Our team attended the first-ever virtual MozCon last week on Tuesday, July 14th, and Wednesday, July 15th. The two days were packed with a lot of noteworthy speakers covering a wide range of search engine marketing topics. Below is a round-up of some key takeaways from the conference.
Take advantage of automation
 Adam Henige | Automation is boss. I really need to take some javascript lessons because the fun bookmarklets that Rob Ousbey put together to check for indexed pages by folder are really handy. Plus, building these simple tools are a huge saver of time and money. |
 KelliKaufman | Two words – embrace automation. In our world today of increasing technology, AI and other advances are here to stay so it’s in our best interest to embrace these tools and allow them to help us. We can only benefit from leveraging the knowledge that Google has and help us do our job more efficiently and easier. |
Slow and steady link building
 Michael Hall | When it comes to link building, it’s important to follow tested strategies that have a history of driving consistent results. You’ll often see flashy case studies that are difficult to recreate across multiple industries – while these are certainly interesting to read, it’s not always a good idea to mix up your strategy and try something that has a good chance of crashing and burning. That’s why I liked Shannon McGuirk’s presentation so much – it was so relatable for so many people who do link building. |
Adam Henige | Shannon McGuirk was onto something when she pointed out that consistent performance in link building will push the needle. Rather than trying to hit constant home runs, and beating yourself up over it, creating and consistently having small to medium successes will win in the long haul. Tortoise vs. hare. |
Don’t be afraid to develop data
 Joseph Ford | Research, research, research. If I want our content or blog posts to gain more traction, we need to have more quantitative research. That was a key content takeaway for me from most of the presentations, but certainly from Andy Crestondina. |
 Lexie Kimball | If there isn’t research on a topic, create it. Andy Crestodina has researched and developed data to answer questions when nobody else has. It has helped him build credibility in the industry and doesn’t hurt his website traffic either! |
Share and share again
| Kelli Kaufman | When it comes to content creation, we all know how much time and effort goes into this… After you spend the time creating this masterpiece, it won’t just promote itself on its own. No matter how much research went into creating your content, if you don’t pair it with promotion it can likely be a flop. Brian Dean hit home on this idea with brilliant ideas on how to promote your content once it’s created. He shared so many great tips that can be easily done to promote any type of content. |
Don’t let keywords become stale
| Michael Hall | When you spend enough time in the SEO world, you’ll discover that keyword volumes are never static. Trending keywords emerge and fade away and new keyword targets replace older and less relevant keywords. Many of our clients work in constantly changing industries, which is why it’s so important to stay up to date on emerging keywords and new trends. Pete Meyers’ showed how you can use Google trends to discover trending keywords as they pop up so you can edit or create new content quickly and get ahead of your competitors. |
Lexie Kimball | Pete Meyers’ Moving Targets’ presentation was a great reminder that you can’t ever coast when it comes to keywords. When you have had a client for an extended period of time, it is easy to focus on the keywords that work, but it is important to always be utilizing tools like Google Trends to find up and coming keywords so you can get ahead of the competition. |
Make someone’s idea better
Adam Henige | Sherlock Homeboy is a phrase I won’t soon forget thanks to Ross Simmonds and his interesting take on relating the movie world to content development. You can’t make the same thing someone else made, but you can take their ideas and make it bigger and better – and that can win in the world of SEO. |
Utilize exact match PPC queries
Joseph Ford | The death of match types in PPC is been documented, but this past week it really became more prevalent to me. Francine Rodriguez’s presentation had a lot of great PPC automation hacks, but her dive into keyword match types really got me thinking. I have since started to do more actual search query reports on my exact match types across client accounts and have been shocked at the variations that are generating impressions in the exact match categories. |
Relationships take work
| Kelli Kaufman | Attracting new customers to your business should be looked at as a nurturing relationship. Flavilla Fongang perfectly describes how important it is to nurture and slowly develop a relationship with a new customer. There are so many different facets to this that can help ensure the customer keeps your business at the top of mind. It’s important to take a step back and assess your business and its brand voice to continue drawing in new customers with a unique experience, partnerships, and more. |
Lexie Kimball | Flavilla Fongang had so many great points on building customer relationships and keeping customers happy. Your audience and services or products are both evolving. It is important to always be learning about your audience to make sure you can surprise them and keep them engaged. |
Focus on organic CTR
Joseph Ford | The correlation between ranking and dwell time is not a secret. But Izzi Smith’s talk helped me understand how CTR fits into that sandwich of factors. We have always used Google Search Console for extensive non branded query research and position data, but I think we as a team need to improve how we are using GSC to evaluate opportunities for improving organic CTRs. Improving those CTRs and generating more “last clicks” could drastically help our rankings and more importantly, generate quality visits to our client websites. |
Machine learning: anyone can do it
| Michael Hall | A huge pro about the 2020 MozCon format was that many of the presentations provided tutorials, as they knew that attendees could re-watch their presentations once the conference was over. I definitely need to re-watch Britney Muller’s presentation on accessible machine learning a few times as there seem to be plenty of opportunities for assessing Screaming Frog data, refining competitor backlink data, and filtering search query data. |
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