SEO News

What are blue links?

These are the organic search results in a SERP, not the ones that have been paid for. 

In fact searching for ‘blue links’ in Google brings up an entirely organic SERP.

If you were to scroll down all the way, you would in fact see 10 blue links.

10 blue links

I first heard the phrase ‘10 blue links’ within the much more sensationalist quote “10 blue links are dead”.

In 2009 Yahoo stated that “people don’t really want to search”. They want quick access to the information they’re looking for, rather than scrolling through a list of links to web pages like a librarian slowly browsing a tray of index cards.

Yahoo began showing different page layouts, featuring maps, images, aggregated reviews and very quickly the layout of a SERP became a completely altered landscape. 

I talked to Search Laboratory’s head of SEO, James McCann for his opinions on the matter of ’10 blue links’.

I always interpreted the ‘ten blue links’ as referring to the more rigid Google of old. This is when Google had set results (displayed universally), which refreshed once a month, ten of which were on the prime first page. These were the days when someone could definitively say they were number one or number three for this term or that term.

In that case the days of ’10 blue links’ certainly are dead especially in relation to the rigid Google of old.

Current SERPs

Here’s the current Google SERP for ‘Nike’.

With paid ads, news results, multiple sitelinks, related searches and a Google+ box this only leaves room for six organic results. More and more similarly rich elements are being added to the SERP all the time. Hence the cries of “10 blue links are dead”.

However, this may not entirely be the case. Bing announced in 2012 that it would adopt a ‘more than 10’ approach to its SERPS and to this day Bing has kept to that promise.

Searching for ‘Nike’ on Bing reveals 13 organic results. Other more general searches like ‘best steak restaurants in London’ (it’s nearly lunchtime) reveal 10 organic results.

With two paid ads and a local map with related search results languishing somewhere down the bottom, this looks on the face of it like a more ‘organically oriented SERP.

Here’s the same search on Google:

Here you can see six paid ads, a map and three local search results all filling up the above-the-fold portion of the screen. However, if you include the ‘authored’ results, there are 10 blue links in the Google SERP.

Further complications

James Mccann ran his own test for me, in which he searched for the same term on Google, five minutes apart, in two different locations using different Google logins.

The results for ‘sheds’ show two completely different SERPs, with only two results appearing in the same position.

As you can see, a web page has absolutely no guarantee that it will appear in the same place in the same SERP twice.

Organic link distribution

Conductor has recently published its own survey of organic link distribution revealing that nine out of 10 SERPS have nine or more organic links.

It seems that the idea of organic ’10 blue links’ may be alive and kicking in the non-rigid Google world.

73% of SERPS have exactly ten organic results, so there is still significant opportunity for small businesses and brands to appear in the organic listings.

Although don’t think for one minute that Google and the like are relinquishing a little more control of the SERP space to organic search, as the following chart reveals more than half of search results pages have nine or more ads.

56% of search pages now have nine or more paid ads and paid search ads will of course only continue to grow in number and size. 

Even the most casual of searcher realises that they have formed a subconscious blindness to sponsored search ads. Especially the ones at the top of the SERP in the coloured box.

Marketers realise this too. As searchers seek out organic results and search engines continuously tinker with the SERPs themselves to offer a more intuitive experience (it of course pays for Google to serve its users with the most relevant content possible for fear they might wander to a competitor), SEO becomes a more vital tool than ever.

For some tips on SEO check out Andrew Girdwood’s post SEO is D.E.A.D.

Spoiler: it’s not actually dead by the way.

Although non-desktop traffic is accelerating and the region has impressive mobile penetration levels, only around half (48%) of organisations use mobile marketing (up by only 3% since 2012).

Which of the following digital channels or disciplines do you use for marketing?

The second annual State of Digital Marketing in Asia report, published by Econsultancy in association with Campaign Asia-Pacific, looks in detail at the relative levels of spending across different traditional and online marketing channels across the Asian region.

Nearly 400 companies participated in this research, which also looks at how organisations are measuring marketing effectiveness, examines the barriers to digital marketing and ecommerce in the region, as well as assessing the existing levels of industry skills and knowledge.

