I have continued my streak of attending Mozcon, which started in 2013. I have also continued curating some of the best digital marketing tips from the experts who traveled to Seattle to learn and speak about all things search.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. This week, I’ve got some awesome digital marketing tips to share with you from the speakers and experts at MozCon.
Last week, I made the annual trek to Seattle for MozCon. I’ve been to every MozCon since twenty thirteen so I couldn’t break my streak. Plus Seattle is awesome and it’s always a ridiculously fun time seeing everyone. As always, I chatted with some of the speakers and experts who were there and collected a bunch of tips about digital marketing.
Check them out.
My name is Crystal Carter, and I’m here reporting from a MozCon.
No.
Don’t do Alright.
Guess what? July first twenty twenty four, Universal Analytics is going away. You will not be able to access your data anymore. It is not just gonna hide somewhere.
Like, it’s gone. So if you have not yet downloaded your Universal Analytics data, the clock is ticking. You need to get it. I have a dashboard on Looker Studio that you can use to download it or the UA backup service for Analytics Canvas is also excellent if you have a lot of data to back up.
But do not forget to back up your data because you think, I don’t need it. And then a year from now, you’ll need it. So back up your data. Do it before July first.
Don’t leave it till the day before July first like y’all did with GA four because we know how that happened. Get it now.
So one of the best tips that I’ve been able to learn throughout my career is caring more matters more than knowing more. And at the end of the day, when you are able to apply whatever knowledge, whatever learning that you have been able to learn in a way that is most applicable to that stakeholder, that business, that is ultimately when you are going to drive more value. So think to yourself, how do I care more?
The number one thing that SEOs need to be learning about that they’re not learning about doesn’t have anything to do with search at all. You need to learn more about business. You need to learn more about how to run a business, and you need to learn more about the things that people who run businesses think about and care about. This is true if you’re in house. It’s especially true if you’re an agency.
Take some time. Take some business classes. Read some business books. Get outside the realm of search.
That’s how you’re really gonna understand how to make the business case for what you wanna do. Most business owners don’t care about traffic. They may not even care about rankings. What they care about is money.
Not just money, they care about their p and l. They care about their operating expenses. They care about their brand presence. They have real world business concerns.
The more you can show them that you understand those concerns and the more you can relate the things that you wanna do to those overarching business concerns, the more you’ll get buy in, the more you’ll build trust internally or with your clients, and the better results you’ll be able to see.
One of the most important things you need to do is to be thinking about why people buy from you. It’s not enough to just look at gender, geographical location, age, you know, browsers and devices. What you really need to be thinking about is why are people coming to your website? What is the problem that they’re trying to solve? What are the pains that they’re feeling right now? And what are their desired outcomes? When you know that, when you understand the actual pain that they’re trying to solve, you can serve them better copy and better design, and you can start AB testing, and you can really test strategies versus just element on the page, and you’ll get better results for that.
Just like roads and bridges and, different buildings, everything needs to be well architectured.
So, when you look into design or redesign your website, start with a why, then, gather your your client’s goals, and then take these goals and the why questions that you have gathered and assign them to, in a spreadsheet and assign each URL on your website with a with a keyword or a keyword focus.
Once you have the keyword focus, the why’s, and the business goals, then assign all this stuff to your design team. And from there, you’re able to create, to to guide your users to, better conversion points and and, more like a better sub better goals.
I’m gonna start with a tip from Miriam Ellis, who is one of my hub contributors.
The this is for local businesses specifically. The barrier to entry to local SEO in general right now is lowest. I know there’s a lot of noise right now with AI and all that stuff. But for local businesses, all you really need is your GBP, your Google business profile, and a basic website.
Something like Wix. We are perfect. The local SEO ecosystem has never been easier to get into. So if you’ve been thinking about expanding your presence, like, it you will be surprised at how within reach it is.
Secondly, if you’re thinking about AI and you’re a local business, nothing will replace marketing fundamentals.
Need you need to understand what it is you are doing. No one is going to be willing to give you the keys to get into a NASCAR when you just got your license.
Right? If you don’t understand a higher professional or invest time into it, don’t just adopt something without understanding the implications and what you’re putting in part in front of your potential customers.
If you deal with local SEO, here’s a tip. Make sure your ranking reports are scanning at the same hour of the day. Now that Google has added hours as a bigger part of the algorithm, your business will rank a lot better when you’re open than when you’re closed. So you wanna make sure that you are comparing accurate things.
I know this is gonna sound repetitive because this is the same tip I left on Greg’s last video, but it’s absolutely the most important thing I can leave which is ROI.
It’s much simpler to calculate than you think. And reach out to me. I’m happy to help you.
Do the work. I’m telling you, everyone has advice. Everyone has different context. You need to run your own experiments and you need to figure it out for yourself.
Your website, your business, you know better than everyone. Take all the recommendations and try them out. See the results. If it works, double down.
If not, move on. That’s what SEO is all about. We’re mad scientists. Right?
Alright. My tip is pretty simple. Test. Test stuff.
Keep testing. You will have successful tests. You’d replicate that on one or two client sites, and then it won’t work on fourth and fifth. Test. Test. Test.
