Machine learning

• Talk about people not sessions
• Use free machine learning tools to get started
• If you have the data, you can begin right away
• Statistics say you have to convert the customer again within a month or their loyalty is lost
• Start small, optimise, scale up
• “Target 1% of visitors, deliver 1.5% conversion rate improvement”

AI

• Rankbrain
• AI works to understand the relationship between data
• We can help Google with semantics and natural language data gathering
• The natural language links between words build up a contextual database for effective algorithm functionality
• Google is sensitive to content density, quality not quantity
• Adopt the mind of a data scientist
• Keras – deep learning library
• Be a great data collector
• Take time to build the logic
• Automate analysis
• Google consumes as much annual energy as the whole of San Francisco

Blockchain

• The decentralisation of trust
• A lack of trust is inefficient, due to the number of checks and balances it demands
• Blockchain is resilient, e.g. as a global financial system
• Transparent and consistent
• Steem dollars are run on a blockchain framework, earners can trade them for cash
• Possible to change the economics of spam by adding a transaction cost to digital activity
• Also possible to incentivise honesty, paying to challenge plagiarism and winning the challenge if correct
• “Collaboration on mass without permission”

Insight reporting

• Google search console
• Once you have the numbers, turn them into stories
• Tool recommendation – Answer the Public

Converting emotion

• Identify emotional goals for the customer
• Know what they want to feel when they take the action
• Avoid them having to process information, that’s not the state you want people in for optimal conversion
• Limbic maps are a great emotional matrix
• Create a simple and streamlined user journey
• Site priority for conversion – on every landing page visit, 55% of our focus is on images and colours, 35% on headings and layout, 10% on copy
• Adverts should be about the person you’ll become once you’ve bought the product
• Use implicit signals when creating great landing pages

Site speed

• Poor site speed means lower conversion
• Every second is a 7% drop in conversation rate
• Slow sites rank lower
• Everyone creating content should play their part in site speed optimisation
• To generate senior buy-in, prove that time equals money
• “Traditional performance metrics have little to do with user experience”
• Site recommendation – Google Lighthouse
• Automate image compression
• Celebrate performance improvements to keep motivation high
• Create a performance culture
• Consider putting critical CSS into the page itself
• Avoid custom fonts and ‘heavy’ content
• ‘font-display: optional’ will become standard in AMP
• Aim for under two seconds but you can never be too fast

Keyword research

• Identifying intent is key
• Queries are becoming longer so Google can become more accurate
• Consider syntax and semantics
• Search types: informational, commercial, transactional, local
• Understand the competitive landscape
• Create test intention campaigns to better understand what audiences are looking for
• Location influences the intent, e.g. searching “chips” in Brighton would point you to a fish and chip restaurant, whereas in America it would recommend a nearby 7/11
• The right keywords are relevant, popular and attainable
• Intention funnel: awareness, consideration, purchase, retention
• Identify what motivates people and what detracts them
• Ensure consistency in results across different tools
• Tool recommendation – Google suggest
• Shops have extra challenges with so many categories and modifiers
• But they can use good keyword research to map natural language searches into a sorted matrix of product categories (e.g. black Levi’s jeans)
• Research competitor rankings and identify content gaps for optimal product marketing
• Disallow Google to crawl more than four levels deep