Wes Cutshall

This is a review of the SEO monitoring service SEO Moz Pro.

Introduction – SEO Moz Pro

If you have no idea what SEO is read my SEO Primer article. Every website owner needs to understand what SEO is and how it’s affecting your position in the search engine and your free traffic. SEO Moz Pro simply helps you to monitor your SEO performance, and the performance of your competitors. It’s not necessarily an SEO consultant, but it does help you identify areas of improvement and help you to monitor how your SEO work is affecting both SERP position and natural search traffic.

Reports

SEO Moz Pro is made up of a bunch of reports, much like Google Analytics (GA) is. SEO Moz Pro has 6 useful tools for anyone doing SEO. These tools are Traffic Data, Crawl Diagnostics, Keyword Rankings, Competitive Domain Analysis, On-Page Optimization, and Social.

Traffic Data

The Traffic Data report monitors performance and changes of your natural search result traffic. SEO Moz Pro can sync with your GA account in order to provide you with reports specific to SEO. You can view your organic search visit data, much like you would in GA, but you can also view “branded search traffic.” For example, let’s say we’re monitoring MemberMob.com (crowdsourced marketing) and we see that we have an increase in natural search visitors for the previous week. We can look further and see how much of this traffic is from branded searches, “MemberMob”, versus keyword searches, like “Crowdsourced Marketing.” This report shows you a graph of natural search keywords delivering traffic and also provides a data table of these keywords, much like in GA.

Crawl Diagnostics

The Crawl Diagnostics report provides you with essential information on any errors found while crawling your website. This report is much like the Google Webmaster reports but with a different viewpoint. This report is broken into Errors, Warnings, and Notices. Notices are things like 301 redirects and things that you might just want to be aware of, but aren’t necessarily “bad.” Warnings are things like Long URL, Overly-Dynamic URL, Missing Meta Tags, etc. Errors are problems like Duplicate Page Content, Missing Title Elements, and Server Errors. This report, although necessary to revisit over time, is mostly useful the first time SEO Moz crawls your website. One you’ve decided if the Errors, Warnings, and Notices are something that need to be fixed or ignored there is little value in this report on a week-to-week basis. Obviously if you have major changes to your website on a weekly or monthly basis the value of this tool increases.

Keyword Rankings

The Keyword Rankings report is a pretty standard SEO report that shows your SERP position for each of your keywords across whichever search engines you wish you monitor (Google and Bing, duh). The report shows your position as well as the delta since the last search. A nice feature of this report is that it also shows your search traffic visits and delta next to each keyword. This way you can relate any traffic increases or decreases to your keyword position changes. In the past I would simply check my keywords in Google via search link bookmarks I had saved, but this is proving to be less reliable over time. With Google getting more “local” and with the introduction of tools like Google+ each user’s SERPs are less and less like their neighbors. The Keyword Rankings reports gives you a report that is not geo-localized and not affected by any outside factors.

Competitor Domain Analysis

The Competitive Domain Analysis report is probably the most informative report in SEO Moz as it shows exactly how to rank against your competitors. Of course the data is only as good as what variables you provide it. If you do not have any clear competitors this report becomes less informative. Through this report you can see both an overall ranking of your domain, SEO-wise, versus your competitors as well as the individual characteristics that make up the domain ranking, or “domain authority.” This report tracks many factors some of which are External Followed Links, Total External Links, No Follow vs Follow Link Ratio, etc. This can give you an idea of why you might be performing better or worse than your competitors in the SERPs. Having the highest number of total links but the lowest number of “followed” links might lead you to realize that your competitors are better at getting high-valued links than you are.

On-Page Optimization

The On-Page Optimization report is where you can find some actual action items for improving your SEO. This report shows where you’ve “made the grade” on implementing your on-page SEO and where you’ve failed, based on the keywords that you’ve included for your campaign. You not only get a grade for each keyword, you also can see each characteristic that makes up the grade. Even better, SEO Moz will tell you what it takes to “fix” any item that didn’t go towards a grade of “A.”

