Ranking and Visibility

By now, most SEOs are comfortable with the idea of featured snippets, but actually understanding and capturing them in the changing search landscape remains elusive. Britney Muller will share some eye-opening data about the SERPs you know and love while equipping you with a bevy of new tricks for winning featured snippets into your toolbox.

Off-site SEO" (also called "off-page SEO") refers to actions taken outside of your own website to impact your rankings within search engine results pages (SERPs). Learn just what those "actions" are, why they matter, and how to get started with your own off-site efforts in this article.

Local search marketing comprises both offline and online tactics employed to promote businesses that serve customers face-to-face. The underlying goal can be to improve customer satisfaction, build brand reputation, drive more traffic, visibility, conversions, and revenue, by engaging a greater number of nearby customers.

Traditional content marketing focuses on educational value at the expense of product value, which is a broken and outdated way of thinking. We all need to sell a product, and our visitors all need a product to improve their lives, but we're so afraid of being seen as salesy that somehow we got lost, and we forgot why our content even exists. We need our M.O.M.s! No, not your actual mother. Your Marketing Optimization Map — your guide to exploring the nuances of optimized content marketing through a product-focused lens. In this session you'll learn data and lessons from Oli Gardner's biggest ever content marketing experiment, and how those lessons have changed his approach to content; a context-to-content-to-conversion strategy for big content that converts; advanced methods for creating "choose your own adventure" navigational experiences to build event-based behavioral profiles of your visitors (using GTM and GA); and innovative ways to productize and market the technology you already have, with use cases your customers had never considered.

The emergence of voice-search and Google Assistant is forcing Google to change its model in search, to favor their own entity understanding or the world, so that questions and queries can be answered in context. Many marketers are struggling to understand how their website and their job as an SEO or SEM will change, as searches focus more on entity-understanding, context and action-oriented interaction. This shift can either provide massive opportunities, or create massive threats to your company and your job — the main determining factor is how you choose to prepare for the change.

The analysts are coming for your job, not AI (at least not yet). Analysts stopped using Excel years ago; they use Tableau, Power BI, Looker! They see more data than you, and that is what is going to make them a threat to your job. They might not know search, but they know data. In this talk, Wil Reynolds documents his obsession with Power BI and the insights he can glean in seconds which is helping every single client at Seer at the speed of light. Search marketers must run to this opportunity, as analysts miss out on the insights because more often than not they use these tools to report. We use them to find insights.

In August 2017, Google stated that local searches without the "near me" modifier had grown by 150% and that searchers were beginning to drop geo-modifiers — like zip code and neighborhood — from local queries altogether. But does Google still know what searchers are after? For example: the query [best breakfast places] suggests that quality takes top priority; [breakfast places near me] indicates that close proximity is essential; and [breakfast places in Seattle] seems to cast a city-wide net; while [breakfast places] is largely ambiguous. By comparing non-geo-modified keywords against those modified with the prepositional phrases "near me" and "in [city name]" and qualifiers like "best," we hope to understand how Google interprets different levels of local intent and uncover patterns in the types of SERPs produced. With a better understanding of how local SERPs behave, SEOs can refine keyword lists, tailor content, and build targeted campaigns accordingly.

In our rush to rank, we put ourselves first, neglecting what searchers (and our future customers) want. Google wants to reward sites that deliver on searcher intent, and SERP features are a window into that intent. Find out how to map keywords to intent, understand how intent informs the buyer funnel, and deliver on the promise of ranking to drive results that attract clicks and customers.

Search engine optimization is a numbers game. We want some numbers to go up (links, rankings, traffic, and revenue), others to go down (bounce rate, load time, and budget). Underlying all these numbers are assumptions that can mislead, deceive, or downright ruin your campaigns. Russ Jones will help uncover the hidden biases, distortions, and fabrications that underlie many of the metrics we have come to trust implicitly and from the ashes show you how to build metrics that make a difference.