On September 21-23, I attended and presented at the Share15 conference in San Francisco. Hosted by BrightEdge, this conference highlights the latest and greatest in what’s going on in the world of SEO. I learned alongside SEO leaders for top global brands, and although it was hard to winnow it down, here are my top 5 takeaways and SEO tips.
1. Intent begets content.
From BrightEdge’s upcoming Content Atlas release to several speaker presentations, there’s a renewed focus on keyword intent in content marketing. Speaker Sean Kainec from Home Depot discussed adding the following questions when evaluating content development priorities:
- What type of transaction or interaction does the keywords intent imply?
- Can you or should you satisfy the customer need for a specific keywords?
2. There are groups of keywords for every stage of the consumer journey.
We’ve been talking about the consumer journey for a long time now, but if you still believe that only three high-level keywords matter to your business, you need to broaden your view. Google brought its concept of micro-moments to the Share15 keynote, and everyone from Open Table to Best Buy to B2B software company Prophix was sharing their tips and tricks for expanding their concept of core consumer keywords.
3. How-to pages and how-to videos are moving into their sweet spot for search influence.
SEOs are seeing a growing amount of how-to searches… and content marketers are seeing lots of success with how-to videos. How-to content is more in depth than your typical product brochure, and Kirill Kronrod, Sr. Global SEO Manager at Adobe, vouches for its overall effectiveness: high-quality how-tos make for a more informed, more engaged customer.
4. Businesses work better together when metrics are universally defined across units.
A universal theme that I heard — and unfortunately did a poor job of attributing in my notes — was that businesses had the greatest SEO and content success when everyone was on board with the same KPIs. Organizations worked together when sales, marketing, product development, and IT all shared (and agreed on) the same universal business metrics. These KPIs weren’t always revenue; microconversions like session duration and were also defined business-wide for overall cooperation and success.
5. Markup here, markup there, schema markup everywhere.
With Quick Answers rising in search results and local search rearing its ever-complex head, markup was a top buzzword at Share15. Well structured content with proper markup has a higher chance of ranking in search results for highly searched queries. Within apps and in the new iOS 9 search on iPhones, developers have been using similar structures to schema markup to identify important content, according to Dave Lloyd, also on the search team at Adobe. What has worked for web search will also work for apps — so get your technical search knuckles cracking and look for opportunities to markup your content!
About the Author
Deborah Carver is NHI’s Content Marketing Manager and is considered an SEO content expert in the digital marketing industry. Carver was asked to speak at Share15 and her session was featured in AdWeek.
