KEY TAKEAWAY

Fili Wiese Ex-Googler @filiber

I heard a lot of talk about links and link building. But also about measuring success and content.

Bread and butter content feeds long term conversions

Outreach news

Ex-Googler’s Top Tips

Data News in briefDara Fitzgerarald of Fresh Egg highlighted that Google Analytics creates incomplete data because it is currently based on sessions and can be visited from multiple browsers and devices. Dara uses the term “session silos” and says that by using universal analytics, multi-channel funnels and attribution modeling, users can make better business decisions.

Ali White, T W White & Sons described how data from phone calls can change a search marketing strategy, giving the full picture of both on-site and off-site conversions, which also highlights areas that are not currently targeted or appear not be performing on-site. He also stressed the importance of focusing on “conversion through to sales”.

Nikki Rae of Future Insight said it’s important to check that Google Analytics cookies are working correctly and that issues may arise such as pages not being tracked or incorrect mediums being displayed in the traffic sources. “To check the cookies use Google Analytics debugger. To track subdomains or multiple domains use _setdomainname as well as _setallowlinker,” she said.

Anna Lewis of Koozai said that Google Analytics contains many tools that can analyse data and help you make informed decisions. “Continually test your website to improve conversions and usability. Consider metrics such as what operating system, type of browser or screen resolution is being used,” she said.

SEO in large organisations Nick Rinylo of Creare described how combining an effective strategy, a dedicated team, intelligent systems and effective delivery can generate retention and scalability: “Choosing the right people is paramount. Close ties with local universities and education means they can recruit the people they need and influence the curriculum,” he said.

Dan Patmore of Argos described that getting buy-in from stakeholders for a piece of activity is easier if your competitors are doing the same thing. Dan also described that “quick wins” are difficult to achieve at Argos due to their long development schedule; making friends with other departments is critical and allows you to influence people and get things done by ‘piggy backing’ on other developments.

Berian Reed of Autotrader explained how companies can automate SEO on large websites in order to improve efficiency and reduce costs. Automatic link building, via software such as Tynt, can show where your content has been copied and pasted from and can provide links. “Automate what keeps you up at night – you can use Analytics alerts to see key trends day on day, week on week, month on month,” he said.

Stop chasing Google, start chasing the customer, says SEO expertSEOs need to stop “chasing Google” and start “chasing the customer” in order to sustain traffic and conversions in the long term. Making the internet more navigational for the consumer, by solving user queries effectively, should be the main aim of search marketing, according to Ade Lewis of Teapot Creative.

Problem solving Following the Google Penguin update, optimising a site with the sole aim of improving SERPs is no longer a viable strategy; firms should now focus on delivering high quality content that helps consumers to more effectively solve problems: “Good Google rankings shouldn’t be the overall aim of SEO, but an outcome of good business practises which maximises the overall consumer experience,” said Lewis. “SEO is therefore no longer about optimising a website for SERP, and more about optimizing a business so it deserves to sit at the top of these rankings. “SEO now needs to begin making positive changes to people rather than computers. The

starting point is the consumer, not driving ranking positions,” added Lewis.

Quality over quantity To allow this to happen, firms need to improve the quality and relevance of their content while aligning SEO strategy with other marketing output. Content, according to Pete Wailes of SEOgadget, should be carefully planned and executed to best satisfy consumer demands:

“SEOs should not be saying, let’s make an infographic or let’s write a guest post, just because that is fashionable right now. They should be asking: what is the customer’s search query? What type of content will best solve this problem?”

An integrated approach Tim Grice, of Branded 3, spoke of the need to integrate search with other marketing functions such as advertising and PR:

KEY TAKEAWAY

Sharon Flaherty Confused.com@ConfusedSharon

I think it was clear that SEO is really all about good quality content. That was my take-out.

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Dave Coplin Bing@dcoplin

For me is to stop seeing SEO in isolation but as part of a joined up approach.

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Kevin Gibbons BlueGlass@kevgibbo

It’s not SEO, PR or content marketing - it’s simply getting your brands story in front of a target audience.

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Tim Grice Branded3@Tim_Grice

I think it was that SEO needs to be genuine marketing activity, and not just some stuff you do to get rankings.

