From a sun-kissed bar overlooking the Thames at Doggetts Coat and Badge we gathered to enjoy a beverage or two and listen to Search London‘s lineup of expert speakers deliver some sage search marketing advice. Pete Campbell and Jono Alderson were sharing the benefit of their knowledge, an experience in what turned out to be a great evening. Read on for my writeup of the evening – with added slides!
Pete Campbell – “How Learning PR Techniques Made Me Awesome at Outreach”
Pete from Kaizen Search gave a really interesting talk, lending some of his pearls of wisdom towards PR-led outreach – the resounding point being that SEOs need to stop outreaching like SEOs and think Public Relations! I’d advise you to look through his slide deck below, but I’ve also summarised the key points below for quick reference.
- If you’re outreaching with you “SEO” hat on – you probably need to step up your game – link building is PR these days!
- Don’t be obsessed with “scale” of linking (i.e. lots of), gain focus – eyes on the most important links
- Don’t make 20 pieces of content and outreach them 20 times, build a campaign and supporting content and build one outreach campaign off that – “One Huge Idea – Multiple Link Opportunities”
- Create a PR framework before you build content – it’ll help you form the content and highlight outreach opportunities
- Ask your client about the product – find out what needs to be solved
- Use word association to brainstorm ideas
- Look at upcoming trends
- Make a list of your key linking sources
- 100 : 1 Principle – 100 crap ideas to 1 good one
- STEPPS process
- Social Currency
- Triggers
- Emotion
- Public
- Practical Value
- Stories
- -> your idea needs to tick three of the boxes!
- Make your content
- Get in contact with authors, email them, call them, call them again, email again and repeat (politely until they say “please stop talking to me” or “okay, you win”
- Use Journalist/PR resources to look for easier linking opportunities
You can check out Pete’s post about it here – https://www.kaizensearch.co.uk/blog/content-marketing/search-london-2015/, but you should follow him on twitter too.
Jono Alderson – “Understanding ROI with Advanced Keyword Research”
Jono, Linkdex‘s Head of Insight gave a blistering talk about Advanced keyword research and how you might go about the return on investment behind it. Jono, as expected, dove pretty deeply into the process and whilst I’ve tried to summarise the points, you’ll get much, much more from checking out the slides below.
- Good SEO is about aligning with the intent of your customer
- To do this you need to understand the market place
- People just want to build a ‘ranking wishlist’ when starting an SEO campaign, this usually amounts to the same 10 keywords that everyone else has applied to their own wishlist – this is uneconomical
- Because of this keyword research is seldom actual research.
- Get all the keywords, classify/categories by everything. Crunch data, identify the opportunities get buy-in and monitor the results.
- Don’t think about keywords, think about topics, intent and need groups
- Monitor your competitors – be aware of where they are
- When you find the gaps in the market that can be easily filled, using existing strengths to win consumers
- Track & react over time
- Start small, aim big (high enough to get the result you need)
- Define success and demonstrate it
Again, I need to stress that you need to run through the slides to do it justice, but I’d strongly suggest you follow Jono on Twitter to get more of his insights as they come.
If you’re serious about search marketing, I can’t advocate Search London enough – check our their Meetup page here. We’ll be looking forward to the next session and gain more insight that helps keep us one step ahead.
Got any questions about any of this? Of course you do – get in touch today, we’ll be happy to help out!