Types of mobile marketing

The report also asked agencies which types of mobile technologies their clients use for marketing.  

For the second year running, mobile apps were the most popular form of mobile marketing (67%), followed by SMS and mobile advertising (both 57%).

Which mobile channels or technologies do your clients use for marketing?

Interestingly, there are significant differences between client-side and agency results at this question. For example, mobile applications are used by two-thirds (67%) of agency clients, compared to 38% of client-side respondents.

Similarly, more than half (57%) of agencies say clients are using mobile advertising, compared to 42% of companies who mention this. More than a quarter (28%) of supply-side respondents indicate their clients are using location-based services, but only 13% of client-side respondents say the same.

This reflects the nature of the Asian digital landscape, where there is a significant divide between organisations and agencies in terms of understanding, skills and execution.

Posted by SarahBird

Time for the 2013 end-of-year wrap-up. You can read Rand’s 2012 wrap-up here. The “T” in TAGFEE is for “Transparency,” so let’s get this show started.

This is a long post. Here are some convenient links to whatever tickles your fancy:

Four Big Investments in 2013

Community & Customers

Inside Moz HQ

Technical Achievements

Looking Forward

If long-form blog posts aren’t your thing, I invite you to check out our Moz 2013 Year In Review Infographic extravaganza!

Four Big Investments

1. The rebrand from SEOmoz to Moz

We’d been planning the rebrand from SEOmoz to Moz for about 18 months before we executed. The original plan was to launch the rebrand simultaneously with the release of Moz Analytics. Ah, yes. What a lovely dream!

When it became clear that Moz Analytics wasn’t going to be ready before May, we decided to decouple the rebrand from the product launch.

The rebrand went amazingly well. Better than we anticipated. Most people weren’t surprised, which I think is a good thing; we had been seeding the idea of “Moz” for a long time. Recently, Search Engine Land released study results indicating that Moz is the second-most recognized marketing technology brand. Happily, 85% of people who listed us correctly used “Moz” instead of “SEOmoz.” Whoa!

We suffered a slight dip in traffic after the switch from seomoz.org to moz.com, but managed to recover quickly. <high five> You can see our traffic stats in the Community and Customers section below.

2. The epic nine-month launch of Moz Analytics

We began launching Moz Analytics in May and are only now wrapping up the final phase of launch. Rebuilding the old PRO application from back to front was the biggest and highest-risk endeavor we’d ever undertaken. Including product planning, we worked on it for two+ years, and a team of engineers spent 18+ months building it.

The Moz Analytics launch deserves a thoughtful blog post on its own. I tried to capture the complexity, disappointment, and excitement when drafting this post, but it’s just not possible.

So I’ll just say this: Launch diverged dramatically from the plan. Some of it was forgivable naiveté about the complexity of the project, and some of it was just plain old stupid mistakes. All of the factors were valuable lessons.

I’m relieved and happy to say that we’re wrapping up the “launch phase” of Moz Analytics very soon. We’ve almost solved the the critical bugs, and soon we’ll be launching some critical features (like monthly timeframes) that weren’t quite critical enough to block public release.

3. Building data centers in Virginia, Washington, and Texas

We create a lot of our own data at Moz, and it takes a lot of computing power. Over the years, we’ve spent many small fortunes at Amazon Web Services. It was killing our margins and adding to product instability. Adding insult to injury, we’ve found the service… lacking.

We spent part of 2012 and all of 2013 building a private cloud in Virginia, Washington, and mostly Texas.

This was a big bet with over $4 million in capital lease obligations on the line, and the good news is that it’s starting to pay off. On a cash basis, we spent $6.2 million at Amazon Web Services, and a mere $2.8 million on our own data centers. The business impact is profound. We’re spending less and have improved reliability and efficiency.

Our gross profit margin had eroded to ~64%, and as of December, it’s approaching 74%. We’re shooting for 80+%, and I know we’ll get there in 2014.

