Hero Conf and SearchLove Virtual Summit

Come meet your fellow search experts! Kick off the Virtual Summit in our 'Network' or 'Chat' zones. Here are some icebreaker questions: - Have you attended a SearchLove or Hero Conf event before? - What's your role within your organization? - What's your paid media or organic search specialism? The Network zone will match you randomly 1-1 with a fellow attendee, a great way to meet lots of people directly. Each network session will last a maximum of 5 minutes.

SEO and PPC might be seen as different channels, and typically be run by different teams, but to the user, they are all part of the same search journey. Over the last year, Will and the Distilled team have been integrating their business with the paid search experts at Brainlabs (and Hanapin!). In this presentation, Will is going to outline the ways they have found to bring their combined skills together, and the tactical and strategic changes they have made for clients as a result.

Take 5 to reset and refresh.

As search marketers, we're all guilty of treating content as a series of isolated ingredients. You may find yourself swinging to the fences with interactives, ultimate guides and data visualization only to strike out in the first inning. The reality is that effective content performance happens through consistent and choreographed efforts composed through robust and well-crafted content strategies. In this talk, Mike King takes you through the process of building a content machine that ties together data, tools, people and pipelines to yield content performs.

It's time to meet your fellow search gurus! Take this time to network or ask questions of your fellow attendees. Here are some icebreaker questions: - Have you attended a SearchLove or Hero Conf event before? - What's your role within your organization? - What's your paid media or organic search specialism? - What's the biggest pain point in your work, right now? The 'Network' zone will match you randomly 1-1 with a fellow attendee, a great way to meet lots of people directly. Each network session will last a maximum of 5 minutes.

Google wants us to match our content with user intent and drive engagement with our web interfaces. Where to start? Well the biggest brands have the biggest budgets, the biggest teams, and the most on the line when it comes to their web interfaces. Their processes and tricks can be invaluable for small, big and every business in between. Learn from Amazon, Home Depot, and Allstate's websites and come away with how you can replicate optimization tactics that the big dogs use with their huge resources.

Are your SEO projects seeing a clear diminishing point of return? Are you fighting a losing battle against click attrition? Not sure why your tests aren't reaching significance? In this session, we'll cover how to leverage CRO to turn your SEO tactics into a customer-centric strategy and how to make the most of the traffic that's coming to the site.

Everyone wants más out of their PPC but as digital marketers we hit that wall and start looking to new campaign types or networks to compensate when growth is stagnant. In this session, we will uncover why the Hyspanic audience is an important market to reach online and will learn best practices to start experimenting with bilingual campaigns.

At Microsoft Advertising, we’ve been supporting our clients and agency partners on their journey of inclusive marketing for a few years. We began seeing the importance of a shift to focus on people, their values and how we could help our clients represent that in their marketing and build a deeper relationship with their customer. It led us to dig deeper with additional consumer research studies on how brands can build trust that impacts brand and advertising performance. It’s about building trust, and more. It’s about building meaning. That’s Marketing with Purpose. Based on this research and the transformation in how we approach working with our clients, we created a Marketing with Purpose playbook that shows how brands can increase purchase intent and improve brand performance through authenticity. Authenticity is the leading driver of trust, builds brand trust and contributes to customer loyalty and advocacy. How is authenticity achieved? By putting purpose into practice in three ways: * Responsibility: data privacy and protection, accessibility * Values: sustainability, ethics, brand and consumer values * Inclusion: inclusive consumer mindset, inclusive product marketing

As marketing platforms continue to peel away the data and controls we once had, 2021 is a time to prepare our accounts, and ourselves, for a complete migration to Smart Shopping. Account managers who have not prepared for the end of standard Shopping need to start today. In this session, Chris will reveal how his teams successfully improved account performance using Smart Shopping for our clients and taking a product-centric approach to increase revenue and ROAS. He will also describe low-risk tactics for migrating large catalogs over to this new format. Get ready to get smart with your shopping strategy!

Join Laura Bony’s live presentation of Oncrawl’s product vision for 2021 and discover how data SEO is an integral part of our product development. Understand how data science and technical SEO merge together for smarter SEO decisions and request 1 month of free trial to see what everyone’s talking about.

Enjoy 15 minutes of refocusing and energising yoga.

"Do you build business case after business case to tweak the tiniest thing about your company's website? Then get snowed under with requests for the next ""quick win"" from SEO? It's time to flip the script on ""technical""! In the wide world of SEO, technical compliance is an important part of a bigger whole. This session will teach you how to fit technical SEO into a coherent strategy, how to do it right, and how to talk about it with your colleagues so that fixes really get made."

In this presentation, we will see how the Chrome and Safari announcements of last year are in fact direct outcomes of the biggest trend impacting programmatic and the digital space in general, the rise of data protection legislation and privacy. We will then examine how the industry is preparing for the new ecosystem and also establish scenarios for the future.

Ask questions live to your speakers from our first day of sessions. Moderated by Will Critchlow.

Ask questions live to our day 1 PPC speakers. Moderated by Anu Adegbola

E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness) is a hot topic within the SEO community, with many SEO professionals focused on the role it plays in Google’s organic search results, particularly as it relates to Google’s core algorithm updates. However, the organic search results are not the only place where Google is focused on E-A-T; Google has been increasing its focus on surfacing highly authoritative results and combating misinformation across a variety of its products. Learn about the ‘E-A-T ecosystem’ - the various search features where E-A-T is crucial for improving performance – and how to optimize for each of them.

