With two full days of speakers and knowledge, there was much to take away from SearchLove this fall. George (@gzlatin) and I were able to visit Boston and attend the conference, so we’ve summarized the multitude of things that we learned and heard at the event. You’ll note that the “Keep it Real” comments from the speakers are missing most of the important words as these are supposed to remain “attendee secrets” for the next 30 days.
Yes, I know this list is long (it’s supposed to be), so I’ve summarized it into the following categories to make things easier on you. (side note: within each category, the individual items are ordered from when they were provided throughout the event)
Speakers | SEO | Link Building | Local Search | Social Media | Content | Analytics | CRO | Mobile | Business | Tweets
You can download the speaker presentation decks over at Google Drive and even better yet, buy the full conference videos over at Distilled. Note all images are property of Distilled.
Speakers
Dan Shapiro | Google, Inc. | Creating Serendipity
www.danshapiro.com | @danshapiro
Categories: Business, SEO
Rob Ousbey | Distilled | Characteristics of a Successful Outreach Campaign
www.distilled.net | @RobOusbey
Categories: Link Building, Content, Business
Ian Lurie | Portent | Making Your Pitch: Writing Clear, Compelling Proposals
Categories: Link Building, SEO, Local Search, Business, Social Media
Jen Lopez | SEOmoz | Utilizing Social Media for Customer Acquisition & Retention
Categories: Social Media
Wil Reynolds | SEER Interactive | Chasing Algorithms: Think Deviously, Act Angelic, and Never Get Hit by a Penalty
www.seerinteractive.com | @wilreynolds
Categories: SEO, Mobile, Content
Mike Pantoliano | Distilled | CRO & SEO – Better Together
Categories: CRO, Analytics, Content, Business
Annie Cushing | SEER Interactive | Establishing a Framework for SEO Audits
www.seerinteractive.com | @anniecushing
Categories: SEO, Analytics
Stephen Pavlovich | Wish.co.uk | How to get Attention, Links and Sales for a Scrappy Start-Up
www.wish.co.uk | @conversionfac
Categories: Business, CRO, Content, Social Media
Eytan Seidman | Oyster.com | Content Strategies that Work
www.oyster.com | @eytanseidman
Categories: Business, Content
David Mihm | GetListed.org | The Need to Know of Local SEO
www.getlisted.org | @davidmihm
Categories: Local Search
Lexi Mills | Distilled | Leveraging PR to get Big Links
www.distilled.net | @leximills
Categories: Content, Link Building, Analytics
Mike King | iAcquire | Reinclusion Afterlife
Categories: Content, Social Media, Business, Link Building
Ben Wills | Ontolo | Concepts and Practices of Efficiency, Scale and Value
Categories: SEO, Business
Mat Clayton | mixcloud.com | Marketing Hacks
www.mixcloud.com | @matclayton
Categories: Business, Social Media
Cindy Krum | MobileMoxie | How to Win at Mobile SEO
www.mobilemoxie.com | @suzzicks
Categories: Mobile, Business
Todd Friesen | Salesforce.com | Penguin Penalties: Diagnosis and Recovery
www.searchfanatics.org | @oilman
Categories: SEO, Link Building, Content, Analytics
Will Critchlow | Distilled | Head to Head – Inbound Marketing on a Shoestring Budget
www.distilled.net | @willcritchlow
Categories: Link Building, SEO, Analytics, Content
Rand Fishkin | SEOmoz | Head to Head – Inbound Marketing on a Shoestring Budget
Categories: Content, Analytics, SEO, Link Building, Social Media, CRO
SEO
- Google is making it harder and harder for SEO’s. Over 500 updates to Google’s algorithm in the past year. – Duncan Morris
- The new purpose of SEO is to build trust with your users. If you build an audience that trusts you, you won’t have problems with updates – Duncan Morris
- Not one thing has changed in the last ten years if you aren’t chasing the updates – Duncan Morris
- Don’t file a reconsideration request until you really have to – Ian Lurie
- A site has to do some diligence before disavowing links – but she supports link disavow because old style reconsideration requests didn’t really work. – Annie Cushing
- It’s hard to make a sell to do Real Company Marketing when all the crap stuff works, it’s a lot easier to get real buy in now to do real marketing. Especially since Penguin. – Annie Cushing
- The initial idea behind Penguin was just to Scare websites. The SERPS after penguin weren’t that great but most brands won’t take the risk now of doing grey link building. – Annie Cushing
- Europe wasn’t hit as much by Panda because the nature of their market is different (it’s much smaller) and therefore the content farm model didn’t neccessarily work. Google’s webspam team is English centric. – Will Critchlow
- Google is looking to replace search results for Cars, Credit Cards and other keywords that they feel they can provide a better experience for with their own results. – Dan Shapiro
- Marketing has always been about persuading people, but for some reason some people consider SEO to be manipulating spiders…instead of persuading people. – Wil Reynolds
- 242 Google changes since April – Wil Reynolds
- No one at this conference has PHDs (except for one guy who raised his hand). No one is going to outsmart googles 1800 PHDs – Wil Reynolds
- 4 Facts about Google patents (and why you shouldn’t worry about figuring out how to game them) – Wil Reynolds
- #1 – they may never implement it – Wil Reynolds
- #2 – if they do, it could be 8 years from now – Wil Reynolds
- #3 – if it doesn’t work they’ll yank it – Wil Reynolds
- #4 – surfacing quality content – Wil Reynolds
- Every algorithmic change is designed to surface quality content – Wil Reynolds
- Quality assets are how you protect yourself – Wil Reynolds
- Use UberSuggest – Wil Reynolds
