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sascon

We really enjoyed our two days up in Manchester at SAScon 2013. Unfortunately, with three tracks going on and only two of us, we couldn’t get to every talk. However, we did our best to attend as much as possible. So here are our top takeaways from our favourite talks.

Day 1

Keynote – Alistair Thornton, Marketing Director thomsonlocal.com

The big focus of this talk was on local businesses and local search.
Some quick stats:

  • £1 in every £3 spent in the UK is spent in small businesses
  • 20% of UK business revenue comes from SMEs
  • 20% of desktop search and 40% of mobile search has local intent
  • In total, 61% of local searches result in a purchase

As such it’s more important than ever for small businesses to optimise themselves for search. However, it can be hard to balance the volume of leads they need to generate in order for it to be worthwhile with the costs of doing so.

To provide anything of real benefit to local businesses, you can’t use organic, paid, or local search alone. In isolation they don’t drive enough search volume at a low enough cost. Self-service isn’t a good option either, as it requires too much time and effort for the business owner, which they won’t get back in terms of leads or revenue.

The best option for local businesses is a solution which is as automated as possible and which will deliver multiple benefits. It needs to combine local, organic and paid results and deliver the maximum amount of benefits at the lowest possible cost per lead.

Small business owners are more interested in leads and conversions than they are in search rankings, so that’s what your focus should be. It can be best to find areas where they have already made some investment and build on it, rather than start from scratch – it’ll help lower overall costs which is essential.

The bottom line is to drive as much traffic as possible for the lowest possible cost. Small businesses can’t afford to spend too much time or money on search, but clever strategies can help to drive lots of traffic, improve conversions, and generate revenue. There is a huge market for local search, you just have to tap into it effectively.

We’ve had a great couple of days at SMX London – here’s what we learnt from the Paid Search track from day 1 and the SMX Advanced track from day 2!

Day 1 – Paid Search Track

Amazing Paid Search Tactics & Tools

Ann Stanley, Co-Founder and MD of Anicca Digital (@annstanley)

Ecommerce advertising has changed quite a bit recently: Google Shopping transitioned from free to paid last month in the UK, and Google have just announced that they’re getting rid of product extensions. That means having product listing ads is more important for ecommerce.

Having a PLA ad group set for ‘all products’ with a really low bid has got them good results – it can be a good way to turn up in searches no one else is appearing on.

There doesn’t seem to be a true quality score for PLAs, but CTR is a factor to whether they get seen or not. Improve CTR with negative keywords. Also check your feed – you may be using low quality information.

SEOptimise attended this year’s SMX London, and came away with a number of amazing tips and takeaways. I have provided a list of all the takeaways that I took from the SEO, Search and Social Track.

Day 1 – From Authorship To Authority: Why Claiming Your Identity Matters

The first session on the SEO track saw Chelsea Blacker, Grant Simmons, Jim Boykin and Google’s Maile Ohye talk about Authorship and how to enhance your authority in an industry. The main draw to the session was as you would expect Maile Ohye, with the hope she would give away some inside information. Unfortunately this didn’t happen, but she did confirm that a lot of what the speakers had discussed was correct. I managed to take a lot away from this session, but here are a few of the key points.

Two days, three tracks, over 50 speakers. IonSearch 2013 certainly didn’t lack in ambition, nor in potential for some insightful search marketing conversation and thought.

And it did not disappoint; we thoroughly enjoyed our in time in Leeds, and came away with plenty of takeaways. With so many talks (over 40 different talks/panels), we sadly couldn’t see everything there, but we’ve put together some of the key takeaways from our favourite sessions of the conference.

We are live from Brighton, and we’re really looking forward to hearing the insights and thoughts of all the speakers (all 19 of them!) Doors opened at 9:00am and the first speaker is scheduled to speak at 10:00 am. Stay tuned.