Social

The Social report provides you with information on your Twitter and Facebook interactions. You can stay updated on your follower/fan increases and decreases, traffic from your social profiles, and even your Facebook shares and Twitter retweets.

Conclusion

At the time of this blog post the price of the SEO Moz Pro subscription is $99/month. I know for my business this price is worth every penny to be on top of my SEO efforts. I might not find something every month to improve on but I definitely have to be on top of my website SEO work to make sure I’m staying ahead of my competitors.

If you have an idea for an online business you often are faced with the option of designing your website for a broad market or a niche market. Do you want to sell Sporting Goods or exclusively Football Equipment? Just like in the real world, there are benefits of each option, but online has a different set of issues that will factor in your website’s success. Whether you are selling an actual product or simply building a website of information, you need to consider whether a broad market or niche market is the way to go.

In researching our competition I often find that they have decided to go for a broader market while still serving the same demographic that we do in our niche market. In most cases I find that they are less successful in marketing to a wider market than we have been marketing to a niche market. For example, Fido Finder which was built to market to “lost dog” owners has been more successful in than other “lost pet” website (and also more successful than any “lost dog” website). We get more animals registered per day than even the top “lost pet” websites. We learned early on that there is a benefit to marketing to a niche market when it comes to online marketing.

For most new websites your traffic will come in this order: online ads, word of mouth, and search engine results. Due to the Google algorithm, natural (free) Google search results will be one of the last ways that you get traffic to your new website. In the end, natural search results will be the king, but it takes time to get there, often many years. Up front you will be paying for most of your visitors and then enter a pattern of paying for something more like 15-20% of your visitors while getting the rest from word of mouth and natural search results. Your goal should be to end up with the majority of your traffic coming from word of mouth and natural search results. Niche marketing can get you there.

Online Advertising

Any new website has to advertise to get started, period. You’re not just going to be on the news after a week of having a website. Using Google Adwords as a model, the cost of your ads will be determined by the popularity of the keywords that you want to see your ad next to. If you decide to sell Sporting Goods you have to compete for space on Google’s search results with every other sporting goods website. Some of these websites will be willing to spend much more per click than you are willing to spend on your startup. If Dick’s Sporting Goods, Sports Authority, and Academy are all bidding $0.30+ a click you’ll have to bid up there with them in order to get a decent volume of visitors from your ad. Conversely, advertising for “football equipment” produces a different subset of advertisers. East Bay, a large catalog company, is the only big company competing for that keyword. You can now bid for the number two spot without losing money on each customer acquisition. In general, niche Pay-Per-Click (PPC) keyword marketing will be cheaper than broad keyword marketing. Since online ads will be your first source of traffic it’s much cheaper to start a successful niche website versus a broad market website.

Word of Mouth

Links from Facebook and other social websites have become a top source of visitors to all of our websites over the last 2 years. Having a Facebook presence (page) definitely helps, but word of mouth via social networking is a very good source of traffic without having a popular Facebook page. Having Facebook users, bloggers, and people on Twitter talking about your website all fit under Word of Mouth as far as online goes. Having a niche website actually increases your chances that users will start talking about your website with their friends, online and offline. Although your market might be smaller, the passion of your customers is usually higher. Everyone knows that one friend they have that is in 5 football fantasy leagues, but rarely do we know that we have a friend who plays 5 different sports. People who are passionate about one specific thing tend to discuss it more often, with a higher energy, than those who have a more rounded interest. Getting links from football-related Facebook groups is much more likely than getting links for a general sporting goods website from a general sports-related Facebook group, for example. Online forums fall under this category as well. Most online forums are built for a specific niche. Becoming a well-known website within those niche forums could garner a great deal of traffic. It’s just more likely that your startup will spread like wildfire through word of mouth around these niche markets than in a broad market.

