On July 19, I walked into the Space Gallery in Denver … and knew immediately I was not cool enough to be in the room.

Fellow copywriter Lacy Boggs and I attended MozTalk: Content Edition knowing we were going to get insights from some of the best marketers and SEO experts around. What I didn’t know is that I should have dyed my hair pink for the occasion.

I’m only partially kidding. Marketers are pretty hip dressers with colorful fashion sense. There was a guy there with a wooden tie.

My hair is no longer rainbow colored. Nor did I sport a funky tie of any sort. I stood out like a sore thumb.

It was totally worth it. What I learned at MozTalk completely changed how I look at the content on my own site, and how I’m guiding my clients regarding the content on their sites, too.

The speakers, in order, were:

Everett Sizemore from Inflow …

Emily Grossman from Mobile Moxie …

and finally, Rand Fishkin, the Wizard of Moz …

Each presentation was so good. So good.

I had so many takeaways from that night.

When I got home, I put together a quick video brain-dump of the highlights while they were still fresh in my brain …

No time to watch a video? No worries. Here are some detailed bullet points:

1. Prune your “cruft” (your bad content). Get rid of the website content that hasn’t gotten any organic search traffic in a year, that is outdated (e.g. old even pages) and that isn’t valuable or engaging (e.g. the page or post has a high bounce rate, no comments or shares, and/or no links to it). The quick and easy way to cut the cruft without deleting the page is to change the SEO settings to Noindex.
2. Bad content actually weighs down your average and good content, causing the latter to rank lower and perform worse in search results. By getting rid of bad content from your website, it actually raises your average and good content up in the search algorithms and your website traffic will get a big boost, very quickly.
3. Think mobile first when you’re creating content. Literally. Don’t create content that looks/works great on your PC and try to make it work for mobile. Create content that looks/works great on mobile and make it work for PCs. Google is prioritizing mobile-friendly (fast-loading, easy to use) content more and more.
4. Your brand’s engagement reputation determines how much of and how often your content appears in search results — from Google to Facebook. When you publish high-quality content that engages your readers (gets them to comment, share, and link back to it, and that keeps them clicking around on your website instead of going back to Google), your engagement reputation improves and your search ranking goes up. When you publish low-quality content that no one engages with, your brand’s engagement reputation suffers and future content will rank lower — even if that future content is awesome and engaging. Your engagement reputation is hard to build, easy to hurt, and determines how your content performs within any search algorithm.
5. Email is becoming a viable content type. Google is rolling out search technology that pulls up emails in your private search results. So if people like your marketing emails enough to keep them, those could later be served up in your subscribers’ search results.