Live @ The Inbounder, London

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Today I am at the The Inbounder, London, live blogging the second instalment of a world tour that takes the conference setup by Gianluca Fiorelli, across the globe to Madrid, New York and Milan.

There are some great speakers on show today including:

Through the out the day I will be updating this post to bring you the key points of each talk, and the slides when they become available.

Tom Anthony – 3 New Techniques for the Modern Age of SEO

Tom Anythony talking about 3 New Techniques for the Modern Age of SEO – Image Courtesy of Kristen Baird @kristenbaird91
  • Best practice SEO doesn’t always fit every client, and you need to focus more on split testing.
  • Basic tests showed adding alt tags doesn’t necessarily have an impact on results
  • SEO split testing is different to traditional CRO A/B testing is user oriented. You basically put them in to separate buckets
    • You are unable to do this with SEO due to potential cloaking issues
  • Machine learning did as much in 2 months of working with Google Translate, as 200 engineers over the previous 10 years
  • Is content on category pages any good? Tests by ODN suggests that it had positive impact on one website, but a different website had a negative impact. This backs up the point that each website is different, and best practices doesn’t always work for all.
  • Does Google crawling Javascript have issues? Implementing a having a CSS fallback on Javascript enabled pages led to a 6.2% uplift in organic traffic.
  • Title Tag Test: Exact match search queries within the title tags saw and 8% negative impact. You’d expect this as what a user would enter in to the search is the question, and the results should be an answer.
  • Adding structured data to category pages provided an increase in 11% organic traffic for an eCommerce client.
  • SEO Reasons for using Machine Learning
    • ML Search Algo: we need ML to unravel it
    • IPAs, Apps, Smart Watches: too much data
    • Competitive Advantage: better insights, sooner
  • “Learn to drive, not to build the engine” when it comes to learning about Machine Learning. “If anyone asks you to learn ML then punch them in the face.”
  • Understand what categories Machine Learning can do for you.
  • FUTURE THINKING: Businesses are starting to think more towards a hub & spoke model with APIs being used to create their ecosystem.
  • What does this mean for SEOs? Invest in centralised analytics, to ensure you can plugin any type of channel/metric

[Tweet “”Learn to drive, not to build the engine” Good advice from @tomanthonySEO about Machine Learning”]

Kelvin Newman

Why Podcasting is the missing Piece n Your Inbound Strategy & How to Excel in Audio Content

Kelvin Newman trying to convince us about podcasting – Image courtesy of Steven Howe @stevenhowe
  • Why should you do podcasting? Well.. there are more people interested in podcasts than you’d imagine.
    • 24% of Americans listen to podcasts across the US
    • 14% increase growth year-on-year
    • 40% growth over the past two year.
    • More than half of all podcast listeners generally listen to 3 or 4 podcasts per week
    • Over a 5th of podcasters listen to six or more podcasts a week
  • Better to create a podcast that is shorter, but have more podcasts per month as frequency is important. This is due to 85% of podcasters listening to the majority of the entire feature, but having shorter but more will enable this to improve.
  • What do you need to create a good podcast.
    • Microphones
    • Interesting people
    • Stuff to talk about
  • You first 10 podcasts will be terrible, don’t be self conscious about it. You want to launch with a number of podcasts as they are more of a feed process than you’d expect.
  • Having a podcast with multiple people allows for you to have a conversation/debate which is a lot more useful to the user.
  • Finding podcasters within your industry and offering your time to get a spot on them, is a much better opportunity for you than guest posting.
  • To get your podcast out there, you need to produce a feed. These are two of the most basic options that you can do today.
    • The Serious Simple Podcasting – WordPress Plugin
    • Use your usual webhost
  • The main place to submit your podcast is to iTunes. It is worth getting your artwork right in multiple formats so that you will look great if you get on the feature list.

