 have a secret. It might be embarrassing. It could be funny. It could be completely harmless. But each and every person in this room carries around secrets. I actually still remember creating one of my very first secrets around the age of five when I told my younger brother Alex that our parents found him in a dumpster when he was a baby. We were a little bit older than this, but I still remember that cute little face looking at me and going, I don't believe you. To which I had to sadly inform, no, it's true. They found you in this dumpster, and they had to sign a contract stating that they could never tell you how you were found. But I was just a baby, so I couldn't sign it, which is why I'm telling you now. I go, but Alex, you have to keep this a secret, because if you go to mom and dad and you ask them, they're just going to say it's not true because they signed that contract. You can imagine this horrible little secret didn't last very long, right? Tears ensued. I got in huge trouble. I'm actually still apologizing to this day about it. My brother and mom are actually here today, so if you see my poor dumpster brother, who's staying right over here, feel free to just give him a hug, like poor kid, poor kid. Oh, my goodness. So one definition of a secret is that it's something that's not properly understood. It's a mystery. And working at Moz has allowed me to test and see things on a domain 90-something website that I never thought possible. But keeping those secrets to myself isn't going to do anyone any good, right? So that's why I'm so excited to share some of the stuff with you all today. And these are also just kind of the things that I would, in all honesty, tell industry friends of mine after a conference or over beers. This is kind of the fun stuff that moved the needle that you might not expect. So I want you to ask yourself, what secrets is your website hiding? Because if you're able to uncover some of these secrets, you can start to really move the needle like we were able to this year at Moz. Curiosity is the one essential element that you're going to need to uncover some of these secrets. You have to be asking the right questions. You have to be looking in the right corners and uncovering some of this stuff. So some of you are probably wondering, OK, how the heck did she get to Moz? Rand kind of alluded to this, but it's been a very interesting journey. So essentially, I started a digital marketing agency in 2012. We were a team of seven at our peak and did very well. But after a couple years working in the private medical space, we stopped feeling so good about marketing some of the procedures and medical practices that we were marketing. And so we collectively decided to let most of our highest paying clients go. So a really tough decision. And while we could have continued on a kind of changed course, I was so burnt out. And having met Rand a couple times at different conferences we're speaking at, he just magically picked up on this exhausted founder vibe of mine. And so he did reach out on Twitter and was just like, hey, we're hiring for an SEO. If you're at all in a position, please feel free to apply. And it took me all of, I don't know, a couple of minutes to be like, OK, yep. I would love to see where that goes too. So about a dozen interviews later and a couple of months I was at Moz. So I do not take being the SEO at Moz very lightly. I think it's a very huge honor. And I also realize that I get the privilege of working with some of the greatest people in the entire world. Our staff is out of this world brilliant and so amazing. So it's just been a true honor. But like Rand kind of alluded to, it's a little bit like being the internal tax accountant at H&R Block. It's high expectations, high pressure with that extra layer of public scrutiny. But I love to think that that just kind of makes me better at my job. And I love what I do. So without further ado, let's take a look at where Moz.com was when I started on July 11, 2016. So the first thing I needed to figure out was just what's true north for Moz. And immediately it was pretty obvious that it was Moz Pro and Moz Local Signups. At a micro level, that's the free trials and the check local listings. So everything I did was trying to increase the qualified organic traffic to these two funnels. And like many of you, I did what any SEO or any strategist would do upon a new client or a new job. You do a very in-depth site audit. And what was unique about this site audit is I decided to put it in Google Slides, which blew me away because immediately everyone at Moz started jumping in to help fix all of this low-hanging fruit that we had discovered. So that was a really, really cool thing to see. We had 175,000 index pages. And we had around 800,000 organic users a month. That is enough to fill 12 century link fields. It's insane. A month. We also had a home page domain authority and page authority of 89. And my job was to bring all of this up significantly. I was definitely sweating. It was terrifying. So we're going to go through the five secrets. And it's kind of going to be this fun journey that I'm going to take you on. Here's a really cheesy picture of Radra. I tried to get where he was reaching out his hand to take you guys on one of those journeys. So stupid. And then after we go through the five, we're going to take a look at the results one year later, the full website results. So the first secret, who's ready? First secret is that our website had 70,000 pages of crap. And not just crap, indexed crap. This is a big problem for SEOs, right? It was something that caught me off guard right away. And I thought, oh, we've got to address this first and foremost. So like I said, we had 175,000 indexed pages. 