That sound you hear is the coming together of MozCon 2017.
[You can hear that, right? It’s not just me.]With less than two months to go, most of the nuts and bolts of the event have been fastened together to create what looks to be one of the strongest MozCons in history. Yeah, that’s saying a lot, but once you’ve perused the speakers’ lineup, we’re sure you’ll agree.
MozCon has a rich tradition of bringing together the best and brightest minds in digital marketing, creating a place for individuals across the globe to learn from top-notch speakers, network, share ideas, and learn about the tools, services, and tactics they can put to use in their work and their business.
As a bonus, attendees also get to enjoy lots of snacks, coffee and lots and lots of bacon.
Also, this year we’ll offer pre-MozCon SEO workshops on Sunday, July 16. Keep reading for more info.
You will, however, need a ticket to attend the event, so you might want to take care of that sooner rather later, since it always sells out:
Now for the meaty details you’ve been waiting for.
The MozCon 2017 Agenda
Monday
08:00–09:00am
Breakfast
09:00–09:20am
Welcome to MozCon 2017
Rand Fishkin, Wizard of Moz
@randfish
Rand Fishkin is the founder and former CEO of Moz, co-author of a pair of books on SEO, and co-founder of Inbound.org. Rand’s an un-save-able addict of all things content, search, and social on the web.
09:20–10:05am
How to Get Big Links
Lisa Myers, Verve Search
Everyone wants links and coverage from sites such as New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the BBC, but very few achieve it. This is how we cracked it. Over and over.
Lisa is the founder and CEO of award-winning SEO agency Verve Search and founder of Womeninsearch.net. Feminist, mother of two, and modern-day shield maiden.
10:05–10:35am
Data-Driven Design
Oli Gardner, Unbounce
Data-Driven Design (3D) is an actionable, evidence-based framework for creating websites & landing pages that will increase your leads, sales, and customers. In this session you’ll learn how to use the latest industry conversion data to inform copywriting and design decisions that impact conversions. Additionally, I’ll share a new methodology for prioritizing your marketing optimization that will show you which pages are awesome (leave them alone), which pages aren’t (massive ROI potential here), and help you develop a common language that your teams of marketers, designers, and copywriters can use to work better together to collectively increase your conversion rates.
Oli, founder of Unbounce, is on a mission to rid the world of marketing mediocrity by using data-informed copywriting, design, interaction, and psychology to create a more delightful experience for marketers and customers alike.
10:35–11:05am
AM Break
11:10–11:30am
How to Write Customer-Driven Copy That Converts
Joel Klettke, Business Casual Copywriting & Case Study Buddy
If you want to write copy that converts, you need to get into your customers’ heads. But how do you do that? How do you know which pain points you need to address, features customers care about, or benefits your audience needs to hear? Marketers are sick and tired of hearing “it depends.” I’ll give the audience a practical framework for writing customer-driven copy that any business can apply.
Joel is a freelance conversion copywriter and strategist for Business Casual Copywriting. He also owns and runs Case Study Buddy, a done-for-you case studies service.
11:30–11:50am
What We Learned From Reddit & How It Can Help Your Brand Take Content Marketing to the Next Level
Daniel Russell, Go Fish Digital
@dnlRussell
It almost seems too good to be true — online forums where people automatically segment themselves into different markets and demographics and then vote on what content they like best. These forums, including Reddit, are treasure troves of content ideas. I’ll share actionable insights from three case studies that demonstrate how your marketing can benefit from content on Reddit.
Daniel is a director at Go Fish Digital whose work has hit the front page of Reddit, earned the #1 spot on YouTube, and been featured in Entrepreneur, Inc., The Washington Post, WSJ, and Fast Company.
11:50am–12:10pm
How to Build an SEO-Intent-Based Framework for Any Business
Kathryn Cunningham, Adept Marketing
Everyone knows intent behind the search matters. In e-commerce, intent is somewhat easy to see. B2B, or better yet healthcare, isn’t quite as easy. Matching persona intent to keywords requires a bit more thought. I will cover how to find intent modifiers during keyword research, how to organize those modifiers into the search funnel, and how to quickly find unique universal results at different levels of the search funnel to utilize.
