[blog]_[Director Amanda On The Main Stage @ Brighton SEO]_[Blog Picture]

Director Amanda On The Main Stage @ Brighton SEO

by Cedarwood Digital NewsDigital PR & Outreach tipsGeneral Marketinghome pageLink BuildingPaid SearchPaid SocialSEO

For her fourth time speaking at Brighton SEO, Director Amanda took to the main stage at Brighton SEO to deliver a talk on “Reimagining E-E-A-T: Using Ethos, Pathos And Logos To Boost SEO Campaigns” drawing on skills that she learnt when studying philosophy at school, Amanda discussed how the valuable rhetoric of Ethos, Pathos and Logos can be applied to SEO campaigns to not just improve performance, but most importantly to improve conversion rate and drive sales and leads – which at the end of the day is why everyone does it!

At the event which had over 2,000 attendees, Amanda went into detail about how to apply these principles to your SEO campaigns and why doing so plays such an important role in ensuring your maximising your return on investment. Key focus areas included:

  • Understanding that 87% of people will leave the conversion funnel if they read a negative review or mention of your website – brand perception and awareness is key and building/protecting your reputation plays a key role in this

  • Showcasing “benefits” not “features” – why should I use your product/service, what benefit does it have to me? Rather than just listing a specific feature it has, appeal to the user’s emotional side by helping them to understand how it could help them

  • Matching user intent plays an important role in keeping users in the funnel – understanding what type of content best resonates with them is important here, do they want content that showcases experience or expertise? Or sometimes do they want a mixture of both?

  • Utilising Digital PR effectively to build reputation – how to best use your thought leadership and data-led campaigns to make people find your brand online and ensuring that when people are researching they’re finding what they need to to better understand your brand.

Overall, the outline of the talk focused on how Aristotle utilised “rhetoric” to help persuade an audience to do something – not too different from what we try to do in modern day SEO and provided relatable takeaways that not only help to align E-E-A-T (specifically in YMYL industries) but also help to boost those all important conversion rates.

A big thankyou to everyone who attended the talk – please reach out if you’d like a copy of the deck!

[blog]_[Director Amanda Walls Speaks At The SEO Mastery Summit, Saigon (Vietnam)]_[Blog Picture]

Director Amanda Walls Speaks At The SEO Mastery Summit, Saigon (Vietnam)

by Cedarwood Digital NewsDigital PR & Outreach tipsGeneral Marketinghome pageLead GenerationLink BuildingPaid SearchPaid SocialSEO

Our Director Amanda Walls was on stage at the SEO Mastery Summit, Saigon last week discussing “Using Digital PR To Simultaneously Boost SEO And CRO”

The SEO Mastery Summit is one of the most highly regarded SEO conferences in the world with nearly 500 delegates from around the world attending the week-long conference each year & Amanda was delighted to have been invited to speak at the event. The conference is held each year in Ho Chi Minh City and attracts a huge international audience.

“The SEO Mastery Summit is one of the leading SEO events in the world so it’s great to be able to get on stage and share knowledge with as well as learn from some of the world’s best SEO’s,” she said.

Also on stage, were leading SEO speakers including Craig Campbell, Kavi Kardos, SEO Jesus, Christopher Hofman and many more…

Key themes of the conference focused around the rise of AI and how we can adapt it into strategy to help improve efficiencies, as well as looking at personal branding and the rise of this within SEO. There were many cutting-edge talks discussing recent Google algorithm updates and how to stay ahead of the evolving landscape, as well as some great social networking events and a chance to meet SEOs from all over the world.

Overall, the conference had some great actionable takeaways to bring home for clients, in addition to being a great way to learn from and speak in front of some of the world’s leading SEOs.

[blog]_[Is Digital PR Valuable? And How Is It Measured?]_[Blog Picture]

Is Digital PR Valuable? And How Is It Measured?

by Digital PR & Outreach tipshome pageLink Building

When it comes to planning and budgeting for a new campaign, analysing the success of previous campaigns is paramount. Therefore, knowing the monetary value of coverage is hugely beneficial, providing teams with the ability to make informed decisions and allocate spend accordingly.

