BrightonSEO – always worth it! The ideas you pick up from these SEO authorities is invaluable. Our clients demand cutting-edge strategies, and this is a great place to find them. And, it’s free entry. This year a 4-person team from Relevance met in sunny Brighton (NOT). Two came from our UK offices, two from our Monaco HQ; a meeting of minds. We were also treated with a John Mueller from Google interview on the main stage. He is a legend – it was so nice to tap right into Google him/herself. He was pretty Google and standoff-ish, but it was great to get some advice about the huge new mobile-first algo change.
Look, I know you don’t have time to spend all day reading waffle, and I don’t have much time to write pages of content about the hundreds of issues that came up during BrightonSEO……..so I have put everything down in bullet points. I have added the presentation notes where possible to if you want to dive down any particular vertical; that would be your best bet.
Here goes……
John Mueller – Google
What happens if there is less content on the mobile version and what can we do?
We are only indexing one version don’t worry about it.
What about hidden content on mobile version?
At the moment you can have hidden content, but we will see.
Should a company with low mobile traffic still give the same importance to mobile?
Yes – mobile is the future.
With so many changes happening – do they still know what is going on at Google?
Yes we have a huge and highly efficient team.
When can we expect a better Search Console?
Check the API there is a lot of good info in there.
Can you confirm the best way to deal with huge websites that have thin content & don’t change much?
- Robox.txt is a big hammer – can make sense for search pages, for others…noindex/nofollow, canonical
- The best way is test « sections » of the site and see what happens
Should we be proactive for disavow?
Yes take care of issues yourself but disavow is mildly dead.
Is Google Male or Female?
Neither.
Peter Watson-Wailes – Tough & Competent – Customer Experience Agency
A New Era for the Digital Agency
- Search Agencies have a problem
- Digital agencies are having a hard time
- CTRs are falling over time
- A lot of content is going out there but it isn’t that creative
- TV adds have been remarkable
- There has been some really creative, impressive stuff going on
- Digital Executives haven’t enough experience
- So……Only hire 5 year plus people?
- Or train people doe 18 months on fake clients before setting them loose?
- Clients want amazing customer experience at scale
- The scale is difficult as we don’t buy ads (organic)
- Do something nobody else is doing
- Start fighting for Ad Budget
- Kill dependency & foster creativity
- Get your young people to train for 18 months (but what if they leave)
- Don’t be Precious
- Go Big or Go Home
- The World doesn’t need another blog post
- Put something on the internet that has never been done! Doesn’t matter whether it is text, image, or video – People are obsessed with video ads
- Huge growth of Twitch?
- Create amazing experiences which build brands people are glad exist
Charlie Whitworth – Banc
Dealing With Tricky Development Resource
Slideshare.net/whitworthseo
@whitworthseo
The relationship between devs and tech SEOs has always been a battle
It is very difficult trying to get SEO implemented
From July mobile responsive will be most important plus HTTPS
Issues
- Ability
- Tighten up Communication
- Dev Budget
- Design
- Complex apis
- Other Channels
- Political Issues
- Global Issues
- Bad Rep/Anti SEO
These make it difficult to get your items implemented
At Banc we always do forecasts for our clients
So
- Put the hard work in
- Clearly and concisely
- No ambiguity
- Often a waiting game
- Deal with the right person
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/2 check it out
- Effective task management system (Jira/Basecamp)
- Concise detailed documents
- Jargon Free
- Check all work
- AMP Analytics check it out
A few hacks
- Tealium/Tag Manager – you do the implementation yourself
- 100% tests
- Don’t forget Search Console
- How to Annoy Devs
- Not learning your CMS – organise a meeting with devs for functionality
Mark Thomas – VP Customer Success EMEA at Botify
How much positive impact can crawl budget optimization have in a mobile first index era?
