SearchLove London 2014 Roundup

Stuart Shaw 9 years ago

After featuring as part of the speaker line up at SearchLove San Diego in September the Zazzle team was back again at the London event as spectator to capture the biggest and best tips in the digital marketing world to share with the wider industry.

Below is our Searchlove London 2014 round-up - featuring the best takeaways from this year's event. Scroll down now for the best cutting edge tips and tactics, direct from the event...

Hannah Smith: Existential Crisis Management

- Respond to customers to engage with them, not by using condescending language but answer their questions, whether that be in Twitter/Vine etc.
- Oreo created 100 pieces of content in 100 days when they turned 100 years old
- Here's not what to do...
- 45 days of planning went into a tweet about commercially selling a product, don't sell via social, help!
- 68% of people share content via social media because they think it defines them to their followers/audience.
- Meaningful brands produce commercials which don't feel like commercials.
- Standing for something beyond your products and service is most potent.
- Taking a bold stance on a relevant issue, even if it could actually hurt your business, can create a lasting impression.
- Creating content that people will 'look smart' when sharing and seeing real success from this!
- 92% of consumers would not care if your brand disappeared. Scary.

Oli Gardner: The Landing Page Manifesto

- Do not design like Wikipedia. Lots of content, lots of links to useful stuff, but we're not doing that...
- Attention ratio - the number of things you could be doing to the ones you should be doing.
- Attention ratio at 130:1 on a website confuses a user.
- Attention ratio at 1:1 shows the user what to do and is the benefit of having a dedicated landing page.
- Image slider load time, 26 seconds... of blank space
- Co-branding, show the users where you've brought them from and to.
- Context is like Velcro, the more you have, the more you can hold on to.
- Clarity beats clever, almost every time.
- Usability hub is a cloud based CRM to get anonymous opinions on your landing pages.
- Questions to ask on Usability hub: what do you think this page is about? What do you expect to happen if you click on the call to action button? do you think this page looked trustworthy?
- Don't design experiences to acquire customers, design experiences to acquire your ideal customers.
- Embrace friction.
- Don't use stop words; spam, sell, 3rd party etc.
- Use go words.
- Safety net statements - taking the knowledge of what people want to use it as a positive influencer to get people to sign up!
- Silence is better than bullshit. If it's not true, don't say it. Fake testimonials are obvious.
- Video testimonials are more believable/viable - 25% uplift.
- Split testimonials up, don't group them up as you may be less concerned about the content.
- Be obvious.
- Design rules, people like to be lead where to go.
- Button colour is irrelevant, it's about the contrast of the button.
- STOP buttons, don't have a 'cancel' button on a form/submission.
- 'Download my free ebook' is better than 'Download your free ebook'
- NSAMCWADLP - Never start a marketing campaign without a dedicated landing page!

Ade Lewis: Becoming a Digital superhero

- A digital superhero is someone who loves their job, clients love them and they go home happy.
- Freelance, agency and in-house are the three variants of digital superheros.
- Freelance - happy clients = happy life
- In-house - happy boss = happy life
- Agency - happy clients = happy boss = happy life
- Understand your client!
- Know, like and trusting you from a clients perspective, makes you a digital superhero.
- Agency/freelance all revolves around capacity, the time available.
- Google+ communities used for sharing interesting content ideas into a library format.
- Get some buddies; share, challenge, help, discuss, learn, collaborate.
- Competitor content audit - bit.ly/teapot-audit
- Get successful competitors sitemap, import sitemap into urlprofiler, selecting majestic metrics and social shares - gives you valuable content ideas to steal/make better and outreach too.
- Topsy.com to see Twitter stats, including shared content from 'influential users'
- urlprofiler.com/searchlove for a free trial/set of tools.
- presspass.me gives you journalist details.
- site:twitter.com -inurl:lists -inurl:members inurl:music "music journalists" gives you lists of journalists, we don't know what's in the lists, but refine.
- SERP scraper, set delay to 'random' to export these Twitter lists.
- Twitter scraper, allows you to get twitter profiles, names, handles etc.

Annie Cushing: Are Your Google Analytics Reports Pretty Little Liars?

