2019 was THE year in Brighton for SEO and Digital Marketing. More than 4,000 marketers, industry fans and practitioners, software techs and exhibitors gathered to join what’s probably the biggest conference on topic.

The Advanced Web Ranking team was there on site and compiled the complete list of presentations and takeaways for you to sit down and analyze each and every one in particular.

Take your time, tho’, it’s gonna get you ready for work!

Snippets and Schema	Link Building	SEO Automation
Onsite	Online PR	PPC
Competitor Research	Ecommerce	Paid Search
Future of Search	Crawl Management	Client Success
Site Speed	Tech SEO	Russia & China
SERPs	Data	International
Content Marketing	Content Production	Cross Channel
Local SEO	Beyond Google	Efficiency
Measurement	Fundamentals	Experimental

Snippets and Schema

1. “Driving meaningful clicks with enriched SERPs” – Izzi Smith, SEO Manager & CBO (Chief Beer Officer) at Sixt rent a car – Presentation slides

• 2019 is the year to spend time on enriching snippets and SERP Feature presence to increase CTR
• Avoid wasting time on no-click queries / Google direct answer searches
• Is CTR an actual ranking factor? Whether it is or not, you should be focusing on improving it!
• Marketers should not only rank high for keywords, but bring relevant visitors and help them fulfill a purpose
• Aim to rank “above the fold” as a benchmark

2. “Featured Snippets – the achievable SERP feature?”, Emily Potter, SEO Analyst at Distilled – Presentation slides

• Featured snippets improve CTRs for every organic position
• Position 4 and up are most likely to own them; position below 10 are less likely to gain them
• For the top 5 results, backlink and other authority signals matter much less for winning a featured snippet
• See which of your pages are performing better and add on-page content for the ones ranking in SERPs where featured snippets are present

3. “A Structured Data Case Study: How to Make Your Websites Stand Out in Search”, Kenichi Suzuki, Search Advocate at Faber Company Inc. – Presentation slides

• Rich Results have the potential to enhance search performance
• Choose wisely which structured data to implement. Its critical role is to help Google understand your content better. Eventually, there’s opportunity for higher rankings.
• Add as much structured data as possible and you’ll get more opportunities to be visible in the search.
• Google started experimenting with a new kind of structured rich listing, which is likely to roll out: “how-to” and “FAQ” Rich results

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Onsite

1. “Improve your Rankings with Internal Link Building, and no headaches”, Christoph C. Cemper, Founder & CEO at LinkResearchTools – Presentation slides

• External links bring the trust and power to your website
• Network, subdomain and internal links allow for much better keyword targeting, much faster testing and more aggressive use of money keywords
• Change “branded phrases” to generic explanatory that people search on your site / on Google
• The best links you can get are the ones that your competitors cannot get. You can find them using Google Site command

2. “Building an SEO Exponential Growth model by Closing Your Content Gaps”, Razvan Gavrilas, Founder at cognitiveSEO – Presentation slides

• The content gap analysis is the process of reviewing and then identifying the content opportunities needed in order to fill the “gap” between the current state and the desired state
• Gaps can be filled by both optimizing the existing content, as well as creating new content
• Use the following 3 metrics to determine the content gap opportunities: search intent, keyword links difficulty and keyword content difficulty
• Start by collecting opportunity keywords using GSC -> filter the ones with volume higher >500 -> create a search intent + keyword + links profiling -> determine where existing content can be updated and where new content opportunity resides

3. “Why I adore Sitemaps, an ex-Google engineer’s love story”, Fili Wiese, Search Brothers.