- 1 reason to follow ranking algorithms – protect yourself from affiliate/partner risk – Wil Reynolds
- Don’t pay attention to algorithm changes, pay attention to SERP display changes and how they affect your business – Wil Reynolds
- Your best protection against algo updates is Real Company Stuff – Wil Reynolds
- The algo changes of today are more like a swinging pendulum – it’s like a pengulum that comes back again and again. – Wil Reynolds
- Most common issues that lead to index bloat are “borked internal linking” & “internal search result pages” – Annie Cushing
- Main causes of indexed page bloat: borked internal linking, search results pages, ecommerce parameters (sorting options) and faceted navigation – Annie Cushing
- Bing only tolerates 1% dirt in a sitemap, after 1% dirt they don’t trust it – Annie Cushing
- Annie wrote a very easy to use post on how to use regex – Annie Cushing
- Screaming Frog is the #1 site audit tool – screaming frog is a create resource to look at sitemaps and find dirt – Annie Cushing
- Make sure that your sitemap files are submitted in Webmaster Tools (both Google and Bing) – Annie Cushing
- Bing has a much harder time getting pages and full sites indexed – Annie Cushing
- Loss of valuable links can come from homepage that 302s, pages with links that 404, pages that 500 – Annie Cushing
- Use screenshots in your audits since your words may not make sense to everyone that reads it, especially one that gives URLs for the screenshots
bit.ly/audit-post for a list of 300 tips, tools and checklists for performing audits – Annie released this post during the conference. – Annie Cushing - Bing is not as good at indexing URLs, Google got much better since caffiene – Annie Cushing
- Take ______ of your _______ sites on a _____ basis to see what new features have rolled out and if you can see spikes in _____ etc. and then _______ to see what they did that day on a _______ basis – Ben Wills from Keep it Real
- Give embed code for ________, don’t just give the _______ – use the _________ as your __________ instead of putting _____ below that – Todd Friesen from Keep it Real
- ______ that aren’t ______ for ________ and are just at the ______ perform better – Mike Pantoliano from Keep it Real
- Use a _________ from a _______ test to show clients how they match up to competitors – Annie Cushing from Keep it Real
Use __________ to import a __________ and clean it up and export the good one – Annie Cushing from Keep it Real - Do not submit a reconsideration request if you have been hit by Penguin – Todd Friesen
- Cannibalizing your own stuff sucks – Make sure that the right landing page is the one that ranks – Rand Fishkin
- If you’ve been hit by Penguin and you can’t get rid of those links, then use the disavow tool – Ian Lurie
- The disavow tool is the last resort – Ian Lurie
- Links disavow tool is a good thing because it helps business remove shady links that prior SEO agencies have built. For example, if you by a domain and it has crappy links that you can’t get rid of. – Ian Lurie
- Disavow is a very “Matt Cutts-ian” name – Will Critchlow
- Penguin and Panda has not affected black hat link building at all since the game has always been churn and burn tactics – Will Critchlow
- Penguin has dramatically changed the grey area especially for brands, etc. the blackhats are still doing their thing but the clients in the middle ground are affected more. – Will Critchlow
- Germany is still big on low quality directories, spun article marketing and blog comment spam. – Will Critchlow
- Outreach = Prospecting > Contacting > Communicating > Conversion – Rob Ousbey
- Priorities for Outreach – Build Relationships, Get Coverage, Acquire Links – Rob Ousbey
- If you aren’t doing outreach as yourself, then you are losing out on the networking opportunity – Rob Ousbey
- Help your outreach team learn more about the brand and consumers. If they have a good understanding of the brand they can do a much better job. – Rob Ousbey
- Avoid PageRank Magpies – don’t judge opportunities just on DA – look at the relevancy as well – Rob Ousbey
- When doing PR and outreach, make sure to understand your real audience – Rob Ousbey
- Outreach is very similar to online PR. There’s a huge amount that SEO’s can look from PR people. – Rob Ousbey
- Pre-outreach is a great way to get buy-in from relevant sites and individuals, but it can also help guide the design of the content – Rob Ousbey
- People doing outreach have a great sense of what’s going to work for a site as far as getting approved – content planners should communicate with outreach team – Rob Ousbey
- Treat bloggers/webmaster like people instead of only link building opportunities – “bloggers are people too” – Rob Ousbey
- Use Facebook and/or Reddit to find the target audience to line up outreach opportunities and build relationships – Rob Ousbey
- Don’t use the term link building or SEO while doing outreach. Use something like “PR” or “digital marketing” instead. – Rob Ousbey
- If you aren’t doing outreach as yourself, then you are losing out on the networking opportunity – Rob Ousbey
- Target guest blog opportunities using Facebook ads (or LinkedIn ads – Will Reynolds tweeted this tip during the conference). For example, you can target fashion bloggers over the age of 18. – Rob Ousbey
- Distilled spent $70 and got two good leads through Facebook from bloggers who are willing to accept guest posts. – Rob Ousbey
- Conversion straight to links – look at this awesome thing I found. If bloggers feel like they discovered something themselves, they are more likely to want to share it – Rob Ousbey
