The SearchLove London 2016 Roundup

Amy Harrison - Stand Out to YOUR crowd: A Framework For Customer-Driven Copywriting

• Don’t use “cheating copy” - copy that is not exclusive to you. You can recognise it because it’s hanging out on other websites.

• Where do you find your unique selling points? Customer reviews and testimonials.

• Don’t use “Umbrella” terms - vague promises, generic descriptions.

  • To solve: qualify - eliminate vagueness in favor of specificity and use the words your customers use.

• Weave into your copy:

  • 1. Here’s what you may have recognised (symptoms).

  • 2.Here’s why that happens (problem).

  • 3. Here’s how to fix that (cure).

  • 4. This is why it’s good to fix it (contrast).

Dr. Pete Meyers - Tactical Keyword Research in A RankBrain World

• In 2013, Google brought out voice search in browser - a little later, Hummingbird came out. Hummingbird was in part designed to address very long form queries common to voice search.

• It doesn’t matter whether your customers are using voice search - Google rewrote the algorithm to address this and therefore it impacts you regardless.

• Just saying ‘build great concepts’ or ‘target concepts’ isn’t really that helpful. When a person searches, at some point there has to be a query.

• Target using ‘group entities’ rather than individual keywords.

  • We’re essentially going from keywords → concepts → *keywords*

  • Why not just write for people? We’re aiming for this but we’re not there yet.

Dominic Woodman - How to Get Insight From Your Logs (and Start Using All That Free Google Data)

• When you visit a site, a bot logs the information about you. These logs usually contain some standard pieces of information including: IP address, timestamp, request type, page requested, protocol, status and user agent. You can do a surprising amount with this data.
• What can you do with this log data? The 5 main things are: diagnosis of crawling and indexation issues, crawl prioritisation, site health diagnosis, calculating how important Google views various parts of your site and learning how fresh your content is from Google’s POV.
• You don’t need any programming knowledge to get set-up, it can be done easily with a couple basic tools and about 15 minutes of your time. BigQuery is the best tool to use. Full setup instructions can be found in this really useful article that accompanies the presentation: A Complete Guide to Log Analysis with BigQuery

Larry Kim - 10 CRO Truth Bombs That Will Change Your Approach to CRO

• CRO often increase quantity of leads rather than quality of leads

• FB video ads are very cost effective because FB wants to be competitive with Youtube

• Don’t forget about remarketing.

• Don’t blindly follow best practice - instead, think about the user experience. Do you need an explicit call to action for example?

Bas van den Beld - The Secrets of Storytelling

• A story can have a hero and a villain, but you must remember that you, as the brand, are not the hero; you’re the guide. The user is the hero, and the villain is essentially the consequence of not using your product.

• Focus on the ‘why’. You have to make people care about the ‘why’, before they’ll pay any attention to the ‘how’.

• Always tell your story from the perspective of the audience. It’s all about empathy, and people will warm to you or your brand very quickly if you show understanding of their culture.

Tom Anthony - SEO Split-Testing: How You Can Run Tests and What We’ve Learned

• SEOs should, by nature, be good at deciding what page should rank above another. As it turns out, we’re only slightly better than the average layperson and worse than a coin flip. Our instincts, even based on past experience, aren’t as good as we think for this particular task. We need data to help inform our decisions.

• All CROs run tests, as they know that whenever humans are involved you can’t use ‘best practice’ to get to the best answer. Google is starting to use human factors (use behaviour signals) in the ranking algorithm so now argument is becoming more true for SEO. We need to adjust the testing method, but it can still be done by small and large businesses.

• To create your own SEO split-test, create two buckets of pages (e.g. your product pages divided into two groups), then make a change to one of those buckets. Finally, analyse which performs better.

Distilled’s Optimisation Delivery Network can help you run SEO split-testing at a much larger scale.

Jessica Gioglio - Make Your Marketing Memorable With Visual Storytelling

• 90% of info transmitted to the brain is visual. Visuals process 60x faster than text alone. The challenge of using visuals is “how do you stand out?”

• There is so much content noise online today, you need to celebrate your brand’s key differentiators to have any chance of standing out. What is your company’s culture? Do you take part in CSR initiatives? What makes you different?

• Cinemagraphs are mostly static images with one element that moves, such as a still picture of a landscape, with a rippling river. These cinemagraphs  can really drive attention to a focal point without being overpowering.

Jes Stiles - What’sAppening With Messenger App Marketing

• Chatbot marketing is the future of search marketing, and the two will eventually collide and merge. It’s the new internet.

• Chatbots can be especially helpful if your customers want to interact with your brand when you’re not there. If Sunday is a popular day for interaction, a chatbot can be there even when you can’t.

• When launching your brand on chat apps, don’t forget to do the all-important chat app optimisation for app search. Update taglines, brand names, descriptions, categories and tags.

Larry Kim - Hacking RankBrain and Other Machine Learning Algorithms

• Google describes RankBrain as “Query interpretation that changes rank” - but it’s more of a layer on top of Panda, Penguin and the Core Algorithm

• It works by taking a long-tail query and interpreting it and uses user behavior signals to determine whether it’s done a good job or not.

• How can SEOs respond? Work to improve CTR of SERPs. Use tactics from paid search to help with this because this is what paid search marketers have known for years.

• Other key areas to improve: engagement rates, bounce rate, brand affinity (FB ads and GDN)

• The key to increasing presentation impact is threefold. First, be your audience. Second, use the tools at your disposal wisely. Third, maximise the absorption of data.

• Death by Powerpoint is a user problem; we aren’t making our presentations compelling enough. Start by getting rid of bullet points, because they expose the info at once and overload the brain.

• Give your slides much more impact with P.I.C.A (Purpose, Insight, Context, Aesthetics)

  • Purpose: What decision are you trying to inform? And what visualisation tells the story best?

  • Insight: There needs to be a clear distinction between data and insight. Give your chart a Mckinsey title, which immediately displays the key learning from the visualisation

  • Context: Help the user understand the data as quickly and easily as possible.

  • Aesthetics: Put your charts on a detox and reduce the cognitive effort required to read the data. Remove axis lines, recolour to grey shades, and then use a key colour to highlight the most important stories.