While the bedazzling speaker lineup at this year’s MozCon had just two presenters with local-specific talks, tips applicable to local business marketing were wonderfully plentiful. Today, I’ll share the takeaways that rang bells and lit bulbs for me, with the recommendation that if you weren’t able to attend in person or online, you consider purchasing the MozCon video bundle for extensive and advanced SEO and marketing learning!

Amanda Jordan’s excellent presentation on becoming a dominant player via local search contained the above slide, urging business owners to focus on forming real, local partnerships as a way to earn good links. In addition to this, most of the local SEOs I know will have noticed the reference to “mentions” in the recent Google documentation leak. It’s a concept that may feel new to general SEOs, but local SEOs have known about “unstructured citations” for years.

When relevant third-party publishers mention your business’ complete or partial name, address, phone number, or other contact information, it’s a valuable win for your brand. The leak seems to solidify this understanding. Find a way to partner up with a trustworthy brand near you for a win-win.

Moz’s own Tom Capper gave a fascinating talk on the critical importance of understanding how Google views search intent as a means of informing how we can support customer journeys. Search intent is typically broken down into four categories: informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional. It was very confirming to see that Tom’s research found that Google commonly understands local searches as having a transactional intent, serving up local packs as actionable SERP features.

It’s been a historic challenge to pin down a single intent category for local searches. For example, if I look up “Pizza Hut,” I could theoretically be said to be making a navigational search because it contains a brand name. But the fact that Google will almost definitely serve up a local pack for this search means they understand that I’m probably on the verge of making a transaction, whether immediately for something like a quick slice of pizza or, eventually, like booking a hotel room for a vacation next month.

The takeaway for local businesses is to realize just how critical it is to support every step you can towards a customer’s transaction with an accurate and informative Google Business Profile, clear driving directions, great product descriptions, and smooth e-commerce functionality so that the customer sticks with you to the end of the journey instead of being disappointed and going elsewhere.

However, not all local searches are transactional, and Moz debuted an amazing new Moz Pro feature called Search Intent that will help you categorize search terms via the four intents for smarter marketing. Check it out!

Talia Wolf is new to the MozCon stage and her presentation on the emotional aspects of online publication and marketing ended up being one of my favorite talks of the event. My ears pricked up when Talia mentioned how McDonald’s successfully embraced the powerful impact of nostalgia in a marketing campaign that offered happy meals to adults. Nostalgic content is massive on the web, from YouTube channels dedicated to collections of old TV ads to sites that help you relive your life as a ’70s kid, '80s kid…and now even a 2000s kid!

If your local business is earnestly seeking a way to engage your community and increase brand awareness, I highly recommend considering what you might do to tune into local nostalgia. Have you got old photos or film footage of what life was like in your town in decades past? My local newspaper publishes things like this, and the public gobbles them up. Extra kudos to you if you can tie your business into that local timeline with a long history of service. Share this content socially, and invite neighbors to contribute their memories. It’s a great way to get people interacting with your brand, even if it’s the first time they’ve encountered you.

Brilliant speaker Crystal Carter delivered a memorable presentation on finding antidotes to AI-generated rubbish in the context of Google’s hunt for “hidden gems.” As you can prove to yourself via a huge variety of searches, Google is now surfacing forums like Reddit at a never-before-seen rate, and I loved Crystal’s takeaway from this behavior that we should be applying the forum ethos to anything our own businesses publish:

None of these attributes can be replicated by AI. I’d urge local businesses to audit their website and social content to see if it ticks off these boxes or if it sounds more like it was just written to put “something” out there on the web. I strongly believe that the more searchers encounter AI content, the greater their appetite for real human communication will grow. Now is the time to embrace authenticity in everything your local business publishes. As Crystal puts it:

I think it’s worth noting that while multiple MozCon 2024 presenters spoke of ways in which they are using AI as an aide to specific toilsome tasks, the overall attitude I encountered was that SEOs are interested in helping clients “beat the bots” at this stage. Not one speaker suggested you should forget about human creativity in favor of letting artificial intelligence do all the work.

Bernard Huang really drove this message home in his presentation, urging SEOs to make the switch from merely focusing on keyword-driven content to perspective-led content to increase human engagement:

I bet Joy Hawkins’ presentation caught the attention of everyone present at MozCon because she had the courage to speak up transparently about a subject all SEOs dread: losing valued clients! Because Joy is such a visionary and a leader, she was able to turn negative experiences into learning opportunities for her agency, Sterling Sky, and the insight she shared that really struck me was this one: Don’t ask clients what keywords they care about; ask them who their ideal customer is so you can delve down to what actually makes them money.

Joy shared an anecdote about how her agency missed that a DUI lawyer’s ideal client was a first-time (rather than a repeat) offender. Effort was put into the wrong campaign. The mistake occurred because the account strategist and the account manager were two different people, and a communication gap arose. After this client was lost, Sterling Sky changed their org’s architecture so that the strategist and manager are the same person, minimizing the chance of this type of unfortunate error.

Joy has generously made Sterling Sky’s client losses every other agency’s gains by sharing the metrics she has developed to improve client retention:

This seems like a great set of questions for any local SEO or agency to be asking on a regular basis!

Also, from Talia Wolf’s presentation, this slide of a clever Timex billboard was one to which I immediately and viscerally reacted. I recently captured a bunch of customer satisfaction data from the couple of days in which Ace Hardware (the largest non-grocery co-op brand in the US) was trending on Twitter/X. Multiple loyal customers volunteered the information that when they need help with a home repair project, they do not want to use an app or talk to a staff member who has to use a big box store app to locate the appropriate inventory. They want a simple, efficient experience that solves their problem with trustworthy and speedy human expertise.

That trending event, coupled with the Timex billboard, is a good reminder to be sure you’re delivering the core solution to customers’ most basic needs and not chasing too many faddish marketing bells and whistles. Some people just want to know what time it is when they look at a watch. They don’t need to have it be like a smartphone.

In fact, there’s a small but growing trend of consumers who no longer want their phones to connect them to apps and social media, for the sake of mental health and peace. They just want to talk and text. Nokia’s old/new flip phone sales have reportedly doubled. What a great hint to be sure that your feature set of goods and services is the right set being sold by the right staff.

“That's a lot of learning in two days for someone who's been doing this for almost 20 years. I think that speaks to the quality of MozCon.”
— Joshua Squires, Director of SEO, Amsive

“The good folks at @Moz should know this was the best #MozCon in the past three years.”
— George Nguyen, Director of SEO Editorial, Wix.

“Once again, you've proven to be one of the best, MASSIVELY *relevant* + most supportive SEO/Marketing conferences out there - and offering a sea of opportunity at a critical time.”
— Cyrus Shepard, Owner, Zyppy SEO

As these attendee comments indicate, I have barely scratched the surface of MozCon 2024 today; the insights and takeaways were non-stop for both days of the event, and only the videos can tell the full story.

But if I had to label the overall message of the conference, voiced by many speakers, it was to dig deep into authentic brand messaging based on a genuine regard for other people whom you’d like to have the chance to serve. It’s a takeaway from a maturing SEO industry eager to build actual relationships with clients, colleagues, communities, and customers!