Top takeaways from SearchLove London 2012

On the 29th and 30th of October 2012, I was lucky enough to attend the second ever SearchLove London conference, which is organised by Distilled.

The SearchLove conference covers a variety of topics related to SEO, including content marketing, link building, analytics & attribution, conversion rate optimisation and much more.

As always with the Distilled conferences, SearchLove had a great line-up of speakers, which can be seen below.

• Wil Reynolds (Seer Interactive), Stephen Pavlovich (wish.co.uk & Conversion Factory) and Hannah Smith (Distilled) – Live site reviews
• Justin Briggs (Big Fish Games)- The life of an in-house SEO
• Guy Levine (Return on Digital) – The future of small business SEO
• Mark Johnstone (Distilled) – Beyond linkbait : First steps to content strategy
• All Speakers – Let’s get real (actionable tips from each speak)
• Wil Reynolds (Seer Interactive) – Chasing algorithms: Think deviously, act angelic and never get hit by a penalty
• Heather Healy (StickyEyes) – Do social signals actually play a part in search rankings
• Mat Clayton (MixCloud) – Marketing hacks
• Will Critchlow (Distilled) vs Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz) – Head to Head
• David Mihm (GetListed) – The need to know of local SEO
• Richard Baxter (SEOgadget) – How we build links at SEOgadget
• Lauren Vaccarello (SalesForce) – Conversion tracking & online / offline attribution
• Dave Peiris (SharkSEO) – The unexpected value of creating things
• Lisa Myers (Verve Search) – International SEO – one size doesn’t fit all
• Paul Madden (Automica) – Building an outsourced & automated infrastructure from scratch
• Phil Nottingham (Distilled) – The building blocks of great video
• Patrick McKenzie (Kalzmeus) – Eating CRO – Real world case studies for 20 ~100% increases in revenue

Here are my notes from the event (apologies for the slightly sporadic structure, I only made limited notes).

CRO / UX Takeaways:

• Present a coherent argument to the user / new proposition
• Best content doesn't come across on the homepage
• Use on-site communication tools, such as Qualaroo and live chat
• Look at ModCloth, they have really good product descriptions
• Maximise product reviews on product pages
• Utilise benefit bars
• Don't have unnecessary steps in your checkout 

SEO Takeaways: 

• When working in-house, it's really important to evangelise SEO
• Getting input from your target audience can help a lot with infographic outreach
• Providing exclusive content to editorial websites gets them more interested
• Providing customised versions of infographics can get more buy-in from top sites
• Creating sneak-peeks for product launches can generate links
• Make sure you always have a landing page for things - can result in a missed opportunity if people talk about your product / campaign
• Small companies think that an SEO agency is their web development agency
• PPC should be on the radar for every SEO
• The best type of content is the content that people want to read or they're currently reading
• Small businesses should be targeting the longer tail terms, people who are aware but aren't ready to buy
• Use Google suggest for content ideas
• Use Mintel for content ideas
• Use Google Analytics 'what' and 'how' keywords for article ideas
• Look at what people are talking about at MoneySavingExpert to get ideas for content
• Look at live chat transcripts to get ideas for content
• Vocus is a PR tool that allows you to gain access to journalists within niches
• ResponseSource allows you to see when journalists are looking for content
• Infographics do not succeed if you know nothing about the topic, so work with someone who does
• Show your infographic ideas to your friends and decide on if it's good by their response / reaction
• Google registers lots of patents, but they may not implement them - and if they do, it might be in 10 years
• Responsive infographics can often be more effective
• Design Taxi - a resource that aggregates interesting content online
• Use the #journorequest hashtag to see what journalists are looking for
• Tweet archivist archives twitter searches
• Think carefully about what your audience would find useful with linkbait
• No good creative ideas have ever been designed by a committee
• Searchga.me, hackerbuddy and grndctrl.com are great examples of creations that got links (by Dave)
• There are 8.26 billion web pages online
• ccTLDs are the best for international SEO
• ccTLDs are best for physical locations - so if you have offices in different countries
• You don't need to have hosting in the given country with a ccTLD
• Use Google Webmaster Tools for geo targeting
• Use seperate Google Webmaster Tools accounts for international subfolders
• Use different sitemaps for each folder
• Don't use ip redirection / detection
• Only use the href-lang tag for indexation, it won't help you rank
• Link development is the most important thing (apart from geo targeting) for international SEO
• Use oDesk to automate SEO processes and tasks
• Quix app is an auotmation resource created by Yoast
• Video isn't content, it's form
• Use JW player for indexable videos
• Use the html5 video tag to get video content indexed
• Video XML sitemaps are fundamental for rich snippets
• Appliances Online visitors who watch videos are twice as likely to convert - they also spend 9% more money
• Product videos are not sales videos
• Use speechpad for transcripts
• YouTube is the world's second biggest search engine
• Advertising on YoiTube means you can add clickable links in video content
• If you put video content on YouTube, put it everywhere

Local SEO Takeaways: 

• 30% of all searches are local
• 20% of desktop searches are local
• 50% of mobile searches are local
• Google wants to show everything they know about a business
• 67% of results are blended since the Venice update
• Google hasn't removed any of the previous ranking factors for local, they've just added to them
• Geositemapgenerator.com - creates KML and geo site maps
• Use schema.org to markup your local info
• Crawlable store locator pages are important for sites with multiple stores
• Links are still important for local search
• Branded anchor text in local does seem to play a larger role
• Locally-relevant sites and links from articles on local blogs are good for local SEO
• Larger sites should be leveraging internal links (good local anchors etc)
• A citation is a mention of your business name, address and phone number - or a combination of the three
• The four sites that are the most important for local SEO are LDC, 118 info, companies house & market location
• Niche citations are valuable (job listings are an opportunity for larger companies)
• Look for duplicates for your business, then report a problem to Google (one consolidated listing will rank better)
• In the US you can use Google mapmaker
• Search for your full address to see what shows up
• Google takes a long time to incorporate data into its local index
• +local reviews are slightly more important than they were
• External reviews are still really important for local SEO
• Sentiment analysis: Google can look at how good the experience was for the reviewer
• Reviews is a huge part of Google's local algorithm
• Google are looking at most helpful reviews
• Segment customers with Gmail addresses
• Yahoo local is better for the everyday user to do a review - no login required
• Incorporate feedback into your processes
• Try and reach the Yelp elite users
• Use advanced search operators to find users on social sites
• Search for a business within an area on Gplus, results come from maps
• Use google suggest for local keyword research
• Look at regions of users who go to your contact page

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