Insights

Posted August 7, 2019
By Cody Hanson |

The second week of July, three Klü team members went to Mozcon to learn about cutting edge technology and industry trends. They came back with their heads filled to the brim with ideas that will benefit our client’s SEO and paid campaigns.

Digital Marketers may be familiar with the annual event, but for those who are not, Mozcon is one of the top digital marketing conferences in the world, filled with mind-blowing strategies.

In a nutshell, Mozcon is Disneyland for digital marketers (minus the roller coasters). It is something our team looks forward to each year. Seattle’s Washington State Convention Center is the location of Mozcon. 

This year’s event was thrilling. After landing in Spokane, our team compiled notes from the many presentations. Here are a few key takeaways from this year's event:

1) Super Practical Tips for Improving Your Sites E-A-T from Dr. Marie Haynes (@marie_haynes) 

One of the major takeaways for our SEO team was how to improve a website’s E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust) based on Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. This 166 page document is not for the faint of heart. Dr. Haynes shared tips to help improve a site’s E-A-T. Understanding how much weight Google gives E-A-T was especially impactful. Haynes expanded on ideas on how to gain authoritative mentions for publications, publishing original research, and finding common, but sometimes unanswered, questions.

2)   Web Search in 2019 – Rand Fishkin (@randfish) 

One of the first presentations of this year’s event was by Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz and SparkToro. During his presentation, Rand discussed the current state of search and addressed the common (mis)perception that new media kills old media. Rand proved that video didn’t kill the radio star. He noted that traditional media is still relevant. New technologies often don’t kill the old ones; it just consumes more of our free time.

3)   Building a Discoverability Powerhouse – Heather Physioc (@heatherphysioc) 

On day two, Heather Physioc exposed some common inefficiencies of digital marketing teams. A good marketing strategy takes a holistic approach. Every department plays a significant role.

Her research found that many digital teams siloed themselves instead of collaborating, sharing data, and building a cohesive strategy. Klü has worked very hard on collaborating, but we still learned a lot from Physioc’s presentation. For example, when we look at the research and work of each team, we see areas where every aspect of digital marketing benefits from the other. Noting the importance of providing feedback and sharing successes, Physioc provided valuable resources to improve strategy sessions, data reporting, and networking.

4)   Content Rankings and Lead Generation – Andy Crestodina (@crestodina)  

On day three, Andy Crestodina took a deep dive into content, exposing the direct link between quality content and quality leads. Crestodina’s visual correlated time/effort as linear and overall success as exponential in nature. More simply put, if we put in 10X the time/effort, we can expect to see 100X the result. Of course, there are steps to creating quality content. Some of the most insightful tips Crestodina shared included:

• Strong opinion pieces and original research pieces are proven to generate the highest engagement.

• Adding references and mentions to your articles improves your chances of getting more shares, and engagement.

• New ways of analyzing search queries to identify content opportunities.

5)   Killer CRO and UX Wins Using an SEO Crawler – Luke Carthy (@MrLukeCarthy)

As the title suggests, Luke Carthy provided new and killer ideas for finding conversion rate optimization (CRO) and user experience (UX) wins. Carthy showed us how he crawled Best Buy’s website to identify URL’s that returned ‘no results found.’ His crawl revealed that 190K people received ‘no results found’ pages a month, which is a massive amount of missed opportunities. The list of product searches with ‘no results found’ is an opportunity for Best Buy to add inventory they’re not currently stocking. Carthy’s example showed us the potential this technique could have not only for e-commerce but any site that has internal search capabilities.  

6)   Featured Snippets ­­– Brittney Muller (@britneymuller)

Test everything, which many presenters emphasized, is something we agree with 100% and LOVE. Brittney Muller walked attendees through her testing process for featured snippets, which are the information boxes typically shown before any ads or organic searches. Winning a featured snippet designates your site as the trusted source for that search query. Muller tested Google with various formats and character lengths to see what they would and wouldn’t allow then shared her research with us. 

With so many great presentations this year, the hardest part is prioritizing which techniques to implement first. Thanks to the team at Moz and all the presenters for a fantastic event. Our team can’t wait to come back next year!

Tags

• digital marketing
• conference
• Paid Search
• SEO
• content marketing