4. Growing the Moz team

We ended the year with 134 people on the team. In 2013, we brought in 47 new people, nearly a person each week. We also saw 16 people move on. That’s a tremendous amount of change and growth on top of a high-headcount growth year in 2012. It’s invigorating and humbling when I think of the talent we’ve brought together at Moz. Check out our Annual Report Infographic for lots fun extras on the team.

Financial Performance

Revenue grew 33% last year and ended at $29.3 million.

That is off-plan performance. It could have been even worse. Quarters 1 and 2 were actually really strong, and in a subscription business, the year is made by Q1 and Q2 net adds. In the second half of the year, though, we lost momentum while in launch mode.

What happened? Many books will be written by many historians on what happened at Moz in 2013. (Okay, maybe not.)

Here is a list of contributing factors, in no particular order (like I said, this is really a much bigger topic than we can squeeze into this post):

• Delayed launches of the rebrand and Moz Analytics (MA)
• Customer unhappiness from some nasty bugs at launch
• Customer unhappiness from some high-priority features not included at launch
• Lower-quality leads than hoped through the invite list for MA
• Compromised marketing funnel during the transition time from the legacy PRO app to MA
• Mismatch between marketing materials and launch offering

It feels really good to have this launch nearly behind us. I’m looking forward to the next phase of the product development cycle: iterate, iterate, iterate. And we’ll take the lessons of this launch with us into all of our future projects.

Our Cost of Goods Sold came in at approximately $10.8 million.

The vast majority of this spend is Amazon Web Services, listed here as “Cloud Services” (see the section above on data centers for more context). While building our data centers and moving our systems over, we paid for both the data centers and Amazon. In 2014, we should see a substantial reduction in Cloud Services because we’ll have moved almost entirely off Amazon.

Our Gross Profit Margin for the year came in at 63% overall, but it was up to 70% and climbing in December. Data centers FTW!

For those of you curious about what we spend money on, feast your eyes:

I’ve included the expense as a percentage of revenue to better express how the business scales. Notice the growth in Personnel (headcount- and benefits-driven), Professional Contractors (the fleet to help us get Moz Analytics out the door), Office Expenses (doubling our square footage means more supplies and snacks!), and the arrival of the Data Center Depreciation line.

Yes, you’re reading that right. The percentage of revenue is greater than 100% when you add it up. We’re not profitable this year. We’re ending the year with a $5,754,925 EBITDA loss (that’s fancy accounting-speak for how much money was left over after you paid the bills).

We knew we were going to burn in 2013. That’s why we took the $18m Series B. This is a bigger loss than we planned on, though, and we’re disappointed we missed our goals.

The good news is that we have enough capital to keep growing the business, and we’re really excited to have the hairy launch behind us and a clean platform on which we can start iterating. We expect to be profitable in Q3 of this year.

Community & Customers

At the end of the year, over 25,000 people had Pro subscriptions.

Over 21,000 of those accounts are paying subscribers.

On the one hand, I’m disappointed because I don’t think we met our potential. We have the skills, resources and passion to build the best Inbound Marketing Analytics software on the planet. We’re on the path, but we’re not there yet. The whole team is picking up the pace. The destination keeps moving too, which is part of the fun.

It was a pretty amazing year for web traffic. We’re seeing a little dip here at the end of the year, but we averaged 2.9 million uniques per month. Wow.

Our organic search traffic rose by 28% this year, even with the little hit we took during the transition from SEOmoz.org to Moz.com.

Our community engagement metrics increased really nicely this year. (Thanks if y’all are still reading this!) Also, people LOVE Whiteboard Friday. Can you believe folks watched over 35,000 hours!?

Inside Moz HQ

I already mentioned the team growth in my Big Four above. What I didn’t talk about is how awesome it is to be a part of this team.

Can you believe that combined we donated over $100k to charity in 2013?! Mozzers gave $41k+ to their favorite charities. Moz contributed $63k+ as part of our 150% Moz Match program. That’s an average of ~$783 per Mozzer.

I’m really proud of this number. It shows me that I work with people who believe the world can be a better place and are willing to do something about it. It excludes the time Mozzers have donated; We should start tracking that, too.

