Kristine Schachinger is the founder and CEO of Sites Without Walls, Digital Strategist & SEO Consultant and a regular speaker at events like SMX Advanced and SMX East.
Kristine Schachinger has almost 20 years of experience in website design, development and implementation experience and has helped design/code/implement sites for everyone from SMBs to Reba McEntire, AOL, Superpages.com, and USA.gov. Kristine also has nearly fourteen years experience in accessibility and over a thirteen years experience in website visibility and SEO.
Kristine Schachinger with Juan González and Dawn Anderson
What is RankBrain?
RankBrain is a machine-learning artificial intelligence system, the use of which was confirmed by Google on 26 October 2015. As a true machine learning system, RankBrain can teach itself how to do something, rather than being taught by humans or following detailed programming.
RankBrain uses machine learning (and arguably artificial intelligence) to answer queries that have never been answered before by the search giant.
This system converts the search inputs by the users in the form of mathematical patterns which are further processed by the search engines.
RankBrain also uses semantic search – which was implemented with the Hummingbird update – to associates unfamiliar words semantically to already known linguistic entities. This means that RankBrain no longer just looks at keywords (and keyword density) but rather, it tries to understand the meaning behind any given search.
Although Google never really told us what RankBrain looks at if I had to guess, then I would say RankBrain looks at:
Monday morning.
Smile. Send a thank-you email. Call just to see how they’re doing. Pick them flowers. Make them a cup of coffee. Give them a cherished book. Praise them publicly. Help them get ahead. Be proud of them.
How difficult is to make somebody happy?
New summer gloves from ARMR. Let me describe them to you: comfort. Very often when the customer can happily describe your product in one single word you are on the right path to success.
Meanwhile Happy Monday everybody.
Intelligent search and intelligent assistants: Exploring the AI- Era of Search.
Purna Virji is Senior Manager, PPC Training at Microsoft. Named by PPC Hero as the most influential PPC expert of 2016, Purna specializes in SEM, SEO and Voice Search. With over a decade in search, she is a regular keynote speaker at conferences across the globe such as MozCon and SMX Advanced and is a popular industry columnist. An award-winning former journalist, Purna was the CEO of Purview Marketing prior to joining the Bing Ads team.
Useless projects: Where AI meets human creativity
Rob McGowan, Edit
Who is Rob McGowan?
Rob is a Group Strategy Director at Edit – agency that specialities in customer, data, loyalty and insight strategy, customer engagement, insight-driven marketing, communications planning and execution.
Entities, Search, and Rank Brain: How it works and why it matters.
Kristine Schachinger, Sites Without Walls
Kristine Schachinger with Juan González and Dawn Anderson
Who is Kristine Schachinger?
Kristine Schachinger is the owner of SitesWithoutWalls.com and the CEO & Founder of The Vetters Agency. Kristine Schachinger has 17 years digital experience including a focus on website design and implementation, accessibility standards and all aspects of website visibility involving SEO, social media and strategic planning.
Dawn Anderson is an SEO & Search Digital Marketing Strategist focusing on technical, architectural and database-driven SEO. Dawn Anderson is the Managing Director of Move It Digital Marketing Agency, International SEO Consultant, Trainer, Lecturer and Speaker.
Craig Campbell is an SEO based in Glasgow in the UK who has over 16 years in the industry, starting out as a freelancer working from home to building up a successful digital marketing agency.
In recent years Craig’s focus has changed and is now providing consultancy and training services as well as speaking in any Digital Marketing events to help people learn from the experience Craig has made over the years.
The Mobile First Index: What, why and, more importantly, when!
Jon Myers, DeepCrawl
Jon Myers (DeepCrawl) at SearchLeeds
Who is Jon Myers?
Jon is an experienced senior leader with over 19 years’ experience within the Digital Marketplace working for large corporate organisations to startups within the sector. Jon has a strong understanding of all sides of the market, very strong business and people connections across EMEA and recognised for his experience and thought leadership within the European online advertising industry. Having worked in Paid Search since its inception, with many years’ experience in SEO, Display and Paid Social as well
He is a regular speaker/moderator at conferences worldwide and frequently judges Awards in the Industry. Currently, Jon is the Chief Growth Officer at DeepCrawl.
