SEO News

Posted by randfish

It’s probably crossed your mind before. Should you optimize for your competitors’ branded keywords? How would you even go about it effectively? Well, in today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains some carefully strategic and smart ways to optimize for the keywords of a competitor — from determining their worthiness, to properly targeting your funnel, to using third-party hosted content for maximum amplification.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat about optimizing for your competitors’ branded terms and phrases, the keywords that are your competitors’ product names or service names. This gets into a little bit of a dicey area. I think it’s challenging for a lot of SEO folks to do this and do it well, and so I’m going to take you through an approach that I’ve seen a lot of folks use with some success.

A strategic approach

So to start off with, let’s go to the strategy level. Is it actually the case — and sometimes it’s not, sometimes it is not the case — that branded keywords are driving high enough volume to actually be worth targeting? This is tough and frustrating, but basically one of the best thing that I can recommend in this case is to say, “Hey, if we are…”

I’m going to pretend for the purposes of this Whiteboard Friday that we’re all working together on the SEO campaigns for Wunderlist, which is a to-do app in the Google Play and iPhone app stores, bought by Microsoft I think a little while ago. Beautiful app, it looks really nice. One of their big competitors obviously is Evernote, certainly an indirect competitor but still.

Are branded keywords driving high enough volumes to be worthwhile?

Essentially what you might want to do here is actually go ahead and use AdWords to bid on some of these keywords and get a sense for how much traffic is really being driven. Can you draw any of that traffic away? Are people willing to consider alternatives? If there’s almost no willingness to consider alternatives — you can’t draw clicks here, you’re not getting any conversions, and it is the case that the volume is relatively low, not a lot of people are actually searching for Evernote, which is not the case, there are tons of people searching for Evernote and I’d probably tell Wunderlist they should go ahead. Evernote is actually bidding on Wunderlist’s terms, so turnabout is fair play. Bidding on AdWords can answer both of these questions. That can help them get us to:

What do you need to solve?

All right, now what is it that we need to solve? What are potential customers doing to compare our products or our services against these folks, and what are they interested in when they’re searching for these branded names? What makes them choose one versus another product?

Related searches can help us here, so too can normal forms of keyword research. So related searches is one form, but certainly I’d urge you to use search suggest, I’d urge you to check out Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool, if you like keywordtool.io or if you like Huballin or whatever it is that you think is a great keyword tool, check those out, go through those sources for your competitor’s keywords, see what’s coming up there, see what actually has some real volume. Obviously, your AdWords campaign where you bid on their branded terms can help tell you that too.

Then from there I’d go through the search results, and I’d see: What are people saying? What are the editorial reviews? For example, CNET did this Wunderlist review. What does their breakdown look like? What are people saying in forums? What are they saying on social media? What are they saying when they talk about this?

Ask the same questions of your competition

So if I’m seeing here’s what Wunderlist versus Evernote looks like, great. Now let me plug in Evernote and see what everyone’s saying about them. By the way, you don’t just have to use online research. You can go primary source on this stuff, too. Ask your customers or your audience directly through surveys. We’ve used here at Moz Google Custom Audience Surveys, and we’ve used SurveyMonkey Audience’s product. We like both of those.

Once you’ve got this down and you say, “Hey, you know what? We’ve got a strategic approach. We know what we need to talk about in terms of content. We know the keywords we’re targeting.” Great. Now you get to choose between two big options here — self-hosting some content that’s targeting these terms, or using third-party hosting.

Self-hosted content

With self-hosted content we’re going to try and go after those right terms and phrases. This is where I’ve seen some people get lost. They essentially go too high or too low in the funnel, not targeting that sweet spot right in the middle.

1. Target the right terms & phrases

So essentially, if someone’s searching for “Evernote review,” the intent there is that they’re trying to evaluate whether Evernote is good. Yeah, you know what? That’s right in the middle. That’s right in the sweet spot, I would say that is a good choice for you targeting your competitors’ keywords, anything around reviews.

