Announcing Our MozCon 2022 Community Speakers!

High fives and fist bumps for each and every person who took the time to submit pitches for this years’ community speaker spots!

Our selection committee read, watched, and researched, whittling things down to a shortlist of top contenders and then read, watched, and researched some more to determine if a potential speaker and their talk would be a perfect fit for the MozCon stage. We take lots of things into account during our review, but ultimately there are three main factors that determine our final selections:

• Strength of the pitch (e.g., value, relevance to the audience, etc.)

• Can the content reasonably be delivered in the time allotted?

• Does it fit with overall programming and agenda?

After much deliberation, we settled on seven (yes, we added a seventh) community speakers that we’re confident are going to be a great addition to the MozCon Stage.

Grab a seat and see for yourself!

Ready to meet your MozCon Community Speakers?

Chris Long (he/him), VP of Marketing, Go Fish Digital

Chris is the VP of Marketing for the Go Fish Digital team. He works with unique problems and advanced search situations to help clients improve organic traffic through a deep understanding of Google's algorithm and web technology.

Talk: Advanced On-Page Optimizations

Take your on-page optimizations to the next-level using advanced tactics for one of the most common SEO tasks. This presentation goes beyond simply adding keywords to show how you can utilize tools such as IBM's Natural Language Understanding to find semantic entities of competitor pages, how Google's EAT guidelines apply to content, and what actionable steps you can take to improve content, perform on-page content experiments, and measure the impact of those tests.

Debbie Chew (she/her), SEO Specialist, Dialpad

Debbie Chew is an SEO Specialist at Dialpad with a focus on content and SEO. With over eight years of experience in digital marketing, she's passionate about link building and helping other marketers in this and other areas of SEO.

Talk: How to Capitalize on the Link Potential of a Research Report

There are many types of link magnets, but there's one that'll never go out of style: data-backed research reports. When done well, you're creating a piece of content that helps your E-A-T, drives backlinks, and is genuinely interesting content for your target audience. This talk will cover the different steps needed not just to create a research report, but to create one that can get links.

Emily Brady (she/her), SEO Consultant

Emily has worked in the SEO industry for 10 years as an individual contributor and team lead in both agency and in-house roles. Her focus includes content, local, schema, and on-site SEO — all of which she’s executed for small and enterprise businesses alike.

Talk: Get Your Local SEO Recipe Right with Content & Schema

Local SEO can be so much more than off-site listings, so let’s talk about it! By using content and schema on local landing pages, businesses can create unique value that satisfies customers and search engines.

Karen Hopper (she/her), Performance Marketing Strategist, Razorfish

Karen brings a data-driven perspective to everything she does, from testing to creative, email to social media, advertising to websites to text messages. She spends her days helping clients understand their data, and A/B testing just about everything.

Talk: Beyond the Button: Tests that Actually Move the Needle

In a world that has a million different options for every creative element... where do you start? How do you know this or that element is where you'll see an impact big enough to make a difference for your bottom line? This is the number one question CRO strategists get asked, and the answer every time is: it depends! This session will walk through how to understand your testing opportunities, generate test ideas, and measure your results with scientific accuracy.

Paxton Gray (he/him), CEO, 97th Floor

Paxton Gray serves as the CEO of 97th Floor, the team behind award-winning work for mid-market to enterprise clients like EOS, Google, Celebrity Cruises, AT&T, and Salesforce. He has been building agency marketing teams for 13 years.

Talk: How True Leaders Transform a Marketing Department into a Dream Team

There are hidden, structural factors holding stellar marketers (and their teams) back‚ and it's not their fault. Discover what these factors are, how to root them out, and how to help your existing team members reach their potential.

Petra Kis-Herczegh (she/her), Solutions Engineer, Yext

Talk: Things I Learned from Sales Teams that Every SEO Should Know

Whether you're trying to build a business case or get buy-in for your SEO project, some of the core challenges will come down to the same thing: How well can you sell it? As SEOs, we often forget that even though we spend our day-to-day analyzing data and optimizing content and websites for bots, at the end of the day, we are working with human beings — and some of those people have decision making power over what we can and can't achieve in our roles. This is where learning a good set of sales skills becomes crucial. In this talk, Petra will explore some of the key skills and methods sales teams use, and how you can apply these to your SEO work. 

Tina Fleming (she/her), Senior Brand Strategist, Designzillas

Tina Fleming, Sr. Brand Strategist at Designzillas, is a level 20 inbound marketing mage with questing experience in conversion marketing and SEO. Her passions lie within the realm of unifying digital strategies, clarifying brand messages, and being ferocious.

Talk: How Marketing Data Intelligence Skyrocketed Our B2B Conversions

If you want to geek out on data, you've come to the right session. And we're not talking about Google Analytics or your plain ol' CRM data. We're talking about de-anonymizing your website traffic, providing one-on-one personalized user experiences, shortening your lead forms without missing out on valuable information, and doing everything you can to get to that SQL. In this presentation, Tina will demystify the basics of marketing data intelligence, reveal actionable strategies for your day-to-day conversion marketing, and share real examples of how her agency has skyrocketed B2B conversions with the addition of marketing intelligence.

Announcing Our MozCon 2022 Community Speakers!

