YOY

3. 59% of Americans with social media accounts think that customer service through social media has made it easier to get questions answered and issues resolved.

4. Over 50 million businesses use Facebook Business Pages.

5. 2 million business use to Facebook for advertising.

6. Facebook’s total revenue grew 56% in 2016, and advertising revenue grew 59%.

7. 93% of Pinterest users use the platform to plan or make purchases.

8. 39% of LinkedIn users pay for monthly premium accounts.

9. Pinterest drives 25% of all retail website referral traffic.

10. More than 56% of online adults use more than one social media platform.

Reciprocity of Social Platforms

Social Media Content Statistics

1. Tweets with images receive 18% more clicks than tweets without images.

2. 100 million food and 146 fashion boards exist on Pinterest.

3. On LinkedIn, 98% of posts with images receive more comments and posts with links have a 200% higher engagement rate.

4. There are about 81 million fake Facebook accounts and about 5% of twitter accounts are bogus.

5. 100 million hours of video content are watched on Facebook daily.

6. More than 1 million LinkedIn users have published long-form content, with 160,000 long-form posts being published weekly. and over 19.7 million SlideShare presentations have been uploaded to the platform.

7. 88% of businesses with more than 100 employees use twitter for marketing purposes.

8. The user-submitted YouTube video with the most views is “Charlie bit my finger” with over 845 million views.

9. Pizza is the most widely instagrammed food, directly ahead of steak and sushi.

10. Blogging continues to grow, with over 409 million people viewing more than 23.6 billion pages each month on WordPress alone.

Our prediction for 2107? Messaging apps!

Messaging Apps 2017

29% of smartphone users utilize general messaging apps, like Whatsapp, Viber, or Kik. As Facebook continues to test new methods for advertising through messenger, and customers demand a higher level of customer service, we predict that more brands will look to utilize messaging ads and applications in the year to come. Stay tuned…

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27 Big Updates & A Peek at the Future: Moz Pro’s 2016 Retrospective

Posted by adamf

Another year has slipped by, and while we had our ups and downs, returning to our SEO roots has given us greater focus and renewed purpose. We’ve redoubled our efforts with the goal of building the best SEO product in the industry. We know it’s a lofty goal with so many great competitors out there, but this is the target that served as our north star in 2016 and continues to get us out of bed each morning.

Our increased focus on SEO translated to a big increase in the number of new features and improvements we were able to add to Moz Pro in 2016. In fact, we shipped more significant updates in 2016 than 2014 and 2015 combined, and we already have a lot in the works for 2017.

We also collected and surfaced a huge amount of data in 2016. A few notable examples:

Customers created 141,000 new campaigns for their websites
4.6 million tracked keywords were added to campaigns
1.8 million keyword queries were run in Keyword Explorer
25 million URLs were researched in Open Site Explorer

Such ever-increasing demand keeps us on our toes and we continue to invest in scaling our infrastructure to keep the data flowing smoothly.

Without further ado, here’s a rundown of some of the noteworthy updates you may have missed in 2016 and a sneak peek at some exciting updates coming in 2017.

Keyword Explorer: Redefining keyword research

Okay, I’m sure you’ve heard us mention Keyword Explorer once or twice. More than twice? Alright, we do like to talk about it. Building Keyword Explorer was a huge effort and our biggest release of the year. Keyword Explorer was a passion project for Moz’s co-founder, Rand, and it shows in the quality of the data and thoughtful workflow. If you do keyword research for SEO or content creation, check out this tool.

1. We launched Keyword Explorer with a rich set of capabilities

Keyword Explorer launched during the first half of the year, and offered some cool benefits right out of the gate:

Keyword Explorer takes you all the way through the keyword research process. Save time and simplify your keyword research process, from discovering keyword ideas to getting metrics to building a list. Once you’ve built a list, filter and prioritize which keywords to target based on the numbers that matter.
Keyword Explorer features metrics essential to the SEO process: two you’re familiar with — Volume and Difficulty — and three that are less familiar: Opportunity, Importance, and Potential. Use these comprehensive metrics to prioritize more effectively and focus your time on the best opportunities.
We built a keyword volume score that goes beyond what AdWords reports with ~95% accuracy. Accurate, trustworthy keyword volume data is getting harder to obtain, but we’re here for you.
Keyword Explorer gathers keyword suggestions from a broad variety of sources, so you can gather a greater variety of keyword ideas from one source.
We invested in strong import and export capabilities, so it’s easy to incorporate Keyword Explorer into your existing keyword research process.

Rand even created a quick demo video to introduce the new capabilities:

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And we didn’t stop there. We collected a whole bunch of feedback after launch and built in a ton of new features to make the tool even better:

2. Automatically group Related Keywords

Rather than wading through large volumes of similar keywords and adding each variation to a list, we’ve added auto-grouping as atop any list of keyword suggestions. This is helpful for discovering and focusing on themes, and adding a whole group of related keywords to your own research lists.

3. Check page-one rankings in Keyword Explorer research lists

See if you already rank on page one for they keywords in your lists. This is a hugely valuable data point for prioritizing which keywords to target.