[Tweet “Podcast is not scary, you just need to keep at it. @kelvinnewman #TheInbounder”]

 

Olga Andrienko

User psychology and social media: Triggers that drive conversion

Olga Adrienko User psychology and social media: Triggers that drive conversion – Image Courtesy of Jon Myers @jondmyers
  • Research your competition and identify where you’re better than anybody else
  • Focus on these strengths and you’ll be unbeatable
  • Use RivalIQ to see how brands positioned themselves, and then used LinkedIn to identify the people behind the profiles. See how they react, engage and post.
  • 4 components of a good social media presence are:
    • Creativity
    • Freedom
    • Budget
    • Responsibility
  • You can do anything, but not everything. Use tools such as BuzzSumo / aHrefs to find out where different content types are being shared. If it is in one place, then just market there and not everywhere.
  • Be diverse in your feed, add visuals, tag people and celebrate your fans/followers.
  • Social Media posts with Screenshots that show data highlighted has the biggest impact for SEMrush.
  • Employees are you biggest asset. Ask them to share content or tag a few people below the brand’s target.
  • Fonts is an understate part of social media. Fonts speak a lot louder than we think they do.
  • Typefaces have personality. Typography – visual summary of your copy.
  • There are four ways that you can repurpose content such as user generated content, creating a recap post, create checklists and images for quotes to be share on your social media channels.
  • Having amazing content on social media is not enough, you need to network with your audience.
  • User TweetBinder to get all tweets for the event that you are at. Export to Excel, filter users by authority and engage with them afterwards
  • Use social media to listen to conversations, and respond with relevant information.
  • People are ready to buy products and services they see on social. Instagram ads work!
  • Embed your social media on to your website. People trust you, not social media.
  • Amplify your reach, by asking your audience to share when they have registered for your activities/bought your product.
  • Make all of your responses personal. Use the persons first name and not “you” or just the user handle.

Hannah Smith

Going down the rabbit hole – Chaos, Curiosity and Creativity

Hannah talk “Going down the rabbit hole – Chaos, Curiosity and Creativity” – Image Courtesy of Omi Sido @omisido

 

Hannahs’ talk was incredibly useful, but also really quick as she had ~240 slides so I have only managed to get a few key points written down. However, I do have the slides below which I recommend that you take a look at.

  • Find something that you love and build upon them to build something new.
  • Hannah recommends a book called “Steal like an artist” by Austin Kleon
  • Stealing can be bad, especially if you steal the graphics and do not adding anything new for the user. Steal responsibly
  • Figure out where you want to get coverage (5-10 sites), and see what content gets the most share.
  • Try to figure our why people share the content and not what they share.
  • Talk to human beings who care about the product, as if you don’t understand your audience, they will not understand your content.
  • We are all creative, it’s just that nobody talks about how hard it is to do.

[Tweet “”Just because you *can* steal doesnt mean that you should” @hannah_ba_banna #TheInbounder”]

 

Nichola Stott

9 Things We’re checking for a Mobile First Index

Nichola giving her talk “9 Things We’re checking for a Mobile First Index” – Image Courtesy of Henko Labs @henkolab
  • Nichola thinks this is the biggest single step change within our industry over the 20 years since Google.
  • Nichola thinks the index change will be in June 2018
  • This is the single biggest opportunity to get ahead of your competitors, who are generally already behind the curve.
    • 1. Check mobile agent/client handling – Make no assumptions, but check sample in a device lab. Have multiple mobile devices on hand to check mobile responsiveness
      • If it the website is responsive you have little to do, but do take a look at GA to check out behavioural analysis, commercial analysis, speed, UX content and journey.
    • 2. Speed/HTTP2
      • HTTP / 1.1
        • Head of line – resources
        • Priority queue – ‘educated’ guess
        • Queue held on client
        • Keep-alive – stated
      • HTTP / 2
        • Prioritised by type & context
        • Browser to server
        • Keep-alive enabled by default
    • 3. Speed / Front End Optimisation
      • Image optimisation is a biggest step change drivers in speed change
      • Use image spriting to help improve image optimising
    • 4. Tag Handling
      • Conduct a tag audit to analyse and compare any issues, provide recommendations to fix.
      • Use GTM to take tags out of inline code helps improve page speed.
    • 5. Structured Data
      • 20% of mobile searches are voice search
    • 6. Service Workers
      • Seek to solve biggest problem – no connectivity
      • Replacement to AppCache
      • Browser runs in the background
    • 7. URL Hierarchy / Ecosystem
      • Don’t rely on alternate /canonical to infer hreflang.
    • 8. Content Experience
      • Higher bounce rate on mobile, but it is difficult to compare between mobile and desktop.
      • Use words efficiently, whilst using natural language.
    • 9. Journey Experience
      • What is the point of the page.
      • Simple UX review and scoring system for top revenue driving landing pages / templates if wide-ranging ecommerce.
      • Use a scoring system to easily understand which pages or templates are working and which needs work.

