Search continues to be one of the fastest changing industries there is. Online marketing strategies need to be able to adapt and change, making conferences an essential part of how we grow. Not only do these events provide an ideal platform to learn from other search professi0nals, they also allow us to explore the latest innovations in search and how they might affect clients in the near future.
MEC recently attended the ION Search conference in Leeds, headed up by the search marketing agency Blue Claw. The venue was great and there were many leading industry speakers on hand to provide key insights into how they are adapting their search marketing strategies. As with all conferences there’s a lot to take in in a short space of time, but with eight of our team in attendance we were able to learn a great deal from the experts listed below.
Ross Hudgens
Ross specialises in content marketing and conversion rate optimisation, and has been featured on major search websites like SEOmoz and Search Engine Journal. The main topics of Ross’ talk were how to use different strategies for link outreach.
Ross’ tips included how to use current brand mentions for new acquisitions, and link building using miss-spelling of brand names. Ross also talked about using YouTube links and broken link building to improve your reach for your brand
It was good to hear re-iterated that agencies should only be using up to 20 per cent commercial anchor text, with more creative link building methods like infographics being employed where possible. Following recent Google updates which are clamping down on over optimised link profiles, this is something we believe all SEO companies should be doing.
Marcus Tandler
Marcus delivered a presentation featuring over 400 slides. This might sound dull, but with most of them included simply for comedy value, it was actually rather hilarious. Similarly to Ross, he talked about broken link building as a way to aid SEO, as well as how a third of all searches are now looking for fresh results – highlighting the importance of updating sites on a regular basis.
Also covered was the topic of Author Rank, with attendees advised to use author-rank.org. This tool provides statistics on author popularity and may help with our efforts to put Author Rank into our link building tactics
Sam Crocker - Enterprise SEO
Sam Crocker spoke about SEO for enterprise-level clients, a great talk for our team to attend as it is perhaps the closest to our client base. In a similar manner to the last panel, Crocker discussed how new content on big brands can rank quickly.
His main points were around communication to the client, stating the SEO team should be using above the line jargon and not confusing the client with technical information. He also talked about the importance of streamlining the approval process to make changes on big brands. Examples of improving the process include:
- Writing brand guidelines for SEO
- Producing separate sites that can be edited and manipulated far easier
In terms of tools Sam gave away two to help us including:
- http://www.woorank.com/ - a tool which diagnoses a site
- www.deepcrawl.co.uk – A tool which crawls sites and provides great information for SEOs to optimize to help generate more traffic for their clients.
Review
MEC understands the importance keeping up with the latest industry changes and regular conferences like ION Search allow us to continue to deliver the most innovative, best practice SEO to our clients.
The event provided a great insight to how other companies and agencies are developing their SEO strategies, with lots of great insight into the sector that can be useful in helping deliver the best results to clients in achieving their business goals.
There were many takeaways from the conference, but here are three we feel are among the most vital:
- Outreach – Implementing additional tactics to help improve out outreach skills
- Tools – Provided more tools to explore for our clients
- Broken link building – Tools to replace broken links for our clients
It was great to meet some other key figures in the search world, and also to validate that MEC are already implementing most of the tactics that some key figures in the search industry are.