• How to avoid common mistakes when composing a sitemap:
  • The sitemap should only have canonicals and the indexable URLs
  • Keep the website up to date
  • Don’t nest indexes
• Choose the suited type of sitemap that works better for your website
• Sitemaps can creatively help to solve other SEO problems

4. “Sexy AF SEO Revenue Growth with Your Discontinued Products”, Luke Carthy, Digital Lead at Mayflex

5. “The State of Pagination and Infinite Scroll on the Web”, Adam Gent, SEO Product Manager at DeepCrawl – Presentation slides

• Paginated pages are indexed separately, since they provide access points
• Site architecture: Review your internal link schemes on architecture, infinite scroll and lazy load to reduce click depth
• Indexability: Important paginated pages which provide access points to deeper levels should be indexable
• Excluding pages linked from the index will remove internal linking and can create orphaned pages
• Crawlability: Make sure paginated pages have unique URLs and can be discovered by crawlable links
• Test, test and test again!

6. “Predicting the Impact of Technical SEO changes”, François Goube, CEO & Founder at OnCrawl – Presentation slides

• Look at your website through “business eyes” and build segments, each for every business dimension
• Don’t neglect the internal linking architecture. The “money pages” should be located close to homepage
• The ideal dataset for predicting SEO ROI:
  • Visitors and sessions from organic results
  • GSC data: avg CTR for each Position
  • Crawl data: see which pages have Structured Data

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Competitor Research

1. “Competitor Analysis: A Scientific Method”, Paola Didone, SEO Analyst at Distilled – Presentation slides

• Track the list of keywords you are targeting:
  • Use page, topic and search intent categorization
  • Exclude branded keywords
  • Track by geographic zone
• Analyse ranking
  • Discover all your organic ranking competitors
  • Use traffic estimation metrics (search volume x CTR) to see how much traffic competition is receiving
• Content outreach opportunities
  • Compare backlink quality
  • Find opportunities using high quality pages linking to competitors
  • Look for topics you could target on your content
• Topic searches and trends
  • Reveal opportunities, but avoid targeting seasonal or topics popular on short term
  • Find evergreen content
  • Prioritize your list of topics to cover and get started

2. “Killer Competitor Content Research and Strategy”, Lana Burgess, Freelance writer & content strategist at Lana Burgess Ltd – Presentation slides

• Identify search intentions
• Research and analyze competitor content
• Plan your content strategy and creation roadmap. Write to outshine competition
• Measure success

3. “How you should build your new retail content strategy based on SERP and competitive analysis”, Alexandre Sigoigne, General Manager at Myposeo – Presentation slides

• Optimize eCommerce SEO content and strategy through SERP and competitor analysis
  • Select Keywords and group them into multi-level categories
  • Find opportunities with SERP, volumes and competitor domains data
  • Select the best content topics and queries
  • Identify which formats to produce based on the identified categories / keywords
  • Define the amount of pages you need in order to cover everything
• Write, track and measure your success

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Future of Search

1.“Huge SEO success stories and what we can learn from them”, Marcus Tober, Founder and Chief Innovation Officer at Searchmetrics,

• SEO is coming towards product management direction. Deal with technical SEO, UX and business
• The user is the key for achieving good ranking
• Following ranking factors without applying them to your business will lead to failure
• Run your own studies using Google Lighthouse

2. “How to Drive Big Site SEO Impact in Google’s New, Linkless Algorithm”, Chris Liversidge, CEO at QueryClick – Presentation slides

• Integrate Social & Brand monitoring to link analysis and pre-qualify your content like it’s 2016!
• Study SERP CTR behaviour vs expected and:
  • Drive up traffic from already earned rankings
  • Remove paid search cannibalization
  • Develop a positive-feedback loop for top 3 rankings
• Drive multi-channel activity into “See” & “Think” phases
• Track “Rank Volatility” and target quick rank opportunities

3. “Forget Alexa, The Voice Search Devices Of The Future”, Patrick Reinhart, Sr. Director of Digital Strategies at Conductor / WeWork – Presentation slides

• Most voice searches aren’t searches at all, but actually voice commands
• The average retention rate for an Alexa skill after a week is around 3%

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Site Speed

1. “Speed & Performance Optimisation: How to Meet Users’ High Expectations”, Rachel Costello, Technical SEO at DeepCrawl – Presentation slides

• Critical rendering path: prioritize “above the fold” content to load as quickly as possible
• Don’t assume everyone is accessing your site in optimal conditions
• Talk to developers to learn about new performance optimization methods

2. “How to get a 100% Lighthouse performance score”, Polly Pospelova, Head of Search at Delete Agency – Presentation slides

• Serve images in next-gen format, such as WebP, better compressed than a PNG or JPEG. Lazy load: images should only load when they get into the user’s viewport and not before
• SEOs should unite with developers. Ongoing optimization is the new norm.
• Page speed is a ranking factor for both mobile and desktop searches.

