Resource Listings

Flex those note-taking muscles, because you'll need them for this high-powered talk! Luke Carthy will share solid, profitable, and actionable tips on just how to identify juicy e-commerce revenue wins using the unlikely duo of an SEO crawler and custom extraction. You'll learn how to uncover impactful low-hanging fruit to both increase your conversions and improve your UX using the tool that's already in every SEO's arsenal. You'll also glean in-depth insight into some of the world's biggest names in e-commerce, sharing major missed CRO opportunities, costly oversights, and rookie mistakes hidden in plain sight.

How can you use data to find and update content for higher rankings and more traffic? Andy Crestodina will take us through a four-point presentation that pulls together the most effective tactics around content into a single high-powered content strategy with even better results.

Google's algorithms have undergone significant changes in recent years. Traditional ranking signals don't hold the same sway they used to, and they're being usurped by factors like UX and brand that are becoming more important than ever before. What's an SEO to do? The answer lies in testing. Sharing original data and results from clients, Rob Ousbey will highlight the necessity of testing, learning, and iterating your work, from traditional UX testing to weighing the impact of technical SEO changes, tweaking on-page elements, and changing up content on key pages. Actionable processes and real-world results abound in this thoughtful presentation on why you should be testing SEO changes, how and where to run them, and what kinds of tests you ought to consider for your circumstances.

Google Posts and Questions & Answers are two incredibly powerful features of Google My Business, yet most people don't even know they exist. Greg Gifford will walk through Google Posts in detail, sharing how they work, how to use them, and tips for optimization based on testing with hundreds of clients. He'll also cover the Q&A section of GMB (a feature that lets anyone in the community speak for your business), share the results of a research project covering hundreds of clients, share some hilarious examples of Q&A run wild, and explain exactly how to use Q&A the right way to win more local business.

Digital marketers have a responsibility to learn to spot the biases that frequently find their way into online copy, replacing them with alternatives that lead to stronger, clearer messaging and that cultivate wider, more loyal and enthusiastic audiences. Last year, Help Scout audited several years of content for unintentionally exclusionary language that associated physical disabilities or mental illness with negative-sounding terms, resulting in improved writing clarity and a stronger brand. You'll learn what inclusive content is, how it helps to engage a larger and more loyal audience, how to conduct an audit of potentially problematic language on a site, and how to optimize for inclusive, welcoming language.

With voice, local, and rich results only rising in importance, how do image and visual search fit into the online shopping ecosystem? Using examples from Google Images, Google Lens, and Pinterest Lens, Joelle Irvine will show how image optimization can improve the overall customer experience and play a key role in discoverability, product evaluation, and purchase decisions for online shoppers. At the same time, accepting that image recognition technology is not yet perfect, she will also share actionable tactics to better optimize for visual search to help those shoppers find that perfect style they just can’t put into words.

Google’s local algorithm is a horse of a different color when compared with the organic algo most SEOs are familiar with. Joy Hawkins will share results from a SterlingSky study on how proximity varies greatly when comparing local and organic results, how reviews impact ranking (complete with data points from testing), how spam is running wild (and how it negatively impacts real businesses), and more.

By now, most SEOs are comfortable with the idea of featured snippets, but actually understanding and capturing them in the changing search landscape remains elusive. Britney Muller will share some eye-opening data about the SERPs you know and love while equipping you with a bevy of new tricks for winning featured snippets into your toolbox.

How much time and money do we collectively burn by fixing the same kinds of basic, "binary," well-defined things over and over again (e.g., meta tags, 404s, URLs, etc), when we could be teaching others throughout our organizations not to break them in the first place? As long as we "own" technical SEO, there's no reason (for example) for the average developer to learn it or care — so they keep making the same mistakes. We proclaim that others are doing things wrong, but by doing so we only reinforce the line between our skills and theirs. We need to start giving away bits of the SEO discipline, and technical SEO is the easiest piece for us to stop owning. It's time for more democratization, education, collaboration, and investment in open-source projects so we can fix things once, rather than a million times.

Traditional content marketing focuses on educational value at the expense of product value, which is a broken and outdated way of thinking. We all need to sell a product, and our visitors all need a product to improve their lives, but we're so afraid of being seen as salesy that somehow we got lost, and we forgot why our content even exists. We need our M.O.M.s! No, not your actual mother. Your Marketing Optimization Map — your guide to exploring the nuances of optimized content marketing through a product-focused lens. In this session you'll learn data and lessons from Oli Gardner's biggest ever content marketing experiment, and how those lessons have changed his approach to content; a context-to-content-to-conversion strategy for big content that converts; advanced methods for creating "choose your own adventure" navigational experiences to build event-based behavioral profiles of your visitors (using GTM and GA); and innovative ways to productize and market the technology you already have, with use cases your customers had never considered.