SMX Advanced was even more powerful for me than day one in relation to being exposed to new information. Most of the sessions I attended were packed with insights and had downloadable decks, checklists, and templates that will directly improve many of my work processes.
Here are my takeaways from SMX Advanced day two:
- Bing confirmed that the future of search is displaying results based on an understanding of entities and connections between entities partially powered by schema.org coding. Bing is also now powering Siri search. Not sure if this is new news, but it was new to me.
- The content strategy session was stellar and provided TONS of tips, templates, and downloads. The session focused on tips and tools of how to create a successful content strategy process that involves research, content audits, and improvements. The session ultimately covered how to ensure that the content you create is findable and usable by your target audience and helps drive your business objectives. It was also one of the best sessions I attended.
- My favorite quote from the session from Jonathan Colman’s presentation was “Meta data is a love note to the future”.
- And the most exciting tip for me: voiceandtone.com – It’s MailChimp’s online guide that outlines how to ensure that their content is written to match their corporate voice.
- Some of the decks from this session are already available online here: meaningandmeasure.com/smx-content and here: bit.ly/cssmx
- Local and maps session. This was also stellar and the decks provided have TONS of tips about how to tackle cleaning up your local listings and how to decided if you should transition to the social Google+ local profile or not.
- My biggest takeaway: ensure that your name, address, and phone number is correct and consistent across all local directories and registries, and then fix your search engine listing.
- The slide decks have great resources about how to get Google support with local map issues.
- It turns out that Google is re-writing title tags to put the brand name first in the title tag, so it would make sense to create those type of title tags moving forward because they will be re-written anyway.
- They also shared some great tools like: bit.ly/localgrader which will create a local audit for your site and this one that will create an audit for your local landing page: bit.ly/locallanding
- There is a tool that will let you compare your Google+ local listing with your competitors: http://www.brightlocal.com/google-plus-local-wizard-faqs/#GPWlocal
- Google uses a business phone number as the default ID, so if you run 2 businesses and would like both of them to appear in search, you will need unique phone numbers for each business.
- The Extreme Excel Excellence session made me even more determined to learn Excel functions on my own. The decks are going to be critical for me to remember what was covered, as the pace was fast and it was definitely advanced content.
- I loved that Annie Cushing started with the brain physiology that impacts why presenting data and encouraging the readers to take action is difficult and presented ideas and recommendations for how to present data (particularly data that shows negative results) in a way that will motivate action.
- John Gagnon from Microsoft showed off even more mind blowing tools developed for SEOs that are available via a Microsoft Excel plugin. I had seen John present at Online Marketing Summit in February when he showed off the ability to match keywords to demographic information from the Yahoo/Bing database. This time he showed off the ability to dynamically show PPC ad performance geographically on a US map which updates dynamically. Amazing. For SEOs, definitely a reason to upgrade to the latest version of Office and Excel.
- It appears that advanced filters in Excel work in an even more powerful way than regular expression.
Those were the biggest insights that I picked up on from the sessions I attended. Next on my agenda is a crash course in what’s going on in International Search Marketing.