- Sometimes people _______ the link when they link to you and link to the _____domain name – find those sites and get the ______. Use your ________ to see what people have searched for and develop the list of _______. Then use ________ and then do the _______to contact those sites and get them ______. – Wil Reynolds from Keep it Real
- You should strive for your first 4 or 5 top anchor text variations to be branded terms before non-branded terms are coming up. – Wil Reynolds
- Making a story real, really helps it sell – Lexi Mills
find an idea that worked before and redo it – you don’t always need a brand new idea – Lexi gave an example of an alien in a jar that was copied from a previous story about a dragon in a jar (or vice versa). – Lexi Mills - If it’s feasible, use the domain when referencing a client so that it’s easy to ask for the link afterwards – Lexi Mills
- Ask to be credited with a link – Lexi Mills
- When pitching a locally or regionally relevant outreach story, make sure to include the location in the email subject – Lexi Mills
- Use the word byline instead of the term guest post – Lexi Mills
- Sites that use a paywall get a lot of readership, so don’t skip the idea just because of the loss of SEO value – Lexi Mills
- B2B coverage and proof can lead to better success with B2C once you have the credibility built – Lexi Mills
- When using surveys, get a minimum of 2,000 results or you may run into troubles pitching the story for lack of respondents – Lexi Mills
- Getting on the phone increases results by about 70% over just email, plus you get more direct feedback. – Lexi Mills
- Try to include your clients domain name in the article. If they’ve already written you clients domain name in the article, you’re more likely to get a link – Lexi Mills
- Byline vs guest post – When going after high level stories, tell them you want to pitch a byline (this is PR terminology) – A byline is exactly the same as an opinion based guest post – Lexi Mills
- Newsdesks are helpful – if in doubt send your request to the newsdesk and they will send it to the right person – Lexi Mills
- Stop creating patterns with your link building – Low level guest posting that uses duplicate bio descriptions will be axed by Google soon. – Mike King
- Linkdex categorizes the types of links a domain has pointing to it – Todd Friesen
- Organize your links so that you can scrub out what you need to: dump networks; reach out via email, phone, whois; duplicative content; and track all of your efforts/results – Todd Friesen
- Once you have done all of the work to get things cleaned up and removed, only then can you submit a reconsideration request – Todd Friesen
- Reconsideration request rules: Full Disclosure and Full Documentation: list of links, methods of contact, dates of outreach, etc. – Todd Friesen
- And only at the last, last, last resort should you disavow links – Todd Friesen
- Penguin means that you have a higher percentage of bad stuff than good stuff. So if you do more good stuff you can bring your rankings back. – Todd Friesen
- Go make yourself an alien baby and get 10,000 links! – Todd Friesen
- If you have been hit by penguin, don’t forget that you need to continue with your day to day and continue to do good things and don’t just focus on fixing the bad – Todd Friesen
- Google is using the public as their personal Mechanical Turk with the disavow tool. – Todd Friesen
- Sitewide links are not a good strategy anymore (obviously some exceptions apply with sister companies) – Todd Friesen
- In reference to anyone doing negative SEO – you’re only doing that because you’re not good enough to do the rest of it. – Todd Friesen
- Sometimes it’s better to do SEO on someone else’s site – pay attention to great news pieces on your brand and promote them – Rand Fishkin
- Co-citation may be the next anchor text – when you search for “backlink analysis” SEOmoz ranks because others mentioned the kw on the page when they linked to SEOmoz. – Rand Fishkin
- Siri and Apple are Google’s biggest threat in search simply because they have the platform and devices, not because they are necessarily good at search – Ian Lurie
- For local businesses, you can __________ as a business, so attach those __________ consistently on ___________ like _________ to improve your business’ visibility – David Mihm from Keep it Real
- Leave a _____ as a ________ and you can promote that easily as ___________. This will keep your ________ at the top (and a link to your business) – David Mihm from Keep it Real
- #1 need to know – 30% of all searches have local intent – number is directly from Google and Bing
- 50% of mobile searches are local in intent
- 10 packs started showing up in 2008
- In 2009, generic search terms deemed to have local intent started showing 10 packs
- Mike Ramsey wrote a great blog post on SEOmoz about the Venice local search algorithm update
- With blended search, you need to make sure that your organic and local strategies are in sync
- Google MUST be able to associate your website with your location in order to blend your +Local page.
- Name, Address and Phone number should be in HTML format on your website
- www.geositemapgenerator.com in order to create a KML file to upload to Webmaster Tools
- Schema and microformats not important for ranking, but are important for standing out in the search results
- Multi location businesses need a crawlable store locator with unique pages for each location.
- Multi location businesses should submit each location to Google+
- Embedding a MyPlaces map is the ideal way to include your location within a map on your website
- The over/under on decent, non-spam, non-directory links a typical SMB is likely to have is 3.6.
