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Unlocking SEO Potential at MozCon

January 25, 2024

A Look Back at MozCon 2023 as We Prepare for the 2024 Conference

In August 2023, our technology team attended MozCon 2023 in Seattle and spent two full days learning, talking, and exploring innovative ways to implement Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and all of the facets that surround best SEO practices.

Our team arrived back on the east coast ready to share all of their ideas with the full company and begin implementing everything they learned. After spending some time putting their new education into practice, they have highlighted the greatest takeaways from last year’s conference.

Here are the top three topics that our team highlighted as most important after MozCon 2023:

1. Google is a Digital Ecosystem

Google is only one search engine among many, but it stands out from all the rest because of its broad expanse of offerings. Google is now a social network, a business directory, a place to shop, a place to image search, an aggregator, and a personal assistant––all rolled into one.

Thinking of Google as a digital ecosystem encouraged our team to incorporate all Google had to offer into our strategy and web presence going forward. SEO is equally interconnected and needs to be woven into all layers of content, campaigns, websites, and ads from start to finish. Google is currently the expert on users’ motivations for search and data collection, making Google the key to connecting with targeted audiences.

How our team is using Google differently in 2024:

  • Not thinking of Google solely as a search engine
  • Not getting sucked into the algorithm-thinking SEO practices
  • Using Google’s offerings to find and retain target audiences
  • Exploring content beyond just web pages––especially indexed YouTube video
  • Focusing on identifying local link opportunities in addition to traditional backlinks

2. GA4 Offers Privacy Conscious User Data

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a customizable tool our technology team uses to measure traffic and engagement across the websites that we create, optimize, monitor traffic, and study user behavior. In order to address privacy concerns, Google moved away from Universal Analytics (UA) and implemented the GA4 data structure to collect, store, and use data in a way that is compliant with privacy regulations in different countries/states while focusing on events rather than sessions. It uses modeling to estimate conversion data that can’t be observed directly without identifying users. GA4 aims to collect user web and app data  in a privacy conscious manner while preparing for a cookieless browsing future.

How our team is leveraging GA4 in 2024:

  • We are using GA4 to track user behavior and sources of traffic
  • We are using the funnel report builder to analyze flows and track conversions
  • We are customizing our team’s navigation for easy access to useful reports
  • We are building custom audiences and using them for remarketing in Google Ads
  • We are using GA4 to measure the impact of our paid media efforts 
  • We are using GA4 to create custom reports to extract key insights for decision making 

3. AI and the Rise of Large Language Models

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not new, but universal accessibility to it is. Like many, our team regards AI with equal parts skepticism and curiosity. While at MozCon our team approached new information about AI with an open mind and challenged their own beliefs to embrace experimentation.

ChatGPT is a natural language processing tool developed by OpenAI to generate human-like text based on input. OpenAI trained ChapGPT on a massive amount of text data from the internet, using a machine learning model known as a large language model (LLM). ChapGPT “learns” by identifying patterns in the data and uses them to make predictions.

After Open AI launched ChatGPT, many companies such as Microsoft and Google started to integrate ChatGPT into their search engines or created their own LLMs, such as LaMDA/Bard and Bing Chat.

How our team is leveraging AI in 2024:

  • Increasing efficiency as a digital partner and personal assistant
  • Solving problems and expanding research
  • Learning better skills for prompting AI
  • Integrating ChatGPT functionality into other applications
  • Increasing transparency when using AI and sharing it’s benefits with each other
  • Continuing to explore all that AI has to offer our company workflow

Our technology team was thrilled to learn all they could from MozCon in 2023 and are very excited to gain even more exposure to new technologies at MozCon in 2024.

Education is at the heart of everything we do. If you are looking for a partner who is constantly exploring and learning new technology, we are ready to share our knowledge with you and solve your digital marketing problems. Let’s connect!