2018 Seattle Localogy Conference Notes
The 2018 Seattle Localogy Conference brought in voices from Facebook, Microsoft, and SEO thought leaders to Microsoft’s Redmond campus to provide valuable insights into the modern digital marketing world. As the world transitions into the newest search tools and interfaces, their advice can make or break an SEO campaign.
1. Most business owners have never interacted with their Google My Business listing, but customers have.
About 30% of Google searches are resolved in Google My Business, meaning users may never reach the website. Users check business hours, make phone calls, read reviews, and check FAQ’s using the Google My Business Panel. The takeaway? Make sure you and your clients keep this information up-to-date.
2. Google reviews impact everything: not just user first impressions but your keyword rankings and click-through rate.
The more the merrier. More reviews cause your star rating to increase. The most beneficial reviews contain keywords (frequently searched for phrases) e.g. products and services and the name of your city, but don’t get any bright ideas – reviews cannot be written by your staff.
3. You can’t write your own reviews on Google My Business, but you can write your own FAQ’s.
You can ask and answer questions directly on your own (or anyone else’s) Google My Business panel. Fill this space with helpful, keyword-packed information. Customers will also leave questions on your panel – don’t leave them hanging!
4. Voice search only informs customers about the top 1 to 5 results.
Thankfully, voice search has not blown up the market…yet, but it’s good food for thought as times change. Customers using Siri, Alexa, and other voice search tools will only hear about the most popular and successful results for their search terms. What does this mean for your company? Get as many keyword rankings as possible into the top 5.
5. Your backlink anchor text matters.
Backlinks are links on other websites pointing to yours. It still matters who backlinks come from (hint: .govs and .edus are nice and strong backlinks), but the text itself has a forgotten impact. Treat it like prized meta data and fill it with keywords, especially your company name, products or services, and your location.
6. Any near-identical pages on your site are cannibalizing their rankings.
If you have two pages tackling the same keywords, take your favorite parts of each and turn them into one page. Use the URL of the one that ranks the highest. Make sure the old pages reroute correctly. Pages that never ranked before will start bubbling to the top.
7. Vendors have two golden opportunities to send an email.
First, when a customer leaves an item in the cart and navigates away, email them a reminder including pictures of similar items. The majority will come back, fill up their cart even more, and check out. Second, when a customer checks out, ask for a review. This is where 80% of reviews come from.
8. Showing up in the Google Answer Box is like winning a worldwide chess tournament.
Landing in that box takes knowledge and strategy, and the domain authority to even enter the competition. To appear, write one individual page per question. Then answer it in one or two keyword-packed sentences at the very top. If everything is set up just right, your answer and your domain will be the first thing people see.
9. Each missed review hurts your company in invisible ways.
Include a review system on your site requesting customers to leave star ratings and quick reviews. Use customer feedback and star ratings to capture more clicks. GatherUp offers an all-in-one tool to collect customer feedback, display star ratings, and get customers to leave reviews on Google and Yelp.
10. On average, organic search received the majority of the clicks.
Balancing the budget between SEO and SEM is more important than ever. Focusing entirely on the Google Ads campaign means losing the majority of potential clicks. However, cutting down on SEM research means letting other companies take the first spot in Google Ads. A successful digital marketing campaign requires a tactical SEM approach with a strong SEO backbone.
Intellitonic has roots in the oldest SEO frontiers, and we have seen how rapidly the market can change. Staying ahead means investigating every tip and every new angle.