Search Results

Once your website is established there is no doubt that search engine results are the king of traffic. The most important thing you can do for your new website is focus on becoming #1 for your keyword. It’s going to take 1-3 years for most websites to even have a chance, but you should do the work to get there. It’s a lot of work to get the #1 listing but if you get it it’s worth every penny. You’ll get 2-5x the traffic from being #1 versus #5 for the same search term. This means you’ll spend less money on online advertising as you’re getting so much free traffic. A high website ranking is based on your website score. Good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will greatly increase your chances of being in the #1 spot.

In SEO you optimize your website for a specific keyword or set of keywords. When people search for XYX you want your site to show up. This means you have to have this keyword all over your website as well as have this keyword in or around all the links that link to your website. If you decide to build a Football Equipment website all the links to your website will have “football” in them, and often “equipment”, “gear”, or some other keyword accompanying “football.” This will make your website rank very well for “football equipment” if you get enough links and perform all the right on-page optimization techniques. If instead you build a Sporting Goods website and want to rank well for “football equipment”, “basketball shoes”, “baseball bats”, “soccer balls”, etc, you have a lot more work to do, and are frankly less likely to be successful at ranking for all, or any, of those keywords. A website that is strictly SEO’d for “baseball bats” will usually rank higher than the baseball bat section of your sporting goods website. In some markets it’s much more likely for a person to actually search for the niche keywords than the general category.

Online it’s much more important to have a website that can do well with SEO techniques than a website that mimics a real world store. If your website concept does not SEO well you will always be paying high dollar for advertising and have a hard time ever getting “free” visitors. The most valid site for a keyword will always show up at the top of the list. For example, although we all know Amazon is the king of online books, etc, Barnes & Noble actually shows up first in the natural search results when you search for “books” in Google. This is because all of their website content and links to their website focus around the keyword “books”. They get all that free traffic for ranking well for “books” while Amazon has to rely on other methods (word of mouth/advertising/brand recognition).

Unless you have a large marketing budget it’s going to be hard to get your broad market website to get the same amount of traffic as the #1 site for a subcategory of products you sell. For example, although my company could have created a Lost Pets website, it is more successful to develop a Lost Dogs (FidoFinder.com) and Lost Cats (TabbyTracker.com) website separately because of the factor of search engine traffic. Each website does better in registering a high volume of dogs and cats, respectively, than any other Lost Pets website does. The same goes for our website Naming Force. Although other websites offer product naming among their slew of crowdsourcing options (logo design, copywriting, website design, etc) we get more naming projects than any of our competitors do. When you search for “crowdsource naming” we come up first. Our website also appears before our competitors for other keywords such as “business names”, etc. We focus strictly on naming businesses, and Google knows that.

This is a good except from Wikipedia about niche marketing online:

“An often used technique for affiliate marketers is Internet-based niche segments of larger markets, referred to as niches, a website can be developed and promoted quickly to uniquely serve a targeted and usually loyal customer base, giving the affiliate a small but regular income stream. This technique is then repeated across several other niche websites until a desired income level is achieved. A bigger niche is harder to market to as the expense of online advertisements increases according to the popularity of the keywords used (on Adwords, for example).”

Conclusion

Online niche marketing is the fastest method of growth for a new business. Getting a business off the ground is more important than the overall potential to serve a business has. Just because you can do everything doesn’t mean you should market yourself as being able to. If you never make a profit it doesn’t matter how versatile your website or business was. Online, niche marketing is the way to go for rapid, affordable, marketing of a business. If you decide to expand on your initial product offering, the way Amazon has, that’s fine, but starting out by being known for selling one thing, or one group of things, is much a cheaper option and gains traction much quicker. This will increase your success rate ten-fold.

I’ve found a handful of reasons, when developing new websites, to want to acquire existing websites or domains. I do not mean parked domains, I mean websites that are active, but not successful, and are in the Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). In this post I’m going to discuss why you should be researching domains and websites that show up in SERPs for your website’s targeted keywords.