Kathryn is an SEO consultant for Adept Marketing, although to many of her office mates she is known as the Excel nerd.
12:10–01:40pm
Lunch
01:45–02:30pm
Size Doesn’t Matter: Great Content by Teams of One
Ian Lurie, Portent, Inc.
@portentint
Feel the energy surge through your veins as you gain content creation powers THE LIKES OF WHICH YOU HAVE NEVER EXPERIENCED… Or, just learn a process for creating great content when it’s just you and your little teeny team. Because size doesn’t matter.
Ian Lurie is founder, CEO, and nerdiest marketing nerd at Portent, a digital marketing agency he started in the Cretaceous era, aka 1995. Ian’s meandering career includes marketing copywriting, expert dungeon master, bike messenger-ing, and office temp worker.
02:30–03:00pm
The Tie That Binds: Why Email is Key to Maximizing Marketing ROI
Justine Jordan, Litmus
@meladorri
If nailing the omnichannel experience (whatever that means!) is key to getting more traffic and converting more leads, what happens if we have our channel priorities out of order? Justine will show you how email — far from being an old-school afterthought — is core to hitting marketing goals, building lifetime value, and making customers happy.
Justine is obsessed with helping marketers create, test, and send better email. Named 2015 Email Marketer Thought Leader of the Year, she is strangely passionate about email marketing, hates being called a spammer, and still gets nervous when pressing send.
03:00–03:30pm
PM Break
03:35–04:05pm
Marketing in a Conversational World: How to Get Discovered, Delight Your Customers and Earn the Conversion
Purna Virji, Microsoft
@purnavirji
Capturing and keeping attention is one of the hardest parts of our job today. Fact: It’s just going to get harder with the advent of new technology and conversational interfaces. In the brave new world we’re stepping into, the key questions are: How do we get discovered? How can we delight our audiences? And how can we grow revenue for our clients? Come to this session to learn how to make your marketing and advertising efforts something people are going to want to consume.
Named by PPC Hero as the #1 most influential PPC expert in the world, Purna specializes in SEM, SEO, and future search trends. She is a popular global keynote speaker and columnist, an avid traveler, aspiring top chef, and amateur knitter.
04:05–04:50pm
Thinking Smaller: Optimizing for the New Wave of Social Video Platforms
Phil Nottingham, Wistia
@philnottingham
SnapChat, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Periscope… the list goes on. All social networks are now video platforms, but it’s hard to know where to invest. In this session, Phil will be giving you all the tips and tricks for what to make, how to get your content in front of the right audiences, and how get the most value from the investment you’re making in social video.
Phil Nottingham is a strategist who believes in the power of creative video content to improve the way companies speak to their customers, and regularly speaks around the world about video strategy, SEO, and technical marketing.
07:00–10:00pm
Monday Night #MozCrawl
The Monday night pub crawl is back.
For the uninitiated, “pub crawl” is not meant to convey what you do after a night of drinking.
Rather, during the MozCon pub crawl, attendees visit some of the best bars in Seattle.
(Each stop is sponsored by a trusted partner; You’ll need to bring your MozCon badge for free drinks and light appetizers. You’ll also need your US ID or passport.)
More deets to follow.
Tuesday
08:00–09:00am
Breakfast
09:05–09:50am
I’d Rather Be Thanked Than Ranked
Wil Reynolds, Seer Interactive
@wilreynolds
Ego and assumptions led me to chose the wrong keywords for my own site — yeah, me, Wil Reynolds, Mr. RCS. How did I spend three years optimizing my site and building links to finally crack the top three for six critical keywords, only to find out that I wasted all that time? However, in spite of targeting the wrong words, Seer grew the business. In this presentation, I’ll show you the mistakes I made and share with you to approaches that can help you to build content that gets you thanked.
