It is a crisp cold December morning and I am meeting with Julia Marsh @juliaruzich - Web Designer and Analyst for the luxurious beauty care company Bath & Unwind to drink hot chocolate and talk about searchlove.
Before you think it, this isn't the latest online dating forum, this is a two day 'advanced search marketing'' conference held in London.
So Jules, what is searchlove all about?
Searchlove is one of two main online marketing conferences along with Linklove, put on by Distilled, in London and New York annually. Distilled work very closely with SEOmoz, an SEO agency based out of Seattle to help put this event on, which is geared as an advanced online marketing conference with actionable tips and information.
It sounds like there was a lot of planning involved in this conference, what did each day cover and who were the guest speakers?
It is set up as an 8 hour day with 9-10 speakers a day, covering all areas of online marketing from community and social building to content strategy, link building techniques and case studies. The speakers included:
Wil Reynolds from SEER Interactive,
Rand Fishkin and Joanna Lord from SEOmoz
Will and Tom Critchlow, Rob Ousbey and Hannah Smith from Distilled
Richard Baxter from SEO Gadget
Ciaran Norris from Mindshare
Mat Clayton from Mixcloud
Patrick Altoft from Branded3
Stephen Pavlovich from Conversation Factory
Wiep Knol from linkbuilding.nl
Martin MacDonald from OMD
I have been to many conferences, and I can safely say that this group of speakers is the most inspired and knowledgeable group I have ever seen on one stage.
Wow! Definitely some high calibre individuals, I follow@randfish and am a huge fan of his blogs. These people really know their stuff, did you ever feel a little bit out of your depth during their talks?
Not at all, the event is open to anyone, although I do think some back knowledge would be essential for really getting the most out of it. That said, I still consider myself quite early in the learning curve of SEO, and I could barely keep up with everything I learned from this conference. I never felt over my head or that I was missing anything, which I think comes down to the talent of the speakers in communicating their topics really clearly. There is a focus on making sure each talk has actionable tips and best practices that you can take away and apply to your situation. That ethos means that the ROI for a company thinking of sending someone to this event is almost guaranteed to come back in multiples, even if you just make a few changes based on the two days of expert advice, you are going to make an impact.
I bet you were eager to get back to the office so you could start critiquing your site and making changes?
Well critiquing of the site actually happened there and then in front of a live audience of 450 people!! The last session on the last day is called “Head to head: Live Site Reviews”. They pitched Will Critchlow against Rand Fishkin and gave them each 2-3 sites to go away and review for a few hours, then they had to do a presentation/review of each one.
It was an incredible opportunity to get personalised feedback from arguably two of the best SEO consultants in the field. Bath & Unwind was lucky enough to be chosen from the sites submitted, and Rand reviewed our site. That experience alone was worth the price of admission, not only for me, but for anyone watching that session, as the tips both experts gave to all the sites were also easily transferable to any site.
Gosh, that is incredible. What advice did they give you?
I don’t know how to quantify all of what I learned…other than the biggest conceptual thing for me was an increased understanding of how all the things we do affect SEO, affect Social, effect everything. Sometimes it’s easy to get tunnel vision on the areas you work on, but they aren’t separate, and they can’t be as successful separately as they are when you can keep the whole picture in mind. This is why SEO has definitely pushed me to be a more informed designer and I recommend that all web designers engage with SEO to help craft their design.
You must remember some little gems they gave you?
They suggested creating a Pinterest account to help assist with our current social media efforts as this would be another route to connect and share with a huge community. It’s an incredible tool if you have something visual to share, and also creates links (with link juice) back to your site, as it is used worldwide people will be 'repinning' when we are sleeping which will more often than not convert to a transaction. We will also be redesigning our blog to be appropriately in-line with our site, and integrating it throughout the site more.
The tech session I recall most is Will Critchlow’s talk on The Modern SEO’s Toolkit. He started with a more technical example, or more technical than I thought I would be able to follow, regarding taking a 22GB log file of Googlebot visits and using command line grep, getting what he needed down to a small, easy to manage amount of data. The example was broken down step by step so even those of us who don’t handle the code-side of our sites could follow along and really gain an understanding of how we can really dig into that kind of raw data.
The tools that stood out most for me in Will's talk were the following:
Screaming Frog -
a small desktop program you can install on your PC or Mac which spiders websites’ links, images, CSS, script and apps from an SEO perspective.'
Tamper data - an SEO testing tool used to view and modify HTTP/HTTPS headers and post parameters.
Another great tip was to replicate the Google Panda update survey using Smartsheet.com and Mechanical Turk ( an Amazon owned, US based service where you can get things done, pay users to test your site.) It’s a bit of a quick and cheap way to quickly have users answer questions about the authenticity and perceived expertise of your site, since these are all things Google now looks at when deciding how legit your page is, and where you will compare in SERPS versus your competitors. I am planning to role out a small test of this type of survey for B&U soon, to see how the updates we have been doing are doing from the user-side. Think baby usability testing.
Tom Critchlow is a renowned SEO consultant, did he give you much food for thought?
Linkbuilding in the SEO age… Tom Critchlow and Rob Ouseby (Distilled) both talked about this topic in depth, and I have to say it is one of the topics I was most hoping to learn about, and indeed found it the most inspiring for me and my upcoming work at B&U. Linkbuilding is about outreach, relationship building and then and only then about acquiring links.
They both shared some tools (GroupHigh and Followerwonk) and stressed that it’s not about batch emailing everyone you can find with a “Dear xxxx, can you link to my page/blog/site. thanks, me.” email, but is more about building a long-term conversation and relationship that you can then rely on, and come back to. It’s also all about your content strategy - have great content, and people will link to it.
I read an article recently by Cyrus Shepard, former SEO for SEOmoz, and he said basically: If you visit the NASA site, it’s poorly optimized, covered in Flash, clearly no one is doing SEO for it. But their stats are incredible…visits, links and traffic beyond most people’s dreams. Why? Because THEY BUILD ROCKETS. They send people to SPACE. So it is not always about how well optimised your site is and how many links you have hustled!
I walked away from my meeting with Jules I realised just how important it is for Web Designers to understand SEO or at least have a basic knowledge of it whilst they are designing. What I took from Jules is that as a web designer you have to bear in mind that you are most importantly designing for the user and if you do this well then you will naturally have high search engine rankings.