Skip the Sandbox

Things are always changing in the Google algorithm, but it’s been known for some time that Google tends to limit the exposure of brand new websites. Unless you can burst onto the scene and get tons of links quickly, you won’t show up on the first page for the keywords you are targeting for quite a while. It used to be a rule of thumb that you wouldn’t see your website in the top 10-20 pages in Google for 6-12 months after its release. Google has become much more dynamic, but mostly with content on existing, well ranking, websites. But one thing you can bank on is if you purchase an existing domain that is 2+ years old you can skip any type of sandboxing of your website in the SERPs. So sometimes acquiring an existing domain is better than coming up with a brand new domain name. Do some searches for websites that rank decently for your keywords. Getting your website in the top 5 pages right out of the gate is a great start. You will hopefully be building backlinks after the release so your site should move up in the SERPs. Any website that has the keywords in the domain will be easier to optimize for search engines, but this doesn’t mean it will be the most marketable domain available. Most of the big internet websites don’t include their purpose, or keywords, in their domain.

Jump SERPs

Let’s say you start a new website about Poker. Let’s say that the #5 website in Google when you search for “poker” is something like “pokerpoker123.com”. Your website has a more marketable name like “Donkfest.com” (a humorous poker term). If you can negotiate a purchase of “pokerpoker123.com” you can set up a 301 (moved permanently) redirect to “Donkfest.com” and once Google picks up on this, suddenly “Donkfest.com” replaces “pokerpoker123.com” in the SERPs. Now you’ve jumped from nowhere in Google to the #5 spot. Most of your keyword competitors will ignore this failing website and you can just snatch it up and jump right into the competition.

Gain Backlinks

The main reason that SERP Jumping works is that when you 301 the domain to your website you suddenly acquire all of its backlinks. So if that website had 500 backlinks and you had 20, now you have 520 backlinks. This obviously creates an increase in your Google PR. This will also help you with Bing/Yahoo and other search engines. But aside from the SERP jump you will now start getting referral traffic from these websites that linked to the other website. You could see a significant amount of traffic from visitors trying to visit this older website via links.

Kill the Failing Competition

Sometimes you’ll have a competitor that has been around so long, and has so many backlinks, that they stick at the #1 spot in Google for your keyword despite getting half the traffic you do. Their site is not as successful as yours, they aren’t updating it, but they maintain that #1 spot with no effort. You might convince yourself that since you can see more activity on your website than on theirs that #2 in Google is just as good as #1. The concern here is, what happens if someone with some drive and vision decides to purchase that #1 website and totally revamp it? Now you have a driven competitor who already has the upper hand with the #1 spot in the SERPs. This could cost you thousands in advertising if you suddenly feel that you have to convince searchers that your site is actually better/bigger/more important than that #1 site that used to be so lackluster. Don’t risk this happening. If you can acquire that #1 site for the cost of a few months of revenue, you can save yourself tons in advertising expenses should someone decide to buy the site and revamp it (or 301 redirect it to their existing website). So, with purchasing that #1 site you can SERP Jump and remove a potential thorn in your side at the same time.

Make a Deal

If you get an individual to agree to sell their domain to you your going to want to have them sign a contract that includes a few specifics before you even consider how to physically pay for and transfer the domain.

1. Make sure that the seller agrees to sell you any related domains, not just the domain that you discovered. I once purchased a domain only to discover later that the seller had other domains that had been linked to the same website. Once the 301 was set up to my new website, instead of SERP Jumping, the sellers other domain just replaced the original one in the SERPs. I’m still not 100% sure how this happened, but it’s my fault for not making sure that a) he didn’t have other related domains and b) that he agreed to take down the website content that had ranked well for the keywords.
2. Require the seller to agree to not make any WHOIS changes prior to the sale. This can delay the transfer as some registrars lock domains for 30 days after a WHOIS change.
3. Ask the seller to not make any website changes from the time of the sale to the time of the transfer. You don’t want them to adversely affect the website’s ranking right before you buy it.
4. Use Google Webmaster Tools to tell Google about the website move.
5. Don’t think that you have to fork over tens of thousands for a domain. I’ve been able to acquire domains for only $2,000-$3,000 that had much more value to me than that, as expected.
6. Make sure to have the seller sign a contract that holds him to these promises.

