The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
Welcome back to Whiteboard Friday! First up in our fall season, Will Critchlow shows you how, much like the NBA, SEO is undergoing an analytic revolution — and how you can make the most of it.
To hear more on this topic, and from our other amazing MozCon 2022 speakers, be sure to pre-order the video bundle[1]!
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hi, Moz fans. Will Critchlow here, CEO at SearchPilot[2]. I want to start today by talking about the NBA in 2001. This is what the shot chart looked like. So these are the 200 most commonly shot from locations in the NBA in 2001.
So in professional basketball, you can see that they took a load of shots around the rim. These are the dunks and layups. They took a load of shots from outside the three-point line, and they took a lot of these mid-range shots, which are all the jump shots in between.
NBA analytic revolution
Something happened in the subsequent 20 years, because today the shot chart looks more like this. It's pretty mind blowing. You can see there's still a ton of dunks and layups, still a ton of three-point shots, but the mid-range has all but disappeared. Why is that? Well, what happened was they installed advanced camera systems in every NBA stadium and every NBA arena and applied a whole load of advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence to track all of the players and the ball throughout every single game.
And using that advanced statistics, they