Yesterday, we kicked off day one of MozCon 2024. That’s right — we’re back and better than ever!

We’ve returned to the Seattle Convention Center in its brand new venue for a second year running. Whether you joined us in person or via our live stream, we are so grateful to get back together again for another year of MozCon madness.

We hope day one helped set the scene for what the future of digital marketing will look like. Let’s recap yesterday’s talks.

Setting the stage for what’s to come, Moz’s General Manager Ethan Hays kicked off MozCon 2024, laying out all the important details you’ll need to get through two jam-packed days! From seasoned speakers to our community speakers, Ethan made sure to let us know what we’re in for this year. The emcees for this year are Cheryl Draper, Cyrus Shepard, and Melissa Rae Brown.

Our theme this year is the future of digital marketing, similar to last year’s theme of the future of search, and it’s our 20th anniversary! The times we’re living in as digital marketers are turbulent, and a lot has changed since the last time we came together. Between artificial intelligence (AI) creeping into our everyday work and personal lives, algorithms that constantly make us scratch our heads (including the recent massive Google documentation leak), and new ways to track and measure performance, we’re forced to think more than ever about the future of digital marketing. But this new environment is also full of opportunities for us as digital marketers and SEOs.

Ethan mentioned the Birds of a Feather Tables, where you can meet people and talk about a topic of interest to you — be sure to check one out today if you missed it yesterday! And feel free to check out our product and sponsor booths. Ensure you take breaks, grab yourself some lunch, and stay hydrated! Remember to follow #MozCon on X (formerly Twitter) to get involved in the conversation over there.

Last year, Lily Ray spoke about why your rankings may have changed during a Google core algorithm update and recently contributed to the Moz Blog, identifying four major trends from Google’s March 2024 Core Update. Lily joined us again this year, kicking off day one of MozCon with her talk on how to ensure your priorities are aligned with the outcomes of your clients and to not miss the search engine optimization (SEO) forest for the trees.

Lily thinks we need to redefine SEO — we don’t ruin the internet — we improve it, and we’re essential. We need to rebuild trust and the narrative around SEO. How do we do this? Think in three ways: critically, holistically, and in the long term. Typically, we start with checklists, but Lily thinks we need to go beyond those because they often offer tips that will actually get you penalized by Google. We also need to go beyond tools, Google is targeting popular SEO tricks and exploits; think scaled content abuse, site reputation abuse, and expired domain abuse.

Lily said we need to take a step back and use critical thinking by doing the following to develop a comprehensive, holistic, data-driven, prioritized SEO roadmap:

1. Learn our client’s website's purpose and how it makes money — SEO can be dramatically different depending on the website’s category, the industry, and monetization methods. Establish and track KPIs based on revenue-generating activities.

2. Understand our client’s target audience — Use tools to help you do so, such as Buzzsumo and Google Search Console.

3. Audit your client’s SEO history — Ask them about the history of their domain and brand and if they’ve been affected by algorithm updates or any manual actions.

4. Evaluate the lay of the land and your client’s SEO footprint — Conduct a thorough audit and look for patterns. Use tools such as Google Search Console and GA4.

5. Strategize with a small group — Get a paid search expert, a tech SEO expert, a local SEO expert, a content writer, a UX designer, a Google algorithm update specialist, and the client in the same room.

6. Monitor the AI overview landscape.

Above all, we need to remain honest with our clients to build trust:

In his inaugural MozCon talk, Garrett Sussman explored the untapped influence of searcher bias in SEO. Following up on his Moz Blog post on the psychology behind search, Garrett dove deeper into the psyche of searchers. From leading queries like “Is coffee good for you”? to the self-guided nuances of conversational search, he examined how biases shape our interactions with search engines.

Garrett mentioned that the searches we make and the results we choose based on our audience form the basis of our whole purpose with SEO. But what does Google care about? Relevance, authority and experience — as confirmed by the recent Google leak. And what does our audience care about? Being right, positive associations, familiar brands, not thinking too hard, social proof, and expert perspectives.

