MobileMoxie Glossary
Moxie Score
What is the Moxie Score and How Can I Increase My Moxie Score in a SERP?
Moxie is something that you can control because it is your representation in the SERP. By default, we will record all rankings that are associated with your domain and brand, and when those show up on a SERP that you are tracking, then that gives you Moxie. You can also improve by adding social profiles for your brand like Facebook when they rank. Similarly, you can claim your Knowledge Graph, Google My Business Listings, and anything else with a URL that represents your brand, in our system, and that will also count towards your Moxie Score when any of those things show up in a SERP. This includes News items, Images, Featured Snippets, Twitter carousels, and the first 3 results in a People Also Ask box.
After you have claimed all your stuff, the next thing to do to increase your Moxie Score is simply to have those things rank. This will give you a more realistic, holistic, comprehensive view of your brand, your marketing, and your impact on search results. You may have a press release or an announcement that you want to promote, but it is not on your domain – that is fine, and that still counts in your Moxie Score. You may have a huge Facebook community that drives loads of business, and when that ranks, it will also count in your Moxie Score. You may be doing a great job ranking in People Also Ask, Interesting Finds, and Twitter Carousels, and that will also count in your Moxie Score.
What is the Moxie Meter & How Do I Read It?
At MobileMoxie, we know that some search results are much easier to rank for than others – and it is not just a matter of organic competition. Often, it is related to the growing list of hosted inclusions, aka ‘Google stuff’ that is being injected into the search results, that is designed, or at least effectively results in keeping people in the search engines, rather than getting them to a website. The Moxie Meter was designed to measure this ‘Mess’ in each search result, and compare it to your comprehensive presence in that search result. Moxie Meters goal is to help you evaluate how much of the search result is associated with content that is a representation of your brand, and how much is other ‘Mess’ that might be harder to displace from the SERP. It will also help you understand which search queries are even worth trying for in organic, and/or, if different strategies than traditional SEO will be needed, to drive traffic from a result.
We provide you with with 2 main scores in the Moxie Meter:
1. Moxie Score – Your brand presence in this specific SERP – the score is a number from 1 to 100, which considers any brand representation that is present on page 1 of any SERP and is associated with your brand in your MobileMoxie Brand Profile.
2. Mess Score – The prevalence of Google elements such as Featured Snippets, Knowledge Graph, Video, and Image Snippets in this specific SERP – These elements can be harder to control and often require non-traditional SEO strategies and tactics for your brand, website, or information to be included. The score is a number from 1 to 100 and shows the complexity or ‘messiness’ of Page 1 of this specific SERP.
How Is the Moxie Score Calculated?
To understand how these numbers are calculated, you have to first understand that the Mess Score describes the SERP, and the Moxie Score describes your specific performance in that SERP. They are related but not dependent on each other. One SERP can have a high Mess Score, and a brand can still have a high Moxie Score if they are dominating the Mess. Conversely, a brand can have a low Moxie Score on a search result that also has low Mess – this happens if a search result is mostly blue links, but your brand is not included in any of those blue links or in the paid results.
It is easier to have a high Moxie Score on a SERP with a low Mess Score.
It is harder to have a high Moxie Score on a SERP with a high Mess Score
You turn Mess into Moxie when you claim it as yours in our system, by marking it as yours
The Moxie Meter puts the two scores on one dial so that you can see how you are doing on a SERP and at the same time, appreciate how easy or hard it was to do
To get these scores, the math is quite complicated, for which an advanced math degree is useful, but a strong understanding of calculus and statistics would do. Essentially, we take all these weighted metrics, and figure out what the top possible scores could look like (often VERY large numbers are generated here), and then we turn them into ratios, so that they can be normalized, and plotted on a meter that is easy to understand. It is important to understand that it is not a zero-sum situation – When you improve your Moxie, you are not making the mess go down, you are just DOMINATING it with all your Moxie.
How Can I Decrease the Mess in a SERP?
The level of Mess in a SERP is mostly determined by Google and is generally hard to control. Google will include lots of non-organic elements in a SERP if they think it is useful for the user, and if they have good information to display. As an example, think about a search result for something with lots of vetted content, like ‘SpongeBob’. This SERP is generally dominated by a Knowledge Graph result, and sometimes also includes App Packs, Images, and Videos – mostly from official or semi-official (aka Wikipedia) sources. This SERP will likely have a super-high Mess Score because there is so much in the result that will be very hard to displace.
Another example might be a search for ‘bread’. You may sell bread, and you may even have lots of great web assets and ranking signals, but it will be hard to displace the Knowledge Graph, Images, and potentially disambiguation that shows up in the search result for ‘bread’. It will be a mess if you try to drive lots of traffic from search engines on that keyword – It might be incredibly time-intensive and difficult or impossible to drive great traffic from that keyword – it is a bit of a mess. Sometimes algorithm shifts, Google runs tests or there are changes in the interpretation of a query intent can change the Mess in a SERP, but otherwise, this score will rarely show quick and dramatic changes.
What about Paid Elements & PPC in the SERP?
Unlike other SEO tools, we count everything that might distract and average use from clicking on one thing over another – this includes the paid elements of the search result. This is important because some search results include significantly more paid results, and some paid results, like Product Listing Ads (PLAs) are more distracting than others – so those drive the Mess Score for a SERP up. This is because it will be harder to get attention on an organic ranking when it is stacked below a long list of paid results, and if you decide to compete in paid, to drive up your Moxie Score, the queries that result in large groups of paid ads at the top of a search result, are also quite competitive and expensive in PPC.