It's that time of the year again, and Saby, Jo and Mal have been at the first day of SMX London to bring you the best pieces of helpful advice and tips from the esteemed panellists speaking there. Enjoy these 91 tips, and come back tomorrow for more!
SEO ranking factors 2014
- Quality is about doing less, but doing better. Think thin to be valuable. (@simmonet)
- Sitemaps help with speed, freshness and ranking. (@simmonet)
- Adidas never use a H1 tag but still are a great brand in Google's eyes. (@searchmetrics)
- You can't just write any content. If you're an expert, keep topic focused, you'll rank better. (@searchmetrics)
- Backlinks still matter for better rankings and freshness of link. (@searchmetrics)
- Citations, mentions and associations are important. All these together help make up your digital footprint (@simmonet)
- good in page technical implementation is a must Don't foget the basics such h1 tags and description tags. (@searchmetrics)
- An SEO campagin needs to be sustainable and long-term. (@IamJanaya)
- Learn how to use the tools for your job - do an Excel course! (@IamJanaya)
- Don't use any data you don't need! (@IamJanaya)
- Textbook stuff - change one thing at a time, test and record your results (@IamJanaya)
- Know your limits! (@IamJanaya)
- Organize your work in bitesize chunks, and keep records of what you have changed. (@IamJanaya)
- Make a plan - have a content plan, and a research and content calendar (@IamJanaya)
- Keep your learnings - record the lessons learnt for when you start again. And you should start again (@IamJanaya)
- Did it all go to plan? Adapt and refine - nothing is right the first time - be proactive! (@IamJanaya)
Hummingbird and the Entity Search Revolution - What is Hummingbird? It is a brand new search engine, created by Google. (@davidamerland)
- Treat search as a way to communicate - focus on targeted content. (@davidamerland)
- Think of trust as a factor. If trust is not there no relationship is ever made. (@davidamerland)
- SEO mentality is changing from "chasing Google" to "Marketing to people". #Hummingbird (@davidamerland)
- Search looks for knowledge, not just information - it needs a connection. (@davidamerland)
- now have to work in a more real, more organic, more honest way (@davidamerland)
- Entities lift video search results and determine query to show YouTube trailers in results (@justinrbriggs)
- Look at foundational work - check out the knowledge graph optimization (@justinrbriggs)
- Convert strings to structured queries (@justinrbriggs)
- A lot of Hummingbird is about understanding natural language search (@justinrbriggs)
- Entities lift video search results and determine query to show #YouTube trailers in results(@justinrbriggs)
- Provide accurate information - define connections and relationships (@justinrbriggs)
- Keyword targeting 101 - start using entities in copy (@justinrbriggs)
- Keyword targeting by using entity attributes, don't just repeat a name over and over again. (@justinrbriggs)
- Think about the questions you are going to ask about an entity and make sure these questions are answered (@justinrbriggs)
- Think about the questions you are going to ask about an entity and make sure these questions are answered (@justinrbriggs)
New PPC Best Practices In An Enhanced Campaign World - Google Shopping Campaigns give better targeting than PLAs and give you more data - impression share, benchmark CTR & CPC (@annstanley)
- Shopping ads let you use 5 custom label fields for more specific targeting (@annstanley)
- New to PLAs? You oneed a proudct feed and a Merchant Centre Account with your AdWords details added (@annstanley)
- If you use PLAs already, then your Merchant Centre Account should already be linked to your Adwords Account (@annstanley)
- Design your hierarchy for Shopping Ads in advance - the more granular, the better (@annstanley)
- Audience location & 'time of day usage' are becoming more and more important for analyzing PPC campaigns (@adido)
- Every available metric is worth analyzing for optimization, even for small percentage point improvements. (@adido)
- Review every ad group to ensure it's optimized for mobile (@adido)
- Try using Ad Extensions - but don't try them all at once. Choose the most effective ones after testing. (@adido)
- If you're already using Enhanced Campaigns, check back regularly for updates and new features (@adido)
- Be aware of the consequences of using Bid Adjustment. You can blow your budget, or kill your traffic if you're not careful. (@adido)
- Keep calm and always be testing. (@adido)
Long-Term SEO: How To Win For Years, Not Days - Where do you start? Start with a site cleanup & use 3rd party tools, don't just rely on Google WMT (@davenaylor)
- Nothing is future-proof, so categorize everything (@davenaylor)