Will robots destroy us all? Putting ethical debate back into the narrative about the future of AI.
An experienced digital leader and digital transformation specialist, Kristal Ireland heads up the E-commerce and Retail team at Virgin Trains East Coast. With over a decade of experience in all facets of digital marketing and technology development, she has worked with some of the UK’s biggest brands to define and deliver digital futures fit for the modern day consumer.
SearchLeeds Conference Review
Honestly, guys, I am absolutely knackered. But let’s not talk about me. Let’s talk about the conference. SearchLeeds is getting better and better and better every single year. This conference – and it’s free – can compete on so many levels with so many paid conferences in the UK, in Europe and even in the United States. Stephen Kenwright, Branded3 team honestly guys: Well done!
At the beginning of this week, I asked you to make somebody happy. So today I am thinking: What makes us happy?
And I can’t give you a definite answer as I am still exploring this subject but what I’ve realised so far is that the same thing can make us happy or unhappy at the same time.
Say I busted my knee yesterday. So today I could be like I can’t go to the pub and watch the World Cup. I can’t go and see my friends. I can’t play football. So I am unhappy, I am sad, I am angry. At the same time, I could be like hmm yesterday I busted my knee so today I can stay at home, read my favourite book, learn something new or maybe talk more to my mother and I am happy.
What makes us happy. I will continue exploring this subject. So if you really wanna know I think about happiness please do come back here next Sunday cause maybe my videos make you happy. No. You’ve got the questions and I can give you the answers.
Hi Guys, I know I am pushing you every Monday to be happy, to work hard but let me also be very real with you: You are not going to fix your life in one single day or in one single week or even in a month.
On a macro level take it easy. On a micro level make one day perfect and then keep doing that every single day.
Nick’s presentation – How to use voice devices within your marketing strategy
Voice devices have faster adoption rate than mobile phones. This year they have hit the mainstream and should now become part of your marketing mix. Beyond the statistics, Nick will explain how voice can work for your business. What you need to prepare for voice strategies, what are the common pitfalls and how to avoid them. What role should voice play and how can these platforms give you a competitive edge.
Gianna Brachetti-Truskawa’s presentation – AI vs Human Translation in Localisation
Localisation is often misunderstood, or the resource requirements underestimated – we’ll show you what to expect when it comes to localisation and helps you decide why or when human translation might be a better fit.
Fili Wiese’s presentation – Structured Data Explained
Want to know how and which structured data to implement on your website? This no-hype session focuses on SEO tips that will help you move the needle. No complex theory but highly actionable SEO tips. This session will have SEO tips for all levels of experience. Join ex-Google engineer Fili Wiese to learn all about structured data and how to make it work for you and avoid common pitfalls. Having programmed websites and Google internal tools, Fili Wiese is the go-to guy when it comes to technical and international SEO.
The Giant Speed Benchmark: Your Emotional Support Dog
We all know that mobile speed matters for user behaviour, conversion and is an important ranking factor; but what do we need to do? Which metrics really matter and how much time and effort should we assign to this?
Data without context is useless.
Because data without context is useless, in this session Nichola Stott gives you an introduction to speed and performance metrics for standard mobile configs, then she reviews the UK’s top 5,000 websites by sector, looking at the benchmark timings across key measurements (TTFB, RenderStart, VC, FL ). This will help give you the confidence and support required to understand “how fast is fast?”
Search Elite Conference Review
I’m gonna be totally honest with you. I am pleasantly surprised and I am eager to return to this conference next year. What started with a simple invite from Craig Rayner ‘Omi, come on over mate. Tell us what you think about our conference’ ended up with a conference that has a clear objective. We gonna show you how to significantly increase your online visibility and make more money from your online business through search marketing.
With Cristina Sturza – www.seomonitor.com
Do I have any suggestions for next? Yes. We need more of Jono Alderson. One hour of him is simply not enough.
SEO & CRO – No more Silos. The Panel Session
We are all focusing on platforms and technology and JavaScript. He (Bart Schutz) very much focuses on emotions, the behaviour of individual human beings and tries to optimise for that rather than the mechanics.
