I decided to go for the presentation about Persona models in Search marketing having had a slight inkling that this one may hold some interesting advice. I have to say the hall in which this presentation took place looked prepped for a State banquet. I wasn’t too sure about if this was all that necessary considering the hall was half empty. Anyway, the presentation was kicked off by Jonathan Beeston. It seemed a bit vague to be honest talking much about developing personas into categories and seeing what different brands they engaged in. I guess this served the purpose of introducing the next two speakers.

Finlay Clark was on hand to discuss the bigmouthmedia approach (I got one of those chattering teeth things at last). Why do you build persona. Well, according to Mr Clark, you have to know your audience better, increase brand loyalty and build on sales. It is important to give your personas names such as ‘Working parent’ , ‘Business traveller’ or ‘Student gamer’ and so forth. Assign attributes to these people; do they have a High or low value to the brand? You’ll need to identify vital search characteristics about the personas such as would they use different search terms either plural or singular? Next one must identify the right Keywords for these personas. Finally, understand something about the what media influences your personas. Test your creative messages on different personas and see how they react. There was a lot to take in on this presentation and I unfortunately missed the parts on ‘Propensity to defer (deference cycle) and ‘Propensity to search via Proxy’. I’ll have to look around to see if anyone else took notes on this part.

Next up, Will Critchlow from Distilled. Will broke down the process of models in three parts: Tribal, Dialect and Validating. He stressed the model was a simplification of the real world and not one that is exact. You as a marketeer, must understand that you must empathise with the customer. Understanding how the persona will interpret the world andyour brand is key. For instance, age plays a part in what you call an object or thing. Will stressed that users , in general are bad at using search engines simply because they can’t be specific about anything. Finally the one bit of advice that rang true, is that you have to go out and meet your customer. get feedback directly from them and that will be the key to a successful campaign.

The q&a session followed, where Will kindly offered more advice. He said start small when working out your persona. Beware, persona research may fail if you are optimising for a vague keyword which can apply to more then one persona. To solve this, the landing page could be less ambiguous with a choice menu like what kind of person are you?

International SEO

Having thought this morning’s presentation about Global search was about the technical efforts on getting pages ranked in local search engines, I managed to get it right this time round. Key statements from speakers: Andy Atkins -Kruger and Duncan Morris are as follows:

Duncan Morris said the purpose of targeting local search engines was clear:

1. Increase traffic

2. Target new markets

3. Decrease bounce rate

4. Improve your conversions.

The biggest sticking point is of course TLDs. He certainly doesn’t favour redirecting users based on IP address. Understandable as you could be searching in a foreign country and then all of sudden find yourself in the Russian version of the site. There was some debate over whether it was better to use subfolders coming off an authoritative ‘quality’ domain or going down the ccTLD route. It was an interesting debate but I think the ccTLD argument won as it was backed up by research. Anyway, Duncan favoured the former approach for example www.ikea.com/us for American content. His reasoning was all the link juice flows back to one domain. He’s certainly not a fan of subdomaining. However, ultimately the question was what do you have on the homepage? Certainly local TLDs will be harder for link builders and still there could be the possiblity of duplicate content. In terms of content optimisation, it is always important to have a physical address on every page., make sure your backlinks are country specific and of course use webmaster central tools to specifiy a region.

Andy offered his 10 ‘low hanging fruit’ methods to optimise for International sites:

1. Use UTF-8 character encoding
2. Don’t ‘translate’metatags and page titles – Localise them! Beware Plurals, prepositions, accents, alternate spellings, disaggregation, inflection
3. Adopt a global PR strategy
4. Manage 301s and find broken links
5. Use keyword rich URLS – Translate them if necessary
6. Source local links
7. Use a smart geographic selector – Drop down menus of countries
8. Expert keyword research – from a local speaker
9. Local hosting – Apparently it was not as important as you may think!
10. Language content and presentation

Andy clearly favoured the ccTLD route as he was sure evidence said people from other countries do not use .com by default but .fr in France or .es in Spain etc. His final bit of advice was to pilot test in a small country first. Sounds reasonable.

That was it for Day One of SMX London and it was a serious head blast. Lots of info to take in all round. Some interesting points raised particularly in the afternoon session. Definitely worth some kind of follow up from myself.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 at 7:45 pm and is filed under Advanced SEO, SEO Blog News, SMX London Expo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.