High fives and fist bumps for each and every person who took the time to submit pitches for this years’ community speaker spots!

Our selection committee read, watched, and researched, whittling things down to a shortlist of top contenders and then read, watched, and researched some more to determine if a potential speaker and their talk would be a perfect fit for the MozCon stage. We take lots of things into account during our review, but ultimately there are three main factors that determine our final selections:

• Strength of the pitch (e.g., value, relevance to the audience, etc.)

• Can the content reasonably be delivered in the time allotted?

• Does it fit with overall programming and agenda?

After much deliberation, we settled on seven (yes, we added a seventh) community speakers that we’re confident are going to be a great addition to the MozCon Stage.

Grab a seat and see for yourself!

Ready to meet your MozCon Community Speakers?

Chris Long (he/him), VP of Marketing, Go Fish Digital

Chris is the VP of Marketing for the Go Fish Digital team. He works with unique problems and advanced search situations to help clients improve organic traffic through a deep understanding of Google's algorithm and web technology.

Talk: Advanced On-Page Optimizations

Take your on-page optimizations to the next-level using advanced tactics for one of the most common SEO tasks. This presentation goes beyond simply adding keywords to show how you can utilize tools such as IBM's Natural Language Understanding to find semantic entities of competitor pages, how Google's EAT guidelines apply to content, and what actionable steps you can take to improve content, perform on-page content experiments, and measure the impact of those tests.

Debbie Chew (she/her), SEO Specialist, Dialpad

Debbie Chew is an SEO Specialist at Dialpad with a focus on content and SEO. With over eight years of experience in digital marketing, she's passionate about link building and helping other marketers in this and other areas of SEO.

Talk: How to Capitalize on the Link Potential of a Research Report

There are many types of link magnets, but there's one that'll never go out of style: data-backed research reports. When done well, you're creating a piece of content that helps your E-A-T, drives backlinks, and is genuinely interesting content for your target audience. This talk will cover the different steps needed not just to create a research report, but to create one that can get links.

Emily Brady (she/her), SEO Consultant

Emily has worked in the SEO industry for 10 years as an individual contributor and team lead in both agency and in-house roles. Her focus includes content, local, schema, and on-site SEO — all of which she’s executed for small and enterprise businesses alike.

Talk: Get Your Local SEO Recipe Right with Content & Schema

Local SEO can be so much more than off-site listings, so let’s talk about it! By using content and schema on local landing pages, businesses can create unique value that satisfies customers and search engines.

Karen Hopper (she/her), Performance Marketing Strategist, Razorfish

Karen brings a data-driven perspective to everything she does, from testing to creative, email to social media, advertising to websites to text messages. She spends her days helping clients understand their data, and A/B testing just about everything.

Talk: Beyond the Button: Tests that Actually Move the Needle

In a world that has a million different options for every creative element... where do you start? How do you know this or that element is where you'll see an impact big enough to make a difference for your bottom line? This is the number one question CRO strategists get asked, and the answer every time is: it depends! This session will walk through how to understand your testing opportunities, generate test ideas, and measure your results with scientific accuracy.

Paxton Gray (he/him), CEO, 97th Floor

Paxton Gray serves as the CEO of 97th Floor, the team behind award-winning work for mid-market to enterprise clients like EOS, Google, Celebrity Cruises, AT&T, and Salesforce. He has been building agency marketing teams for 13 years.

Talk: How True Leaders Transform a Marketing Department into a Dream Team

There are hidden, structural factors holding stellar marketers (and their teams) back‚ and it's not their fault. Discover what these factors are, how to root them out, and how to help your existing team members reach their potential.

Petra Kis-Herczegh (she/her), Solutions Engineer, Yext

Talk: Things I Learned from Sales Teams that Every SEO Should Know

Whether you're trying to build a business case or get buy-in for your SEO project, some of the core challenges will come down to the same thing: How well can you sell it? As SEOs, we often forget that even though we spend our day-to-day analyzing data and optimizing content and websites for bots, at the end of the day, we are working with human beings — and some of those people have decision making power over what we can and can't achieve in our roles. This is where learning a good set of sales skills becomes crucial. In this talk, Petra will explore some of the key skills and methods sales teams use, and how you can apply these to your SEO work. 

Tina Fleming (she/her), Senior Brand Strategist, Designzillas

Tina Fleming, Sr. Brand Strategist at Designzillas, is a level 20 inbound marketing mage with questing experience in conversion marketing and SEO. Her passions lie within the realm of unifying digital strategies, clarifying brand messages, and being ferocious.

Talk: How Marketing Data Intelligence Skyrocketed Our B2B Conversions

If you want to geek out on data, you've come to the right session. And we're not talking about Google Analytics or your plain ol' CRM data. We're talking about de-anonymizing your website traffic, providing one-on-one personalized user experiences, shortening your lead forms without missing out on valuable information, and doing everything you can to get to that SQL. In this presentation, Tina will demystify the basics of marketing data intelligence, reveal actionable strategies for your day-to-day conversion marketing, and share real examples of how her agency has skyrocketed B2B conversions with the addition of marketing intelligence.

Navigating through Departments: The Key to Making Impactful Changes in SEO

SEO is unlike any other digital channel. It does not and cannot live in a silo, while something like a paid search program can be run by a single person with minimal help.

