Last week I travelled down to London for the SEOmoz/Distilled Pro Training. It was the first time that the training had made the trip “across the pond” from Seattle where it is normally held. It was a great conference and the guys did a great job of the organisation and the presentations given were all very advanced.
I’ve summarised my top 10 actionable points from the conference below which hopefully you will find useful.
1. Will Critchlow gave several talks, one of which was on Google Analytics. He talked about a cool Excel add-on called Excellent Analytics. This allows you to access your data via an API and pull data straight into Excel.
Action – download Excellent Analytics and start using it for reporting and analysis.
2. Richard Baxter talked about getting SEO done within an organisation and this was actually one of my favourite presentations of the event. He also spent some time showing how to use Excel to display useful SEO data which could help when pitching for more resources to your boss or client.
Action – Learn how to use Excel properly including Pivot tables to display data to those who may not fully understand SEO in a friendly, visual way.
3. Tom Critchlow from Distilled concentrated on several presentations around link building tips. One of the key points that was enforced not just by Tom but in general, was finding your websites/company’s unique selling points. Use this to get those links that your competitor can’t get.
Action – Identify your USP and use it to get links
4. Patrick Altoft shared a presentation slot with Tom Critchlow and he talked about various elements of Google Universal search. One actionable point he made was to create a video sitemap and submit it to Google. He showed how he’d done this without actually providing a video file and Google showed the result on its Italian site. This demonstrates that Google is desperate for video content and will index just about anything.
Action – Learn how to build a video sitemap and submit it to Google
5. The other part of the Universal search presentation was Tom Critchlow talking about Google local search and how to improve traffic from your listing. There were a number of good actionable points in this one but the one that interested me the most was getting reviews for your business even if they are bad reviews can help your listing perform better.
Action – Encourage your customers to go to your Google listing and leave comments
There were lots of actionable tips given out which was nice to see as many conferences can be a bit too generic with their content. Rand and Will had promised this when they first started pitching the event a few months ago so it was good to see them deliver on this.