Think Visibility 5 Roundup

So, the time was upon us again. On Friday, I began my journey up to Leeds, for Think Visibility 5, an event attended by around 250 online marketers and website owners, with an array of speakers from a number of disciplines in the online world.

The event is held at the Alea Casino, and is split across 2 rooms – so this blog post covers those sessions that I attended. There were some really tricky decisions to make at a few times and I would have loved to have been able to attend some of those that I missed, so will look forward to reading some of the other catch up posts and find out the gems from those sessions.

Let’s Talk About Links Baby, from Paddy Moogan

One of the SEO’s that I know better from outside of Vertical Leap, Paddy Moogan is an SEO at Distilled, and his talk was all about links – baby.

The format of this session was primarily some looks at submitted websites, some generic tips and some shady fun stuff that was not to be repeated.

Paddy took a link at backlink profiles first for  the submitted websites, to evaluate what they had already and what they would be needing to push on further.

One of the sites had a lot of sidebar and sitewide links, meaning that whilst they had a good “total” number of links, they were lacking in domain diversity – where you have  links from a wide variety of sources. This was something that needed addressing.

Paddy had some good tips – he didn’t seem so keen on link baiting per se, due to efforts that can be put in, for little result, but I was interested by his concept of “ego bait”. One of the example websites was a restaurants review site, and it was suggested that some easy wins would be to identify some of these that had websites, and look to include them in top 10 lists, to encourage a link back from those sources.

Another good idea (again, looking at this ego baiting principle) was to look at running a simple poll, perhaps to determine these top 10 lists, and reach out to those involved to let them know they were in the running. Those that have up to date websites, and perhaps have areas like news or blogs, with frequently updated content would be the best for doing these, and by reaching out to them, they can engage with their loyal visitors and customers by virtue of linking to the poll – mission accomplished!

Paddy also had some good ideas for utilising twitter for links. Plenty of Twitter users have websites, and Paddy had some good ways to be mining Twitter to collate data into CSV’s where you can draw up lists of potential linking targets. Again, you can then reach out to these folks to gain some links, or perhaps pander to some more ego’s to encourage that a bit more naturally.

Similarly, in an example for another site, it was suggested to do some awards in various areas, with badges (which of course link back to your website) for those that are nominated, or are winners.

There were also some good ideas on how to use competitions  and securing guest blogging opportunities to gain some additional precious links back to your site.

All in all, a cracking presentation from Paddy with lots of actionable tips and ideas.

Using Brainwashing, Psychology & Cults to Boost Your Conversion Rate from Stephen Pavlovich

Stephen Pavlovich, from Conversion Factory, did his presentation about the psychology of conversion. I was really interested in the premise of this presentation, as I have been spending increasing amounts of time looking at ways of improving client conversion rates.

At the outset, it was made clear that this was “not just about the buttons”!

The talk here centred around understanding the motivations of your audience, and manipulating with small tricks to encourage the action you want more swiftly.

Using notifications that stand out on a page, saying there are only a small amount of that particular product left available, makes people think that if they don’t buy it then and there, they are going to miss out. Another interesting suggestion along these lines was to say how many people had those few remaining left in their basket to really make it look like the chance of getting the item was reduced unless you bought it right now.

We also saw some examples of things like Acai berries, including pictures of doctors to add authority to their product and a certain level of reassurance.

Another important factor in looking at things like this are with “Social Proof”, where the feedback from other users who have already purchased that product help to reassure potential purchasers that they are getting something that others have already got and are getting what they need from it.

I was also really interested by the cults angle, with Apple being the primary example here. Many Apple users form a community of anti-Windows/Microsoft products, and this gives that group a shared identity, with a virtuous circle of retaining those users as on-going purchasers of products that the “cult” approves of (i.e. all things Apple).

Adventures in Outsourcing with Paul Madden

This presentation was all about Paul Madden’s usage of outsourcing opportunities, instead of hiring a full staff and creating time to have an extra 2 days off a week, and trying to remove “me” from the business without losing too much of what needed to be done.

This presentation was chock a block full of ideas and places to source the expertise that you need for various tasks for the online world.

Key tips from this were to be really, very explicit in the instructions when engaging with these folks, try potential people out before giving them some of the more important tasks that were needed to be undertaken, and that a lot of the time, whilst there could be gems in the freelancer world, that often, its more effective to work with organised outsourcing teams to get things done.

Also, make sure you get what your spec asked for – folks will often do the bare minimum of what is required, rather than do the whole of what you had originally asked for.

