Brighton SEO 2018

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

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

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