3. “How to Trim JS, CSS and External Stuff to Slim Down and Speed up your Site”, Chris Simmance, Operations Director at Under2 Ltd

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SERPs

1. “Search Presence Intelligence – Where Search Meets Business Intelligence”, Stephan Bajaio, VP Professional Services, Co-Founder at Conductor – Presentation slides

2. “Why UX is SEO’s best friend”, Luke Hay and Michelle Wilding-Baker – Presentation slides

• User testing should become part of any SEO’s job
• Traffic in isolation is just a vanity metric. Traffic requires context for showing true value
• Conversion goals help measuring user journey, when fulfilling their intent
• Take a user-centered attitude to your work: no pop-ups, clear accessibility and signposting
• Consider blockers (slow load time, poor usability, information overlooked etc) and persuaders (social proof, likeability, anchoring) on your key landing pages

3. “Uncovering SERPs: What happens in search right now and how to benefit from it”, Olga Andrienko, Head of Global Marketing at SEMrush

• Google has moved from the search engine to the answer engine. It gives a quick and direct answer as quick as possible and tries to guess the user search intent
• When it comes to loses because of Google updates, poor content is not always the reason. For local listings, an important factor can be schema optimization
• “Priced” keywords make up to 75% of list snippets across all questions, prepositions and comparison phrases
• Use PAA to rank higher in SERPs. Google displays topics of related Featured Snippets in the “People also ask” box and most of the URLs used as responses are low-ranking newcomers.

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Content Marketing

1. “Podcasting for subscribers, mentions and really big links”,
Corinne Card, Founder at Full Story Media – Presentation slides

• Podcast mission: explain clearly and succinctly to the audience
• Create a clever name: best option for newbies is a name the audience will find when asking their questions online
• Strong interviews can make you famous
• Craft a solid intro – the first 30 seconds of your podcast are absolutely crucial. Use them to explain to your listeners what they’ll get out of your podcast
• Build trust and cherish your audience

2. “Standing out online with a unique and compelling brand voice”,
Bethany Joy, Brand voice crafter and wordsmith extraordinaire at Bethany Joy – Presentation slides

• Steps to finding your brand voice:
• Look at your current voice
• Clarify your identity and audience
• Define your desired voice
• Flesh out your chosen voice
• Develop simple guidelines

3. “The Content Comeback: 5 Steps for Bouncing Back When Your Campaign Fails”, Shannon McGuirk, Head of PR & Content at Aira Digital – Presentation slides

• Re-evaluate launch timings, data sets, design, story
• Find your story and transform it to a headline, to make things more relatable to the audience
• Ask an expert: Journalists are the experts when it comes to writing stories that directly address to people
• Create a digital press pack
• Re-launch and compare efficiency

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Local SEO

1. “Small Biz Small Budget – 10 Do’s and 5 Don’ts for Local SEO Success”,
Claire Carlile, Founder at Claire Carlile Marketing – Presentation slides

• DOs when using GMB for local citations:
  • Get reviews and engage with your audience through them
  • Choose the right categories
  • Use Google Posts
  • Try product collections
  • Use UTM parameters
  • Get followers
  • Enable messaging to connect to your customers
  • Have great images
  • Fight name spam in order to rank higher
  • Read all the good things
• DON’Ts
  • Review your own business
  • Leave spammy reviews for competitors
  • Enable messaging, if using Google’s messaging service, since it has various problems.
  • Keyword stuff in your business name