- Branded anchor text is also very important for local search, not just with SEO
- Location prominence = “A highest score associated with the documents referring to a business”
- Do a search for site:.edu Boston sponsors or site:.org Boston sponsors to find locally relevant and valuable links and citations
- Larger companies with many listings should get a local scent by leveraging internal linking, leveraging the corporate blog, leveraging social channels, hosting events and sponsorships at a local level (using individual location pages)
- In a multi location business, links from local resources and sponsorships should be to the location page, not the homepage
- NAP +W = Name, Address, Phone Number and Website
- Big 3 data providers are Localeze, infogroup and Acxiom
- Apple Maps get their data provided primarily from Localeze, Yelp, Acxiom, Tomtom and OpenStreetMap
- Finding niche citations CAN be the differentiating factor for SMBs
- Mine your existing links to see if you can get citations
- Bonus tip for getting citations for large companies: job listings
- Hospitals are great for getting niche citations as they will list local businesses as a resource to their guests
- whitespark.ca is a great paid tool to find niche citations
- Use Google Mapmaker in order to clean up old or incorrect listings
- Claim over an old listing instead of submitting a new listing when changing addresses
- Make sure to update the 3 major data providers before going to individual listings
- Reviews on +Local are slightly more important than they used to be
- it is important to diversify the places that you are getting reviews, don’t just focus on one
- Keywords in reviews for both long tail and head terms
- Power of the reviewers is increasing as a factor
- Google is not using Yelp reviews in part of it’s algorithm
- Sentiment in reviews is most prominent for restaurants, especially after their purchase of Zagat
- “At a glance” terms can be pulled from both reviews and non-traditional blog posts on completely non-local related websites
- In terms of getting reviews, segment customers with Gmail addresses and invite them to review you on Google
- Consider the ease of leaving a review for someone without an account by suggesting Yahoo and CitySearch
- Incorporate feedback into the everyday process
- Reviews from the Yelp elite definitely skew the rankings and ratings on Yelp
- Topsy is a good tool to find Yelp elite reviewers
- “title=”Elite 2012″” Portland site:yelp.com/user_details – use this search term to find Yelp elite reviewers in Portland
- Create a Twitter dashboard using Hootsuite or something along those lines and develop a relationship with the Yelp elite
- Don’t just offer a discount or free meal to the Yelp elite – can get your listing banned
- Use Followerwonk to isolate people that are following both the Yelp and Google Local Community managers in a specific city
- Get the categories squared away on Google Places first and then Google +Local next since they don’t display them all like before
- Keyword research is best done with Google suggest and related searches at the bottom of search results
- Can use Google trends to drill down to regional and city level data to compare trends for various terms
- Do NOT use local tracking phone numbers
- Rankings not ideal to track for local simply because the display results change so frequently
- whitespark.ca has a ranking tool for local results – best used to show magnitude visually and not the exact ranking number changes
- Overcoming centroid bias – pay attention to the outliers to find out what those companies are doing that aren’t right at the city center
- In order to compete in a tough market try to get at least one citation from a .edu or .gov
- Foursquare definitely counts as a citation, but it’s unclear if number of checkins or velocity of checkins is any factor. Tips or reviews for a business do carry sentiment and are a better focal point than checkins.
- First things first: you have to optimize social sharing so you can further the opportunity – Jen Lopez
- Basics – optimize social sharing widgets on your site – Jen Lopez
- Use Followerwonk – Jen Lopez
- Use Simply Measured – A lot of info about your social data – Jen Lopez
- Show some data (and then make it really easy to share) – Jen Lopez
- Read the Noob Guide to Internet Marketing – get it for a tweet – pay with a tweet/share – Jen Lopez
- Make people tweet your link to download a report – generate your report by tweeting. – Jen Lopez
- Use social proof – Jen Lopez
- You can connect your Google+ and Google AdWords to increase CTR – Jen Lopez
- Images do really well on Facebook – Jen Lopez
- You can pay to promote your posts on Facebook – SEOmoz does this and it works well for important posts. – Jen Lopez
- Try something new and measure the difference in the results. – Jen Lopez
- Use social sign in to make it easier for people to use – Jen Lopez
- Make sure your social contact information is available on your contact page – Jen Lopez
- Sometimes you have to take it off social. Take stuff offline when you need to – sprout social sent @jennita cupcakes and made a lasting impression. – Jen Lopez
- Empower your social media manager to make decisions and take actions before the opportunity is lost. Don’t make them have to get approval for everything. – Jen Lopez
- There’s no one single best time to send/publish across all industries. Don’t follow the data other people provide, test what works best for YOUR site. – Jen Lopez
- If you are tweeting something multiple times, make each post unique instead of saying the same thing 3 times. – Jen Lopez
- Use LinkedIn to post blog posts as well – not just Twitter/Facebook/Google Plus – Jen Lopez
- If you are posting a news mention or blog post on multiple social sites, use a different message best suited for each one (i.e. Facebook vs. Twitter) – Jen Lopez
- You should be where YOUR people are, not just where people are – Jen Lopez
- Talk to people like people and try to help them when dealing with negativity – Jen Lopez
- Don’t use sponsored tweets or sponsored Facebook posts in a “douchey” way. You know when you’re being “douchey”. – Jen Lopez
- Tag people on Google + that might like your post. G+ makes this easier than Facebook or Twitter. – Jen Lopez
- LinkedIn groups are awesome – a lot of people like to ask questions on LinkedIn – Jen Lopez
- Get your social mechanisms in place so that you can leverage the sharing opportunities – Stephen Pavlovich
- Figure out who is the ideal person to seed your “product”. It should be someone that is naturally a good fit for promoting the product based on their interests (and followers). – Stephen Pavlovich
- As soon as you get seed credibility, repitch to other celebs – Stephen Pavlovich
- Push on social media (advertise) and scale with services like buzz stream. – Stephen Pavlovich
- If you can’t sell to someone due to geographic constraints, find another way to convert them (i.e. social connection and promotion) – Stephen Pavlovich
- Don’t post to _______ from _______ – lowers your ______ – Jen Lopez from Keep it Real