4. Add keywords from your list to a campaign for rank tracking

This was at the top of the list of feature requests at launch. Now you can take the keywords in your carefully cultivated list and add them directly to a campaign for ongoing rank tracking.

5. View improved and expanded keyword volume data

Clickstream-based search behavior, plus data from other sources, combined with our modeling against AdWords’ impression counts on real campaigns, has given us higher accuracy, more coverage, and faster recognition of volume trends than ever before. It also allowed us to calculate search volume data for more countries, with significant coverage for the UK, Canada, and Australia, more moderate data for other Western languages and countries, and a small amount in regions and languages beyond those.

6. Find questions people are asking in search engines

This is great for content ideas, refining existing content, and finding featured snippets you might want to try and win.

*Further reading: Get even more out of your keyword research

Whether you’re using Keyword Explorer or just doing keyword research in general, we’ve posted a few articles this year that can help you improve your research, especially as Google gets more sophisticated:

Try Keyword Explorer free now

Huge improvements to Rankings: SERP Features, historical timeframes, algo updates, and more!

7. Discover and track SERP features

Dr. Pete has been pushing the industry (and us internally) to think beyond 10 blue links. While organic rankings remain a core SEO focus, Google has been adding more and more SERP features to a large proportion of search queries, and as an SEO, you just can’t ignore them anymore. To help provide more visibility to the SERP features and related opportunities, we’ve integrated in-depth SERP feature analysis into the rankings section of your campaigns. Highlights include:

Track the 16 highest-impact desktop SERP features for each keyword ranking you track in a campaign.

View which SERP features show up for the keywords you track, and whether you or your competitors show up in them.

See how different SERP features have trended for the keywords you track. You may find that a certain type of search feature is trending up and is worth attention.

Discover when we think you have an opportunity to show up in a SERP feature and how best to approach it.

8. Get alerted to featured snippet opportunities

Featured snippets appear above organic position #1 and can improve click-through rates for keywords you already rank in the top 10 for. Find the most lucrative opportunities for them in your Campaign Insights list.

*Further reading: Win those featured snippets

If you are interested in featured snippets, I’d recommend a couple of great posts from Dr. Pete:

And SERP Features is just the tip of the iceberg. Almost everything else you see in campaign rankings is new or overhauled.

9. See all of your historical rankings data

We started the year with a significant architectural overhaul of our rankings system. Aside from a faster and more streamlined interface, this also allowed us to support one of our biggest customer requests, and present all historical rankings data. Choose any timeframe to see and report on how your rankings have changed within that period.

10. Overlay Google algo updates on your rankings graphs

See a dramatic change in your rankings overnight? We now leverage the great data from MozCast to show any Google algorithm changes that might be affecting your search presence. Just hover over the little Google “G” to see major and minor update details.

11. Get more from your data with advanced filtering and improved sorting

Easily filter down your long list of rankings by keyword, label, location, or brandedness, and sort them accordingly to get a handle on your data.

12. See search volume data alongside your rankings

This had been a frequent request. We baked in the same powerful search volume data from Keyword Explorer alongside your rankings.

13. View detailed keyword analyses in your campaigns

Our keyword analysis page was completely rebuilt, with some great new additions:

Flexible timeframes, including the ability to view a keyword’s performance at any time in the history of your campaign
Volume and Difficulty scores, powered by Keyword Explorer’s data
Four beautiful graphs: Search Visibility, Highest Ranking Position, Keyword Performance, and SERP Features
An easy-to-read SERP report with callouts for pages on your domain, and those on your competitors’ domains
Faster page loads and improved performance

Intrigued? Take a trial of Moz Pro, free for 30 days

Page Optimization improved again

We made some big upgrades to this section late in 2015, but we weren’t quite done.

14. Discover topics related to your page content

This new tab shown with Page Optimization reports lets you see the topics that your SERP competition is writing about. This can help you understand what kinds of keywords signal topical relevance to Google and provide good ideas for how you can make your content more robust and relevant to searchers. I’m not going to go too deep here, but check out Jon White’s fantastic post for some great tips and examples to get the most from this feature. Rand also shares some great tips in this Whiteboard Friday, Using Related Topics and Semantically Connected Keywords in Your SEO.

15. Dive right into on-page optimization from your rankings

Quickly run page optimization reports and view page optimization scores right from your rankings.

We’ve made Insights better

Our Insights dashboard also underwent some solid improvements in 2016. We continue to surface new insights in this section as we add more capabilities across Moz Pro. Our aim is to make this a powerful section that surfaces new problems and opportunities that we discover as we collect and analyze your data every week.

16. Mark completed insights as “Done”

We heard feedback that many of you were attempting to use Insights as a to-do list, but we didn’t make that very easy. Now you can check off insights from your list once you’ve read or acted upon them. They will then be moved to your Done list, where you can track your completed work.

17. Add tasks to Trello

If you need a more robust workflow, we’ve added a way to quickly add insight tiles to Trello. Trello is a power task management solution, which also happens to be free. I’ve used it quite a bit myself, and happily recommend it.