Jono Alderson

Accelerate Mobile – Beyond AMP!

Jono Alderson talking about Accelerate Mobile – Beyond AMP! – Image Courtesy of Nichola Stott @nicholastott
  • Start to think about speed as a competitive advantage rather than a technical challenge, you can start to get some real good data.
  • Jono recommends that you read Barry Adams BrightonSEO presentation as a good resource to get started. https://www.slideshare.net/Badams/are-accelerated-mobile-pages-really-worth-it-google-amp-case-studies
  • For the most part, you are giving up the control of your own content even though there are lots of positives for moving to AMP.
  • Infrastructure & Network Optimisation
    • HTTPs and HTTP2 is the future of the way internet works. You will need to adopt it at some point, and from Jan 2018 Chrome will mark you down as insecure
    • HTTPs isn’t a binary thing. There are complexities that the the different SSL certificates bring and you need to be aware of what yours work.
    • HSTS – A better version of HTTPS – Check out hstspreload.org which will check your setup. This is for those that are committing to HTTPs.
    • Check out Fille Wisse awesome guide on HTTPS – online.marketing/guide/https
    • If you have adopted HTTPs but not HTTP2 then you have made your website slower. You need to do both to make them work better. You can only use HTTP2 if you have HTTPs. It is an easy thing to setup, speak to your Dev team as it takes 10mins.
  • Connection & Data Transfer
    • Images are the easiest win when speeding up your site.
    • Test CSS3 (draw dots rather than have images) vs images vs sprites vs encoding vs inlining
    • SRCSET is the only solution for managing image sizes/resolutions – More here
    • You can also use <picture> to support multiple formats
    • You can turn your basic images into data using base64-image.de – Please bare in mind that this may not be cached by the browsers on every page. There is always cons to the pros.
    • Using sprites has a bigger impact than using HTTPs / HTTP2, but can be a pain to manage.
    • WebP is a better format of JPG & PNG combined. More info can be found here. This is not very popular at the moment, but is becoming so. There is a fall back for those browsers that do not support WebP, just edit your HTaccess.
    • Better management of common errors – Make sure any 404s, old files are redirected as the server will still try to load them regardless.
  • Measurement
    • There is no metric for things such as ‘Speed’,  tools such as Google PageInsights, Pingdom, WebPageTest, are all nonsense. None of them actually test the speed of your website.
    • Look at New Relic & Server Density to help with speed measurement.

At this point Jono was told that he had 2 minutes left, so went into overdrive. Check out the slides from this point on.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t adopt AMP, but you should read their documentation and understand the trade-offs.

 

Kirsty Hulse

Content Marketing: How to work less and win more!