“Evernote download,” however, that’s really at the bottom of the funnel. They’re trying to install at that point. I don’t think I’d tell you to go after those keywords. I don’t think I’d bid on them, and I don’t think I’d create content based on that. An Evernote download, that’s a very transactional, direct kind of search. I’d cross that one off my list. “How to use Evernote,” well, okay that’s post-installation probably, or maybe it’s pre-installation. But it’s really about learning. It’s about retaining and keeping people. I’d probably put that in the no bucket as well most of the time. “Evernote alternative,” obviously I’m targeting “Evernote alternative.” That is a great search phrase. That’s essentially asking me for my product. “What is Evernote,” well okay, that’s very top-of-funnel. Maybe I’d think about targeting some content like, “What do apps like Evernote, Todoist and Wunderlist do?” Okay. Yeah, maybe I’m capturing all three of those in there. So I’d put this as a maybe. Maybe I’d go after that.

Just be careful because if you go after the wrong keywords here, a lot of your efforts can fail just because you’re doing poor keyword targeting.

2. Craft content that delivers a superior user experience

Second is you need to craft that content that’s going to deliver a superior user experience. You’re essentially trying to pull someone away from the other search results and say, “Yeah, it was worth it to scroll down.

It was worth it to click and to do the research and to check out the review or check out the alternative.” Therefore, you need something that has a lot of editorial integrity. You need that editorial integrity. You can’t just be a, “Everything about them is bad. Everything about us is great. Check out why we kick their butt six ways from Sunday.” It’s just not going to be well-perceived.

You need to be credible to that audience. To do that, I think what’s smart is to make your approach the way you would approach it as if you were a third-party reviewer. In fact, it can even pay in some cases to get an external party to do the comparison review and write the content for you. Then you’re just doing the formatting. That way it becomes very fair. Like, “Hey, we at Wunderlist thought our product compared very well to Evernote’s. So we hired an outside expert in this space, who’s worked with a bunch of these programs, to review it and here’s his review. Here are his thoughts on the subject.”

Awesome. Now you’ve created some additional credibility in there. You’re hosting it on your site. It’s clearly promoting you, but it has some of that integrity.

I would do things like I’d think about key differentiators. I’d think about user and editorial review comparisons. So if you can go to the app stores and then collect all the user reviews or collect a bunch of user reviews and synchronize those for folks to compare, check out the editorial reviews — CNET has reviewed both of these. The Verge has reviewed both of these. A bunch of other sites have reviewed both of them. Awesome. Let’s do a comparison of the editorial reviews and the ratings that these products got.

“Choose X if you need…” This is where you essentially say, “If you’re doing this, well guess what? We don’t do it very well. We’d suggest you use Evernote instead. But if you’re doing this, you know what? Wunderlist is generally perceived to be better and here’s why.” That’s a great way to do it. Then you might want to have that full-feature comparison breakdown. Remember that with Google’s keyword targeting and with their algorithms today they’re looking for a lot of that deep content, and you can often rank better if you include a lot more of those terms and phrases about what’s inside the products.

3. Choose a hosted location that doesn’t compromise your existing funnel

This is rarely done, but sometimes folks will put it on their main homepage of their website or in their navigation. That’s probably not ideal. You probably want to keep it one step away from the primary navigation flow around your site.

You could conceivably host it in your blog. You could make it something where you say, “Hey, do you want to see comparisons? Or do you want to see product reviews?” Then we’re going to link to it from that page. But I wouldn’t put it in the primary funnel.

3rd-party hosted content

Third-party hosted content is another option, and I’ve seen some folks do this particularly well recently. Guest content is one way to do that. You could do that. You could pay someone else, that professional reviewer and say, “Hey, we want to pitch this professional reviewer comparing our product against someone else’s to these other outlets.”

Sometimes there are external reviewers who if you just ask them, if you just say, “Hey we have a new product or we have a competing product. We think it compares favorably. Would you do a review?” A lot of the time if you’re in the right kind of space, people will just say, “Yeah, you know what? I’ll put that on my schedule because I think that can send me some good traffic, and then we’ll let you know.” You kind of knock on wood and hope you get a favorable review there. You could contribute it to a discussion forum. Just be open and honest and transparent about who you are and what you’re doing there.

