Although this year I couldn’t make it to SES London 2014, I have scowered the interwebs to bring you a concise list of stats, tips and takeaways from the 3 day conference. Here we look at the sessions from Day 2 of the conference. If you missed it you can find SES London Day 1 roundup here.
KEYNOTE: Keeping Up With The Consumer
Ian Carrington, Director of Performance Solutions & Innovation at Google
- 28% of 3-4 year olds in the UK use a tablet device.
- 86% of people expect technology to make their lives easier.
- 90% of smart phones in Japan are waterproof.
- Google’s Project “Loon” uses balloons to bring internet coverage to areas where there hasn’t been before.
- By 2020 they’ll be 8 billion people in the world that will have access to the internet.
- The average person in the UK owns 3 devices.
- Google’s goal is to help users find information quicker and simpler.
- Google Now anticipates your next move and makes suggestions based on your lifestyle and search patterns.
- Advertisers need to be there, be relevant and be optimised (sites must be mobile optimised).
- Use RLSA (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads) if you want cheaper CPA’s and increased conversions.
- Google is prioritising ads for searches made on mobile devices so make yours relevant.
- Ian’s Main Tip: Prepare for these changes from Google and get yourself a mobile strategy.
- Google’s Knowledge Graph incorporates conversational search. It also means you don’t have to ask Google the same thing/place again. Instead merely ask for extra information or specific details about something you’ve searched for before. Here’s a video demo of Google’s Knowledge Graph:
SESSION: Brilliant Blogging: Best Practices to Enhance Your Customer Reach
Lee Odden, CEO at Top Rank.
- Lee shared his seven key tips for blogging success:
- Stand for something, something specific. Focus attracts attention, builds authority and credibility.
- Know your reader. Understand their preferences for discovering, consuming & interacting with blogs. Be the answer to what you target audience cares about.
- Social drives discovery, search validates it. Understand the search & social dynamic for your target audience.
- Great content isn’t great until it’s discovered, consumed & shared. Invest equally in creative & amplification. (so ensure your Outreach strategy is in place).
- A person has a finite number of original ideas. Look beyond your business or industry for blog topics & creation.
- A blog is only as interesting as the interest shown in others. Engage with readers on & off your blog.
- Optimize for readers first with interesting, useful topics. Google doesn’t comment on or share blog posts.
Bas van den Beld, Owner & Founder at StateofDigital.com
- When choosing bloggers to communicate with: find out who is knowledgeable on specific topics.
- Create a safe place for the writers. Make them feel comfortable so they’ll feel empowered to publish their content online. For example, set up a private Facebook group,
- There is no average user you’re talking to. People approach the buying process in different ways.
- There’s always something to write about.
- Use tools like Evernote to make notes of ideas and topics.
- Use TweetDeck to find out what people are talking about.
- Use Quora to find out what questions people are asking.
- Use Tweetadder to find users who are tweeting about topics you’re interested in and add them to a list.
- Never forget the ‘so what’ to give the reader a takeaway.
- Perfect a structure for a blog post that starts with the subheadings and then tries to make them topical but interesting.
- It’s not about you it’s about your audience.
SESSION: Effectively Converging Paid, Owned And Earned Media
Dave Freeman, Head of SEO at Havas Media
- We have all lost keyword data, but if you monitor the performance of individual pages you won’t have to worry.
- Use landing page reports in Google Analytics then segment your audience into paid, organic and referral traffic.
- Keep agile – test and fail quickly to keep expense and time waste to a minimum.
- Agree your aims, set a test strategy, choose your keywords, agree a measurement framework, set timeframes, and make sure everyone has realistic expectations.
Nick Drabicky, Head of Bought Media at iProspect
- Where possible, configure your analytics package so you can see profit margins for individual products.
- Make sure you’re analytics works across all of your marketing media. This way you can compare the performance of each.
- Redistribute your spend based on the success of each channel.
- Consumers often start by searching on mobile, but convert or purchase on a desktop. Ensure your marketing can track them.
- An average site conversion rate is roughly 5%. Make sure you analyse the 95% who aren’t converting and improve using CRO.
SESSION: Game, Set, ROI: Developing an Effective Search & Social Strategy
Jonathan Beeston, Director of New Product Innovation at Adobe
- What you can’t control: Google are sometimes putting PLAs above brand adverts
- PLA’s (Product Listing Ads) are continuing to expand further and changing the playing field.
- 76% of Facebook and Twitter users are active on mobile.
- Paid, earned and owned are converging. Even Facebook are now using sponsored posts.
- Evolve your approach to ensure that search and social work together.
- To achieve an effective search and social strategy, start uniting disparate teams.
- Track and report on integrated search and social campaigns in the same way.
- Decide on an objective for your social media activity and track it.
- Twitter is the place to go for the “now searches”. He used the example that if you want to find out the password for SES London, someone will have tweeted it, but Google won’t index it for 3 months.
Nick Beck, Managing Director at Tug
- Nick claims that evidence suggests Twitter can have an impact on short term rankings.
- You can’t rule out social as a ranking factor (until Matt Cutts flat out said it wasn’t one).
- Run your own tests to see how much social influences your rankings.
- Take a qualitative approach to testing for your brand, products and services e.g. posts in different formats (pictures, tweets) and what’s their engagement like on different social networks.
- Don’t run social tests with brand terms. Use long tail terms that don’t see much fluctuation instead.
SESSION: Next Generation Site Architecture Maximising Usability & Findability
Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead at Google
- Google wants to improve user experience, relevance, comprehension and speed. So take these into account with your site layout and architecture.
- If you have a separate mobile site, it’s worth implementing rel=”alternate” and rel=”canonical” tags so Google can find your mobile content
- Users like to be able to switch between the mobile and desktop versions of your site, so include a link where applicable.
- 7 seconds is the average page load time on mobile. Which is about 6.5 seconds too long.
- Use webpagetest.org to see visuals of how your mobile site loads
- Google demotes pages that have a poor smartphone experience.
- It’s difficult for Google to crawl pages that have ‘infinite scroll’. So split the page and use rel=”next” and rel=”prev” tags to let Google know that there’s more content to find
Alan Perkins, CEO at SilverDisc Limited
- Site structure: target broad competitive keywords on the pages that sit at the top of your site architecture
- Use Open Graph Markup for better quality shares on Facebook. Use Twitter cards for Twitter markup.
SESSION: Paid Search Analytics & Multi-Touch Attribution Analysis
A bit of a cop out on my part but State of Digital did a great round-up of this session over on their site: http://www.stateofdigital.com/paid-search-analytics-and-multi-touch-attribution/
Yehoshua Coren, Founder & Principal at Analytics Ninja LLC
- Upload your cost data to Google Analytics.
- Cost Analysis is one of the most under rated reports in Google Analytics so use it more.
- Sort keywords by bounce rate in Google Analytics to uncover negative keywords and cut spend.
- Google Analytics Demographic reports help you analyse paid traffic by gender and other key criteria.
- Remarketing lists in Google Analytics are way more powerful than dynamic tags.
- Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA’s) can be tracked with Google Tag Manager.
- Users who are logged in to Google are not added to RLSA lists.
- Display Network Assists will help you see what other factors assist a purchase.
- Create a performance search query report for Bing Ads.
SESSION: World Class Local: Optimising Listings, Place Pages, and Beyond
Pete Young Search Director Media-com
- 33% of searches in 2013 had local intent. That means over 7 billion searches a year have local intent.
- 20% of searches on a desktop have local intent
- 50% of mobile searches have local intent
- 49% are using their smartphone – 37% of searchers are looking for information in the UK.
- 92% of mobile users are clicking on paid ads
- Try to take greater control of your local listing as certain results are “hyperlocal”, e.g. all of the listings are Google Plus Local results.
- Note that searches with local intent affect different verticals more than others e.g the gaming industry.
- Use Tourdash to overlay hotspots on top of virtual tours letting the user interact with your images.
- PPC will give you some quick wins, particularly when using image extensions as they cover a large amount of the results page.
Greg Stewart, President at Geary LSF.
- Structured data such as Schema is what’s pulling your listing up in Google
- Local algorithm varies upon device and platform, so make sure you understand each devices key leverage points.
- Data needs to be synced across all sites (e.g. citations) and all of your content should be match across the board.
- Local optimisation is becoming a key point of local delivery.
- Become more agile in the services you offer and in your communication with the consumer.
SESSION: Breaking Down the Borders: International SEM
Motoko Hunt, President, at AJPR
- Do not force your main keywords on local markets. Share your keywords, use them as a guide, but find local targets.
- Use Google Trends to find where (in the world) people are searching and related opportunities.
- Success in international SEO depends on creating standards and processes that are applied around the world.
- If you want international teams to give you their time and resources, you’ll need to demonstrate the business value of your SEO work.
Look out for the SES London Day 3 round-up coming soon…
The above took me a fair amount of time to compile so please feel free to share it with your chums.