Mobile 1st
How to Audit your mobile site
- Internet, Crawler, Scheduler, URLs, Parser, Indexing, Index, Search
- Switch to using content for mobile users will be the fundamental index
- Index driven by mobile version
- Transitioning sites slowly
- On an Individual Basis
- Check all server logs to see if desktop or mobile
- Monitor Google Search Console Notifications
- Mobile Testing
5 areas
- mobile friendly test – not enough
- mobile usability test
- chrome dev tools
- crawl mobile with mobile user agent
- Javascript scan – make sure it is enabled
- Compare
- Links
- Speed
- Content
- Metadata
- Structured Data
- Analyse KPIs vs mobile
- What is Javascript? The browser’s behavioural language
Recommended Approach
- Plan, Validate, Migrate
- Optimise Crawl Budget
- Prune content
- Clean internal redirects
- Avoid inconsistent signals
- Use robots.txt to block sections rather than page by page of the site
- Improve Architecture
- 304 Not Modified Status Code – Page hasn’t changed
- Use 410 when content is primarily gone
- Grow Organic Revenue
- Identify and cut waste – pruning content
- Analyse Architecture
- Make sure you are assessing website from mobile perspective
Barry Adams – Polemic Digital
Technical SEO in the Mobile First Indexing Era
@badadams
Responsive design is what Google wants
Double check everything
- Page content
- Title tags, content, keywords – are they all there for the mobile version
- Go through the mobile version page by page
- Are you hiding content? Doesn’t really matter says Google – less onscreen real estate
- Look at source code – is it indexable
- Do you have the same structured data as desktop
- Hreflang? Make sure these are present on desktop and mobile
- Overlays? “give me your e-mail address” – this is negative UX
- Put yourselves in your customer place
- Google will always see the overlay
- Paginated content – pagination is not visible for Search Engines (16,000 pixels)
- Javascript? Look up issues – may take longer on older devices
- Google may not go so deep
- Internal Site Structure
- Crawl Map
- Internal Links are very Important
- Check for missing links on mobile (Hamburger menu?)
- Footer Links don’t work (ballshit)
- Reasonable Surfer Patent – Google ranks links depending on how many people are likely to click on this
- PageRank still exists – just on their SE side
- Indexable Site Map – Crawl the site map
- Robots.txt
- Best Practices for mobile 1st indexing
Arianne Donoghue – Epiphany
Paid Media Development Manager at Epiphany Search
The PPC Automation Revolution is Coming
Bidding
Analysis
Reporting
- Scripts
- Tools
- Excel Plug ins
ASAP Utilities – templates, process
- Analytics Edge bring in the data with GA + plug ins for other areas
- Bing Ads Intelligence
- Supermetrics Data Grabber
- Data Visualisation
- Google Sheets – Supermetrics Plug in
- Google Data Studio
- Microsoft Power BI
Bidding
- Google – Target CPS, Outranking – experiment with these
- Campaign Experiments – time to settle in but need to be checked
- Scripts for Bidding
- Weather Based Bidding (on the weather)
- Adwords Script: Real-Time position bidding
- 24-Hours Bid Scheduling
Analysis
- Power BI
- N-Gram Analysis – N-Gram is a phrase…..