Native ads

Today you can do sponsored content or what’s called native ad content, where essentially you’re paying another site to host it. Usually, there’s a bunch of disclosure requirements around that, but it can work and sometimes that content can even rank well and earn links and all that kind of stuff.

Promotion & amplification

For promotion and amplification of this content, it’s a little trickier than it is with your average content because it’s so adversarial in nature. The first people I would always talk to are your rabid loyal fans. So if you know you’ve got a community of people who are absolutely super-passionate about this, you can say, “Hey, guess what? We released our comparison, or we released this extra review comparison of our product versus our competitor’s today. You can check it out here.”

You can pitch that to influencers and pundits in your space, definitely letting them know, “Hey, here’s this comparison. Tell us if you think we were honest. Tell us if you think this is accurate. Tell us if this reflects your experience.” Do the same thing with industry press. Your social audiences are certainly folks that you could talk to.

Give them a reason to come back

One of the key ones that I think gets too often ignored is if you have users who you know have gone through your signup flow or have used your product but then left, this is a great chance to try and earn their business back, to say, “Hey, we know that in the past you gave Wunderlist a try. You left for one reason or another. We want you to see how favorably we compare to our next biggest competitor in the space.” That can be a great way to bring those people back to the site.

Consult your legal team

Last thing, very important. Make sure, when you’re creating this type of content, that you talk to your legal professional. It is the case that sometimes using terms and phrases, trademarked words, branded words, has some legal implications. I am not a legal professional. You can’t ask me that question, but you can definitely ask your lawyer or your legal team, and they can advise you what you can and cannot do.

All right, everyone. Hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we will see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by SarahBird

Longstanding insomnia sufferers, rejoice! My Moz 2015 Annual Report is here. Check out 2012, 2013, and 2014 if you’re a glutton for punishment.

So much happens in a year — fantastic and terrible things — distilling it into one blog post is my annual albatross.

Here’s me agonizing over what to write. It’s not always good to be king.

Alright. Enough wallowing in self pity.

Here’s how I’m organizing this post so you can jump around to whatever strikes your fancy:

Part 1: tl;dr 2015 was a strengthening year!

Part 2: Two 2015 strategic shifts

Part 3: Two invisible achievements

Part 4: The tough stuff

Part 5: Inside Moz HQ

Part 6: Performance (metrics vomit)

Part 7: The Series C and looking ahead

[Part 1]

tl;dr: 2015 was a strengthening year!

2015 was a strengthening year. We grew customers, revenue, and product offerings. We also began some major tech investments that will continue to pay off in the years ahead.

With all the product launches comes increased opportunity in 2016, and also increased complexity. In the year ahead, you’ll see Moz delivering much more personalized onboarding, re-working the brand to accommodate our product families, changing up our customer acquisition flow, and investing in technologies and practices to speed up product development.

[Part 2]

Two 2015 major strategic shifts

First, instead of a one-size-fits-all product, we’re offering many crafted customer experiences.

The most visible strategic change is the move away from cramming every feature into one product; instead, we’re offering products designed to help specific kinds of customers with their particular needs. Our community and customers are diverse. The solutions we offer should be too.

We started 2015 with Moz Pro, Moz Local and our API business. We’re ending the year with two new products under out belt, Moz Content and Followerwonk. Pro will continue to evolve in 2016 to focus on professional SEOs. Moz Local just launched a major upgrade to its offering, making it the most useful way to manage your local SEO. Content marketers will love Moz Content’s new features. And social fanatics will enjoy analyzing their followers and fans with Followerwonk.

Why did we back away from all-in-one? Well. We discovered that adding more features into a product isn’t always better. Sometimes it’s just more. We heard from customers that they valued certain parts of the product that solved their problem, but weren’t interested in the others.

More simply, we built one product that many different kinds of customers could get a little benefit from. Instead, we want to build many products that customers get a lot out of. Even more simply, we won’t give each of our customers identical plates of food with lots of small bites, only 30% of which each enjoys. We’re giving everyone a big plate of their favorite food. Yum.

Second, people sometimes really want to talk to other people. And that’s good.

