Modern SERPs require modern understanding. National SERPs are a myth — these days, everything is local. And when we're basing important decisions on SERPs and ranking, using the highest quality data is key. Russ Jones explores the problem with SERPs, data quality, and existing solutions in this edition of Whiteboard Friday.
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Video Transcription
Hey, folks, this is Russ Jones here again with another exciting edition of Whiteboard Friday. Exciting might be an exaggeration, but it really is important to me because today we're going to talk about data quality. I know I harp on this a whole lot.
It's just, as a data scientist, quality is really important to me. Here at Moz, we've made it a priority of the last several years, from improving the quality of our Domain Authority score, improving Spam Score, completely changing the way we identify the search volume in particular keywords. Quality is just part of our culture here.
Today I want to talk about a quality issue and probably the most important metric in search engine optimization, which are search rankings. Now I know there's this contingent of SEOs who say you shouldn't look at your search rankings. You should just focus on building better content and doing better outreach and just let it happen.
But for the vast majority of us, we look at our rankings for the purposes of determining how we're performing, and we make decisions based on those rankings. If a site stops performing as well for a very important keyword, well, then we might spend some money to improve the content on that page or to do more outreach for it.
We make important decisions, budgetary decisions on what the SERPs