Wednesday, May 1, 2019

Chris Janson - Good Vibes in Florida!

Chris Janson - Good Vibes in Florida!
Chris Janson - Good Vibes in Florida! Listen to "Good Vibes" here: http://bit.ly/2TAXzEE Find out when Chris is playing in a city near you! Visit http://bit.ly/1G7pa6W Get your Chris Janson merchandise here: http://bit.ly/2iHZOVY Chris' album, "EVERYBODY," is available now: http://bit.ly/2iEnNVV Download or stream more songs by Chris: iTunes: https://wmna.sh/cj_it Spotify: https://wmna.sh/cj_sp Stay in touch with Chris! Website: http://bit.ly/1G7pa6W Facebook: http://bit.ly/2CJ0RNX... Twitter: https://twitter.com/janson_chris Instagram: http://bit.ly/2D8mzfd... Music video by Chris Janson. ©2017 Warner Music Nashville LLC. #ChrisJanson #GoodVibes

Chris Janson - Good Vibes in Florida!

Chris Janson - Good Vibes in Florida!
Chris Janson - Good Vibes in Florida! Listen to "Good Vibes" here: http://bit.ly/2TAXzEE Find out when Chris is playing in a city near you! Visit http://bit.ly/1G7pa6W Get your Chris Janson merchandise here: http://bit.ly/2iHZOVY Chris' album, "EVERYBODY," is available now: http://bit.ly/2iEnNVV Download or stream more songs by Chris: iTunes: https://wmna.sh/cj_it Spotify: https://wmna.sh/cj_sp Stay in touch with Chris! Website: http://bit.ly/1G7pa6W Facebook: http://bit.ly/2CJ0RNX... Twitter: https://twitter.com/janson_chris Instagram: http://bit.ly/2D8mzfd... Music video by Chris Janson. ©2017 Warner Music Nashville LLC. #ChrisJanson #GoodVibes

Announcing the New Moz SEO Essentials Certificate: What It Is & How to Get Certified

Posted by BrianChilds

“Does Moz offer a certification?”

Educating the marketing community about SEO is one of our core values here at Moz. I worked at an agency prior to joining the team back in 2016, and much of what I learned about how to deliver SEO to our clients came from reading the Moz Blog and watching MozCon videos.

In 2016, one of Moz’s entrepreneurial product managers, Rachel Moore, launched a new catalog of SEO coursework called Moz Academy. This initiative enabled our community to learn faster through structured, interactive workshops. Since 2017, the team has taught SEO to almost 2,500 students through our various class offerings (I looked it up prior to writing this. That number made me really proud).

Across all these interactions, one question asked by our students kept surfacing: 

Can I get a certificate for completing this coursework? 

For agencies, the ability to show a certificate of completion is a way to differentiate themselves amongst a crowded market. I knew from my own experience how valuable having “HubSpot Inbound Certified” and “Adwords Certified” on my LinkedIn profile was — they allowed our team to show proficiency to our prospective clients. For our friends working as in-house marketers, showing a certificate of completion is a way of showing that the student made good on the investment they requested from their managers.

I’m proud to announce that Moz has put in a tremendous amount of effort to create a certificate program that meets this consistent customer demand. Today, Moz is launching the SEO Essentials Certificate through our Moz Academy platform. Check it out below:

I'm ready to check it out!

What is an SEO Certificate?

An SEO Certificate from Moz is all about developing familiarization with Moz tools and covering some of the essential types of projects you can use to hit the ground running. Though attendees of the Moz Academy come from a variety of backgrounds, we built the certification coursework with an Agency or freelance SEO in mind. However, I believe this material is valuable for anyone interested in learning SEO.

The certificate is focused on five core competency areas:

  1. Fundamental SEO Concepts (Understand the Fundamentals)
  2. Keyword research (Develop Keyword Strategies)
  3. Page optimization (Apply On-Page Optimization Strategies)
  4. Link building essentials (Build Effective Link Strategies)
  5. Reporting on SEO (Create Efficient Reporting Strategies)

By completing this certificate, attendees should be able to articulate for their stakeholders where SEO fits in a digital strategy, how to find and target search engine results pages (SERPs) based on the competitive landscape, and how to approach delivering basic SEO tactics using the Moz toolset.

With this foundation, you'll be able to jump off into more advanced topics such as technical SEO fixes, local SEO, and how to set up your agency for success.