We’ve also relaxed our religious fervor about keeping humans out of the sales and onboarding process. We prided ourselves for years on dogmatically proclaiming that only bad products need human intervention. “The product should sell itself and be obvious to use,” we insisted.

We [I] clung to this belief in the face of overwhelming feedback from our customers that they would love to have more interaction with Mozzers.

I’m finally ready to let go of my belief that wanting to speak with a human is a failure in the system. We should give our customers what they want. Guess what? They sometimes want sales people, and personal onboarding and training.

We will not resort to barfy tactics like high pressure sales, harassment, and limit self-service. But maybe, just maybe, the world isn’t so black and white as humans=bad, computers=good.

Expect more opportunities to engage with real, live, bona-fide Mozzers as part of your product experience, should you need us.

[Part 3]

Two invisible accomplishments

Not all of our big 2015 accomplishments are transparent to customers or the community. They’re important nonetheless.

The fance-pantsiest new engineering platform

We knew that to out-innovate our competitors and make marketing easier for our customers in this dynamic environment, we needed a step-function improvement in our ability to experiment and innovate.

We were inspired by compelling new development platforms built and tested at places like Google, Hubspot, and Twitter. They simplified the software development process without compromising security or performance.

RogerOS is our new engineering platform. It’s based on the Mesos kernel with a marathon wrapper. Moz Content was built 100% on it, so the two innovations incubated and launched together last year. More Moz services are starting to move to it.

In the spirit of generosity, we open sourced a big chunk of our work and look forward to contributing more in the future. We’ve still got a lot of work to do to make the platform more robust and we’ll continue these efforts in 2016.

The platform is poised to deliver the step function increase in innovation. Because a bigger, more complex Moz shouldn’t mean slower.

Kissing bad architecture goodbye

Technical debt is the worst. Ugh. It’s demotivating for the team and siphons cycles away from innovation. It’s hard on customers because feature delivery stalls when you’re keeping a fragile system from imploding.

Our Moz Pro product was hobbled with some serious tech debt. The team spent months trying to keep it up. Customers were disappointed and the team was tired. We needed a plan to fix it that didn’t involve a highly risky 18-month rebuild.

Luckily, one of our engineers had an epiphany, and a bunch of other engineers worked very hard to turn that epiphany into a workable plan that delivered feature improvements (not just parity!) while retiring painful tech debt in seven months. That’s way, way better than the dreaded 18 month slog.

We have massively transformed the backend architecture for Moz Analytics. This frees up cycles for innovation and unlocks a bunch of latent potential in the data. It feels like we were running a race in a cast and crutches, and now finally our leg is free! We’re throwing those crutches to the sideline and sprinting. Here we come!

[Part 4]

The tough stuff

Have you noticed how many year-in-review posts skip the tough stuff? I don’t want to do that. After all, a lot of this year’s tough stuff become next year’s strategic initiative.

The marketing software space is getting crowded. It’s no secret that companies need to transform their marketing to match the new ways people discover, engage, and buy.

The spigot of investor cash has been flowing fast and free into marketing tech for last couple years. We’re definitely seeing more competition in the market.

To our competitors: We Salute You!

You keep good pressure on us to innovate and deliver a great experience for good value.

Moz is ahead in some areas and lagging in others. We’ve struggled to keep our link data reliable and we have to play catch up on the size and quality of our index. We’ve been very weak on keyword research, and will be remedying that in 2016. Our customer acquisition flow and brand is also way more complicated than it was a mere two months ago. We’ll be investing heavily in optimizing and improving this experience so it’s easier to find what you’re looking for.

These challenges are non-trivial, and yet invigorating. We’ve got the best people on the planet at Moz and we’ve been making forward-thinking tech investments. It’s game on in 2016.

[Part 5]

Inside Moz HQ

Amidst all of the shifts and changes, some things remain constant.

TAGFEE remains our aspiration and our compass. As an organization, as people, we often have great integrity with our values. We also have moments of failure.

But what makes Moz special is not the absence of flaws, or the TAGFEE page on the website; it’s the genuine commitment to those values. The pursuit is relentless.

I don’t know anyone who is perfect. The people I admire most are those that strive for excellence when they fail; they pick themselves up and keep trying. They never give up the commitment to their values. Mozzers are like that.