From our experience, the biggest deficiency in SEO campaigns is not a lack of understanding of the craft, rather, it’s the roadblocks that occur during implementation and cross-team collaboration. Great ideas can be presented and discussed, but taking an idea from a whiteboard or a slide to actually living on a site where it can impact performance can be difficult.

Whether in-house or on the agency side, blockers to success often come from internal site teams or long development queues. The key to making progress comes from two primary avenues:

• Advocating for SEO through exceptional knowledge of the channel as a whole

• Deep integration with internal teams to move projects along

The departments that SEO impacts (and how to work with each)

With a channel like SEO where progress is not solely achieved by one consultant or advocate for the channel, but from the implementation of recommendations, it’s critical to understand how to navigate through a business to make progress.

We break down the departments as follows:

• Business / Marketing

• Design / Creative

• Development / Engineering

• PR / Thought Leadership

• Content

Business / Marketing

The business and marketing teams are the stakeholders whose resources will be used to execute your SEO strategies. These are the individuals at a company who you must win over to be successful. Ever had an amazing idea only to be squashed by leadership? Many of us have been in that situation at one point or another, so the key is to make the case for SEO.

Unlike other marketing channels where ROI can be predicted, it can be difficult to forecast growth for SEO. How do we provide statistical evidence that our strategies will be a driver for success? Although there’s no perfect science, we break down our methodology below:

Step 1: Start by quantifying potential traffic gains through ranking improvements by utilizing average click-through-rate at various positions.

Step 2: Utilize this data to build a forecast based on investment and potential growth using conversion rate and average order value to predict potential revenue.

Step 3: Agree on a reasonable forecast and set expectations with the client. Ensure both parties are on the same page about the opportunity in the vertical to avoid any potential pitfalls, and keep growth conservative.

Step 4: Start audit and planning exercises. Our audits serve as the roadmap for success and the forecasting exercise occurs during this phase as a compliment to the strategy.

Design / Creative / UX & UI

Once your strategy is approved and you’re ready to build out new pages, new sections of the site, or redesign pages, it’s time to consult with the design team. They’ll be the ones to help you move your recommendations from ideation into a design, but that process isn’t always as simple as it sounds.

The first issue is not a lack of resources, but the incessant battle between UX (site teams) and SEO. Ever heard any of these statements before?

• We shouldn’t expand our main navigation because our users want a more simplified approach

• This doesn’t meet our brand guidelines as we don’t want any text content on our pages

• These site changes don’t seem to ladder up to our goal of getting people to convert

• We can’t change that because our users are used to it that way

Although these are all valid statements, they do present an issue with being able to progress and grow organic traffic.

SEO and UX need a balance. Finding it can be hard, but necessary. As the advocate for the organic channel, you must always be willing to argue how and why your recommendations can help the business grow. You can do so by providing clear, concise, and effective instructions to design and site teams.

We utilize checklist templates to provide to design teams an idea of what needs to be included with examples (after marketing / business teams have approved our recommendations, of course).

We finalize these recommendations by signing off on designs prior to development, when the real site work begins.

Development / Engineering

Why are development and engineering resources the largest blocker to SEO success at the mid-market and enterprise level?

SEO is de-prioritized (YES! Even after executives are bought in). We see it again, and again, and again. As engineering and development teams have urgent things come up, it’s easy to move around other projects that are less time sensitive. On average, website migrations we've worked on are delayed one to two months at the mid-market level. For enterprises, this can be much more severe. So how do you get around your projects being moved to the back of a development queue?

It can be hard. I have personal horror stories of asking for the same on-site changes for over three years with no movement due to other internal pressure for other things to be done, or blockers from other teams.

There are two main tips we have for ensuring that SEO development projects move through the pipeline properly once they’re scheduled:

Tip #1: Create in-depth tickets to help alleviate potential development problems. Many times, projects stall out because development can be difficult. The first thing you can do is document in detail what needs to happen. What does the final state need to look like?

Many of our clients work in JIRA, and we are able to integrate directly in to create tickets, comment on them, and QA them upon completion.

Tip #2: Create an accountability tracker. Whether you’re a consultant, and in-house SEO, or an agency partner, a “next actions” or project tracker sometimes isn’t enough. We create an accountability tracker where we can discuss weekly where projects are when they fall on other teams, specifically on engineering teams that are pulled in many different directions.

Project Tracker Template

PR / Thought Leadership

Ever engaged in some sort of authority building? Well, there’s undoubtedly some overlap with PR efforts, especially with how link building looks at this point in Google’s existence. There is no gaming or tricking the algorithm anymore- linking needs to be through concentrated content development and promotion.

Link building is outreach, and therefore, some of the efforts an SEO agency or SEO team might be working on may intersect. We have three main tips to ensure your outreach efforts are successful and well received.

Tip #1: Ensure that relationship boundaries are defined between PR and SEO. We start every engagement by first asking for a “Do Not Contact” list from any existing PR agencies. You do not want to be contacting a media outlet that a PR agency or an internal team has an existing relationship with. Start by understanding the types of relationships that already exist.