Complete the Purchase

Your best option for safely acquiring the domain is Escrow.com. Escrow.com allows a buyer and seller to make the transaction online without any chance of one party being cheated. The purchaser will pay Escrow the money for the domain, an amount that was agreed upon by both registered Escrow.com users. Escrow.com will then instruct the seller to transfer the domain to the buyer. Escrow allows the buyer to register their WHOIS information and only releases the funds to the seller once the domain’s WHOIS information has changed to the buyer’s information. This way everyone is safe and the sale and transfer goes without a hitch.

Setup a Redirect

Once you acquire the domain you’ll want to 301 redirect the main domain to your new site. Research any page on the old site that might be in line with current pages on your site and 301 those pages directly to the pages on your site that relate. Be sure that you have a custom 404 page set up so that users get your website navigation if they visit a page that does not exist. You don’t want them to get a web server 404 page with no navigation.

With the major search engines supporting the Sitemap Protocol many developers have switched to using these XML versions of sitemaps for telling search engine crawlers about the pages on their sites. I recently found that this was a big mistake. I personally had switched to using these XML sitemaps 100% on my sites. I no longer had links to old-school sitemaps where we listed every page on our website. For many sites every page can be found through the standard crawling of links. For example, Fido Finder has thousands of Lost and Found dog listings, but the crawler can get to all of these by simply going to the Lost Dogs page and crawling the “Next Page” link, over and over. There are truly no hidden pages that I want Google to index. Tagomatic, being a search engine, is a different story. And there’s actually a story to go with this lesson.

One day I noticed that Tagomatic’s traffic dropped off by about 75%. I was in a panic. Had Google suddenly decided that Tagomatic was no longer important? It took me days to finally realize that for whatever reason Google had de-index any Mod-Rewritten URLs. 3-4 months prior to this I had changed the website listings on Tagomatic to include the domain name (which is unique) in the URL instead of having a standard querystring identifier (so /domain.com/ instead of page.php?id=12345). The only website listings showing up in Google were listings where the “domain name” (mostly older entries that contained sub-folders, so forward slashes) contained characters that did not allow me (with the rewrite code I found) to rewrite them. So ONLY standard querysting URL’s were index in Google for the websites section of Tagmatic. This makes absolutely no sense, and technically Google shouldn’t “know” that these URL’s are rewritten, but the only listings on Tagomatic that were still showing up where standard querystring, non-rewritten, URLs. The new, pretty, URL’s had already been indexed in Google for months. They were correct being redirected if you entered the old URL, but for whatever reason Google decided these URL’s were not worth indexing any more. So I rolled the code back and after some time, and submitting a re-inclusion request via the Google Sitemaps dashboard, the URL’s slowly started to show up again. After 4 months only about 50% of the original URL’s had returned. By 8 months about 70% of the URL’s that were previously index had returned, but the growth had definitely stopped. In the Google Sitemaps dashboard I could see that one of my sitemaps had 25K of its 50K links (max 50K per sitemap) indexed and the other had 23K of 25K indexed. I wanted that ~25K back.

As a test I created an old school sitemap, where any search engine could crawl “next page” after “next page” and see all of the pages on Tagomatic. Within a week 7K more pages showed up as “indexed.” Hopefully we can get back to having 90% of the pages in our sitemaps indexed, but it won’t be thanks to the new sitemap protocol. For whatever reason Google needed an old school sitemap to get all of the pages in the index. Sometimes you have to just experiment and you’ll find something that doesn’t make sense that works anyhow.

