Search Elite – The New Search Conference

As the digital marketing conference season gets into full swing, you have probably purchased your tickets for the standard conferences already, but there is a new kid on the block – Search Elite.

Having attracted some of the best speakers in digital marketing, founders Craig Rayner and Jackie Bissell are looking to do something a little different to the conferences of old.

Speaking to Jackie about SearchElite, she was passionated about wanting to be different to what is currently going being offered by other conferences.

Jackie continued by saying “If I am taking time to visit a conference the key things I want to take from it are knowledge sharing, learning and networking.  Search Elite has been programmed to offer all of them.  To be able to spend a day with the experts in SEO/SEM discuss, make contacts and keep in touch with important changes within your industry are crucial to your job.”

This same passion ran through the conversations I had with some of the speakers I managed to talk to. They were also generous enough to answer a few questions about the first Search Elite and what attendees can expect from their presentations.

You can use the navigational links below to skip to certain speakers if you prefer:

• Gerry White
• David Iwanow
• Bas van den Beld
• Samantha Noble
• Jim Banks
• Judith Lewis
• Jono Alderson

Gerry White

How excited are you about speaking at the first Search Elite, and what are you expecting?

SearchElite has such a formidable lineup, it was a little daunting when I saw the rest of the speakers, knowing most of the personally I know this is going to be amazing, I know that I am going to be making so many notes, I love great conferences and this looks to be one of the best of 2017, so to be within this speaker selection is quite an honour.

Apart from your own talk, who are you most looking forward to seeing at Search Elite?

That is a hard one, I have seen Russel and Jono talk a lot, and typically make a point of going to see them, Judith is legendary, but I think I am going to have to say Jim Banks, my reasoning is simply that I haven’t actually heard him talk before but have read much of what he has written and his knowledge and experience is (and I hate to use the word twice) legendary.

Without giving too much away, what can attendees expect from your presentation?

When I first got into the wonderful world of SEO, websites were (or at least the ones I worked on) were fairly simple, table based layouts and simple images, the best way to show where we were vs where we are today is to watch the video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g . Today most of my clients are built on ever more complicated platforms which to get something in takes months to get something in, often by the time it is ready I will be want to change the original specs “scope creep”, because SEO has changed something new has appeared … Imagine being able to test something quickly in SEO before you ask developers to build it, imagine every time a developer says – no you can’t do that, you can ‘hack it in’.

So if I can hack in something that has SEO impact, is this a good thing, should I be trusted with this much power? Should everyone who has this access? Is your website as safe as you think it is, is the workflow as robust as it needs to be, and why the developers are looking terrified when I can demonstrate to them that I can just hack it on. If I can put a Konami Code onto TakeItOffline.co.uk in ten minutes, I can record every keystroke you make, with GDPR this is something that should rightfully terrify your IT team.

Critically three points, you can do awesome stuff with GTM, you probably shouldn’t be using it as a CMS and finally you should probably be aware of who else has access to this backdoor to your website.

What do you think is the biggest barrier for marketeers moving further towards GTM?

GTM isn’t as simple as most people would expect it to be and despite the messaging from Google and advocacy from people like myself, users still need a basic understanding of tags, JavaScript and the web to really get the most from it. This isn’t necessarily, I am grateful that people who have a good technical understanding should still be involved in deployment to a commercial website (if only to preserve security, https and making sure that users privacy isn’t compromised). Google have recently introduced workspaces and with publishing rights already there, it does feel like they are making strides in the right direction.

For most websites, a couple of days training can certain start to get you a long way with GTM, but as I say I think this is something that should have a technical pair of eyes.

Any tags that should be being implemented via GTM that are not?

A lot of what I am talking about is almost a last resort hack, or alternatively a way of testing something that would otherwise be costly. GTM is not a CMS, it is a JavaScript injector – so if there is a better way of doing something, I talk about doing it this way as a way of testing something before I try and get too many developers on the task.

My personal blog site has hacks layered on hacks, with a side portion of code, this isn’t how commercial sites should operate (it is probably not how my blog should work) but if you aren’t testing it somewhere you aren’t learning.

Many CRO tags modify the on page content, which if done using GTM often will result in the user seeing this content before the tag has managed to fire – this causes an odd flash, or if the content is of a different size, content can jump around the page, resulting in users clicking in the wrong location. I have also seen an increase in people blocking JavaScript, this is through plugins such as Ghostery, so nothing critical to a conversion.

One thing I have noticed increasingly is a lack of awareness of the tags deployed through GTM, theses should be audited regularly, are they still in use, are they up to date (if you are sending hits to a domain or worse executing JavaScript from an unknown source, you could be setting you and your users up for a world of issues).

The future of analytics is increasingly managed by tag management and this will open the doors for increasingly interesting CRO hacks and tools to be deployed…

[Tweet ” I love great conferences and this looks to be one of the best of 2017, so to be within this speaker selection is quite an honour. @dergal @thesearchelite @danielbianchini”]

David Iwanow

How excited are you about speaking at the first Search Elite, and what are you expecting?

I’m always excited to speak at new and upcoming events as there is often a lot of energy from the audience and there is not the usual roster of speakers. I love several of the existing conferences but I’ve found for growing my industry networks and finding new and interesting people to follow on Twitter new conference are often a better option if I have a limited budget for conferences. The other aspect which I like about Search Elite is that the ticket price makes the conference attractive to a larger range of folks who might not be able to spend £1-2k on tickets.