Tip #2: Don’t just email everyone. Similar to establishing boundaries between PR and SEO, consider other areas of the business that have relationships with website owners. For example, affiliates are another area that you want to think more in-depth about. There are strategies you can use to acquire links that are valuable from affiliates, but you’d want to ensure you’re touching base with whoever manages those affiliate teams first. Start by setting a meeting and strategizing with them.

In addition, you want to be careful about contacting websites that may not be a fan of your company or client. Be sensitive to the information in an article. When performing a service like link reclamation, be sure that the sites you’re reaching out to weren’t saying something negative or are not a fan of a company. Although this isn’t extremely common, it does happen and can cause internal issues.

Tip #3: There is always opportunity. Don’t get discouraged. Even if you’re working on outreach where there are a lot of blockers in place, there are still sites you can contact that will add SEO value. Focus on sites that are strong and receive organic traffic, but aren’t in the same tier of what a PR agency would be focusing on (think USA Today, or Seventeen Magazine). Although these are amazing sites to be featured on, you can still get value from mommy blogs that have strong rankings and some authority. These sites can still move the needle (as long as they are high-quality and don’t have high spam scores).

Content

Content creation is crucial to SEO progress, and sometimes it is the most critical piece. This varies by business type, but generally every business can benefit in some way from having SEO-focused content on a website (content built to rank for a specific query).

Most businesses have some sort of copywriting resources in-house. These individuals are not always focused on web content, but might be focused on many other types of content to support awareness initiatives or internal processes.

When looking at the content process, there are many areas that SEO teams need to support. No matter who is actually creating content, the SEO team needs to provide strategy and direction.

Our content process is as follows:

Just like all other departments that we’ve discussed so far, content teams also need to be aligned with SEO goals and understand how to produce content that ranks.

We recommend creating content maps to help guide content teams. These roadmaps should contain everything that a copywriter needs to understand how to write for SEO.

As the SEO strategist is working towards the goal of ranking for a keyword that drives business results, the strategy for the content should be coming from someone who knows the goals of the business on a deep level.

Content Roadmap Example

These are two key areas that impact rankings that can sometimes be harder to deliver on:

1. Content comprehensiveness: Although not always true, longer content does tend to rank better for informational / research queries. While a 2,500 word post may not always be the preference for the business, sometimes it is necessary to rank. It’s important as an SEO to advocate for comprehensive content (when we believe that the result should be an in-depth response).

2. Keyword targeting in content titles: There is no such thing as “writing for search engines” anymore. The truth is that content needs to be written for users. However, we still must use keywords in the title tag and in the title of the post. These are still the strongest on-page signals we have. Many times, the title of posts are written with brand or marketing language, without considering its ability to rank competitively. For example, a content team might title a post about workplace efficiency as “7 Ways to Improve Your Efficiency Throughout the Day'' without taking into consideration a keyword focus for SEO. Whereas, an SEO might recommend a title such as, “Workplace Efficiency: Tips to Improve Workflows”. As the title holds so much weight, the SEO team needs to advocate for ensuring that the title of the post has a balance between being optimized and engaging.

Conclusion

Making meaningful progress towards growth in SEO takes an entire company. It is our job as SEOs to serve as the project manager and guide projects through the pipeline. We’re also responsible for ensuring that stakeholders on different teams know and understand our initiatives, and that everyone is working towards the same goals.

When everything is working as it should, the results will follow.

Navigating through Departments: The Key to Making Impactful Changes in SEO

SEO is unlike any other digital channel. It does not and cannot live in a silo, while something like a paid search program can be run by a single person with minimal help.

From our experience, the biggest deficiency in SEO campaigns is not a lack of understanding of the craft, rather, it’s the roadblocks that occur during implementation and cross-team collaboration. Great ideas can be presented and discussed, but taking an idea from a whiteboard or a slide to actually living on a site where it can impact performance can be difficult.

Whether in-house or on the agency side, blockers to success often come from internal site teams or long development queues. The key to making progress comes from two primary avenues:

• Advocating for SEO through exceptional knowledge of the channel as a whole

• Deep integration with internal teams to move projects along

The departments that SEO impacts (and how to work with each)

With a channel like SEO where progress is not solely achieved by one consultant or advocate for the channel, but from the implementation of recommendations, it’s critical to understand how to navigate through a business to make progress.

We break down the departments as follows:

• Business / Marketing

• Design / Creative

• Development / Engineering

• PR / Thought Leadership

• Content

Business / Marketing

The business and marketing teams are the stakeholders whose resources will be used to execute your SEO strategies. These are the individuals at a company who you must win over to be successful. Ever had an amazing idea only to be squashed by leadership? Many of us have been in that situation at one point or another, so the key is to make the case for SEO.

Unlike other marketing channels where ROI can be predicted, it can be difficult to forecast growth for SEO. How do we provide statistical evidence that our strategies will be a driver for success? Although there’s no perfect science, we break down our methodology below:

Step 1: Start by quantifying potential traffic gains through ranking improvements by utilizing average click-through-rate at various positions.

Step 2: Utilize this data to build a forecast based on investment and potential growth using conversion rate and average order value to predict potential revenue.

Step 3: Agree on a reasonable forecast and set expectations with the client. Ensure both parties are on the same page about the opportunity in the vertical to avoid any potential pitfalls, and keep growth conservative.

