 Welcome to MozCon 2021. I'm Sarah Bird, CEO of Moz and I am so excited to bring you to another virtual MozCon here. I am really also excited because more than half of you, this is your very first MozCon and it's a real joy when we get new people into our Moz family. I usually like to start out these MozCons by asking for a show of hands, how many MozCons people have been to. For many of you, this is your second, your third, your fourth, your fifth, your sixth MozCon or more. So thank you to those of you who come back year after year after year to have your skills refreshed. You've seen a lot of changes at MozCon over the years and I really do appreciate your continued support. Usually I also like to see where all the different people are coming from. We often have a big map of all the regions of the world and invite you to tag your home country or where you came in from on the map. That's obviously a lot more challenging to do here in our virtual world, but I do invite you right now to use the chat function, let us know how many MozCons you've been to, let us know where you're coming in from. I know from looking at ticket sales that we have MozCon attendees from over 37 countries and over 15 different industries. That's just, that's so wild. Thank you to everyone. Tune in from all over the world. It's been quite a year in digital marketing and SEO and no matter where you're sitting or what industry you're working in, it can be really challenging to keep up with those changes. So you have made a great choice by investing the time to learn from experts across the all industries, how to succeed in search and digital marketing. We've got an incredible lineup of presenters all here to help you navigate these recent changes in marketing and SEO and to help see maybe a little bit about what is to come. Before we jump in though, you've probably been wondering what is going on with Moz? What's going on with Moz? You may have heard that Moz recently merged with a group of really great marketing technology brands all focus on meeting the needs of small to mid-sized companies and the agencies who serve them. So we are thrilled to announce that together all these brands are now the Moz group. The brands of the Moz group share a dedication to developing the best organic search, email and digital marketing solutions to help our customers grow and prosper. And that is not all we've been up to around here. Later today, Dr. Pete Myers will share a sneak peek of our new SEO product that Moz has been working on. It's gonna help you dig deeper and gain a deeper understanding of your customers. You will soon have access to our true competitor beta through your Moz Pro subscription. So really excited to share that with you. And that's not all. Tomorrow, our VP of strategy, Rob Uzby, will share two new product alphas that are living in Moz Lab. And that's a great place where we can test different product ideas for you. These two new alphas include the on-page keyword grouper. And this helps you improve your on-page targeting by using Google's own data to help guide your content strategy. The second alpha is our new topical link finder. This helps SEOs and digital marketers grow a site's domain authority by finding topically relevant domains that have linked to sites just like yours already. We are offering early access to these new features exclusively to MozCon attendees. So if you're not already a customer, all you need to do is sign up for a free Moz community account to experiment with these new features in our Moz Labs. Are you getting excited? I really hope so. Also, we have some housekeeping. I want you to have a very successful MozCon. So let's talk through. First of all, I want to give a very big thank you to our sponsors. I think you all know that we are very careful to allow only companies to sponsor MozCon that we feel will really offer our attendees some important value. Those sponsors we curated for this year's MozCon include 97th floor, proud content, page one pager and Wix. Thank you sponsors, thank you, thank you. Next, here's a few helpful tips. Our MCs, long time MozCon MC, Cyrus Shepard and relatively new to the MozCon stage but not new to the Moz community, Ola King will be guiding us through our programming. I think it's probably obvious that our speakers presentations are all prerecorded. We are really concerned that you get the best quality. We want you to have a wonderful experience and prerecording speaker sessions allows us to ensure that you have a great MozCon. But all of our speakers are online. We're all here, we're ready to chat with you. So just because it's prerecorded, don't feel like you can't engage with us. We encourage you to make really good use of that chat as the day progresses. Please, please, please, don't be shy. Many of you know your SEO game already. When you signed up, you told us that you were already an intermediate skill band when you registered for this year and by the end of this conference, I am certain you will learn something new and be on your way to claiming expert status. Don't worry though, if you're also a beginner, don't feel left out, don't be worried. This is gonna be a good stretch for you. You're starting such an important career journey. So if you're starting out, you will also hear a lot of great tips, tricks, tactics from our speakers to help you skill up really quickly. Also be sure to check out our Moz's beginners guide to SEO, it's a very handy reference and it's great to keep by your side for those first few months on the job. And for all of you experts out there, you will be