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Ade Lewis Teapot Creative @Teapot_Ade

For me it was 50/50: the shift of SEO towards proper marketing and google reinclusion requests.

“Good Google rankings should not be the overall aim of SEO”

“Focus your content and user experience on conversion goals – make it clear to reach.”~ Ralf Schwoebel, Tradebit

“We need to fully integrate SEO strategy so that its central focus is about marketing, not manipulation. This doesn’t mean SEO is dead, far from it,” he said. It is therefore no longer viable to view SEO strategy in isolation – optimising content and ranking positions must fully account for overall brand values. Ralf Schwoebel, of Tradebit, spoke of the need to create an overall brand “feeling” which is consistent across all content and marketing mediums:

“All of Red Bull’s messages are consistent with a feeling of ‘giving you wings’. You don’t need to spend millions to achieve this, just be consistent in your approach.” Mark Henshall and Stefan Hull, Propellernet also highlighted the need to use consumer insights to drive content strategy, incorporating market research findings to produce high quality content which makes the internet, and world, a better place.

Ex-Googlers on… spam and disavowed links• Google responds to most

spam reports within a week: keep them short and concise.

• All manual link penalties are reviewed personally.

• If you’re disavowing links, it may be worth disavowing the entire domain; this tool has no negative effect.

• Google uses Chrome user data and can track every click within it

Ex-Googlers on… social signals• Social media links are not

currently used for improving search rankings.

• Facebook cannot create signals because Google can’t access the required data.

• Google+ will become important in the future, start using it now and you will benefit later.

Following her talk, Lauren Pope of Brilliant Noise was quick to correct a member of the audience who simply referred to her as a “Content Marketer”. “I’m a Content Strategist,” was her firm, razor sharp rebuttal. Many speakers emphasised the need to think carefully, plan and successfully combine different types of content in order to satisfy long term business requirements. It is not enough to create content on a whim or chase viral traffic which creates quick ‘sugar rush’ wins but ultimately fails to generate a steady number of conversions. “Bread and butter content is the stuff that answers questions like who, what, where, when, why, how much, and helps users to accomplish the task they came to your website with in mind.

“Viral content is like jelly beans: it’s tasty and gives you a sugar rush, but not healthy in the long-term.”

An overall content strategy should aim to balance bread and butter content with an occasional boost of viral content. This way

SEO activity can maximise traffic, revenue and advocacy in the long term. “You’re probably going to have to veer so far away from your core product area to capture attention in the kind of volume you need to go viral that you probably won’t make many or any sales or leads. “Bread and butter content should always be geared towards generating sales, either by doing a beautiful job of telling customers about your product, or by encouraging them to use more of it. “They might not like or share it, but if you help them solve a problem, find an answer to a question and give them a really effortless, straightforward and enjoyable experience, they’ll remember it. They’ll come back again, and they’ll probably recommend you in the future too.”

Insights from Paul Madden, Manual Link Building Paul’s talk provided some really interesting insight around link building. Following Penguin, he feels that all links should be seen as posing some element of risk and should be validated by SEOs at every opportunity: “analyse the risk of every link that you place or have placed,” said Paul. The key signals of risk include: a high percentage of commercial anchors, banned words, poor link metrics, wrong cctld, links to bad places and low social and site interaction. Paul explained that if you are hit by a penalty you need to carry out a link audit, keeping a record of links you remove and disavowing those you can’t. Firms should also bear in mind that re-inclusion requests may take several attempts.

Lexi Mills, Dynamo - 7 secret weapons of successful content & outreach

Outreach news in briefGeoff White at Channel 4 shared some insights into successfully pitching ideas to journalists. Timing is crucial, particularly in the case of press releases, as one news story can easily replace another. Great content tells a story and is written for people, about people.

Hannah Smith, Distilled, described how “small content” such as guest posts can generate consistent but low-level results; acceptable until your niche becomes more competitive. “Big content” can take more than 40 hours to create and is often an expensive gamble, but can result in much greater rewards. Pitch “big content” to clients by demonstrating that the idea supports brand positioning; implement them over a longer time period to spread costs.

Link news in briefDanielle Fudge from Forward3D described that within specific niches ‘Black Hat techniques’ are still widely used within the pay day loans market. Interflora provided enough evidence that we should stay away from advertorials and avoid building unnatural link portfolios. Danielle also highlighted the importance of knowing what your competitors are doing.

