Last month, 766 of our readers took a few minutes to tell us what they thought of the Moz Blog. We were absolutely blown away by the quality of the feedback we got, and we’re excited to share what we learned with all of you.
You told us you’re squeezed for time in a constantly changing “need-it-yesterday” world. You told us you’re sick of “ultimate guides,” and that you’re (for the most part) already well versed in the basics of SEO, and are craving more advanced tips, tricks, and tactics. You told us that content marketing and data analysis are two areas where you could use some help.
We hear you.
The rest of what you told us can be found below, and we’ll be incorporating these takeaways into our planning for the Moz Blog over the coming months. The entire set of results is available as a Google Spreadsheet—if you’re interested, please feel free to make a copy. If you learn anything beyond what we show here, please let us know!
Your job titles
One of the things we’ve wondered as we’ve made the transition from SEOmoz to Moz is whether our audience would begin to include a greater number of people from outside the world of SEO. As Rand explained so well, we can’t just be SEOs anymore. So, we did what anyone would do—we tossed all of your job titles into a word cloud.
Two things are immediately obvious:
- SEO is still a huge part of what you all do, as it’s the largest word in this cloud
- Given how large the word “marketing” is, there are also quite a few of you whose jobs likely include many other aspects, as well.
It’d be interesting to see how this cloud changed over time. Would those two words be similar in size six months from now? A year? Time will tell, but for now, our best course of action might be the T-shaped approach. Lots of advanced depth in SEO, combined with enough depth in other areas to make sure everyone’s up to speed with the changes in the industry.
Your experience
Along the same lines, as our audience continues to expand and the Beginner’s Guide to SEO continues to be our most successful piece of content, we wanted to know how experienced our readers were in their lines of work. As it turns out, we have a pretty good spread:
Your level of SEO expertise
It’s no secret that Moz’s background revolved around SEO, and so it comes as no surprise that most of our readers consider their SEO skills to be pretty advanced. On a scale of 1-5, 86% of respondents rated their SEO expertise a 3 or better, and 14% labeled themselves “industry experts.” Given people’s natural inclination to choose responses toward the middle of a scale like this (central tendency bias), we might even have more industry experts than these results show.
Still, there are a significant number of readers who are relatively new to SEO, so one of our challenges is to find the right line between basic and advanced SEO content.
One of the ideas we’re considering is implementing more of what I call “pre-read transparency,” making it easier to get a feel for what a post is about and whether it’s relevant for you before you even start reading it. If done well, this could save our readers valuable time and make it easier to find additional reading that’s relevant to your work. (If you’ve got ideas on ways to make that happen, we’d love to hear about them in the comments!)
How much SEO?
At the same time, 45% of respondents said they spend less than half of their time doing SEO work. More than 20% said they spend less than a fifth of their time on SEO. There are some blurry lines here, for sure (how much of your day-to-day would you need to spend on SEO before you considered yourself an expert?), but our read is that even the people who have the most expertise in SEO are finding themselves doing more and more work outside of that area.
Your greatest challenges
This was one of the more telling sets of responses we received. Our primary goal with the Moz Blog is to help you all become better marketers, and in order to do that, we need to know what you all need help with. This was a text-entry question; people could write as much or as little about their challenges as they pleased. We noted recurring issues in the responses, and tallied every distinct mention of each of those issues.
Some issues might seem like they overlap, but we think this paints a pretty clear picture of what our readers are struggling with in today’s world of marketing:
| Challenge | # mentions | |
| 1. | Changing industry | 93 |
| 2. | Content marketing | 70 |
| 3. | Clients/customers misunderstand my work | 67 |
| 4. | Time management | 52 |
| 5. | Politics and buy-in | 43 |
| 6. | Too much to learn and keep track of | 40 |
| 7. | Link building and maintenance | 39 |
| 8. | Measurement and analysis | 38 |
| 9. | Google and the algorithm | 32 |
| 10. | Limited budget/resources | 29 |
| 11. | Ranking | 28 |
| 12. | Managing people and relationships | 24 |
| 13. | Clients/customers are difficult | 23 |
| 14. | Social media integration and management | 23 |
| 15. | Strategy and goals | 22 |
| 16. | Reporting | 21 |
| 17. | Branding | 17 |
| 18. | Understanding SEO | 16 |
| 19. | Conversion rate | 16 |
| 20. | Competition | 14 |
We all work in a rapidly changing industry, and even the experts are constantly having to learn new techniques. One of our primary jobs involves not only informing you of those changes, but also offering recommendations on how you might adapt your work. We’ll continue to seek out the best advice in that respect.
Content marketing is obviously an essential field for today’s marketers, and there are relatively few good resources for people looking to improve their own content skills. We hope to bring you more posts to fill that niche and help you level-up.
