In this episode I'm sharing some of the absolute best takeaways from SMX Munich. I just got back from the conference, and I couldn’t wait to break down the expert tips and cutting-edge strategies I picked up—everything from local SEO quick wins to advanced PPC insights that can seriously move the needle for your business or clients.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. This week, I’m sharing some awesome tips from the speakers and experts at SMX Munich.
A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to be invited back to speak at SMX Munich. As always, I grabbed my camera and had some of the speakers and experts share tips to help digital marketers and business owners. I got some amazing tips this time, check ‘em out:
Jyll Saskin Gales:
My best tip to become a better digital marketer is to remember the human. We can be so focused on the creative or the targeting or the placement or this trick or this hack that we forget, on the other end of it, we're just trying to create a connection with a real human being. So remember the human at the other end, it'll make everything else so much easier to execute.
Talia Wolf:
If you want to increase conversions and you're thinking about running your next A/B test, instead of just testing buttons, which don't work, try an emotion-based test. An emotion-based test's goal is to figure out why people buy from you. What is the real motivation? One of the biggest things that you can do is actually run a test against what are they feeling right now versus what do they want to feel? So before and after. Think about the emotions they're feeling, their frustrations, their concerns, how the things that they're challenged with every day. Can you put that into an ad or on a page or in an email and test it versus something that promises a different result, an emotional result? How are they gonna feel about themselves? How are other people going to feel about them? That is a very highly successful test and it's a meaningful one because whether if it increases conversions or it doesn't, you will learn from it.
Alfie Payne:
Understand what you're trying to say to your customers and say it to yourself and say it internally and really believe what you're trying to say.
Tom Capper:
Hey, so my, uh, quick tip would be that... And this is something, something that's come up a lot in a lot of the talks here, uh, at SMX Munich, is that you should be measuring and reporting on and seeing expectations based on brand in SEO. That doesn't necessarily mean that, that as an SEO you're gonna own brand within the company. Obviously that might be great, but not always realistic, not always the right person, but you should be incorporating brand in how you're talking about SEO and you should be reporting it. Just start getting people used to associating brand metrics with SEO because that ultimately is gonna be an important part of whether you can succeed or not.
Kabeer Singh:
My tip is I love optimizing in general, whether it's for search or for general life, optimizing trips, optimizing my way back home. But I also end up over-optimizing almost all the time. So my tip is optimize whatever you can apart from search, but be careful with over-optimizing because I end up doing that way more often than I would want.
David Mihm:
Great. So the local search tip that I wanna share with you guys today is something that is a, I think maybe a misperception of the thing I said a while ago, like several years ago, which is that directories don't matter, right? Uh, directories were huge. Back in the ear- very early days of local search, when Greg Gifford and I myself got started in our careers, you had to be on Yelp and Yellow Pages and CitySearch and Superpages and fill-in-the-blank pages, right? Uh, and that as the traffic and authority of those directories declined, it became less and less important to be on them.
But instead of directories going away entirely, the thing that's taken their place is vertical directories. So, depending on the most important directories in your industry, uh, that rank well and that draw customers in, it is still absolutely critical to have not just a listing, not just a mention of your name, address and phone, but a really well-optimized presence with strong photos, with review responses, with a full description of the products or services or attributes of your business. Uh, and those we see in our research at Near Media, we see those really, really mattering to customers, uh, and playing an important role in their decision-making process about which business they want to transact with.
Phil Nottingham:
Alright, so my tip is that you need to start to think about different kinds of videos for different platforms. The stuff that's gonna work on LinkedIn probably isn't gonna work that well on YouTube. The stuff that's gonna work on TikTok maybe isn't, not gonna work that well on your website. And you need to start to think about the individual platforms and creating stuff for those. So, uh, Instagram for example, you can think about, um, shots that really show the behind the scenes of your company and what's going on. Lots of visual stuff, lots of color. For YouTube, you can think about trying to solve problems and finding out the topics that are really aligned with what people are, um, interested in finding out about. For your website, think about things that help to support pages. And LinkedIn, um, have things that are driven from the individuals at your company, uh, really talking about their own experiences.
Itamar Blauer:
When we're considering the vast amount of change in the search industry, especially when it comes to seeing traffic declining, but in reality, usage and consumption of content is increasing like we've never seen before, which means that your content needs to be found. And the best way to do that without spending so much more money creating new content is repurposing the existing content that you have. Take what you've already got and you can be smart with it and use AI to automate certain workflows and processes. But use that in a way to get your content out to as many different places as possible with loads of different mediums and formats. That's something that if you're not repurposing your content, I recommend you start right now.