On many occasions I have noticed an increase in activity on one of my websites and had not know what was causing the new traffic. It could be a TV news report, a blog post, a forum post, or any number of events. I always thought that Google Analytics should tell me What Has Changed. But, it never did…until now! Google has a new feature in beta called “Intelligence”. The Intelligence report shows different variables that have increased or decreased significantly over the selected date range. It’s an easy way to find out What Has Changed in regards to traffic, goals, and commerce on your website. It’s a great feature and it should help many website owners to not just identify traffic trends but to help find bugs and other changes on their website. I’m glad they finally realized how valuable this information can be to us.

If you’re going to own and operate a successful website you need to become familiar with the acronym SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s the practice of designing and/or tweaking your website so that the search engines know what your website content is about. The idea is to specifically tell engines like Google what content is on your site so that your website shows up when users query search engines for your targeted keywords. Some might also say that you are quietly suggesting to the search engines what keywords your website should show up for. Unlike the early years of the Internet, search engines no longer rely on META tag data for indexing websites. It’s the structure and makeup of your content that tells Google what your website is about. If you follow a few tips you can help to suggest to Google, and other engines, what keywords it should rank your website highly for. This will result in your website showing up higher in the results for your targeted keywords. These tips were gathered from months of reading both SEO forums and SEO articles online. We will use FidoFinder.com as an example in some of the suggestions to help explain the tips.

Title

The HTML title of each individual web page needs to contain your keywords. Many websites simply include the name of their website in their HTML title tags across the website. You need to also include your targeted keywords, in a natural manner, in your title tags. Be sure to modify every web page’s title tag to represent the content of that page. A good example is Fido Finder’s web page titles including the keyword “lost dogs” and “found dogs” in their titles. The individual dog profile pages include the dog’s breed and location in the title.

URL

The actual text that makes up your URL needs to contain your keywords. If your domain name itself does not contain your keywords make sure you name your pages in a manner that keywords are included in them. On Fido Finder the “lost dogs” search page is named “lost-dogs.php” instead of “search.php.” It is widely believed that dashes are the best way to break up words in a URL as Google will consider lost-dogs to equal “lost dogs” but lost_dogs to equal “lost_dogs”.

Internal Links

Links within your own website should contain your keywords. Instead of using links with anchor text like “click here” be sure to actually use your keywords in the anchor text. On Fido Finder links within a paragraph urging a visitor to register their lost dog use “register your lost dog” as the anchor text instead of linking text like “click here to register.” Use your keywords as links throughout the site, it is good to have 2-3 of the same keywords in links on the same page. Text links are better than image links. If you use images for your site navigation be sure to include ALT text for the images so that search engines can tell what the image links represent.

Inbound Links

If you have control, it is best to have links to your website from external domains that include your keywords. On Fido Finder we employ the use of a tagline (Where Lost Dogs are Found) in our website identity that includes our keywords to help to encourage webmasters to link to our site using our keywords. So webmasters tend to create links that use “Fido Finder – Where Lost Dogs are Found” as the anchor text – which helps to tell Google that Fido Finder is about “lost dogs.” Most developers believe that the number of inbound links with your keyword is the number one most important factor in your position in Google’s search engine results.

Heading Tags

Be sure to actually use H1/H2/H3 tags for headings of your page and include your keywords in these tags. You can use CSS to style the headings tags so that they don’t act quite as ridiculous (padding, etc) as the HTML specifications dictate. It is believed that Google looks for these tags and gives them weight when indexing a website.

Bold Text

Use the HTML bold tag around keywords within the text of your website. Again, it’s believed that Google looks for bold text to help determine important parts of a website.

Keyword Saturation

Be sure to use your keywords multiple times on your web pages. Don’t overdo it, but be sure to repeat your keywords on your site. On Fido Finder we continue to use the terms “lost dogs” and “found dogs” in places where we would more naturally just use the term “dogs.” But we want Google to be 100% sure that our site is not just about dogs, but lost and found dogs.