SMX Advanced London

I attended the SMX Advanced in London on May 18^th to hear what was happening in the industry in terms of SEO and Social Media.  There were two particular seminars at the search marketing expo that stood out in my opinion: Top Ten Customised Search Analytics Reports and The Art of Measuring Local and Mobile Search Results.  Here’s a bit of a recap, hope you pick up a few tricks of the trade!

Top Ten Customised Search Analytics Reports was part of the Analytics & Conversion Track.  They chose to do this seminar to help marketers sort through the huge amounts of data generated by web reports.  The seminar helped to highlight the few relevant reports for search marketers.  They said that the more you customise reports, the more you will increase the value of your business because you can tune into your site’s personal needs.  They noted that you can create customised reports by making advanced segments in your analytics.  The top ten advanced segments were:

1. Visitor to Purchase
2. First Touch vs. Last Touch vs. Paid Search
3. First Touch vs. Last Touch vs. Non-Branded
4. Search v. Direct
5. Econometric Models

(*1-5 Attribution)

6. New Links
7. Keyword Length (segments for elements in long tail)
8. Number Organic Landing Pages Over Time (all landing pages that has had at least one visitor; indexation by sections i.e. products, blogs)
9. Real Time
10. Heat Maps

The Art of Measuring Local and Mobile Search Results seminar was part of the Social Media Track.  It was to help people understand how to measure the offline conversions from local and mobile search marketing efforts.  They chose to do this seminar because companies have more difficulty measuring return on investment from mobile marketing than any other digital channel.  They gave us an idea of what metrics and techniques that sheds some light and help for accountability for local and mobile search campaigns.  They said to check out “place pages report” from Google.  They also said to check out www.getlisted.org.   They talked a lot of strategy on how to get into the “7 pack”, which is the local map section.  For that, you need to do these five things:

1. Have a local vanity URL (i.e. www.domainname.com/cityname).
2. Create tracking URL (Google Campaign URL Tool Builder).
3. Redirect vanity URL with a 301 redirect to ugly URL you got from Google Campaign URL Tool.
4. Make sure to de-dupe either with canonical element or replace ? with # with pagetracker_setallowanchor(true)
5. Create advanced segments in Google Analytics

For mobile search they said to check out FourSquare and Yelp.  They said that with mobile, universal search will grow increasingly important.  Thus you need to tag and put links on maps, images, video, news, maps, books and products.  They listed ten areas that are overlooked in local/mobile search:

1. Do employee profile pages with hcard microformat
2. Events and Calendars with hcard microformat
3. Contact us and location maps with hcard
4. Telephone numbers to do standard format
5. Testimonials
6. Coupons/special offers (in Google places)
7. Product/service descriptions
8. Books/white papers/PDFs
9. Images help in SEO & Local SEO (optimise because blended and universal)
10. Custom Maps (user generated maps and places “related maps” with embedded links to places of interest

One last little nugget of information I picked up was to look at your competitor’s citation to see where they have links from and make sure to get on their same directories and with people like Chamber of Commerce (infoseek).