A former teacher with a knack for advising, he’s been helping Fortune 500 companies develop SEO strategies since 1999. Today, Seer is home to over 100 employees across Philadelphia and San Diego.
09:50–10:35 am
Reverse-Engineer Google’s Research to Serve Up the Best, Most Relevant Content for Your Audience
Rob Bucci, STAT Search Analytics
The SERP is the front-end to Google’s multi-billion dollar consumer research machine. They know what searchers want. In this data-heavy talk, Rob will teach you how to uncover what Google already knows about what web searchers are looking for. Using this knowledge, you can deliver the right content to the right searchers at the right time, every time.
Rob loves the challenge of staying ahead of the changes Google makes to their SERPs. When not working, you can usually find him hiking up a mountain, falling down a ski slope, or splashing around in the ocean.
10:35–11:05am
AM Break
11:10–11:15am
MozCon Ignite Preview
11:15–11:35am
More Than SEO: 3 Ways To Prove UX Matters Too
Matthew Edgar, Elementive
@MatthewEdgarCO
Great SEO is increasingly dependent on having a website with a great user experience. To make your user experience great requires carefully tracking what people do so that you always know where to improve. But what do you track? In this 15-minute talk, I’ll cover three effective and advanced ways to use event tracking in Google Analytics to understand a website’s user
Matthew is a web analytics and technical marketing consultant at Elementive.
11:35–11:55am
A Site Migration: Redirects, Resources, & Reflection
Jayna Grassel, Dick’s Sporting Goods
@jaynagrassel
Site. Migration. No two words elicit more fear, joy, or excitement to a digital marketer. When the idea was shared three years ago, the company was excited. They dreamed of new features and efficiency. But as SEOs, we knew better. We knew there would be midnight strategy sessions with IT. More UAT environments than we could track. Deadlines, requirements, and compromises forged through hallway chats. …The result was a stable transition with minimal dips in traffic. What we didn’t know, however, was the amount of cross-functional coordination that was required to pull it off.
Jayna is the SEO manager at Dick’s Sporting Goods and is the unofficial world’s second-fastest crocheter.
11:55am–12:15pm
The 8 Paid Promotion Tactics That Will Get You To Quit Organic Traffic
Kane Jamison, Content Harmony
@kanejamison
Digital marketers are ignoring huge opportunities to promote their content through paid channels, and I want to give them the tools to get started. How many brands out there are spending $500+ on a blog post, then moving on to the next one before that post has been seen by 500 people, or even 50? For some reason, everyone thinks about Outbrain and native ads when we talk about paid content distribution, but the real opportunity is in highly targeted paid social.
Kane is the founder of Content Harmony, a content marketing agency based here in Seattle. The Content Harmony team specializes in full funnel content marketing and content promotion.
12:15–01:45pm
Lunch
01:50–02:20pm
How to Be a Happy Marketer: Survive the Content Crisis and Drive Results by Mastering Your Customer’s Transformational Journey
Tara-Nicholle Nelson, Transformational Consumer Insights
Branded content is way up, but customer engagement with that content is plummeting. This whole scene makes it hard to get up in the morning, as a marketer. But there’s a new path beyond the epidemic of disengagement and, at the end of it, your brand and your content become regular stops along your customer’s everyday journey.
Tara-Nicholle Nelson is the CEO of Transformational Consumer Insights, the former VP of Marketing for MyFitnessPal, and author of the Transformational Consumer.
02:20–02:50pm
Up and to the Right: Growing Traffic, Conversions, & Revenue
Matthew Barby, HubSpot
@matthewbarby
So many of the case studies that document how a company has grown from 0 to X forget to mention that solutions that they found are applicable to their specific scenario and won’t work for everyone. This falls into the dangerous category of bad advice for generic problems. Instead of building up a list of other companies’ tactics, marketers need to understand how to diagnose and solve problems across their entire funnel. Illustrated with real-world examples, I’ll be talking you through the process that I take to come up with ideas that none of my competitors are thinking of.
