SEO can drive very meaningful traffic to your website, so being knowledgeable about where your site stands in the rankings and how to improve is like having a golden key for your business.
When it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization), there are no better-trusted services in the game than Moz.
Take it from us: just 4 months ago, we decided to get serious about boosting traffic to our blog by specifically focusing on SEO. We anchored our efforts around keyword research (utilizing a WordPress SEO plugin) backed by writing quality content.
The result? We more than doubled our blog traffic, with most of our articles ranking very well for the specific keywords that we targeted.
We were not using Moz at the time—boy, was that a mistake.
Once we set up our Moz Pro account and finished the crawl diagnostics, we were in shock.
There were so many small things we had completely missed: multiple crawl errors, warnings, and notices that were potentially affecting our blog. Without Moz, we would never have known these things needed fixing.
Spy on the competition
Not only does Moz provide an amazing diagnostic system to point out errors with your website, but they also provide a competitive link analysis tool that lets you compare your site to your competition.
You get an in-depth look at each and every one of your competitors, how they stack up against you, where their links are coming from, and much more.
If you’ve ever wondered, “how can we beat these guys?” Moz’s tools are the first step in the right direction.
Fresh Web Explorer
The tool in Moz’s arsenal that we found to be one of the most useful is their Fresh Web Explorer. Type in any term, and it will show you mentions of that term across the web.
For example, type in your business name, then type in a competitor’s name, and you can see a comparison of web mentions and exactly which websites are mentioning both.
This can be extremely helpful to see where your competitor may have the edge on you and how you can infiltrate that space.
Open Site Explorer
If you’ve ever wanted to analyze links to your website or your competitor’s site, then give the open site explorer a try.
With open site explorer, you can investigate your backlinks, anchor text, and even compare a whole slew of link metrics against your competition.
This really helped us to identify where we stand next to our competitors and what we can do to improve our overall linking strategy. Namely, we can leverage it to develop press in similar places to where our competitors are appearing.
Keyword & Ranking Tools
Ready to take the data you’ve gathered and use it to grow your business with SEO? Moz has a handful of useful tools for tweaking your content.
Rank Tracker
Curious as to where you are in the search engines for certain keywords? Type in your URL, as well as the keyword, and the rank tracker will show you where you sit in the rankings.
On-Page Grader
Optimizing your pages around the keywords you want to target is extremely important for SEO. Using the On-Page Grader, just enter your keyword with a URL, and it will measure how well your page is optimized for that particular keyword.
The best part is that it will also provide recommendations on how to further optimize the page.
Keyword Difficulty
Before considering ranking for a particular keyword, you’ll want to see how hard it is going to be to make a dent in the rankings.
With the keyword difficulty tool, you can type in a keyword, and it will give you an in-depth analysis of how difficult it is to rank for that particular keyword.
The Keyword Difficulty tool even provides a SERP report showing you the top ten results for your keyword, showing you who is already ranking for it and how high of an authority they may be.
This is helpful for figuring out whether you can break into the top 10.
We’re only a few weeks in, and there are a bunch of tools and resources that we have yet to dig into, but the value of Moz is just mind-boggling:
- We’re sweepstakes experts first and foremost, and our priority is making the best sweepstakes product out there. With Moz, we get actionable data and proven advice from the industry leader in SEO. This makes figuring out ViralSweep’s SEO easy for us.
- Spending time and money learning the ins and outs of SEO wouldn’t be a wise use of our resources. If we can trade a few dollars and save hours of our time every week for the same end product, we’ll make that trade every time.
- Even though Moz is focused on SEO, we can learn from the data provided and figure out who we should forge personal relationships with to help drive our business forward; for getting new press, creating new partnerships, or customer acquisition.
One portion of Moz that we get a great deal of value from is the blogs. The Blog section is free for anyone to read, and it is broken down into several segments:
- Moz Blog (posts written by members of the Moz team)
- YouMoz (posts written by members of the community)
- Rand’s Blog (posts written by the CEO).
The Moz blogs are worth a look. The value and knowledge that you gain from the information provided for free on the blog is just astounding, and I highly recommend checking it out.
60 Days Free of Moz Pro to Boost Your SEO
Just in case you’re still on the fence, we reached out to Moz to see if they’d be willing to give our readers a special freebie. They were very generous to agree to a free 60-day offer on their Moz Pro plan.
With Moz Pro, you get access to all the great tools mentioned above, plus the stuff we haven’t personally had a chance to dive into quite yet.
If you don’t find value from Moz within the first 60 days, you can easily cancel at any time.
If you’re like us and have been handling your SEO manually before, I suspect you’ll get hooked once you see how powerful and time-saving Moz’s tools are.
