We published 156 posts on the Moz Blog this year, and as is tradition, it's time to look back at the most popular ones! You’ll find blogs on new findings in social media search, tips for e-commerce SEO, trends in technical and local SEO, and so much more.

Have a safe and happy new year, Moz friends! See you in 2023.

*The top 25 written posts published between January 1 - December 26, 2022, in order by pageviews generated during that timeframe.

1. How to Win Potential Consumers with Customer Journey Mapping on Google

By Christopher Hofman Laursen | April 20, 2022

If your website is like most others, there is likely a mismatch between the content you provide, and what your prospective customers search for on Google. This article is about understanding those potential customers and their conversation with Google by using the customer journey mapping method to provide them with the best content.

2. TikTok SEO: Understanding the TikTok Algorithm

By Lidia Infante | October 26, 2022

In the first chapter of this series, we dug into the search behavior on TikTok and why it should matter to SEOs. In this article, we are going to cover the ins and outs of the TikTok algorithm, and how to leverage it to get more users looking at your brand’s content.

3. Shopify SEO: The Guide to Optimizing Shopify [Updated for 2022]

By Christopher Long | January 25, 2022

Shopify is an increasingly popular platform for e-commerce sites, but it's not fully SEO-friendly out of the box. What's the best way to optimize your Shopify experience for SEO?

4. How to Prep Your SEO Strategy for a New Website

By Adriana Stein | March 16, 2022

Your SEO strategy should be one of the primary considerations before you even start your website. Instead of fighting to make your website SEO-ready later on, start with this holistic SEO checklist for new websites and save yourself valuable time and resources.

5. How to Use Chrome to View a Website as Googlebot

By Alex Harford | August 17, 2022

In this article, Alex shows you how and why to use Google Chrome (or Chrome Canary) to view a website as Googlebot. Viewing a website as Googlebot means we can see discrepancies between what a person sees and what a search bot sees – useful for technical SEO and content audits.

6. How to Optimize for Google's Featured Snippets [Updated for 2022]

By Ann Smarty | November 14, 2022

Google’s featured snippets started as an experiment almost a decade ago. They have since become an integral part of Google’s SERPs, showing up for lots of queries. In fact, featured snippets are now considered organic position #1, so making them part of your SEO strategy is essential to build more traffic.

7. Protect the Hours of Operation on Your GBP from Unwanted Google Edits

By Miriam Ellis | May 9, 2022

Google wants to employ machine learning and AI to alter the hours of operation on twenty million Google Business Profiles as part of their project of creating a “self-updating map”. Google has good reason for pursuing accuracy in their local index, but local business owners have even better reason to be on top of this announcement and proactively safeguard the validity of their own data. 

8. The Top Tech SEO Strategies for 2022 and Beyond

By Crystal Carter | January 27, 2022

Last year was an incredible year for core updates, and for how SEOs improve page quality for users. Moving forward, we can expect to see increased diversification of SERPs — led by developments in Google’s algorithms — and new features from tools like Google Lens. These developments will change how we manage our SEO now and in the future.

9. TikTok SEO: Is TikTok Going to Replace Google?

By Lidia Infante | August 31, 2022

User behavior on TikTok has been evolving as its popularity grows. We’ve seen the app go from dancing teenagers to influencing shopping behavior across the world. Now, the next step for TikTok seems to be turning into the next big search engine. What does it mean for SEOs?

10. 5 Things I Learned About E-A-T by Analyzing 647 Search Results

By Molly Ploe | September 13, 2022

How can SEOs possibly prove to Google, amid all the noise and competition and other experts out there, that their clients deserve a place on Page 1? To find out, Molly compared the top results on hundreds of SERPs to determine what actually proves E-A-T.

11. What Are the Best Tools for Storytelling With Data Visualization?

By Jo Cameron | July 27, 2022

Charts and infographics can be pretty, but if they aren’t also properly breaking down data in a way that makes an impact on the audience, they are likely not worth the time and effort. Below, we discuss how storytelling ties into data visualization, and what tools can help you bring more data into your content.

12. Social Media Competitor Analysis: The Complete Guide

By Sally Ofuonyebi | July 26, 2022

Looking for the steps for performing social media competitor analysis? Here’s a detailed breakdown.

