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Join us for MozCon 2025. With a fresh look and feel, we will expand to two one-day events in New York and London. Read more for dates and what’s up next!

Struggling with SEO that doesn’t drive revenue? Learn how to identify profitable keywords with high intent to boost your traffic and grow your bottom line.

Discover proven strategies for strengthening your brand’s authority in 9 easy steps. From product excellence (featuring Tony’s Chocolonely) to customer service mastery (like Amazon), learn how successful brands maintain their edge. This guide covers essential elements, including brand identity, omnichannel content strategy, customer advocacy, and adaptable marketing approaches. Perfect for marketing leaders looking to enhance their brand’s presence and authority across digital channels.

Finding the right keywords can feel like navigating a busy train station. Which direction leads to your destination? What’s the most efficient route? Keyword Gap 2.0 is your express ticket to competitive insights.

Looking for resources to scale your SEO agency? Check out this list of client onboarding tools to automate manual tasks.

Join Peter Richman from Plug and Play as he tackles a common marketing dilemma: should you maintain multiple domains or consolidate them? Learn the key factors affecting this decision, including SEO impact, resource management, and audience targeting. Discover why larger websites often have greater pull for attracting links and traffic, and when maintaining separate domains might make strategic sense.

Discover the key findings from a Ziff Davis study on LLM training data and how it can help you improve your efforts to rank for generative search features.

90% of the U.S. population has eaten at a McDonald’s over the past year. Whether a Big Mac is your drunk go-to, or you like to bribe your kids with Happy Meals on long car rides, the point holds: McDonald‘s is one of the most popular and long-lasting brands we’ve got. We all take it for granted. Except maybe we shouldn’t. There‘s a reason McDonald’s ranks among the top 10 most magnetic brands for Gen Z — surpassing Sephora, NFL, and Starbucks. And it’s not the nostalgia factor… At least, not entirely. To get to the bottom of this, I sat down with two experts — Anna Engel, Director of brand, content, and culture at McDonald‘s, and Nathaniel Gaynor, Brand marketing manager at McDonald’s — whose full-time job is to make McDonald’s cool to Gen Zers. Lesson 1: Marketing should be symbiotic. Engel thinks of campaign elements — whether it’s a new food item, a digital campaign element, or a social media post — as “ingredients.” Of course she does. And what she loves about Gen Z is how they‘ve created a symbiotic relationship with McDonald’s campaign “ingredients”. Engel‘s team doesn’t just create content for Gen Z. Gen Z creates content for them, too. As Engel told me, Gen Zers often take brand ingredients and “create something new with them — that’s what excites us and motivates us,” she says. “For instance, they might create a narrative or an anime poster for a campaign… Things like that.” Let’s also address the elephant in the room — why have they created an entirely separate Gen Z marketing team? Because “Gen Z is driving culture,“ Engel explained to me. ”And our ambition is to continue to be a cultural icon.” Lesson 2: Connect with your customers in the wild. Every year, one of McDonald’s agencies takes a road trip. (Wholesome, I know.) “The Fan Truth Road Trip helps us understand who our fans are and why they connect with our brand,” Gaynor says. “We see our fans pulling our brand into many different parts of culture — whether that’s anime, fashion, art, or gaming.” Engel and Gaynor’s team then takes these learnings to create authentic experiences for their Gen Z fans. Consider the Feb 2024 “WcDonald’s campaign.” The campaign was a nod to McDonald’s anime and manga fans, and included a limited-edition menu, Japanese manga-themed packaging, a four-episode anime series, and an interactive experience in L.A. Along with McDonald’s restaurants, the agency visits college campuses, malls, movie theaters, and parks, too. As Engel puts it, “We break outside the four walls of McDonald’s to connect with our fans in the wild.“ She adds, “It’s important for us to understand the universe they live in, what their interests are, and who they are outside of McDonald’s.” While you might not be able to orchestrate a “Fan Truth Road Trip” for your brand, the lesson here works for all marketers: To fully understand your customers, you need to meet them outside the confines of your marketing efforts. What else do they enjoy, and how can your brand show up there, too? Lesson Three: Be fan-led. “Where we haven’t hit the right note in the past is when we haven’t been fan-led,” Gaynor told me. “Now, we let our fans guide the way to our next big idea. It’s our job to embrace them and live in their creative universe and speak to them. And when we do that, we succeed.” Engel echoes his point, and explains that another mistake they’ve made in the past is not being data-driven enough in their campaign approach. “We can build great brand relevance campaigns. But if it doesn’t link to something tangible in the restaurant for the fans to purchase, touch, feel, eat, then it’s not going to be a business driver,” Engel says. Because ultimately, Engel and Gaynor‘s main goal isn’t just to seem cool to the 22-year-olds on Fortnite. (Although it’s a fun side-benefit.) Their goal is to drive sales. And if that just so happens to entail anime, fashion, or artwork, so be it.

