SMX London is underway over the World Wide Web. Here’s what we saw on the first day.

Content Optimization Tips

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An SEO Dream Team Unpacks the SEO Periodic Table

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Judith Lewis, Decabbit Consultancy (@JudithLewis)

There are a few different elements of SEO shared by the panel the SMX London team describes as the “Dream Team.” Judith Lewis, the founder of Decabbit Consultancy, shares some crucial elements of content, which fall under the ideas of Quality and Depth. Here are the key takeaways:

• Quality content is unique and well-written.
• It has been researched, has a topic theme, and provide value to the targeted audience.
• It has depth, meaning it investigates the subject in a new or different way, not merely having a lot of words about it.
• It reveals new information or insight in a new way.
• It has substance, meaning it shares meaningful, well-thought-out arguments and perspectives on the topic.

Four #SMXInsights

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PPC Optimization in 2020: What’s Fresh and New, What’s Tried and True

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Aaron Levy, Tinuiti (@bigalittlea)

Aaron Levy, Director of SEM for Tinuiti, shared his insight on PPC optimization. He says that over the last 20 years, PPC has changed a lot, and today’s latest features and technology can help you more than ever before. Particularly, AI can help. Levy emphasizes that understanding how it works, knowing which data it uses and builds upon, and maintaining it fill in the gaps with your intuition can leverage this powerful tool on behalf of your clients. Some additional vital #SMXInsights include:

• The full-picture structuring of your campaigns is the best practice.
• Understand how AI works, and then optimize the inputs to improve its outputs
• Remember, if data is king, then intuition is queen. You must have both working together, not allowing them to operate alone.
• You are driving the campaign, but remember that the engine is the power.

Levy also encourages anyone to share the #SMXInsights on your social channels:

Tips for UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) Tagging

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Advanced GMB Tactics for SEOs: UTM Tagging and Addressing Suspensions

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Claire Carlile, Claire Carlile Marketing (@clairecarlile)

One of the highlights from the first day was Claire Carlile’s presentation on the core marketing challenges with Google My Business (GMB) for your clients. Carlile’s presentation addressed how you can track and measure what’s happening with GMB activities and how to manage the challenges presented by promoting multi-location enterprises. When it comes to using UTM tagging, Carlile offers the following tips and tricks:

• First, be consistent. Carlile says your Google Analytics (GA) reports will thank you for using the same format for your tags.
• Next, Carlile says to keep them lower case as GA is case sensitive.
• Also, be careful not to mix up your medium and source.

To see the whole deck from Claire Carlile at Claire Carlile Marketing, please click here.  

Day two was more of what made day one great. Here are few we knew you would want to know about:

Search Marketing During a Time of Change & Challenges

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Liang Chen, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Checkout.com (@LChen_)

Sonia Mazzotta-Morrison, Head of SEO, Funding Options (@SoniaMazzotta)

The day kicked off with a timely and relevant topic, Search Marketing During a Time of Change & Challenges with Liang Chen at Checkout.com and Sonia Mazzotta-Morrison at Funding Options. While search marketing was never a walk in the park, Chen and Mazzotta-Morrison say it has certainly kicked it up a notch with today’s challenging environment. Moreover, it is a complex process with many moving parts, like coordination of SEO, PPC, and social marketing, Google’s decision to phase out third-party cookies earlier this year, ever-changing privacy rules, and budget management and attribution measurement, to name a few. Oh, and then, of course, the pandemic dropping a big load of uncertainty on top of all of this!

Greg Sterling (@gsterling), VP of Market Insights for Uberall interviewed the pair to talk more about these challenges and how they have solved them. 

Bring it With B2B PPC Landing Pages

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Optimized B2B Landing Pages That Convert

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Melissa Mackey, Search Supervisor at Gyro (@Mel66)

James Brockbank Managing Director & Founder, Digitaloft (@BrockbankJames)

On Wednesday afternoon, Melissa Mackey from Gyro and James Brockbank from Digitaloft teamed up to present on how to ensure that B2B landing pages convert. They say the fastest way to impact the bottom line with your SEO and PPC campaigns is to increase the conversions on the landing pages to which you send your targeted audience. The duo showed attendees how to build better landing pages that rank higher, how to get better traffic going there, and how to test offers and other features on the page to optimize the conversion rates. Some of the key takeaways from the session include:

• Have a clear call-to-action (CTA) above the fold. It should be obvious what you want your traffic to do, having arrived on the page. Furthermore, you should test your CTAs to see which once inspire the best response. 
• Focus your landing page on what drew your traffic there. If you drove your traffic based on a specific search query, be sure it is included in the page copy. However, Mackey and Brockbank, say you should test this concept, too. 
• Match the page content to where prospects are in the sales process.  Prospects have a journey to become customers. You should have a good idea of where your traffic is on that path so you can present them with the right content at the right time. Sometimes that means an informational page, sometimes that means throwing up a gate to capture their information for follow-up. 
• Minimize copy. Remember to keep it to how your product or service benefits the targeted audience.
• Test your forms, too.  Mackey and Brockbank refer to Goldilocks here because you should test your forms to find what is just right for the number of fields.

To see the whole presentation by Mackey and Brockbank, please click here.

Next up? You can attend SMX Next Advanced June 23-24, 2020, from your couch.

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