SearchLove London 2012 - Recaps, Roundups and Slidedecks

by Mikael Jonsson

I had the privilege of attending my first Searchlove conference in London on the 29-30 october 2012. It was two great days with an impressive line-up of speakers and I am really happy to have attended this conference.

My last conference was SMX Stockholm two years ago and the difference of topics and focus is huuuuge. As mentioned in Mari Hamara´s recap the topics of the different sessions was on content, website and community, conversion, tracking and getting customer buy in to actually GET SH*T DONE. Being great to the community was also mentioned more than once and the focus being on creating great content, tools, etc. online but even on helping to organize offline activities for non-profits(!). So it´s basically were KliKKi´s always been at!

There are some great roundups and recaps of the sessions available on various sites (links below) as well as all the slide-decks available so I will not make any attempts to recap the various sessions. What I will do is highlight some of my favourite takeaways and provide you with lots of links to awesome recaps, speakers, tools and blogs for further reading.

ROUNDUPS, AWESOME ROUNDUPS & SLIDEDECKS:

• Distilled - Day 1
  
• Distilled - day 2
  
• Foliovision - Day 1
  
• Foliovision - Day 2
  
• State of search - Day 1(1)
  
• State of search - Day 1(2)
  
• State of search - Day 1(3)
  
• State of search - Day 2(1)
  
• State of search - Day 2(2)
  
• Barry Magennis - Day 1
  
• Barry Magennis - Day 2
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• Recap of searchlove as sketchnotes (by verticalleap)
  - Dude... AWESOME link/share-bait
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• Searchlove takeaways and tips by Wordtracker
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• Slidedecks from the conference 
  

TAKEAWAYS - SEARCHLOVE LONDON 2012

On-site content

• Focus on the user
• Is the niche full of poorly designed websites? focusing on design and usability can really add to trust factors with your users.
• Have clear goal for your site and individual pages?
• Make sure you have a prominent call to action on each page to control traffic and direct people to what you want
• Build credibility and build trust with your users
• Look at the competitors designs - User interface (UI) and User Experience (UX)! How do you stack up? Improvement opportunities!
• Speak to your users and learn what their objections are to the content, what their wants and needs are
• Constantly be improving content
• Be great to your community
• Product pages - make them awesome and reflect company personality

Don´t worry about the algoritm

• Worry about changes to the SERP

E-commerce tips

• Don´t ask people to register before getting to the checkout page (only Apple gets away with that).

Content strategy

• Infographics: know about your topic inside and out - otherwise it will bomb hard
• If you´re not an expert - find an expert (or become one)
• Where does your business and target audience interests intersect?
  • You have to dig into what your users care about - listen to your target market
  • What do they talk about and what would make their lives easier
• Build content that is valuable to them and you will get more than just links back
• Create Big Bang content pieces when targeting links

Getting SEO done

• “Just do this” intructions won´t get it done when communicating with your clients “doers, you need to get buy-in from the people that will make the changes otherwise lead-time can be mind-boggling for getting a single task done
• Consolidate steps and make it easy

Link Worthy content - ideas and examples

• Create a killer product - get this right and the marketing will almost take care of itself
• Cooffe meetup for tech-bloggers - linkidea for kopi.co.uk
• Have nice images that people will “borrow” - Find them and connect, entice them to link back to you by offering to retweet their post for example if they give you credit
• A good content idea can still fail if you choose the wrong format (example: How music travels)
• Use the Distilled (Content/infographic) idea checklist
• Example: Epic infographic - How music travels (Dynamic version | Static version)
• Example: Game walkthroughs
• Example: Step by step guide to social media success
• Example: Google Adwords Small Business Guide

SESSIONS / SPEAKERS

Justin Briggs - The Life of an in-house SEO 
Made a great presentation about the challenges of going in-house and how he´s been working with bigfishgames.com to improve their SEO including examples of great link-building tactics through doing RCS (real company shit).
BigFishGames.com | @justinbriggs

Guy Levine – The Future of Small Business SEO
Guy Levine share his experiences of bootstrapped Small Business SEO ...and included case studies ...
ReturnOnDigital | @guylevine

Mark Johnstone – Beyond Linkbait: First Steps to a Content Strategy 
Great session on content marketing strategy and a lesson learned on why infographics fail if you dont know your subject and/or know how to present it in the right way. How to go from one-off linkbait to a coherent content strategy.
Distilled | @markajohnstone

Wil Reynolds – Chasing Algorithms: Think Deviously, Act Angelic, and Never get Hit by a Penalty 
Great session, Inspiring and educational on how to get buy-in from clients to work on long term strategies and some great examples.
Seer Interactive | @wilreynolds

Heather Healy – Do Social Signals Actually Play a Part in Search Rankings 
Aiming to put an end to the speculation about whether social signals have a direct influence on achieving high rankings...
Sticky Eyes | @heatherhealy

Lisa Myers – International SEO – One Size doesn’t Fit All 
How do you create a international targeted SEO strategy? ...crucial areas of international SEO
Verve Search | @lisadmyers

Mat Clayton – Marketing Hacks 
… using product development to get famous, how to build a community, how to integrate social tools to turbo-charge your growth …
Mixcloud | @matclayton

Phil Nottingham – The Building Blocks of Great Video 
… highlight the key creative and technical tactics required to win the internet with video...
Distilled | @philnottingham

David Mihm – The Need to Know of Local SEO 
Super interesting and great about Local SEO by the best known Local SEO practitioner in our industry. His annual Local Search Ranking Factors study is the canonical resource on the subject.
davidmihm.com | @davidmihm

Richard Baxter – How we Build Links at SEOgadget 
… how to acquire links from the right people with the right content, using the right method.
SEO Gadget | @richardbaxter

Lauren Vaccarello – Conversion Tracking & Online/Oflline Attribution 
… advocate of integrating online/offline marketing to gain a clearer picture of what’s driving ROI...
Salesforce | @LaurenV

Dave Peiris – The Unexpected Value of Creating Things 
… experiences of creating searchga.me and HackerBuddy.com ...how to create useful content + how to get value
Shark SEO | @SharkSEO

Paul Madden – Building an Outsourced & Automated Infrastructure from Scratch 
Shared how he deconstructs processes and turns them into scalable and repeatable systems.
paulmadden.co.uk | @PaulDavidMadden

Patrick McKenzie – Eating CRO: Real World Case Studies for 20 ~100% Increases in Revenue 
Shared the lessons he’s learned, conversion rate optimisation case studies and their results, and offering actionable advice on how to create scalable systems.
Kalzumeus | @patio11

Will Critchlow & Rand Fishkin – Head to Head – Inbound Marketing on a Shoestring Budget
Will “can anyone talk faster in the world” Chritchlow and Rand “I cry cause my community love me so much” Fishkin went head to head with two different approaches to getting Inbound marketing done on a low budget (still requires you to pay - in sweat or exchange of some sorts) but anyway it was fun to see the engagement from two of the most known SEO´s.
Distilled | @willcritchlow
SEOMoz | @randfish

Wills Searchlove slides (London) 2012 here
Rands Searchlove slides (London) 2012 here