The Annual Report has a complete list of the organizations we’ve helped.

It’s hard to capture what it feels like to work at Moz. This list helps:

Technical Achievements

We’ve already talked about building Moz Analytics and the new data centers. Those are major achievements, but they aren’t the only things we’ve been busy with. Au contraire.

Moz is an increasingly complicated business. We have loads of tools. Even if you’re a long-time Moz fan, I bet we have tools you’ve never seen. We’ve been making investments in some of our key tools and the back-end infrastructure to support complex web properties.

Launched Fresh Web Explorer in April 2013

We’re really excited to offer a simple, high quality mentions-tracking tool. This is one of our most powerful features, but is still a relatively hidden gem. Do yourself a favor and go play around with it. It’s better than Google Alerts, and way cheaper than enterprise-y mention trackers.

Relaunch GetListed in May 2013

We acquired GetListed in 2012 and did a complete back-to-front rebuild in early 2013. The rebuild improved scalability, reliability, speed, and allowed folks to log in to GetListed with their Moz accounts. The improvements laid the groundwork for an upcoming launch that we can’t wait to share with you! The new release will be a major step forward in listing management.

Followerwonk Improvements

Check out Social Authority Score and our Partnership with Buffer.

Open Site Explorer Improvements

We added Just Discovered Links to Open Site Explorer in May 2013. We’re working hard to get you fresh link data. There will be more to come in 2014.

Sexy Behind-The-Scenes Stuff

Well, we think it’s sexy. We rebuilt our billing system (rapture!), updated our email management back-end (joy!), and created a unified authentication system to tie all our different web properties together (hallelujah!).

Looking Forward

Things are starting to move fast around here, and that’s a good thing. There is a renewed sense of energy. Launch is behind us, and we can focus on bug squashing, tuning, and adding some critical MA features like monthly timeframes, a keyword-not-provided solution, and a content section. We’re getting a little bit closer each month to our goal of 80+% gross profit margin (GPM). The launch of our Moz Local v.1 is in alpha testing as I write.

For the next several months the company is focused on (1) Increasing retention by making happier customers, (2) Acquiring new customers by improving the funnel and driving high-quality traffic to the site, (3) Getting to 80% GPM, and (4) Launching and learning from our v.1 Local product.

Rand and I are settling into our new roles, and the whole team is starting to rock a faster, more iterative approach to building software. We’re also learning our way around our brand spanking new digs. If you’re in Seattle, you should come say “hi.”

Did I mention the Annual Report?

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by SarahBird

Time for the 2013 end-of-year wrap-up. You can read Rand’s 2012 wrap-up here. The ‘T’ in TAGFEE is for “Transparency,” so let’s get this show started.

This is a long post. Here are some convenient links to whatever tickles your fancy:

Four Big Investments in 2013

Community & Customers

Inside Moz HQ

Technical Achievements

Looking Forward

If long-form blog posts aren’t your thing, I invite you to check out our Moz 2013 Year In Review Infographic extravaganza!

Four Big Investments

1. The rebrand from SEOmoz to Moz

We’d been planning the rebrand from SEOmoz to Moz for about 18 months before we executed. The original plan was to launch the rebrand simultaneously with the release of Moz Analytics. Ah, yes. What a lovely dream!

When it became clear that Moz Analytics wasn’t going to be ready before May, we decided to decouple the rebrand from the product launch.

The rebrand went amazingly well. Better than we anticipated. Most people weren’t surprised, which I think is a good thing; we had been seeding the idea of “Moz” for a long time. Recently, Search Engine Land released study results indicating that Moz is the second-most recognized marketing technology brand. Happily, 85% of people who listed us correctly used “Moz” instead of “SEOmoz.” Whoa!

We suffered a slight dip in traffic after the switch from seomoz.org to moz.com, but managed to recover quickly. <high five> You can see our traffic stats in the Community and Customers section below.

2. The epic nine-month launch of Moz Analytics

We began launching Moz Analytics in May and are only now wrapping up the final phase of launch. Rebuilding the old PRO application from back to front was the biggest and highest-risk endeavor we’d ever undertaken. Including product planning, we worked on it for two+ years, and a team of engineers spent 18+ months building it.