One of the biggest influences in search behavior is confirmation bias, which is the tendency to favor information that confirms one’s existing beliefs or hypotheses. Put simply, if we search “Does recycling benefit the environment” versus “Recycling doesn’t benefit the environment?’ — we’ll receive different results for both searches based on our confirmation bias. Other biases Garrett mentioned include position bias, familiarity bias, authority bias, and the halo effect.

He referenced the Google study on the messy middle and introduced three frameworks (that you can find in his presentation deck here) to help craft a bias-informed content strategy based on three particular elements that matter to Google: Keywords, relevance, and brand.

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You can learn more about Moz AI in Dr. Pete’s blog post — Moz AI: Introducing Augmented Intelligence.

Andy Crestodina hit the stage by storm with his talk on how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can make us better and the classic challenges of how to get discovered, connect through content, and stay top of mind with the people who matter most. In his recent Moz Blog post, Andy shared five ways to find what’s missing at every stage of the buyer journey using AI-powered gap analysis.

During his MozCon talk, Andy shared a number of concerns among digital marketers and how we can use AI to address them:

1. Google’s SGE will kill click-through rates — But perhaps we need to look at it differently; maybe AI can help with CTRs. We can upload files to ChatGPT with a paid account to help give the AI more context so it can, in turn, give us more personalized SEO recommendations.

2. AI-generated content will be penalized — However, it currently cannot be detected. We can use AI to improve content quality by training it to know our target audience. Andy shared an example prompt to get started with building a persona:

We must follow up by telling the AI what it missed, asking it about our persona’s information needs, and then asking it for topics.

3. Search itself is threatened — SERPs are cluttered, but the reality is that AI will be a new source of traffic. The kind of content that attracts AI traffic is the same type of content that attracts links. Enter AI Overviews (AIO) — the way we will appear in AIO will be through deep content and original search, YouTube videos, list posts, podcasts, and more.

4. The internet is going to collapse — But it’s been collapsing for a long time. Our audience still needs our help and expertise, and maybe AI can help. Take conversion optimization — upload a webpage to AI to identify the gaps in your most important pages. Instead of using AI to find efficiencies, use AI to find deficiencies.

He ended his talk by saying that we need to stop doing what AI is doing and do what we, as humans, are good at.

Last year, Amanda Jordan focused on how to build better backlinks for local brands. This year, she provided us with another bucketload of local SEO knowledge with her talk on creating local dominance through your digital ecosystem. Even if you aren’t a local SEO, this talk was super valuable.

We want to dominate SEO, but we get caught in the trap of limited thinking and become too focused on Google, AI, organic, and the bottom of the funnel (BOFU). However, SEO is changing, and we need to catch up.

Amanda shared the marketing ecosystem she uses with clients:

1. We can use social media as an SEO tool; it can expand the reach of our content. It helps with semantic signal boosting, building authority across platforms, and brand partnerships.

2. Our website is also hugely important; it helps with user experience, the customer journey, and comprehensive structured data.

3. Third parties are more than just backlinks; they are strategic partnerships that help us control and dominate the SERP.

4. Real-world relevance of our customers impacts our digital visibility. It helps provide an experience to our customers, which can impact our reviews.

Along with the above ecosystem, machine learning can provide a symbiotic relationship. Large language models (LLMs) can help enhance search results, improve context, and increase relevance.

Strategies to create local dominance include:

1. Understand our target audience — By adapting to local search trends and behaviors, along with utilizing social media and third parties.

2. Unify your brand — Consistency in branding impacts SEO and how LLMs interpret and rank your content in search results. Do this by consistency in visibility, messaging, content, contact information, media, logo usage, and color scheme.

3. Leverage your location — Make sure our content is localized, be a part of the community, ensure we have location consistency online, and build truly local links.

In a world already saturated by AI-generated content, there is one component that matters more than anything else in marketing: emotion. Talia Wolf joined us for the first time and shared how to create emotion-based content that actually converts.

How we think people make decisions and how people actually make decisions are different. Each decision we make is based on emotion, and that’s something we sometimes forget as digital marketers. These emotions impact whether our customers will buy from us or not, even in B2B.

Talia mentioned some of the most common emotions that impact buying decisions and grouped them into two clusters: self-image and social image. By leveraging our customers' emotions, we can increase conversions.

