Mozcon 2017: Britney Muller

Britney Muller at Mozcon 2017

DISCLAIMER: This post is written as a live blog from Mozcon. There may be typos and grammar to make my high school English teachers weep. Please excuse those … it’s a fast-paced conference with back-to-back sessions and no time for proofing or even proper writing.

Britney Muller takes the stage to chat about being the head of SEO at Moz. She starts by talking about secrets and how we all have them. She talks about having to keep the secrets she learns from working and testing at Moz and that she gets to talk about them and some that we might not expect.

Ask yourself – what secrets if your site hiding?

Britney got to Moz after stating a digital marketing agency. After working in the private medical space they didn’t feel great about what they were doing so they let some of their top clients go. She was burnt out and hired by Moz in 2016 – a high stakes job.

So first she needed to increase qualified leads to free local check and free trials.  She used Google Slides to post the audit and found that folks jumped ina nd elped solve the problems.  Here are the 5 secrets she found:

Secret 1 – site had 70k pages of indexed crap.

40% of the pages were community profile pages – most were spam crap and those pages had linked-to crap to boost the profile link. So she switched to linked profiles requiring 200 MozPoints to to get indexed droping to 1500 indexed pages.  They saw a 13% improvement in traffic.

So – prune the crap from your site to push authority to the important pages.

Secret 2 – URL parameters

Britney noticed in the sEarch Console that the URL paramteres weren’t configured propertly. By correcting them such as noting in the search console whether content changes with it, etc. they unified their URL weight and strengthened th pages and increased traffic.

Secret 3 – Old CMS

They had an old CMS and after building a new site structure and landing on Craft as the new CMS the moved all the content bit-by-but over to an updated system.  JSON was baked in which was great and it was more easily crawled and also easier to use. There were HUGE jumps in rankings. HUGE.

Takeaway – evaluate your CMS.

Secret 4 – Nurture your leaders

Everyone should evaluate sites any way they can. They had multiple categories for each article which showed poor recommendation.  They fixed that and selected only one and provided better recomended additional contnet resulting in over a 5% increase in pageviews.

Secret #5 – Mozers aren’t perfect SEOs

If you can make others understand SEO they will get better by doing it. Get your team curious and give them tasks to try and you’ll learn new things and so will they.

Bonus Secret – Break stuff

She found that a typo in a meta description cost them a featured snippet and corrected it. She then started playing around with typing o lose them to find out where the tipping points were at. You can learn more by breaking things than fixing them.

So ask youself …

What secrets can you uncover if you look at your site and really look at it.

You can download her slide deck here.