- TL;DR for user data - totally broke.
- User based data on GA is total BS. Doesn't report on users at all, it's clients - mobile, tablet, desktop etc.
- Users, new users, days since last session, % new sessions, count of sessions, user type (new/returning visitors) - all broken. New visits recorded on different devices, that is not a new visitor.
- Google knows these aren't visitors.
- Old GA profiles 'classic' is different to 'universal'. visitorID is now called clientID.
- bit.ly/ga-debug for debugging GA code.
- userID was meant to fix this... but there are a few caveats.
- They are; site must have a login, visitors need to actually log in, site needs to be updated to Universal, site must capture customer ID, you must set up a new view (formally called profile, no historical data and your user data will shrink!).
- Social network, dating, netflix etc - these type of sites NEED this type of profile to be set up to capture user data.
- In this view, no logged out user data will be recorded.
- Using used/customer ID data allows you to export most valuable customers on monetary spend, marry with CRM and target with unique offers!
- Good candidates for this data capture to target; customer id, logged in, author, page category (not tags), publication date, gender, age, membership level, number of help articles viewed, complaints - bit.ly/custom-examples for more!
- ecommerce metrics that can be captured; cost of goods sold, profit, margin, number of members, population, game score, awards, points, email opens (email marketing) & email sends - bit.ly/ga-custom for more!
- In campaign tracking, labels matter! Medium, source and campaign are the main three. Term and content are an additional two. Medium is the most valuable player!
- If you don't get Medium right, over 10+ profiles will be affected and become incorrect.
- Tagging internal links breaks GA - use event tracking instead!
- PayPal pro keeps users on your website, if they go off to PayPal, you lose all data and they'll use it leaving GA empty!
- Two strategies to keep data, 1) Keep them on your site. 2) Enable cross-domain tracking (cookie that allows you to set up a bridge between two websites, GA on both sites that carries data across as if the user never leaves)
- bit.ly/ga-debug - GA debugger, command opt & j - check the client Id, make sure domain is different, check for a match in the clientId

Mackenzie Fogleson: The Measurement Behind Your Integrated Marketing Strategy

- Why does an integrated approach work?
- An integrated approach is about building a better business. It's a transformation that happens from the inside out.
- An integrated approach promotes and improves the business through multiple tools and channels, but the premise is about promoting and improving.
- An integrated approach is the long game.
- Building a brand from crappy tactics just won't stick and work long term.
- Process outlined here - bit.ly/c3-mackweb
- Communicating value always starts with goals.
- Campaign > Brand > Visionary.
- Choosing the wrong KPIs or reporting on every metric can not tell the whole story.
- Ranking #1 for a keyword, having more followers aren't goals. Take them back to their business goals and reiterate the work you're doing is working and helping them become the business they want to be.
- Continually look at progress over campaign lengths.
- Don't be distracted by the 'shiny things' - make sure the opportunity aligns with goals.
- Key takeaways about integration: nothing works in isolation - all your efforts work together to accomplish goals, it's not just about what you measure - it's the story you tell, contrast breeds clarity - continually test and modify the KPIs you use to prove your value.

Wil Reynolds: Marketing in Your Sleep: How to Build Links, Engagement, Mentions, and Shares with Big Content

