How Do You Know If Your Data is Accurate? A case study using search volume, CTR, and rankings

Posted by Matt Peters

Big Data and analytics has been called the "next big thing," and it can certainly make a strong case with the explosion of easily accessible, high-quality data available today. In the inbound marketing world, we have access to backlinks and anchor text, traffic and click stream data, search volume and click through rate (CTR), social media metrics, and many more. There is huge value in this data, if we can unlock it.

But, there's a problem:  real world data is messy, and processing it can be tricky. How do we know if our data is accurate, or if we can trust our final conclusions? If we want to use this data to find a better way to do marketing, we have to be careful about accuracy.

There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to data analysis. There are some best practices, but even these can get a little murky. The most important thing to do is to put on your detective cap and dive into the data. The more familiar you are with the data, the easier it is to spot something that seems strange. More than likely, your findings will be … Read the rest

April 9, 2013  Tags: , , , , , , , ,   Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing  No Comments

So, You Want to Know About Foreign Language SEO? Mozinar Q&A

Posted by Zeph Snapp

I was grateful for the opportunity to do a Mozinar about foreign language SEO. There were a ton of questions from viewers, and while I was able to get to most of them, there were a few topics that I wasn’t able to cover in the detail they deserved.

There has been a lot of talk lately about what SEO is, and what it will become. One of the main things that SEOs have to think about every day is opportunity cost. We’ve also started looking at the world through a long-term lens rather than just short term wins (although quick wins are always great). Foreign language SEO plays on both sides of the field. You have to think long-term, but there are certainly opportunities for quick wins. Out of the top ten economies in the world today, only two of them are English-dominant. None of the primarily Spanish-speaking countries rank, but … Read the rest

December 6, 2012  Tags: , , , , , ,   Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing  No Comments

5 Facebook Marketing Resources You Didn’t Know About

Posted by JoannaLord

A few years ago, many of us were skeptical about how Facebook was going to get marketers to spend a significant amount of time and money on their platform, which is clearly not the case these days. One thing I'm sure of now is that Facebook advertising is here to stay.

According to the State of Inbound report HubSpot put out this year, "42% of marketers say Facebook is critical or important to their business." That percentage has gone up 75% from where it was just a few years ago. Talk about up and to the right!

With all that pickup, one would expect Facebook to have some resources out there to help us market our companies more effectively on Facebook. Never fear, for these resources exist! Unfortunately, they are somewhat hidden. Here are five pages and resources worth exploring if you are looking to drive traffic and sales through Facebook.

Facebook Marketing Page

Say what? Yup. Believe it or not, Facebook runs a page (with over 2 million likes, by the way) that they manage actively to help marketers use Facebook more effectively. They often post about webinars they are holding for marketers, answer specific … Read the rest

October 9, 2012  Tags: , , , , ,   Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing  No Comments

How Many SEO Consultants Actually Know What They’re Talking About?

Posted by Ashley Tate

As an industry, SEO has struggled with setting standards of quality from day one. Even with countless professional SEOs doing best-in-class work, the industry as a whole is constantly battling the bad rap of being tactless, unethical, and sometimes even "dead."

Black-hat or black cat?

At SEOmoz, we find ourselves pleasantly surprised day after day by the array of high-quality SEOs that make our industry such a wonderful place to be. Unfortunately, the time finally came where we had to ask ourselves the nagging questions looming over our industry: where was all this negative noise coming from? Had we been missing a widely accepted fact in the SEO world? And, most importantly, was the current state of SEO really as awful as some were making it seem?

There was only one way to find out.

Inspired by a post highlighting the "sad state" of today's SEO consultants, we decided to conduct a survey of our own to determine the true, calculated quality of SEOs in 2012. Similar to the Webmaster World member whose less-than-awesome exchange with various SEO consultants sparked this hot debate, we chose to reach out to real, third-party SEO companies for … Read the rest

September 25, 2012  Tags: , , , , , ,   Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing  No Comments

Do You Speak SEO? Ten Terms You Want to Know

When asked what I do, I often will respond “I work in SEO,” or “I’m an Account Executive for an SEO agency”.  Other times, I find myself having to go into a longer, more detailed explanation, explaining “it means Search Engine Optimization. We get websites ranked higher in Google…” Or if there’s a very large generation gap I’ll keep it super brief and say “I do stuff with search engines.”  When I first decided to dive headfirst into the SEO world it didn’t take me long to realize if I wanted to hang, I absolutely needed to learn the lingo.  SEO has a language of its own, and if you want to stay afloat in this industry, but more importantly in the search engines, you better know your stuff!

With that said, I’ve created 5 common terms and 5 recent (and increasingly common) terms I regularly discuss in my interactions both internally and with clients.  This is the list I feel you better speak, understand, and implement in the SEO world today in order to thrive.

5 Common Terms Everyone Should Know:

1. SEO & SEM: Search engine marketing (SEM) is the overall practice of marketing your products or … Read the rest

June 12, 2012  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing  No Comments



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