1. We can do this by making it about the customer — What does our customer feel before finding a solution? What emotional triggers drive their decision-making? What are their hesitations and concerns? How do they want to feel after making a decision? We can uncover these insights through customer and visitor surveys, customer interviews, social listening, and emotional competitor analysis.

2. Audit — Ensure to review our funnel. Are we making it about ourselves or the prospect? Are we describing their real challenges and obstacles? Can people immediately see the WHY? Are we using the words and descriptions prospects relate to? What aren’t we saying that people need to see & read? Are we including the social proof people care about?

3. Add emotion to your copy —Leverage copywriting formulas to insert the information people care about into our pages. We shouldn’t be afraid to write long-form copy and tell the full story.

Talia guided us through the emotional marketing framework she uses to create high-converting pages:

4. Add emotion to our design — Use images that support and enhance our message. Ensure emotion is consistent throughout the ENTIRE page and customer journey. Don’t blindly follow design trends or copy competitors. Leverage design & UX to show people where they need to go and WHAT actions they need to take to get their desired outcomes.

We had the pleasure of being graced by Dana DiTomaso’s presence on stage this year, where she spoke about the future of analytics — her tenth time speaking at MozCon — impressive! Our ability to capture data is rapidly changing, and Dana shared precisely what these changes mean for us as digital marketers, as well as how we can navigate these changes with strategies to make informed decisions.

Analytics is not perfect, and we will never be able to make it perfect; in fact, it’s getting worse. From systems that don’t want to communicate with each other to people using ad blockers — specifically, 52% of Americans doing so — these elements make it difficult for us to do our jobs. Consequently, we’re making decisions based on half of our data.

Let’s embrace a new way of thinking — “just good enough.” Dana told us we need to use directional data in our reporting by using directional data points and detailed a number of examples of the types of questions we should ask ourselves:

• Which landing page is doing a better job of driving signups?

• Is our organic search traffic increasing or decreasing?

• Is this video encouraging people to buy our products?

Dana also spoke about effective marketing. Looking at this with data, she suggested we pick any two metrics that we want, e.g., impressions (ads + organic + social) and transactions (online + offline). Effectiveness is equal to our transactions divided by our impressions:

From here, we need to get others on board. We need to present stakeholders with the facts. Talk to them about how they use the internet and all the elements that make data inaccurate. Eventually, they’ll realize that this is how it’s going to be, which will help to make your job that bit easier.

Our first community speaker of MozCon 2024 was Navah Hopkins. In her talk, Navah focused on the separation between search and social and how we can identify wins through overlapping opportunities in both areas.

We, as industries, tend to stay siloed, but both search and social have the potential for good. Many people who start with one tend to struggle to adopt the rules of engagement for the other:

But both social and search can be B2C and B2B heroes. Navah detailed why you would use one over the other:

And finally, she mentioned how we can win by using social and search together:

1. Harness comments for content (paid + organic)

2. Let our audiences empower each other

3. Respond to social conversations that don‘t require a login

4. Audit our UTMs and reports for hidden attribution help

5. Know when and where your budget can thrive

Last year, our very own Dr. Pete Meyers, the Principal Innovation Architect at Moz, touched on how AI is disrupting search as we know it. This year, he showed us how to tap into the power of brand, referencing Brand Authority^TM, along with why brand is essential for driving search traffic in 2024 and beyond. Quite fitting, as we know from the Google documentation leak last week, that the search engine is biased toward brands — but only because people are biased toward brands.

Think about the brand Apple. If you type ‘apple’ into Google, the technology business dominates the SERP, despite apple having other meanings and potential search intents. This is great if our intent is to buy a piece of Apple technology; however, Google can struggle at times to figure out what the user’s intent actually is — maybe we wanted to look up the nutritional contents of an apple.

Take OpenAI and all of the terms associated with the brand. ChatGPT is the most searched head term associated with the brand, but it’s not the brand — it’s a product name. OpenAI created this traffic out of thin air — they did not have to compete for the space and have quite literally demolished the competition.

