After a keynote on content marketing and storytelling at i-SCOOP’s Fusion Marketing Experience Brussels, SEO expert Joost de Valk gave the attendees of the Antwerp edition a crash course in how conversion optimization starts in the search engine result pages (SERPs).
We often forget it but the ways our businesses and brands are perceived, include all touchpoints and experiences. Indeed, in SERPs as well.
Just as Dela Quist focused on the branding aspects of email marketing at our Fusion Marketing Experience, in Brussels Joost looked at the branding dimension and the start of the conversion funnel in search engine ads and most of all in SERPs in Antwerp.
A much debated keynote, somewhat technical for some people, but absolutely eye-opening and food for a lot of thought and…action.
Bryan Eisenberg, who also spoke in Antwerp, already took action by applying Joost’s insights and writing about Joost’s presentation on his blog and on Clickz.
Joost in fact, used the blog of marketing optimization expert Bryan at the event to show how you can use SERPs to get the results up.
It inspired Bryan to write his post on how every website sucks and how we can always do better.
Joost’s presentation was about how you can improve your online marketing by using rich snippets such as author biographies or ratings/reviews in SERPs, adding social proof to search engine results.
He also explained how you can do much more with search engine ads, what difference the right image in SERPs can make, how you should have a call-to-action in your posts, what the impact of removing the date from your posts and pages can make, etc.
I’ll look more in detail to each of those – and other – elements later. And I still have to change a lot myself. Furthermore, there was some debate about specific tips Joost gave and which I will also tackle later, among others regarding the post date and authenticity.
Here are some key conversion and SERP optimization lessons to remember:
- Conversion optimization happens everywhere, including in the SERPs.
- Improving conversion requires a mentality to be open for improvement (the culture, remember), just like Bryan did when he applied Joost’s tips during his presentation (!).
- Marketing optimization requires a structured approach. That is what Bryan has been emphasizing a lot lately.
- Conversion optimization never ends. You can and should always – try to – do better.
Stay tuned for more and in the meantime check out Bryan’s post and Joost’s presentation below.