- Use _________ to find out what people are talking about and ________ – Jen Lopez from Keep it Real
- _____________ created a tool for ________ to find the best folks to ______ for a specific search term. – Ian Lurie from Keep it Real
- Use Knowem.com to build all of your social profiles – Mike King
- New Facebook notifications have a 17% minimum CTR because they’re considered too spammy otherwise – Mat Clayton
- What, when and how frequently we share matters a ton. – Rand Fishkin
- A picture is worth 50%+ engagement – Rand Fishkin
- Flywheel of brand credibility – start out by publishing quality content on your own site and then leverage that content to get better guest post opportunities on other sites. – Rob Ousbey
- The CEO of sales force guest posts on techcrunch and Forbes – get company heads to write content – Rob Ousbey
- Understanding the purpose and the reason that someone is writing in a particular niche will help increase your opportunities – Rob Ousbey
- Use the relationships you have built within a niche during outreach for networking purposes – Rob Ousbey
- Product – have product available to use in one way or another – it’s remarkable how much it can affect success of an outreach campaign. – Rob Ousbey
- Add their own egg – if you can create “just enough work” you will get more buy in – if I give you a necklace and require a picture and at least 500 words. Have enough of an egg for them to feel useful. – Rob Ousbey
- Advertorial content usually fails – Rob Ousbey
- Anything with a competitive aspect helps drive further success. For example, Mac users donated more money than PC users. – Rob Ousbey
- If you’re looking for good content ideas, look in your own analytics – for example, Adam and Eve put out a post on which state buys the most sex toys – Rob Ousbey
- Alignment of Outreach with Content Planners and Creators will drive higher levels of success – Rob Ousbey
- Be prepared to reformat the creative – Rob Ousbey
- Having a plan and a calendar is vital to a successful campaign. Why now? Special event, seasonal creates urgency – Rob Ousbey
- Most of your ideas suck – worry about what other people want and what they are looking for – Wil Reynolds
- The better you get at policing your ideas the better your content is going to be – Wil Reynolds
- If you are going to do an awesome infographic, do it in HTML5 instead of graphics so that you can rank for the search terms you are writing about – Wil Reynolds
- Get inspiration, don’t just copy – Mike Pantoliano
- There are four types of content that get attention: topical, sexual, celebrity and controversy. – Stephen Pavlovich
- Gather quotes, media and “proof” – Stephen Pavlovich
- Create a new interesting product, create a fake product, spin an existing product – Stephen Pavlovich
- Follow up with a press release (include images and quotes, write the article for them) – Stephen Pavlovich
- If you have great images, use Google Images to find out instances of them being copied/stolen – Eytan Seidman
- Question to ask yourself: will someone take time out of their day to share this? – Eytan Seidman
- Photo fakeouts are extremely successful for Oyster.com – They compare doctored pictures that hotels provide on their sites to “real life” photos of the same hotels. – Eytan Seidman
- The Forbes 400 List (The richest people in America) – This is one of the most successful forms of content marketing – Eytan Seidman
- Your content marketing should produce things that only you are uniquely capable of doing – this is why photo fakeouts worked so well for oyster – Eytan Seidman
- Your content marketing should reinforce what is unique about you – Eytan Seidman
- Another successful content marketing strategy for Oyster.com: Bundle Breakdowns – Bundle breakdowns shows the real cost of travel bundles – this connects back to the oyster brand really well – Eytan Seidman
- Start out by focusing your content marketing on vertical niches (these are easier to get at first), then go broad once you have some examples and credibility to show. – Eytan Seidman
- Your content marketing has to be effectively branded – Oyster on huffington post has the oyster.com watermark on all photos. If a site doesn’t want to add your logo, don’t let them use your content. – Eytan Seidman
- How do you find people that produce content for you? Answer: Contracted employees who are in the field write the content – They have 75 people at different locations and all the content marketing efforts are produced in house. – Eytan Seidman
- One of the keys is starting with the smaller guys and then moving to the bigger guys – this Is how you get the bigger links – the rich get richer – Eytan Seidman
- Screencast your ________ and then make a _______ of it so that you can __________ to someone – Lexi Mills from Keep it Real
- Use _________to strengthen the quality of your ______ and get more ______- Mike King from Keep it Real
- Don’t hit enter on Google and instead see what people are looking for in order to get content ideas. – Wil Reynolds
- You can get experts to comment on your stories and get coverage – just email universities and ask. Most experts are willing to comment on your story if you ask. – Lexi Mills
- If trying to portray a celebrity for a video, find a lookalike on the cheap! – Lexi Mills
- Use pics of hot ladies – Your story will get more coverage with hot ladies. – Lexi Mills
- Minimizing risk – think of multiple angles for content in case someone else comes out with something similar or if the media doesn’t bite you can come out with your back up story. – Lexi Mills
- Use comparisons of size to relate-able objects like people or cars since people can more easily understand the magnitude of the data – Lexi Mills
- Don’t piggyback or news jack stories that aren’t happy, fun or cool – Lexi Mills
- Find trend data in your analytics and create a story relating the data to your industry – Lexi Mills
- Piggybacking – When you put together content that relates to something going on in the news. Some examples given were prince Will and Kate’s royal wedding pizza and Lego’s recreation of the Red Bull space jump – Lexi Mills
- Don’t jump on the back of a negative news story like Hurricane Sandy – these can lead to negative press. – Lexi Mills
- If you want to try and get a link inserted into a story ask a night editor. Night editors will do things that regular editors won’t do – don’t ask the journalist, they usually don’t know how to do it. – Lexi Mills
- Invest in content strategy, not just content marketing – Mike King
- Always have a crisis content strategy – Mike King
- File DMCA complaints on the duplicate content that other sites have stolen (you’d be amazed at how well they work) – Todd Friesen
- There are 2 kinds of “bootstrapped” marketing – #1 pay using something other than money or #2 spend someone else’s money – Will Critchlow
- ROI is a terrible metric for bootstrapped marketing since the amount you put in is not an appropriate divisor – Will Critchlow
- If you have traffic and no content, find someone who has content but no traffic and work out a deal – Will Critchlow
