Welcome to the Moz.com Tutorial! We’ll walk you through some SEO tools that can be used to drive your marketing strategy. NOTE: Moz.com has a premium version but there are plenty of free tools too if you’re just getting started. All tools I show you today are part of the free package.

Moz.com is great for:

1) seeing how your domain or specific page is comparing to other sites in terms of two of the most important aspects of SEO: domain authority, page authority and keyword rankings. See what variables contribute to SEO

2) Helping you narrow down which keywords will be competitive to try to organically rank for and which you need to use Google Ads for.

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1. Go to Moz.com
2. Click “Free SEO Tools” in the top menu
3. Select “Link Explorer”
4. Click Button “Get link data”

Enter a website in the search bar to get your website’s SEO analysis.

You’ll see:

• A raw score for your domain authority. Learn about domain authority
• how many other domains backlink to your website Learn about backlinks
• how many keywords you are rankings for Learn about keywords
• a spam score: this “represents the percentage of sites with similar features to the site you’re researching which we’ve found to be penalized or banned by Google. “
• Top pages by links: see which of your pages has backlinks and thereby contributes to raising your domain authority.
• Top linking domains: see what websites are citing you frequently.

PRO TIPS: 1) Foster relationships with those sites citing you a only few times to get more backlinks. 2) Look at quantity and quality of backlinks. The higher the domain authority of sites linking to yours, the higher their quality.

Example: This website is doing great with backlinking domains. They not only have a high quantity of links but they also have a high quality of links.

• Top featured snippets: verify your website set up on google ads is performing well and appearing as needed.

Now that you know how your site is performing, you’ll need to know how likely it is that you’ll rank for page 1 on specific keywords. To do this you’ll need to compare your website’s SEO scores with all other sites ranking on page 1 scores. Learn about SERP Analyses

Because it is the most weighted part of your SEO ranking, domain and page authority will be the main measurement we will be looking at for all page 1 results. From your site’s SEO diagnostic, you already know the most important factor contributing to your SEO ranking, your domain authority score. You’ll compare this score to the domain and page authority scores of all other site’s on page 1.

1. Navigate to keyword search
2. Enter the keyword you want to rank for. Moz lists all the sites listed on page 1 of google for the given search term.
3. Look at the domain authority of each of these pages. This is the most important contributing factor in SEO
4. Compare the domain authorities to your domain authority. It is reasonable to try to organically rank for the keyword unless your domain authority is significantly lower than those ranking on page 1. If this is the case you should consider using Google Ads to boost your ranking.

For example, if you are trying to rank for the keyword “Taylor Swift Merch”, the domain authority for these pages is mostly all in the 90s with a few in the 80s high 70s. These domain authorities are rather high, this is a very competitive search term. To reasonably rank for this term organically, your site’s domain authority should be in the 90s. If your domain authority is not that high, this tells you that paid ads might be a better way to get on page 1.

KEY INSIGHT: If there is a big disparity between your domain authority and others ranking for the keyword, where you’re ranking lower, you should be paying for ads.

1. Download the .csv file
2. Clean the data
3. Look at the title and URL columns in the .csv file for the top ranking pages. Are there any patterns? Is there a specific word commonly found? Try to emulate any patterns you see for your page’s in URL and Title that’s trying to rank for this same keyword.
4. Create a new column. Label it “Content”. (Moz.com does not provide this info for you)
5. Click on each URL to see what kind of content they are displaying. Generally content falls into a number of categories including: personal blogs, how tos, tutorials, video format, itemized shopping, technical analysis, pdfs and lists.
6. For each URL note the categories of content each page falls under in the “content” column
7. Note what types of content are performing well and use that same content format for your page trying to rank for this keyword.

For example, with the keyword “Taylor Swift Merch” most of the pages are itemized shopping pages. There is 1 brand/company page and 1 blog article. Therefore, if you have a domain authority in the 90s you should try to organically rank for this keyword by creating an itemized shopping page. If it does not make sense for your website to have itemized shopping, you should not be trying to rank for this keyword.

That’s a summary I hope this was helpful- thanks!

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