What's New

Last month, we announced our Performance Metrics beta within the Site Crawl tool in Campaigns. In case you missed it, the Performance Metrics beta helps users get ahead of Google’s summer algorithm update and check thousands of Core Web Vitals, and other performance metrics, in bulk.

It not only allows users to streamline technical SEO workflows by auditing performance directly within your SEO platform, the beta also enables you to easily understand what and where performance issues are occurring, as well as how they can be fixed.

Since our release, we’ve been working around the clock to add in new functionality after hearing feedback from users like you! The new updates continue to help our beta users pinpoint and prioritize performance issues quickly and efficiently.

New functionality includes:

• A new page source
  Display and analyze URLs from your top landing pages by organic traffic visits. If you haven’t already, simply connect your Google Analytics account via the Site Traffic tool within Campaigns. You can also connect your account directly from the beta after selecting the new page source. Pages with higher organic visits and poorer performing performance scores may want to be prioritized for updating first.
  
  
  
  
• Additional filters for the ‘Pages’ table
  After selecting a page source to display URLs, you can further filter the list with enhanced filters. In addition to filtering by URL text, you can also multi-select performance score categories across mobile and desktop (looking good, needs improvement, or requires fixes) and URLs based on analysis status (previously analyzed, not yet analyzed, or analysis in progress).
  
  
  
  
• A dynamic Pages table
  Now when you select a page source to display a list of URLs, the ‘Pages’ table includes additional data related to each source. For example, the page source “Top pages by rank” includes a column for ranking status data and the keyword for which a page ranks. Pages with crawl issues include the number of issues per page and crawl depth.
  
  
  
  
• Page-level diagnostics
  Within individual page reports, we’ve added a diagnostics table below opportunities. Diagnostics are additional tips that can help you improve your overall performance scores. We recommend prioritizing opportunities first and then supplementing your fixes with diagnostic recommendations.
  
  
  
  
• Supplemental details to opportunities and diagnostics
  Within individual page reports, dig deeper into opportunities and diagnostics to see exactly which element or asset is impacting a potentially affected metric and overall performance. These additional details can be passed along to your development team as a guide on what to fix, faster.
  
  
  

As a reminder, anyone with a Moz Pro subscription can access the beta as long as you have a Campaign set up. And, all plans are currently able to analyze up to 6,000 URLs per month per Campaign!

So, what are you waiting for? Head to the Performance Metrics beta today to dig deep into your performance health and give us feedback on our latest features. We’d love to hear what you think.

Moz is making the process of purchasing Moz Local plans for multiple locations easier! Previously, customers would have to purchase plans one at a time. Now, you can purchase plans for multiple locations and upload the basic business details of those locations in a single transaction, saving you time and streamlining the process of getting your listings published on Google, Facebook and other sites and directories.

You can purchase the same subscription plan for multiple locations in the same country, and use the pre-formatted Moz Local template to enter and upload basic business details (such as name, address, and country) for all locations purchased in a single transaction. If you need to purchase locations in different countries or at different subscription plan levels, those will need to be purchased in separate transactions. You can view the various plans and their prices per location on our plans and pricing page.

How to purchase multiple plans in Moz Local:

1. Choose the country of your locations (All locations within the same transaction must be within the same country)

2. Select your Moz Local plan level (All locations within the same transaction must be the same plan level)

3. Download the CSV template provided, enter your location details, and upload the CSV

4. Confirm your location details were uploaded correctly and proceed with the purchase process to complete your transaction

5. Once the transaction is complete and your locations are created, access the Moz Local Dashboard and add your remaining location data to start the sync process.

For more information and a step-by-step guide on how to purchase multiple subscription plans in Moz Local, please visit our Help Hub. To get started with Moz Local, visit our plans and pricing page.

Get your site in tip-top performance shape – analyze Core Web Vitals in bulk

With Google’s recent announcement of Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal, it’s critical that modern SEOs understand the impact they'll have on their site and prioritize steps to ensure it’s user-(and search engine-)friendly.

