Last week, Fat Media’s digital marketing team attended SearchLove London 2015. For the uninitiated, SearchLove is a two-day event that is jam-packed full of expert speakers offering invaluable observations on the topics of SEO, social media, analytics, content, paid promotions and more.
So in a bid to share the knowledge, here’s our roundup of this year’s conference, which includes the top five actionable insights taken straight from the mouth of industry leaders.
- Implicit signals have become the fundamental element of the search query model
Implicit signals have long been touted as the future of search queries. However, according to Tom Anthony, head of R&D at Distilled, that once imagined future has very much become the present.
Within a search query, keywords such as “London Tube Stations” represent the explicit signals. Conversely, the implicit signals of this same query will consider factors such as the device used, where the user is located and more.
Because of the proliferation of mobile devices and the rise in wearable tech creating user specific data, Google are placing greater importance on implicit signals than ever before. For this reason, from a search perspective, implicit signals, rather than keywords, will be used more and more to determine the content returned in search results.
Consequently, as a business owner, you need to start thinking about the implicit signals that might currently prevent people from finding your brand.
Insight provided by @tomanthonySEO
- Using paid social and AdWords can boost rankings and shares
Traditionally, marketers outreached for links to help boost their presence in the search engine results pages (SERPs). However, with the average click-through rate of businesses ranked at number one on SERPs being just 5%, innovating or using different strategies can help to drive success.
To help illustrate this, Wil Reynolds and his team at Seer Interactive spent four weeks promoting an interactive marketing guide on Pinterest using only Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and AdWords. The team’s efforts proved successful, and they were able to boost the guide to the first page of the search results for marketing guides on Pinterest.
This proves that creating fresh content and then paying for social ads to target key influencers can help you reach your brand’s customers and boost rankings at the same time.
Insight provided by @wilreynolds
- PPC and SEO are better together
Daniel Gilbert used to work for Google where he managed a $40million PPC portfolio. According to Daniel, during his time at the search giant, the PPC and SEO departments never spoke to each other. In the years since, the disciplines of PPC and SEO have drifted even further apart.
In his presentation, though, Daniel likened PPC to Superman and SEO to Batman – two superheroes that are even better when they work together in tandem.
For instance, copy testing, tags, headlines, site speed and calls-to-action are just a few things that SEOs can help develop for a PPC landing page. And in doing so, SEOs can help improve the overall Quality Score for PPC campaigns, which, in turn, can also boost the usability of your site.
Insight provided by @danielgilbert44
- Links are no longer an overwhelming algorithm factor for SEOs
In his presentation, Rand Fishkin took a look at Moz’s 2015 analysis of ranking factors in Google’s search engine to provide a picture of how modern SEO looks. One of his most interesting conclusions was that links, while still powerful, were no longer such an overwhelming algorithm factor in the eyes of many SEOs.
After Penguin 2.0 all but ended mass link building overnight in 2013, SEOs had to innovate to survive. For this reason, improving click-through rates, bounce rates and time spent on site by building a better user experience have, arguably, become more important to SEOs than solely building links.
Insight provided by @randfish
- You can do effective paid social ad campaigns with just £50
A billion people log on to Facebook every day. But, according to Larry Kim, the founder of WordStream, the organic reach for social networks ‘stinks’ and to make the most out of promoting content, you need to leverage paid ads.
To do this effectively, though, first you need to discover which content your audience likes. To do this, you will need to promote all your content a little bit using paid social ads. Then, after using Facebook and Twitter analytics to find out what has been successful, you will need to heavily promote your most popular content.
This will allow you to target your most popular content at the right people, at the right time. In turn, this will ensure your ad’s quality and relevancy scores remain high. And because higher engagement rates equal a much lower cost per engagement, carefully targeting what content to promote in this manner can improve your return on investment significantly.
Insight provided by @larrykim
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