Matt, who heads up user acquisition at HubSpot, is an award-winning blogger, startup advisor, and a lecturer.
02:50–03:20pm
How to Operationalize Growth for Maximum Revenue
Joanna Lord, ClassPass
@JoannaLord
Joanna will walk through tactical ways to organize your team, build system foundations, and create processes that fuel growth across the company. You’ll hear how to coordinate with product, engineering, CX, and sales to ensure you’re maximizing your opportunity to acquire, retain, and monetize your customers.
Joanna is the CMO of ClassPass, the world’s leading fitness membership. Prior to that she was VP of Marketing at Porch and CMO of BigDoor. She is a global keynote and digital evangelist. Joanna is a recognized thought leader in digital marketing and a startup mentor.
03:20–03:50pm
PM Break
03:55–04:25pm
Analytics to Drive Optimization & Personalization
Krista Seiden, Google
Getting the most out of your optimization efforts means understanding the data you’re collecting, from analytics implementation, to report setup, to analysis techniques. In this session, Krista walks you through several tips for using analytics data to empower your optimization efforts, and then takes it further to show you how to up-level your efforts to take advantage of personalization from mass scale all the way down to individual user actions.
Krista Seiden is the Analytics Advocate for Google, advocating for all things data, web, mobile, optimization, and more. Keynote speaker, practitioner, writer on Analytics and Optimization, and passionate supporter of #WomenInAnalytics.
04:25–05:10pm
Facing the Future: 5 Simple Tactics for 5 Scary Changes
Dr. Pete Meyers, Moz
@dr_pete
We’ve seen big changes to SEO recently, from an explosion in SERP features to RankBrain to voice search. These fundamental changes to organic search marketing can be daunting, and it’s hard to know where to get started. Dr. Pete will walk you through five big changes and five tactics for coping with those changes today.
Dr. Peter J. Meyers (aka “Dr. Pete”) is Marketing Scientist for Seattle-based Moz, where he works with the marketing and data science teams on product research and data-driven content.
07:00–10:00pm
MozCon Ignite
Join us for an evening of networking and passion-talks. Laugh, cheer, and be inspired as your peers share their 5-minute talks about their hobbies, passion projects, and life lessons.
Be sure to bring your MozCon badge.
Wednesday
09:00–10:00am
Breakfast
10:05–10:50am
The Truth About Mobile-First Indexing
Cindy Krum, MobileMoxie, LLC
@suzzicks
Mobile-first design has been a best practice for a while, and Google is finally about to support it with mobile-first indexing. But mobile-first design and mobile-first indexing are not the same thing. Mobile-first indexing is about cross-device accessibility of information, to help integrate digital assistants and web-enabled devices that don’t even have browsers to achieve Google’s larger goals. Learn how mobile-first indexing will give digital marketers their first real swing at influencing Google’s new AI (Artificial Intelligence) landscape. Marketers who embrace an accurate understanding of mobile-first indexing could see a huge first-mover advantage, similar to the early days of the web, and we all need to be prepared.
Cindy, the CEO and Founder of MobileMoxie, LLC, is the author of Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers No Matter Where They Are. She brings fresh and creative ideas to her clients, and regularly speaks at US and international digital marketing events.
10:50–11:20am
Powerful Brands Have Communities
Tara Reed, Apps Without Code
You are laser-focused on user growth. Meanwhile, you’re neglecting a gold mine of existing customers who desperately want to be part of your brand’s community. Tara Reed shares how to use communities, gamification, and membership content to grow your revenue.
Tara Reed is a tech entrepreneur & marketer. After running marketing initiatives at Google, Foursquare, & Microsoft, Tara branched out to launch her own apps & startups. Today, Tara helps people implement cutting-edge marketing into their businesses.
