Search LDN’s 11th Birthday Party

Recently Search LDN hosted us at their 11th Birthday Party in London, their first in-person event of 2022. Provided with amazing food, drinks, and some pretty great talks, I came away with stacks of insights!

Below I’ve summarised two of the presentations which I found incredibly relevant and useful.

Crystal Carter – Top of the SERP: Rich Results and Featured Snippets in 2022

In this talk Crystal made us think about Featured Snippets in a different way. More than just your classic answer box, Featured Snippets can take up many different shapes and forms – even different placements on the SERP.

How can you optimise for current FS trends?

Top tip: If you want to know what Google is changing on the SERP, look at Bing. Crystal tells us that Bing is extremely transparent with regard to sharing information about its algorithm. Pay attention to what Bing is doing to learn a lot about the MUM update.

How to optimise for MUM Featured Snippets

Crystal says you need to be prepared to share!

• Google is happy to mix content from multiple sources to complete a snippet.
• Google treats Featured Snippet Keywords as Topics rather than standalone terms.
• Protect your traffic:
  • Covering your topic in multimedia with schema
  • Cover the full funnel of your topic
  • Build strategic topic links and partnerships

Key Takeaways

To sum it all up, Crystal’s key takeaway was to look at Featured Snippets as more than just an answer box. They can take up other parts of the SERP, and it’s important to consider all parts of the user journey when trying to win these types of results.

Natalie Mott: Website Migration Disasters and How to Avoid Them

Despite there being a lot of literature about migrations on the web, we still find ourselves in situations where migrations don’t go according to plan.

As an industry, we seem to take post-migration traffic loss as a given. Natalie ran a Twitter poll and found that 78% of people agree! Tweet here.

Google advises us to see ranking fluctuations post-migration. Natalie, however, thinks that we can do better than blindly accepting a loss of traffic.

For every migration fail like this, there are plenty of case studies that show success. However: typically what can go wrong, will go wrong.

What can go wrong:

1. The project management process is lacking
2. SEO is not involved early enough
3. Lack of understanding of risk
4. SEO or dev understanding deficits (JavaScript, client-side rendering)
5. Mismatched objectives (dev will want user-friendly content)
6. SEO recommendations ignored
7. Sometimes migrations coincide with an algorithm update (you can get everything right but unlucky timing)

We have no way of knowing if Google will favour our new content, but we can manage everything from a human standpoint.

Key Takeaways

Natalie’s key takeaway was to always ally yourself with the team running the migration. You want to be a part of these conversations early so that you can ensure that SEO considerations are taken into account. While there are a lot of things that can go wrong in a migration, all potential technical SEO issues are avoidable with a strong client relationship.

Written by ROAST, SEO Account Manager Christie Tucker. Follow Christie on Twitter here.

Christie Tucker

SEO Account Manager

Christie moved to the UK from Canada in the summer of 2019 where she began her career in SEO as an exec at Mindshare. Prior to this she had very basic knowledge and experience in the field, but soon learned that there was much more to SEO than just keywords. At Mindshare she was able to work on a diverse client base ranging from ecommerce to charity, and she became an account manager in early 2021. Outside of work, Christie loves travelling and is a big foodie. Her goal is to one day try every restaurant in London - which may take a while.