I was also quite interested by Fiverr, as it sounded like a site where you could get people to do all sorts of crazy things (some useful, some less so, and others just downright funny).

Gathering Link Intelligence to Improve Your SEO by Dixon Jones

The next session I attended was with Dixon Jones, from Majestic SEO – a link intelligence tool that I am using more and more often of late. The tool has crawled 3 trillion URLs and recrawls a staggering ½ billion a day!

Dixon had a number of themes running through his presentation and kicked off with a case study of Beautiful People, a dating site that a year or so ago caused quite a stir by kicking out a number of users of the site that had put weight on over the festive period, and were no longer considered beautiful enough. This was an interesting look at an area that would generally speaking not be considered newsworthy, but by some clever use of PR managed to create quite a stir and of course, generated them lots of links.

There were some other useful tips on engaging with bloggers to get some links – show them that you have things to share that would be of interest to their audience, and give them exclusives, before any of their competitors get a chance to get a whiff of what’s going on.

Dixon also suggested that you don’t look at how many followers in social media that these have when looking to identify them, and instead look at how often they get retweeted or shared – you want this to be shared with as large an audience as possible, not just those with vastly inflated follower numbers that have no engagement with them.

I was also interested in the Link Reclamation tactics, as this is something I have spent some time doing recently for some sites. Checking 404 logs for pages that are being linked to from external sites, and getting those redirected to a more useful page can gain you some easy links back or get them updated, and fix redirect chains if a link to your site has to pass through too many hops.

One Domain, One Hundred Days, One Result by Gary Taylor

This presentation from Gary Taylor looked at comparing whether or not it was better to start with a new website or buying an established aged domain, and which one would “win” in making more money.

The sites in question were not really in comparable niches, one was a dog website (the aged, and purchased domain) and another was for 3D Ready TV’s (a new site), but there were some important lessons from this presentation.

Eventually, it was determined the dog oriented website won, and the fundamental reason for this, as far as the lesson learned is that this was the topic Gary was passionate about. TV’s and TV shows were not his bag, and as a result, its easier to find the motivation and passion to get behind a website that you are looking to promote when it truly is something that you love, or is of great interest to you.

I think this lesson applies to most folks that create their own websites – you are going to be far more motivated about doing things with your site and putting in the work required to achieve whatever goals you set for the site if it’s something that you enjoy, and really care about.

Dave’s Den by David Naylor

This section of the day was one that was of a site review format from Dave Naylor for the most part, so I will summarise some of the main notes that I took regarding this.

I was slightly late into this session, so the first thing that I saw being discussed were some of the useful site analysis tools, such as Xenu, the Screaming Frog SEO Spider (a tool I love, and use a hell of a lot at the moment, as well as having blogged about before), Majestic SEO and a few tools that I think were Bronco specific. It’s really important to understand the landscape of what you are working with on a campaign, and these tools take a lot of the “work” out of collecting that data in the first place.

Of course this is only the first step – this is all just raw data, and the more you do to sort, organise and understand it, the more you can get from it.

Some other useful tips given whilst looking at the sites that were put forwards for the clinics were to reduce home page links. To a degree this depends – I fully agree about streamlining the outgoing links on sites, particularly when they are not of any real authority, and again fully agreed that sites with large amounts of authority can probably get away with doing what they want in this regard.

One tip that really intrigued me, and something that hadn’t entered my thought process before was with regards to having CSS and Javascript files hosted on sub-domains, and the reasoning for this really intrigued me. In short, when these files are linked to and hosted on the same domain, they are downloaded sequentially from that server, but if they are hosted on a sub-domain or external site, they will be downloaded in parallel – this is something I am going to look at testing to see what kind of page speed improvements it can gain, as regular readers of my posts here will know that I have had some issues caused by very slow sites, and the implications that this can have on their search marketing.

Summary

All in all, it was a cracking day, with lots of great speakers, with some really useful tips, tricks and sparking ideas on how to make use of it all.

Towards the end of the day, prior to after party, there was a moving video from the wife of Jaamit Durrani, a prominent member of the UK SEO community who passed away in tragic circumstances towards the end of last year. Jaamit was very popular, and was a source of great encouragement to people, always happy to help out, and the first member of the wider SEO community that I met. Frankly, and I am sure I am not alone here, this moving video caused me to fight back the tears, as he will be sorely missed by all those that knew him.

All in all Dom Hodgson put on a great event, and I can’t wait until September, when I’ll hopefully be able to go back to attend the next one!