13. How to Improve Organic Clickthrough for Your Content

By Ann Smarty | January 13, 2022

Google search result pages are becoming more diverse and even interactive, which makes any click-through study out there much less reliable, because no two sets of search results are ever the same. So how much control do writers and content creators have over how their content is represented in search? As it turns out, quite a bit!

14. How We Increased Organic Traffic by 65% Using Keyword Research Working Sessions

By Daniel Wood | July 20, 2022

In this blog, Daniel shows you why you should do a keyword research working session with your clients to tap into their expert industry knowledge, and how these sessions helped his team deliver organic traffic growth for one of their new clients with low Domain Authority.

15. Understanding the Google Ads Auction & Why Ad Rank Is Important

By Tanuja Mahdavi | February 16, 2022

When there is a search query on Google, Google Ads runs a quick auction to determine which ads will show for that search query, and what the ad positions should be. This ad auction is repeated every time an ad is eligible to appear for a search term, and is an integral part of the SERP landscape. To help understand it, Tanuja covers the what, how, and why behind the Google Ads auction.

16. How to Earn Topical Authority in 2022 and Beyond

By Zoe Ashbridge | June 8, 2022

Zoe takes a deep dive into topical authority: what it is, how to earn it, and, importantly, how to strategically develop topical relevance.

17. How to Use Keywords to Combine the Power of SEO and Google Ads [Case Study]

By Adriana Stein | July 19, 2022

Both SEO and PPC are used for a common goal — search engine marketing (SEM) — and neither would survive without targeted keywords. Since both strategies have user intent and search demand in mind, you can use them to achieve both short-term and long-term business goals. When approached correctly, using SEO and PPC together can unlock significant opportunities for your brand, so let’s dig in!

18. How We Increased a Client’s Leads by 384% in Six Months by Focusing on One Topic Cluster [Case Study]

By Lydia German | September 26, 2022

Lydia shares the content update process she an her team at Tao Digital Marketing used to generate great results for a client in the financial services niche.

19. The 7-Day Quick Start Guide to SEO + Cheat Sheet

By Cyrus Shepard | October 31, 2022

Unless you work for an agency or want to make a lifelong career out of SEO (an excellent choice), most folks don't learn SEO for the sake of learning SEO, but want the same quick wins that professional SEOs look for. That’s why we created the Quick Start Guide to SEO, which includes seven days of actions to check the SEO health of your site while putting you on the path of sustained improvement. If you want something even more compact, we also created the SEO Quick Start Guide Cheat Sheet.

20. Freshness & SEO: An Underrated Concept

By Christopher Long | July 6, 2022

After working with a news organization and testing the learnings from that work on other sites, Chris and his team started to see the immense power that freshness updates could produce in SEO. In this post, he explains why the entire SEO community has underrated the concept of “freshness”, and how to start optimizing for it.

21. 2022 Local SEO Success: The Year of Everywhere

By Miriam Ellis | January 4, 2022

Take a look back at Miriam's seven local SEO precepts for the 2022, including some expert commentary.

22. The Top 5 Soft Skills SEOs Should Develop

By Petra Kis-Herczegh | September 6, 2022

When it comes to SEO, especially technical SEO, we often talk about the importance of hard skills. And while there’s no doubt that vlookup and regex can be your best friends, there are some essential soft skills to learn that will help you excel in your role and progress in your career.

23. How to Do Better, Lazier Keyword Research

By Tom Capper | September 5, 2022

In this post, Tom expands on one of the points from his 2022 MozCon talk: that a lot of time spent on keyword research is wasted. He’ll go over the three main ways SEOs turn what should be an involved piece of strategic thinking into an overly time-consuming routine, along with what to focus on instead.

24. Transitioning to GA4: Is this the Right Analytics Move for Your Team?

By Sam Torres | July 25, 2022

As you've likely heard, Google plans to fully retire Universal Analytics for GA4. Here's what you should know before making any moves.

25. Beginner's Guide to Google Business Profiles: What Are They, How To Use Them, and Why

By Miriam Ellis | October 17, 2022

Google Business Profile is both a free tool and a suite of interfaces that encompasses a dashboard, in-SERP editing, local business profiles, and a volunteer-driven support forum with this branding. Google Business Profiles and the associated Google Maps make up the core of Google’s free local search marketing options for eligible local businesses. In this guide, we’re doing foundational learning! Share this simple, comprehensive article with incoming clients and team members to get off on the right foot with this important local business digital asset.