Step 4: Start audit and planning exercises. Our audits serve as the roadmap for success and the forecasting exercise occurs during this phase as a compliment to the strategy.

Design / Creative / UX & UI

Once your strategy is approved and you’re ready to build out new pages, new sections of the site, or redesign pages, it’s time to consult with the design team. They’ll be the ones to help you move your recommendations from ideation into a design, but that process isn’t always as simple as it sounds.

The first issue is not a lack of resources, but the incessant battle between UX (site teams) and SEO. Ever heard any of these statements before?

• We shouldn’t expand our main navigation because our users want a more simplified approach

• This doesn’t meet our brand guidelines as we don’t want any text content on our pages

• These site changes don’t seem to ladder up to our goal of getting people to convert

• We can’t change that because our users are used to it that way

Although these are all valid statements, they do present an issue with being able to progress and grow organic traffic.

SEO and UX need a balance. Finding it can be hard, but necessary. As the advocate for the organic channel, you must always be willing to argue how and why your recommendations can help the business grow. You can do so by providing clear, concise, and effective instructions to design and site teams.

We utilize checklist templates to provide to design teams an idea of what needs to be included with examples (after marketing / business teams have approved our recommendations, of course).

We finalize these recommendations by signing off on designs prior to development, when the real site work begins.

Development / Engineering

Why are development and engineering resources the largest blocker to SEO success at the mid-market and enterprise level?

SEO is de-prioritized (YES! Even after executives are bought in). We see it again, and again, and again. As engineering and development teams have urgent things come up, it’s easy to move around other projects that are less time sensitive. On average, website migrations we've worked on are delayed one to two months at the mid-market level. For enterprises, this can be much more severe. So how do you get around your projects being moved to the back of a development queue?

It can be hard. I have personal horror stories of asking for the same on-site changes for over three years with no movement due to other internal pressure for other things to be done, or blockers from other teams.

There are two main tips we have for ensuring that SEO development projects move through the pipeline properly once they’re scheduled:

Tip #1: Create in-depth tickets to help alleviate potential development problems. Many times, projects stall out because development can be difficult. The first thing you can do is document in detail what needs to happen. What does the final state need to look like?

Many of our clients work in JIRA, and we are able to integrate directly in to create tickets, comment on them, and QA them upon completion.

Tip #2: Create an accountability tracker. Whether you’re a consultant, and in-house SEO, or an agency partner, a “next actions” or project tracker sometimes isn’t enough. We create an accountability tracker where we can discuss weekly where projects are when they fall on other teams, specifically on engineering teams that are pulled in many different directions.

Project Tracker Template

PR / Thought Leadership

Ever engaged in some sort of authority building? Well, there’s undoubtedly some overlap with PR efforts, especially with how link building looks at this point in Google’s existence. There is no gaming or tricking the algorithm anymore- linking needs to be through concentrated content development and promotion.

Link building is outreach, and therefore, some of the efforts an SEO agency or SEO team might be working on may intersect. We have three main tips to ensure your outreach efforts are successful and well received.

Tip #1: Ensure that relationship boundaries are defined between PR and SEO. We start every engagement by first asking for a “Do Not Contact” list from any existing PR agencies. You do not want to be contacting a media outlet that a PR agency or an internal team has an existing relationship with. Start by understanding the types of relationships that already exist.

Tip #2: Don’t just email everyone. Similar to establishing boundaries between PR and SEO, consider other areas of the business that have relationships with website owners. For example, affiliates are another area that you want to think more in-depth about. There are strategies you can use to acquire links that are valuable from affiliates, but you’d want to ensure you’re touching base with whoever manages those affiliate teams first. Start by setting a meeting and strategizing with them.

In addition, you want to be careful about contacting websites that may not be a fan of your company or client. Be sensitive to the information in an article. When performing a service like link reclamation, be sure that the sites you’re reaching out to weren’t saying something negative or are not a fan of a company. Although this isn’t extremely common, it does happen and can cause internal issues.

Tip #3: There is always opportunity. Don’t get discouraged. Even if you’re working on outreach where there are a lot of blockers in place, there are still sites you can contact that will add SEO value. Focus on sites that are strong and receive organic traffic, but aren’t in the same tier of what a PR agency would be focusing on (think USA Today, or Seventeen Magazine). Although these are amazing sites to be featured on, you can still get value from mommy blogs that have strong rankings and some authority. These sites can still move the needle (as long as they are high-quality and don’t have high spam scores).

Content

Content creation is crucial to SEO progress, and sometimes it is the most critical piece. This varies by business type, but generally every business can benefit in some way from having SEO-focused content on a website (content built to rank for a specific query).

Most businesses have some sort of copywriting resources in-house. These individuals are not always focused on web content, but might be focused on many other types of content to support awareness initiatives or internal processes.

When looking at the content process, there are many areas that SEO teams need to support. No matter who is actually creating content, the SEO team needs to provide strategy and direction.

Our content process is as follows:

Just like all other departments that we’ve discussed so far, content teams also need to be aligned with SEO goals and understand how to produce content that ranks.

We recommend creating content maps to help guide content teams. These roadmaps should contain everything that a copywriter needs to understand how to write for SEO.