We’ve got 192 Mozzers now, up from last year’s number of 149.

This year, we’ve done a lot of good work on teaching Mozzers learning about productive conflict, feedback, and inclusion in tech. We’re not done, but we’ve made an earnest start.

Our gender diversity numbers are still terrible, but at least we’re headed in the right direction. Overall, we’re 40% women, up from 37% last year. We’re up to 27% in engineering. 54% of non-engineering roles are women.

A lot of the work we’re doing to make the tech industry more inclusive doesn’t benefit Moz directly, but we’re still happy to do it. For example, we partner with lots of programs to bring middle and high school girls on tours of Moz HQ and encourage them to consider careers in STEM — maybe even start their own business someday. Several Moz engineers volunteer at coding schools, like ADA Academy, mentoring and welcoming underrepresented people to tech careers. We’re also partnering with Year Up to give underserved young adults meaningful careers.

Our charity match program continues to be one of my most proud parts of Moz. Last year we donated over $110k to charities that Mozzers are passionate about. We match every Mozzer donation 150%.

Our paid, PAID vacation program continues to be a high point for all Mozzers.

Last year, Moz spent over $400k on airfare, hotels, tours, food, boats, and life-changing, memory-making experiences for Mozzers.

That’s money well spent on lives well lived.

Lastly, we reached a milestone so wonderful, I’m having a hard time expressing how it makes me feel. Two Mozzers, who didn’t know each other when they started working here, fell in love and are getting married. We made a whole family!!!

[Part 6]

Performance (metrics vomit!)

2015 was a strong improvement over 2014 revenue growth rate. We finished the year at about ~$38 million in revenue. That’s a growth rate of 21.6%, compared to the 5.7% the year prior.

Moz Pro still drives the majority of revenue, and Moz Local has demonstrated impressive growth.

Product gross profit margin fared well this year at 76%. That’s basically holding steady from last year. If you throw non-product in there, overall gross profit margin is 73%.

Total Cost of Revenue (COR) went up a little bit from last year. Most of the cost driven by increases in the amounts we pay to our data aggregator partners for Moz Local. We expect this to grow even more in 2016 as Local becomes a bigger share of our product mix.

Total operating expenses came to $36.4 million dollars in 2015 (excluding CORs). The basic shape of that spend has remained pretty constant. The vast, vast majority of our company spend is people. No major shifts in spending trends from 2014 to 2015 other than increased 3rd Party Data.

As planned, our EBITDA loss increased from last year to -$3.1 million.

Cash burn was slightly above our 10% of revenue plan, but we were pretty darn close at 11%.

Adam shared a detailed reflection of changes and upgrades to Moz Pro in 2015. I encourage you to check it out. Those changes are attracting a slightly different customer. The number of new Moz Pro customers we’re acquiring is much lower than in previous years, but our average revenue per user is increasing. We’re also keeping customers longer. Obviously, we’d love to add tons of new Pro customers *and* increase Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). We’ll be putting energy into that in 2016.

Moz Local locations more than doubled in 2015. And we’re very excited to see how customers are enjoying the big Moz Local Insights release we released this week. It’s only been 24 hours, but initial response is very good.

Organic traffic grew in 2015 by 16.7%. We hit just shy of 16 million organic visits.

You can read a bunch about the community we host here on Moz.com from this post.

Our external communities continued to grow. We did, however, decide to stop investing in the LinkedIn group in 2015 in favor of Instagram.

[Part 7]

The Series C and looking ahead

I wrote last week about closing our Series C. (BTW, did you notice the public markets for SaaS companies nose-dived soon after? Phew! If you’re reading this, we love you Foundry!)

We made big investments and placed some big bets in 2015. It’s so exciting to see them start to bear fruit. In the next 12 months, you should see (1) more feature releases, (2) more personal interaction with the Moz team when buying and using our products, and (3) increased clarity on our brand and customer acquisition flows.

Thanks for sharing your feedback, sticking with us, and rooting for us. We’ll keep trying to make great stuff that helps you do your job better, and bring a smile to your day!

Okay. And that’s a wrap on your 2015 Annual Report. Peace out.