The Evolving Ads Ecosystem addresses industry changes stemming from new policies, data protection regulations and the phasing out of advertising mechanisms like cookies. Due to these changes, which are largely in response to people’s expectations for privacy, businesses must take decisive action. If they do not, people may face a digital world dominated once again by less personalized and potentially disruptive ads— creating a poor experience for them and increasing costs for advertisers. This presentation explores the ecosystem changes at the root of this new reality and the actions businesses can take to ensure that privacy and personalization can coexist. The presentation is divided into three primary sections named for the three evolutions we are seeing across the ecosystem. Each section also includes actions businesses can take in response: - The first section, “How data is managed,” covers regulations like CCPA, GDPR, and LGPD and their impact on how businesses must manage data. - The second section, “How data is surfaced,” digs into changes to the ways businesses can surface data to ad platforms. This includes the phasing out of cookies, as well as upcoming policy changes from Apple that will impact the availability of device identifiers for advertising. - The third section, “How data is sourced,” explains why businesses will have to source data through means that are more browser- and device ID-independent to inform their advertising.

It's that time again! Network with intention by joining a 1:1 Networking chat or Roundtable discussion. What are you working on? What excites you in digital marketing? Get some face time with folks who can offer new perspectives and shared excitement in all things digital. Click over to our Expo to learn what new tools can catapult your search efforts.

2020 was a year we can all agree was challenging and unique. Businesses needed to adapt to the ever-changing conditions to stay relevant and operational. Now more than ever, businesses understand the value of a robust user research program within their organizations. User research allows companies to do frequent pulse checks with customers and adapt accordingly. But even user research doesn't provide all the answers. It provides possible issues - but never the solution. In this session, I will present case studies and a process where you can conduct meaningful user research, extract problem areas that customers are struggling with, how to come up with the right solution, and test out the solutions to validate whether or not you successfully provided the answer for the customer.

Learn the ins and outs creating a content strategy built on the bedrock of SEO, how to adapt that strategy to your unique business model (agency vs. in-house, B2B vs. B2C, self-serve vs. sales-assisted, etc.), and how to report on its success. Kameron will walk you through the exact steps she takes in her process, including her tools and workflows, so you'll come away with a template you can use to build your own search-led content strategy.

Marketers continue to be concerned about a cookieless future: paid & organic attribution has gotten even more obscure. As challenging as losing reliance on beloved trackers may be, it’s time to cut our losses and change with the game (and any KPIs of user acquisition). With the release of Google Analytics 4, Google has confirmed that attribution sources — or even number of users — are not the most important part of our data’s story: web and app events are. Join to learn how to modernise your analytics tracking and reporting.

"Marketing planning comes in many shapes and sizes and, in my experience, is always awful. It's too long, not focused and rarely used once the presentation to the Board/budget holder is over. But it doesn't have to be this way. The 3 Page Marketing Plan™ is a simple yet powerful marketing planning process. This presentation will outline why, what and how you should make your planning process, using a real-world example. If you're thinking "but I'm just an SEO and I don't write the whole marketing plan" come along anyway, this format will be useful for your work AND help you understand how to dovetail with the wider marketing process. "

Media Buying programmatically through self-serve platforms continues to be an advantage for small to large advertisers. As this advertising category grows, we find a fragmentation of platforms, raw data, and insights to make decisions. By extracting and visualizing platform data, we will be able to improve our advertising performance and derive insights, which will drive better decision-making on the target audience and creative. A discussion is never complete without case studies, which will be presented and help us drive home how Platform Data Visualization is a true advantage for media buyers.

Automation and machine learning in Google Ads accounts isn’t anything new and isn’t going away anytime soon. For low volume advertisers, these innovations present new challenges. How do you utilize machine learning, technology that relies on data, when your account does not generate a lot of it? Additionally, there are so many differing opinions on what automations Google is introducing, how do you know where to start? The amount of data and time needed to evaluate if something is ‘worth it’ while trying to balance the needs of your business leave us wondering if we should even adopt these options at all. This session will focus on what low volume advertisers can control when it comes to automation – and how it is possible to work with machine learning instead of viewing it as the enemy or an impossibility.

Jump into a roundtable to connect with a crew who understands your every day wins and challenges. Pick a roundtable based on a topic you find appeal or join a general chat - the choice is yours!

A few companies control the overwhelming majority of traffic, advertising, and attention on the web, and increasingly, they don't like to share. As marketers, we still have a chance to take advantage of the opportunities provided by Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon, but the threat of monopoly power has never been greater. Thus, we need to find new, creative ways to reach our audiences *directly* through the people, publications, and sources of influence that reach them. In this presentation, Rand will show ways to use ads, content, digital PR, and outreach of all kinds to work around the barriers the tech giants are erecting and build more effective marketing strategies.

Take 5! Are you staying hydrated? Don't forget to refill your water bottle while you're at it.

With the advent of brands finding success across social platforms, the immediate strategy for marketers was making sure that their content ended up everywhere. But being “present” isn’t the same as being prominent in a way that stands out in the news feed. If your content can’t stand out then every other trick we have in the bag – from targeting to ad formats- is pointless. How can marketers rethink and refine their approach to creating content that cuts through the clutter to engage and connect with audiences? LinkedIn’s Purna Virji will share key strategies and actionable tactics to building breakthrough content.

Ask questions live to our day 2 SEO speakers. Moderated by Will Critchlow

Ask questions live to our day 2 PPC speakers. Moderated by Anu Adegbola.