As the SEO strategist is working towards the goal of ranking for a keyword that drives business results, the strategy for the content should be coming from someone who knows the goals of the business on a deep level.

Content Roadmap Example

These are two key areas that impact rankings that can sometimes be harder to deliver on:

1. Content comprehensiveness: Although not always true, longer content does tend to rank better for informational / research queries. While a 2,500 word post may not always be the preference for the business, sometimes it is necessary to rank. It’s important as an SEO to advocate for comprehensive content (when we believe that the result should be an in-depth response).

2. Keyword targeting in content titles: There is no such thing as “writing for search engines” anymore. The truth is that content needs to be written for users. However, we still must use keywords in the title tag and in the title of the post. These are still the strongest on-page signals we have. Many times, the title of posts are written with brand or marketing language, without considering its ability to rank competitively. For example, a content team might title a post about workplace efficiency as “7 Ways to Improve Your Efficiency Throughout the Day'' without taking into consideration a keyword focus for SEO. Whereas, an SEO might recommend a title such as, “Workplace Efficiency: Tips to Improve Workflows”. As the title holds so much weight, the SEO team needs to advocate for ensuring that the title of the post has a balance between being optimized and engaging.

Conclusion

Making meaningful progress towards growth in SEO takes an entire company. It is our job as SEOs to serve as the project manager and guide projects through the pipeline. We’re also responsible for ensuring that stakeholders on different teams know and understand our initiatives, and that everyone is working towards the same goals.

When everything is working as it should, the results will follow.

Title Tag Rewrites: 7 Months Later

Back in August, we analyzed 10,000 SERPs and found that Google was rewriting 58% of the title tags we were able to track. In September, after some serious objections from the SEO community, Google released the following statement:

Based on your feedback, we made changes to our system which means that title elements are now used around 87% of the time, rather than around 80% before.

This immediately raises two questions. First, has the situation improved? Second, why the huge mismatch between our numbers (and similar numbers by others in the community)?

Rewrites by the numbers

We collected new data on March 2, 2022 from the MozCast 10,000-keyword tracking set. Here are the basic stats, which are very similar to what we found in August 2021:

• 84,639 page-one results

• 71,265 unique URLs

• 57,832 <title> tags

• 33,733 rewrites

So, let’s compare the August 2021 rewrites to the March 2022 rewrites:

Technically, the numbers did go down, but this probably isn’t the news you had hoped to hear. If 57% of titles in our study were rewritten, then — I think we can all agree with this math — 43% did not get rewritten. So, how do we reconcile our 43% with Google’s 87%?

Truncation, from simple to …

First off, our definition of “rewrite” is extremely broad, and it covers truncation, where Google just runs out of physical space. In August, I took a pretty simplistic view of truncation, but let’s try to give Google some benefit of the doubt. I’m going to dig into three forms of truncation, starting with the simplest:

1) Simple truncation

The simplest form of truncation is when Google cuts off a long title but preserves the original text from the beginning. For example:

No one is doing anything wrong here — the IRS’s <title> is accurate and descriptive, but Google ran out of space. They didn’t take any liberties with the text.

2) Midstream truncation

Let’s review another form of truncation, with this example from the Linksys website:

Again, Google truncated a long <title>, but here they removed the branded text from the beginning and started with the more unique, descriptive text. Is this a rewrite? Technically, yes, but it’s a direct excerpt and the “...” clearly implies truncation to searchers.

3) Excerpt truncation

Finally, we have situations where Google uses a portion of the <title> tag, but they don’t clearly indicate truncation with an ellipsis (“...”). Here’s an example from Congress.gov, a site Google is unlikely to view as spammy or in need of editorial revisions:

I don’t think Google’s trying to hide the truncation here by removing the ellipsis — the truncated title is a complete thought/phrase within the original title. In some cases, is this the excerpt the creator would have chosen? Maybe not, but I would still generally call this truncation.

All told, these three forms of truncation accounted for almost exactly one-third of the “rewrites” that we observed. These forms were distinct enough that we could separate them. From here on out, it gets a bit more complicated.

Title additions (brand & local)

In addition to truncating long titles, Google sometimes adds information they deem relevant to the end of a display title. The most common addition is “brand” information (using the term loosely) that wasn’t present in the original <title> tag. For example:

I kind of love this title, and you should definitely ride Top Thrill Dragster at Cedar Point if you’re a coaster fan, but notice here how Google has appended “Touring Ohio” to the end of the display title. This kind of add-on is very common, occurring in almost 14% of our observed rewrites.

In some cases, adding the brand text caused Google to truncate the title prior to the addition. See this example from Goodreads …

While the rewrite here is intended to be beneficial, this can cause problems with long brand names. Anecdotally, though, Google seems to be doing a better job of this in the past few months, and most brand identifiers are of reasonable length.

Finally, in a few cases, Google appended location information. For example:

It’s not clear what situations trigger this added location information, but it does show that Google is considering appending other forms of relevant information that could drive future rewrites and go beyond brand tagging.

Capital-R Rewrite examples

We can argue about whether truncation and addition are real, Capital-R Rewrites, so how about the situations where Google is clearly making substantial changes? Some of these situations — even working with a moderately-sized data set — are hard to classify, but I’ll cover some major categories.

