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As SEOs, our goal when we're creating content is to provide equitable access, which means that content isn’t just available to search engines, but also to people of all abilities. In the second installment of his three-part accessibility series, Cooper shows you how to ensure that your amazing content is accessible by bots AND people.

Photo of the whiteboard with handwritten notes on how content SEOs can focus on accessibility.

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Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to the latest edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cooper Hollmaier. I started doing SEO in 2016, and today I worked at a large outdoor specialty retailer helping make our strategies for technical SEO come alive. Thank you for attending this Session 2 of 3 of our SEO and accessibility series. 

It all starts with accessibility

If you've taken the intro to SEO[1] course here at Moz, you're probably familiar with the concept called Mozlow's hierarchy of SEO needs. If you're not, the basic idea is that we have to have some foundational elements that are needed to make us rank in search engine results, and then we can layer some things on top to make us more competitive in those results.

A pyramid-shaped chart showing how different elements of SEO are graded according to how essential they are. The lower tiers are 'essential to rankings' and the higher tiers 'improve competitiveness'. Bottom tier: Crawl accessibility (so engines can reach and index your content). 2nd tier: Compelling content (that answers the searcher's query). 3rd tier: Keyword optimized (to attract searchers and engines).4th tier: Great user experience (including fast load speed, ease of use, and compelling UI on any device). 5th tier: Share-worthy content (that earns links, citations, and amplification). 6th tier: Title, URL, & description (to draw high CTR in the rankings). Top tier: Snippet/schema markup (to stand out in SERPs).

But it all starts with crawl accessibility, and in the same way it starts with basic human accessibility as well. Our goal when we're creating content is to provide equitable access. So this means my content is not only available to search engines but people of all abilities as well. Let's look at an example.

Making assumptions about your audience

Let's say I'm a restaurant. Commonly you'll see restaurants post their menu in

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