Search doesn’t begin with 10 blue links and SERP features. Search begins with the idea in our heads that we have before we go to the search engine. Brand is the idea in our heads — if we can get our brand into our audience’s heads, that’s how we can win and dominate the SERP. Ultimately, brand awareness is fundamentally an SEO task, and it’s not something to be overlooked.

Mozzer Chima Mmeje graced the MozCon stage for the first time and spoke to us about crafting a personal brand that commands trust. Chima believes in building a strong personal brand while recognizing the barriers and fears that can hold us back from doing so. Chima shared the blueprint for building a memorable brand, aligning our personal brand with an organization’s voice and tone, and using our brand to attract organic leads.

The reason Chima wakes up every morning is money. Our personal brand can help us make money by ranking in the user’s mind before they start their search journey, becoming the authoritative source of truth for one thing, and turning our brand into revenue.

In order to build a personal brand that earns trust and makes us a thought leader, we should:

1. Define our goals for personal branding, e.g. “I want to grow my LinkedIn followers by 32% in 90 days.”

2. Find our voice — Who are we?

3. Identify our key topics — What do we want to be known for?

4. Find our people, such as hiring managers and peers.

5. Identify our vehicles, e.g. LinkedIn, Twitter, public speaking, blog, guest posting, podcasts, webinars, communities, video, courses, newsletters, books.

6. Create content to cement your following, and use social to stay top of mind.

So, how do we go about building a memorable brand?

1. Show expertise, such as lessons learned from experiences, hacks, how-to posts, questions, etc.

2. Be helpful — Share our techniques for automating a task and share mistakes others are making.

3. Be vulnerable — Share our failures and personal stories that humanize us.

4. Drive more followers by having an alienating opinion, and writing follow-up posts to viral content.

5. Train ChatGPT to help us write social content.

6. Use guest posting to get in front of our target audience.

7. Use our blog to show topical expertise.

8. Keep a pulse on trending topics and revisit keyword research twice a year to find new opportunities.

9. Use public speaking to cement our authority and reinforce your messaging.

10. Repurpose everything.

Chima shared a final thought on how to develop our personal brand as an employee. We need to think about how to align our tone of voice with our organizations. But, we need to not lose sight of ourselves and our authenticity — our brand is OURS. We must find common ground where our goals intersect with our organizations. We need to be consistent, even if it’s not working, and ensure we share everything publicly.

Wil Reynolds ended day one of MozCon with a bang, following up on his talk at MozCon 2023 on the great reset; this year, he gave us more tips on how to stay ahead with our existing SEO skills. Wil recently touched on why he thinks the future of content success is social on the Moz Blog. Focusing more on the future, he also believes our jobs will be to develop unpredictable ideas and approaches to solving customer problems, and the way to do so is to tap into our invaluable skill sets.

Community is everything — it’s sometimes easy to forget that the traffic numbers we see are actually humans. We need to figure out how we can turn opportunities into building communities. Wil spent 30 hours writing three blog posts, and none of them ranked for his target keywords. He turned to social media and found humans who cared there.

If we follow the SEO rules, we get the ranking — but we end up competing with the sea of other web pages out there doing the same thing. Wil believes that it’s time to break the rules and drop the ranking. It’s time to sacrifice the ranking for community and win for humans rather than search engines.

Wil finished by mentioning a few exciting points relating to targeting humans:

• Some of the most powerful places to be and to get traffic from are private communities, such as Slack groups, Telegram, and WhatsApp groups. In these micro-communities, humans are sharing stuff with other humans.

• Social communities are another big one to keep an eye on. See Ross’s recent Moz Blog, which is linked further up, to read more about that concept.

• We need to start targeting more conversational terms, such as keywords with the word “i” in them.

• We need to keep an eye on Reddit. Are we using “Reddit” in our target terms? Because others are!

The first day of MozCon 2024 provided many insights. We launched Moz AI; let us know what you think of our revamped toolset — we’re always open to feedback on how to improve. Discover Moz with a Moz Pro 30-day free trial.

We hope you enjoyed happy hour in the Signature Ballroom and are ready for another day of MozCon magic.

Check out the day two MozCon recap.