To help you get ahead of the algorithm update, we’re pleased to announce our Performance Metrics beta – available for Pro customers on all plans, up to 6,000 pages per Campaign per month.

In the beta, you can streamline your technical audit workflows and analyze thousands of URLs of your choosing for Core Web Vitals and other performance metrics.

You can also:

• Analyze performance on an ad-hoc basis, separate from full site audits
• Report on performance across mobile and desktop, at scale
• Understand performance in the context of other search data, like Page Authority and other crawl issues
• See a breakdown of how many pages require fixes, need some improvement, or look good
• Filter and manipulate your performance data with CSV exports
• Analyze individual page reports for Core Web Vitals and additional performance metrics. Plus deep-dive into opportunities on how to fix issues
• Receive powerful prioritization recommendations

Our Performance Metrics beta makes it easy to understand your site’s performance health and quickly take recommendations to your development teams.

We want to hear from you.

We have a list of features and functionality on our roadmap, but we'd love to hear your thoughts! You can let us know by making a suggestion in-app in the upper right-hand corner of the Performance Metrics beta.

We’ve also got helpful resources for you, like our Help Hub documentation or our Learn Center content.

Not sure where to begin with performance metrics?

Join our webinar “Make Core Web Vitals Your Competitive Advantage” with Tom Capper, Senior Search Scientist at Moz, on April 27 to learn how to harness the power of analyzing Core Web Vitals in bulk.

Have you been kicking your keyword research into high gear lately? If you’re nearing your query limits in Keyword Explorer, take advantage of the ability to add on keyword queries to your account.

Visit your Subscription Summary to assess your current usage and add on additional keyword queries to use in Keyword Explorer.

Did you know….

You can also add on:

• Campaigns

• Tracked Keyword Rankings

• Pages Crawled per week

• Keyword Lists

• Link Tracking Lists

• User Seats

Customize your Moz Pro account today with add-ons that you need to do your best work. If you have any other add-on options you'd love to see, don't hesitate to reach out — we're all ears!

Technical SEO is more critical than ever in 2021 – and we’ve got you covered. If you’re ready to level up your skills, we’ve just launched a fresh certification from Moz Academy, focused on all things technical. The on-demand curriculum covers the fundamentals of technical SEO before moving into comprehensive lessons on crawlability, indexation, and accessibility.

Some of the topics the Technical SEO Certification covers include:

• Site architecture

• Robots.txt files

• Log file analysis

• Sitemaps

• Structured data

• Meta directives

• Accessibility audits

• Mobile performance

• Canonicalization

• Site security

This certification is best suited for marketers, SEOs, or web developers who have a firm grasp of the SEO fundamentals. By the end of the certification series, you’ll be well equipped to develop a technical strategy for your website.

Once you’ve completed the curriculum (which is made up of video lessons and tasks to check your understanding) and passed the final exam, you’ll be awarded a certificate and a certification badge for your LinkedIn profile.

Ready to get certified? Get started right here on Moz Academy.

Moz recently added a new Subscription Summary page for Moz Local customers who manage their own subscriptions. Previously, customers with multiple locations had to navigate multiple screens to view the subscription details for each location. The new Subscription Summary page enables you to easily review, add, and manage the locations and product plans under an account.

To view this page, log in to your account, click on Account and Billing, and then Moz Local. You will automatically see the Subscription Summary. Here, you can see a consolidated view of all of your locations, including the business name, address, product plan, status, and renewal date. If you have multiple locations, you can:

• Sort the columns or use the filter to see a subset of locations.

• Change the product plan for a location, by clicking on the product plan name to view and select a new plan.

• Add a new location, by clicking Add Location.

• Access the dashboard for your locations, by clicking Manage Locations.

To check out the new page, log in to your Moz Local account.

