Duane Forrester from Bing – Overlap between Search and Social
Photo credit Thos003
Duane has 12 years in the industry, one of the the first SEOs to be hired by a search engine.
“following best practices then you are onto a good thing”
- 1 in 4 queries deliver successful result
- 42% of sessions require further refinement
- 44% of session lasting day or more
Important for businesses to understand what a ‘session’ is.
The move from query to session
- query is a single action, whilst a session is a collection of related actions over time.
What is in the consumer’s mind when they are actually using a query.
Important to understand the consumer better
Query – Dog
- Session – Dog Beds, Dog accessories, dog toys etc
- understanding the intent is critical
- are they planning to make a purchase, moving towards the sales funnel ?
presenting the right form of content to engage the consumer more.
understanding why the consumer if engaging with you allows to deliver a greater ROI
- 50% of all time spent searching in on sessions > 30 minutes
- almost 50% of queries are returning to previous tasks
presenting the user with what they are actually looking for
“best new york hotels”
- understanding user intent – what is the best for each individual user.
- Web, Online Services and vertically integrated areas
- again presenting the user with the most relevant app, social platform or whatever best suits the users intent.
Duane loves the Nokia City Lense and it pulls in suggestions for what is near that person’s location.
When i type in the name of a famous singer who is also a friend, is my friend not the more important and relevant result ??
- policing the system – example of child having smartphone playing a game, clicking an advert for a gambling site and having access as it is linked to your credit card – hard to police
Reinventing across 3 dimensions
Information architecture – creation of new information via social graph and geospatial index
Interaction Model – not just mouse and keyboard – now include voice, touch, gesture and vision
entry points – not just browser, but also devices, services and social networks – people no longer just rely on a search box
Real-time firehose
- dealing with information from a number of different services and trying to enhance the users experience
- tablets are changing the way in which people consume data.
Schema.org
marking up data to provide the search engine with more information
links, social annotations all help to ensure the search engines produce the best results for the users.
Duane says “Mark up your content”
Deliver knowledge by computationally understanding users intent
user -> Query -> Intent Detection -> Task Derivation
- Linda
- Home Gym
- Intent Detection -> who, where, others, semantic & research
- Task derivation -> purchase, install, sell, set fire to & impress friends
This allows for refined results
everytime we get it wrong allows Bing to refine and improve results in the future.
9 billion mobile devices in the world in use today
25 billion in use by 2021
Google and Bing suggest the move away from m.domains for websites
people are expecting an enriched mobile experience
“the ability of these devices to feed in real time signals help us handle intent better”
Gone are the days of focussing on basics
Working out why people with a number of followers on Twitter are in demand, this allows for Understanding topical authority
Taking care of customer is ensuring they can engage with you socially, not just delivering basic customer service.
- there will always be a social space for every niche – allows for businesses to go and engage with people who are looking for your brand.
80% of people wait to make a purchase online until they have spoke with a friend/family.
Social Search helps the user see their friend’s opinion faster.
- Personalised search in Bing integrates Facebook discussing a particular subject based on what you have searched.
Social graph and patterns
Photo credit BBC
Like farm
- search engines are great at visualising patterns of likes
- natural patterns are what the algorithm is looking for.
- “stay away from shortcuts”
Usability is the most important thing to Duane
SEO and LinkBuilding have a low priority as it should be more about the user.
If you want to become a topical authority – wow people when they come onto your website
6 major investment areas for SEO used by Duane for approaching SEO for MSN
- crawl-ability
- site structure
- On-page
- Content
- Links
- Social
- every area of your site has a value
- determine what the value is
- sort your site by value to see what really matters
- Engines respond to unique and useful content
- how do you define content
- match content to your audience
- different mediums for different jobs
- creating share of voice reports are far better than ranking reports
- “please stop doing ranking reports as it costs Bing money for each query”
- don’t rely on rankings as only the engine has full control over these.
