Two 9-hour flights, piles of pints, one big data party, and several reminders not to stand on the left later, here’s what we learned at our London City Crawl.
If there’s one thing we know about SEO, it’s that every day’s a school day. Which is why we put on City Crawl — so that data nerds (like us) can gather and share what’s new, what’s cool, and what’s keeping us up at night. With food and booze.
For our fifth (and final) City Crawl of this year, we flew to London and rounded up four incredible speakers, all of which are super SEO savvy and certified cool people (we did reference checks). And boy did they bring their A games.
Thanks for the memories
Before we say anything else, a huge, humble slice of thank-you pie needs to be served to our client and friends at 4Ps Marketing, who graciously agreed to house and host City Crawl in their Whitechapel-based office.
We saw familiar faces, new faces, and lots of smiling faces, and before we knew it, talks were commencing, with 60+ data lovers all rushing for a good seat (and one last pint) as our CEO, Rob Bucci, welcomed everyone to the London City Crawl.
Below, a glimpse into all four talks and the minds of the speakers who presented them.
Real talk with Robyn of Builtvisible
Optimizing faceted navigation for SEO is about as fun as going to the dentist.
SEO for faceted navigation
Robyn Lodge of Builtvisible opened City Crawl with the tricky pickle of faceted navigation. On the one hand, it’s fast and efficient, words we all like as both consumers and SEO experts. On the other hand, there’s duplication and keyword cannibalization to contend with. Also, flat and inefficient crawl architecture, which limits a page’s ability to link organically.
Key takeaways
Before you pull your hair out over all that wasted crawl budget, don’t pull your hair out. Instead, according to Robyn, you need to determine what you want in the index and then increase the crawl of useful pages while reducing the crawl of unnecessary ones.
Consult with your friendly SEO experts (hi, Robyn) and leverage fresh SERP data (courtesy of yours truly) to uncover high-level insight so that you can identify areas of crawl budget waste.
How to make awesome client-facing reports like Forward3D
Be like Batman and have the right tools (and data).
Creating awesome reports with STAT and Google Data Studio
Next up was Artiom Enkov, the Organic Performance Manager for Forward3D, who spoke about how his team deploys STAT to filter raw data easily into reporting suites.
When they found their current reporting system (Google Sheets) was much too slow and, well, not particularly pretty, they knew they needed a better solution, especially after onboarding a large retail client who wanted to segment heaps of data across regions, countries, and devices — all in a timely fashion.
Key takeaways
Enter: Google Data Studio. For Artiom’s team, this reporting tool meant that data went from taking 15 seconds to less than two seconds to load. Which is great, as they had 17,000 rows of STAT data to unpack.
With STAT’s API capabilities and Google Data Studio’s visualization, Artiom’s team can easily extract data and funnel it into their own dashboard for highly detailed, simple to analyse, transparent reports for their clients. Fast, efficient, and rich data visualization makes compelling client-facing reports. And compelling reports make happy clients.
Next up: Alex Douglas-Mann tells us what the consumer wants.
What they really really want.
What the consumer really wants
As the Associate SEO Director at 360i, Alex Douglas-Mann spends a lot of time deciphering what consumers want. That’s because Google is doing the same thing, and then using what they learn to constantly change the SERPs.
Key takeaways
360i adopted search intent into the foundation of their own search strategy. Integrating STAT’s API with their new innovative dashboard, ARKE, helps them take a step back, analyse the SERP, and understand what consumers want.
When you switch your perspective to what searchers hope to find and position engaging content around their needs, you’ll intelligently answer their questions, and ultimately drive them towards conversion.
By following their own good advice and focussing on searcher intent, 360i saw an immediate change, including a 96% increase in visits, up to 17.5% CTR, and more than 194k share of voice captured through rich snippets.
Last (but not least)
Self-proclaimed API geek Matt Stannard closes the evening with the future of Voice Search.
Voice search insights
If his title doesn’t already say it all, as Director of Innovation, Matt Stannard is tasked with the duty of inspiring 4Ps Marketing clients to create best in class solutions to SEO problems. And lately, the problem is voice search.
Voice search makes it easier for users to ask questions without going near a search engine but harder for SEOs to track queries. What drives the answers? How do they differ from search results on a desktop? And are they as intimately linked to featured snippets as we believe?
Key takeaways
After asking Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa for “the best” product recommendations, aside from feeling like they were talking to air fresheners, Matt’s team discovered that there’s an authority aspect to voice search — the contents of a snippet aren’t always what is read out.
Matt advises knowing what ranks for comparison terms. This will help you identify potential authorities whose content may be pulled as a response to a voice query. Noteworthy: while Amazon will use its own internal product marketing algorithm, Google will actually integrate with search.
Cheers, London!
Thanks for having us, partying with us, and geeking out over data with us.
Want to be at our next City Crawl?
Well, cool beans, because there’s nothing we love more than spreading the data love. And we plan on doing just that in 2018. Stay tuned — we’ll be letting you in on the deets soon.
Were you at our London City Crawl and want to bask in the memories of friends, pints, and desserts? Peruse our photo album — we have heaps of photos you can tag yourself in.