- Research and categorize links and get rid of the junk ones (@davenaylor)
- Always monitor your links so that you can clean up when needed. (@davenaylor)
- Put in the time to create original content. This includes images. (@davenaylor)
- Ongoing monitoring is essential, especially with negative SEO still being so achievable. (@davenaylor)
Meet The Search Engines - Rich Snippets are not named that because Google are getting "richer". (@johnmu)
- What's Google doing about domain crowding? They're working on it, need real examples - so send them to John Mueller (@johnmu)
- Remember there are many algorithms and not just one. Problems might be in any one of them (@duaneforrester)
- The amount of people who actually know how to build web pages and titles is a small percentage, which forces crawlers to be creative (@duaneforrester)
- For trust, look at the server you're on - has it had security issues with other sites? (@duaneforrester)
- When others talk about you as an authoritative figure it turns the search engine spotlight towards you (@duaneforrester)
AdWords Ad Extensions
- Sitelinks are now 25 characters long rather than 35 (@SamOwenPPC)
- Turning sitelinks on gives a higher CTR (@SamOwenPPC)
- Sitelinks seem to be more important in e-commerce accounts (@SamOwenPPC)
- Sitelinks can be a way for users to self-select a landing page (@SamOwenPPC)
- Moblie-preferred sitelinks can improve mobile CTR by 15% (@SamOwenPPC)
- Keep mobile sitelinks down to 17 characters (@SamOwenPPC)
- Bad sitelinks are better than no sitelinks - so turn them on, and find pages you can use as landing pages at first (@SamOwenPPC)
- Dynamic Search Ads are useful for those with a large inventory of products that are being constantly added and removed. They've improved hugely since their introduction. (@SamOwenPPC)
- Negatives and exclusions are a huge part of making Dynamic Search Ads successful (@SamOwenPPC)
- Use Dynamic Search Ad search term reports to mine for good long-tail keywords. (@SamOwenPPC)
- Call extensions are super-important - on mobile (@suzyvirtual)
- Use the 'tap button' approach on your mobile landing page as well as on your PPC ad! (@suzyvirtual)
- 61% of mobile searchers state that click to call is important (@suzyvirtual)
- Adding a phone number ot mobile search ads results in an average CTR increase of 8% (@suzyvirtual)
- Nearly half of mobile searchers say that if a business doesn't have a phone number associated with the search results, they'll be more likely to explore other brands (@suzyvirtual)
- Phone call leads are typically "warmer" leads (@suzyvirtual)
- Optimizing your scheduling is the critical point for call extensions - make sure your extension doesn't show if you can't answer the phone! (@suzyvirtual)
What’s In My SEO Toolbox?
- Use Twitter Profiler and see what links your users have been tweeting - try the most recent 200 tweets of 20 users (@mattbeswick)
- You need to benchmark your rankings (@james_perrott)
- New favorite - Fruition Search - gives a percentage of organic traffic before & after an update or cleanup campaign (@james_perrott)
- For capturing lead information, Gravity forms a premium plugin - it's very flexible (@miriamschwab)
- Integrate form data with your CRM (@miriamschwab)
- Yoast is the best WordPress SEO tool - nothing compares to it, and it has XML sitemaps built in. (@miriamschwab)
Breathing New Life Into A Tired Paid Search Campaign
- Maximize budget, increase relevancy, expand keywords and increase bids (@nilsson_magnus) (Magnus did say he'd taken this directly from Google...)
- Find the most cost-effective regions for your PPC ads (@nilsson_magnus)
- Automate what can be automated - proudcut feeds, and bid management are examples (@nilsson_magnus)
- Ask yourself "What more can I do?" (@wing_yee_lee)
- Helpful questions to ask are also: Are your ads being seen? Are they being clicked on? Are your customers landing right? (@wing_yee_lee)
- 80% of your keywords shouls have a quality score of 7 or higher (@wing_yee_lee)
- Use sitelinks across your accounts, not just on the top campaigns - you'll take up more advertising real estate on the page. (@wing_yee_lee)
- Pay attention to peripheral queries - those which don't necessarily directly apply to your brand, but are related in some way. (@tozehnder)
- PPC can be used for brand awareness as well as to directly drive conversions. (@tozehnder)
- Advertise your content, Collect remarketing lists, Reach new clients (@tozehnder)
- Use scripts in AdWords to automate reporting, or even to feed stock prices live into ad texts (@tozehnder)
- Expand into new keyword territories. (@tozehnder)
We hope this is helpful, and remember, we'll be back again tomorrow, so stay tuned - you can get some of tomorrow's tips live from the @wordtracker Twitter feed!
