Highlights and Takeaways from MozCon 2015

MozCon is a digital marketing conference in Seattle that covers the full marketing spectrum, including SEO, PPC, Social Media, Content Marketing, CRO, Analytics and more. With 3 days of sessions, over 1,500 attendees and 26 speakers, MozCon is an opportunity to come together with other marketing and advertising professionals, hear from industry leaders on the latest insights, and discuss new learnings with peers from the conference.

Talking with other people who attended this year, the overwhelming opinion was that this conference stands out among the others for being actionable. Every speaker had new insights and feedback to share, and introduced us to tools we could take home to our companies and start applying in our marketing efforts.

With so many knowledgeable presenters and attendees, there was an endless supply of fresh ideas and learning.

In this blog post, I want to highlight the conversations and themes from the conference that resonated most with me.

Disrupt Yourself and Embrace Change.
A theme in many of the presentations was disruption, encouraging us as digital marketers to disrupt ourselves and adapt to change before others beat us to it. Companies like Facebook and Google are embracing this way of thinking, and are willing to alter their current business models in order to innovate.

A lot has happened in the SEO community in the last few years.  SEO today is very different from SEO 5 years ago.  If we want to keep up, we need to be aware of the latest search engine advancements and understand how saturated the market has become with content. We need to be willing to embrace change to keep up with the rise of competitors, platforms, apps, etc. And we need to continually analyze, question, and optimize.

Create Content that Stands Alone from All Other Content.
Content marketing today is at its peak. In Matthew Brown’s presentation, An SEO’s Guide to the Insane World of Content, he noted that “2.5 million blog posts are published daily.” Later, Rand Fishkin mentioned that the top 10% of content online gets ALL of the traffic and social shares. As a result, content can no longer just be good. It needs to be 10X better than all other content on the topic in order to be successful and connect with people. What does 10X better content look like? Rand shared his personal list with us to use as a guide.

Understand New Developments in Search.

A lot has been happening in the SEO community, from Mobilegeddon, to updates in deep app content optimization, SERP changes, and Knowledge Graph additions. Google is no longer just curating content, but also creating content (content that is meeting user’s needs within the search results, without having to click to a website for answers).

Search algorithms are getting even more intelligent and perceptive. During the conference, Rand Fishkin referenced Google’s Jeff Dean and his slides on deep learning, a more advanced form of Google’s machine learning for understanding users and their search queries. In deep learning, rather than Googlers feeding in ranking factors, the machines figure those out on their own.

What does this mean for SEO?

“Welcome to the Two-Algorithm World of 2015.”
In his keynote, Rand Fishkin described the new SEO success metrics of today, which will include optimizing for 2 algorithms: people and engines.

Algorithm 1: Classic On-Site – Optimizing for ranking inputs

Algorithm 2: New On-Site – Optimizing for searcher outputs

Slide from Rand Fishkin’s Keynote “Onsite SEO in 2015: An Elegant Weapon For A More Civilized Marketer”

In the past, SEOs have worked to optimize sites by communicating with search engines, making sure sites are crawlable, fast, and provide a good user experience. With new on-site SEO metrics like high click-through rate, good engagement, and low bounce rate factoring in, it will be important for us to focus on both algorithms.

Summary
I could not have asked for a better experience at MozCon this year. With so many great topics, it was hard to choose which ones to mention in this post. Here is a list of some other stand-out presentations from the conference. Thanks to the Moz team, you can get all of the speaker decks here and watch the presentations here.

Surviving Google: SEO in 2020 with Pete Meyers

Become a Mobile SEO Superhero with Cindy Krum

Dark Search and Social—Run Rabbit Run! with Marshall Simmonds

The Time to Do the Web Right Is Incredibly Short with Wil Reynolds

Upside Down and Inside Out with Mig Reyes

Astoundingly Useful Applications of Facebook Search for Marketers with David Mihm