1. You can eat anything at Pike Place.

Turns out there is only one direct flight from DCA to SEA on a Sunday. And Katie was on it. She arrived in Seattle at 10am and had nothing to do.

After a bit of googling, she booked an afternoon tour of Pike Place with Savor Seattle. Two or three bites at seven different restaurants equals an afternoon well spent.

Turns out Pike Place has more than men throwing fish. It also has amazing fresh donuts, Filipino sausage that melts on your tongue, and clam chowder that lives up to a Boston girl’s standards. The highlight? The best Greek yogurt in the world at Ellenos. Once you taste their yogurt, you’ll never look at Chobani or Fage the same way again.

2. Claw machines are making a comeback.

Apparently.

Because hundreds of adults lined up each day for a chance to win a plushy Roger the Robot. (Moz’s mascot.)
As you can see from this photo, Josh was successful. Katie, less so.

3. Storytelling is backed by science.

Storytelling has been the big marketing buzzword for years. We can’t tell you how often we’ve had a client come to us and say, “I want to tell a story on my website.”

There is a reason it’s a buzzword. Because it works. When you start telling a story, you grab people’s attention. They want to know how it’s going to end. They can relate to you. Turns out there is actual science behind this. In a great session from Kindra Hall, she explained that stories change our brain chemistry to increase focus and empathy.

4. People aren’t converting on mobile.

You’re probably sick of hearing about mobile-first design and optimizing for mobile. But there is still room to improve. In a great session from Talia Wolf, we learned that there is still a big gap in conversion rates between desktop and mobile.

Why is that?
Lots of reasons.

Here’s one reason that stuck with us: load time.
Yup. We know that digital users are impatient, and this is no different for mobile users. Just a one second delay in load time can result in a 7% loss in conversion.

5. This is true for mobile emails, too.

Which means your calls to action need to be big. For emails, text links don’t cut it. You need to have buttons.

Justine Jordan gave us this handy guide:

6.Why aren’t you investing in video?

Check out this video.

You want to go to that camp, don’t you? We did the moment we saw this video.

Steve and Kate’s Camp is probably still trying to figure out why they had a dramatic spike in traffic in early September from Seattle. It’s because Kristen Craft showed us this video during her session. And, immediately, several hundred adults tried to figure out how they could attend.

Video seems overwhelming, but it’s actually easy to create something great. iPhone cameras are getting better and better. There are many free or cheap apps you can use to edit videos on your phone. And there are of course there are business focused solutions with powerful analytics like Wistia.

7. Only developers like Drupal?

Here at the Brick Factory, we build sites in either WordPress or Drupal.

If we’re going to be honest, we like Drupal better. It’s powerful! You can do more with it! It’s great for organizing really big sites! So we were shocked that the overwhelming consensus was that people prefer WordPress. When we pressed them on it, it sounds like the only reason people preferred WordPress was because the admin was easier to use out-of-the-box.

It’s true that to make the Drupal admin intuitive for administrators, it takes a little extra time to set up. However, we showed off some of our back-end solutions to other MozCon attendees and we’re pretty sure they’ll be rethinking their preferences.

8. Seattle is progressive!

We thought this was pretty cool:

Thanks to MozCon for creating an environment where anybody can feel comfortable.

We think this really speaks to the overall accepting and progressive Seattle culture.

9. Digital marketers are tanks!

After day one, there was a sponsored bar crawl in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. There were six bars and at each bar one drink was on MozCon.

Rumor has it many, many people completed the crawl. (Josh and Katie did not.) But nearly all the seats were filled for the first session, at nine AM, the next day.

We tip our hat to you, fellow marketers.

10. There’s amazing innovations happening in search every day!

The way people search online is changing, and digital marketers are changing with them.  We were amazed (and overwhelmed!) to learn some of the new and innovate ways marketers are taking advantage of these changes and creating new tools and techniques to keep up with the latest trends.

From Rob Bucci’s research on Google’s Featured Snippets to Mike Arnesen’s advanced Google Tag Manager tips, we learned there’s a lot more to search than meets the eye and you need to innovate if you’re going to meet the challenge.