Moz Local Elite subscribers can now have their business listing information published to their Nextdoor Business Page via the Moz Local dashboard. This applies to the US, UK and Canada Elite plans. Nextdoor is a neighborhood hub for trusted connections and the exchange of helpful information, goods, and services. There are 50 million local business recommendations on the site, and Nextdoor estimates it's used by one in four US households. With over 125 million monthly users in the US and Canada, this is an exciting new channel for enterprises and small businesses alike.

To learn more about the Moz Local Elite plan, check out the new plans on our website, including a chart comparing all 3 plans.

Reputation management is a critical part of your online presence, especially in today’s environment. We’ve released new Moz Local plans that include reputation management and social posting, to help local businesses engage with consumers and create a more positive customer experience.

The new Preferred plan includes reputation management and social posting, which enables you to monitor and respond to reviews from the Moz Local dashboard, as well as post news, offers and updates to Google, Facebook and other directories. The new Lite plan allows you to monitor reviews. The new Elite plan includes reputation management and social posting (similar to the previous Complete plan), plus it includes additional directories to extend your reach.

We’ve also included one data aggregator, Factual, in each of the plans. For US businesses that desire broader distribution of their location data, an optional data aggregator package is also available.

These new plans are designed to provide better value and flexibility depending on the needs of the location. Check out the new plans on our website today, including a comparison chart.

A new Page Authority is coming soon!

Visit our resource page to prepare for the upcoming change to PA. Dig into the full announcement post here.

Your Google My Business (GMB) page is often the primary source of information about your local business that a searcher sees. Your customers are likely checking your GMB page more frequently these days to find out if your location is back open for business and if so, to what extent, and to learn if there’s anything they need to be aware of before making the trip.

GMB has recently released COVID-19 specific posts that will appear at the top of your business profile. This new post type makes it super easy to update the status of each of your locations as often as needed — to keep your customers up-to-date with the information you’d like them to know.

Add updates about COVID-19 related to:

• Health and hygiene policies for employees and patrons
• Temporary hours or closures
• Product offerings or reduced menu options
• Capacity restrictions
• Operating differences: for example, “patio-seating only” or “virtual appointments only”
• Special contact details

For Moz Local customers on the Complete plan, visit the Publish section to get started. Click “Create a new post” and select the COVID-19 post type.

You can now track hyper-local rankings for your domain (or as many domains as you’d like) across Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom so you can make smarter location-based organic search and local marketing decisions.

Local Market Analytics tracks keywords with more detailed knowledge about your target geographic markets (currently, market = city), analyzing search results from within each city specified at a level that best represents what the searcher would see from their location. We take multiple SERPs from within a city to provide a composite view.

For each keyword-market combination, for example, sausage+Melbourne, we pull and average the rankings from 5 search results within the market. You can dig deeper to view each of the 5 results to see where in the city you rank highest or lowest for a given keyword, or you can use the average provided.

Know which competitors are winning – where and why.

Do you know who’s ranking for your target keywords in Toowoomba, Queensland, in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, or how about in Upper Hutt, Wellington? You can see the local search volume for any keyword as well as the true local SERP competitors in the area, then drill down to the page that’s ranking so you can understand how.

Access to the beta is free up to 100 market-tracked keywords in addition to your Moz Pro subscription – for example, 100 keywords tracked in 1 city, 4 keywords tracked in 25 cities, or 1 keyword tracked in in 100 cities, etc. You can track an unlimited number of sites and competitor sites and can add more market-tracked keywords for $25/mo.

We are still in beta so we are grateful for your use and feedback. Specific feedback we’d like to hear from you about are:

• Completeness of city coverage: does our geo-data contain the cities you expect?
• Geographic accuracy: are the locations you see on the map for the 5 SERP locations where you expect them to be (and not in a body of water)?
• Local search volume: are you getting the local search volume for each keyword you track?
• And of course, anything else you think would be helpful?

Please let us know if you’re not seeing what you expect to see in the data. We’re actively reviewing feedback and making improvements along the way.

Head to Local Market Analytics now!

Since we launched Local Market Analytics as a beta back in October, we’ve been hard at work turning your ideas and feedback into new features and improved functionality.