There were also quite a few responses having to do with workplace productivity: time management, effective communication, and finding ways to convey the value of our work to clients and customers. These are areas we haven’t covered much on the Moz Blog, but are vitally important for effective marketers. Look for more of these posts in the future.
Your reading style
What we were really trying to get at here was how long we felt comfortable making posts (we’ve had a few doozies in our time). Given that nearly two-thirds of our readers try to go for the entire post (and yet only have so much time on their hands), we’re likely to try and keep things compendious so we don’t scare folks away from even starting in.
This also suggests that we shouldn’t worry quite so much about the inverted pyramid, since people generally tend to keep reading anyway, though in our minds that doesn’t hold a candle to Strunk and White’s age-old advice to “omit needless words.” =)
The devices you prefer
This was a shocker for us. One of the items that has remained on our back burner for some time is creating a more mobile-friendly responsive site, especially for the blog, and we wanted to know how much of a priority it was for all of you. With mobile devices now accounting for 28% of all web traffic, we figured this was a high priority for our readership. Boy, were we wrong:
More than 92% of respondents listed “laptop/desktop” as at least one of their preferred devices; fewer than 8% left the “laptop/desktop” option unchecked.
One of the most interesting comments on the survey’s blog post alluded to the idea that this could simply be a result of what people are used to, not what their preferences actually are, since many blogs (our own included) still lack responsive design. That’s something we’ll absolutely work on when we can, but at the same time, these numbers are so wildly skewed toward reading on computers that we feel pretty safe taking care of other priorities first.
Relevancy to your work
This might be more of a baseline to work from than a real metric of how we’re already doing, but we were certainly pleased to see this curve leaning to the right:
We’re planning on diving a little deeper into the data for this one, too. In a sense, the data behind this graph can provide us with a rudimentary content audit. We can look at the people who landed toward the top of this graph, and figure we’re providing plenty of content that’s relevant to their lines of work. We can also look at the people at the bottom of this graph and know we’re missing the mark for them.
As a whole, though, it’s certainly encouraging to see that most people find the majority of the posts on the Moz Blog to be pretty relevant. We’ll likely conduct another (perhaps shorter) survey in a year or so in order to measure progress against data like this.
Accessibility
One debate we have frequently in the Mozplex is whether our posts are appropriately accessible. In other words, are people bored because they’re not learning anything they don’t already know? Or, are they confused because our posts go right over their heads?
Our customer mentor, Matt Roney, has done some fantastic work with Moz Analytics subscribers, and has found out that many people seem to be confused by the complexity of web marketing, and thereby of our tools. That made us wonder if folks were generally confused by our posts, as well.
As it turns out, most of our audience finds the balance to be about right:
One interesting note is that there are significantly more people who think posts are too basic than folks who think they’re too advanced, confounding our expectation based on Matt’s interactions.
Also interesting is the degree to which people find posts too basic or advanced. We asked respondents who chose “too basic” to rate just how basic they were on a scale of 1-5, and asked a similar question for people who chose “too advanced.” The average score for people who thought it was too basic was 2.7—right at the middle of the scale—and the average score for people who thought it was too advanced was 3.6—much higher on the scale. This implies that our beginner-level readers are more lost than our advanced readers are bored.
There’s a great solution to this, which is to offer help to beginner-level readers on the more advanced posts. Perhaps this comes in the form of tool tips with explanations and definitions of more advanced concepts. Maybe it’s a couple of links in the sidebar that lead to relevant “background content,” such as a chapter in the Beginner’s Guide to SEO. Whatever the case, we’re likely to lean just a little in the advanced direction while also offering beginners a way to catch up quickly.
Room for improvement
We asked you all an open-ended question about what you’d like to see different about the Moz Blog. We coded and tallied mentions of each request, and we have to say we’re pretty happy with the #1 response:
| Feedback | # mentions | |
| 1. | Nothing | 103 |
| 2. | More tutorials, how-tos, and action-oriented posts | 44 |
| 3. | More case studies | 39 |
| 4. | More video/multimedia content | 32 |
| 5. | More advanced posts | 23 |
| 6. | Need to branch out from SEO | 20 |
| 7. | Needs to be more accessible to beginners/non-SEOs | 17 |
| 8. | Needs better categorization/navigation | 16 |
| 9. | Post more frequently | 15 |
| 10. | Shorter posts | 14 |
| 11. | Posts should be more data-driven/scientific | 13 |
| 12. | Posts need more variety | 13 |
| 13. | Needs mobile-friendly/responsive design | 12 |
| 14. | More from Rand | 11 |
| 15. | Needs more varied pool of authors | 11 |
There’s a lot of other great feedback in here, too, including a confirmation of your desire to see more tutorials, case studies, and action-oriented posts that keep you on top of your game. There was also an echo of the call for more advanced posts.