We have put together a small guide featuring one simple tool that can be utilised to extract the monetary value of your PR.

Is-Digital-PR-Valuable_-1

[blog]_[Why are links important for SEO, and how can I get them?]_[Blog Picture]

Why are links important for SEO, and how can I get them?

by Digital PR & Outreach tipshome pageLink BuildingSEO

If you’re in the digital marketing world, you’ve undoubtedly heard that getting backlinks from other websites is crucial for SEO. It’s important to utilise anything that can help to boost your website’s search ranking, so we’ll shed some light on why links are so important and teach you how to build them yourself.

Why are links important for SEO?

Building backlinks to your website (getting other websites to link back to yours) sends out a trust signal to Google that your website has good authority, and therefore should be ranked higher. However, this depends on the type and quality of the website that posts the link. Essentially, if a quality website which Google trusts links back to your site, Google determines that you too are a quality website, so should be ranked higher. You can work out the quality of a website by checking its domain rating on websites such as Ahrefs or Moz: the higher score the better.

However, Google can also penalise for backlinks which it sees as unnatural. For example, spamming forums, creating tonnes of directory listings, paying bloggers on fiver to link to your website are unnatural ways to build links, which in turn will lower your position on Google. It is far better for SEO to secure a few strong links a month than to build hundreds of low-quality backlinks in a short space of time.

Hence, you should always ensure that links have a natural connection to your business, which you can achieve with the following techniques.

Brand reclamation

 

It’s always great exposure when a publisher features your brand in their article, though sometimes they will mention a brand without linking back to the brand’s website. Whilst this can be frustrating, it’s easy to maximise this opportunity and secure a link from a high-quality website. Most of the hard work has already been done because a journalist has already noticed and written about your brand. Simply drop them an email thanking them for featuring your business and request a link to your website be added to the page in case their readers want to find out more.

Tracking brand mentions online is very easy to set up so that you don’t miss these opportunities. There are several web-monitoring tools that help you do this, such as Google Alerts (free), Ahrefs alerts and Gorkana. Some publications may have editorial policies not to include external links, but it’s always best to email and check.

Media tools

 

Now that GDPR is in place, media databases with opted-in contact details of journalists are more important than ever for sourcing good quality PR opportunities and contacts. There are a variety of tools you can pay for, as well as free databases that scrape public email addresses from across the web.

One relatively cost-effective way to find feature opportunities is through journalist alerts. These are email alerts that journalists send out to source contacts or information for the features that they are writing. You can then respond to queries that are relevant to your brand, offering information, images, product reviews or quotes. Not only do these tools allow you to effectively build links in a natural way, but they also allow you to develop relationships with key journalists in your market without the need of a pricey media database. Building your own database of journalists that you have successfully worked with makes it easier to work with them again in the future, as you can either contact them with valuable content or they may contact you with relevant upcoming features to you.

Local links

 

Big-budget content campaigns can bring in a lot of high quality links, but exploring your local link opportunities can also be a good cost-effective way to build links on a smaller scale. Investigate whether you have any current connections that you could source a link from. Is your Managing Director an alumni of a prestigious university? If so, perhaps they could make a donation or share their business expertise on their website. Is there a local charity you could work with? Or a local group linked to your industry? Explore current connections that your staff and management have to see if there are any natural links that could be secured by sending an email.

Competitor analysis

 

If a key competitor outranks you for several of your keywords, performing an analysis of where their links are coming from is a great way to see what kind of outreach work they are undertaking. Tools such as Ahrefs enable you to identify which publications your competitors are receiving links from, as well as spark ideas for potential outreach content.

Are there any high quality review websites that your competitor has a link on? If they do and your brand doesn’t, then this can be an area to explore. Do they have any links from high quality bloggers? Again, if they do then you can contact the blogger who wrote the article to introduce your brand and highlight what you can offer them, should they be planning any articles which you could contribute to.