- A script for N-Grams – finding the best and worst search queries
- Bing Ads Intelligence – find the best keyword score, new landing pages, seasonality,
- Keyword Planners
- Auction Insights – Google Aps Script
- Hourly Heat Maps for Day & Device
- A/B Testing Script
Reporting
Most reports never get opened
Ask why things happened – what worked, what didn’t
Metrics that are valuable
Full Automation – GOAL
3 potential workflows
- Excel, Sheets, Data Studio, Power BI
- Double Click – Web Query Reporting, Double Click Report Builder
Start Simple – General Summary
Need to add value to the business
Magnificent 7
- Client Business Objectives
- Channel Strategy
- Attribution – look beyond the last click
- Audiences
- Creative
- Landing Pages – conversion rate optimisation – Google Optimise
- Develop new skills
- Add Value
Ryan Bertollini
CDK Global
Combining PPC and SEO strategies to improve CPC averages and save money with your ad budget
- Auto Retailers face 25% increase in Ad spend
- Sales will decline by up to 5%
- We need to optimise PPC
- Check Ad Relevance & Landing Page Experience
- Include campaign with keywords in meta description
- Competition is the constant variable
- Include all ad copy in destination URL copy
- Keep testing testing
Chris Rowett
Journey Further
Supercharging Google Shopping
Google is showing more shopping
Shopping spend has increased over search campaigns
Creating Shopping Ads
- Split between High, Med, Low priority
- Amend Titles
- Keywords in Descriptions
- Merge Attributes
- Add Custom Dimensions
Sharing Data
- Use CTR from text ads for shopping ad optimisation
- Also Keyword discovery
- Optimise
Differentiate your product
e.g. Thread count for linen
Get Nerdy
Shopping is a game
- Get rid of products that don’t work
- Get the full picture
- Integrate offline tracking – e.g. shop visits
Stephen Kenwright – Branded 3
How to Report in 2018
Grit by Angela Duckworth
Performance Metrics
- Revenue
- Conversions – but maybe you are not tracking everything/value
- Traffic but 95% doesn’t convert
- CTR
Predictive Metrics
- Rankings – Untrustworthy – you don’t want to have these conversations with clients
- Pages Speed and 200 More
User Metrics
- Link Metrics
- Site Health
- Indexing
What have you done and how does that compare to what you wanted to achieve
- Reporting for Stakeholders
- The Boss wants the pure numbers
- Client wants to see your performance over time
- The other teams want the same metrics as you
- IT wants what has gone wrong
Automation
- Early Warning Report – Little Warden – littlewarden.com
- Analytics E-mail Alerts regarding tracking
- Deep Crawl – scheduling, integration with zapier, slack (Search Metrics)
Scaling Up by Verne Harnish
3-5 years where do we want to be
- purpose
- thrusts
- rocks
- Supermetrics
- Buzzsumo – links going live
- Data Studio
Metrics that are going to happen in 6-12 months
Scroll depth
I can increase revenue by 400%
I can increase revenue by £432K if we spend 20K over the next 2 years
Anna Lewis
Polka Dot Data
Top Customisations in Google Analytics
- Custom Analytics Data
- With Analytics you can achieve your goals
- Good data makes money
- GA Customisations
Tag Manager Tag Manager Tag Manager
Event Tracking
Engagement, micro, and macro conversions
Event Tracking – always add category, action, event
Custom Dimensions
- Page Level
- Page type
- Purpose
- Product type
- Category
- Subcategory
- GTM ID
Product Level
- Size category
- RRP
- Discount
Session Level
- Device
- Split test
- Payment
- Business week
- Currency
- Weather
- Language
Enhanced Ecommerce
- Cart to Detail Rate
- Buy to Detail Rate
- Behaviour Report
- Shopping Behaviour
Lead Gen
Tag Manager God = Simoahava.com
Tools
- Google Tag Manager Preview
- GA Debugger – can see any website
- GA Tag Assistant
- Da Vinci Tools Plug in
- Google Data Studio
Best Practice
- Have a plan
- Trust data
- Learn how to use it/get expert
- Find out what works for you
Dana DiTomaso
President at Kick Point
The Math Behind Effective Reporting
Google Data Studio IS GREAT
Google Data Studio is about Math!
- Where do social media visitors land on the site
- Past data can be organised into source categories
Revenue reporting into a non-ecommerce website
- Calculate offline revenue/forms and you have the evalue
Sessions don’t convert, users do
How much more would you make if you increased conversion rate?
Show client predictions if they spent more
- What if you invested more on Adwords
- What if we stopped AdWords completely
- What happens if we have a great winter – skis website etc.
Use custom metrics more
Kickpoint.ca/brightonseo2018
Minimalist reporting