More than 30 people requested an increase in posts that include videos, with many of those expressing an appreciation for Whiteboard Friday. While we’re pretty happy with just one Whiteboard post each week, there’s something to be said for finding other ways to present video content, as there are a great many examples of successful educational videos. We’ve even begun offering our own educational videos to subscribers through Moz Academy. This is an area ripe for further exploration.
Oh, and for the 11 folks who asked for more from Rand, you may get your wish before long. =)
Topics
This was one of the most interesting sets of results for us. We asked about which topics you’d like to learn more about, hoping to gain some direct insight into the most valuable things we could post about on the blog. Respondents could select as many of these options as they liked. As you might guess, advanced SEO came out on top, with nearly 3/4 of responses selecting that option.
If we didn’t already have enough evidence that content marketing was at the forefront of people’s minds, this speaks for itself:
We were also interested to see how high data analysis ranked on this list, although with the volume of data we all deal with on a regular basis, there’s no real surprise. The ability to transform information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom is vital for today’s marketers, and we’ll do everything we can to equip you all for the task.
We’ll use these responses (among other things) as a guide for the distribution of topics we post on the blog. It won’t be an exact science—you won’t see exactly 73 posts out of every 100 covering advanced SEO—but you can expect we’ll post more about advanced SEO than we do about paid search marketing or community management, and so forth.
We’ll also work hard to draw connections between these categories, realizing that it’s impossible to silo them all away from one another. Social media is heavily connected to branding, for example, and video marketing is simply a specific type of content marketing. We’ll use what we know about your day-to-day work as a foundation, and show you what you need to know about the other areas in this list.
Types of posts
Make no mistake, we will never title any blog post “The Ultimate Guide to ___” again. =)
This is no typo or data entry error—out of the 749 people who answered this question, not a single one indicated they wanted to see more “ultimate guides” on the blog.
We’ve talked about this quite a bit in the office, and our theory is that it is always a false promise. There’s no ultimate guide to anything (in any sense of the word). There are really good guides, and there are some that many people will consider the best available—but if someone else put in enough effort, they could certainly make a better guide.
One of the many (many) lessons I’ve learned from Cyrus Shepard is that headlines are a promise to the readers. If what’s behind the headline doesn’t live up to that promise, you’ve lied about what you have, and are breaking the hard-earned trust you’ve built with them over time.
We also think that while some “ultimate guides” are impressive (and are widely shared as a result), they’re usually far too long to actually read through right away. Given the well established lack of time that folks in our industry have, these posts often get pocketed indefinitely, undermining their true value.
That isn’t the only useful part of these responses, though—it’s quite clear that the most valuable posts we can give you all are those that contain truly actionable content. It isn’t about inspiration as much as it is about helping you stay ahead of industry changes, and showing you step-by-step how to be more effective and efficient with your work. You can expect to see more tutorials and case studies as time goes on.
Now we go to work. Thanks to all of you, we have a great sense for what kinds of content we should seek out in order to provide the most value for you.
Here’s a run-down of some of our biggest takeaways:
- While our readers are increasingly focusing on other areas of marketing, the foundation of their work still lies in SEO, and our content needs to reflect that specialization. We should think of our readers as “T-shaped,” focusing on advanced depth in SEO while drawing connections to areas like content, social, branding, and others.
- Our readers are challenged by a constantly changing industry in which they’re required to continually learn (and evangelize) new techniques to retain their expertise. They are frustrated by a lack of time and resources, difficulty in communicating and reporting their work to both colleagues and customers, and a need for up-to-date best practices in many areas—especially content marketing and link building.
- Our readers prefer to consume blog posts on desktops or laptops, and if they choose to read a post, most of them try to get all the way through it.
- Our readers generally have an advanced knowledge of SEO, but there are many who are relatively new to the field and feel lost when reading our more advanced posts.
- There is a great demand for action-oriented posts among our readers, including tutorials and case studies. This demand vastly overshadows the demand for more generalized overviews and higher-level strategies.
Given all of that, here are some things you might expect to see on the Moz Blog as we move forward:
- More actionable posts, including tutorials and case studies
- A tendency toward more advanced posts related to SEO, along with more basic posts that connect SEO to other areas of inbound
- More help for beginners in getting the background necessary to understand the more advanced posts
- High quality posts to fill the content marketing niche
- More posts on data analysis, competitive research, social media, workplace productivity, and other topics toward the top of the list above
- More “pre-read transparency,” offering details to help you determine a post’s relevancy to you before you click
Overall: Content that’s more relevant and valuable to you and your work. That’s our goal, and we want to keep hearing from you. Please feel free to send us your thoughts at any time ([email protected]), whether about something we posted, topic suggestions, or anything else related to the blog.
We’d also love to see your analysis of this data: Did we miss anything? Get something wrong? Let us know in the comments below.
Thanks to everyone who gave their time for this survey; it was immensely insightful for us Mozzers!