2. “Can You Rank in Local Without a Website?”, Darren Shaw, Founder & President at Whitespark – Presentation slides

• “Optimize” the GMB listing. The categories are really the only thing to optimize
• Fill out every field and regularly use every feature
• Regardless if you have a website or not, use a GMB website, which has several advantages such as: enhanced UX, feeds the Knowledge Graph content directly, automatically posts reviews on GMB
• Update the GMB website with content
• It’s not one specific activity, it’s the aggregate of all activities that will move the needle

3. “Harry and Lloyd’s Idiot Proof Guide to GMB Optimization”, Greg Gifford, Vice PResident of Search at DealerOn – Presentation slides

• Use your correct business name (don’t stuff keywords)
• Use UTM tracking on your website link (GA attribution is broken)
• Make sure you list a phone no.
• Use the right categories. The primary one carries more weight
• Upload lots of photos and / or videos
• Start using Google Posts, since they drive important amounts of pre-site conversions and interactions and stand out from your competitors
• “What’s new” Posts are the most common and the easiest to optimize for CTR because they display the most text
• Don’t forget about the GMB Q&As – anyone can ask your business a question and anyone can answer, even yourself

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Measurement

1. “Your New Google Analytics BFF”, Dana DiTomaso, President & Partner at Kick Point

2. “Using Google Tag Manager to send Scroll Depth and YouTube view measurements to Analytics”, Azeem Ahmad, Digital Marketing Manager at Staffordshire University – Presentation slides

• Get to grips with the basics of GTM
• Implement your tracking yourself, don’t wait or rely on other teams
• Update your content strategy
• Pay attention to your digital body language

3. “Changing the game with Supermetrics”, Sam Caesar, Search Account Manager at Sleeping Giant Media – Presentation slides

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Link Building

1. “How to Make Fake News For Links”, Oliver Brett, SEO Manager at Screaming Frog – Presentation slides

• Linkbait is the content designed to attract attention and encourage those viewing to create hyperlinks to the website
• News jacking is taking advantage of current events or news stories to promote or advertise one’s product or brand

2. “10 tips to scale link building for your clients!”, Sam Morton, Client Services Director at Click Intelligence – Presentation slides

• Find the types of content attracting the most backlinks
• Look at the content that doesn’t attract backlinks
• Identify the rate at which good quality links are being built

3. “Gamification: Link building in a Fortnite”, Becky Simms, Founder and CEO at Reflect Digital – Presentation video

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Online PR

1. “How to protect your online reputation: Lessons from the FTSE 100”,
Alex Judd, GCore Business Director at Grayling – Presentation slides

• Bid on your brand keywords
• Implement “organizational” schema mark-up
• Claim your knowledge panel
• Utilise Google Posts
• Get serious about Glassdoor
• Stop driving engagement to negative news
• Gain and promote positive branded news stories

2. “The killer outreach email that gets opened, replied to and mainly gains links”, Hana Bednarova, Digital PR Specialist at Freelance – Presentation slides

• Send tailored emails to each of your contacts, don’t just use templates stripping out the human feel
• Do your homework and read the journalist’s work before outreach
• It’s not just about topic, but sector and readers
• Compose the email subject line and content intelligently – tailor the content to meet the recipient’s needs and expectations

3. “How to pitch an idea your client/boss can’t say no to”,
Chris Lee, Founder/CEO at Eight Moon Media Ltd – Presentation slides

• It’s not just the idea, but the client himself. PRs, SEOs, other creatives should show more empathy for the client. Research into his pain points and who influences them
• Create a campaign that ticks the journalists boxes using “TRUTH:
  • T– timely, topical
  • R – Relevant
  • U – Unusual
  • T – Trouble
  • H – Human interest
• Get ready to showcase and prove your value to your client, when presenting the pitch. Invest all your creativity in the idea presentation video.