And then Tim who is a bit of anomaly…my words are going. Tim is an anomaly. What is it? Tim is an extraordinarily competent technical optimisation person and the jack of all trades similarly to Gerry.
Julia Logan, Jo Turnbull and Dawn Anderson
Stop Making Excuses!
I am about to go to the gym. I have to be honest with you I haven’t been exercising a lot recently cause I’ve been very busy going to conferences, roundtables, travelling abroad. See finding excuses not to do something is the easiest thing on Earth. Let me repeat that statement.
Finding an excuse not to do something is the easiest thing on Earth.
Which reminds me of a saying: From the moment we are born, we begin to die. So when you think about it time is the most precious thing on earth. Not money, not fame not anything. Time. And the way we spent this time is entirely up to us. So like a CRO expert we have to start asking ourselves – Why?
Why am I spending time watching this pointless sitcom every single day? What’s the ROI? Why am I spending time every single day browsing on my phone instead of reading a book and really learning something new?
Why do I make these excuses?
How do they prevent me from moving forward?
How do they cripple my ability to get what I want?
See to get the right answers you need to ask the right questions.
Talking about questions do come back here next Sunday cause you probably wanna see me losing some weight. No. Cause you’ve got questions and issues in digital marketing and I’ve got the solutions.
We all know that mobile speed matters for user behaviour, conversion and is an important ranking factor; but what do we need to do? Which metrics really matter and how much time and effort should we assign to this?
Data without context is useless.
Because data without context is useless, in this session Nichola Stott gives you an introduction to speed and performance metrics for standard mobile configs, then she reviews the UK’s top 5,000 websites by sector, looking at the benchmark timings across key measurements (TTFB, RenderStart, VC, FL ). This will help give you the confidence and support required to understand “how fast is fast?”
Nichola Stott is a go-to expert on all things SEO. Following a position as Head of UK Search Partners at Yahoo!, she founded her own agency called Erudite in 2010 and has since helped a plethora of cross-industry international clients increase their revenue through Search.
Nichola Stott at the Search Elite Conference 2018
Nichola’s professional recognition includes being named in the BIMA Hot 100 Digital People, winning Best Use of Search at both the UK Search Awards and Wirehive Awards and co-authoring books including Econsultancy’s SEO Best Practice Guide and Hit me! How to Get Your Small Business to Punch its Weight Online.
What is Search Elite?
Search marketing continues to be the biggest and most powerful form of digital marketing. Search Elite is a conference designed exclusively for experienced search marketers. All the sessions are fast-paced, Q&A-packed, always informative and delivering the most forward-thinking digital strategies and tactics.
Today on my way back home I was hit by a car. I am ok, honestly, I am ok. The elbow is a bit swollen. It probably needs a bit of icing. So it makes you think. You can die in a blink of an eye. It also makes you think: What is my legacy? What am I actually leaving behind? Let me tell you something. Let your very identity be your legacy. Try an touch as many hearts as you can in your lifetime.
Being good to people is probably the greatest legacy you can leave behind.
I am sorry but I have to completely disagree with this statement. In my opinion, nowadays customers have a natural dislike for big corporations which are often seen a greedy, lying and faceless. On the other hand, yes, on the other hand, personal brands are individuals with unique personal qualities.
The more trustworthy they are the easier will be t generate trust among your shared user base. This can lead to more passionate followers and better initial customer relationships especially if you are trying to penetrate new markets.
Use different personal brands to cater to different audiences
My advice will be to use different personal brands to cater to different audiences. For example, you may want to develop two separate personal brands each of which becomes an expert in two opposite fields. For example, I may like mirrorless cameras. John may like DSLRs. This will greatly help you build niche expertise in separate areas without fully alienating the audience of your core corporate brand.
After talking for an hour about personal branding I realised that people will not listen to you if they don’t like you. How to change that? Well, you have to promise and then you have to deliver.
The importance of your personal brand
www.davidamerland.com
Is personal branding important?