Check out just what's included in the coursework for the Moz SEO Essentials certificate:

1. Understand the Fundamentals

One challenge we observed in the development of SEO coursework: our users often started delivering organic traffic improvements without having a foundational understanding of where SEO tactics fit into a broader digital strategy. Often people will initiate optimization efforts without first conducting effective keyword research. Or, if keyword research was being done, it wasn’t framed within a repeatable, scalable process.

The Understand the Fundamentals course sets the stage for delivering SEO in a way that can be repeated efficiently. In addition to defining essential terminology used in the following classes, you learn how to organize keyword research in a way that produces insight about competition. This relatively simple framework can radically improve targeting of your SEO activities, especially for large enterprises that may compete in several different markets simultaneously.

2. Develop Keyword Strategies

After introducing a framework for conducting keyword research, the certificate program dives into a step-by-step process for creating large keyword clusters and identifying the keywords that will produce the best results. In the development of this coursework, we recognized that many articles and resources talk about keyword research but don’t define a repeatable, scalable process for actually doing it. So many articles about SEO promote hacks that may work for a particular use case, but lack step-by-step instructions. We developed this course to provide you with a practical process that can scale alongside your work.

You’ll learn the importance of mapping keyword clusters to the typical sales funnel customers follow as they move from exploration of solutions to purchase. I’ve presented this material in workshops to large enterprises and small companies — every marketing team that's used this process found it valuable.

By the end of the class, you’ll be familiar with the most valuable features of Moz Keyword Explorer and how to organize lists to help you identify and target the best keywords for your stakeholders.

3. Apply On-Page Optimization Strategies

For many websites, you can find quick wins simply by optimizing page attributes that target strategic keywords. For as much as search has evolved in recent years, we still operate primarily in a world where the text on a page defines the value of that page. This course provides an overview of those attributes and their relative importance.

You'll have a clear understanding of how to use site crawl and page optimization tools to identify, prioritize, and begin optimizing pages based on the keyword strategy they developed in the previous class. Often one of the challenges our students have discovered is that they moved too quickly into optimization without first having their strategy defined. This class will show how strategy and implementation fit together.

4. Build Effective Link Strategies

Link building is another practice that, as an agency marketer, I found difficult to scale. Many articles describe the importance of how relevant links relate to ranking, or hacks that produced a particular result for a page, but not how to create a repeatable process.

As you'll discover in the class, link building is more about process than tools. You’ll understand how to use Moz Link Explorer to isolate the best domains to target amongst the thousands you might consider. I use this process myself whenever launching new websites and it turns a week-long project into a few hours of work. For any agency, where time is literally money, driving down the cost of link analysis with Moz tools can be a big windfall.

5. Create Efficient Reporting Strategies

Whether you're working at an enterprise brand or providing digital marketing services, reporting on outcomes is a big part of your job. Because of the challenges inherent in reporting on attribution with SEO strategies, it's vital to understand both how to set up your data and some common ways to tie SEO projects to broader digital marketing initiatives. This course provides a framework for reporting on SEO that you can adjust to suit your needs. You’ll learn how to use Google Analytics and Moz tools to create actionable reports you can share with your team and stakeholders.

SEO Essentials Certificate FAQs

Here are some of the common questions our community has asked us about the SEO Essentials Certificate during the development process.

How do I get SEO Certified?

Moz offers the SEO Essentials Certificate program via the Moz Academy platform. When you visit Moz Academy, you will see the SEO Essentials Certificate program listed in the catalog. All you have to do is select the course and proceed through the login process.

How long does the SEO Essentials Certificate take?

The Moz SEO Essentials coursework consists of several hours of online instruction, as well as a few quizzes and a final exam. The coursework is developed to be completed within a week of starting. Some attendees have completed the coursework in two days, but for most folks, it takes about a week.

Will I get an SEO certificate and LinkedIn badge?

Yes! We've developed a way for you to get both a SEO certificate you can print and a LinkedIn badge to show you've completed the program. When you pass the final exam, you'll find links to both of these assets and instructions on how to generate them.

How long is the SEO Essentials Certificate valid?

The Moz SEO Essentials Certificate is valid for one year after registration. When the certificate expires, you'll need to retake the coursework to maintain your certification. We set the expiration at one year because SEO changes a lot! (Seriously — just take a look at the Google Algorithm Change History.) We want to make sure that you have the most up-to-date information when displaying your credentials online and to stakeholders.

Sign me up!

Find yourself with questions not addressed in this post? Drop them in the comments and we'll do our best to get them answered.


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Give it up for Your MozCon 2019 Community Speakers!