- Content marketers have become the 'new slaves', as Kanye would say, to the content calendar.
- Comcast, 115,000 employees - 12 shares, shocking.
- Can I Stream It? Website to show you where you can stream your favourite shows.
- Death to the content calendar... doesn't allow you to produce real-time content.
- 1 man band - Scott Edwards, works at Simple. Asks what an audience wants to see and displays it in simple charts and graphs.
- Links aren't the win, letting things go and letting out your secrets is the WIN.
- Creating long-term, sustainable content is a beautiful thing. Investment up front, then huge rewards.
- Big content is a barrier to entry. It stops competitors from gaining your traffic, it drives a wedge between you and your competitors.
- Important question: If your content was removed from the web, would anyone miss it?
- Failed #RCS: people looking for content in regards to layovers, lets create it!
- It started to rank, your job is not over when something ranks...
- The content was to work out what you could do in the time you had available at a layover in an airport, but it wasn't working...
- Do I have a good data set? Is this a problem worth solving? Occasional use? Daily use? is this better than what exists currently for these queries? Did I overdesign the solution?
- Usertesting.com - user reviews on your mobile journey...
- Inspectlet.com - strips out the confusion of GA and is a user friendly version
- Create a 20% oops budget for testing and fixing content
- Hesitation report in inspectlet, if there's hesitation, there's confusion and you need to fix it.
- Do you want more links, or do you want more money? Real question to ask!
- Nofollow links, are you worried if you're getting conversions from content? I hope not!
- If an ecommerce site doesn't offer coupons, search for 'brand + coupons' then feedback to client/brand
- Ads in Gmail - you can target email subject lines with ads. Bank statements/subscriptions etc! Welcome to MailChimp etc... lots to target!! You can target competitors subscribers, cancelled subscriptions of competitors in Gmail.
- You can target paid search ads for people wanting to cancel services and searching for that information in Google.
- 'Cancel + brand/competitor' in Google, capitalise with ads on related websites presented in SERPs - 48 hour window to acquire new customers.
- Target pages in Google Display Network (GDN). Don't use competitor name in ads and you're OK. Target pages ranking well about 'Cancel + brand/competitor' and in GDN.

David Sottimano: Data Driven SEO

- Can a post rank by having a keyword in the URL? Yes.
- What does meta NOINDEX do? Removes a page from the index. Can lower Googlebot crawl rate too...
- Are meta keywords actually useful? No.
- Knew what a good link looked like... then a link from Reuters was mentioned as a 'bad link' in a reconsideration request from Google.
- "Best practice" isn't a good enough answer to people who don't understand SEO fully.
- More input = more output
- But sometimes, more input = less valuable output
- Most times, simple is best
- When testing new methodologies, ask for feedback.
- Historical search results in SERPs displayed on Semrush. Check historical implementations of technical strategies, such as canonical/href lang etc.
- Machine learning, fed garbage in and got garbage out.
- Get better at defining "great content".
- "Build a better practice by binning best practice"
- Prove it! Data or it didn't happen.

David Mihm: Bulletproofing Your Local Search Presence for 2015 and Beyond

- What does Google local mean to Google? Predominantly mobile search queries.
- One of every two mobile Google searches have local intent.
- 25% of people look up local details daily.
- Local searchers have a huge purchase intent. 3 out of 4 local searches done on an iPhone/iPad device purchase a product.
- Therefore, Google local = $$. Google is investing in this as a direct result.
- Google's vision of local search; any mobile device is the starting point because they're using location services/local searches.
- Query could prompt you of local services/amenities as it'll know you have 30 minutes to kill and then you could pay for that by using your device.
- Google local was at the start of the development for Knowledge Graph.
- Sentiment; food, service, dining, ingredients, restaurants etc.
- Text snippets of reviews into SERPs from Yell and blogs, diverse range of what you can integrate.
- Google are serving prompt search results, so would we be ready for a world without ranking reports etc.
- Optimise local directories/websites to ensure Google knows about your business, where it is, what if offers, when it's open etc...
- Pigeon was released in the US and it is an extension of Hummingbird.
- Google+ was a way to incorporate its unified login; across multiple devices to deliver personalised results - spam prevention!
- Google "My Business" has a few new features and new and improved UI.
- Two years ago, Google had 50% of Europe covered in regards to local information, now it has nearly 100% of Europe covered thanks to Maps, Street view etc.
- Pigeon; 7-pack density will reduce from 64.2% in the UK to 25% in what the US sees now.
- Google no longer offers custom categories for local businesses.
- Google now has humans writing snippets for local search results.
- Real estate industry has lost a lot of local search results, will be more organic driven in the UK.
- Google is using knowledge graph better to identify the relation between brands and location.
- Proximity of search result to searcher has dramatically increased since Pigeon.
- The radius of local results has become a lot smaller than previously. Google is able to locate where the specific search has taken place.
- National directories are performing better as a result of Pigeon.
- Pigeon is an extension of hummingbird and has turned up the pace on directories and authoritative sources.
- Internal links from big website to local stores has had a big impact, more so than lots of external links.
- Site architecture: crawlable, traditional directory. Homepage link to all stores and each store should have its own page.
- Enterprise cars in the UK are doing this very well.
- Google needs to see your business information from multiple sources from across the web.
- Get reviews on Google+
- Search for your 'website/niche + reviews' and see where Google is getting reviews from, then get reviews for your business on there.
- One of the most under utilised factors is imagery on Google My Business. Submit great images.
- Barnacle (attach to) onto brands. Optimise your specific listing on major directories that are outranking you and get presence.
- Send links to all of your local directories.