11:20–11:50am
AM Break
11:55–12:25am
From Anchor to Asset: How Agencies Can Wisely Create Data-Driven Content
Heather Physioc, VML
@HeatherPhysioc
Creative agencies are complicated and messy, often embracing chaos instead of process, and focusing exclusively on one-time campaign creative instead of continuous web content creation. Campaign creative can be costly, and not sustainable for most large brands. How can creative shops produce data-driven streams of high-quality content for the web that stays true to its creative roots — but faster, cheaper, and continuously? I’ll show you how.
Heather is director of Organic Search at global digital ad agency VML, which performs search engine optimization services for multinational brands like Hill’s Pet Nutrition, Electrolux/Frigidaire, Bridgestone, EXPRESS, and Wendy’s.
12:25–12:55pm
5 Secrets: How to Execute Lean SEO to Increase Qualified Leads
Britney Muller, Moz
I invite you to steal some of the ideas I’ve gleaned from managing SEO for the behemoth bad-ass Moz.com. Learn what it takes to move the needle on qualified leads, execute quick wins, and keep your head above water. I’ll go over my biggest Moz.com successes, failures, tests, and lessons.
Britney is a Minnesota native who moved to Colorado to fulfill a dream of being a snowboard bum! After 50+ days on the mountain her first season, she got stir-crazy and taught herself how to program, then found her way into SEO while writing for a local realtor.
12:55–02:25pm
Lunch
02:30–03:15pm
SEO Experimentation for Big-Time Results
Stephanie Chang, Etsy
One of the biggest business hurdles any brand faces is how to prioritize and validate SEO recommendations. This presentation describes an SEO experimentation framework you can use to effectively test how changes made to your pages affect SEO performance.
Stephanie currently leads the Global Acquisition & Retention Marketing teams at Etsy. Previously, she was a Senior Consultant at Distilled.
03:15–03:45pm
Winning Value Propositions for Crawlers and Consumers
Dawn Anderson, Move It Marketing/Manchester Metropolitan University
@dawnieando
In an evolving mobile-first web, we can utilize preempting solutions to create winning value propositions, which are designed to attract and satisfy search engine crawlers and keep consumers happy. I’ll outline a strategy and share tactics that help ensure increased organic reach, in addition to highlighting smart ways to view data, intent, consumer choice theory, and crawl optimization.
Dawn Anderson is an International and Technical SEO Consultant, Director of Move It Marketing, and a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University.
03:45–04:15pm
PM Break
04:20–05:05pm
Inside the Googling Mind: An SEO’s Guide to Winning Clicks, Hearts, & Rankings in the Years Ahead
Rand Fishkin, Founder of Moz, doer of SEO, feminist
Searcher behavior, intent, and satisfaction are on the verge of overtaking classic SEO inputs (keywords, links, on-page, etc). In this presentation, Rand will examine the shift that behavioral signals have caused, and list the step-by-step process to build a strategy that can thrive long-term in Google’s new reality.
Rand Fishkin is the founder and former CEO of Moz, co-author of a pair of books on SEO, and co-founder of Inbound.org. Rand’s an un-save-able addict of all things content, search, and social on the web.
07:00–11:30pm
MozCon Bash
Join us at Garage Billiards for an evening of networking, billiards, bowling, and karaoke with MozCon friends new and old. Don’t forget to bring your MozCon badge and US ID or passport.
Additional Pre-MozCon Sunday Workshops
12:30pm–5:05pm
SEO Intensive
Offered as 75-minute sessions, the five workshops will be taught by Mozzers Rand Fishkin, Britney Muller, Brian Childs, Russ Jones, and Dr. Pete. Topics include The 10 Jobs of SEO-focused Content, Keyword Targeting for RankBrain and Beyond, and Risk-Averse Link Building at Scale, among others.
These workshops are separate from MozCon; you’ll need a ticket to attend them.
Amped up for a talk or ten? Curious about new methods? Excited to learn? Get your ticket before they sell out:
