Sneak Peek: The MozCon 2023 Speaker Line-Up

The year may slowly be wrapping up but we’ve got an extra special, early gift to share before you log off that laptop and put away your favorite travel mug.

We’re thrilled to announce the first 19 extraordinary speakers that will be taking the MozCon 2023 stage in Seattle this coming August (in alphabetical order).

Snag your Super Early Bird tickets!

Meet the speakers

Amanda Jordan (she/her)

Director of Digital Strategy, RicketyRoo
@amandatjordan | @ricketyroo

Amanda is passionate about helping complex, large businesses improve their local visibility. Her background includes working with clients in the legal, health, financial, and home services industries.

Andi Jarvis (he/him)

Strategy Director, Eximo Marketing
@andijarvis | @EximoMarketing

Andi is the Founder and Strategy Director of Eximo Marketing, a marketing strategy consultancy based in the UK. Eximo works with established manufacturers who want to grow their business via direct to consumer. Andi also hosts the Strategy Sessions podcast.

Brie E. Anderson (she/her)

Owner, BEAST Analytics
@brie_e_anderson

Brie E Anderson is an Analytical Nerd with a Soft Spot for Strategy. She’s spent the last 10 years helping businesses of all sizes execute data-driven strategies to increase ROI. Today, she runs BEAST Analytics, a digital marketing analytics consultancy.

Carrie Rose (she/her)

CEO & Founder, Rise At Seven
@CarrieRosePR | @RiseAtSeven

Carrie Rose, Founder of leading Global Search-First Creative Agency Rise at Seven both driving and facilitating search demand for global brands operating in 4 locations across the world including UK, US and EU

Chris Long (he/him)

VP of Marketing, Go Fish Digital

@GoFishChris | @GoFishDigital

Chris Long 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.

Crystal Carter (she/her)

Head of SEO Communications, Wix
@CrystalontheWeb | @wix

Head of SEO Communications, Wix, Crystal is an SEO & digital marketer with over 15 years of experience. Her clients have included Disney, McDonalds, and Tomy. An avid SEO communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, Brighton SEO and more.

Daniel Waisberg (he/him)

Search Advocate, Google
@DanielWaisberg | @google

Daniel is a Search Advocate at Google, part of the Search Console engineering team. His job is divided between educating / inspiring the Search community and working with the product’s engineering team to develop new capabilities.

Duane Brown (he/him)

Founder & Head of Strategy, Take Some Risk Inc.
@DuaneBrown

Duane has lived in 6 cities across 3 continents while working with Ecom, DTC and SaaS brands. He now lives in Canada helping brands grow through data, strategy and PPC marketing across search & social ad platforms.

Jackie Chu (she/her)

SEO Lead, Intelligence, Uber
@jackiecchu | @uber

Jackie Chu is currently the SEO Lead, Intelligence for Uber, driving analytics and tooling for the SEO teams globally. She has deep experience in technical SEO, content SEO, ASO and international SEO spanning both B2B and B2C industries.

Jes Scholz (she/her)

Group CMO, Ringier
jes_scholz | @ringier_ag

Group CMO at Swiss media giant Ringier, marketing technologist & mum of two tiny humans. Jes loves to talk about the future of search, smart marketing automation and travel.

Lidia Infante (she/her)

Senior SEO Manager, Sanity
@LidiaInfanteM | @sanity_io

Lidia has been working in SEO for almost a decade, helping businesses in SaaS, media and e-commerce grow online. She has a BSC in Psychology and a Master in Digital Business and is a regular speaker at SEO events such as MozCon, BrightonSEO or WTSFest.

Lily Ray (she/her)

Senior Director, SEO & Head of Organic Research, Amsive Digital
@lilyraynyc | @​​amsive_digital

Lily Ray is the Sr. Director, SEO & Head of Organic Research at Amsive Digital, where she provides strategic leadership for the agency’s SEO client programs. Lily began her SEO career in 2010 in a fast-paced start-up environment and moved quickly into the agency world, where she helped grow and establish an award-winning SEO department that delivered high impact work for a fast-growing list of notable clients, including Fortune 500 companies.

Miracle Inameti-Archibong (she/her)

Head of Organic Search, John Lewis (Financial Services)
@Mira_Inam

Miracle is Head of Organic Search at John Lewis (Financial Services) and is armed with more than a decade of supporting national, and global brands with technical SEO and data strategy.

Noah Learner (he/him/his)

Product Director, Two Octobers
@NoahLearner | @twooctobers

Noah is a technical marketer, nicknamed the Kraken, who is happiest building SEO tools, automations, data pipelines and communities. When not in the lab, he loves skiing, fly fishing, camping with his family, and walking his dog, Shadow.

Dr. Pete Meyers (he/him)

Marketing Scientist, Moz
@Dr_Pete | @Moz

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.

Ross Simmonds (he/him)

CEO & Founder, Foundation Marketing
@TheCoolestCool | @FoundationIncCo

Ross Simmonds is the founder & CEO of Foundation, a global marketing agency that provides services to organizations all over the world ranging from some of the fastest-growing startups to global brands. He was named one of Atlantic Canada’s Top 50 CEO.

Tom Anthony (he/him)

CTO, SearchPilot
@TomAnthonySEO | @SearchPilot

Tom is CTO at SearchPilot, where he leads the engineering & product teams. Tom has been working on the web for over 25 years, and has a PhD in Computer Science. He lives with his wife and 3 daughters in Germany.

Tom Capper (he/him)

Senior Search Scientist, Moz
@thcapper | @Moz

Tom heads up the Search Science team at Moz, providing research and insight for Moz’s next generation of tools. Previously he headed up the London consulting team for SEO agency Distilled, and worked as a chef in a roadside grill.

Wil Reynolds (he/him)

CEO & Vice President of Innovation, Seer Interactive
@wilreynolds | @SeerInteractive

Wil has been leading the charge to leverage “Big Data” to break down silos between SEO, PPC, and traditional marketing — pulling together data from various sources to see the big picture.

Meet the emcees

Cheryl Draper (she/her)

Event Marketing Manager, Moz
@CherylDraper | @Moz

Melissa Rae Brown (she/her)

Learning Team Manager, Moz
@Melissa_R_B_ | @Moz

Ola King (he/him)

User Researcher, Moz
@justolaking | @Moz

From fan favorites to fresh faces, it’s a pretty great start to what’s sure to be the best MozCon yet! We’ll have even more incredible speakers to reveal, including our community speaker lineup, in early 2023.

But don’t wait to snag your tickets! Save up to $600 on MozCon 2023 now with Super Early Bird pricing.

Grab your Super Early Bird tickets!

SEO Gap Analysis — Whiteboard Friday

Ranking on Google is not ranking in a vacuum. Ranking is outranking your competitors. When you’ve got very limited space on the first page of the SERPs, you need to be doing better than your competitors. 

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Lidia Infante shows you her recommended strategies for successful SEO gap analysis. 

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to a new edition of Whiteboard Fridays. My name is Lidia Infante, and I’m the Senior SEO Manager at sanity.io. Today, I’m going to be talking to you about SEO gap analysis, and yes, I know it’s a very unsexy topic, but bear with me because it’s worth it.

SEO gap analysis takes us to the first principles of what we do in SEO because ranking on Google is not ranking in a vacuum. Ranking is outranking your competitors. You’ve got a very limited space on the first page of the SERPs, and you need to be doing better than your competitors to be able to rank there. That means, then, you need to know what your competitors are doing and how you’re going to do it better.

Identify competitors

But first of all, you need to know who your competitors are, who they are really. We’re going to be speaking about competitor identification in a different Whiteboard Friday, so be sure to check it out.

Benchmark

Once you have your set of competitors ready, you’re going to proceed to benchmark yourself against them, and we’re going to be doing this across the three pillars of SEO. 

So we’re going to be looking at content, we’re going to be looking at links, and we’re going to be looking at tech SEO. We’re going to look at how our competitors perform from each of those and how we compare.

Content

So when it comes to content, the very first thing that we want to look at is at the estimated traffic by type that our competitors and we have. So when I’m talking about traffic by type, what I mean is like: Are they getting branded traffic versus unbranded traffic, product traffic, editorial traffic? It’s going to be very different depending on the vertical that you’re in, so adapt it to make it yours. We’re also going to be looking at the number of editorial URLs that they have and how much traffic these editorial URLs are getting each on average. And lastly, we’re going to be looking at the number of keywords that they’re ranking for. We’re not going to be looking at all of the keywords. We’re going to be aiming for the range of 1 to 30. Again, you can make this yours. You know your market better, and you know what’s relevant, but that should narrow the entire pool to stuff that’s a little more relevant to your competitors.

Links

Then, we’re going to be looking at links. We’re going to begin with link gap analysis. That is we’re going to look at how many links your competitors have and how many referring domains are pointing to your competitors. Then, we’re going to use this to measure link growth. We’re going to look at how many links your competitors had 6 months ago or 12 months ago if your market is a little slower, and we’re going to get a percentage of growth out of that. That’s going to indicate to you whether your search market is very aggressive with link building and you need to make an effort to keep up or it’s a little bit more relaxed. Then, we’re going to be looking at branded search. So how many people are looking for your competitors’ brands versus how many people are looking for your brand? That’s going to indicate the level of brand awareness that you have within your target audience in comparison to your competitors.

And we’re going to take it one step further, and we’re going to be looking again at branded traffic. There should be a very, very correlated relation between branded search and branded traffic. If you’re first for branded search, you should be first for branded traffic and so on. But if there isn’t, it might be an indicator that you don’t have content within your site that’s responding to the users’ queries about your brand. So that’s definitely a very quick win that you could action right now.

Technical SEO

Lastly, we’re going to be looking at tech SEO, and this is incredibly difficult to measure because the requirements in tech SEO vary from website to website, from vertical to vertical. I am personally in the SaaS market, so my requirements for tech SEO is essentially make it readable and make sure that JavaScript is not blocking anything, classic crawling and rendering issues, and that’s about it. But if you’re in e-commerce, you’re likely dealing with faceted navigation. You’re dealing with filter management, and it’s a little bit more demanding. So the best way that I have found to measure tech SEO changes and performance is Core Web Vital scores. We’re going to go on the Chrome UX Report on Data Studio, and we’re going to look at the main three Core Web vitals, grab the percentage of good URLs according to Google, and then we’re going to average them out into one score. Then we’re going to be looking at page speed. You can do this with PageSpeed Insights, and we’re going to be looking at the scores for mobile versus desktop. I don’t average these out because I think they provide really useful information of what issues your industry is running into when it comes to mobile usability. And then lastly, we’re going to do some manual checks. Take a look at the robots.txt, take a look at the sitemap, how they manage canonicalization, and that’s going to inform you better on how you could outperform your competitors.

And if this seems very complicated, don’t worry. I have provided a free template for you so that you can make it yours.

Thank you so much for watching my Whiteboard Friday. My name is Lidia Infante, and you can find me on Twitter @LidiaInfanteM. You can find me on my website at lidia-infante.com and see you soon.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com