With the snow falling here in Boston, we happily agreed to attend Search Engine Watch’s inaugural conference, Connect, in Miami last week. Over the course of two days, we attended Organic and Paid Search sessions, which helped reinforce the current knowledge and trends in the industry right now. Having FOMO? Do not fear – here are our top takeaways.
- Increase your brand’s content assets. With the changing digital landscape, brands need to become a lot more like a publishers. By creating unique, thought leadership content that adheres to all four intent clusters will increase your brand visibility and build loyalty with your consumer. In addition, the increase of rich answers reinforces the idea of tailoring some of your content strategy to answering the queries and really keeping the user at the forefront of all your content strategy.
- User generated content is a great content strategy. This was a reoccurring theme as brands are finding new ways to engage with consumers for review data and creation of content at scale.
- Larry Kim has a lot of energy (or caffeine). Founder and CTO of WordStream, Larry led an engaging 156 meme-heavy presentation (that he successful flew through in 30 minutes) and it was one of the most talked about session and is still making waves days after. His key insight: only promote your best posts (your ‘unicorns’) for $50 and not treat all posts the same.
- Localization is a pain point for organic search marketers. There was a collective complaint about the local 3-Pack which massively affected the organic space. To maintain strong local rankings, UNAP (accurate business information), citations and reviews need to be a key focus to rank competitively.
- Search is not just about keywords. It is about understanding the specific intent of the person behind the query. Avinash Kaushik led a brilliant session on his putting his framework of See (no commercial intent), Think (weak commercial intent), Do (strong commercial intent), and Care (extra-loyal customers) into action as it applies to Content, Marketing and Measurement.
- “We’re all in for Search.” Since the Yahoo Bing alliance changes last year, Bing has confirmed their dedication to Search in 2016 and beyond. (Did you also know that Bing now holds 21% of the search share due to the growth of Windows 10? It would be worth checking your current investment levels to ensure you are reaching your consumer on Bing.)
- The mobile space continues to evolve with app indexation. We were surprised to hear that only 44% of Fortune 500 companies are not mobile friendly. Several companies discussed their deep linking tactics and how tracking is still a challenge within the app space.
Jessica Lambert, Regional Director, SEO - East, also contributed to this blog post.