Neil Walker from Quaevo Media discussed scalable post-Penguin link building. He recommended that SEOs do not ignore WMT unnatural link warnings and ensure that all unnatural links are disavowed. For reconsideration requests, SEOs should “tell the truth”, “provide examples” and remember that “Google reviewers are human”. Build links that aid local search, sponsorship, content PR and social.

Matt Roberts, Linkdex, and Kevin Gibbons, Blueglass, explained that we need to refrain from using the term SEO as search marketing has now evolved hugely. Businesses currently implement strategy across a number of separate ‘marketing silos’, but it is important to collaborate. They also said you should “plan, create, optimize, share, measure and value” when creating a content plan.

News round-upDave Coplin, Microsoft Bing highlighted the need to redefine our use of technology in order to maximise global opportunities. “Doing something the way we have always done it is no longer acceptable, we need to work to make the web, and world, a better place,” he said.

Rich Falconer, Lbi, explained that SEO friendly AJAX is good for user experience but, if used badly, poor for search; Power Mapper also usefully visualizes your website structure. SEOs should study competitors’ pages to see which keywords they’re using.

Sharon Flaherty, Confused.com, discussed content strategy, showing how her successful creative campaign drove traffic, conversions and rankings. “It’s not all about SEO,” she said, “it’s also a lot about brand engagement”. Content is about “getting people to be loyal to us,” she said. Dixon Jones, Majestic SEO, emphasised the need to use data more accurately to predict future trends. By using social signals from Twitter, analysing data from Wikipedia, or harnessing information from any other widely available source, we can understand trends and more accurately create future value.

Julia Logan, Content Mango, talked about how “negative SEO” can be self-inflicted as a result of insecure plugins, incorrect redirects or duplicate content. Make negative SEO economically unviable for competitors; develop a highly reputable and trustworthy site with large levels of traffic.

Alan Ferguson, Central Bedfordshire Council, explained that by streamlining his site he was able to make his site work for customers. “Cut out unnecessary pages, optimise your content, put it in the language of customers,” he said.

Marcus Taylor, Venture Harbour says that prior to implementing a campaign you need to ask yourself why it matters: “gather feedback from users, remove any content which might give the impression of spam, provides incentives for people to share your content,” he said.

Alex Moss, 3 Door Digital, explained that socially structured data can improve click through rates, generate exposure and allow content to be tailored for each social network. Using Google+, Facebook Open Graph or Twitter Cards can help to build clicks when your content is shared.

Photo: Jackie Hole

Photo: Jackie Hole

Ex-Googler Jonas Weber raised a few eyebrows when he described how SEOs “think too dirty” in their search activity, instead opting to hire journalists and writers who generally use less manipulative techniques.

Their advice focused on creating quality content and relevant links:

1 Overall, SEO should be a long-term strategy - keep outreach and link building relevant.

2 For an in-house SEO, build up a relationship with relevant sites and exchange links; make them consistent.

3 If you are going to buy links then at least make them relevant to your site.

4 Content for search engines should be about solving a problem – description has to be followed by an explanation.

5 Your content should be relevant and useful to potential clients – cater for people rather than search results.

1 Understand what people will be talking about in the future.

2 Supply images with your content and consider design elements.

3 Topical ideas often lack longevity - scale them through niche markets.

4 Integrate social hooks - review social media to see what people are talking about.

5 Generate additional links through the creation of linkable on-site content.

6 Target your top 20 influencers - give them beta versions of your product, ask their opinion, make them feel part of the story.

7 Place no more than three relevant links in your content - include any anchor text links in the footer.

TakeawaysTakeaways

A guide to International SEO in 3 steps Aleyda Solis, SEER Interactive

1. Assess your international potential Analyse international traffic using Google Analytics. How does your visibility translate into clicks? Study the volume of searches, queries and CTR from international locations and analyse keyword trends.

2. Target your audienceTarget by language or country depending on relevance. Study behaviour – what are the keyword trends and conversion rates?

3. Develop an international site Find the right structure for your business’s characteristics. Host locally with a local IP to target relevant language or country markets. Promote within international communities through Social Crawlytics and Followerwonk.

Image creditsThanks to Jackie Hole

www.jackiehole.com