SEO News

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

You are master of the keyword.

You create 1,000 links with a single tweet. You rank for the word “rank.” Google engineers ask for your approval before updating their algorithm.

You, my friend, are an SEO expert.

Ready for fun? Here at Moz we gathered our wits (it didn’t take very long) and created a new quiz to test our SEO knowledge.

Based on a quiz that our co-founder Rand first published back in 2005, at the dawn of electronics and lighter-than-air travel, we now present to you the new and improved
SEO Expert Quiz.

The quiz contains
50 questions and takes about 15 minutes to complete. The questions are randomized so no two people will get the exact same quiz with the same order of questions.

Here’s what to expect.

1. The quiz is hard! 

Like, astronaut training hard. Very few people score 100%. The breakdown of performance looks like this:

• 0-40% SEO Newbie: You rank on page 7, but are aiming to move up.
• 40-60% SEO Novice: Young, but strong in the ways of the Force, you are.
• 60-75% SEO Pro: The traffic is pouring in!
• 75-90% SEO Expert and Formula One race car driver
• 90-100% Lord of the Internet, Master of the SEO Realm

2. For fun only!

The Expert Quiz isn’t meant to be a rulebook of the Internet. You may even disagree with some of the answers—and you may be right!

We work in a constantly evolving field with lots of room for interpretation at the top levels. Discussion and debate between very smart people is how we learn and grow our expertise.

The only reward for finishing in first place is supreme bragging rights. If you win your office pool, you may get free lunch for the next month. Please participate and help our knowledge grow, but don’t take it too seriously.

3. MVP: next steps

We built this out of passion for testing our SEO knowledge. If you like the quiz, we’d love to build a more robust version that saves your score, and even gives you a badge to display on your user profile. Let us know what you think.

Ready to get started?

Take the SEO Expert Quiz

Don’t forget to show off your score when you finish. Let us know in the comments below! What surprised you, which question did you totally ace, and what should we ask next time?

Rock on, SEO Sensei.

Big thanks to Devin, Derric, Josh, Carin, Shelly and Rand for the hard work putting this together.

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!

These results tally with a separate survey carried out as part of Econsultancy’s Organisational Structures and Resourcing Best Practice Guide.

Alongside a general trend towards more capability being developed in-house, the report found that social (76%), analytics (71%), email (60%) and content marketing (60%) were the channels most likely to be dealt with in-house. 

Do you carry out the following digital marketing activities in-house or via an agency?

CRO

This year’s UK Search Report was the first time that companies have been asked about the resourcing of their analytics and CRO (conversion rate optimisation) activities.

It’s worth noting that a significant proportion of companies are not even doing any CRO, with 24% selecting “not relevant” as their answer. 

According to Latitude MD Richard Gregory:

The fact many brands still struggle to identify conversion as the quick win in every campaign is the eighth wonder of the digital world.

To truly optimise campaigns across paid search, natural and every other channel, you need a strategic roadmap of analytics testing and projects to interrogate the data you do have and make the most from it.

Any decent agency will put their own necks on the line to deliver a performance-based model where the risk all lies with them.

The UK Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report 2014 contains a comprehensive analysis of the UK search marketing environment. 

The report, covering search engine optimisation (SEO or natural search), paid search (PPC), social media marketing and display advertising, is based on an online survey of more than 700 client-side digital marketers and agencies.