41% of those are community profile pages. And they're not the community profile pages like you wonderful people here, or Chris, who's been a legend in the field. Not you guys. These are people like Barack Obama, who leaves ridiculous comments just to increase his mouse points and makes me crazy. Oh my gosh, frack. Rude. Or it's people like this, a New Delhi modeling agency, a cover as an escort service that Mazwan's nothing to do with, right? And a lot of you technical SEOs can probably see where this is going. Profiles like this are either bot created or they're spammy. And they actually send tens of thousands of links to their profile pages in hopes of what? Passing page link to the link to their website, right? It's ridiculous. So I knew we had to do something about it. I wasn't really sure how we were going to do it. But we had decided that a good quality metric might be those mouse points, right? So we could evaluate people based off that, based off the low mouse points that weren't really contributing much at all to the website. So the hypothesis here was just that meta-no-indexing profiles under 200 mouse points would eliminate many thin spammy pages and add value to the primary pages that deserved it. So we went from over 71,000 index profile pages down to 1,490. Crazy. Big jump, right? And we immediately saw improvement. So organic users went up almost 9% the following month. And then this sweet little voice came into my head, which is a co-worker of mine, Trevor Klein. He's actually been behind the curtain this whole time, being like the glue of the conference. He's the best. But he sends me stuff like this. And he goes, yeah, well, that previous period included December. He'll always double check my stuff and go, he's right. If you're just comparing previous period, you're not accounting for those seasonal trends. And granted, these results that I'm going to show throughout the deck, they're all sample data. We all know that. They're Google Analytics. And I'm not saying that these are exact causations, but they're correlations. And this is the data that we saw. So if I compare this year over year, we saw over 13% increase in organic users the following month. Really, really crazy. Big, big takeaway here is that you have to find those low-traffic, low-converting web pages on your site. They are not doing anything for you. And it's a lot like actually pruning a plant or a bush. Not that I have a whole lot of experience with that, but it sounds like if you prune it right, the other stuff grows and gets really healthy. It's so similar for something like a website. You want to push authority to those primary pages that deserve it. I emailed Dawn about this, who's speaking later today. And she told me, because I wasn't sure how to explain this, and she goes, it's important optimization, which I thought was beautiful. You can also evaluate this by doing the site colon search and seeing what thin pages are showing up somewhat high on your site. So this is not me picking apart profiles. I'm not just a profile hater. But I looked at hometalk.com. Super interesting website. They're a DIY site that does all these projects and really cool things. But I thought, why would they not want their home decor and their cleaning and their lamp recycling front and center on some of those pages instead of cute crafty girl or whatever we saw back there? So definitely take a look at that. So I do have one regret confession to make. And actually, this comes from a good place. I am very driven to fix everything on Moz.com. And I think especially when you start a new job, you aren't aware of the barriers or roadblocks. And so you just want to fix everything. So the night after we implemented the Robot Note Index for those profile pages, I was on my computer. I was super late. And I opened up Search Console, which you know is just a bad idea. And I looked at our URL parameters. And saw that we had all sorts of URL parameters that were not configured. And so I did what any of you would probably do. I stayed up for a couple hours and I configured them all, which added up to over a million unconfigured URL parameters that were then configured. While I don't think it would have had as big of an impact as those Meta Note Index profile pages, it definitely could have helped, right? To the extent, I'm really not sure and it sucks that I would have spaced that out a little bit more. But I think the point here, especially those of you in e-commerce or with any sort of website that is using lots of filters or sorting or ordering, you have to look at Search Console. You have to configure those URL parameters. Not only does it help your crawl budget, but it also helps solve for lots of duplicate content issues and just makes your site a lot, lot stronger. So if you go to Search Console, you look at URL parameters, if you don't see anything here, you're good. You're totally good, but if you see some stuff, you want to make sure that it's configured properly. And the first part is just making sure that you set it to whether or not the content is changed, yes or no. From there, you can configure how it's crawled. And to make sure that you're doing all this properly, this video is so easy to follow. It just really walks you through the basics, which is really nice. So definitely check that. Our next secret, our CMS was very outdated. Not just outdated, it was a homegrown CMS. That did, I mean, it did great things for us while we were using it, but we definitely needed to update it. And we were updating our Learn Center. So we were doing all this reorganization, all these updates across Moz Learn Center, and we knew we had to put it somewhere where it was accessible to us and a little bit easier to use. So Rachel Goodman Moore is an amazing, amazing architect of stuff like this. And she just made it really, really strong and we knew we had to support her. And we considered all sorts of CMSs. And it really came down to Kraft. And so after Kraft was chosen, I knew that I had to really dive into the estomatic plugin. And so I knew the things that we needed to do