LeadsCon Day 1: A Few Good Nuggets To Share

Today was the first day of LeadsCon and it’s been one heck of a busy day for me. Since my primary focus is Fashion Metric I spent most of the day in the room working with Daina but made it to LeadsCon in the afternoon for my panel and a few other talks I was interested in attending.

As always, when I go to these events I’m looking for nuggets, little bits of information and data that can make a big difference. I always think that every meeting, seminar, etc. has a few good nuggets in it and as always I love sharing these with you here on my blog. I have less than ten minutes to write this post so let’s get rocking!

BradenPollock_MorganLinton_LeadsCon

Braden Pollock moderated the first-ever Domaining panel at LeadsCon and we covered a range of topics with a focus on leveraging type-in traffic coming from domain names. I know that many of the people who read my blog know all about this but for many at LeadsCon this was a brand-new topic and an interesting one. The room was packed and I was honored to be a part of it!

If anyone would like a synopsis of topics covered just ping me in the comments below and I’m happy to send you a quick review. I’m going to leave these details off my blog for now as I have covered many of these topics in depth over the years.

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Right after our panel was an awesome SEO panel featuring one of my favorite people in the space, DK from Purpose Inc. DK is a bit of an Internet legend having first had a major run in with Google’s Matt Cutt’s who outed him for his SEO practices. Later the two became friends and now DK is one of the most respected people in the SEO world.

A few nuggets from this one that I thought you would all be interested in specifically pertaining to Penguin and Panada.

  • Now more than ever you have to know every single inbound link coming to your site – make sure to disavow any junky links you may have made in the past, they are hurting you.
  • If you have an ad between your <h1> tag and the first line of text on your site, this is now hurting you.
  • Make sure your site has both a Disclaimer and a Disclosure, Google is now using this in their ranking algorithm
  • If you have inbound links going to a page that has nothing but links on it, this can also hurt you.
  • Google is tightening the noose on Penguin and Panda ranking factors so you’ll have to continue to tweak even more than before
  • No more than 30% of your inbound links should have exact match anchor text

Last but not least, the topic of Exact Match Domains came up and DK squashed the myth that exact-match domains will hurt your rankings. They have a number of sites that are getting a major SEO bonus from having an exact match domain. Yes, if you have an exact match domain filled with spammy content it will get hurt, but you should have known better, right?

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The next talk I went to discussed seven steps for improving mobile conversions. There’s no doubt that mobile is growing, and fast, so understanding how to optimize your site for mobile users is getting more important by the day. Here’s are a few nuggets from this talk:

  • Reduce the number fields in a form, less is more when it comes to mobile
  • “Try It Free” outperforms “Free Trial”
  • The call to action you use on your buttons is critical and directly impacts conversion rate
  • Tailor your site to the visitor, first time visitors may respond differently to repeat visitors, segmentation is important
  • It is much easier to test today than ever before, test and iterate

Okay, that’s it for now, I’m over time, this took 20 minutes to put together but I think it was worth it! Off to dinner, hope you enjoyed the nuggets from today, more to come!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton