In one day our team was able to attend 16 talks and 6 workshops. Then we put all the valuable information together and selected the top ten most interesting talks (and its main ideas) from the conference for you.
Wolfgang Digital Study
The beginning of the day was very interesting thanks to gentlemen from Wolfgang Digital, well known Irish SEM agency. They brought back to life their lecture from SMX and showed us the results of their study. They worked with a giant dataset of client’s data from retail sector, ecommerce, and travel websites. The number of visitors on these websites combined reached 80 million during one-year study. Their findings are following:
- Visits from FB raised four times during the last year.
- Smartphones are decision-makers, desktops are money-makers.
- Organic search from Google is in most cases the most common source of visits.
- E-shops with an actual physical shop have much lower (around 50 % less) conversion rate than solely online shops.
- The speed of websites has a positive impact on both SEO and the conversion rate of a given e-shop. You know, time is money.
Click here the whole presentation.
Data-driven content
Shyam Dattani (@StillShyam) from SearchMetrics explained the audience, that one keyword = one landing page approach is not effective anymore. A research based on the analysis of TOP 10 organic results in Google US, where they tested a huge number of keywords, has clearly shown, what are the most important content rules for Google.
So, what has changed over the last year in the TOP 10 organic results on the American Google?
- Decreased the number of searched keywords in the title – by 20 %
- Decreased the number of searched keywords in the header – by 10 %
- Raised the average number of words on a webpage – by 27 %
- Decreased the number of internal links leading to the optimized page – by 16 %
What to take from this? Classic SEO factors taken into account by many SEO specialists are less valid than in the past. Successful SEO should focus on covering whole topics, rather than just specific keywords. Use text, video, pictures, lists, etc. Use the rich content.
And all this due to the phenomenon called RankBrain. It has been changing the search results for the past few years. Google does not try anymore to find one answer to one question, but find all the answers to both the specific question and questions (searches) related. It is one of the ways to be successful, even without a great amount of high quality backlinks. Of course, the results of these strategies vary based on the field your website specializes in.
Learn more from the original presentation original presentation. I strongly recommend to go through it.
Social networks according to the Miss World
The next lecture, particularly the lecturer, was a big mystery for me. The reason is that the speaker in front of me was Rosanna Davison, former Miss World. She showed the audience, how social media work in her lifestyle company (healthy lifestyle, food, beauty, etc.) and how mainly thanks to them she is able to constantly develop her company. However, we haven’t learned anything new, she just showed us what works for her brand.
She considers these five Cs to be the most important ones:
- Content – to know what and how to say it.
- Consistence – don’t change faces.
- Creativity – be original and attract attention.
- Clear communication – no complicated ideas, be clear and brief.
- Community – communicate with people who care about your company.
What does work for her and what does she recommend?
- Publish in the morning, when the target group gets up, during lunch and after work – just pick the right times, when most of the people are online on social media.
- The most successful posts (measured by community reactions) are between 7:30 and 10:30 p.m.
- Saturday and Sunday afternoon are the best times to launch a social media competition.
- Report and block trolls, send them back to their cages.
These surely are valuable data, but I recommend you to use your own and focus on them.
You can find the presentation here.
The future of digital creativity
Johnny Spindler showed us a new era of digital creativity in his presentation. In order to attract attention on a social network, especially concerning videos, you have to come up with something truly original and unique and very often also technically difficult. However, if you are into technologies and new things, this might be something for you. Another thing Johnny mentioned was the transition from mobile first targeting to mobile only targeting.
- 85 % of the Facebook videos are muted while playing, you have to stand out visually.
- 75 % of the potential viewers does not even see the first three seconds of a video
- Expects a great success of vertically captured videos, because they fit better in the facebook wall format.
- Insufficient use of dynamic (changing in real time) parametres of a video according to the user’s options.
- Lack of virtual reality advertising (360° videos are slowly coming)
- Slow TV. People actually watch it.
- Mas personalization in videos.
The following video will show you how difficult it is to attract the attention of an experienced social media network user. He watches only what he is interested in or what attracts his attention. That is why you should consider it, not only while creating social media content.
Download the presentation here.
(Hyper)local campaigns
After that two speakers from SearchOptics came on stage. They focused on very often underestimated (hyper)local user targeting. Why are users so often targeted so widely, when we are able to focus on a very small area of just couple of meters? They showed everything on examples of their clients (casinos, car sellers, restaurants), whom they were able to lower CPC and boost the traffic on their website, mainly thanks to local campaigns and various technologies and techniques.
You can find the presentation here.
How important is web analytics in companies?
Darren McManuse’s survey was focused on how important consider Irish companies web analytics to be.
The results are following:
- 85 % of the questioned companies use Google Analytics as a tool to analyze the traffic on their website.
- 3/4 of the companies consider GA a crucial source of information for the company strategy, but there is often nobody who would be able to interpret the data.
- A little less than 1/3 of the companies does not measure the goals on their websites and does not use the UTM parameters for marking their campaigns.
- Without correctly marked, understandable data cannot companies take proper actions.
Revise the way you measure data on your website and try to improve it, maybe consult a specialist. It is an important step to understanding both your company and your customers. You can take Darron’s manual as the first step on your way to a better analysis. The survey (including the results) is here.
Most common SEM mistakes
Interesting, nice, funny and relaxed lecture by Richard Talbot from the TinderPoint agency (@tinderpoint) showed us some funny fails, that has been happening in SEO and PPC over the past few years. What should you be careful about?
- Redirect URL when redesigning. Richard mentioned company Ryan Air that few years ago, recreated a website and forgot to redirect the old URLs to the new ones.
- Always carefully test and control automatically created PPC adds.
- Be careful when trying to take an advantage of a significant incident (death, anniversary, etc.).
- Do not upload on social networks posts that are enforcing interaction, such as:
How to avoid such fails? Just think twice. And also check out the presentation here.
What did not make it in the overview
There were also other interesting lectures and talks, you can find their brief descriptions and links for the original presentations bellow.
- Alleesha Tully:
The customer journey, find the touch points. (PDF)
- Louis Grenier:
A presentation full of advices and manuals what mistakes you should avoid as an online marketer and how to get information for a real growth instead. “Ask your visitors/customers, do not bother them too much and be trustworthy.” (PDF)
- Simon Jacobson:
If I were about to build the first search engine today, wat would it look like? That was the main topic of Simon’s presentation. It could have been an excellent presentation if it was approached differently and not given by a Microsoft employee. This way it was just about what Bing already knows and can do. So, how should the ideal search engine work? Well, in many ways basically like Google does now. (PDF)