Online SEO Tools: A Guide to Moz for Beginners

Before working at VA Partners, I never had the opportunity to work with online SEO tools. I would work long hours to try and improve a webpage’s search ranking, only by using educated guesses to change the content. After having discovered Moz, however, I am now able to improve a page’s search ranking with a single content change iteration.
 
If you aren’t familiar with Moz, it’s a marketing tool that helps you improve your page rankings and SEO. It dives deep into your website content and puts all of your mistakes on display. If you look at the data without really understanding what it means, it can be very daunting and scary.
 
However, after using the tool a number of times for different clients, I’ve come to embrace Moz. Here are a few things you need to know before you jump into it head-first:

 

SEO is crucial for your site, but it doesn’t need to be an endless pit of content changes.

 
If you haven’t looked into an SEO strategy for your website, I highly suggest you start doing so. A webpage with strong SEO will receive more page views than one that doesn’t: it’s a simple fact.
 
Jumping straight into SEO can seem overwhelming, however. Instead of guessing what content changes will improve your SEO and then waiting around to see if it works, Moz can help you start off on the right foot.
 
You can track certain keywords to see how often they’re being searched, and how competitive it is to rank (how close to the top you’ll be on the Google search). From there, Moz can look at the page you want to associate with that keyword, and tell you what changes you need to make to rank higher. It’s as simple as that.
 

Sometimes, however, what it suggests isn’t important.

 
As I’ve said before, Moz dives deep into your website’s content and will flag anything it may see as something negatively affecting your search engine ranks. This is really great when you have a broken link somewhere deep in your site, but not all issues are detrimental.
 
Say you have a blog with a long but necessary title. Moz will flag this as an issue. It took me a little while of attempting to fix issues like this before I realized that changing it would do more harm than good. My suggestion would be to take each issue Moz finds with a grain of salt. If making a content change will have a negative impact on your page, then don’t worry about it.
 

Keyword rankings are a science. Treat them that way.

 
A great feature within Moz is that it will make suggestions for how you can improve a page’s rank for a specific keyword. Typically, if you make the changes Moz is suggesting, you will rank higher on a keyword. I was working on a webpage that had zero SEO strategy behind it, and just by following Moz’s suggestions, the page went from a 50+ ranking to number 7 in a day. This really showed me how powerful the tool is.
 
One of my key takeaways after getting acquainted with Moz was to spend time focusing on targeted keywords: instead of “social media company”, focus on “social media marketing help”. The latter is more specific, and therefore less competitive to rank high than the former. Take time to think about what your audience will be searching, and select your keywords from there.
 
If this summary helped make Moz seem a little less daunting, tweet us and let us know how you’re liking the tool, or subscribe to our newsletter for more online SEO tool updates.
 

Online SEO Tools: A Guide to Moz for Beginners