Resource Listings

Clicks from local search results to business websites are on the decline. For local businesses, it's no longer enough to rank. Your presence in the SERPs has to stand out in order to attract new customers. So how do you set your business apart from the competition? Reviews! Reviews can help your rankings, but more importantly, positive reviews drive more leads and conversions. In this talk, Darren Shaw will teach you the latest strategies and tactics to level-up your review game on Google and other important sites, so that consumers will choose your business over the competition.

At this point, we should all have some idea of how important site speed is to our performance in search. The recently announced "speed update" underscored that fact yet again. It isn't always easy for marketers to know where to start improving their site's speed, though, and a lot of folks mistakenly believe that site speed should only be a developer's problem. Emily Grossman will clear that up with an actionable tour of just how much impact our own work can have on getting our sites to load quickly enough for today's standards.

Or maybe, "SEO you don't know you don't know." We've all heard people throw jargon around in an effort to sound smart when they clearly don't know what it means, and our industry of SEO is no exception. There are aspects of search that are acknowledged as important, but seldom actually understood. Michael King will save us from awkward moments, taking complex topics like the esoteric components of information retrieval and log-file analysis, pairing them with a detailed understanding of technical implementation of common SEO recommendations, and transforming them into tools and insights we wish we'd never neglected.

Google's improvements in understanding language and search intent have changed how and why content ranks. As a result, many SEOs are chasing rankings that Google has already decided are hopeless. Stephanie Briggs will cover how this should impact the way you write and optimize content for search, and will help you identify the right content opportunities. She'll teach you how to persuade organizations to invest in content, and will share examples of strategies and tactics she has used to grow content programs by millions of visits.

People generally react to machine learning in one of two ways: either with a combination of fascination and terror brought on by the possibilities that lie ahead, or with looks of utter confusion and slight embarrassment at not really knowing much about it. With the advent of RankBrain, not even higher-ups at Google can tell us exactly how some things rank above others, and the impact of machine learning on SEO is only going to increase from here. Fear not: Moz's own senior SEO scientist, Britney Muller, will talk you through what you need to know.

SEO requires a delicate balance of working for the humans you're hoping to reach, and the machines that'll help you reach them. To make a difference in today's SERPs, you need to understand the engines, site configurations, and even some machine learning, in addition to the emotional, raw, authentic connections with people and their experiences. In this talk, Alexis Sanders will help marketers of all stripes walk that line.

Your company's unfair advantage to skyrocketing paid search revenue is within your reach, but it's likely outside the control of your paid search team. Good keywords and ads are just a few cogs in the conversion machine. The truth is, the success of the entire channel depends on people who don't touch the campaigns and may not even know how paid search works! Amy Hebdon will look at how design, analyst, UX, PM and other marketing roles can directly impact paid search performance, including the most common issues that arise, and how to immediately fix them to improve ROI and revenue growth.

You have a kick-ass keyword strategy. Like seriously, it could launch a NASA rocket, it's that good. You have the best 1099 local and international talent on your SEO team that working from home and an unlimited amount of free beard wax can buy. You have a super cool animal inspired company name like Sloth or Chinchilla that no one understands but the logo is AMAZING. You have all of this, yet, your client turnover rate is higher than Snoop Dog on an HBO Comedy Special. Why? You don't talk to your clients. As in, really communicate, teach them what you know, help them get it, really get it, talk to them. How do I know? I was you. The first five years of my agency we churned and burned through clients faster than Kim Kardashian can take a selfie. My mastermind group suggested we *proactively* set up and insist upon a monthly review meeting with every single client. It was a game changer and we immediately adopted the practice. Ten years later we have a 90% client retention rate and over 30 SEO clients on retainer.

At the end of 2017, we totally redesigned our company's blog. Why? Because it's not really a blog anymore - it's an evergreen collection of traffic and revenue-generating resources. The former design catered to a time-oriented strategy surfacing consistently new posts with short half-lives. That made sense when we started our blog in 2014. Today? Not so much.

You know it exists. You know what a citation is, and have a sense for the importance of accurate listings. But with personalization and localization playing an increasing role in every SERP, local can no longer be seen in its own silo — every search and social marketer should be honing their understanding. For that matter, it's also time for local search marketers to broaden the scope of their work.