Will Critchlow: The Threat of Mobile

- TBA

Phil Nottingham: Building a Brand With Online Video

Phil Nottingham from Distilled speaks about how to build up your brand presence using video marketing using YouTube, Here are some key takeaways from his deck which can be found here:

- Ad Revenue growth 1996-2014
- Used to think impressions were actually “making an impression” However it’s just when the page return a normal http 200 code, so impressions are measured on successful page loads, which doesn’t really provide benefit for the Brand.
- Online Video ad revenue will increase 20% next year, which is faster than any medium other than mobile. By 2018, mobile video will account for 69% of mobile traffic data.
- The top 10 ad agencies make 71% of the money
- Aim for a consistent style that leaves a lasting impression. For example Moz’s Video Branding – Doesn’t even need the logo, and you know it’s a moz video from the thumbnail & video branding colours.
- You may of seen the Mother’s Day Campaign – Interview for Worlds Hardest Job 13.8 million views in 5 days – However the branding was lacking from this video.
- There are 4 key things to keep in mind when video marketing: Style, Content, Distribution and Measurement
- STYLE – Memorable and recognisable along with the 4 P’s.

  • Performers – Voice overs, actors, someone close to the product/company People like brands that have character.
  • Perspective (first person, second person, third person)
  • Palate ( Audio Motive – for example intel’s jingle. Also Colour – In the movie Drive, throughout the movie the main colours are orange and blue)
  • Personality – Mirror the language your audience uses.

- CONTENT – Different and resonant.
- Play – Have Fun –Good example of this is “Wista”. The Reason they have content so good video content, is because they have so many bad, which allowed them to develop and explore different things.
- You need freedom in the creative process to explore opportunities and to experiment
- Having any type of video builds brand, for reach and exposure get on YouTube(the second large search engine) However, what works on TV may not work on YouTube.
- Content needs to be shareable to gain traction, it’s not all about great production. It’s about telling a great story. A brand called steak sauce did this brilliantly (find video) it tells a great story which has let to high shares and engagement.
- Customer insight – Google Trends, Tubular
- Competitor insight - Unruly
- The main thing to get from this research is your product truth – what people are thinking about your product or business.
- Google Trends finds the opportunities for trending content ideas. Tubeola is a great insight into what’s doing well on YouTube.
- Unruly Analytics - Which is basically Searchmetrics for YouTube to see how people are engaging with your and competitors video content.
- Survey Monkey is also good for the product truth.
- DISTRUBTION – reach the right people and get them to watch, some tools to help:
- Paid distribution is not an alternative for organic potential. You can play a guitar without an amplifier but you can’t play an amplifier without a guitar.
- We share to communicate our identity - Strong emotions triumph
- Share rank, do all the research and see if you ad is sharable touches your emotions – It is quite expensive, but Ideal for big marketing campaigns to find out if content will perform as expected.
- Link build from existing videos related to yours to look create a prospecting list to content. The Likelihood is, if they have shared the video related to yours, they will more than likely share yours too. Put the video URL through majestic to find potential websites.
- Unruly Activate. – Paid video network on bloggers sites, you pay per action.
- Finally you can use Tubular to target specific channels and videos to see how well they have performed.
- MESAUREMENT - report the right metrics to prove success.
-  Measure active engagement, not impressions.
- Engaged Views – (views x average percentage viewed x percent of viewers in target demographic)

Justin Cutroni: Mobile Analytics: Straight Talk On Measuring Your Mobile Efforts

Justin Cutroni from Google kick off his talk about measuring your mobile efforts, he talks about tracking your apps performance through analytics. Here are the main takeaways from his deck.