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Ecommerce

1. “8 Ways to Increase your Ecommerce Conversion Rate”, Faye Watt, Senior Digital Marketing Executive at Edico Media Ltd – Presentation slides

• Personalize your homepage
• Promote alternative and compatible products on the product page
• Use multiple product images
• Provide user reviews
• Display shipping costs on product and cart pages
• Always offer a guest checkout
• Simplify your checkout process
• Promote trust with icons, badges and copy

2. “Black Friday SEO: where and when to start, quick wins and top tips”,
Alexandra Coutts, Head of Digital at ThoughtShift Ltd – Presentation slides

• Google is now prioritizing publishers over retailers in the Organic Search results
• Ensure product page accessibility, UX and trustworthy content
• Don’t false start. Stick to your plan and generate the sales at the time the people are looking to buy.

3. “Social Proof and Leveraging the Power of Consumers”, Justin Clarke, Brand Ambassador at Psydro – Presentation slides

• You need to see the good, average and bad reviews to make an informed choice, and not just from one source, but as many as possible
• Quality is essential. Quality reviews create a better user experience for the consumer and merchant alike

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Crawl Management

1. “Restructuring Websites to Improve Indexability”, Areej AbuAli, Head of SEO at Verve Search – Presentation slides

• Start by working on a comprehensive audit focusing on Links, Tech and Content
• Fix the problems addressing Crawling, Indexing and Ranking to plan your strategy. Use search volume data to determine which pages are valuable to search engines
  • For larger websites, such as the job posting engines, use split sitemaps and a strong internal linking structure to enhance crawlability
  • Perform an in-depth keyword research and opportunity analysis to what generates traffic
• From determining the issues, to planning the strategy and implementing it, take the time to walk this one step at a time

2. “Simple ways to visualise your crawl data with no coding knowledge required”, Anders Riise Koch, Technical SEO Director at Datawords – Presentation slides

3. “Crawl Budget is dead, please welcome Rendering Budget”,
Robin Eisenberg, VP of Engineering at Botify – Presentation slides

• Page Delay vs Time to Interactive. Before, we counted the time for the server to send the page, now, we count the time for the crawler to render the page
• Crawl Ratio vs Render Ratio. Before, we parsed log files and counted unique URLs, now, we parse log files and count unique referrers.
• PHP vs JS. Before, we added server side SEO tracking, now, we add crawler side JS SEO tracking.

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Tech SEO

1. “Living on the Edge: Elevating your SEO toolkit to the CDN”, Nils De Moor, Cofounder and CTO at Woorank – Presentation slides

• Make use of serverless functions since it ensures high performance, few platform restrictions and easy release management

2. “How To Use Chrome Puppeteer to Fake Googlebot & Monitor Your Site”, Tom Pool, Technical SEO Manager at Blue Array – Presentation slides

• Google can render JS, but it in no way perfect, or even that effective
• Puppeteer allows you to monitor a site in real-time, letting you know of any issues, such as meta changes, New 404 errors, Updated Links
• It can also emulate Googlebot behavior using various user agents or devices, so that you can track meta tag changes in time, word count increases or decreases, robots directives, canonicals

3. “CLI Automation – Using the Command Line to Automate Repetitive Tasks”, Mike Osolinsk, Technical SEO Strategist at Edit – Presentation slides

• Command line is a command language interpreter that helps us work more efficiently. Command like examples include Terminal, Command Prompt, Bash and Cygwin
• It’s useful to write ad-hoc scripts quickly and easily, which would otherwise take much longer, such as merging files, renaming files in bulk, running Lighthouse reports.
• Using it, you can take advantage of a huge library of pre-built scripts or chain different scripts and libraries together to create fully automated solutions. An example would be to extract information from server log files, such as entries from particular user agents like Googlebot

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Data

1. “The Circle of Trust: SEO Data”, Matthew Brown, Licensed SEO Therapist at MJBLabs – Presentation slides

