Well SMX West 2015 has come to an end and it’s time to get back to work and attempt to implement everything I learned at the conference on our current clients campaigns. This was a fun axperience, I met a lot of new people and said hi to several friends that I don’t see often unless we meet up at a conference like SMX. SMX was a welcomed chance of pace from a typical day at the office. Altough I am glad to be going home sleep in my own bed, it will a bitter sweet moment when my plane touches down at John Wayne.

After two days of non-stop learning, day three was another opportunity to learn about the dynamic world of Internet marketing. The first session of the day was great and Andy Talyor, Jake Stewart from Buyer Path and Isabell Sheang from Bing had a lot of very useful information about Mobile advertising.

Session One
First let’s hear from Andy Taylor.

The lower your state median income and higher your age, the phone usage decreases. (See study in ppt.)

Sales per click by state median income has a positive correlation.

Cross-Device Conversions
Ebags provides – Option to email cart to yourself to track conversions that happen as a result of that email and get a new email. They still have email contact to drip on.

Micro-conversions – actions which users can take while they aren’t full conversions they provide value to advertiser.

Phone Calls -Click to call buttons on mobile. Phone orders are 70% larger than online orders.

Store locator visits are a sentiment of offline growth from paid search ads.

Acknowledge the Branding Impact
80% lift in top of mine awareness in advertisers in first position of paid search ad as opposed to not being showed at all. Report didn’t measure impact of being showed as the 2nd or 3rd ad.

Whether it is micro conversions, or cross device or branding a lot of these will have greater impact on your overall success.

Up next was Jake Stewart from BuyerPath.

Recognizing the differences and the potential of mobile.

You have a 0% impression share on position 4 with mobile ads

New mobile-friendly tag on Google SERPs

PLAs carousel has increased from 7 to 9-10 products

Make mobile ad text specific to mobile users talking about how payment is easier.

Be sure to pack most important content into description line 1 even though they may pull line 1 into the headline to keep description line 2 in the ad.

Use local inventory ads for a local retailer.

We need to focus on simplifying the mobile conversion process.

Ecommerce – integrate with Paypal Express Checkout, Google Wallet and Apple Pay. – Study showed a 15% increase in conversion when these were on the pages.

Split test mobile landing pages to optimize engagement.

Set bid parting rates:
(Est total computer & tablet cpo – est total mobile cpo? Est total mobile cpo) X 100

Be constantly evaluating mobile bids.

Geobid parting will help encourage visitors to visit local results.

Now Isabell Sheang from Bing

Enhanced targeting and Unified Device Targeting.

Review category keywords mentions by device in different industries graph.

Great deals of people start increasing searches on Bing in multiple industries around 4-5pm when people start getting off work.

Retail shows that activity is consistent so as long as people are awake we are shopping. US searchers have strong purchasing power at all times.

24hr Fitness, Guitar Center and Macy’s – all location based search queries in the afternoon. They are about to get off work and need to look for directions to go to the store.

Design campaigns with day of week and time of day targeting thinking about where your users are and how they use their devices.

Use location targeting to attract people to zip codes.

Turn on location extensions, call extensions to help mobile users find and contact you. People respond to local numbers better then 1800 numbers when looking for a location.

Use intent/interest based targeted. Show ads to people who are searching for or viewing pages, but they aren’t in your location. People are searching for this area, but they are searching from another area.

Mobile preferred ads – in your ad group you want to have ads that are mobile preferred ads and these other ads are desktop preferred ads.

Mobile preferred sitelinks – Click to call (Keep mobile copy under 24 characters).

See slide of conversion – pink slide.

Use universal event tracking for remarketing.

Google for Mobile can track 60% of traffic down to zip code level and 90% of traffic down to city level.

How do you control mobile spend? Start with modifiers and test using separate ad groups for mobile.

Does Bing have plans to launch a local PLA? Yes, it is on Desktop, but no timeline for mobile yet.

Session Two
My last session of the day was taught by Eric Wu from Edmunds.com and Ehren Reilly from Glass Door their topic was Conquering Today’s SEO Challenges. SEO has many challenges to overcome and here is what Eric had to day.

The use of javascript is growing rapidly to increase speed of sites.

Look into these javascript programming languages to optimize for a better UX using speed – AngularJS, backbone.js

They optimized javascript and they had an increase in 80% of pages crawled per day which resulted in an 80% increase in organic search sessions. Time on site stayed the same, but bounce rate decreased. Social shares increased. This better UX resulted in people having a great experience with the brand online.

Never block CSS & JS

Infinite scroll is something everyone likes to implement on site. The easiest thing to do on mobile is scroll. We should think of infinite scroll as basic pagination.

Navigate/paginate – rel=next/prev

Idea of Continuous Content – the URL of the page is changing, but the page is not being reloaded. This is called “Pushstate” when you are doing infinite scroll or content. From a javascript stand point it is a deck of cards.

Quartz – Qz.com does a great job of this

Ajax Galleries
Loaded a lot of content via javascript to speed up the site.

Vox.com has a great example of this using 1)pushstate 2) view-source next slide links and 3. Rel=next/prev

Deferred Image Loading
When you are thinking about image seo think more about UX than traffic.

Image search traffic is not there anymore as where is was before 2013.

So focus more on image ux on site.

Make the main images crawlable

Put images above the fold in

Desktop – defer only if you hae to

Mobile – defer to improve ux

Lazy Loading
1X1 blanks – developer will put in a blank pixel that is a place holder image then when javascript comes in user can react to the page and image will pop up later.

A better technique is to use skeleton screens – When you load FB for the first time, you see it loads a grey block that flickers (this is a skeleton screen) This prompts users that an image is loading so the perceived ux is better because they are expecting an image to be there.

Low resolution images until they can replace with a higher resolution image

Buzzfeed, polygon and verge do this tactic.

Responsive images
Use different source sets in images to tell browser there are different images to pull in based on screen width.

Up next Ehren Reilly from Glass Door who covered the importance of Technical SEOs Cleanup for Panda. We see this problem every time we take over for a previous SEO company.

Panda isn’t just about content. It is also about site architecture.

Cruft pages can be harmful – a lot of garbage, useless pages.

People may think their site is high quality even though it really isn’t.

He pretended like his presentation was off to compare it to Google bot crawling his site.

Don’t create pages just to show no results on that page.

URL Based Duplication
Most common reason is extra query parameters that don’t affect content such as session IDs

See what should and shouldn’t be case sensitive. You can manage this in Webmaster Tools. See other solutions.

You don’t need separate pages for different reviews or prices to be indexed separately.

Make sure alternate/hreflang tagging scheme to make sure that you tag .uk and .com versions separately even though they may use the same content.