Moz launches first-to-market metric: Q&A with its marketing scientist

This week Moz launched a first-to-market metric called Brand Authority at MozCon, allowing companies to measure the total brand strength of their domains in the market from a score of 1 to 100.

Brand Authority—available to all Moz Pro users and via the Moz API—allows companies to compare and analyze their value and growth potential so that they can make more informed decisions when considering important moves like sales prospects or merger and acquisition targets.

Brand Authority can help marketers and public relations professionals assess the impact of deployed campaigns by measuring the influence of brands that pick up their stories.

In this exclusive Q&A session, Dr. Peter J. Meyers, marketing scientist at Moz, reflects on the launch of Brand Authority and shares his invaluable insights into crafting SEO strategies that work.

Q. Can you share your insights on how brands can implement robust SEO and marketing strategies that effectively work? What key elements should businesses focus on to achieve success in their SEO efforts?

Dr. Peter J. Meyers: Put simply, effective search engine marketing focuses on meeting your target audience along their path. It’s easy to get hung up on impressions and clicks and ranking for vanity keywords, but successful SEO seeks out the people who already want to find your product or service and meets them halfway. This can happen anywhere along the customer journey, from showcasing your expertise and answering their early questions to building the trust that will drive a final decision further down the sales funnel.

Tactically, this means building a site that search engines can easily crawl and index, doing targeted keyword research to understand your audience’s questions, producing content to address those questions, and understanding your competitive search landscape (which may not always match your brick-and-mortar competitors). Products like Moz Pro can effectively support marketers with a suite of tools that include keyword research and analysis, competitor analysis, rank tracking, and reporting. In 2023, SEO is never one-and-done – it’s a process of tracking your progress and making incremental improvements.

Q. As a marketing scientist at Moz, you must have a unique perspective on the direction of the SEO and marketing industry. How do you foresee the industry evolving in the next few years, and what trends do you believe will have the most significant impact?

Meyers: There’s a lot of talk right now about the role of “AI” (in the form of Large Language Models), and while that world is evolving rapidly, it’s all part of a larger trend — search engines are getting better and better at understanding how people actually talk and how they ask questions. This is mostly good news, as we’re able to write like humans (and for humans).

This also means that search engines and SEOs have to be more aware of intent. The kind of marketing and content that serves us well for general questions (informational queries) vs. purchasing decisions (transactional queries) aren’t going to be the same. There’s also more matching of intent to formats — some searches are better suited to short answers, some to long answers, some to video or audio, some to ads and shopping results, etc. It’s important to track rich SERP features (including video) to best understand the kind of content Google is rewarding.

Q. Canadian businesses face fierce competition in the global market. How can businesses in Canada stay ahead of the game in terms of SEO and marketing to remain competitive? Are there any specific strategies or techniques you recommend?

Meyers: I think this really comes down to understanding your reach and being realistic about your target audience. Local search has changed a lot in the past decade — there’s a big difference between being a single-location coffee shop in Toronto vs. being Tim Hortons vs. being Starbucks. Just being online, even with e-commerce, doesn’t magically make every business global. Your reach starts with your existing customer base, whether that’s a neighbourhood, city, province, all of Canada, or all of North America. You have to build from that and recognize that the competition and the kind of content Google rewards can vary massively from region to region. Start where you are.

Q. When it comes to implementing SEO strategies, what are the most common mistakes that brands tend to make?

Meyers: SEO is a long game, and I think many common mistakes come down to shortcuts. Done right, SEO can be a flywheel — it takes a bit of time to build momentum, but that momentum is self-sustaining and can carry you through the ruts. People often get caught up in the ego of it, too, trying to rank for some vanity term or be a viral sensation for a day. SEO is marketing — it’s about meeting your customers on search where and when they’re trying to find you, not trying to manipulate them for a few clicks.

By Sydney Vardja, Editor of Marketing News Canada