The email hit my inbox late Thursday night to say that I would be heading to SearchLove the following Monday. To say that I was excited would be an understatement! For many the thought of going to a conference about SEO would be boring, however, I couldn’t wait to meet some of the best SEO, marketing and tech guys in the business.
SearchLove is a two day event held at The Brewery in London, just a short walk from Moorgate Tube Station. Created by Distilled and with the sponsorship of Moz and SEMRush it is designed to bring the best techniques and latest news from the search world.
This years line up was fantastic and the speakers all coming at Search, Social, Strategy and Marketing from different angles. With so many great speaks and topics I couldn’t write about everyone, so I have picked just a handful that most relate to us.
Hannah Smith – Existential Crisis Management (‘the musing of a content strategist’)
Day One kicked off at 9am with an introduction from Will Critchlow from Distilled. However, this wasn’t before everyone enjoyed some beautiful pastries provided by The Brewery. If you think that the day started slowly it didn’t, we dived into our first talk Hannah Smith talking about how to create a meaningful brand and what to stand for.
Did you know: Consumers would not care if 92% of brands disappeared!
Oli Gardner – The Landing Page Manifesto
This was followed by Oli Gardner’s presentation on how to create high-converting landing pages. He showed us that it wasn’t all about what you as a business may think you want on these landing pages, its about using contextual design and the psychology of conversions to build search marketing experiences that elevate your brand as well as your conversion rates. This is something that all businesses and website owners should be thinking about when going through the creating pages in order to increase sales.
Ade Lewis – Becoming a Digital Superhero
Abe Lewis, who is a friend of StrategiQ explained the way to becoming a digital superhero. I defiantly loved this presentation, if for no other reason alone, is that he used Minions in his slides, and who doesn’t love a Minion! Ade’s talk really got me thinking about new tools I hadn’t come across and is now something I am using with my clients in order to make sure we continue to get the results that we need.
Annie Crushing – Are Your Google Analytic’s Reports Pretty Little Liars?
This lady will make your head spin. Flying all the way from New Jersey in order to pass on her Google Analytics knowledge and let me tell you she is full of it. Annielytic’s broke down the barriers that Analytics places in front of you and the tricks it tries to play on you when trying to understand your data. Thanks to Annie we have come away a little bit wiser to Google.
Did you know: New Users in Analytics means nothing! Google can’t track your movements across different devices.
Mackenzie Fogelson – The Measurement Behind Your Integrated Marketing Strategy
What Mack had to say will be something that every Agency feels with clients and something every in-house teams feels from their bosses. She talked about the importance of looking at the big picture, don’t always focus just on what happened that month or that week. On a week by week basis activity may fluctuate, however, over the course of year you will see an increase in the performance of the company. I think Mack managed to give everyone in the room the confidence to tell those they are reporting too, that everything can be distributed at the speed of light, but results may take longer.
Will Critchlow – The Threat of Mobile
Rounding off the day, Will talked about the threat of mobile and how we should be changing our campaigns to account for Google chasing the mobile-first approach to design. Will really highlighted how serious agencies and business alike should be taking this. Mobile friendly websites are a must and should no longer be over looked and seen as a luxury. Content should be written for mobile and for desktop. “Don’t build things differently, build different things.”
Did you know: There will be more mobile search queries than Desktop this year.
Justin Cutroni – Mobile Analytics: Straight Talk on Measuring Your Mobile Efforts.
You couldn’t get any closer to inside the Google machine than talking to Justin Cutroni, except for Matt Cutts (if he EVER returns). You might be wondering why? Justin is a Google Analyst and has a wealth of knowledge on the challenges that we as marketers will face with mobile measurement.
Jono Alderson – Turbocharging Your WordPress Website
Many people including us here at StrategiQ use WordPress as the CMS on a website. Jono https://twitter.com/jonoalderson gave us loads of new tips, tricks and practical guidance to ensure that websites on WordPress perform to the best of their abilities. Looking at hosting configurations, plugin’s and technical SEO we are armoured with the knowledge to make our websites even better.
Rand Fishkin – Cracking the SEO code for 2015: Tactics to Love Vs Leave
To round up two amazing days, Rand Fishkin, former CEO of Moz talked to us about the changes in SEO for 2015. If we thought SEO had changed a lot over the last year, what his insights showed us is that we haven’t seen anything yet. With keyword matching changing to keyword association, will this make it hard or easier to get the top results? SEO is changing to be Domain Level keyword matching, something that wasn’t the case before. However, what Rand said that nearly every speaker on the day said was content is the main focus in SEO now. If you don’t have the content you won’t get those much desired Page 1 positions.
Did you know: Just because the Keyword Planner says there aren’t any search volumes, that isn’t true! It has to show commercially intent keywords.
So that was SearchLove over for another year. I was really happy to hear so many of the speakers shouting out about SEMRush. This is a tool that I have used for the last 2 years and have seen it grow and improve. I honestly couldn’t do without it, so it was lovely to see them as a sponsor next to Moz.
Goodbye and farewell Searchlove, we look forward to attending next year and can’t wait to see whom Destilled have lined up.