• Shoot for fewer pages per keyword segment / market
• Ruthlessly eliminate everything else from Google’s crawl on a quarterly basis
• Segment XML sitemaps into as many index files as you can for granular data
• GSC isn’t getting any better. Your own data is the way

2. “Turning Your Data Into Compelling Stories”, Jeroen Maljers, Co-founder and Managing Director at Swydo

3. “Why data science analysis is better than YOUR analysis”, George Karapalidis, SEO & Data Science Specialist at Vertical Leap – Presentation slides

• Exploratory data analysis: Find all the metrics relevant to the problem and exclude the ones that generate noise
• Time series analysis: Try to identify patterns in data and frequency of events.
• Predictive analysis. Analyze current and historical facts to make accurate forecasts about the future

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Content Production

1. “Big budget video advertising on a small business budget”, Phil Nottingham, Only British Person at Wistia – Presentation slides

• New small business model should focus on:
  • Goals. Target changes in user behaviour
  • Metrics. Measure impact, not impressions
  • Channels. Distribute where you can better communicate
  • Targeting. Prioritize behavioural and contextual triggers
  • Budget. Optimize spend for impact
  • Creative. Show, don’t tell

2. “LMFAO: Leveraging Machines for Awesome Outreach”, Gareth Simpson, Co-Founder & Head of SEO at Seeker Digital

3. “The Art of Content Necromancy: How to Resurrect a Dead Campaign”, Kat Kynes, Content & Outreach Consultant at Pole Star Digital – Presentation slides

• Get the content right
  • Identify the most trustworthy headline
  • Qualify the content with journalists before starting the outreach
• Work with internal PR teams
  • Identify websites you can / can’t contact upfront
  • Work with PR to divide and conquer the outreach
• Think outside the box. Don’t go with the obvious publications. Who else might be interested?
• Don’t be afraid to get personal.
  • Target journalists who have been already tackling with the topic
  • Make your pitch relevant to the contact
• Timing is everything.

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Beyond Google

1. “Why we all should stop ignoring Bing”, Julia Logan, SEO consultant at IrishWonder’s SEO Consulting – Presentation slides

• It’s the 3rd most popular search engine worldwide, after Google and Yahoo, covering close to 3% of searches
• It’s one of the search partners for DuckDuckGo privacy results engine
• It’s handwired to Cortana’s voice search commands and Siri’s image search results
• Bing incorporates SERP Features and UX functions for search queries, as well as Bing Places for Business or the Webmaster Tools kit for SEOs and Site Owners

2. “Voice Visibility: Tracking voice results on Alexa & Google”, Steff Preyer, Business Director at Rabbit & Pork – Presentation slides

• The landscape will change: by 2020, 50% of all searches will be conducted via voice commands. Now, there are 22% searches conducted using voice commands.
• Check voice results to decide whether there’s opportunity. Use Featured Snippet results to achieve exposure on voice commands

3. “No search volume? No problem!”, Dom Hodgson, Former Disney Princess at Kerboo + Little Warden

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Fundamentals

1. “Leveraging E-A-T for SEO Success”, Lily Ray, Director of SEO at Path Interactive – Presentation slides

2. “6 Things Your Boss Expects You Should Know About SEO”, Lukasz Zelezny,

3. “How to Repurpose Existing Content to Help your Strategy”, Coral Luck, Head of Content at Ricemedia – Presentation slides

• Existing content is the quick win – rewrite and repurpose
• New content is super important too; first approach: look for Featured Snippet query opportunities and check whether the ranking competitor is answering the question
• Use the data you have to push rankings
• Always fetch and render
• Track and add notes

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SEO Automation

1. “Screaming Frog + Xpath: A Guide to Analyse the Pants Off Your Competition”, Sabine Langmann, SEO Specialist at Freelance – Presentation slides

• Which is the necessary data to look for? Xpath can be used to check the client or competitor site H1, H2 tags, image and word density or linking structure
• Can I crawl the elements? Check whether the elements you are after have a common node to look at
• Extract the Xpath selector and use Screaming Frog to compile the data all in one place

2. “Automate your SEO tasks with custom extraction”, Max Coupland,Lead SEO Consultant at Type A Media – Presentation slides

• Keyword Research Tool. See what PAAs exist for your targeted search queries using scrapers and custom extraction
• Market Share Analysis tool. You can pull all title tags from every SERP listing ranking for your keyword at the same time, automatically, using custom extraction. At the end, you’ll have a list of categorised keywords
• Internal Linking tool. By scraping search engine databases and applying custom extraction, multiple outreach offerings are revealed.