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Posted by adamf

2015 was very much a rebuilding year for Moz Pro. We entered last year with some core infrastructure problems, and so worked heavily on less visible projects to make our SEO software faster, more reliable, and more polished. Still, on top of everything, we were able to add a host of new features and make some major design improvements.

The great news for 2016? A lot of that core infrastructure work is done or near completion. With this foundation in place, we’re going to seriously level up key sections of Moz Pro, like rank tracking, keyword research, site audits, and crawls. Expect to see some of these improvements as soon as next week!

If you’re a Moz Pro customer, or just interested in where we’ve been and where we’re going with our SEO product (hint, hint, we offer a free trial if you’re curious), give this post a read. I’ll cover the following:

• Key updates from 2015
• Moz Pro’s renewed focus on SEO
• Some improvements in store for 2016

Key updates from 2015

Link data and analysis

Spam Score

This new metric helps SEOs identify spammy links for the purposes of assessing risky link profiles, performing link cleanup, and evaluating link targets. To learn all about Spam Score and how to apply it, check out Rand’s excellent Whiteboard Friday on the topic.

Spam Score is available in Open Site Explorer, the MozBar, and through our Mozscape API.

Spam Score in OSE

Spam Score in the MozBar

Link building opportunities

Finding high-value link targets is challenging work, so we added some powerful new features to Open Site Explorer early in 2015 to surface those hard-to-find opportunities that are most relevant for your site. You’ll find three views in the Link Opportunities section of OSE.

• Reclaim Links: Find pages with link equity that are broken or blocked
• Unlinked Mentions: Find fresh content that mentions your site or brand, but doesn’t link back to you
• Link Intersect: Find links that related or competitive sites have, but that you don’t

We now surface unlinked mentions in your campaigns, too!

The Mozscape index

I won’t sugarcoat it: it was a rough year for our link index. We ran into some infrastructure issues that led to delays, outages, and inconsistencies. The good news? We’ve added reinforcements to the team and the infrastructure to keep our core index running smoothly. We are dedicated to improving our index quality, stability, and consistency in 2016.

Keyword rankings

From mobile rankings to search visibility to a complete UX refresh, we made some significant updates to campaign rankings data in 2015.

Mobile rankings

Last year, Google made it no secret they would take mobile seriously. They added mobile friendliness to their ranking factors, so we added it to our rank tracking. You can now track mobile rankings for Google, compare them to desktop rankings, and see which pages Google considers mobile-friendly.

We also added an extra engine to all campaigns allowing you to collect mobile rankings for every keyword you already track! Effectively, we added 25% more rankings collections to your account for free!

Search Visibility

Along with mobile, we added a new way to understand your rankings—our new Search Visibility Score. You can easily see how visible your ranking pages are across all of the keywords you track. Tying this together with mobile rankings lets you see if your site’s mobile device compatibility may be affecting how you rank.

Local rankings

Last, but certainly not least, we completed a lot of the work to support Local Rankings in January of 2015. This robust addition offers the capability to not only track your rankings nationally, but also see how Google rankings appear in specific areas within a country. If location matters for your business, this feature can really help you understand and measure your local SEO visibility.

Page optimization

In 2015 we completely revamped our on-page optimization section of Moz Analytics, offering more accurate scores, updated advice, real-world usage examples, and a more elegant and intuitive design.

Precise scores & better advice

We eliminated letter grades from Page Optimization reports in favor of numerical scores. Scores of 0–100 are more precise than letter grades, and are more universally understood. We also updated relative weighting of page optimization criteria and incorporated updated advice from top SEOs to provide clear, relevant, practical optimization suggestions.

Improved workflow

We also made some big improvements to the on-page optimization workflow, adding a brand new page for you to track, monitor, and report on just the pages that you are actively optimizing. We’ve also improved our optimization suggestions, and put them into a separate Discover tab.

Other notable improvements

Multi-user support

We released our first version of Multiseat this past summer, which allows you to create extra logins and share access to your Moz Pro account with your team or clients. This was our most requested feature ever, and a feature we were keen to build for a long time. Multiseat turned out to be a surprisingly complex project, and required a coordinated effort across a bunch of teams to build out the infrastructure and make this feature a reality.