Amanda King:
So my tip to make digital marketing better for you in 2025 and beyond, consolidate your content. Find all of your old keyword specific content, merge it into topics. You can increase your traffic easily by up to 50% in 12 months.
Jono Alderson:
I would think about all the things that aren't SEO that affect how people search and experience your brand and make decisions. Think about the quality of your packaging. Think about the phrasing that your customer support team use when people phone up. Think about your returns policy, think about your opening hours. Think about all these things that influence whether people might choose and select you whilst they're searching and making decisions. Because those are the things that Google and ChatGPT and this new wave of search engines are looking to evaluate. They don't care how many links you have. They don't need another article on your blog. But they do care if your proposition is a good fit for a given audience. So do the hard work to prove that's the case and win out over your competitors.
Navah Hopkins:
Hey friends, I've got a dirty little secret for you. Broad match, actual spend, impressions, clicks, conversions, a lot of that ends up being phrase match or even exact match when you actually look at the search terms report. So before you throw away broad match or you decide that you just, you refuse to test it, check your search terms report with a one or two broad match keyword tests. See how much your close variants are going. And you might actually find that you get better deals on your exact match inventory, your phrase match inventory by leaning into broad match. Obviously, be clever. Leverage smart bidding alongside it. Use your negatives as appropriate. But don't fear broad match. Fear the fear.
Sam Tomlinson:
One tip to get better performance from your Google Ads is to actually search the keywords that are converting for you. See what the SERP looks like, and make sure that your ad is well positioned on the SERP. For instance, you might find that all of your competitors are running price discounts on their ads. Well, if you do that, you're gonna look and sound exactly like they do. So instead, flip your offer into a percentage off or another value prop that's gonna appeal to your target customer and make comparisons between you and everybody else on the SERP look a little bit more in your favor. One of the easiest ways to get better performance out of your ads and make your clients happier is to be able to surface that information, provide a relevant or justifiable, uh, alternative, and keep evolving as your competitors change what they're doing.
Fabrice Canel:
I'm at SMX today and I'm pleased to have a just out of a session where I disclose best practices to surface in AI. As you may not know, this is Bing, is powering not only Bing.com, this is powering my solution. That is for Bing and AI is powering not only advertising multimedia news and everything, it's powering all experiences at Bing. But beyond Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and some people at ChatGPT and Meta are also leveraging some of AI solution to power some of their experiences. So clearly, if you rank well at Bing, you can be surfacing in many other places. But where to be uh indexed Bing? Easy. Have a good quality sitemaps, adopt an extra protocol to help you getting the latest and the most relevant content indexed on your sites. It's a one-way, easy way to be adopted, helping you to get your content indexed at Bing. Then this is all about having great quality content, matching customer intent and you will be ranking well and do well at Bing.
Cindy Krum:
Hi everybody. My tip is about using Google MUM to advance your SEO strategy and plan for the future of AI overviews and AI mode as they evolve over time. So Google MUM stands for multi-step unified model or multi-touch unified model. But it basically just means Google's trying to understand the context of a query, uh, and put it in a journey model that they're creating and building over time. Uh, and so to do that, they use what I call journey filters that you click on in a search result. And the more those get clicked, the more you tell Google about the journey that you're on. And then when you do searches that aren't in a filter, they kind of learn about what you want next as that's related to the larger journey. And they map all that, um, and try and use that to, as a model, to decrease the cost of any kind of AI processing, uh, that they're doing when you ask a question.
So once they have the model, they don't have to process so hard, like it's new. They put it into this model and say, "Okay, we, we know kind of where you're going. We've seen something like this before." So that decreases the cost of the AI processing at the same time as it increases the value of the search results and their ability to target and potentially personalize, uh, ads and monetization that they do getting you into the different micro-moments of Google. So I wanna know, I wanna go, I wanna do, I wanna buy. So they're either getting you into Merchant Center Maps, YouTube and YouTube universe with music and stuff like that, um, or just regular knowledge. And they've got monetization strategies for all of it so they can make, they can increase the money to cover the higher cost of AI.
Joost de Valk:
One thing that I've been playing with a lot the last weeks and, uh, that people really should be learning about, model context protocol. It's a protocol that to get AI to understand the other tools you have. Basically to connect them with human-readable language, so you can talk to your AI. And then for instance, edit, edit, write, delete posts in your WordPress sites or create users or add categories to posts or redirect links or... Well do a whole lot of these things. MCP, it's a fantastic protocol. You should learn about it and play with it and see what it can do.
Awesome tips, right? That’s definitely all the time we have 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 ‘cause you learned something awesome. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.