1) Maximum verbosity

I almost said “keyword stuffing,” but that’s a judgment call and isn’t always fair in these cases. Granted, there are legitimate cases of keyword stuffing, like this example:

Prior to August 2021, Google might’ve just truncated this title, but now they’re saying “Yeah, no” and replacing the entire mess. Other cases aren’t so clear, though. Consider this one:

AMC hasn’t really done anything spammy here — this <title> tag is likely a direct reflection of their site architecture. In this case, though, Google has gone beyond truncation and rewritten the title, including replacing pipes with hyphens, removing “Movie Times” (which is arguably redundant with “Showtimes”) and pushing the site/brand up.

2) Minimum verbosity

Some people have too much to say, and some people are too quiet (I’m afraid I know which side I fall on). Here’s a case where the title didn’t quite provide enough information:

In many of these cases, like displaying just the brand name, a generic placeholder like “Home”, or – in one notable case – a code placeholder (“”), it’s likely the culprit is an overzealous CMS default setting. These are clearly Capital-R Rewrites, but I would argue that Google is generally adding value in these situations by rewriting.

3) Excessive superlatives

Sometimes, we marketers get a little carried away with colorful language (in this case, the family-friendly kind). Google still seems to be disproportionately rewriting <title> tags with certain superlatives, even when they may not seem excessive. Take this example:

This is a case where Google replaced the <title> with the contents of an <h1> — while it’s not a bad rewrite, it does feel aggressive to me. It’s hard to see how “21 Best Brunch Recipes” is wildly over the top or how “21 Easy Brunch Recipes” is a major improvement.

4) Miscellaneous nonsense

It’s hard to measure the real head-scratchers, but anecdotally, it does appear that Google’s rewrite engine has improved since August 2021, in terms of the truly bizarre edge cases. Here’s a funny one, though, from Google.com itself:

Even Google thinks that Google said “Google” too many times in this <title> tag. I suspect the rewrite engine flagged the word “Google” as redundant, but I’d definitely call this a misfire.

A more nuanced pie chart

I made myself a to-do of creating a “pie chart with nuance,” and I now realize that’s impossible. So, here’s a pie chart that’s slightly less misleading. Many rewrites are hard to categorize and count, but let’s take a look at the data if we carve out the truncation scenarios (all three) and the additions:

Separating truncations and additions, we’re left with about 30% of <title> tags being rewritten in our data set. Keep in mind that many of these rewrites are minor and some probably involve forms of truncation and/or addition that were difficult to detect programmatically.

Flipping this around, we have 70% of titles not being rewritten. How do we reconcile that with Google’s 87%? It could just be a function of the data set, but let’s carefully re-read that quote from the beginning of the post:

Based on your feedback, we made changes to our system which means that title elements are now used around 87% of the time, rather than around 80% before.

Note the highlighted text — Google is specifically saying that they used the <title> element/tag 87% of the time. They may have subtracted from, added to, or slightly modified that original data (they don’t really say). So, the 13% of cases here is likely only when Google is pulling the display title in search from some other area of the page (body content, headers, etc.).

As to the bigger question of how much Google toned down rewrites after the initial outcry, it’s difficult to measure precisely, but I’d say “Not very much.” It does appear that some edge cases — including mishandling of parentheses and brackets — did improve, and I think Google turned down the volume a bit overall, but changes to titles remain fairly common and the reasons for these changes are similar to August 2021.

Title Tag Rewrites: 7 Months Later

Back in August, we analyzed 10,000 SERPs and found that Google was rewriting 58% of the title tags we were able to track. In September, after some serious objections from the SEO community, Google released the following statement:

Based on your feedback, we made changes to our system which means that title elements are now used around 87% of the time, rather than around 80% before.

This immediately raises two questions. First, has the situation improved? Second, why the huge mismatch between our numbers (and similar numbers by others in the community)?

Rewrites by the numbers

We collected new data on March 2, 2022 from the MozCast 10,000-keyword tracking set. Here are the basic stats, which are very similar to what we found in August 2021:

• 84,639 page-one results

• 71,265 unique URLs

• 57,832 <title> tags

• 33,733 rewrites

So, let’s compare the August 2021 rewrites to the March 2022 rewrites:

Technically, the numbers did go down, but this probably isn’t the news you had hoped to hear. If 57% of titles in our study were rewritten, then — I think we can all agree with this math — 43% did not get rewritten. So, how do we reconcile our 43% with Google’s 87%?

Truncation, from simple to …

First off, our definition of “rewrite” is extremely broad, and it covers truncation, where Google just runs out of physical space. In August, I took a pretty simplistic view of truncation, but let’s try to give Google some benefit of the doubt. I’m going to dig into three forms of truncation, starting with the simplest:

1) Simple truncation

The simplest form of truncation is when Google cuts off a long title but preserves the original text from the beginning. For example:

No one is doing anything wrong here — the IRS’s <title> is accurate and descriptive, but Google ran out of space. They didn’t take any liberties with the text.

2) Midstream truncation

Let’s review another form of truncation, with this example from the Linksys website:

Again, Google truncated a long <title>, but here they removed the branded text from the beginning and started with the more unique, descriptive text. Is this a rewrite? Technically, yes, but it’s a direct excerpt and the “...” clearly implies truncation to searchers.

