It’s hard to believe that 2017 is already past. We entered the year with big ambitions and we’ve made some great strides. As has become tradition, I’ve compiled a rundown of some of the most interesting updates that you may have seen (or missed) this past year. We’ve intentionally focused on significant product updates, but I’ve also shared a little about some newer programs that provide value for customers in different ways.
TL;DR, here are some of the larger and more interesting additions to Moz in 2017:
- Keywords by Site: Keyword Explorer adds site-based keyword research and competitive intelligence
- Major investments in infrastructure: Better performance and resilience across the Moz toolset
- New instructor-led training programs: Targeted classes to level-up your SEO knowledge
- Customer Success: Custom walkthroughs to help you get the most out of Moz
- Bonus! MozPod: Moz’s new free podcast keeps you up to date on the latest industry topics and trends
Big updates
This year and last, we’ve been spending a disproportionate focus on releasing large infrastructural improvements, new datasets, and foundational product updates. We feel these are crucial elements that serve the core needs of SEOs and will fuel frequent improvements and iterations for years to come.
To kick things off, I wanted to share some details about two big updates from 2017.
1) Keywords by Site: Leveling up keyword research and intelligence
Rank tracking provides useful benchmarks and insights for specific, targeted keywords, but you can’t track all of the keywords that are relevant to you. Sometimes you need a broader look at how visible your sites (and your competitors’ sites) are in Google results.
We built Keywords by Site to provide this powerful view into your Google presence. This brand-new dataset in Moz significantly extends Keyword Explorer and improves the quality of results in many other areas throughout Moz Pro. Our US corpus currently includes 40 million Google SERPs updated every two weeks, and allows you to do the following:
See how visible your site is in Google results
This view not only shows how authoritative a site is from a linking perspective, but also shows how prominent a site is in Google search results.
Compare your ranking prominence to your competitors
Compare up to three sites to get a feel for their relative scale of visibility and keyword ranking overlap. Click on any section in the Venn diagram to view the keywords that fall into that section.
Dig deep: Sort, filter, and find opportunities, then stash them in keyword lists
For example, let’s say you’re looking to determine which pages or content on your site might only require a little nudge to garner meaningful search visibility and traffic. Run a report for your site in Keyword Explorer and then use the filters to quickly hone in on these opportunities:
Our focus on data quality
We’ve made a few decisions to help ensure the freshness and accuracy of our keyword corpus. These extend the cost and work to maintain this dataset, but we feel they make a discernible difference in quality.
- We recollect all of our keyword data every 2 weeks. This means that the results you see are more recent and more similar to the results on the day that you’re researching.
- We cycle up to 15 million of our keywords out on a monthly basis. This means that as new keywords or terms trend up in popularity, we add them to our corpus, replacing terms that are no longer getting much search volume.
A few improvements we’ve made since launch:
- Keyword recommendations in your campaigns (tracked sites) are much improved and now backed by our keyword corpus.
- These keyword suggestions are also included in your weekly insights, suggesting new keywords worth tracking and pages worth optimizing.
- Coming very soon: We’re also on the cusp of launching keyword corpuses for the UK, Canada, and Australia. Stay tuned.
A few resources to help you get more from Keywords by Site:
2) Site Crawl V2: Big enhancements to site crawling and auditing
Another significant project we completed in 2017 was a complete rewrite of our aging Site Crawler. In short, our new crawler is faster, more reliable, can crawl more pages, and surfaces more issues. We’ve also made some enhancements to the workflow, to make regular crawls more customizable and easy to manage. Here are a few highlights:
Week-over-week crawl comparisons
Our new crawler keeps tabs on what happened in your previous crawl to show you which specific issues are no longer present, and which are brand new.
Ignore (to hide) individual issues or whole issue types
This feature was added in response to a bunch of customer requests. While Moz does its best to call out the issues…