as far as the SEO side to keep this strong and stable and supportive. But you really don't know what's gonna happen on a migration, right? It's not an exact science. You kind of gotta see where this stuff goes. So our hypothesis was that updating the CMS will provide better accessibility and could help SEO, right? You just never know with stuff like this. You can do all the evaluation in the world. So we moved all the Learn Center pages over to Kraft. And I immediately saw these three primary SEO benefits that kind of blew me away. And I knew some of these were coming, but the self-referencing rel canonical tag was there, which Google, I think just a week or two ago said that they definitely prefer that, right? So that was a good first one. JSON-LD schema was just baked into the CMS, which was great. And it had much better crawlability. So the result was that it was definitely more accessible to our staff. It was a lot easier to use. And it helped our SEO tremendously. Like to a point, or to be totally honest, I'm still investigating this. And if any of you can bring some clarity to me, please let me know, because this was shocking. Learn Center pages went through the roof organically. I mean, crazy and perfectly coinciding with that date that we launched it. We saw a 203% increase in organic page views versus the previous period. And just for Trevor, we're gonna take a look at the 170% increase in organic page views year over year, right? That's huge, really, really impactful. I think the huge takeaway here is that you have to evaluate your CMS. You have to test this stuff. And I really like how we did it at Moz where we just took a folder, right? You don't have to move the whole site if you have a huge site. It's brilliant to test something like this on a folder path and just see what it does and see what it provides you with. Secret number four. We were not nurturing our readers like we should have been. This was a really interesting discovery and something I think that says a lot as far as you're more than an SEO, you're more than a marketer, you're more than a copywriter. We should all be evaluating these websites as the user and providing value in any way that we can. So I was doing some research for a keyword research article I was writing for the blog and I started reading Russ Jones's article here on keyword research. And I thought this is perfect. It's gonna be the gateway to all the other top keyword research articles for Moz. This is great. But I got to the bottom of the article and there was one out of four suggestions had anything to do with keyword research, which was a little shocking. So I immediately went to Felicia Crawford and Trevor Klein at our blog and our developer Devon. I go, how are we pulling this stuff? What's going on? And it was pulling from the three categories that we were setting within the article. And that just kind of confused me because there's one clear primary category for that article, right? So the hypothesis here was by providing more relevant suggested articles, we're gonna increase pages per session. So instead of those three, we narrowed it down to the one and immediately the suggestions improved. So this is that same post. Now three out of the four are talking about keyword research, which is pretty cool. Pages per session went up. Almost 5% versus previous period and just a little bit over 11% year over year. Really, really cool stuff. But I think this says a lot as far as optimizing for your user's journey. What do your users want after they consume a piece of your content or after they're on a primary page of yours? What would be those next steps? I think no one does this better than Life Hacker. So I recently put together a Raspberry Pi game console and it all started at this article. And what was so cool is when I got to the bottom of the article, it had three subsequent articles that helped me really complete this whole process. I knew what game controllers I wanted. I knew that I needed Raspbian to upload the different game image components. I knew how to do all of it just from these four articles. So I think kind of optimizing for your user's journey and fulfilling that intent onto the next steps is a huge untapped market for some websites. Secret number five, this is funny. Okay, Mazers are not perfect SEOs, myself included. I chose this picture because I think a lot of hands touch a lot of websites. I bet a lot of you in here have a much larger staff that are constantly doing things on your website. Whether that's updating things, adding images, graphic design, you name it. You have to optimize for your optimization. And my whole theory behind this is teach a woman a man to fish, right? So this is a picture of my dad and the secret behind this picture is that he did not catch that fish. We were actually just canoeing and we found it struggling in these weeds and we were trying to get it to deeper water and I told him, I'm like, this is amazing. I have to take a picture. And he was like, you're so stupid. This is so embarrassing. Did not catch that fish. But it's a great picture and I think it's a funny one for this point. So you're responsible for sparking that in-house SEO curiosity. I truly believe that people understand SEO by doing it. It's a lot like programming. You can't read a book on Python and know how to program Python. You have to do it, right? You have to execute it. So I did this really fun Moz master, SEO master class and a big part of it was getting the attendees to do this SEO thing where I wanted them to either make up a word or to find a keyword or a keyword phrase that had little to no search volume and then I wanted them to create a page about it. And my example was Devin made sweaters. He's our main developer and he wears these really great old man sweaters. And so I had to play off that. That was the example. Devin actually doesn't even know that, I don't think. But gave them