The Land of Moz — Q&A with Britney Muller, SEO & Content Architect

This post was originally shared by Weidert Group on April 26, 2017.

Moz became a pioneer in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) when it was founded in 2004, and since then has become one of the top inbound marketing platforms. The comprehensive suite provides more than analytics and website scoring; it can monitor your online reputation, increase visibility and rankings, and even integrate with your enterprise or agency internal systems.

Britney Muller, SEO & Content Architect for Moz, manages all of the company’s on-site SEO, discovers digital opportunities and assists with overall product strategy. She is among the keynote presenters at Experience Inbound 2017 in Wisconsin June 13–14, and will present The Future of Search — How search, machine learning, user technology and marketing landscapes will rapidly change.

We wanted to get to know Britney a little better and, of course, glean from her knowledge of SEO and the pulse of inbound marketing today—so we asked her a few questions in anticipation of her upcoming presentation.

What do you enjoy most about living in Colorado and working at Moz?

The outdoors! Colorado offers so many fun activities to do year-round, and with 300+ days of sunshine there’s never a dull moment. But if I’m honest, when I’m not out snowboarding, golfing or cross country skiing in my free time, I truly love playing around with APIs, scraping data and reverse engineering websites, so being at Moz really fuels those passions and allows me to use the left side of my brain.

Tell us about TAGFEE at Moz. What do you think is the most important aspect of a company’s culture?

For those who don’t know, TAGFEE stands for Transparent, Authentic, Generous, Fun, Empathetic and Exceptional. I love it all, but for me, the transparent and authentic characteristics are most important—having the freedom to be yourself and say what’s on your mind.

You work with a range of companies varying in size, resources and industry. How do you tailor your product for individual companies with different needs?

Our products are setup to deliver valuable take-aways for any size company, and they’ll respectively use different product features more or less than others. Our tool aims to provide value for any website, and there are different packages available depending on a company’s needs.

You also work with a lot of big names like Otterbox, Aaron’s and Obility. How can smaller, more local companies benefit from inbound marketing software?

Many businesses rely on local customers and need to rank highly in local searches. Local companies can benefit by solidifying consistent, local business listings with Moz Local. Smaller businesses, no matter their location, can gain a better understanding of their digital landscape, competitive analysis, most valuable keywords, etc. through our Moz Pro research features.

What is a leading trend in SEO that marketers should pay attention to in 2017?

These are definitely on the rise:

• SERP features (Search Engine Result Page)
• Featured Snippets (answer boxes)
• People Also Ask (Google search feature)

Marketers will want to pay particularly close attention to Featured Snippets as they currently deliver the single answer for any prospective voice search.

Speed, Machine Learning, PWAs, Intuitive Design, and Schema Markup will also play a big SEO role for the rest of 2017.

Video content has exploded in the past couple of years. Do you think vlogging will surpass blogging and written content in the near future? If so, how will marketers keep up with this trend?

Yes, video, VR, MR, and interactive content will be some of the primary ways searchers will want to receive information in the future. Marketers should experiment with different forms of content now and evaluate which perform best. Refurbishing your website’s top pages content on other platforms (SlideShare, YouTube, Quora, Pinterest, etc.) for example, and linking back to your site, is a great way to gauge the type of content that your target market prefers.

There also are so many use cases for when and where someone might be searching for something; they may be driving, walking, on a bus, shopping, etc., so it’s also not a bad idea to provide different options for consuming content—video, audio and written.

What are some free tools marketers are not utilizing enough?

Google Trends, Answer The Public, Google Suggest and Google Analytics top my list.

What kind of marketer would benefit most from your talk at Experience Inbound 2017?

Any marketer that is looking to stay on the cutting edge of SEO and increase their qualified organic website traffic needs to be there.

Having grown up in Minnesota, what are you most looking forward to when you come back to the Midwest for Experience Inbound 2017?

Midwest people! I forget how incredible Midwest people are until I’m back home and recognize all of the solid Midwest values. You don’t see that level of genuine kindness blanketed in any other part of the U.S.