- Rapportive makes it easy to find email addresses – Will Critchlow
- Macy’s first Thanksgiving parade was just it’s workers – Will Critchlow
- The Tour de France was originally a promo for a newspaper (and it put their rival out of business) – Will Critchlow
- Get in other people’s emails – don’t be afraid to send cold emails – Will Critchlow
- True Love – It lasts and it can’t be bought – If you can get people to really love your content or service then they will stick with you through good and bad times – Rand Fishkin
- Empathy and creativity = great content – Rand Fishkin
- Innovation does’t always trump imrovement – Seomoz’s well known “Ranking Factors” post was not an original idea – It was an improvement on someone elses idea. – Rand Fishkin
- Even amateur graphics perform shocking well – you don’t need high end graphics – Rand Fishkin
- Being transparent with success works, but being transparent with failure works even better – Rand Fishkin
- Only sharing your own content is a recipe for disaster – Share other people’s stuff – Use the law of reciprocity – Rand Fishkin
- Real world interaction is greater than virtual world – Rand talked about his personal connection to Guinness beer after visiting the factory in Ireland once – now he drinks more Guinness – Rand Fishkin
- Make sure Deliverability isn’t holding you back – if more than 1% of your list reports you as spam, Mail Chimp will block you – Rand Fishkin
- Include only the good stuff, not the kitchen sink – the little things devalue the greater stuff – For example, putting spanish on your resume as an added benefit doesn’t really help if you’re applying for something not related to Spanish. It actually hurts your chances of getting hired. – Rand Fishkin
- Some sites have over 55% of their traffic showing as (not provided) – Duncan Morris
- Spend more time on the Landing Pages, Funnel Visualization and Goal Flow reports – Mike Pantoliano
- Avoid geek speak in your filter titles in analytics – Annie Cushing
- Always add an annotation to your analytics when making filter changes – Annie Cushing
- First of the month is a good day to do add a filter just to have easier MOM reporting – Annie Cushing
- Make sure PPC traffic is coming across properly so that it isn’t inflating organic traffic – Annie Cushing
- Use kwcid in a table filter to filter out ppc landing traffic in landing pages report – Annie Cushing
- ___________ can be used for ______ retargeting – Wil Critchlow from Keep it Real
- You can put your ________ pixel on your _______ websites – Wil Critchlow from Keep it Real
- Good Google Analytics functions for finding stories: Browser, Time of Day, Referring Traffic and Device – Lexi Mills
- Traffic for the sake of traffic isn’t a relevant metric, need to focus on the business return and conversions – Todd Friesen
- CRO is helping your site become Panda friendly since you are improving usage – Mike Pantoliano
- The ROI on SEO goes down over time. CRO is a great way to improve that ROI and add value to clients. – Mike Pantoliano
- Successful headline tests can be applied across all marketing mediums. You can apply “headlines that win” to different marketing initiatives – email, banner ads, etc. – Mike Pantoliano
- CRO is 80% experience (doing) and 20% tactical (reading) – The only way you get better at it is by doing. – Mike Pantoliano
- The not-secret secret of CRO is testing – Mike Pantoliano
- Build, measure and learn from your tests – a lot of people don’t do the learning step. Important to always ask – what did we learn from that test? – Mike Pantoliano
- Emphasize “You”, not “We” – Mike Pantoliano
- For every 1 second of load time, conversion drops 7% for REI – Mike Pantoliano
- If you aren’t running any promotions at the time, don’t show the coupon code box – Mike Pantoliano
- Be Human – stop it with the stock photography – Mike Pantoliano
- The first rule of CRO is to become the customer – Stephen Pavlovich
- If you are offering a promotion like free shipping over $50 purchase, pre-fill that code in the checkout for increased conversions – Stephen Pavlovich
- Wish.co.uk _________ after the ________ to see what people are thinking. For example, what almost _____________ your purchase? – Stephen Pavlovich from Keep it Real
- Use a headline to draw people in when you want them to fill out a form. – Stephen Pavlovich
- Use real people looking either at you or at what you want them to look at on the page – don’t use stock photos – Stephen Pavlovich
- Ranking #1 isn’t all it’s cracked up to be – video, authorship and other rich snippets really help you stand out and increase CTR – Rand Fishkin
- One of the great myth of CRO is that testing all the variants will produce greatest returns – survey and ask why do people buy and answer those comments – Rand Fishkin
- Mobile devices accounted for 41% of the Olympic coverage data consumption – Duncan Morris
- Responsive design is very important since mobile traffic accounts for a ton of the social traffic – Wil Reynolds
- Google now has a preference for responsive design as opposed to separate mobile pages – Cindy Krum
- Primary mobile site design options: responsive design, mixed solution (RESS), separate mobile pages – Cindy Krum
- Responsive design is far less taxing on Google’s resources – Cindy Krum
- Responsive design is harder to target mobile specific keywords with one set of content since it’s all on the same URL – Cindy Krum
- By using rel=alternate and rel=canonical to reference desktop and mobile versions of pages, you can retain the desktop ranking value in mobile searches – Cindy Krum
- DUST = Duplicate URL Same Text – make sure the URLs on both versions of sites are the same, including trailing slashes – Cindy Krum
- redbot.org to show site code as it downloads – Cindy Krum
- 50% of consumers watch TV whilst browsing the web on a different screen – Duncan Morris
- Don’t do anything important (like launch a big update or new website) at midnight. You’ll be up all night fixing it. – Dan Shapiro
- Believe in luck – Dan Shapiro
Fish in deep water – the kind of connections that move your biz forward are impossible to predict but you can control when and where they happen. – Dan Shapiro - Triage quickly – know when to move on to the next set of conversations at conferences and events – make the best use of your time. – Dan Shapiro
- Learn the one, magic phrase – How can I Help? If you think from this angle, it will come back around to you. – Dan Shapiro
- Getting “buy in” from your client/boss makes the job so much easier – Rob Ousbey
- One of the first things you get when you get “buy in” from clients/boss is more budget – Rob Ousbey
- Flywheel of success = Good results > they like you > more buy in > you get more access – Rob Ousbey
- Kids are nature’s way of teaching us to write great proposals – they always ask “why?” – Ian Lurie
- You have to talk about Why you do what you do, then you have to parallel the why with everything you do. why=value. If you can get How and Why in sync, then that’s where you can really win – Ian Lurie
- Read “start with why” by Simon Sinek or at the very least watch his TED Talk.