Managing old news content? Learn proven strategies to update, archive, or remove articles to boost SEO, streamline performance, and maintain site authority.

Any time an interviewee makes me ask my boss, “Can we say that in a newsletter?” you know it’s gonna be a good day. Today, we’ve got spicy takes and spicy language from a master of marketing who made his fortune selling spicy shorts. Lesson 1: Don’t get hooked on the performance marketing drug. Preston Rutherford openly admits that he made every mistake in the book when co-founding the shorts company Chubbies. So I kick off our chat by copping a line from Sheryl Crow: “What’s your favorite mistake?” “Favorite mista-a-ake.” He sings, then laughs. “Favorite. Obviously a euphemism for gut-wrenching and sleep-depriving mistake. But, just to honor Sheryl…” He thinks a moment: “Getting hooked on the drug that is short-term performance marketing — and in particular return on ad spend (or ROAS), where effectively all of our marketing investments were evaluated on that basis.” My eyebrow goes up. Most marketing leaders want to see a measurable, proven return, right? How else do you know what’s working? Rutherford says that exact sentiment is why he (and so many marketers) over-rotated toward performance marketing. That drive to make all of your marketing efforts systematic, measurable, and scalable. “ We’re so used to a certain feedback loop on the data side, right? If I’m spending dollars, I’m only measuring success by who clicked on my ad and purchased in a 24-hour period.” But that feedback loop incentivizes marketing efforts that produce short-term results — at the cost of long-term brand building. Not to mention, it led him away from all of the fun and unusual things that made Chubbies recognizable in the first place. And what’s worse, the hypertargeting of performance marketing means “you’re spending dollars to claim a purchase that would have already happened.” But if you’re not focusing on return, what are you focusing on? “Brand is the most important asset that any kind of business builds,” he says. “And is ultimately the least measurable with current tools.” Rutherford’s hot take? Only 40% of your marketing dollars should be spent on short-term ad spend, with the rest going to brand building. “You would much rather have someone come directly to you — not being prompted by some kind of promotion or false urgency — but rather, ‘this is just a company that I believe in’.” Lesson 2: If content is king, difference is queen. “What marketing trend needs to die in a fire?” I ask him. “Generative AI,” he blurts without a moment’s pause. Y’all. I bark-laughed. (Then I wondered if anyone in my reporting hierarchy reads the newsletter, and nervously tugged my collar like Rodney Dangerfield.) “Creativity is queen. Things that are different are queen,” he explains. “Generative AI is trained on models of what has already been done in the past and what has ‘worked.’” He puts that last word into air quotes. According to Rutherford, this creates two problems: “Only looking backward and, in my opinion, an incorrect definition of what works. It’s based on driving short-term revenue.” Rutherford is quick to qualify that this doesn’t mean there isn’t any place for AI in marketing. But for many marketers, it will lead to churning out what he calls “the sea of sameness.” Breaking out from that “sea of sameness” is how Chubbies was born in the first place. When Rutherford and his friends sported the handmade shorts on vacation, the unusual cuts and colors had complete strangers approaching them to comment. Not everybody loved them, but everybody noticed them. That success would have never been realized if they had based their decisions on what already worked. Lesson 3: Think of marketing like building friendships. You’re probably thinking this lesson is gonna get all touchy-feely. Nope. This is a much more cuss-laden concept. Rutherford says that any idea, tactic, campaign, or concept he has absolutely must pass through this filter: “Would I send this email to a buddy or would they talk shit to me?” For the third time in 15 minutes, I’m doubled over in laughter, but Rutherford has an excellent point. Stop and think about your favorite brands. They’re probably the ones that talk to you like a human being. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be funny, irreverent, or uncouth. But I guarantee you didn’t think of someone who blasts you with corporate-speak. Because at the end of the day, brand building is actually relationship building. That relationship will look different if you’re selling hot sauce, tax software, or maternity pillows — but they all require authenticity… and respect. “Am I treating the people who view my ads like I’m a corporation marketing to faceless customers? Or am I a person marketing to other people?” As proof, he points out that this is exactly why influencer marketing is so effective right now. It’s a real person talking to you as another real person. And our recent survey data bears out the same story as marketing leaders are pouring heavy budget into creator content, brand building, and developing authenticity. Rutherford then drops a sweary little denouement: “People can see through our bullshit. People are not idiots.”