MancSAS February 2016 Meetup – Top Takeaways

(Header Photo Credit – https://twitter.com/I_COM/status/697507967441235969/photo/1)

Last week was the reboot of the MancSAS meetup that took place in I-COM’s offices on the 10th February. This meetup was the first in a new format, in that it had a larger collection of talks and lightning talks as well to get a broad range of speakers from all disciplines. I was one such speaker, and as well as speaking, I also scribbled together some notes. Here are my takeaways from the event

Michael Cropper from Contrado Digital – Justifying Your Digital Expertise

First up was Michael Cropper from Contrado Digital. In his talk he talked about basically justifying your digital expertise. Unfortunately the people who usually make decisions may not understand exactly what you do. This talk simply talked about how to justify your experience.

• Most business are quite risk averse, and digital is rarely a priority.
• Research your ideas to put together your case, and put together case studies.
• Back everything up with data & evidence

Daniel Morehead from CTI Digital – Making Short Work of the Longtail

The second speaker was Daniel Morehead from CTI Digital, in his talk, he talked about how to get the most out of the long tail to get an opportunity for your businesses. He listed some tools, and some dashboards to use for your search visibility on your site.

• Long tail offers quick wins, with lack of competition, and smaller competitors.
• Answerthepublic.com – Is good to formulate long tail strategy and get ideas.
• Content – includes Crowdsourcing, Research and provide assets.

Jamal Atcha from I-COM – The Content Engagement Review Process

Next up was Jamal Atcha from I-COM, who gave a talk on how to improve Content Engagement. This was a fascinating talk that give insight into how content engagement issues were identified. It’s well worth checking out the dashboards and implementing them on your site, so be sure to check out the slides.

• Audit to find low converting pages, thin and incorrect messaging of content.
• Select a data range in GA (a year), view all pages and segment with sessions with conversions. Divide that by all sessions and identify those that are under the average.
• Review the pages to identify any issues/opportunities, and look at the pages from a user perspective.

Ben Barker from FireCask – Search Operators: Navigating Google’s Index

Next up was my work colleague Ben Barker from FireCask. His talk looked at Search Operators, and ideas on how to get links and citations using Google. He also shared some interesting ideas on how to even use Google to recruit people. He goes in depth on the FireCask blog about this, so read it there.

• Find mentions of your brand, that many not link to you, as well as look at reputation issues.
• Overview of site indexation and order of indexation (which is the most important page on your site?)
• Find content that could benefit from sites that need content updating.

Me! – 5 Top Tools For WordPress SEO (To Use as Well As Yoast’s Stuff)

You can see the slides and information from my talk here.

Dawn Anderson from Move It Marketing – SEO as a Whole Brain T-Shaped Marketer

Dawn Anderson from Move It Marketing gave a talk on how to become a whole brain marketer, and also become T-Shaped: a broad understanding on a lot of things, and an in-depth understanding in one area. Dawn shared a wide range of tools so that techies can become more creative and creative types to become more technical. Again, another talk I recommend checking out.

• SEO has many lives, currently equal to 2 cats worths of deaths already.
• What’s dangerous is not to evolve.
• Those with analytical ability married to strategic or creative talents are highly sought after.
• The T-Shaped marketer has deep expertise in a core subject and an understanding of a wide range of subjects

Overall, this was a great return to form for MancSAS, and April is the next event. I urge all marketers to aim to attend, it was so useful. If you’re in and around Manchester, I urge you to attend. Subscribe to the group on Facebook to find out when the next event is.