3) Excerpt truncation

Finally, we have situations where Google uses a portion of the <title> tag, but they don’t clearly indicate truncation with an ellipsis (“...”). Here’s an example from Congress.gov, a site Google is unlikely to view as spammy or in need of editorial revisions:

I don’t think Google’s trying to hide the truncation here by removing the ellipsis — the truncated title is a complete thought/phrase within the original title. In some cases, is this the excerpt the creator would have chosen? Maybe not, but I would still generally call this truncation.

All told, these three forms of truncation accounted for almost exactly one-third of the “rewrites” that we observed. These forms were distinct enough that we could separate them. From here on out, it gets a bit more complicated.

Title additions (brand & local)

In addition to truncating long titles, Google sometimes adds information they deem relevant to the end of a display title. The most common addition is “brand” information (using the term loosely) that wasn’t present in the original <title> tag. For example:

I kind of love this title, and you should definitely ride Top Thrill Dragster at Cedar Point if you’re a coaster fan, but notice here how Google has appended “Touring Ohio” to the end of the display title. This kind of add-on is very common, occurring in almost 14% of our observed rewrites.

In some cases, adding the brand text caused Google to truncate the title prior to the addition. See this example from Goodreads …

While the rewrite here is intended to be beneficial, this can cause problems with long brand names. Anecdotally, though, Google seems to be doing a better job of this in the past few months, and most brand identifiers are of reasonable length.

Finally, in a few cases, Google appended location information. For example:

It’s not clear what situations trigger this added location information, but it does show that Google is considering appending other forms of relevant information that could drive future rewrites and go beyond brand tagging.

Capital-R Rewrite examples

We can argue about whether truncation and addition are real, Capital-R Rewrites, so how about the situations where Google is clearly making substantial changes? Some of these situations — even working with a moderately-sized data set — are hard to classify, but I’ll cover some major categories.

1) Maximum verbosity

I almost said “keyword stuffing,” but that’s a judgment call and isn’t always fair in these cases. Granted, there are legitimate cases of keyword stuffing, like this example:

Prior to August 2021, Google might’ve just truncated this title, but now they’re saying “Yeah, no” and replacing the entire mess. Other cases aren’t so clear, though. Consider this one:

AMC hasn’t really done anything spammy here — this <title> tag is likely a direct reflection of their site architecture. In this case, though, Google has gone beyond truncation and rewritten the title, including replacing pipes with hyphens, removing “Movie Times” (which is arguably redundant with “Showtimes”) and pushing the site/brand up.

2) Minimum verbosity

Some people have too much to say, and some people are too quiet (I’m afraid I know which side I fall on). Here’s a case where the title didn’t quite provide enough information:

In many of these cases, like displaying just the brand name, a generic placeholder like “Home”, or – in one notable case – a code placeholder (“”), it’s likely the culprit is an overzealous CMS default setting. These are clearly Capital-R Rewrites, but I would argue that Google is generally adding value in these situations by rewriting.

3) Excessive superlatives

Sometimes, we marketers get a little carried away with colorful language (in this case, the family-friendly kind). Google still seems to be disproportionately rewriting <title> tags with certain superlatives, even when they may not seem excessive. Take this example:

This is a case where Google replaced the <title> with the contents of an <h1> — while it’s not a bad rewrite, it does feel aggressive to me. It’s hard to see how “21 Best Brunch Recipes” is wildly over the top or how “21 Easy Brunch Recipes” is a major improvement.

4) Miscellaneous nonsense

It’s hard to measure the real head-scratchers, but anecdotally, it does appear that Google’s rewrite engine has improved since August 2021, in terms of the truly bizarre edge cases. Here’s a funny one, though, from Google.com itself:

Even Google thinks that Google said “Google” too many times in this <title> tag. I suspect the rewrite engine flagged the word “Google” as redundant, but I’d definitely call this a misfire.

A more nuanced pie chart

I made myself a to-do of creating a “pie chart with nuance,” and I now realize that’s impossible. So, here’s a pie chart that’s slightly less misleading. Many rewrites are hard to categorize and count, but let’s take a look at the data if we carve out the truncation scenarios (all three) and the additions:

Separating truncations and additions, we’re left with about 30% of <title> tags being rewritten in our data set. Keep in mind that many of these rewrites are minor and some probably involve forms of truncation and/or addition that were difficult to detect programmatically.

Flipping this around, we have 70% of titles not being rewritten. How do we reconcile that with Google’s 87%? It could just be a function of the data set, but let’s carefully re-read that quote from the beginning of the post:

Based on your feedback, we made changes to our system which means that title elements are now used around 87% of the time, rather than around 80% before.

Note the highlighted text — Google is specifically saying that they used the <title> element/tag 87% of the time. They may have subtracted from, added to, or slightly modified that original data (they don’t really say). So, the 13% of cases here is likely only when Google is pulling the display title in search from some other area of the page (body content, headers, etc.).

As to the bigger question of how much Google toned down rewrites after the initial outcry, it’s difficult to measure precisely, but I’d say “Not very much.” It does appear that some edge cases — including mishandling of parentheses and brackets — did improve, and I think Google turned down the volume a bit overall, but changes to titles remain fairly common and the reasons for these changes are similar to August 2021.