MozCon 2017 Key Takeaways

What is MozCon?

Three days, one track of forward-thinking, actionable sessions in SEO, brand development, CRO, the mobile landscape, analytics, customer experience, social and content marketing, and more.

Industry leaders and speakers share next-level tactics on everything from ranking higher in today’s evolving search results to making data-driven decisions in your marketing.

Fun fact, Moz partners with 50/50 Pledge and commits to better representation of women on stage.

Key Takeaways

All the sessions are jam-packed with insights! Although I’ve organized the key takeaways to (hopefully) the most relevant teams, I believe all teams would benefit from everything here.

Want more?

• Decks

Content Optimization

• Optimize all images with relevant ALT and TITLE. ALT is the objects in the image. TITLE is the short contextual description of the image.
• Image search is on the rise. This could be a potential additional traffic source.
• Image alt and the title was intended to improve accessibility for the blind. Sites with that are 508c compliant generally rank better on SERP.
• Create content that not only solves a particular problem but dive into other tangents of questions that may arise. Answer every possible question that may arise.
• People do not want to be pitched. They just want to solve the problems and clear all doubts.
• Imagine if we’re only allowed get 1 backlink for a content. We need to be damn sure we have the best of the best.
• Produce the content you want to find not what you want to rank.
• Writing something to be “thanked” for rather than “ranked”.
• Don’t worry about Rank Brain. Write for humans.
• Invest in finding a winning reusable format to create content that encourages discussion and engagement. Post-hoc rationalization.
• Content with data/graphs works best but it does not have to be boring.
• Formats are only the vessel (data) but the creative (feeling) is what connects with people.
• People are more likely to share engaging content.
• Exercise in regular brainstorming sessions to come up with content ideas.
• To find the “diamond in the rough”, we need to first come up with a shit ton of shit ideas.
• Find content ideas from online communities.
• StackOverflow- see most commented and upvoted questions/comments
• Slideshare — See which “slide” that gets clicked a lot
• Reddit — Find popular content to model and riff off from.
• Look for posts with the last month in a popular subreddit.
• Can also use them for focus groups
• Repurpose content to increase reach
• Take snippets (screenshot, quotes, etc) of content and share on social
• Use tools to auto-convert markdown to ebook, slides, etc.
• Use stock photos that is free for commercial use and don’t require attribution
• Pexels
• Unsplash
• In keyword research pay attention to intent modifiers for opportunities that we can focus on.
• https://getstat.com/blog/how-serp-features-respond-to-search-intent-modifiers/
• Segment keywords by intent.

Brand Awareness

• Create an online community (Ambassador Program) to drive ongoing engagement.
• Having a content-first community
• eg: Shopify University
• Community forums — gamification increases engagement.
• Always outreach for everything.
• Even the best campaign ever wouldn’t get any coverage without outreach.
• Outreach is being more about perseverance and is more of who you are.
• Leverage social platforms for long-term branding and not referral traffic or customer acquisition.
• Facebook is a dopamine hit because we’re bored, mobile, muted and time-bound.
• Funny short videos. Silent videos, similar to Charlie Chaplin. Think of ‘snackable content’.
• Instagram is to explore lifestyles
• Company work culture. Showcase benefits, perks, work-life balance, events, office-space
• YouTube for how to tutorials. Use Wistia Soapbox to produce videos quickly.
• Work on brand awareness to secure future of search, voice.
• Voice only gives 1 result. So need to make sure when people think of “Integration” they think of Zapier.
• When people search for “how to integrate X with Zapier” on voice, it totally eliminates the competition. Zapier” on voice, it totally eliminates the competition entirely.

Landing Page Optimization

• Improve landing pages by leveraging information from customer user journey.
• Ask customers pain point
• Talk to people and ask about their understanding of what is our product.
• Gather stories, and use the text verbatim on landing page copy
• Stop thinking for the customers. Generic content does not evoke emotions. Emotional copies work best.
• Ask what customers think what info is important, then adapt information/sections on landing page accordingly.
• Ask users why they clicked on the SERP.

Customer Feedback

• Run live chat for 1 week to figure out questions not answered in websites
• Use that to improve Help doc or landing pages.
• Satisfying user intent and giving instant gratification always beats “identity”
• Be there, be useful, be quick.
• Read competitors bad reviews to see what we can do better.
• Track what people are clicking on the page
• Track “time to click”. After page load, when did the user click on a link or interact with the page?
• Page, Previous Page, Active Time

Originally published at Asad Zulfahri.