It has been an exciting afternoon here at Digital Summit Detroit! We started out the afternoon with Michael King, Founder & Digital Marketing Consultant for iPullRank, then a roundtable discussion on social media and ended Day 1 learning about landing pages with Oli Gardner, Co-Founder at Unbounce.

Futureproofing your SEO by Michael King, Founder & Digital Marketing Consultant, iPullRank

It takes a content effort to do effective white hat link building. Most of the time, client’s don’t want to do that, until Google holds an algorithmic gun to your head. There’s a lot of misinformation about SEO like:

• SEO is just make up
• SEO is not technical
  

@audette “SEO should be invisible”

New stuff:

• Accelerated mobile pages (AMP)
• Mobile-friendly updates
• Feature snippets
• Structured markup for voice search

What’s the future?

• Local, quick, fast and when you need it.

Rankings are not the right measure, it does not show how SEO impacts your business. Success metrics: Leads and conversions.

For those who are even measuring rankings, how are you even reporting on actual rankings? It’s not really possible.

The big shops, just source out the SEO to small shops.

Find the right SEO partner:

• Make effective business cases – Speak in terms of money based on recommendations.

Tools:

• Pitchbox
• Chrome Developer Tools (DevTools)
• Google Search Console

Roundtable: Key 2016 Trends in Search and Social

1. Matthew Capala – Founder & Managing Director, Alphametic, Author
2.  John Colucci – Director of Social Media, Sinclair Broadcast Group
3. Leslie Drate – US Consumer Print Social Media Marketing, HP
4. Jason Drove – Senior VP of Sales, SocialCentiv

Roundtable Discussion:

Programmatic: Testing different segments against the creative for ultimate results.

Social Media: Facebook has shown the best results for HP.

Instagram: Not as much CTR because of the medium.

Facebook: At work messenger.

Twitter: Has seen better days…everyone agrees.

Discussion about Salesforce acquiring Twitter and how that may affect marketing on Twitter: If you’re looking at acquisition, might not be good for marketers. They are putting more focus on live and on sports.

• Twitter needs to figure out a way for your to find what you’re looking for easier. Feed curation may negatively affect the engagement, and be more pay-to-play.

• Salesforce and Twitter may be a good match when considering customer satisfaction and customer care. It could turn Twitter into a different tool.

• Currently debates are the largest thing on Twitter. It is also the current police scanner. It’s the most real-time, up-to-date information. Facebook is not as current, not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s just a different medium.

Discussion:

• Instagram algorithms are amazing, crazy accurate and personalized.
• Google + does not correlate to rankings, but it does rank by itself.
• Google indexes Twitter.
• Put copy over your videos on Instagram and Facebook – Not a lot of people are viewing the content with sound.
  • People view videos for :30 or longer with no sound
• Snapchat has officially transformed into the Instagram for Stories.
• Snapchat is winning with millennials and geofencing.
• Experts say: not the best results with LinkedIn campaigns.

Frankenpage: Using A Million Little Pieces of Data to Reverse Engineer the Perfect Landing Page by Oli Gardner, Co-Founder, Unbounce

If you’re going to do ads, you better have specific pages for them on your website.

• Links that are ok:
  • Anchor Navigation
  • Terms & Conditions
  • Privacy Policy
  • Just make sure everything keeps you on the same page.

• Immediacy:
  • Can people understand your value proposition within 5 seconds?  – IF the answer is no you’re failing.

• Visual Identification:
  • Can people figure out what you offer right away? Do they understand what the page is about?
  • Take away the copy, can you get it the point of the page? If the answer is no, you’re failing.
  • Running experiments with limited creative resources?

• Discussion on designing forms:
  • But how many form fields? 4 and 7 have over 7% conversion rates so you might as well get more information!
  • Top performing forms are in zone 3 – top fold.
  • Encourage hunting by moving call to action lower on the page as well.
  • What’s the most persuasive word in the english language? It’s because 
    • Conversion rates increase 25% when you add it to your landing page!
    • Free vs. non free verbiage on a landing page – Word free decreases conversions— say what?!? 

In closing, there were some excellent speakers today, Seth Godin was absolutely fantastic. We may have to go and read all of his books, after today. Meeting Siri, was amazing and we had a blast seeing lots of familiar faces. We look forward to another day of digital marketing tomorrow!