It’s been a couple months since SMX Advanced Seattle so myself and Michael Knight (Anvil’s Paid Search Strategist) wanted to regroup to see what takeaways actually made an impact in our day-to-day. Below are the top six that are still running strong.

Link Building Is Still Kickin’ It:

The buzz of the year was that link building was dead. However, as Matt Cutts stated, it’s not dead, but spammy tactics are. A big theme at SMX was how link building should still be utilized in a tactical and smart way. Link building and content marketing are not the same – link building is not glamorous or sexy, so sometimes it can get buried in the to do list.

Less Data, More Impact:

Data, data, data. Being particularly into the analytics side of the business, I can easily see why one could get lost in the details. We notice one thing in analytics and end up going down a rabbit hole of data that we feel we must share. A great presentation at SMX focused on “small data” – yeah it was in a joking manner, but it made sense. We need to give our clients the impactful data that is useful and not the data we think is cool. Focus on action, not data floods.

Social, Still Big:

As it’s been said for a while, social is big. Not only is it a great way to engage with your audience, but it has SEO benefits as well. At SMX we got a sneak peek into SearchMetric’s 2014 SEO ranking report. While social didn’t have as strong of a correlation as the previous year it was still important. Main take away here – it’s all about the holistic approach.

Better Paid Search and Social:

Since SMX, we’ve taken a bigger interest in how social can influence our overall results using both paid search ads coupled with social advertising to drive engagement and extended reach through multiple platforms. This helps reach the targeted audience at different points in the sales cycle instead of missing out on one of the most obvious points of influence; social engagement.

Product Listing Ads/Shopping Campaigns:

We’ve taken on a few new strategies and ideas into my shopping campaigns. First, realizing the benefit of simply adding this campaign to any of our ecommerce clients, due to how many advertisers and companies don’t utilize it or utilize it properly. Secondly, using the new shopping categories to better breakout the product feed for best results and best possible bidding options. Lastly, optimizing the product feed with keyword rich content to drive better search results and in turn, more conversions.

Retargeting

Another area of re-thought strategy has been in retargeting and looking outside the walls of Google display remarketing. There are so many other great retargeting channels that can gain an even further reach. For example, Ad Roll is a solid platform for social retargeting on Facebook and Twitter. Giving the social aspect of paid search, like the above insight into growing social and paid strategies. The other form of retargeting that is underutilized is RLSA, for extended search reach by bidding on higher cost terms (for less) to a very targeted, remarketing list audience that is usually further in the buying cycle. This allows advertisers to continue to keep showing ads to these visitors who are ready to buy with a more direct message rather than the original text ad the visitor originally came to the site through.