The Moz Analytics launch deserves a thoughtful blog post on its own. I tried to capture the complexity, disappointment, and excitement when drafting this post, but it’s just not possible.

So I’ll just say this: Launch diverged dramatically from the plan. Some of it was forgivable naiveté about the complexity of the project, and some of it was just plain old stupid mistakes. All of the factors were valuable lessons.

I’m relieved and happy to say that we’re wrapping up the “launch phase” of Moz Analytics very soon. We’ve almost solved the the critical bugs, and soon we’ll be launching some critical features (like monthly timeframes) that weren’t quite critical enough to block public release.

3. Building data centers in Virginia, Washington, and Texas

We create a lot of our own data at Moz, and it takes a lot of computing power. Over the years, we’ve spent many small fortunes at Amazon Web Services. It was killing our margins and adding to product instability. Adding insult to injury, we’ve found the service…lacking.

We spent part of 2012 and all of 2013 building a private cloud in Virginia, Washington, and mostly Texas.

This was a big bet with over $4 million in capital lease obligations on the line, and the good news is that it’s starting to pay off. On a cash basis, we spent $6.2 million at Amazon Web Services, and a mere $2.8 million on our own data centers. The business impact is profound. We’re spending less and have improved reliability and efficiency.

Our gross profit margin had eroded to ~64%, and as of December, it’s approaching 74%. We’re shooting for 80+%, and I know we’ll get there in 2014.

4. Growing the Moz team

We ended the year with 134 people on the team. In 2013, we brought in 47 new people, nearly a person a week. We also saw 16 people move on. That’s a tremendous amount of change and growth on top of a high-headcount growth year in 2012. It’s invigorating and humbling when I think of the talent we’ve brought together at Moz. Check out our Annual Report Inforgraphic for lots fun extras on the team.

Financial Performance

Revenue grew 33% last year and ended at $29.3 million.

That is off-plan performance. It could have been even worse. Quarters 1 and 2 were actually really strong, and in a subscription business, the year is made by Q1 and Q2 net adds. In the second half of the year, though, we lost momentum while in launch mode.

What happened? Many books will be written by many historians on what happened at Moz in 2013. (Okay, maybe not.)

Here is a list of contributing factors, in no particular order (like I said, this is really a much bigger topic than we can squeeze into this post):

• Delayed launches of the rebrand and Moz Analytics (MA)
• Customer unhappiness from some nasty bugs at launch
• Customer unhappiness from some high-priority features not included at launch
• Lower quality leads than hoped through the invite list for MA
• Compromised marketing funnel during the transition time from the legacy PRO app to MA
• Mismatch between marketing materials and launch offering

It feels really good to have this launch nearly behind us. I’m looking forward to the next phase of the product development cycle: iterate, iterate, iterate. And we’ll take the lessons of this launch with us into all of our future projects.

Our Cost of Goods Sold came in at approximately $10.8 million.

The vast majority of this spend is Amazon Web Services, listed here as “Cloud Services” (see the section above on data centers for more context). While building our data centers and moving our systems over, we paid for both the data centers and Amazon. In 2014, we should see a substantial reduction in Cloud Services because we’ll have moved almost entirely off Amazon.

Our Gross Profit Margin for the year came in at 63% overall, but it was up to 70% and climbing in December. Data centers FTW!

For those of you curious about what we spend money on, feast your eyes:

I’ve included the expense as a percentage of revenue to better express how the business scales. Notice the growth in Personnel (headcount- and benefits-driven), Professional Contractors (the fleet to help us get Moz Analytics out the door), Office Expenses (doubling our square footage means more supplies and snacks!), and the arrival of the Data Center Depreciation line.

Yes, you’re reading that right. The percentage of revenue is greater than 100% when you add it up. We’re not profitable this year. We’re ending the year with a $5,754,925 EBITDA loss (that’s fancy accounting-speak for how much money was left over after you paid the bills).

We knew we were going to burn in 2013. That’s why we took the $18m Series B. This is a bigger loss than we planned on, though, and we’re disappointed we missed our goals.

