[Build Backlinks Online] All About You: Results of the Moz Blog Survey

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'All About You: Results of the Moz
Blog Survey'

Posted by Trevor-Klein
Last month, 766 of our readers took a few minutes to tell us what they thought
of the Moz Blog. We were absolutely blown away by the quality of the feedback we
got, and we're excited to share what we learned with all of you.


You told us you're squeezed for time in a constantly changing
"need-it-yesterday" world. You told us you're sick of "ultimate guides," and
that you're (for the most part) already well versed in the basics of SEO, and
are craving more advanced tips, tricks, and tactics. You told us that content
marketing and data analysis are two areas where you could use some help.


We hear you.


The rest of what you told us can be found below, and we'll be incorporating
these takeaways into our planning for the Moz Blog over the coming months. The
entire set of results is available as a Google Spreadsheetâif you're
interested, please feel free to make a copy. If you learn anything beyond what
we show here, please let us know!



Your job titles

One of the things we've wondered as we've made the transition from SEOmoz to
Moz is whether our audience would begin to include a greater number of people
from outside the world of SEO. As Rand explained so well, we can't just be SEOs
anymore. So, we did what anyone would doâwe tossed all of your job titles
into a word cloud.




Two things are immediately obvious:

SEO is still a huge part of what you all do, as it's the largest word in this
cloud
Given how large the word "marketing" is, there are also quite a few of you
whose jobs likely include many other aspects, as well.

It'd be interesting to see how this cloud changed over time. Would those two
words be similar in size six months from now? A year? Time will tell, but for
now, our best course of action might be the T-shaped approach. Lots of advanced
depth in SEO, combined with enough depth in other areas to make sure everyone's
up to speed with the changes in the industry.

Your experience

Along the same lines, as our audience continues to expand and the Beginner's
Guide to SEO continues to be our most successful piece of content, we wanted to
know how experienced our readers were in their lines of work. As it turns out,
we have a pretty good spread:



Your level of SEO expertise

It's no secret that Moz's background revolved around SEO, and so it comes as
no surprise that most of our readers consider their SEO skills to be pretty
advanced. On a scale of 1-5, 86% of respondents rated their SEO expertise a 3 or
better, and 14% labeled themselves "industry experts." Given people's natural
inclination to choose responses toward the middle of a scale like this (central
tendency bias), we might even have more industry experts than these results
show.




Still, there are a significant number of readers who are relatively new to
SEO, so one of our challenges is to find the right line between basic and
advanced SEO content.


One of the ideas we're considering is implementing more of what I call
"pre-read transparency," making it easier to get a feel for what a post is about
and whether it's relevant for you before you even start reading it. If done
well, this could save our readers valuable time and make it easier to find
additional reading that's relevant to your work. (If you've got ideas on ways to
make that happen, we'd love to hear about them in the comments!)

How much SEO?

At the same time, 45% of respondents said they spend less than half of their
time doing SEO work. More than 20% said they spend less than a fifth of their
time on SEO. There are some blurry lines here, for sure (how much of your
day-to-day would you need to spend on SEO before you considered yourself an
expert?), but our read is that even the people who have the most expertise in
SEO are finding themselves doing more and more work outside of that area.



Your greatest challenges

This was one of the more telling sets of responses we received. Our primary
goal with the Moz Blog is to help you all become better marketers, and in order
to do that, we need to know what you all need help with. This was a text-entry
question; people could write as much or as little about their challenges as they
pleased. We noted recurring issues in the responses, and tallied every distinct
mention of each of those issues.


Some issues might seem like they overlap, but we think this paints a pretty
clear picture of what our readers are struggling with in today's world of
marketing:






Challenge


# mentions


1.


Changing industry


93


2.


Content marketing


70


3.


Clients/customers misunderstand my work


67


4.


Time management


52


5.


Politics and buy-in


43


6.


Too much to learn and keep track of


40


7.


Link building and maintenance


39


8.


Measurement and analysis


38


9.


Google and the algorithm


32


10.


Limited budget/resources


29


11.


Ranking


28


12.


Managing people and relationships


24


13.


Clients/customers are difficult


23


14.


Social media integration and management


23


15.


Strategy and goals


22


16.


Reporting


21


17.


Branding


17


18.


Understanding SEO


16


19.


Conversion rate


16


20.


Competition


14



We all work in a rapidly changing industry, and even the experts are
constantly having to learn new techniques. One of our primary jobs involves not
only informing you of those changes, but also offering recommendations on how
you might adapt your work. We'll continue to seek out the best advice in that
respect.


Content marketing is obviously an essential field for today's marketers, and
there are relatively few good resources for people looking to improve their own
content skills. We hope to bring you more posts to fill that niche and help you
level-up.


