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.
Rand Fishkin takes the stage and begins with changes in search. He points out tha search and direct traffic keep rising as a traffic source but social is not. Nex he entions that machine learning is a huge story since last year. We’ll hear more about it in the coming days.
Only 3% of searches have 10 blue links (i.e. a top 10). H points out that 40% of SEO’s DON’T optimize for search features even though they’re crucial.
Quality Score is moving more to a sitewide factor as opposed to page-based.
Rankbrain and Hummingbird have changes optimization. They understand context and not just keywords. This means better content can rank for broader ranges of keywords.
Paid search trending is leveling off. Some clickstream data Moz has collected shows that most searchers perform 3 per day on their desktop. Only 1.19% result in an ad click. 51% of all clicks happen in organic and 49% go to Google properties. About 40% of searches result in no click at all.
22.8% of all clicks go to the top 20 sites.
He then discusses their layoffs and the focus on SEO and search.
He talks about some of their recent launches as well including Keyword Explorer (a big favorite of mine).
Next he’s talking about all the folks we’ll meet and the parties.
There’s also a game made for this conference at https://moz.com/roger-patrol.
And then he’s done and handing the stage off so watch for our next post coming shortly …