all full admin access because I wanted them to see everything that was available to them. I wanted them to break the site. I wanted them to play around with it. That's the point. And the results were amazing. These guys got some of the funniest things up in ranking. And the thing that I saw that made me so happy was they started asking questions they would never otherwise ask. And I got to see them and they're talking about SEO every day. I got to see these things click for them. And it was wonderful and so much fun. But I think there's a genuine understanding in doing and it was so cool to see everyone sort of latch onto that and get excited. But the big takeaway here, I love this quote from Tony Heich is learn by doing. Theory is nice, right? But nothing replaces the actual experience. I think that's really, really powerful. And that's what we have to get instilled in our staff and our coworkers so that we're not putting out fires, right? Let's optimize how we optimize. So we got time for these bonus secret slides where we aren't breaking, we weren't breaking and testing stuff. And this might get into a little trouble, especially with Dr. Pete. Okay, Rance says I'm good. All right. Okay, so we have been playing around with this feature snippet, how to choose a domain name that GoDaddy and Amy Lynn Andrews, this really cute mommy blogger have been ranking really well for. But Rand has a really good whiteboard Friday. So we have been tweaking the page and I was able to get this, which is kind of cool. So it's how to choose a domain name Moz. But what's funny is I lost it and I remember not doing a whole lot to the page and I didn't know what was going on and I looked a little closer and there was a typo in the meta description. The word choose. I couldn't believe it. I fixed it and it came back. I added the typo and we lost it. I did this over 10 times over two days, tested it from a couple different VPNs, couple different browsers, really, really interesting. And then I had this crazy epiphany, you guys. It was like, oh my God, you can uncover more featured snippet secrets by trying to lose them. Genius, right? Moz is like, oh shit, what is she doing? But like, because then you get to see what tipped it to the point of losing it. It's so hard to get some of these featured snippets because you're changing all sorts of markup, you're making it into a table, you're, you know, fun secret about this. This is John Doherty's dog, Butterbean, who's adorable and I get to watch him sometimes. So I tried it again on another page and this is where, Dr. Pete, I am so sorry because watching his talk yesterday, he was so proud of that featured snippet title, or the title tag featured snippet, which I actually tried to lose at one point because I added this typo. I knew I felt so bad during his talk, I was like, oh God. So I added that typo, which actually our incredible editors caught. That was very impressive. But no dice, didn't work. And then I think I kind of woke up from my foggy SEO dream and was like, that's probably not a good featured snippet for you to lose, Britt, like go find something else. So I left that alone and I found this, by Twitter followers, which another secret is that we have old content on our blog and we're well aware of it and we're not telling anyone to buy Twitter followers, but I thought this would be a good one to experiment with. So I added the typos, I added two typos here, nothing. I changed the H2 to H3 for the heading that was kind of being pulled here. Nope. And then I removed to sum up and I was gone. And I thought that was super interesting. And then I just wanted to fix the typo in the meta description, because my whole thing is, we know as SEOs that meta description isn't supposed to have an impact on ranking, right? It has an impact on click-through rates that tangentially has an impact on ranking. But it came back. Yes, so crazy. And then I added the typo back, gone. Fixed it, it was back, so crazy. I got so excited, kept doing this multiple different times. I had people all over Moz testing this for me. Really, really interesting stuff, but I think you have to always be testing. You have to always be curious and kind of pushing the envelope and seeing what's working and what's not. So to recap here, those five Moz secrets that you can all kind of take away and apply to your website or your clients is that we have a lot of crappy pages on our site, a lot of dead weight that we were able to prune. Number two, we had those unconfigured URL parameters, which is also just sort of dead weight, dead crawl weight for your website. Outdated CMS, not optimizing for that user journey, and we're not perfect SEOs. And then obviously go ahead and break stuff. All right, so what are the results a year later? Like how did all of this do overall? So we went from 175,000 to 84,700 index pages, so we really tried to trim that down. We increased organic users by over 100,000 a month. That is adding on another 1.4 of those century link fields to the first 12, right, which was pretty cool. We got domain authority from 89 to 92, and a homepage page authority from 89 to 91, which is pretty exciting to see. 30% year-over-year organic page view gains, which is awesome. And 12% year-over-year organic user gains. SEMrush says that we increased keyword reach by 51%. And to be totally honest, this is so clearly a reflection of the entire Moz staff. I am honored just to be a catalyst for these cool case studies, so it totally takes a village. Each and every person at Moz helped get all of these results up and to the right for us, and I could not have done it without any of them. But my question to you is, what secrets will you uncover? What questions will you go back to the office and ask? What things can you be looking at, or testing, or experimenting? Because I think it can uncover some really incredible insights for you. Thank you guys so much. Thank you.