- What is Mobile Analytics? The Mobile Web & Apps - Google splits mobile web and apps across their platforms.
- Process to follow: Strategy – KPI –KPI – KPI – Sections
- JavaScript and cookies, is how they understand marketing through mobile search & desktops. However it is different with apps (read on further for more info on this)
- Measuring behaviour with apps is hard, the main two players are the Google Play & Apple App Store. Which obviously allow installs, reviews, and videos.
- People used to make apps and sell them on for profit, however this is changing as the ad's earn more money and there are multiple ways to advertise.
- An example is the app - Garden Minder, which helped grab new consumers with an app to manage your garden (plan garden layout, reminders to water plants, when to plant etc.) Once you register with an email, you get $10 off purchase. Great marketing example to help people benefit from it.
- In-app purchases – PicsArt. Photo editing community. – Monatised by having standard ads, however they soon realised they were building software, which users could benefit from, the hard-core users could buy these added features within in-app purchases and now, 20% of their revenue comes from it.
- Another example: Clash of Clans – All revenue comes from in-app purchases, to speed up process of the game using "gems". Some people spending $2000 a month. Last year they made $892,000,00 all from an app.
- No Cookies in Apps is Good, instead users have a unique identifier, much more reliable compared to cookies.
- You can use Google's tag manager on your apps, which works more effectively than going into the applications code you can also track events in apps using this method.
- Apps holds information on a database, then transfers data to analytics. This is called Dispatching.
- How to get people to install the app is the hardest thing to measure. Driving them to stores, cant track the data very well. People get around this for using custom URL’s. Currently can’t do landing page optimisation, but hopefully in the future this will change.
- Unique identifier gives information to analytics about their users, how often they play, what they do while on the app. You can use this information to change a casual user to a hard-core user like on Clash of Clans. You can do this by remarketing on other Apps. Device messaging from the app, could choose more traditional methods like email to get users back into your app.
- Free online course coming soon about app tracking here: analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com

Molly Flatt: Putting the X Into Content

Molly Flatt from 1000Heads speaks about putting the X into content, with some insightful information o what it takes to be successful on content marketing. See the main takeaways from her presentation below.

- “Content is the wealth of Nature”

- 70% of brands say their top 2014 investment will be Content Marketing.
- Read the content marketing bible for inspiration, but Molly goes on to say the oldest content marketing bible is the actual BIBLE.
- Red Bull – Started from selling energy drinks, are now a big content empire.
- Coca Cola – Content 2020
- Nike – turning running into religion - compare and compete running times.
- Porter Magazine. Fashion by Retailer. Launched in 60 countries, costs 5 pounds. Big Success.
- The Furrow Magazine “John Dee’s Tractor Porn” 1.5 million subscribers.
- Discontent Marketing- We are becoming content addicts. Marketers are content pushers.
- A lot of content without "content" - hollow, meaningless content to attempt to gain links and shares.  This is a depressing way to think about social media.
- Social media is not a “marketing tool” It was made for individuals to connect. Don’t confuse contenting marketing with social media.
- Focus on Context (emphasis on the X) Marketing. It’s what you do with the content that matters. Here are 8 things to consider when creating content.

  1. This is about relationships not stuff (help people)
  2. Content is less important than the social action it performs.
  3. Know what your audience needs, here and now.
  4. Don’t just make it informative, make it useful.
  5. User’s content matters more than yours.
  6. Silence can be the most powerful voice
  7. Focus on emotion and the content will follow.
  8. Make your content into an experience.

Jono Alderson: Turbocharging your WordPress Website

Jono Alderson from Linkdex states at the start of his talk he is going to make you care about technical SEO. He provides some excellent code, tips and tools to maximise your WordPress websites performance for user experience and search engines. See the main takeways below.