Posted by cheryldraper


High fives and fist bumps for each and every person who took the time to pitch their hearts out for this years’ six community speaker spots — a whopping 130 entries were submitted!

Our selection committee read, watched, and researched, whittling things down to a shortlist of top contenders and then read, watched, and researched some more to determine if a potential speaker and their talk would be a perfect fit for the MozCon stage.

We take lots of things into account during our review, but ultimately there are three main factors that determine our final selections:

  • Strength of the pitch (e.g., value, relevance to the audience, etc.)
  • Can the content reasonably be delivered in the time allotted?
  • Does it fit with overall programming and agenda?

After much deliberation, we’re confident these six community speakers are going to be a great addition to the MozCon Stage.

Grab a seat and see for yourself!

Ready to meet your MozCon Community Speakers?

Areej AbuAli, Head of SEO at Verve Search

Fixing the Indexability Challenge: A Data-Based Framework

How do you turn an unwieldy 2.5 million-URL website into a manageable and indexable site of just 20,000 pages? Areej will share the methodology and takeaways used to restructure a job aggregator site which, like many large websites, had huge problems with indexability and the rules used to direct robot crawl. This talk will tackle tough crawling and indexing issues, diving into the case study with flow charts to explain the full approach and how to implement it.

Christi Olson, Head of Evangelism, Search at Microsoft

What Voice Means for Search Marketers: Top Findings from the 2019 Report

How can search marketers take advantage of the strengths and weaknesses of today's voice assistants? Diving into three scenarios for informational, navigational, and transactional queries, Christi will share how to use language semantics for better content creation and paid targeting, how to optimize existing content to be voice-friendly (including the new voice schema markup!), and what to expect from future algorithm updates as they adapt to assistants that read responses aloud, no screen required. Highlighting takeaways around voice commerce from the report, this talk will ultimately provide a breakdown on how search marketers can begin to adapt their shopping experience for v-commerce.

Emily Triplett Lentz, Content Strategy Lead at Help Scout

How to Audit for Inclusive Content

Digital marketers have a responsibility to learn to spot the biases that frequently find their way into online copy, replacing them with alternatives that lead to stronger, clearer messaging and that cultivate wider, more loyal and enthusiastic audiences. Last year, Help Scout audited several years of content for unintentionally exclusionary language that associated physical disabilities or mental illness with negative-sounding terms, resulting in improved writing clarity and a stronger brand. You'll learn what inclusive content is, how it helps to engage a larger and more loyal audience, how to conduct an audit of potentially problematic language on a site, and how to optimize for inclusive, welcoming language.

Greg Gifford, Vice President of Search at DealerOn

Dark Helmet's Guide to Local Domination with Google Posts and Q&A

Google Posts and Questions & Answers are two incredibly powerful features of Google My Business, yet most people don't even know they exist. Greg will walk through Google Posts in detail, sharing how they work, how to use them, and tips for optimization based on testing with hundreds of clients. He'll also cover the Q&A section of GMB (a terrifying feature that lets anyone in the community speak for your business), share the results of a research project covering hundreds of clients, share some hilarious examples of Q&A run wild, and explain exactly how to use Q&A the right way to win more local business.

Joelle Irvine, Director, Marketing & Growth at Bookmark Content and Communications

Image & Visual Search Optimization Opportunities

With voice, local, and rich results only rising in importance, how do image and visual search fit into the online shopping ecosystem? Using examples from Google Images, Google Lens, and Pinterest Lens, Joelle will show how image optimization can improve overall customer experience and play a key role in discoverability, product evaluation, and purchase decisions for online shoppers, while at the same time accepting that image recognition technology is not yet perfect. Learn actionable tactics around image optimization, including image framing, categorizing, structured data, and indexing to better optimize for visual search.

Marie Haynes, Owner at Marie Haynes Consulting Inc.

Super-Practical Tips for Improving Your Site's E-A-T

Google has admitted that they measure the concept of "Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness" in their algorithms. If your site is categorized under YMYL (Your Money or Your Life), you absolutely must have good E-A-T in order to rank well. In this talk, you'll learn how Google measures E-A-T and what changes you can make both on site and off in order to outrank your competitors. Using real-life examples, Marie will answer what E-A-T is and how Google measures it, what changes you can make on your site to improve how E-A-T is displayed, and what you can do off-site to improve E-A-T.

Be sure to check out the initial agenda here to get a taste of all the MozCon goodness we've got in store for you.

Snag your ticket!


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!