Here’s what’s new:

Canada tracking now supported

After triple-checking that all the extremely granular (read: geo-coordinate) SERP data we were serving up was appropriately Canadian (read: accurate), you’re now able to track city-wide markets in Canada. So, if you’ve got storefronts in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, ship goods to Gibsons, British Columbia, or are looking to expand into Etobicoke, Ontario, then what are you waiting for?

And remember, for every 1 of your keywords, you’ll automatically receive SERP data from 5 algorithmically-selected geo-coordinates within the Canadian (or American) cities of your choosing. This saves you from the traditional and manual route of having to hunt down geo-coordinates yourself and then enter them in one at a time for each of your keywords. Just pick your keywords and your cities and let Local Market Analytics do the rest.

Ranking URLs added for actionable insight

We also introduced URLs into the mix so that you know which pages on your site are earning the ranks you see. Before, you could get a quick sense of your performance for a given market or keyword — now, you can add “learn where you need to take action on your site” to the list.

Head to Performance > Rankings on the left nav, then click the Page Rankings tab just below the map to get: the ranking URL, the market and keyword it ranks for, as well as its average rank.

You can identify underperforming pages, uncover content that wins across multiple markets, and ensure that the right pages show up for the right keywords. Plus, because you’ll have this information for both your site and all of your competitors’ sites, you can bolster your competitive intel by analyzing the pages they’re beating you on the SERPs with.

Prominent Pages for top-notch content building

Building on the SEO prowess that ranking pages can unlock, it’s now a snap to see the type of content that performs best in your search space.

The new Prominent Pages feature in Local Market Analytics shows the URLs that rank well on your SERPs and appear in multiple markets. Analyze these high-performing, far-reaching pages to help guide your content and link building strategies.

For example, if you’re keen to break into a new market but aren’t sure what kind of content searchers in that area are looking for, filter by the market in question and see what Google likes to dish out. Need ideas for content that can appeal to a more universal audience? Filter by a target keyword for pages that might appear across all your markets.

CSV exports for deeper analysis

From market rankings to ranking movement and your most prominent SERP competitors, Local Market Analytics is chockablock with information. So, it’s only fair that we make it easy for you to extract and analyze that data any which way you like.

Wherever there’s a table full of tasty insight, there’s an “Export as CSV” button just waiting for you to click. Download your data then slice it, dice it, and stuff into your favourite dashboards for deep analysis and customizable reporting.

Competitor tagging for more organized research

Next in making your research and reporting lives easier, you can now keep your tracked competitors organized with a handy new tagging feature.

Are you trying to keep tabs on who’s a brick-and-mortar business versus who’s online-only? Is it important for you to know who’s a regional competitor and who poses a national threat? Maybe you want to know who in the mix is actually a marketing ally? Well, now you can.

When setting up a new site, you can add one or more tags to the competitors you want to track so you can keep them straight later on. You can also edit or add tags to existing tracked competitors by heading to Tracked Competitors in the left nav under Settings.

When it’s time for some reconnaissance, simply filter by the type of competitor you want to focus your attention on.

Total local search volume for big-picture strategy

When we first brought local search volume into Local Market Analytics, you could see how many searches were happening for a keyword in a single market. Now we’ve decided to up the ante with aggregate local search volume.

This means you can see how many people search for all your keywords in a given market, or how much traffic a single keyword drives across all your markets. In other words, you’ll be able to identify keywords with national appeal and spot your more lucrative markets.

Filter settings that follow you

As far as feature improvements go, you may have noticed that the ability to zoom in on specific keywords and markets is an integral part of uncovering insights within Local Market Analytics — which is precisely why we beefed up the filter functionality.

The keywords and markets that you want to investigate in one data view will now stay in place as you navigate around the app, instead of clearing each time.

Clearer data collection messaging for less confusion

We also made the time between setting up your site and getting your data an infinitely better experience.

We cleaned up areas that showed “no data” when what we really meant was “your data is collecting,” added in a handy toast notification and a note in the Notification Center when your data’s ready, and in case you move on to other work while you wait, you’ll also receive an email when your insights have arrived.