- Jono receives great traffic from no links built, no outreach, no comment spam, guest posting or content spun. No Infographics and no budget. But HOW?
- When we starting talking about content marketing, we stopped talking about technical optimisation. On-page is not the same as technical.
- We should Care because Google Cares. Pagespeed is a ranking factor, deleys under half a second can affect business metrics.
- Visualising Performance (ditch the crappy metaphors) such as the overused leaky bucket.
- Use Tools to testt- such as Google PageSpeed Insights, ySlow. Google Analytics. Pingdom and Webpage Test.
- Schema.org. Google, Bing and Yahoo all use this mark-up for structured data, you should comply with it.
- We have all seen the impact of technical faults, such as missing redirects and broken pages etc.
- How does the website feel? Loading Experience, User Experience,  Bandwidth and Overhead optimisation. Don't forget to Minimise the risk of hacking (DDOS)
- But wait, this really isn’t SEO? Well it is.
- Why not SEO Yoast? It stops people thinking, it optimises okay, but could do better yourself. 20% better.
- Hosting – Learn yourself, c-pannel, databases, WordPress.
- Great plugins / third party systems to use to maximise your WordPress site performance.
-  W3 Total Cache - Customisable and makes your website perform better.
- Redirection Plugin - Logs any redirection or error in your website so you can gain link equity from old links that are 404ing.
- Ithemes Security Plugin – Protecting your website from rouge bots / hackers.
- Cloud Flare – Increase your website performance drastically, speed /user experience.
- Better WordPress Minify. (combines JavaScript scripts in your website into a few lines of code.) Or use w3 total cache.
- Search & Replace - Wordpress plugin for http & https, and forces our preferred version (https:// as it is a ranking factor)
- Media Optimisation. Pay attention to every details, sizes, use Smush.it to reduce file size.
- CSS Sprites (multiple images, then using CSS to find the image you need.)
- New Relic – Gives you insights into your server and website, then you can pinpoint actions you could improve.

“if were not thinking about this technical stuff, maybe you are just marketers?”

Kelvin Newman: What the Flash Crash & Black Boxes Teach Us About The Future of Search

Kelvin the man behind Brighton SEO and works at Rough Agenda talks to us about the flash crash in stocks, which use specific algorithms and how we can use Google's Algorith for the future of search. See the main takeaways from his speech below.

- You need to understand customers, understand who pays the bills and attempt to understanding Google
- The Dunning Kruger Effect - unskilled individuals tend to suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate, while highly skilled individuals tend to rate their ability lower than is accurate
- Wrote a 35,000 word eBook on link building, which is no longer relevant.
- We need to think more about how we think
- Dr Adrian Thompson – “Could a circuit evolve to solve a problems”
- Flash Crash Causes Theories (when stocks plummeted for a short period of time)

  • Fat Fingers. (someone make a wrong deal)
  • The Glitch
  • The impact of high frequency traders
  • The reality is no one knows

- Algorithms can react in peculiar ways when they come into content with others. Complex and complicated do not mean the same thing. Complicated – sending a rocket to the moon. Complex – being a parent to a child.
- But what’s this got to do with search? Google algorithm is a perfect example of a complex chaotic system.
- When google releases an update, they don’t know how the full impact it will have in the real world.
- We know broadly what is required for search, so we should focus on that.
- There’s a difference between and interesting and useful, is the SEO information or research actually going to help you with your day to day job?
- If Google Algorithm on a USB stick would you open it? No because it’s interesting, not useful to perform better in search, we already know what is needed to perform well.
- Perfect examples of three books to read, which display complex and complicated elements you can use when thinking about search.

  • 1. The Signal and the Noise - Nate Silver
  • 2. Flash Boys - Michael Lewis
  • 3. Jurassic Park – Chapter about chaos theory.

Think about how you think about Google.

Jo Kerr: Virutal Campfire: GirlGuilding Social Strategies

Jo Kerr head of digital from the charity Girl Guiding talks about the social strategies and building a community the right way using different social media platforms. Here are the main takeaways from her presentation.

- Girl Guiding is a leading Charity for girls & woman over 450,000 members
- Digital Strategy

  • 1. Involve - We want to help girls and volunteers by communicating.
  • 2. Enable - We want to help girls and leaders by providing new tools and events.
  • 3. Champion - We want to tell the Girl Guiding story through our members words.

