Leeds Loves Search, April 2019 - Our recap

Tucked into the back of Duke Studios in Leeds, the ‘Leeds Loves Search’ event - hosted by Edit as part of the 2019 Leeds Digital Festival - was an well-organised and informative afternoon that featured excellent talks by speakers from some of Leeds’ leading agencies.

Here is our recap of the afternoon:

Polly Pospelova - ‘How to get a 100% Lighthouse performance score’

Following on from her BrightonSEO appearance, Polly was first on the bill and talked through her presentation which detailed Delete’s recent success in achieving a 100% Google Lighthouse Score for our own website.

PageSpeed optimisation is still an area where many agencies and businesses are lagging behind, often because it’s quite a challenging area to master - particularly when it’s a major contributing factor to a site’s Lighthouse score.

However, in her talk Polly broke down what it actually takes to get a 100% score, offering practical and real world examples.

Some key takeaway points from Polly’s talk were:

• It’s time for SEOs of all levels to unite with Technical and UI Developers to achieve success.
• As the goalposts for success are changing all of the time, Lighthouse optimisation is not a one-off task and needs to be built into any retainer or ongoing strategy.
• PageSpeed is a ranking factor for mobile and desktop. This has been known in the Search Marketing industry for a long time, but it's interesting to see real world evidence for the impact this type of optimisation can have on key rankings.

Neill Horie – Head of Artificial Intelligence Optimisation, Home Agency - ‘How do people actually use voice search?’

The second talk of the afternoon by Neill Horie highlighted that as most user interactions with voice search are led by travel, news, weather, music and calendar searches, voice optimisation is hard to monitise for most clients.

However, SEOs and digital marketers looking to expand in these areas should instead look at it as more of an opportunity to improve customer journeys than monestise them.

Neill also highlighted the need to focus on voice search by targeting long tail phrases and to deliver short, sharp content which answers the user’s question

Some key takeaway points from Neill’s talk were:

• ‘Don’t forget about Bing! Voice search is led by Bing.’
• Use voice search opportunities to deliver solutions for short, task-based customer journeys. Such as, “What’s *businesses* customer service phone number?”

Jack Nottidge, Senior SEO Lead, Stickyeyes – ‘How not to F**K up a migration’

During his talk, Jack highlighted that website migration doesn’t have to purely be about maintaining rankings and traffic. A good migration backed with clear SEO insight should be a starting point for growth and continued success.

Some key takeaway points from Jack’s talk were:

• Server Logs are an important but overlooked part of website migration. These logs are useful for determining what parts of your site web crawlers pay the most attention to and are great for knowing where to focus your efforts.
• ‘Don’t forget to review legacy redirects and internal links. A lot of SEO value can be lost in these areas if they are overlooked as part of a migration project.’

Carrie Rose – Senior Campaign Strategist, Edit - ‘Landing links on top-tier press - what you should be doing in a competitive space’

The final talk of the event by Carrie Rose focused on gaining links from top tier publications and how data and statistics-led campaigns are the key to success. Having a data-backed campaign makes your content a reference point and therefore difficult to cover in a story without linking back to your content.

An interesting follow-on point from this was that the creation of tools and assets that are evergreen are perfect for continually driving coverage and links, as they can be referenced by publications throughout the year and are not time sensitive.

Some key takeaway points from Carrie’s talk were:

• Show clients examples of what competitors are doing and the successes they are getting if they are unsure or wary of carrying out campaigns. This type of outreach strategy can be carried out by companies in any vertical, no matter the niche.
• Don’t forget about niche publications, they might not be as authoritative as national press but their relevance to your clients more than makes up for this.
• ‘If a journalist can cover your content without having to link back, then start again!’

If you’d like to find out more about Polly’s talk then you can see a recap of her presentation in our other blog post here. What’s more, if you have any other questions or enquiries related to the above, we’d love to hear from you hello@deleteagency.com.