The good news is that we have enough capital to keep growing the business, and we’re really excited to have the hairy launch behind us and a clean platform on which we can start iterating. We expect to be profitable in Q3 of this year.

Community & Customers

At the end of the year, over 25,000 people had Pro subscriptions.

Over 21,000 of those accounts are paying subscribers.

On the one hand, I’m disappointed because I don’t think we met our potential. We have the skills, resources and passion to build the best Inbound Marketing Analytics software on the planet. We’re on the path, but we’re not there yet. The whole team is picking up the pace. The destination keeps moving too, which is part of the fun.

It was a pretty amazing year for web traffic. We’re seeing a little dip here at the end of the year, but we averaged 2.9 million uniques per month. Wow.

Our organic search traffic rose by 28% this year, even with the little hit we took during the transition from SEOmoz.org to Moz.com.

Our community engagement metrics increased really nicely this year. (Thanks! if ya’ll are still reading this!) Also, people LOVE White Board Friday. Can you believe folks watched over 35,000 hours!?

Inside Moz HQ

I already mentioned the team growth in my Big Four above. What I didn’t talk about is how awesome it is to be a part of this team.

Can you believe combined we donated over $100k to charity in 2013?! Mozzers gave $41k+ to their favorite charities. Moz contributed $63k+ as part of our 150% Moz Match program. That’s an average of ~$783 per Mozzer.

I’m really proud of this number. It shows me that I work with people who believe the world can be a better place and are willing to do something about it. It excludes the time Mozzers have donated; We should start tracking that too.

The Annual Report has a complete list of the organizations we’ve helped.

It’s hard to capture what it feels like to work at Moz. This list helps:

Technical Achievements

We’ve already talked about building Moz Analytics and the new data centers. Those are major achievements, but they aren’t the only things we’ve been busy with. Au contraire.

Moz is an increasingly complicated business. We have loads of tools. Even if you’re a long-time Moz fan, I bet we have tools you’ve never seen. We’ve been making investments in some of our key tools and the back-end infrastructure to support complex web properties.

Launched Fresh Web Explorer in April 2013

We’re really excited to offer a simple, high quality mentions-tracking tool. This is one of our most powerful features, but is still a relatively hidden gem. Do yourself a favor and go play around with it. It’s better than Google Alerts, and way cheaper than enterprise-y mention trackers.

Relaunch GetListed in May 2013

We acquired GetListed in 2012 and did a complete back-to-front rebuild in early 2013. The rebuild improved scalability, reliability, speed, and allowed folks to log in to GetListed with their Moz accounts. The improvements laid the groundwork for an upcoming launch that we can’t wait to share with you! The new release will be a major step forward in listing management.

Followerwonk Improvements

Check out Social Authority Score and our Partnership with Buffer.

Open Site Explorer Improvements

We added Just Discovered Links to Open Site Explorer in May 2013. We’re working hard to get you fresh link data. There will be more to come in 2014.

Sexy Behind-The-Scenes Stuff

Well, we think it’s sexy. We rebuilt our billing system (rapture!), updated our email management back-end (joy!), and created a unified authentication system to tie all our different web properties together (hallelujah!).

Looking Forward

Things are starting to move fast around here, and that’s a good thing. There is a renewed sense of energy. Launch is behind us and we can focus on bug squashing, tuning, and adding some critical MA features like monthly timeframes, a keyword-not-provided solution, and a content section. We’re getting a little bit closer each month to our goal of 80+% gross profit margin (GPM). The launch of our Moz Local v.1 is in alpha testing as I write.

For the next several months the company is focused on (1) Increasing retention by making happier customers, (2) Acquiring new customers by improving the funnel and driving high-quality traffic to the site, (3) Getting to 80% GPM, and (4) Launching and learning from our v.1 Local product.

Rand and I are settling into our new roles, and the whole team is starting to rock a faster, more iterative approach to building software. We’re also learning our way around our brand spanking new digs. If you’re in Seattle, you should come say “hi.”

Did I mention the Annual Report?

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!