3. “Bringing the fun back to SEO with Python”, Benjamin Goerler, SEO Consultant at Ayima – Presentation slides

• Anything can be potentially automated with Python
  • Reporting
  • Redirect hops
  • Ad campaigns
  • Keyword Research
  • Internal linking analysis
  • Facet optimization
• Easy to use and scalable for mostly any SEO success activity

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PPC

1. “Google Smart bidding: How to train your algorithm”, Kian Njie, Paid Media Executive at Inchora – Presentation slides

• Pick a realistic goal of +/-15% of current
• Always use portfolio bidding strategies
• Try & follow the testing framework
• Review the measurement tools
• Transition away from SKAGs
• Trial setting and rotation to optimize
• Limit KPI changes to +/-10% jumps
• Don’t set it and forget it

2. “Land Grab: How to win business from your competitors with Google PPC”, Tanesha Stafford, Founder at Armchair Marketing – Presentation slides

• Show adverts where the most active, in market, customers will see them
• Address to the right audience with the right message and using the proper methods

3. “The importance of tagging when it comes to reporting and optimising in paid search”, Charlotte Self , Digital Strategy Manager at WiggleCRC

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Paid Search

1. “Using data science to work smarter, not harder in PPC”, Duncan Sills, Senior PPC Specialist at Vertical Leap

2. “Become a Local Hero: PPC Tips to Boss Your Neighbourhood”, Oliver Ewbank, Paid Media Consultant at Freelance – Presentation slides

• New local search ad formats
• The best campaign structures for local search
• Innovative geo targeting tactics
• Tracking store visit and sales
• Effective local bidding strategies

3. “Search is Stagnating: It’s time to explore more biddable diversity”,
Matt Whelan, Director at The Specialist Works

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Client Success

1. “Search vs. Bureaucracy: How to Stand Up an Organic Search Program for Your Client”, Heather Physioc, Group Director of Discoverability at VMLY&R – Presentation slides

• Resist the temptation to dive straight into tactical execution only
• Define a workshop agenda and find out who can help with what
• Make sure you have access to all the following 5 key components: process, personnel, knowledge, capacity and planning
• Keep track of progress and raise red flags early, so the program can quickly get back on track

2. “Retaining Struggling Clients: How To Rebuild Trust”, Laura Hogan, Founder at Milo’s Mail – Presentation slides

• Set clear targets
• Plan and understand their business, in order to define the correct expectations
• Get to know your customers, be honest and support them. Maintain an active communication.

3. “Efficiency in the workplace: Mindset mastery and meditation”,
Briony Gunson, Operations Director/Modern Meditation Trainer at Pole Star Digital – Presentation slides

• Actions are the products of our thoughts and feelings (mindset)
• Most of our actions are habitual – pre-programmed based on past experiences
• If left unchecked, unhelpful thoughts and feelings can scupper our productivity
• Self observation gives invaluable insight
• Success

4. “How to tell if there’s a demand to launch your business overseas”,
James Brown, SEO Strategist at Oban International – Presentation slides

• Revise what are the audience demands. Use Google Analytics to identify existing opportunities, using language and country business coverage
• Move over to keyword research and competitor analysis to see how hard would it be to try and reach out to different audiences
• See what are the search engine demands and what does international SEO require
• Determine whether logistics are something you can handle in order to address to the right audience using the right means

