Wrapping up at MozCon — and giving away that Apple Watch!

For our final day in Seattle, we made plans to disrupt ourselves, gave one lucky ducky an Apple Watch, and picked up some coveted Roger bobbleheads.

The last day of MozCon was filled with so many great speakers, it was hard to pick our favourites. Lucky for us (and for you) the presentation decks from each speaker can be downloaded on the Moz schedule page.

But all those speakers didn’t make us forget our mission to give away an Apple Watch — congrats to Stephanie Nicoll!

Speakers we loved:

Bringing the real talk, Ruth Burr Reedy spoke about something I think we can all relate to: the struggle to nab your dream job in the SEO world. She says don’t get discouraged if you don’t have the exact experience an employer is asking for: “When you’re looking at a job description, look at the spirit, not the letter.” And don’t forget to establish — and manage — your online reputation, because every employer is going to Google you.

Ever feel like you’re addicted to social media? You’re not alone. Courtney Seiter’s “The Psychology of Social Media” looks at the way that social media has changed our brain patterns, including how our brains now react the same way to a smiley emoji as they do to a real human smiling face. ☺

Closing the day and the conference was the Wizard of Moz himself. Rand Fishkin spoke about the importance of disrupting ourselves, and once again sought to disrupt Google. He explains that we’re living in a two-algorithm world: search engines, and people. We need to be optimizing for both, delivering content that fulfills the conscious and unconscious needs of the searcher, a great UX on every browser, and do it all faster than ever before.

Quotes we loved:

“There’s never been a time when storytelling wasn’t important in content marketing and PR.”
— Lexi Mills, “Marketing Innovations: Creative PR, Content, and SEO Strategies”

“Let’s break things on purpose because this is how we learn.”
— Mig Reyes, “Upside Down and Inside Out”

“If you can’t dominate your whole market, find your niche.”
— Ruth Burr Reedy, “Get Hired to do SEO”

“If you don’t challenge your assumptions, you may be operating on assumptions that might not be true.”
— Chris Dayley, “Rocking your CRO Efforts with Radical Redesigns”

“Being data-driven is for bots. Better to be data-informed.”
— Gianluca Fiorelli, “Parole, Parole, Parole: Practical, Modern Keyword and Topical Research”

Other stuff we loved:

• Thanks so much to everyone who came and met us at the Partner Hub. We met tons of folks, showed off what STAT can do, and even gave out a t-shirt or two.
• A massive hat-tip to MozCon emcees Cyrus Shepard and Jennifer Sable Lopez for putting on a fantastic event full of laughs and insights. Same goes for the rest of the fun, friendly, and fabulous Moz team!
• On a sad note, no one on our team won a special edition Golden Roger bobblehead. But that’s alright, because everyone got a regular Roger bobblehead, and ours have already taken up places of honour in STAT HQ.

Thanks for the good times, Moz. See you in 2016!