SEO Monitor will be repeating their Search Boot Camp on June 22nd in Whitechapel, London.
This time the speakers include:
- Ann Stanley – Anicca
- Cosmin Negrescu – SEO Monitor
- Kelvin Newman – Founder of Brighton SEO
- Alexandra Tachalova – SEM Rush
- Bastian Grimm – Peak Ace AG
- Jack Norell – Forward3D
- Joe Shervell – Datadial
- Alec Bertram – Allotment Digital
You can sign up at http://searchbootcamp.com/ and anyone clicking from this blog will benefit from a 50% discount by quoting anicca50.
Read our review of the first Search Bootcamp in London. The other “Sergeants” were the SEO industry’s top specialists and were delivering talks on a number of topics based on how to improve SEO strategies and how to survive in today’s ever-changing world of SEO.
Lessons in Viral Content from the World’s Biggest News Site
Presenting this talk was Sitevisibility‘s Jackson Rawlings and Brighton SEO‘s Kelvin Newman. Jackson specialises in content and PR and has worked on the world’s biggest news site and had learned a lot from his time there while he worked on outreach and content.
- Jackson explained that in outreach, a no isn’t always a no. It’s important to build trust and relationships with bloggers, websites and people.
- In terms of Content the website Jackson had worked for doesn’t produce content traditionally as it’s known for clickbait headlines. It’s important to not go after longtail, but longtailS. Generally, one headline will answer 2/3 questions at once meaning their headlines have covered all the bases. It was recommended to research and consider the searching patterns of users then create headlines that focus on this user intent.
- Images are everything – The online publication referred to contained 90% images on their articles. This meant that the articles were perfect for ‘lunch browsing’, meaning quick reads and allowed the user to skim through the content. If images aren’t used, USE THEM. Think of your content piece visually before you think of it from a content perspective because images help define style.
- If the last 2 posts were blog posts, change it up and do a Slideshare, infographic, or a photo gallery.
- Make multimedia, both in terms of medium and platform, the basis of your content strategy.
Bottom lines:
Have something to say. – Don’t just do content for the sake of it. Engineer debate and engagement with customers/users. Ignite conversations, but don’t be controversial for the sake of it.
Kelvin Newman on Content Marketing Processes
Next up in this first workshop was Kelvin Newman of SiteVisibility, who discussed some content marketing processes.
T.H.E.M.E. – This was a process for delivering the content marketing process for generating links.
T – Tribes – These are the customers. They could be “mummy bloggers”, for example. It’s important to understand what it is that’s unique about certain groups of people, what they respond to, what they’ve linked to previously and the emotional intent that they’ve linked to.
H – Hook – What’s special about the business? What’s the USP? This is tied to the Tribes. There needs to be something that appeals to the tribes and something that makes the business special to people.
E – Engaging Content – This is based on what the tribes want to link to or want to respond to. Having the previous insight to produce content is ideal to achieve the best results. Producing content with a specific audience in mind will provide success. Some people start with this stage first which doesn’t achieve the best results.
M – Marketing – Once the content is created it needs marketing. This can be done through social channels i.e. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. Sometimes an equal amount of financial effort is required.
E – Evaluation – At this stage, you need to understand which pieces of content have achieved their aims. Learn from what worked, what didn’t work. Set criteria for the evaluation before the content is created.
Bottom Lines:
A lot of people begin at the E – Engaging Content stage, which ironically, doesn’t produce engaging content, but instead results in wasted time and posts which don’t seem researched and knowledgeable.
‘Venture capital content creation’ – At least 1 of 20 businesses a venture capital invests in will be hugely successful. Similarly, not every piece of content will be successful. Test out a bunch of content, see what works, what doesn’t and get good at it. One good article can pay for the articles that went wrong. Better to test ideas and reinvest in the ones that work well, perhaps prototype ideas first, then if it works you can focus on these ones.
Content Marketing on a Shoestring
This workshop was presented by Pete Campbell from the London-based agency Kaizen Search. What was particularly interesting about this workshop was knowing that in their first year they managed to produce a whopping 92 pieces of visual content on an internal production budget of just £250. This is how they did it.
– Audience & Competitor Analysis
Content curation
Audience and Competitor analysis
1 – Fact finding –
- Who is your typical customer?
- What do they love/hate about your product?
- What stops them from finding your product?
- What emotions do they associate with your products?
- What magazines and that do they read?
- What else are they interested in?
2 – Make list of trends using tools such as BuzzSumo to find the most shared content in your niche. Days of the year to find relevant or important events of the year, and installing Scraper for Chrome.
3 – Try word association for topics & themes – To generate ideas, write down a word then branch out, find associated topics with that particular word based on the content goal.
4 – Who are you going to get links from?
- Pick 25 sites you’d like a link from
- Do your homework on these 25 and cut it down to 10 sites
- Do they link to third party sites?
- Have they linked to your competitors?
- Search your topics
- Make list of relevant journalist names
Idea generation – This was where we were shown how to produce good ideas from a simple process.
- For every 100 ideas, 1 idea will be good
- 6-3-5 brainwriting – This was a process in which it is possible to produce 108 ideas in 30 minutes
- The idea was that there would be 6 people producing 3 ideas each in 5 minutes for every 3 ideas.
- There is no talking allowed
Engage in Crafting an SEO Strategy on the Spot
This workshop included Anicca’s own Ann Stanley and SEO Monitor’s Cosmin Negrescu.
In an SEO Campaign, one of the most important steps are performing a Technical Audit. There are a number of factors to consider when performing an audit. A few of the basic factors include:
- Backlinks – How many are there, where do they point to, are they valuable?
- How many pages have been indexed in Google? Does the homepage appear as the first result?
- Content – Are the landing pages optimised? Is the home page optimised? Does the content contain relevant key phrases?
SEO Monitor uses a Visibility Score which represents the percentage of the total searches in a group of keywords where a website was seen by the user in the search results.
For example, the score will be 100% if the site ranks in top 3 results for all of the keywords and 0% if it ranks below page 2 for all of the keywords in the selected group.
Developing a Methodology to Master Majestic and Other Link Building Tools
This workshop was run by Majestic SEO‘s Dixon Jones.
Majestic SEO is the worlds largest private search engine.
For comparison, Twitter for example, receives around 500 million Tweets a day – Majestic crawls 2 billion URLs per day. Links are highly important as they provide the only way to get around the internet.
Data grouping is fundamental to search engines, and make searching easier, it allows the user to:
- Find a fact
- Find a friend
- Find a customer
- Find anything
Categorising the web into topics prevents spam (http://maj.to/1Bb1lHu – Stanford paper), and can be categorised into the following data types:
- Country IP
- Image search
- Video Search
- Local listings
- Maps
- Travel
The MajesticSEO tool allows you to check backlinks, referring domains, as well as generate advanced reports which shows a wealth of data including trust flow and page rank, for example.
You can find the materials for these workshops on the Search Bootcamp website, as well as information on all of these speakers and more.
