Search Leeds: Key Takeaways Part 1

ROAST • 03/07/2019

Paige Hobart shares her key takeaways from Search Leeds in Part 1 of our two part series on what we learnt at “The North’s Largest Digital Conference”:

1) Sam Marsden, Deepcrawl – Overcoming tech SEO challenges for enterprise sites
https://www.slideshare.net/DeepCrawl/overcoming-technical-seo-challenges-for-enterprise-sites-searchleeds-2019-sam-marsden/1
Notes:

Breaks his tech audit into 12 (undisclosed) sections
Tech audits must have: severity, impact, & effort scoring plus a total/average score
Deepcrawl has a data studio connector

Myposeo is a tool that analyses the SERP landscape
When looking at video snippets appearing – what date were they published? Could we do some video optimisation to appear instead?
Use SERP features to automatically apply search intent to queries

PWA’s are better than apps – “90% smaller than apps”
Consumption of apps is dying, uninstalls are a huge issue
Your site must be on https to have a secure PWA (Starbucks got hacked via their HTTP PWA)
- Must be http2 to be any good
You can still have push notifications with a PWA
Full ecommerce PWAs are possible
Audit your PWA with JS on & off
You can submit PWAs to the app store
Very, very difficult to retrofit a PWA to an existing website, better to suggest during new site builds
Can be done in wordpress really easily
Can combine PWA & AMP on the same site
Javascript causes many issues – difficulties with client side rendering

Distilled use STAT
Use “however” to optimise for featured snippets trying to offer two opinions (sometimes will use an ellipses when it wants to do this).
Google is cracking down on confirmation bias (see “are reptiles good pets?” – Yes, “are reptiles bad pets?” – Yes)
BERT NLP

6) Samantha Noble, Biddable Moments – Put your data where your mouth is
Notes

Use supermetrics GDS connector for awesomeness, including GMB data
Have your commentary’s in a submission format so you can see commentary’s from previous weeks/months.
Iframe your live pages into the GDS where appropriate
@helpfulLee creates a load of templates

They have a tool called Equilibrium that turns of own brand bidding when there are no other competitors, no shopping ads, and you’re ranking organically in position 1. @PPC
OneSearch whitepaper coming soon: https://www.stickyeyes.com/resources/one-search-combining-your-organic-and-paid-strategies-for-greater-effect/ (PPC efficiencies based on organic rankings)

2 types of competitors;
- The ones you rank against
- The ones who you share an audience with (can be completely different products)
Easy way to gain links with a 50% success rate (usually 30%) is to find competitor dead links and steal them
- If people are doing this – one more reason to be on top of link reclamation!
Build your media lists based on audience competitors backlinks
Buzzstream is a cool chrome plugin that pulls out journo info

10) Matt Holmes, Thomas Cook Airlines – How to run a great request for RFP process
Notes

“The Van Test” – Innocent Smoothies
- Aka ‘could you spend 3hrs in a van with these people/this person?’
Tips for agencies responding to RFPs
- Make everything about the client and their specific problems. Stop talking about yourself the whole time. I don’t care about the things you’ve done that aren’t relevant to us.
- Know your elevator pitch; know what your agency story is – no it’s not that tool you’ve got, everybody has one.
- I don’t want to meet the pitch team, I want to meet the people who will be working on the account.
- The Pitch Doctor is amazing

ROAST are an agency of performance marketing specialists.

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