Technical

Michael King redefined technical SEO and its importance in our industry back in 2016. In 2018, he taught us everything we didn't know about SEO. This year, he's back to share the hottest technical tactics to uplevel your efforts, plus the case studies and data that should be guiding your decisions.

Opportunities and Diagnostics are two categories of response returned by Google’s Lighthouse tools, which underpin Moz’s Performance Metrics suite, as well as Google’s own Pagespeed Insights. We'll go through each opportunity and diagnostic in turn, offer a basic overview of how to understand each, and link out to more developer-focused web.dev resources.

The push and pull of making decisions for searchers versus search engines is an ever-present SEO conundrum. How do you tackle industry changes through the lens of whether something is good for humans or for machines? Ruth Burr Reedy will take us through human-readable quality signals and their machine-readable equivalents and how to make SEO decisions accordingly, as well as how to communicate change to clients and bosses.

What would your reaction be if you were told that one of Wil Reynolds' clients got more conversions from zero-volume search terms than search terms with 1000+ searches per month? It's true. Wil found this out in seconds, leading him to really look at his whole client strategy through a new lens. It also made him question company-wide strategies. How prevalent is this across all clients? Don't they all deserve to get these insights? It required him to dig into the long tail, deep. To use big data and see PPC data as insights, not just marketing. What would your reaction be if you were told that Google's "bad click" business could be generating as much annually as Starbucks or McDonalds? Wil will be making the case for big data, agencies, and why building systems that looking at every single search term you get matched to is the future of search marketing.

How do you turn an unwieldy 2.5 million-URL website into a manageable and indexable site of just 20,000 pages? Areej AbuAli will share the methodology and takeaways used to restructure a job aggregator site which, like many large websites, had huge problems with indexability and the rules used to direct robot crawl. This talk will tackle tough crawling and indexing issues, diving into the case study with flow charts to explain the full approach and how to implement it.

It’s time to throw the traditional definition of technical SEO out the window. Why? Because technical SEO is much, much bigger than just crawling, indexing, and rendering. Technical SEO is applicable to all areas of SEO, including content development and other creative functions. In this session, you’ll learn how to integrate technical SEO into all aspects of your SEO program.

Before you ask: no, this isn’t Fraggle Rock, MozCon edition! Cindy Krum will cover the myriad ways mobile-first indexing is changing the SERPs, including progressive web apps, entity-first indexing, and how "fraggles" are indexed in the Knowledge Graph and what it all means for the future of mobile SERPs.

Google's algorithms have undergone significant changes in recent years. Traditional ranking signals don't hold the same sway they used to, and they're being usurped by factors like UX and brand that are becoming more important than ever before. What's an SEO to do? The answer lies in testing. Sharing original data and results from clients, Rob Ousbey will highlight the necessity of testing, learning, and iterating your work, from traditional UX testing to weighing the impact of technical SEO changes, tweaking on-page elements, and changing up content on key pages. Actionable processes and real-world results abound in this thoughtful presentation on why you should be testing SEO changes, how and where to run them, and what kinds of tests you ought to consider for your circumstances.

By now, most SEOs are comfortable with the idea of featured snippets, but actually understanding and capturing them in the changing search landscape remains elusive. Britney Muller will share some eye-opening data about the SERPs you know and love while equipping you with a bevy of new tricks for winning featured snippets into your toolbox.