SearchLove London 2015 Roundup

by | Oct 22, 2015

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I had the honour of representing Serps Invaders at this year’s SearchLove in London earlier this week.

Monday and Tuesday were super busy, interesting and fun and I left London with a ton of new knowledge that our agency will be able to use in our daily client work.

Here are some of the highlights:

Unlocking Growth Opportunities with Search Analytics

Aleyda (slides here) made an excellent point about how we use search analytics for tracking results, such as traffic, conversions, indexation, rankings etc. but while these are useful for reporting to our clients and bosses, they don’t really help us that much with improving our work on a day-to-day basis. They won’t tell us the answer to questions like this:

How come my impressions have increased, the positions are the same but the CTR is down?

In order to make this as little time consuming as possible, she gave some great tips on how to get the most of your data and create a matrix that will allow you to get the answers you need for making the most of your opportunities.

She also shared some fantastic tools, some we already use, some new that we will definitely check out:

She also shared this handy directory for marketing tools: http://www.themarketertoolbox.com/

Emotional Targeting for CRO

Talia Wolf from Conversioner gave a great talk about emotional targeting by showing a variety of impressive case studies showing how using emotional targeting enabled them to increase their clients’ revenues. The three pillars of emotional targeting are:

  1. Make it about the customer.
  2. Show it. Don’t just say it.
  3. Test concepts, not elements.

She explained how to use emotional triggers and the emotional power of colours to create landing pages that work. Like this:

Brilliant, right? They understood while a line like “Are you the next winner?” made it about the customer and worked better than the original landing page, the main reason for people playing slots was to unwind after a day at the office, to “just play.” This made this entirely new concept so much more successful than the previous one which still focused heavily on the casino aspect.

The Human Algorithm and Distance from Perfect

Portent’s Ian Lurie spoke about one concept that brings some clarity into the sometimes confusing and conflicting world of SEO: distance from perfect. Ian’s point is that the Google algorithm changes over time – what is good today could be bad tomorrow – but what doesn’t change is the human algorithm, what the human considers perfect (puppies!) and imperfect (scary rat-like creatures which will haunt you in your dreams!). While perfect is unattainable, you can minimise the distance from perfect.

What you want to ask yourself is this: “Will this move me closer to perfect than my competitors?”

As an example he showed that of the Weather Channel (weather.com) being outranked by Accuweather, despite having a much higher authority. Why? Because weather.com uses JSON content and Accuweather uses server-sided content.

Another example was duplication. While the use of canonical tags brings you closer to perfect than nothing, no duplication at all brings you even closer.

Broken links? Fix them. Images in social posts? Make them support your message.

This can be applied to many other areas, such as targeting in paid search, page load speed etc. Simple, right?

You can find Ian’s slides here.

 

SearchLove also featured sessions from Will CritchlowRand FishkinLarry KimPhil NottinghamWil Reynolds and many other influential professionals in the SEO industry. You can check out the full list here.

Read more from other SearchLove attendees on Twitter or join the SearchLove London LinkedIn group.

If you attended SearchLove London this year, what did you think? What were your key takeaways?

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Serps Invaders

Serps Invaders

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