Ranking and Visibility

How can you use data to find and update content for higher rankings and more traffic? Andy Crestodina will take us through a four-point presentation that pulls together the most effective tactics around content into a single high-powered content strategy with even better results.

Google's algorithms have undergone significant changes in recent years. Traditional ranking signals don't hold the same sway they used to, and they're being usurped by factors like UX and brand that are becoming more important than ever before. What's an SEO to do? The answer lies in testing. Sharing original data and results from clients, Rob Ousbey will highlight the necessity of testing, learning, and iterating your work, from traditional UX testing to weighing the impact of technical SEO changes, tweaking on-page elements, and changing up content on key pages. Actionable processes and real-world results abound in this thoughtful presentation on why you should be testing SEO changes, how and where to run them, and what kinds of tests you ought to consider for your circumstances.

With voice, local, and rich results only rising in importance, how do image and visual search fit into the online shopping ecosystem? Using examples from Google Images, Google Lens, and Pinterest Lens, Joelle Irvine will show how image optimization can improve the overall customer experience and play a key role in discoverability, product evaluation, and purchase decisions for online shoppers. At the same time, accepting that image recognition technology is not yet perfect, she will also share actionable tactics to better optimize for visual search to help those shoppers find that perfect style they just can’t put into words.

Google’s local algorithm is a horse of a different color when compared with the organic algo most SEOs are familiar with. Joy Hawkins will share results from a SterlingSky study on how proximity varies greatly when comparing local and organic results, how reviews impact ranking (complete with data points from testing), how spam is running wild (and how it negatively impacts real businesses), and more.

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.

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.