- Active voice should be used whenever possible. – Ian Lurie
- Use you, we and our instead of talking about “the client” or “your website”. “If YOU blank, then we’re you’re agency. if YOU blank the we’ve got a blank for you.” – Ian Lurie
- Illustrate the process well instead of using ordered or numbered lists – Ian Lurie
- All things you do in a proposal can enhance or contradict the why – Ian Lurie
- User PowerPoint (or a similar software) to do all proposals. Microsoft Word makes you put a lot of words on a page. PowerPoint makes you consolidate and use only the important info. – Ian Lurie
- Be careful of overusing stock photos. Use services like iStockPhoto or original pictures instead. – Ian Lurie
- The person reading your proposal will find a way to screw it up, so use PDF to retain how you want it to look – Ian Lurie
- Use eye contact in your writing style. i.e. “If YOU think what YOU do matters, etc” – Ian Lurie
- Build imputed value – Ian Lurie
- Use your autoresponders to pitch your “Why?” and reinforce your message – Ian Lurie
- Silence does not mean all is well – stay in touch – Ian Lurie
- RFP’s kill the “why?” – Ian Lurie
- Use data sparingly and well – don’t send giant keyword lists or stuff that is overwhelming – Ian Lurie
- Do talk about ROI but just don’t lead with that. Start with explaining the WHY first. – Ian Lurie
- Distilled uses toggle as their internal time tracking tool – Mike Pantoliano
- Having a good domain makes your site much more linkable – Stephen Pavlovich
- punch above your weight – focus on your domain name – they spent 10K on wish.co.uk and it was by far the best decision they made. The domain name commands respect right away. – Stephen Pavlovich
- Eighty percent of success is showing up – Stephen Pavlovich
- Prepare your server for craziness – Stephen Pavlovich
- Start with the goal in mind, work backwards – Stephen Pavlovich
- Hotel research has $50 billion of market capitalization, but lacks innovation – Eytan Seidman
- Oyster.com is equivalent to the CNET of hotels – They offer high quality reviews of hotels – Eytan Seidman
- Insist that the ______________ are included in company meetings and dinners. Send an additional _______ to that group to get your work done _____ and ______. – Todd Friesen from Keep it Real
- By default, ________ is checked when setting up _________ – uncheck the box to save money – Cindy Krum from Keep it Real
- ______ your ads to show your address when your ________ and your _______ when someone is ____________ – Cindy Krum from Keep it Real
- Ask “________________?” when talking to clients – Ian Lurie from Keep it Real
- Always monitor your reputation and know your opponent – Mike King
- Respond promptly when negativity does arise – Mike King
- Don’t lean on other brands – Mike King
- Focus on what made you great – Mike King
- Fix whatever the problem is from the inside out – Mike King
- Omit needless work and needless time spent – Ben Wills
- Identify resources that are distractions – Ben Wills
- Identify efforts that aren’t yielding results and aren’t investments – Ben Wills
- Identify where time is unnecessarily spent – Ben Wills
- Know thyself – spend a lot of time figuring out what you and your business are really good at – Ben Wills
- Know they customer – Help them with their threats, obligations and opportunities – If you can help them in one of those 3 areas then they will work with you for a long time. – Ben Wills
- Search for “Jason Freid Curate” – Jason has a great TED talk about curation – The key to the process is figuring out what to keep out, not what to put in – Ben Wills
- The purpose of marketing is to increase the sales conversion rate. – Ben Wills
- Design your culture to make your companies value obsolete every 12 months – keep innovating – Ben Wills
- Users have 3 known states: active, inactive and dead – Mat Clayton
- Users go inactive when they get stale and active when they are resurrected – Mat Clayton
- User accounting = actives + new + resurrect – stale – die – Mat Clayton
- Find a way for your users to do your marketing for you – Mat Clayton
- Little known - @distilled had a negative SEO attack launched against it. Lots of bad links, no effect. We won’t disavow. #searchlove – @dohertyjf
- How often do you use “disavow” in daily conversations #stuffgooglesays #searchlove – @JLBraaten
- It will be interesting to see what Google does with the disavow data in the coming months @willcritchlow #searchlove – @mackfogelson
- @jennita Wait, so we’re NOT supposed to drink every time they say “disavow?” Oops #SearchLove – @JoelD_SEO
- Google created an ecomony that caused the issues we are experiencing with links @willcritchlow #searchlove – @mackfogelson
- My very own Duck of Awesomeness. http://yfrog.com/nvuv6luj #searchlove – @amykelinda
- Building serendipity is really about making friends and seeking to help others. Great mantra for life as well. #searchlove – @dohertyjf
- Now @distilled prefers to do outreach on behalf of themselves (as the agency), not the client. Helps to scale. #searchlove @RobOusbey – @mackfogelson
- @juliantrueflynn tweets are good for engagement #searchlove – @iamdchuk
- Answer this: we are in business because we believe that…..#searchlove @portentint – @mackfogelson
- #Searchlove ”Great marketing can save the world…” -@portentint (especially if you have a TARDIS) – @RyanGPhx