Apart from your own talk, who are you most looking forward to seeing at Search Elite and why?

I’d say Gerry White who is speaking on the topic of “using and abusing GTM” which is certainly a very interesting way to implement some SEO hacks with limited development support to test before rolling them out. Also interested to see what Jono Alderson who is speaking on AMP which is certainly something that is gaining traction for sites as a quick way to significantly increase the page load times along with some bonuses such as visibility in the Google AMP results widget. There are also some great speakers that always bring plenty of energy to stage such as Sam Noble and Judith Lewis that you have to ensure you catch their session.

Without giving too much away, what can attendees expect from your presentation?

So there should hopefully be some fairly actionable items that people could actually start to setup during my presentation if they wanted to…. but much of it is starting to encourage people to think more along the lines of capturing everything so you can do the analysis later if you need. There is a lot of basics you can setup today after reading this post if you really wanted to such as create custom alerts in Google Analytics if you don’t have the time or resources to check your Google Analytics account daily. Same thing around measuring the load time of your website, you made those recommendations to your developers last year to improve the platforms performance metrics but did it work, if you had of been tracking this you would have a years worth of data to measure the change.

How important do you think automation is going to be for marketeers, and how can they implement them easily?

Automation is key to doing a number of tasks that are time consuming or prone to data entry errors such as reporting. No-one likes to do monthly reporting as that’s wasted time, a SEOs time is better spent on analysis of the data and making recommendations for the upcoming months… think more about making actions based on data than just puking up Google Analytics data into an email. There is a lot of manual and repetitive tasks that most SEOs likely do daily, weekly or monthly but the best advice I ever received was from Brad Geddes of Certified Knowledge that said his team works to automate anything their team does manually more than once. So I’m not talking about the full automation of SEO such as your page titles need to have this keyword to rank that some platforms offer. My idea is more so along the lines of you have 30% of your page titles under-optimised and of those page titles that are under-optimised they are now receiving less traffic than optimised page titles, and this change to the code happened on the 3rd March which was linked to a platform release that broke a template.

[Tweet “There are also some great speakers that always bring plenty of energy to stage. @davidiwanow @thesearchelite @danielbianchini”]

Bas van den Beld

How excited are you about speaking at the first Search Elite, and what are you expecting?

I’m very excited to be speaking at the first Search Elite! When Jackie and Craig first told me about the plans, I knew they were on to something good. They don’t just want to create a new search conference. They really want to make a difference.

Apart from your own talk, who are you most looking forward to seeing at Search Elite?

They are all friends of mine, so I am looking forward to seeing them all :-). But if I have to choose one, it’s David Iwanow’s talk on “Automate or die”. I’ve been looking into a lot of automation recently, so am very interested in learning more about it.

Without giving too much away, what can attendees expect from your presentation?

I’m very excited about my talk. For many reasons. For one, I’m not doing it alone! I’ve been working on a great project the past year together with Daniel, who is a coach, a facilitator of change processes. Together we worked with a big Dutch Insurance company to get their staff to a higher level. It wasn’t just about sending knowledge. It was about embedding the knowledge in the organisation. I can only say: it was revolutionary!
I wrote about it here: http://www.stateofdigital.com/train-staff-job-get-real-results/
I’m bringing Daniel to London to join me on stage to talk about this. It will be awesome.

Digital Marketing is key to so many organisations, but there are many that fail at implementing it correctly. How can these businesses, big or small move ensure they start to implement things correctly?

What a coincidence, it’s what I will be talking about at the event! ;-).
Let me highlight a few things that I feel are most important:

• Firstly, you can’t do anything without buy-in from C-level. Support from management is crucial.
• Secondly it’s hugely important to know and agree on what you are trying to accomplish. Make sure everyone is on the same page.

 

Jono Alderson

How excited are you about speaking at the first Search Elite, and what are you expecting?

I’m really looking forward to it. There’s a really strong set of speakers, and I really like the agenda – the topics cover pretty much everything end-to-end, so I’m hoping to level up in a whole bunch of areas. This is the kind of lineup I’d want to attend to see, so it’s a privilege to be part of the mix.

Apart from your own talk, who are you most looking forward to seeing at Search Elite?

So hard to pick! If I had to choose, it’d have to be Gerry’s session on hacking SEO with WordPress and GTM – we’ve had a lot of pub talks about the kinds of things you can (but probably shouldn’t) do, so it’ll be really fun to see what he’s been up to. I like the sweet spot between SEO, Analytics and Tech, and this should tick all the boxes.

Without giving too much away, what can attendees expect from your presentation?

Some technical performance tips and tricks which you can try yourself, or use to beat up your developers. From database design to CSS flow optimisation, it’s going to get a bit geeky…

Though mobile first has been a focus for search engines for a while now, do you feel that enough companies and/or marketeers are giving it enough thought and why?

I think that many brands are treating it as just-another-thing that they have to think about, and aren’t really ready or equipped for. They still have broken websites, poor users experiences, slow pages, mountains of 404 errors, etc – and now we’re asking them to be multi-device, too!? In many cases, I think that the challenge is less of a technical one, and more about building a compelling business case which gets attention, sponsorship, and resource. Challenges with multi-device tracking and attribution make that hard, and obviously, most businesses have multiple (often competing) priorities with finite budget… Hopefully, Russell’s talk on multi-channel data might give people ammunition!