5. “How to measure the value of generic keyword success”, Timothy Hawes (Group Lead at Forward3D) and John Sadeghipoor (Global Head of Digital Marketing at FitFlop)

6. “Using data to keep your customers happy”, Eli Zheleva, Marketing trainer – Presentation slides

• Listen to your customers and really understand what are their requirements. Tailor your message when addressing them
• Keep an eye on your competitors
• Measure your customers’ satisfaction using net promoter scores

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Russia & China

1. “Embrace WeChat Marketing”, Christina Xu – Presentation slides

• Using WeChat as an application designed to communicate and connect with customers, not just in China

2. “Harnessing the Russian digital opportunity”, Anna Milburn, Business Solutions Manager at Webcertain – Presentation slides

• There is a big audience to reach when targeting Russia
• There is still room for growth, especially compared to more mature markets such as Germany or the UK.
• Set strategy differently – time for targeting paid search or schedule social posting
• Explore local players, but don’t forget the international ones targeting Russia as well
• Seasonality is a key factor when planning campaigns. Understand local traditions and how you can harness them to drive sales
• Translate and localise your content to truly reach to your audience

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International

1. “How to use programmatic to drive search results internationally”,
Gemma Houghton, Director of Marketing at Webcertain

2. “The Most Popular Influencer is Almost Never the One You Really Need”, Daiana Damacus, Social Media & Content Marketing Manager at Webcertain Group – Presentation slides

• Brand awareness is the oldest form of influencer marketing
• Find out where your target audience is and what kind of content they consume
• Choose influencers who are on the same awareness level or around your own and tailor your goals to their strength

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Cross Channel

1. “Maximising Your Media Through SEO – How To Drive More From Your ATL Campaigns”, Ric Rodriguez, SEO Director at iProspect – Presentation slides

• Media campaigns can be great for driving new links. But don’t invest in media unless you’re visible on page one
• Make your CTAs branded; it’s easier to rank for them
• Microsites sound cool, but can be an SEO headache. Don’t make “vanity” site changes for the campaign. It may also impact generic queries
• Branded searches make for a great measurement tool
• Keep measurement simple; use KPIs that make sense and remember that any site changes can impact SEO

2. “Identifying new customer acquisition opportunities”, Ross Paton, Software Team Lean at QueryClick – Presentation slides

3. “How to drive content marketing success”, Irma Hunkeler (Head of Operations at Re:signal) and Edward Trippier Content Coordinator at Re:signal) – Presentation slides

• Analyze the line of business for each client and identify opportunities, followed by setting clear goals
• Don’t lose sight of the road, stay on course, and constantly check for feedback
• Work with the client all the way and involve technical departments

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Efficiency

1. “How to Marie Kondo your SEO”, Rebekah Dunne, SEO Executive at Victorian Plumbing – Presentation slides

• Compile targeted keyword set list and use categorization for easier handling
• Use tools such as Google Trends and Answer the Public to extract data for the top-navigation search terms
• Access the backlink profile and categorize them as well
• Check competitors and see what’s their market share

2. “5 Time-Saving SEO Alerts to Use Right Now”, Marco Bonomo, Senior SEO Planner at MediaCom – Presentation slides

• Test the alerts straight away:
  • Robots.txt
  • Traffic & Revenue
  • Performance
  • Rankings
  • IFTTT
• Stay in control. Manage all the notifications with the client and be ready to provide an explanation if anything goes wrong
• Maintenance is key. Review alerts every few months, test and add new alerts all the time

3. “100 million keywords. Now what?!”, Alen-Jelco Todorov, Growth at SEOmonitor

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Experimental

1. “Why Google isn’t giving update advice anymore”, John Warner, Senior SEO, Content and Marketing Exec at Click Consult – Presentation slides

• Stop chasing updates and start collaborating on the analysis of the data
• Links and expertise will always remain important, regardless of what they say
• Structured data is becoming more and more important

2. “Perfect Outcomes: Create amazing websites 10x Faster with Rapid Prototyping”, Justin Taylor, MD & Founder a