I was lucky enough to spend a day at SAScon last week, the UK’s leading search marketing conference, which was held in Manchester. Sessions were given by a variety of SEO and PR experts on specialist topics including: link building; global search campaigns; social media case studies and search and PR. The conference climaxed in a creative ‘rap up’ that left everyone talking and tweeting, which, of course, was the name of the game.
Although search and analytics is a specialism and discipline in its own right, I was surprised by the growing crossover into what we know as traditional PR. More of that later, which deserves no less than an entire blog post – watch this space.
The technical part
I opted to take part in the ‘Feeds and microformats – optimisation beyond the site’ session, which opened my eyes to the skill and intricacies involved in optimising a website beyond the now standard keyword and meta-data considerations.
Specialist programmers and SEOs provided insights into microformatting which, done correctly, helps you to climb the search rankings, stand out and get coveted rich snippets.
Microformats do this by adding structure to the data on a web page. They can then describe that data to the bots and crawlers. Examples of microformats include ‘h-recipe’, which tags and structures the content on a recipe on a page – ingredients, method, cooking time etc.
It seems, though, that it’s not as easy as it sounds (if that sounds easy to you, you may be more of a tecchie than you think!). Your web domain needs to be white listed for microformats to show up. And getting white listed is a challenge – best to leave that to your web developer. They love a good challenge.
Going global
After the technical masterclass, my head hurt but my enthusiasm grew, as next up was the hotly anticipated global search session. Right up my street.
Top 5 tips for international search:
- Importance of research and planning – know your market, or risk alienating an entire population
- Google is not everything but it rules most of the world, except notably China and South Korea
- Don’t abuse keywords – they are abbreviated thoughts and are not translatable
- Have a content strategy – plan what content you need for that marketplace; don’t try to retrofit what you already have
- Have an effective geo-targeting strategy – so that you appear at the front of all relevant searches (super tip – the value of a link is higher if it’s local)
Social media insights
A speaker from Greater Manchester Police talked about the Twitter campaign that the force ran earlier this year, in which they tweeted every call that came in during a 24 hour period. The aim was to engage with local communities and demonstrate the broad spectrum of issues police officers have to respond to and deal with every day. The response was overwhelming and the ‘stunt’ made national news, increasing their following on Twitter from 3,000 to 20,000 overnight.
All good and well, but how do you go about capturing a B2B audience in this way? The speaker responded to this question by emphasising the difference in success factors. Capturing 40 of a target audience of 200 people in the B2B arena can often be considered a success. You just have to make sure that you set your objectives before you get going, or else you could spend time and money with little pay-off.
First you need to find people talking on the web about your area of specialism – your marketing communications partner will help with that. You can then publish and share your knowledge so that you become their first port of call. This approach, which we call content marketing, is a cost-effective and targeted way to become part of the social revolution – but not just for the sake of it. Our results speak for themselves. Get in touch to find out more about our content marketing programmes.
More on SAScon later this week.