We don’t have fancy auto-refreshes so you’ll need to refresh your browser to see the updates :-)

10:01 am: The first speaker is on stage, Dave Trott – Executive Creative Director at CSTTG will be talking about “Predatory Thinking”. Sounds intriguing. Must be similar to “Guerilla Marketing”. Dave’s using an analogy of pure maths and applied math with pure creativity and applied creativity.

Image of Brighton SEO from http://www.brightonseo.com/

SEOptimise is really pleased to announce that we’re sponsoring brightonSEO this year. Since we started in 2007 we have really enjoyed being part of the SEO community, and this sponsorship opportunity gives us a chance to give something small back in helping Kelvin keep the conference free.

As one of the main events in the UK SEO calendar, and now running twice a year, brightonSEO really is a must-attend event, which always delivers on both content and fun. The tickets for this years event went in an hour and considering that the number of tickets has nearly doubled, it’s even more impressive.

From this year’s event I wanted to highlight some of the things that I’m looking forward to (Kelvin did prompt me a little, but it’s been good looking through what’s happening):

Schema & Authorship: 1 Year Layer

  • Hresume in microformats http://t.co/SnqqVgph or schema job posting http://t.co/2yaFTRTf for positions, interesting!
  • Visit http://t.co/dxbvN0kT to find out when the next Google webmaster tools hangout is
  • Think of rich snippets as rich summaries, it must visible on the landing page.
  • Rich snippets are supposed to be short descriptions of the content on to the page, not a spam tactic
  • Google plus pages for publishers with rel=publishers to the publishers google plus page – ideal for Brands!
  • Authorship – use accurately for authors NOT publishers
  • Recommended tools: AWR and quixapp
  • Recommended tool: seo tools for excel – quickly pull data without being a developer
  • 21% CTR without rich snippet versus 26% CTR with rich snippet in one test
  • SERP Turkey is a b testing tool with SERPs
  • Copy the schema and chuck it into the rich snippet tool by google
  • Schema and micro formats enrich our SERPs (or pollute?)

Yesterday at SMX London was full of information and handy tips on Paid Search and Analytics. There were four sessions:

Here’s our write-up of them.

The second day of SMX started with a panelist discussion on social shares, and top tips on how marketers are truly going to be influential.

Here are the top takeaways from the first morning session with more to follow later on today!

Social Shares | New Link Building from @LisaDMyers

  • Rel=Author one of the key factors of Link signals in years to come, mixing in the need of SEO & Social Media
  • If your not there already understand and begin to use Google +, as research has shown a direct correlation for companies having better SERPs because of using G+
  • The end game has not changed in terms of link building, in essence creativity is essential to build great links
  • Examples of short term Social SEO link building: post and publish blogs, articles, breaking news, infographics, competitions and interviews
  • Example of long term Social SEO link building: create a social community, developing a blog, writing white papers and making yourself seem a social authority
  • Understand your target market in making sure they will share your items, relevancy is key
  • Makes the most of what is happening now in the market

Making Waves Not Ripples: Effective Syndicatoin to Drive Social Sharing from @mrjamescarson

Last week I got the chance to attend the latest BlueGlass conference in LA. I’ve got to admit, when heading out to the US I had high expectations for this event having heard a lot of buzz around previous conferences they’ve held and you might have seen my interview with Chris Winfield ahead of the event. But I’d have to say, they exceeded expectations way beyond what I ever expected!

This was quite easily the best search event I have ever attended (and there’s been quite a few now!), the sessions were packed full of great content – once you’ve been to a lot of conferences you find yourself skipping quite a few sessions, but this conference was the exception – and every session was full to the back of the room! But as is normally the way, the highlight was the networking – you really could just sell tickets for “an audience with Greg Boser” show! Getting the chance to meet everyone before the event at Mike’s SEO BBQ was a great way to kick-off the conference – and the intimate feel of the event by having a limited number of 125 attendees and all staying at the amazing Standard Hotel in Downtown LA with a free bar and rooftop party is always an appreciated nice touch!

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