About Maria Cecilia Carpena Lo

Maria Cecilia Carpena Lo is a Lead Content Specialist at WebFX, where she covers everything from hard technical SEO to the broader shifts reshaping digital marketing. She joined WebFX in 2022, but she brings nearly two decades of experience in B2B and B2C publishing, marketing, and PR to the role, which means she’s lived through the transition from print to digital publishing, watched SEO emerge as its own discipline, and adapted through the rise of online video and now short-form, vertical video. Her byline runs across both WebFX and SEO.com.

Maria holds a B.S. in Development Communication, majoring in Science Communication, along with certifications in Google Analytics, HubSpot Inbound Marketing, HubSpot Content Marketing, and PR. That science communication background shows up in how she writes: dense technical topics get broken into clear, structured explanations without losing accuracy. Her industry experience spans B2B, automotive, lifestyle brands, and engineering.

Maria has become one of SEO.com’s clearest voices on the technical side of search. She’s written the site’s breakdown of Core Web Vitals, walking through Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift, along with the shift to Interaction to Next Paint as the newer interactivity metric, and the specific thresholds Google considers good, needs improvement, or poor for each one. She’s also mapped out everything that actually makes up a website’s SEO score, from content structure and indexability to mobile friendliness, structured data, site security, and page speed, giving business owners a concrete framework instead of a vague "improve your SEO" directive.

Maria treats web accessibility as a core piece of technical SEO rather than an afterthought. She’s broken down the WCAG framework’s four principles (Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust) and laid out nine concrete best practices, from alt text and audio transcripts to color contrast ratios and keyboard navigation. She’s also one of the few writers on the team to connect accessibility to the actual legal landscape businesses operate in, referencing the Americans with Disabilities Act in the U.S., Europe’s Accessibility Act, and the UK’s Equality Act, all of which now touch website accessibility directly.

Maria has also written the definitive guide on organic click-through rate for the site, breaking down the formula, why a high CTR signals relevance to search engines, and the concrete levers businesses can pull to improve it: sharper title tags built around real search intent, meta descriptions that earn a click without giving everything away, clean and keyword-rich URLs, schema markup for richer search results, and structuring content to compete for a featured snippet.

Maria has also written SEO.com’s guide to SEO for professional services firms, tackling the specific roadblocks consultants and firms run into: limited time, limited budget, limited in-house expertise, and a search landscape where AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini now compete for the same attention as traditional rankings. She connects this directly to E-E-A-T, including Google’s own guidance that certain "Your Money or Your Life" topics, the kind common in professional services like financial or legal advice, get extra scrutiny for accuracy and expertise, making it especially important for firms to get those pages right.

Outside of work, Maria created a TikTok account for her dogs just to understand how the platform actually works, which tracks, given how much of her professional life has been spent learning new platforms before everyone else catches on. When she’s not writing, she’s usually running, swimming, or, by her own admission, still trying to love burpee broad jumps and wall balls.