Well in a word yes. But in order to understand it completely, we need to talk about two things. We need to talk about Social Identity Theory and Brand Behavioural values. And those two things although they are separate they are actually connected and the moment we take everything online they converge upon the individual and we come to question we are trying to address now.
I can talk about this pretty much all day and we don’t have all day so I am going to be as succinct as possible. Social Identity Theory essentially says that we join groups and we then enhance those groups through a behaviour sharing activity, judgements, biases and so on. Because the more powerful the group and the more enhance it is they are better that reflects upon us.
Brand Behavioural values essentially say that brands behave in very specific ways which project very specific characteristics in a consistent manner which allows that brand to be recognisable.
So if we are working online or even if we are existing online which is an intentional activity we essentially engage in activities which are intended to both enhance us and the groups which we join by association which then reflects back on us and this is classic Social Identity Theory and we also engage upon activities designed to basically make us stand out from the crowd which are essentially copies of brand behavioural, brand behavioural elements.
So, in a nutshell, how do we, what do we do when we get online we use a conflation of those two to enchase our own identity and enchase the groups which we basically join and reflect well upon ourselves. And in a manner of speaking, we are creating personal brands.
So there it is very quickly. I hope it helps.
Building an authentic personal brand
The first and the more important part of building a personal brand is to be authentic. Don’t insult your follower’s intelligence. People can spot a faker from a mile away no matter how convincing you think you are.
When it comes to building your personal brand online the biggest mistake I see is lack of clarity. So let me give you 3 powerful questions to help you a strategic, thoughtful approach to growth.
Who is your target audience?
The first question is ‘Who is your target audience? Who are you trying to reach online? And the answer cannot be everybody cause it just doesn’t work. I am sure you’ve seen this quote online a lot: If you are trying to reach everybody you end up reaching nobody.
What is your value proposition?
The second question is: What is your value proposition? Or in other words what type of content are you posting online and how often?
Who are you and how do you help people?
The third question is Who are you and how do you help people?
These 3 questions are critical to really standing out and getting noticed online.
One thing I wanna say here is:
Building your personal brand you should try and be as human as possible.
So for example, if you are an SEO like me yes you should be also talking about food, good movies, books but if I come to your online profile within 5 seconds I should be able to tell what your core, main value proposition is.
Talking about online profiles, don’t forget to come here next Sunday so you can ask me the questions and I can give you the answers.
Although universities can facilitate learning, nobody can teach you anything – they can only inspire you to teach yourself. That means if you want to learn search engine optimization (SEO), you’ll have to take matters into your own hands.
David Edmundson-Bird is Principal Lecturer in Digital Marketing & Enterprise at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he runs a number of digital communications programmes and is also the Associate Director for Digital Innovation.
David Edmundson-Bird with Tom Cheesewright and Nick Wilsdon
The one-day event features world-class speakers that cover all of the need-to-know search marketing topics to develop and advance your brand’s search engine presence, including:
Organic search (SEO) – how to achieve and maintain your brand’s ranking in natural search engine results and ensure your customers can easily find you.
Paid search (PPC) – driving targeted traffic to your website by showing ads in search engine results when people search for related keywords.
Social media – enhancing brand awareness and advocacy to support your search visibility; your social authority is increasingly considered by Google as a ranking factor.
Content marketing – how to be smart with your content campaigns to build trust and credibility by returning relevant answers to search queries, and earning quality backlinks.
David Edmundson-Bird with Nick Wilsdon, Gerry White and John Warner
Who’s behind Benchmark?
Located in North West England, Click Consult is a multi-award-winning search marketing agency with a focus on organic (SEO) and paid search (PPC). With over 70 professionals employed and a portfolio of over 60 clients from across the UK, Click Consult works with businesses looking for a measurable return on their search marketing budget.
Click Consult also provides a range of other services, including content marketing, inbound marketing and conversion rate optimisation (CRO), as well as international and multilingual search.
The company is Google AdWords and Microsoft adExcellence certified and is on the Recommended Agency Register.
Nowadays shopping is a complex, non-linear event for consumers that happens at odd hours across multiple devices and channels – both in apps and on websites. Brands and retailers are struggling to measure the path to purchase because it can be difficult to follow consumers’ touchpoints and track their journeys all the way to conversion.