New beta pricing for more flexibility

Lastly, we decided to introduce special beta pricing — we’re now offering 100 Market Tracked Keywords for $50/month (originally $99/month).

And, instead of having to level up into tiers when you want more tracking power, you can now add on individual units of Market Tracked Keyword depending on your needs.

A quick refresher on how Market Tracked Keywords are calculated:

Say you have 4 markets across North America — Vancouver, Toronto, Seattle, and New York City — and want to track 6 keywords in each. This will require 24 Market Tracked Keywords (4 markets x 6 keywords).

And don’t forget, hidden in that calculation is the fun fact that you get 5 unique SERPs in each market. So, while you may only be tracking 6 terms in each market, you’re getting 30 SERPs worth of data. Not bad.

When it comes to doing keyword research, we know that sometimes you need the most precise data to make the best decisions. Other times, broader data points, such as max and min volume, might help you to better understand possible fluctuation. For the times when you’re seeking specificity, we’ve rolled out monthly search volume in the form of a single number (in addition to existing volume ranges) in Keyword Explorer.

As a refresher, monthly search volume shows you how often a term or phrase is searched for in Google each month. It is calculated by taking an average of the search volumes of the last 12 months, to account for seasonal fluctuations.

You can now toggle between displaying monthly search volume as a single number or a range—to help you take a look at the data you’re most interested in. Monthly volume display options are now available across Keyword Explorer for en-US, en-GB, en-CA, and en-AU.

For more information on monthly volume, visit the Help Hub.

We’re excited to announce that version two of our Mozscape API — also known as the Links API — has landed.

Armed with user feedback, we streamlined request access, added several awesome new endpoints, and improved overall performance. Highlights of V2 include:

HISTORICAL VALUES FOR DA & PA
Report on link-building progress and chart the growth of any site now that you’ll have historical Domain Authority and Page Authority data on hand.

RETURN FIELDS A HUMAN CAN READ
Thanks to new plain-English field names and a query string-based pattern for requests, it’s so much easier to pull and parse the data you want.

ACCESS TO LINK INTERSECT DATA
Our Link Intersect tool shows which sites link to your competitors but not to you — use this new endpoint to explore backlink profiles and build an A+ outreach strategy.

You can also get your mitts on:

• The top 500 pages across the entire link index, ranked by DA or PA.
• The final redirect of a URL.
• Distribution histograms, daily/monthly history values, and daily/monthly history deltas for link counts.
• Your month-to-date API usage.

And more! Head to the Help Hub to discover all the new endpoints and what they have to offer, plus learn which ones have been priced a little differently.

Getting started with the new API is easy as pie. If you’re a current user, your credentials will get you access, and usage will be charged against your existing plan. And don’t worry about all the code you’ve already written, V1 isn’t going anywhere — existing functionality will be supported in perpetuity, but it won’t receive any new updates or features.

Not yet an API user? See what 36.5 trillion links can do for you.

If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at api@moz.com.

Last week, Google rolled out an update leading to a significant shift in the SERPs. If a webpage listing appears in a featured snippet, that same webpage will no longer also appear as an organic search result on page 1.

To keep pace with Google’s change, our team immediately got to work to address this within Moz Pro. Thanks to quick work from our team, you will now see featured snippets treated as the first organic result (rank #1) across Moz Pro.

The next time your campaign’s rankings refresh, any of your keywords that own featured snippets will now be displayed in Moz as a #1 organic ranking result.

So what does that mean for you? You may notice your Search Visibility and rankings in Moz Pro fluctuate, as we begin to treat featured snippets as #1 organic results. We recommend you dig into the Rankings > SERP Features section to identify which SERP features your site has already won. Keywords with blue featured snippet icons next to them are terms for which your site is currently appearing in snippets—and therefore will no longer rank organically on page 1 outside of the featured snippet.

Please visit our Q&A post for more information on both Google's update and the update to how Moz displays rankings.