18. Enjoy a better summary of your weekly rankings

We updated the rankings summary tile to give you a clearer look at your most important ranking changes from week to week.

Reporting got some needed attention

Outside of the more obvious features I’ve shared, we’ve also been working quietly behind the scenes to make our reporting and exports better.

19. Generate “real” PDF reports

Our old PDF export solution was functional, but clunky. It converted page modules into images and then encapsulated them in a PDF. We rebuilt our PDF engine so that PDFs created in Moz Pro include text as text and images as images, offering better editing, copying, and image quality.

20. Customize your rankings CSV exports

We launched updated CSVs for campaign rankings that respect filters as well as time frames. Now you can export just the data you need rather than poring through a massive historical rankings export.

21. Build custom reports more easily with a revamped interface

Adding and managing custom reports is easier to use and easier on the eyes.

22. Get regular insights directly in your inbox

We revamped our weekly email updates, making them cleaner and more informative. They now include both ranking updates and important insights that we discover for you each week. We plan to add more timely information to these as we continue to improve our datasets and refine the logic behind Insights.

The Mozbar got some love

If you can believe it, the Mozbar recently surpassed 400,000 installs. It was due a little bit of attention.

23. Breath easier, we’ve improved Mozbar stability and reliability

Unfortunately, our most beloved tool ran into some stability and login challenges when some unfriendly folks started abusing the service behind it. We invested some quality time to fix up the authentication issues and data inconsistency that were becoming a real frustration for customers.

24. Get On-Page Content Suggestions for any page on the web (brand new!)

We haven’t officially announced this one yet, but if you are a Pro customer and using the Mozbar, you can click on the little analysis icon:

When you enter a keyword, you will now see content suggestions just to the right of the on-page analysis. You can dig in just like in the page analysis section of your Moz Pro campaigns. Use this to beef up your relevance or find new topics to write about.

Start using MozBar for Chrome free today

Even Fresh Web Explorer got an update

Fresh Web Explorer continues to collect syndicated content from across the Web, making it easy to see where and when fresh content has mentioned a specified brand or linked to a domain. On top of that, Fresh Web Explorer’s alerts serve as a great alternative to Google Alerts, sending you an email anytime we see your target brands or keywords mentioned.

25. Show only Google Verified News Sources to reduce noise in your results

Filter your searches and/or alerts to show only those sources/domains we’ve observed in Google News. E.g. here’s a search for Amazon.com with news filtering on (3,067 results in the last 4 weeks) vs. the same search with news filtering off (28,798 results). This can save a lot of time when you’re looking for the most important results.

Beyond these features, there was a lot more going on behind the scenes

26. We made significant performance improvements

Our hard-working engineering team rebuilt a lot of the scaffolding behind campaigns, making them much snappier to load. This work continues into 2017. They also squashed dozens of bugs and made myriad small improvements across out tools and campaigns. If you are interested in keeping tabs on new features, fixes, or updates, you can find them all on our Moz Pro Updates page.

27. We now offer free product demos to customers and trialers

The friendly faces now helping you navigate Moz Pro

Another important addition we’ve made to our product isn’t in the product at all. We’ve quietly built out a Customer Success team. This cadre of product experts provide custom demos for new customers that are looking for an overview of Moz Pro, as well as long-time customers that are interested in learning more about new features. If you are interested in a refresher or a full walkthrough, schedule one here!

Also, if you’re looking to level up your SEO skills or get some deeper support in using Moz tools to tackle your SEO strategy, we’re actively working on more paid training options. Stay tuned!

So, what’s up next?

I hope you’re still with me, because I’ve got a bit more to share. Here are some of the big things to expect in 2017.

A rebuilt and re-imagined Custom Crawl

One of the big projects that our team has been busy with in 2016 is a total rewrite of our custom crawler. This is already being looked at by a few customers in a very limited alpha release. We still have a lot to add to it before it’s ready to go, but here are some of the benefits that we’ve already baked in:

A much faster and more resilient crawler. Whether your site is hundreds or millions of pages, expect your crawls much more quickly and reliably.
The ability to compare one crawl to the next and see what new issues have cropped up and which were confirmed as fixed.
A much simpler interface to access your data quickly and easily.
A bunch of other features are in the works to support deeper analysis and customization. More to come soon!

“Keyword Universe”

Cool code name, but what the heck is it?

Do you ever wonder which keywords you already rank for? Which ones your competitors rank for? Who are your SEO competitors? Answer these questions and more with this new data set, which we plan to expose in a number of different ways throughout Moz Pro and in our data products. If you’re curious about accessing this sort of data, please let us know!

What about links?

We’ve got some improvements in the works here too, but we’re keeping this under our hats for now.

And much more…

Beyond these large efforts, we will continue to make updates and improvements large and small throughout the year.

Please let us know what you need most!

We are constantly collecting feedback and looking to solve the most challenging problems that our customers face. Please let us know what’s working for you, what isn’t, and what you need most to be successful with your SEO efforts. You can add your thoughts in the comments here, or message me directly. While we can’t get to everything right away, we are always listening and prioritizing what to work on next.

Thanks for reading. I hope you all have a fantastic 2017!

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