There were also quite a few responses having to do with workplace
productivity: time management, effective communication, and finding ways to
convey the value of our work to clients and customers. These are areas we
haven't covered much on the Moz Blog, but are vitally important for effective
marketers. Look for more of these posts in the future.



Your reading style

What we were really trying to get at here was how long we felt comfortable
making posts (we've had a few doozies in our time). Given that nearly two-thirds
of our readers try to go for the entire post (and yet only have so much time on
their hands), we're likely to try and keep things compendious so we don't scare
folks away from even starting in.




This also suggests that we shouldn't worry quite so much about the inverted
pyramid, since people generally tend to keep reading anyway, though in our minds
that doesn't hold a candle to Strunk and White's age-old advice to "omit
needless words." =)

The devices you prefer

This was a shocker for us. One of the items that has remained on our back
burner for some time is creating a more mobile-friendly responsive site,
especially for the blog, and we wanted to know how much of a priority it was for
all of you. With mobile devices now accounting for 28% of all web traffic, we
figured this was a high priority for our readership. Boy, were we wrong:




More than 92% of respondents listed "laptop/desktop" as at least one of their
preferred devices; fewer than 8% left the "laptop/desktop" option unchecked.


One of the most interesting comments on the survey's blog post alluded to the
idea that this could simply be a result of what people are used to, not what
their preferences actually are, since many blogs (our own included) still lack
responsive design. That's something we'll absolutely work on when we can, but at
the same time, these numbers are so wildly skewed toward reading on computers
that we feel pretty safe taking care of other priorities first.



Relevancy to your work

This might be more of a baseline to work from than a real metric of how we're
already doing, but we were certainly pleased to see this curve leaning to the
right:




We're planning on diving a little deeper into the data for this one, too. In a
sense, the data behind this graph can provide us with a rudimentary content
audit. We can look at the people who landed toward the top of this graph, and
figure we're providing plenty of content that's relevant to their lines of work.
We can also look at the people at the bottom of this graph and know we're
missing the mark for them.


As a whole, though, it's certainly encouraging to see that most people find
the majority of the posts on the Moz Blog to be pretty relevant. We'll likely
conduct another (perhaps shorter) survey in a year or so in order to measure
progress against data like this.

Accessibility

One debate we have frequently in the Mozplex is whether our posts are
appropriately accessible. In other words, are people bored because they're not
learning anything they don't already know? Or, are they confused because our
posts go right over their heads?


Our customer mentor, Matt Roney, has done some fantastic work with Moz
Analytics subscribers, and has found out that many people seem to be confused by
the complexity of web marketing, and thereby of our tools. That made us wonder
if folks were generally confused by our posts, as well.


As it turns out, most of our audience finds the balance to be about right:




One interesting note is that there are significantly more people who think
posts are too basic than folks who think they're too advanced, confounding our
expectation based on Matt's interactions.


Also interesting is the degree to which people find posts too basic or
advanced. We asked respondents who chose "too basic" to rate just how basic they
were on a scale of 1-5, and asked a similar question for people who chose "too
advanced." The average score for people who thought it was too basic was
2.7âright at the middle of the scaleâand the average score for
people who thought it was too advanced was 3.6âmuch higher on the scale.
This implies that our beginner-level readers are more lost than our advanced
readers are bored.


There's a great solution to this, which is to offer help to beginner-level
readers on the more advanced posts. Perhaps this comes in the form of tool tips
with explanations and definitions of more advanced concepts. Maybe it's a couple
of links in the sidebar that lead to relevant "background content," such as a
chapter in the Beginner's Guide to SEO. Whatever the case, we're likely to lean
just a little in the advanced direction while also offering beginners a way to
catch up quickly.

Room for improvement

We asked you all an open-ended question about what you'd like to see different
about the Moz Blog. We coded and tallied mentions of each request, and we have
to say we're pretty happy with the #1 response:






Feedback


# mentions


1.


Nothing


103


2.


More tutorials, how-tos, and action-oriented posts


44


3.


More case studies


39


4.


More video/multimedia content


32


5.


More advanced posts


23


6.


Need to branch out from SEO


20


7.


Needs to be more accessible to beginners/non-SEOs


17


8.


Needs better categorization/navigation


16


9.


Post more frequently


15


10.


Shorter posts


14


11.


Posts should be more data-driven/scientific


13


12.


Posts need more variety


13


13.


Needs mobile-friendly/responsive design


12


14.


More from Rand


11


15.


Needs more varied pool of authors


11




There's a lot of other great feedback in here, too, including a confirmation
of your desire to see more tutorials, case studies, and action-oriented posts
that keep you on top of your game. There was also an echo of the call for more
advanced posts.


More than 30 people requested an increase in posts that include videos, with
many of those expressing an appreciation for Whiteboard Friday. While we're
pretty happy with just one Whiteboard post each week, there's something to be
said for finding other ways to present video content, as there are a great many
examples of successful educational videos. We've even begun offering our own
educational videos to subscribers through Moz Academy. This is an area ripe for
further exploration.


