Ion Search – A great day for industry insight!
It’s interesting to see how other SEO companies are evolving and integrating SEO into other digital offerings. For example, Bronco has partnered with a PR agency and BlueClaw has grown its brand through hosting conferences. But it seems that The WebMarketing Group is ahead of the agency game with NetConstruct as a powerful acquisition into other digital realms.
Maria, Ed (Me) and Fred at IonSearch.
There wasn’t a great deal of technical knowledge to bring back. We do it all – better than the speakers – as I’m sure Chris will agree, (you’ll have to ask Chris about that!). However, here’s the run down of IonSearch Takeaways – I got a lot of inspiration for how to go about creating content / infographic generation, mainly from Nicola Stott.
Andrew Durant – Takeaways
Recommended Social Monitoring Tools:
• Buffer
• Kapost
• Topsy
• SEOMoz Fresh Web Explorer
• Optimizely – useful for social media conversion rates and split A/B testing.
Research competitor content categories and discover how you can differentiate.
Russ Hudgens – Takeaways
• Russ spoke a lot about social! ‘Your audience is dispersed, why aren’t you?’
• Talked about scheduling tweets and leveraging the Gold version of Slideshare to create leads.
• Suggested that it helps to create customer VIP lists in twitter. I.e. Someone important says they’re ill – Rand Fishkin sends them a get well soon e-card.
• Facebook Shares – apparently FB shares with 80 chars or less get 23% of the conversions.
• Use Twitter’s feature to download your tweet archive then whack the urls in a backlink checker to find out the most linked to tweets!
• (Do the same with G+ scrapes.)
• New GA feature: ‘Trackbacks’.
• New Gmail Tool: Yessmail
• Advised that businesses should leverage their employees to get traffic by creating unique employee pages and then find out which journalists link to which face and engage with them.
Broken Linkbuilding –
• Brokenlinkbuilding.com
• Siegemedia.com/infographic-embed.co.uk – code to embed a infographic
• Imageraider.com – find images without a credit
• For linking practices – It was interesting that Russ considers PA as a more important factor to consider rather than DA.
He mentioned how that there was a lack of marketers seeking and leveraging key influences on Youtube and Pinterest to increase brand presence.
[On-site] He said that it helps to have email subscription options in the top navigation.
Christoph Cemper – Linkresearchtools.com / LinkDetox
Introduced his software for identifying problematic links – LinkDetox
It pulls data from 22 different sources including GA, OSE, MajSEO, linkbird, linkbutler etc. He was careful about releasing any other info about data sources. His software can detect backlinks that are spammy, have bad neighbourhoods or dodgy anchor text and also backlinks that host malware Therefore easily establishing problematic footprints as observed with the Interflora Case Study)
There were some impressive graphs that give insight into PR curves of backlink profiles and also graphs on the hosting IP and TLD of a backlink profile. These provided an immediate understanding as to which unusual geographic links could be a problem. His software also looks at link velocity trend (LVT) which determines how fast a site wide link grows over time.
• He also spoke about the Google Disavow Tool – it can take 3 months for any action to happen depending on crawl depths.
• He does not advise disavowing without having a message in WMT.
• Discussed how alt tags could be penalised as a footprint for images in the future
Rmoov.com – Link removal outsource platform
They gave some advice about link removal, some of which conflicted with what Christoph Cemper said with regards to the disavow tool.
Take away – Upload lists of links to disavow using UTF-8 format or 7 bit ASCII. New uploads overwrite existing data – they don’t accrue. So always send the complete list each time you file a reconsideration request.
MediaFlow – Takeaways (Nichola Stott)
A dynamic speaker who used to work for Yahoo! Suggests using Google consumer surveys to create a story. Discussed how to find a story in data or create data to drive a story.
Discussed how to create stories out of ubiquitous products:
Invent a USP – Using a Kellogg’s case study, Nichola discussed how they branded their cornflakes to say “We only make cornflakes for ourselves” despite the fact the suppliers are the same as Tesco / smart price etc. By all means use ethical brand policies to your advantage, but if the policy is not ‘baked’ and intrinsic to the company, this can backfire.
Big Data – don’t think quantity of data, think about velocity of data & QPS (queries per second). She advises that brands “Take the product to the human conclusion”. Eg. Using a case study for identifying why book sales went up so much for a recipe author who specialised in preservatives. It was discovered that the trend of purchases happened at Harrnaka – thus the story was found!
The record QPS in history at Yahoo News occurred when Anna Nicole Smith died of an accidental drug overdose.
Discussed getting data from Professor Ed Manley / James Cheshire from the UCL centre of spatial technology and using this to discover what’s normal / abnormal and hence use anomaly filters to drive a story in a different way.
Says to be aware of CAPCODES and the PRCA code of conduct. Read TOC’s of newspapers regarding ‘what you can use as incentives for journalists’. Never call or contact on print press day – they will never speak to you again.
Tools:
HARO
Media Agility – (A media contact DataBase)
Samuel Crocker OMD UK
Samuel talked about pitching to big brands using scare monger tactics to bash through red tapes.
“we need these redirects to happen.”
“The redirects can’t happen”
“Well that’s ok, but you’ll end up losing 2m in sales this year due to the loss of link equity that powered this part of the website. We can write the htaccess code.”
“OK – job done”
Spoke about getting familiar with your big brands buzz words. Apparently Procter and Gamble have their own Lexicon that they give out to new employees.
Digital brand marketers will often use abbreviations like: ROI, TUR, ATL, DR, incremental cost at sale, life-time value, attribution etc.
ROPO – Understand Customer Behaviour
Suggested that with most big brands like Nestle etc., they are competing with themselves essentially which are other brands under their umbrella.
Unless of course Google decides it wants the number one spot for its product – eg. The phrase ‘car insurance’, big brands must have big ideas like RedBull’s Up Your Game campaign.
For international brands be careful with HREFLANG setup and careful with cross domain tracking with cookies.
Mobile SEO
Tools:
• Brightedge – Reporting
• Woorank
• Deepcrawl – a good alternative to ScreamingFrog as there are quite a few problems with QTY’s of data with SF.
• Webtrends
Martin McDonald
Martin talked a lot on his continued theme of ‘SEO is Dead’.
BURN SITES: He pulled up examples about the payday loan niche and how people got these burn sites to rank No.1 for 2 weeks using XRUMER (now Botmaster Labs) and Hacking techniques implemented through the Joomla platform – which is now considered the hot bed of Spam. He reiterated that nurn sites and black hat still works as 3 week old domains can rank after acquiring 4,000 links.
He went on to say how we’re evolving as SEO’s to get away from any previous stigma attached and he talked a bit about harvesting / funnelling traffic through assets that help increase the purchasing cycle of a user – Intent, research / reviews, seeking trusted brand reputation, good shopping experience and finally conversion.
Apparently PPC still has one of the highest conversion rates for purchases. 42-48% of transactions happen in the first 2 PPC listings. Organic listings receive 80% of the traffic base, but the conversion rate for purchases is not as high.