Kirsty Hulse “Content Marketing: How to work less and win more!” – Image Courtesy of Alison Parcell @AlisonParcell
  • Lesson 1: Find the absolute easiest route to the results you want
  • I believe that we need to start investing less in content marketing
  • Use the Hero, Hub, Hygiene model for your content marketing strategy
  • Things that help Kirsty with getting ideas
    • Change your environment – Go for a walk around the park
    • Keep a notepad by your bed
    • Use reddit for ideation
    • Already have ideas when you brainstorm
  • Avoid Idea Dilution – Pitch something insane but make sure you have some buy in from journalists and be on brand.
    • Pitch ideas in threes as you can get people to pick the one you want.
  • Use Pollfish for creating survey data for any data driven content. Keep the angle of the content piece light if you are using survey data, don’t target high focussed content as journalists no longer use it anymore.
  • Check out Amazon new releases as they are likely to be authors that are likely to be launching a book. Get in touch to see if they are interested in collaborating.
  • Partner with other companies – Come together as a group (SEOs) to help each other get the most from the outreach.
  • Don’t just give journalists a story, give them the data to support their story.

Russell McAthy

Using machine learning to forecast future sales, the SEO way!

Russell McAthy “Using machine learning to forecast future sales, the SEO way!” Image Courtesy of Mike Gracia @mikegracia_
  • All marketing will be a combination of programmatic, creative and data & analytics.
  • The biggest issues for SEOs is not Google, but ourselves and the inability to showcase success. SEOs need to talk about revenue & margin.
  • SEOs should be talking about CPAs as we all cost money, so we need to show return.
  • The more fluffy the content being created, the more the CPA is.
  • Getting Started in GA
    • Add goal values to each of the goals that you have setup, regardless of what it is. They are nominal values but comparative to each other.

Hannah Thorpe

Content Marketing for Watching Paint Dry!

Hanna Thorpe “Content Marketing for Watching Paint Dry!” – Image Courtesy of The Inbounder @TheInbounder
  • The majority of products that you work with a just not that interesting, but that doesn’t mean that the brand can’t be exciting.
  • We still make excuses for not writing content, but as an agency we still want to make money and therefore need to work in all sectors.
  • Why are you making content?
    • The metrics can be anything Traffic / Leads / Brand Reputation but they need to be agreed and bought into by all the team.
  • Know the audience
    • Who – Who are they, where do they spend their time, when are they searching.
    • What – What do they want, why are they searching, what will help them decide.
    • Use Yougov profile Lite to get some good data based on the governments data set. You can find it here.
    • Use Bloomberry to find a list of questions and answers for the search term/topic that you have entered.
    • Consider time to consume, platform being used, device and location.
  • Understand the use case
    • Sometimes buying is an experience
  • Don’t try to hard
    • If you are trend jacking, you should probably not.
    • Alliteration, Puns & Rhymes = No.

“The future’s bright the future is orange rugs”

Gianluca Fiorelli

The Alphabet of Google and what we have to expect next in search.

Gianluca Fiorelli “The Alphabet of Google and what we have to expect next in search. “Image Courtesy of Steven Howe @stevenhowe
  • If you categorise all the blog post on the Google’s Webmaster Blog from May 2016 – January 2017, they are all about Mobile.  This is because we are now talking about it. Since then its been about spam and safe browsing.
  • The patents & papers from Google are related to personalised search & content.
  • Natural language processing includes Rhetoric, Entity Search, Context and Personalised Search.
  • Google is buying companies that focus on Images, Video Influencers, App Link Sharing, AI Chatbots, Vocal Search, VR and Machine Learning. This gives us an idea of where they are going.
  • Google are starting to use tags in Image Search to enable you to filter within the search.

  • Do you keyword research and always remember the entities.
  • Look at GBoard as a new source of traffic. You can do a search whilst you are texting and share a link with other people.
  • Do not reduce your SEO strategy to focus on Google Suggest.
  • Star Wars does a really good job with architectural SEO and structured data which leads to the knowledge graph using their data and not Wikipedia.
  • Use safecont.com, an machine learning based platform that helps with you content and ranking.
  • Hypothesis for Machine Learning training set for internal linking optimisation
  • Use Algorithmia to create content such as meta descriptions for large websites that can be created in an automated way.

And that’s a wrap! It’s been a great day of presentations at The Inbounder, London. I hope that you found this roundup useful, and I look forward to attending the next one.

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