Oh, and for the 11 folks who asked for more from Rand, you may get your wish
before long. =)



Topics

This was one of the most interesting sets of results for us. We asked about
which topics you'd like to learn more about, hoping to gain some direct insight
into the most valuable things we could post about on the blog. Respondents could
select as many of these options as they liked. As you might guess, advanced SEO
came out on top, with nearly 3/4 of responses selecting that option.


If we didn't already have enough evidence that content marketing was at the
forefront of people's minds, this speaks for itself:




We were also interested to see how high data analysis ranked on this list,
although with the volume of data we all deal with on a regular basis, there's no
real surprise. The ability to transform information into knowledge and knowledge
into wisdom is vital for today's marketers, and we'll do everything we can to
equip you all for the task.


We'll use these responses (among other things) as a guide for the distribution
of topics we post on the blog. It won't be an exact scienceâyou won't see
exactly 73 posts out of every 100 covering advanced SEOâbut you can expect
we'll post more about advanced SEO than we do about paid search marketing or
community management, and so forth.


We'll also work hard to draw connections between these categories, realizing
that it's impossible to silo them all away from one another. Social media is
heavily connected to branding, for example, and video marketing is simply a
specific type of content marketing. We'll use what we know about your day-to-day
work as a foundation, and show you what you need to know about the other areas
in this list.

Types of posts

Make no mistake, we will never title any blog post "The Ultimate Guide to ___"
again. =)


This is no typo or data entry errorâout of the 749 people who answered
this question, not a single one indicated they wanted to see more "ultimate
guides" on the blog.




We've talked about this quite a bit in the office, and our theory is that it
is always a false promise. There's no ultimate guide to anything (in any sense
of the word). There are really good guides, and there are some that many people
will consider the best availableâbut if someone else put in enough effort,
they could certainly make a better guide.


One of the many (many) lessons I've learned from Cyrus Shepard is that
headlines are a promise to the readers. If what's behind the headline doesn't
live up to that promise, you've lied about what you have, and are breaking the
hard-earned trust you've built with them over time.


We also think that while some "ultimate guides" are impressive (and are widely
shared as a result), they're usually far too long to actually read through right
away. Given the well established lack of time that folks in our industry have,
these posts often get pocketed indefinitely, undermining their true value.


That isn't the only useful part of these responses, thoughâit's quite
clear that the most valuable posts we can give you all are those that contain
truly actionable content. It isn't about inspiration as much as it is about
helping you stay ahead of industry changes, and showing you step-by-step how to
be more effective and efficient with your work. You can expect to see more
tutorials and case studies as time goes on.




Now we go to work. Thanks to all of you, we have a great sense for what kinds
of content we should seek out in order to provide the most value for you.


Here's a run-down of some of our biggest takeaways:

While our readers are increasingly focusing on other areas of marketing, the
foundation of their work still lies in SEO, and our content needs to reflect
that specialization. We should think of our readers as "T-shaped," focusing on
advanced depth in SEO while drawing connections to areas like content, social,
branding, and others.
Our readers are challenged by a constantly changing industry in which they're
required to continually learn (and evangelize) new techniques to retain their
expertise. They are frustrated by a lack of time and resources, difficulty in
communicating and reporting their work to both colleagues and customers, and a
need for up-to-date best practices in many areasâespecially content
marketing and link building.
Our readers prefer to consume blog posts on desktops or laptops, and if they
choose to read a post, most of them try to get all the way through it.
Our readers generally have an advanced knowledge of SEO, but there are many who
are relatively new to the field and feel lost when reading our more advanced
posts.
There is a great demand for action-oriented posts among our readers, including
tutorials and case studies. This demand vastly overshadows the demand for more
generalized overviews and higher-level strategies.

Given all of that, here are some things you might expect to see on the Moz Blog
as we move forward:

More actionable posts, including tutorials and case studies
A tendency toward more advanced posts related to SEO, along with more basic
posts that connect SEO to other areas of inbound
More help for beginners in getting the background necessary to understand the
more advanced posts
High quality posts to fill the content marketing niche
More posts on data analysis, competitive research, social media, workplace
productivity, and other topics toward the top of the list above
More "pre-read transparency," offering details to help you determine a post's
relevancy to you before you click
Overall: Content that's more relevant and valuable to you and your work. That's
our goal, and we want to keep hearing from you. Please feel free to send us your
thoughts at any time (editor@moz.com), whether about something we posted, topic
suggestions, or anything else related to the blog.

We'd also love to see your analysis of this data: Did we miss anything? Get
something wrong? Let us know in the comments below.


Thanks to everyone who gave their time for this survey; it was immensely
insightful for us Mozzers!
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