- Imputed value – sum total of details around an experience – will reinforce value. Does how = why? That’s when you win. #searchlove – @jessweiss
- If you can get the how to parallel the why, that’s when you’re gonna win. The stuff in your proposal’s gotta match #searchlove @portentint – @mackfogelson
- If you’re going to use the word “suckage,” why not put it in the proposal and get it out of the way? #SearchLove – @JLBraaten
- Use data sparingly and well. Don’t get in between the reader and what you’re trying to help them understand #searchlove @portentint – @mackfogelson
- The best TED talk I’ve ever seen. “Start With Why.” If you’re in marketing, take the time to watch this -http://www.startwithwhy.com/Learn/LearningLibrary.aspx?control=ViewGalleryPhotos&HideLink=1&GalleryID=10&photoID=25&cat=1 … #searchlove – @dohertyjf
- Dont use a proposal to get in the door, use a proposal to start a relationship. @portentint #searchlove #sales #Searchlove – @modelrania
- Tip: with social media, you don’t have to tell people all the things all the time #searchlove @jennita – @mackfogelson
- “I don’t really like that Facebook makes me pay 4 people who already like my page to see my sh*t.” #truth #edgerank @jennita #searchlove – @modelrania
- “This is link earning, not link building” #Searchlove Conference Live Blog – Day 2 http://goo.gl/kU6g6 #SEO #linkbuilding @distilled – @RightHatSEO
- We’re so plugged in we forget to take things offline and do something amazing for them. Little things add up. @jennita #searchlove – @shinheeson
- From @jennita - people send super angry tweets at OSE or@SEOmoz & when she gives them a personal response they’re calmed #searchlove – @adammelson
- Directories and articles cannot kill a quality site #rcs #searchlove @wilreynolds – @mackfogelson
- @wilreynolds: Best protection against algo updates? Quality content.#searchlove – @rpboots
- Display changes in SERPs – that’s where you can find golden opps, or find KWs Google already dominates @wilreynolds #searchlove – @JHTScherck
- 19/20 top website results for Wil Reynolds are for @wilreynolds. 7/7 image results are for the model Wil Reynolds #searchlove – @adammelson
- Sweat the small stuff, test the big stuff. Make things easy, you know, for the customer. #searchlove @MikeCP – @mackfogelson
- #SearchLove is happening across the hall from “Recent Advances in Humanized Mice: Advancing the Development of an HIV Vaccine.”#perspective – @kellereno
- Use lots of scrennshots in your audits. It will help to walk the customer through the data. #searchlove @AnnieCushing – @mackfogelson
- The Best SEO Audit checklist - http://buff.ly/SQ6qg9 by@AnnieCushing #searchlove – @wilreynolds
- Don’t ask devs to 301 redirect all the 404′s – you’ll make enemies, only look at the pages that get GOOD traffic#searchlove – @wilreynolds
- http://Wish.co.uk was purchased for only $10,000. That bought a lot of trust #Searchlove – @fairminder
- Try a benefit bar immediately below the nav that includes 3-4 key reasons why someone would choose your company over competitors #searchlove – @mackfogelson
- Venice rocked results harder than Penguin. Since Venice, the whole screen is being dominated by local @davidmihm #searchlove – @mackfogelson
- Rich snippets, not going to impact rankings. Will help CTR (10-20% increase personally) #searchlove #nodownside – @adammelson
- Keywords in reviews are really, really important. Really. #searchlove @davidmihm – @mackfogelson
- Proximity to searcher is important. See what you can Sherlock from the business that is furthest away & make changes #searchlove @davidmihm- @mackfogelson
- Tracking phone numbers: If you have 3, Google thinks u have 3 biz. Bad-Like splitting linkjuice #searchlove – @adammelson
- Sites behind pay walls can have more trust to them; help you build links from other sources easily. @leximills #SearchLove – @Sonray
- Find stories in your analytics! Create a trend stories based on what different groups of people are doing when. @leximills #searchlove – @agalluch
- I’ve not played around with http://brokenlinkindex.com/ until now. Two searches, two opportunities #searchlove @ipullrank – @adammelson
- @37Signals is getting a lot of attention at #searchlove - subscribe to their awesome blog http://ow.ly/f4jgA you wont regret it – @JHTScherck
- @willcritchlow: This is the royal wedding spoof video @leximills just mentioned: http://youtu.be/Kav0FEhtLug #searchlove” This was genius!! – @HudsonHorizons
- Just because you didn’t get hit by penguin….yet….doesn’t meant you won’t. You need to prepare @oilman #searchlove – @mackfogelson
- Panda was inevitable because eHow had 10 articles on How to Pour a Glass of Water @oilman #searchlove – @digsart
- Use Wavelength for MailChimp to find newsletters similar to your ownhttp://bit.ly/ReKk7p #searchlove – @iPullRank
- Local events work. Even for a web company. #searchlove@willcritchlow – @mackfogelson
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Taylor Cimala is the co-founder and Strategic Director here at Digital Third Coast based in Chicago. You can find Taylor on Twitter and Google+.
Taylor Cimala is the Strategic Director at Digital Third Coast, a Search Engine Marketing company based in Chicago. You can find Taylor on Twitter and Google+. Connect with Digital Third Coast on Google+.