- create lists – people love lists
- use hooks – be careful
- participate in communities – valued member of community
- share others information – people love when what they share gets shared
- look for ways to streamline your time
- identify a customer need and fill in the blanks
- look to identify patterns
Shari Thurow from - Site Architecture the Right Way
Photo credit Nordic eMarketing
Anne Kennedy introduces Shari Thurow with a story from 1998 – Shari was presenting and described how engines see 2 things – content and crap.
covering 3 things:
- SEO, Architecture and the User Experience
- labelling website content so that is is easy to find
- organizing website content so that it is easy to find
- ensuring search engines have access to desired content
- global
- formal/local
- supplemental- page interlinking
- headings
- benefit of IA – +30% increase in CTR on 2-line sitelinks
- affects rankings and conversions
- searchers are happy with both the site and the search engines provide the most accurate result
- IA decisions have a clear impact on SEO
- organisations consantly skip the IA process
- technical staff need to take direction and advice from IAs
- by task/process
- topic/subject
- target audience
- type
- alphapbetical
- chronological
- spatial/geographical
- attributes
only SEOs organise something via Keyword Toolusing the right tools but for the wrong reasons
Kristine Schachinger - Web Strategy
Photo credit : Twitter
We are in a constant evolving industry where what was current 6 months can be now outdated.
Website strategy is as simple as it is complex
Defining strategies – what, who, where, why and how
If you cannot answer why you are creating your website - STOP !!!!
Spending money and effort creating something that will be worthless.
Who are my users ??
- technologies and devices
- geolocation
- gender
- age
- income
- education
- browsers & platforms
Pinterest – 90% of users are women – KNOW your users !!!
Geolocation -looking at where users are when they visit and interact with your site. Consider whether they are at work, travelling, shopping or at home – this changes the way they use your site.
Our strategy is not based on guesswork and hunches, but data & fact & understanding our users.
Don’t design your tablet site like a mobile site, users use them like a desktop.
90% of people who hate a website never return to the site. They decide within 1-3 seconds whether they are going to interact with the site.
- Homepage pathing – you have 3 clicks to get someone on the journey. Once you have them, you should be able to keep them.
- Site Architecture – should limit to 6/7 dropdowns as this is all the user can handle.
- Content Development – maintaining it and who is in charge of it ??
- Social Media Strategy – what is your voice ? who is your voice ?
- Usability - this will become an Algorithm check
Technology
The most overlooked part of the site is the technology.
- non www’s and www’s resolving differently
- robots.txt
- sitemap – updated every week
- page speed
- page weight
- url construction
- use of scripting where important content is concerned
“If it is good for users, it is good for search”
Where is the SEO ?
Everything we do is SEO now, if you run a website your SEO team is essential. They should be involved from Day One !!!
Search “Experience” Optimisation – hint from Google about where SEO is going – less about the engine, more about the user.
- search engines – authorship and subjectship to improve results
- social media integration – facial recognition theory by Kristine in relation to Facebook and Bing
- Device Chaos – responsive design
- Mobile vs Everything Else
- mobile seo
- mobile design
- schema
- content
- social
- Identity – Google+ will impact on this
- Search without Search
- Device entropy
- non-website based data presentation
- content APIs
- identity for SEO
- True Linguistic Search
Elísabet Grétarsdóttir – Head of Marketing at Arion Bank
- 40% of YouTube views in 2012 were on mobile devices – shows where the future is going.
- The changing face of the Music Industry, with the introduction of platforms such as Spotify.
- TV as we know it is now dead, more people using streaming services such as Netflix
- Ericsson estimates 50 Billion connected devices in 2020
Big Media & Content Consumption Through Social – The Power of We
Todd Wilms – leads strategy for Digital, Social and Communities at SAP
- Most of us think about what we want as humans
Rob Garner – Independent Consultant
Rob has written a book -> Search and Social by Rob Garner
- Your audience, your customers are always addressable – through many different channels.
- You are publishing to an audience that expects a real-time response.
- You have to think like a scientist – listen to your customers and remove any bias
- sharing starts in the active phase – your Facebook friends share with their friends
- Search Engines perform deep network analysis – Bing and Google have placed a value on every website.
- Search data provides market research and show your audience’s tastes. The Bing Ad Intelligence Tool provides great feedback for your campaigns.
- likes
- retweets
- linkedin share
- number of subscriptions
- ratio of followers to those followed
Craig Kannalley – Huffington Post Senior Editor
- Crowd-sourcing he was able to break news faster than the mainstream sites such as CNN on big stories
Overall a great day’s conference here in Reykjavik and another packed day tomorrow, with an early start at 8am.
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