Test. Good morning, everyone. One quick tip for SEO and digital marketing.
Feel free to reach out to people in the industry. That’s the people that’s gonna help you. So reach out to people on LinkedIn. Reach out to people on Twitter and ask ask questions.
Everyone wants to help you. Everyone likes to share their ideas. So just reach out. That’s how you’re gonna learn stuff about the real thing that people cannot write online.
One of the best ways to learn SEO is to learn or read articles that you think are above your skill level. Read them two, three, four times. Keep coming back to them. You’ll learn more and more each time and get better and better as you go. That’s one of the best ways to get more technical in your job.
Alright. So my tip is for content marketers and SEO.
I would say it’s it’s time to start thinking about your brand more intentionally. It’s not just enough to know stuff. You you have to start sharing it and creating that strong digital footprint that signals to search engine that you are a thought leader in this thing that you’re saying. And that way, it’s just so much easier for your contents to rank and for you to have more leverage.
Hi. My digital marketing tip is that you should be harnessing discussions and and forums because Google is putting them all over the SERP. So if you are not on Reddit, you should consider getting on Reddit or partnering with folks on Reddit or looking at Reddit for content ideas that you can create on your own domain. Additionally, if you are somebody who is managing a discussion or forum on your own domain, then you should be thinking about ways that you can engage that audience directly and make sure that you’re getting the most out of those opportunities.
Google is surfacing this content like never before, and it’s not just Reddit. It’s not just Quora. We’re seeing lots of lots of different forums from lots of different domains and lots of different verticals that are seeing a lot of, up into the right action as well. So you should pay attention to that and get involved.
So focus on personal branding and elevating the experts that work at your company or your clients’ companies.
Search engines are increasingly focused on first hand experience, personal experience, connecting with individual authors and experts and elevating them in in different ways. So as much as you can take the people that are working at your company or working at your clients’ companies that truly have subject matter expertise, they have first hand experience, take their knowledge, take that that content and elevate that content and incorporate that into your actual content as much as you can. And also think about, you know, incorporating expert quotes, forum content, all this type of firsthand experience. That’s really what search engines are looking for these days.
Hi, everyone. Before I give you my tip, I just wanna let you know that Greg has me doing lots of these. This is the last free one. I want this to be recorded in future.
Five hundred bucks per second. Anyway, that’s not what you’re here for. One quick tip that I can give you, and I’m gonna give you a little teaser of my Muscon presentation today. When people create content that is video or audio, it’s like putting a square peg into a round hole.
I think once they’ve created it, it’s done, and we’ll blast it on every platform and see what works best. That’s not how your audience behave. People don’t go onto YouTube to try and look and read for a thousand word blog. Create content for the platform, and you’ll see that most content types have steep retention curves.
You find out which platform that you can keep your audience on the longest, flatten the curve, keep your audience, increase your sales, make more money, and that’s my last free tip. I could drop the mic, but I won’t do that.
So Alright.
Here’s a really great tip, an alternative way, maybe to do some advertising. If we think about Google, as a monopoly board and you’re trying to capitalize on all the real estate possible, sometimes that’s organic, sometimes that’s paid, Depending on the search and you start to see videos populate there, you start to see Reddit, responses and subreddits come up there. You have to think about the amount of time that it would take to actually rank video content to to show up to create a great YouTube presence, and that’s great. But also, did you know that you can buy your way into that table? You can buy your seat at that table super affordably, super cheap. If you pay attention to the top videos and the content creators that continue to come up, you can go and target them for, like, pennies on the dollar in YouTube video ads. So that’s my tip.
Alright, friends. We’re at MozCon, which is a search powerhouse.
But I’m gonna tell you something that’s probably a little bit controversial.
We need to go beyond Google. There is more to life than being on the Google search result page, and that revolves in Microsoft, that revolves around Amazon and their powerhouse audiences for non sellers.
Hot tip, you can get five hundred dollar ad spend credit for free just by signing up before the end of June. Also, listen. Let’s talk about social. TikTok, Pinterest, Meta, Instagram, it’s a boundless world of profit and victory if you are willing to lean into visual. So my friends, say goodbye to Google only, embrace cross channel, and embrace visual.
Alright. So everybody talks about people using chat search. And is that gonna be a thing? And we got all these reports, and we got Gartner reports, and it’s all kinda like, but are my customers using it? So my tip or my recommendation is if your company is using paid search, you get all the queries. And even if you’re using Performance Max, you can still get the queries out with some scripts. So you get all the queries from the customer.
Once you look at those queries, you should analyze things that people are more likely to use if they are also starting to use chat search more. For me, I tend to start a lot of my inquiries with the word I. I would like this. I am a CEO of a company that blah blah blah.
So you can use I in front of a lot of your queries. So if you check the use of I in front of a query by month, you just might find that a lot of your customers are starting to use those words more, which means they’re probably more on the chat types of searches, the perplexities, the chat GPTs, and the Geminis of the world. Go take a look at your data and see how it works out. See you.
Amazing tips. Right? That’s definitely all the time we’ve got left for this week’s episode. So you know what that means. Put your hand on the screen right here.
We totally just high fived because you learned something awesome. Thanks for watching and we will see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.
