Our Paid Search, Display & SEO Seminar last Thursday gave delegates the chance to hear from industry experts, gain useful tips to take back to the office, and have their questions answered during the panel. Some key topics under discussion during the event were whether bidding on competitors’ brands is effective, whether or not to retain an SEO agency, the future of voice search, and ad copy testing versus manual testing. If you didn’t make it to the event or want to refresh your memory, read on for the main takeaways from each talk and follow the links to the full presentations.
An SEO Guide to a Data Led Content Strategy
Erald Krasniqi, Search Strategist at Edit, outlined how to make sure your content is effective using data. He recommended that brands identify the purpose of every piece of content they publish, ensure that all content is organised, and delete any content that’s not performing well.
Erald summarised the different types of customer intent (informational, navigational, transactional, and commercial), showed how to analyse and optimise content, and offered advice for creating a content strategy. Watch Erald’s presentation here.
Test and Earn: Why Experimentation is the Secret Sauce Behind Any Growth Strategy
Daniel Gilbert, CEO at Brainlabs, discussed the growth mind-set and how to foster it in your company. He talked about the role of experimentation in growth and redefined failure: when you fail and learn from it then it’s not a failure.
Daniel went through the test and earn cycle, highlighting key stages, such as data measurement, channel testing, and data science, and explained how to identify how your company is performing at each stage. Watch Daniel’s presentation here.
Rich Results
Hannah Thorpe, Business Director at Found, talked through various methods you can use to make your brand rank higher in Google search results. She showed how to create content with Google’s answer box in mind, use schema appropriately, and get your brand on the knowledge graph.
Hannah emphasised the importance of consistency when talking about your brand online and illustrated how to work out what percentage of a Google search page is dominated by your brand. Watch Hannah’s presentation here.
Find Your Perfect Audience With Google Ads
Gareth Morgan, Managing Director at Liberty Marketing, demonstrated how to identify which customers are the most valuable to your company and how to effectively target them. He broke down the benefits of bidding on keywords versus using ads based on who your target audiences is.
Gareth presented a case study to illustrate how money can be saved during a keyword bidding war, and explained how to use Google to understand customer behaviour and what stage on the purchasing journey customers are at. Watch Gareth’s presentation here.
Making Paid Search Work When You Think You Should Give Up!
Hanifa Dungarwalla, Group Digital Marketing Manager at Bauer Media UK, talked about the decreased demand for print subscriptions and how, at Bauer, they’ve encouraged incremental growth through search. She stressed the importance of testing and outlined how they tested their strategy against a control group. Bauer worked on emphasising the benefits of a print subscription to one of their magazines and Hanifa showed how this had a positive impact on CPA. Watch Hanifa’s presentation here.