delighted with a deep level of knowledge from our speakers. We're counting on you to ask those really hard questions as well, keep our speakers on their toes and our speakers are so fantastic and I know that they'll do great jobs. So thank you for joining us. And no matter where you're at and your digital marketing and SEO career, here's a few hot topics that I've likely been on your mind in that you'll be learning more about in the next few days. Since the last MozCon, the world and SEO has become a much more complicated place. Ranking drivers are now basic table stakes. Optimizing for the user continues to underpin everything we learn and surmise about Google's ranking factors. We see this in factors like core web vitals, HTTPS, mobile friendliness and mobile only indexing and so much more. Machine learning and AI are driving potential future updates like passage indexing and ranking. And while we know that Google BERT and natural language processing are used on most English queries, who knows what's gonna happen in the future. More and more, good SEO requires careful thought about how users experience the internet and wise predictions about how those experiences will evolve. The bottom line is that navigating SEO has become overwhelmingly complex. You're not alone, you're not alone, it is complex. The remedy is good data, strong integrity and great tools because we're playing a long game here. We can't base our good decisions on bad data and misleading metrics. You can't bake a cake with bad eggs and no recipe, the ingredients all matter. With Google's core vital updates, page experience is now more important than ever. Now, I know a little over half of you are already Moz customers, but if you haven't already checked out our performance metrics in Moz Pro, I highly recommend it. These are metrics that help you ensure that your speed, interactivity and stability across your site are top notch. This is just the kind of focusing on the user that you're gonna hear a lot about in MozCon. We hope you enjoy the incredible learning opportunities that our presenters are bringing into your homes and offices, but we also hope you will enjoy the experience of getting to know other attendees. Take some time to poke around the platform, have fun taking online photos in our virtual photo booth, where you'll find a bunch of fun circus themed stickers, backgrounds, frames to help you remember this online MozCon experience. And if I can have your attention for a very special moment before we close and transition to these speakers, I invite you to join me in honoring Russ Jones, our brilliant, funny, bold, courageous, longtime Mozzer, well-known industry insider who's graced MozCon stage so many times and a dear friend of mine, and he passed away unexpectedly a few weeks ago. We prepared a little video we wanna share with you. Let's see how this goes. Gotta figure out the sliding better. Test from sitting for Whiteboard Friday. Hopefully it works well. Howdy Moz fans, I am Russ Jones and I can't tell you how excited I am for my first Whiteboard Friday. Welcome to another great Whiteboard Friday. It's another Whiteboard Friday. Great to be back here with you on Whiteboard Friday. Normally at this time of night, I figured I'd be having a scotch, so maybe I'll start with that. It's not just about the people who are in need, it's about the people who are helping those in need. And the deeper you can dig, the better it's gonna be for them in the long. So just try and stick with me for just the next couple of minutes. The beer is coming, don't worry. It's hard to believe my favorite task in Moz is specifically to ruin Dr. Pete's day. And he's done, he's already given his talk so he can't respond, so that works great for me. I brought my family up this time to finally get to see Seattle and I go in there and I'm like, look, Daddy has gotta talk to like 1,000 people in the morning. You have got to go to sleep. And my oldest looks at me and she says 1,000 people. That's a lot. What if they don't like you? I was like, sweetie, Daddy's a black cat. He can always buy reviews, it'll be fine. There are lots of things that I can think about that are positive, made great friends. I helped build businesses, I've built software, I helped other companies, small mom and pops. And I think that that's the one takeaway I want you guys to walk away with today. It's really great to know that you've got a lot of time ahead of you to make a difference, to do it better. It doesn't have to be the way it feels like every day. It doesn't have to be a situation where you feel like I've got to prove to Google, I got to make Google think that my site's the best now. Today, it has to happen immediately. We need to stop sacrificing the long run for the short run. So please, when you walk away from this conference, I ask that you just remember one thing, to be rather than to see. Thanks. I want to end on a positive note. These are difficult times, but if there's one thing that I've seen, I've seen time and time again, is that people in our industry care and they're trying to make a difference. A memorial site has been set up to honor Russ Jones, go to rememberingrestrones.com and there you can read more about Russ, the loves of his life. You can share a memory. You can also make a donation to a fund that will help his family. It's about this point that Russ would give me a bit of a hard time with a little twinkle in his eye and say, Colin, Sarah, let's get on with it. So with that, let's do that. Let's get on with it. Welcome to ModCon 2021. Let's make it a great one. Thank you.