- Example of a successful campaign. Misifigs – shareable funny content. Creating a scenario which helped benefit the overall brand by getting included getting mentioned into press such as Guardian.
- Promotions – T'shirts, sold out in one day.
- Audience responds to more to creative and fun aspects. Can’t go towards sarcastic tone in their industry.
- Personas – extensive research and set up 12 personas to test their content will perform well. Uses them throughout all their strategies.
- Example of great user generated content. #girlsmatter has more than 4,000 pledges so far. Biggest Driver is Social Media. #bigbrowieboot #girlsattitude and more.
- Meaningful content that people what to engage with. The Big Gig- an Instagram video, trended on twitter, Instagram followers grew by 30%.
- Focusing on new channels, Facebook is not where the audience is spending most of their time. Going more towards twitter and Instagram to target their audience effectively. Instagram is well engaged, average engagement is 80%+ on Girl Guiding’s per 1000 followers.
- Asking users, what should the website do and what do they want from it, to get feedback. This helps the audience feel more involved with the brand.
- Use Social Media for fast customer service, but make sure you can manage this effectively before doing it.

 - Just getting out there is the first step.

Matt Beswick: Get More From Your Content: Embrace Your Inner Geek.

Matt Beswick from Hidden Pixel, a self-confessed geek, he teaches us how to get more from your content using things such as scrapers he provides expert tips and tricks to improve productivity when compiling data and insights for your clients.

- Worked with Facebook's API to make a dog game, it soon became hugely successful, getting almost 3 millions users and 30 million sessions.
- Being a geek helps make your life easier and saves you a huge amount of time. But more importantly helps you get noticed.
- Crafting stories, get you links. Surveys are great for this - use Google consumer surveys tool.
- It’s all about the idea and the story, multiple question server tend to perform a lot better. It gives you a list of answers which you can then use trends.
-refine the list to the most interesting findings.
- Finally get your creative to do their thing, make infographics and interactive pieces using this data.
- Onepoll – survey tool, get great data from this.
- Lessons Learned.

  1. Unique data is great for outreach
  2. You're looking for a story
  3. Where possible, include the data.

- Matt moves onto his next subject which is Scraping.
- Disclaimer: Google don't like you doing this. (stealing is naughty) even though they do it themselves:
- You could use software such as targets local scraper tool. But where is the fun in that? - It's geek time!
- PHP is great to use for this. It's simple to set up.

  1. Google URL - http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&pws=0&q=searchlove
  2. Get the html - $html = file_get_contents($url_check);
  3. Load the HTML - @$dom->loadHTML($html);
  4. Convert to XPath - %xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
  5. Grab the Results - $xpath->evaluate("//fiv[@id='search']//h3/a/@href");

- The power comes when you do it for mass.

  1. Take the top keywords for your clients/site.
  2. Scrape page 1 for each of these phrases.
  3. This will help you get an overall view of who your competitors really are.

- Learn more about API's using treehouse & codeacademy
- Build Requests - use full contact, to get contact information along with share data.
- Get social share data: for example: http://api.sharedcount.com/?url=http://www.zazzlemedia.co.uk
- Take this further by looking at top industries leaders / customers last 200 tweets, see what they are reading. From this you can see what websites that you should be publishing on to reach them.
- You can also use the SEMRush API to grab paid and organic keywords for each of your competitor domains.
- For links you can use Majestic's SEO API to import all the key data into a spreadsheet.
- So with this you can now steal competitors keywords and links, but lets talk about the bigger picture.
- Google wants Brands! Being a liar isn't an option any more
- Combing all of the above helps you build networks to increase your brand awareness.
- Visit Matt's website for more information on API's: http://www.mattbeswick.co.uk/big-list-of-apis/

Ian Haywood: Running Promotional Campaigns: The Good, Bad and Ugly.

Ian Haywood from the competition agency, explains how to succeed at promotional campaigns with expert tips and tricks and he shares his personal experience of the good, bad and the ugly. See the main things you need to know from his presentation below. 

