Matthew Brown Answers Key Questions About SEO and Content

This October at Converge 2015, our focus is to bring the best and brightest together to revolutionize higher education. In this series of blog posts, Content Marketing Intern, Mikayla Wilson, asks our speakers key questions. Read on to find out more about our passionate speakers and the importance of their topics.

Name: Matthew Brown

Organization: Moz

Session: The Different Worlds of SEO and Content Strategy

Date & Time: Wednesday, October 21 | 1:30-2:30PM

Summary: We’ve probably all heard the myth that SEO is just great content, whether someone is a blogger, journalist, e-commerce retailer, small site or business owner, or media mogul. Matthew’s session will dispel this notion by highlighting how SEO and content strategy can work together to achieve maximum gains, even when you need laser focus on one specific tactic.

MW: Tell us more about yourself.

MB: I’ve worked for many years as an SEO and audience development strategist for the publishing world. I worked in-house as director of search for the New York Times Company from 2005-2010. My particular background in SEO and content has been untangling particularly large websites (such as NYTimes.com) so the search engines can accurately crawl and index content. Summed up: if you clicked on a Google result during my time there and ended up on a page you weren’t looking for, it was my fault.

MW: What is new and next in SEO and content?

MB: Search is rapidly becoming more contextual, and not just in Google web search. Facebook, Apple, Amazon…I expect all of these networks to employ smarter search algorithms to deliver personalized, localized and contextualized results that hone in on where you are, what device you’re searching on, and other personalized information that’s relevant to your search query. And by query, that could mean a tap, click, or voice command. You can see what Google is shooting for here by looking at the latest in Google Now for Android. That’s a preview of what might be a ‘smarter’ search result in the near future.

MW: What challenges have you seen in higher education in SEO and content?

MB: I’ve seen a lot of technical SEO challenges due to legacy content management systems and frameworks that are tough to modify on the fly. This can lead to a handful of SEO troubles, such as messy URLs, malformed HTML tags, the inability to add newly relevant tags like Open Graph and Schema.org, and in general, the inability to keep up with technical SEO best practices. To be fair, I see a lot of major media sites that suffer from the same legacy issues, so I have frequently felt this pain.

MW: What are you most excited about for Converge 2015?

MB: I absolutely love talking to folks in other verticals about their search challenges, so I can’t wait for the conversations at Converge 2015! Also, I haven’t been to New Orleans in many years, which is a terrible oversight I’m looking forward to correcting.

MW: Attend Converge 2015 to hear Matthew and many other great speakers. We hope to see you there!