Sabrina is currently an Agency Development Manager at Google, helping UK agencies on all aspects of their digital activity, with a particular emphasis on growth. Prior to working with agencies, Sabrina was a Consultant for the specialised Global Expansions Team, helping Google’s largest advertisers craft and execute their international expansion strategies.
With a background in Finance, Sabrina began her career in banking, working for five years as a Corporate Cash Manager. A native of Montreal, she completed her MBA in Berlin before moving to Dublin to join Google.
The one-day event features world-class speakers that cover all of the need-to-know search marketing topics to develop and advance your brand’s search engine presence, including:
Organic search (SEO) – how to achieve and maintain your brand’s ranking in natural search engine results and ensure your customers can easily find you.
Paid search (PPC) – driving targeted traffic to your website by showing ads in search engine results when people search for related keywords.
Social media – enhancing brand awareness and advocacy to support your search visibility; your social authority is increasingly considered by Google as a ranking factor.
Content marketing – how to be smart with your content campaigns to build trust and credibility by returning relevant answers to search queries, and earning quality backlinks.
Sabrina Garufi
Who’s behind Benchmark?
Located in North West England, Click Consult is a multi-award-winning search marketing agency with a focus on organic (SEO) and paid search (PPC). With over 70 professionals employed and a portfolio of over 60 clients from across the UK, Click Consult works with businesses looking for a measurable return on their search marketing budget.
Click Consult also provides a range of other services, including content marketing, inbound marketing and conversion rate optimisation (CRO), as well as international and multilingual search.
The company is Google AdWords and Microsoft adExcellence certified and is on the Recommended Agency Register.
What do you do when the weather is so nice? Well, you go to the beach.
What an amazing view.
It’s Tuesday and I have to go to work after 3 days off. And then Alexa woke me up an hour earlier. What a life. But then I think this week gonna be great. Tomorrow I am going to the British Council where I’m gonna be talking about SEO and Digital Marketing. And then on Friday, I am going to another roundtable where I’m gonna be talking about well SEO and Digital Marketing. I think Churchill once said
‘You make a living by what we earn, but you make a life by what you give.’
SEO and Digital Marketing roundtable
Wednesday morning and I am on my way to the British Council to teach them some proper SEO. Basically, we gonna be talking SEO and Digital Marketing trends in the UK. Meanwhile what a lovely weather. Honestly, people, I wish I was actually going to the beach.
Two hours later…
Ok, it’s done now. I had an amazing time at the British Council. The conversation wen wild. We were talking about AMP, JSON-LD, artificial intelligence (AI) just name it. The thing is you are learning from me and I am learning from your questions.
Now that I am at home I’d like to say a big, massive ‘Thank you’ to Ann Hutchings for organising this meeting. I said it earlier today but I will say it again:
I love sharing my knowledge with others because they learn from me but I also learn from their questions.
So this morning I woke up I and so worried – Oh my God, am I gonna be able to give them enough value. Do they know more than me? Do I know more than them? Why do people invite me to these meetings? And then it hit me:
It’s not about how much I know, it’s about how much I care about their Digital Marketing problems and questions.
Marketing Business Summit – Milan 29-30 November 2018
Hi, guys. My name is Omi Sido. I am the senior technical SEO at Canon Europe and this November I will be speaking at the Marketing Business Summit in Milan. I will be talking about SEO and Machine Learning.
We all know that the machine learning revolution is affecting SEO and shaping the future of Digital Marketing so I’m gonna give you some insides and some tips on how to survive and how to succeed in a machine learning driven SEO environment. Guys, I know we gonna have a lot of fun so I hope to see you all there. Ciao.
Yes, yes I am going to Milan this Autumn and I will be talking about SEO and Machine Learning. Why do I talk so much about machine learning? Well, nobody wants to talk about it but at the same time, it affects us all not just in SEO and Digital Marketing but also in real life.
From Google Search to Google Maps to Netflix to Uber to PayPal. Well, Machine Learning is everywhere around us. With that in mind make sure that I am always around you so you can ask me the questions and I can give you the answers.