- Competitions - 3 Golden Rules

  1. There is more than one type of entrant
  2. Your Competition is unlikely to be a panacea.
  3. Incentives fundamentally changes the nature of intent

- What can you run a competition for? Once the user land on your competition - What do you want them to do?

  • Email Opt in
  • Address
  • Social Media Activity
  • SEO
  • Coverage
  • User acquisition retention activity
  • Basket value
  • Distribute your ROI over multiple objectives.
  • 3rd party competitions to secure coverage.

- Technical Entry – Build one yourself.
- Rafflecopter - Great for running competitions.
- Voting competitions are extremely attractive to users as it incorporates the users drive to win.
- Marketing – tracking inbound referrals such as competition communities, influencers and competition bloggers.
- This will provide a consistent entries.
- To target high value users. Use the following tips:

  • Transformative prize, large cash prize.
  • Real career opportunities.
  • Famous judges. (increases trust)
  • Institution partners (Increase credibility) This will be more niche users.
  • The insanity Pitch - stupid/insane competitions.

- Compliance – know the rules and regulations before running a competitions. State in the terms what you want to exclude or include so it’s clear.
- Demonstrate that your competition is fair. Always have terms and conditions.
- Platform Compliance –  on social media, check terms and conditions.
- Consequences = Bad PR.
- What out for Cheating/Fraud/Exploitation - Steer away from voting competitions as this could happen.
- Find cheaters by using "Tineye" for reverse image search. Use "Copyscape" for finding duplicate content.
- Pro Tip: Don’t offer tickets as prizes, as they are non-transferal.

Rand Fishkin: Cracking the SEO Code for 2015: Tactics To Love VS to Leave

Rand Fishkin from Moz explains the best tactics to love and continuing using in 2015, and tactics you should probably stop doing if you are.  See the key takeaways from Rand's presentation below:

- Search and engines are demanding more from search results.
- Page Speed Expectations - 47% of consumers expect a webpage to load under 2 seconds.
- Design & UX Expectations - The quality level continues to increase in web design and user experience.
- Content Quality Expectations - Continues to rise and the bar gets higher and higher.
- Pogo sticking, (people going on your site, then go to a competitor to find a better content) may play a part in rankings as his research suggests.
- Employing User and Usage Data - Leaning more from quality data from users.
- Past SEO success may not be indicative of the future.
- The move from keyword matching and topic association. Google know what you want, not just what you typed in.
- Googles upgraded their understanding but have we upgraded our content?
- Domain Level Keyword Connections
- Google algorithm used to be very page level based (links). In the past few years, they’ve become more inclusive of domain level signals.
- Googles crackdown on spam is basically a crackdown on ranking without a brand.
- Ranking Well, but not a brand? Googles going to reclassify those tactics. It’s coming…
- Loosing Critical SEO Data

  • Only 10 percent of referral data still available
  • Adwords {exact Match] no longer exact, it’s now close varients.
  • The deal getting worse all the time!

- Keyword Research - Use web, news, images, YouTube and buzzsumo to gain ideas. Then collect concepts, topic and popular content and use this when finalising your list.
- Then build up your sites associations with a topic (or set topics)
- Link Building Earning- Sometime you have blinders on (do-follow, trust flow, domain metrics)
- Don't do this. Build Relationships. It takes longer, but works better. Can do this by social media, comments or a friendly email.
- The goal isn’t links. The goal is relationships, links are a nice side effect.
- Warm intro – Go Conspire - Find anyone at a given company or specific person to outreach too.
- Brands mentions near keywords may have link like effects.
- Content marketing may be creating false expectation and bad practices
- 90% - 95% of content on the web gets no links or social shares.
- Criteria for the modern content:

  • One of a kind
  • Relevant
  • Helpful
  • Uniquely valuable
  • Great User Experience (UX)
  • Likely to spread?

- The more visual the better.
- Choosing where to invest?
- Measurability is inversely correlated with opportunity. The more measurable a channel is (like AdWords), the lower the opportunity.
- The competition is high. Channels that are hard to measure, on the other hand, like digital video advertising and affiliate marketing, have tons of opportunity to explore in 2015
Bottom line. SEO is getting harder. But the higher barrier to entry means greater opportunity for those who succeed.

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