Improvements to campaign insights

Campaign insights highlight meaningful changes, help you quickly identify issues, and uncover opportunities to improve a site you’re actively optimizing. On top of significant performance improvements, we added new insights, a cleaner, more readable style, and even the ability to export insights to Trello.

New Pro homepage

This simplified page makes it easier to find and access the tools and services included with your Pro subscription.

Lots and lots of other updates and fixes

If you are interested in all of the details, we added a What’s New page with a more detailed chronology of updates, both big and small.

Moz Pro focus for 2016

2016 is the year that Moz Pro refocuses completely on SEO. We’ve diverted our focus in the past, adding peripherally relevant features to Moz Pro, only to find that customers didn’t value them and that we’d spread ourselves too thin.

As a company, Moz has honed its strategy, breaking into smaller teams that can each maniacally focus on the primary needs of their customers. This means that our very driven and talented Moz Pro product and engineering teams will get to focus their time, energy, and ingenuity in these areas:

• Rank Tracking
• Keyword research
• Site audits and optimization
• Link analysis and acquisition
• Great workflow to tie these together

As always, we will strive to provide the best data and metrics possible to help you evaluate, understand, and improve your search engine presence.

A sneak peek at some upcoming releases and improvements

I’m excited to share some of what we have in store for 2016! Our talented engineers, product managers, and SEO experts, along with some exceptionally helpful customers, have collaborated to dream up some big things for the coming year. Expect powerful new data sets, more intuitive workflows, and big improvements to core parts of the Pro subscription. Here’s a preview some of the big things coming your way in the next few months.

Keyword Explorer

This audacious effort has been some time in the making, and a significant passion project for Rand. We’re really looking to make this keyword research tool stand out in the market, so while we already have a working version, we’re still vetting it with our beta testers and adding the final touches so that it can be as powerful and easy to use as possible.

Rand shared a sneak peek at the tool a short while back:

Making progress every day on our new Keyword Explorer. Should be beta testing soon & launching in Q1. pic.twitter.com/sRJNImCoCf

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) January 8, 2016

Rankings history, advanced filtering, and snappier data

At its face, unlimited rankings history doesn’t sound that groundbreaking. That’s because it isn’t. It’s a feature we’ve wanted to offer for some time, but couldn’t due to the limitations of our application’s architecture. Those limitations are history. We’ve invested in a completely redesigned, highly scalable infrastructure that allows us to unleash the entire history of your data, and make it viewable, manipulable, filterable, exportable, and much faster to load.

This will also allow us to build in some more powerful features in the near future, making rankings much more usable if you track a lot of keywords. We are officially launching this update next week, but the engineering team was a little impatient — and so we quietly launched these improvements today. If you’re already a Moz Pro customer, go to your campaign rankings page to see these updates right now!

Related Topics

Along with keyword research, topical analysis and optimization has become an important focus for SEOs. Moz’s Data Science team has built out a great service to analyze and extract topics from any page on the Web. We will soon offer this service in Moz Analytics campaigns to help you discover topically-related keywords based on competitors in the SERP. Adding these keywords to your pages can help search engines identify your pages’ topic and intent, and help you rank for a broader set of queries.

Site crawl and auditing

This update is still in the very early stages, but expect to see some big improvements in site crawl performance and features in the first half of this year.

Bigger, more frequent, and more reliable link index updates

This is a significant priority for this year. We’ve already made some important progress, but there’s still much to do.

And much more

We plan to really beef things up this year. Some features are still in the planning phase, and some are just raw ideas at this point. We will be sharing updates frequently.

In conclusion: Thank you!

Moz is nothing without all of you, our amazing customers and community. Thank you for continuing to engage, be critical, send praise, divulge your best tactics, share lessons from defeats, help strangers, and make new friends. Thank you for being transparent, authentic, generous, fun, empathetic, and exceptional. We will always strive to do the same.

PS: Please keep letting us know what you need

One more thing before I sign off — please, continue to share your feature requests and frustrations with us so we can improve Moz Pro and build the things you need most.

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