The Homebase website was already dying….why kill it with a bad https migration?!
I am sure you’re wondering how a process that’s supposed to boost your site’s rankings could possibly send them plummeting instead.
Here are some observations:
First, we see pages that are being redirected 4 times – yes 4 times – before reaching their final destination, e.g. http://www.homebase.co.uk/en/homebaseuk/bathroom/bathroom-accessories/bathroom-essentials.
From my experience redirect chains do not affect small websites much. Unfortunately for Homebase, their website is big.
When it comes to big websites crawl budget is vitally important.
Every redirect wastes a little bit of a website’s crawl budget. When a website has long redirect chains, i.e. a large number of 301 and 302 redirects in a row, the Googlebot may drop off before it reaches the desired destination page, which means that important business pages may not be indexed. When it comes to redirects have as few as possible on your website, and no more than two in a row.
How many redirects can you do at the same time? We follow up to 5 in a chain (please keep any redirect chain as short as possible), but you can redirect as many URLs on your site as you want at the same time. – JohnMueller, Google
If we deep dive into these redirects it is also quite noticeable that the redirects go from HTTP to HTTPS and then again to HTTP and then again to HTTPS. Not sure why an SEO would do that but at this point, it’s very obvious that there was no HTTPS migration plan in place.
A successful website migration starts with planning – Omi Sido
Could this be the reason for their rankings going in the tank?
Yes and no (this is not the only reason).
Carefully looking at the same starting page http://www.homebase.co.uk/en/homebaseuk/bathroom/bathroom-accessories/bathroom-essentials you will probably notice that the original page is targeting the keyword ‘bathroom accessories’ with a search volume of 27 000
and the ‘new’ page is targeting a keyword with a search volume of 14,800.
At this point, I am laughing…
Who is advising these people?
Going into more detail, let’s have a look at the history of the keyword ‘bathroom accessories’ that for many years was always ranking in the top 3 positions for Homebase.
We can now see what is going on here:
Only a week after the HTTPS migration Homebase went from position 3 to position 21 in the SERPs and few months down the line Homebase is ranking in position 97 for the keyword “bathroom accessories”.
( It’s not very clear from the picture above but at one point between December 2017 and February 2018, this page was indeed ranking for the keyword “bathroom accessories” in position 30)
As this is not enough another page (www.homebase.co.uk/en/static/bathroom-ideas) targeting the keyword ‘bathroom ideas’ with a search volume of 60,500 is now redirecting to the home page. Lol and LOL.
I explicitly told you last year – https://youtu.be/jtgZ5dxYbHM?t=782 – not to redirect pages to the Homepage when migrating your website.
Can these costly mistakes Be Fixed?
If your SEO or web developer mishandles your site migration, can the mistakes be rectified? Of course. In many cases of an HTTPS migration gone wrong, I’ve been working with clients for some time, and we’ve made significant progress.
The real issue is that the ranking destruction done by a website migration gone wrong is almost always a long-term issue.
Finding and repairing the problems isn’t particularly complicated. You just have to look at the stats and everything becomes clear very quickly.
But improving your site’s reputation (especially in a competitive market) with a search engine once’s it’s damaged can be a very slow process, and of course completely at their discretion.
Fixing the technical SEO issues that caused Google to lose trust in your website isn’t enough. A business needs to give Google a good reason to start trusting its content again but also let’s not forget that while your pages were ‘away on holiday’ somebody else took your position in the SERPs.
This week it’s all about the biggest search marketing conference in Europe called BrightonSEO. So let me answer a simple question. Why? Why are we so obsessed with this conference.
Well, when it comes to the SEO industry, it is very difficult to attend a University and get a formal degree in the field. Unfortunately, very often this leads to the misunderstanding that learning on your own is the only way to success.
While this can be done, many SEO veterans will tell you that coming to a conference like BrightonSEO and learning from those with experience is the best way to master the science and the art of SEO. The importance of ranking well on Google isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, so the quicker you learn, the better.
Meanwhile, if you see me at BrightonSEO don’t be shy. Come and say hi. Ask, ask the questions. You know me. You’ve got the problems and I’ve got the solutions.
