Elmer's Next Speaking Event - Pubcon Florida 2018

I'll be attending Pubcon Florida 2018, which will be held April 10-12, 2018 at the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention Center in Fort Lauderdale, FL. I'll be presenting in one session and moderating two others. Here are the details:

• I will share an updated version of my Entity Optimization for Google and Bing presentation. I've learned a few things since my last presentation in February that I'll be sharing. This session will be held on Thursday, April 12th at 11:10am
• On Wednesday, April 11th at 11:10 I will moderate a session with Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting in which he will talk on Technical SEO. This should prove to be an excellent hour for anyone who wants to up their game on Technical SEO topics
• The second session I'll moderate will be on Thursday, April 12th at 2:20pm. In this session, Ann Smarty will do a presentation entitled "Link Building Through Relationship Building." If you're looking to up your game on link building, this will be the session for you

Special Surprise
From now until April 1st, you can use discount code rc-4770120 at checkout and save 20% on registration. 

Working To Update Automotive Schema Definitions

Since a lot of the work I do revolves around the auto industry, one of my goals is to help extend definitions to automotive Schema.org tagging. The current Schema tagging definitions are great, but there are certainly still opportunities to make them better. As I mentioned in my previous post, leveraging structured data tagging is going to be critical to future success in Organic Search.

The way to do this is to join the Automotive Ontology Group on W3C.org.

If you are involved in website optimization for the auto industry, please consider joining in this effort. Head on over to the Automotive Ontology Group website and sign up. You have to first create an account on W3C.org if you don't already have one.

Pubcon Austin 2018 Wrapup - Schema Was The Theme for the Day

On February 21, 2018 I, once again, had the honor to do a presentation at a Pubcon event. In this case, it was the 1-day local event in Austin, TX. It was great to meet up with other experts in the digital marketing community, swap stories and ideas and learn from some of the best in the business.

Of all the great presentations I sat in on, one central theme seemed to surface throughout the day: Website owners need to get going on Structured Data tagging. As I said in my presentation, "You need to make Schema.org your new, favorite website.

The first mention of structured data tagging was from Google's Gary Illyes during his kickoff keynote. He said several things regarding Schema, but the most important thing was that "Schema is here to stay," and he strongly encouraged website owners to start leveraging that. He even mentioned that some types of content, such as job listings and recipes, wouldn't even rank if it wasn't marked up with Schema.

Here's a retweet of Melissa Fach's comment about it:

Both Upasna Gautam and I mentioned structured data and Schema in the presentations we did on Semantic Search and Entity Optimization.

Another prominent speaker who brought up structured data tagging was Duane Forrester. He mentioned two things that struck me. One was that higher level SEO jobs are likely to evolve into what he termed "Digital Knowledge Manager." This person will be responsible for working with tech, development, content and product teams in order to better optimize website content to function better in the evolving search results. The second thing: A key part of the success of the Digital Knowledge Manager will be ... structured data. He also tied structured data to success in voice search results.

I don't remember his exact words, but they prompted me to tweet, "Another ominous warning: Get going on structured data now! Your future depends on it."

The last mentions of structured data were from Microsoft's Purna Virji, who also related this back to voice search results - this time from a Bing perspective. Still, the message was the same.

According to February 28, 2018 data by W³Techs, 54% of websites they survey use no structured data whatsoever. That indicates that a lot of you website owners/managers/SEOs need to get going and start leveraging this tech. It's more than just a fad at this point - and it may end up being more of a directive than a hint from the search engines.

Quick note: My next speaking appearance will be at the Pubcon Florida event, April 10-12, 2018. I will do an updated version of my Entity Optimization presentation and will be moderating two other sessions during the week.

Elmer's Next Speaking Event - Pubcon Austin

I'm happy to let the 2 or 3 of you who read about me here that I will be presenting at the next Pubcon event in Austin, Texas on February 21, 2018. My session will be "Entity Optimization" and I will present an updated version of the same deck I shared in Vegas last November. I've learned a few new things since November, and I'm glad to be able to share them.

I will also be moderating a session on Accelerated Mobile Pages in which Elena Legeros from Google will be presenting. This should also be an interesting session.

If you're at the event, please stop and say "hi."

Pubcon Vegas 2017 Live Blog - Reputation Management with Matt Craine & Tony Wright

On Day 3 of Pubcon Vegas 2017 I sat in on a session on Reputation Management with Matt Craine and Tony Wright presenting. Here are the notes I took during the presentations.

Reputation Management for CEOs & Their Businesses (AKA: Your LinkIn profile probably STILL sucks) - Matt Craine

• Your brand is not what YOU think it is - it's what THEY think it is
• It's not about ownership
• What is their impression of you and your brand?
• It's about your presale relationship with your customer
• Everyone is a stalker
• When you meet someone in a business context, people are searching for you and your brand
• You (CEO or business owner) now represent the company's brand
• Make sure your LinkedIn profile is complete and up-to-date
• Change your LinkedIn visibility settings so those who are not logged in can see you
• Make sure to claim your business' LinkedIn profile
• Keep it updated
• Use current images
• Only 6 out of 10 customers visit a local company's website when researching for a purchase
• Audit yours and your company's public online profiles
• LinkedIn update - business and key employees
• Update team pages
• Updated pictures
• Updated info
• Human-type info
• People buy from other people, not companies
• Register your own domain name for your name
• Put up a quick website
• Link to your LinkedIn profile
• Gives you a place to tell your story
• Optimize for local search - even if you're not totally local
• Can help disambiguate same-named businesses in other areas
• Helps to keep your listings cleaner
• Claim and optimize all local directories
• Monitor your website analytics
• Look for irregularities
• Helps to identify issues that affect your reputation
• Check your website. Are you meeting your customers expectations? Are you meeting your customers expectations on mobile? Bad user experience affects your reputation

Reputation Management is dead! Long Live Reputation Management - Tony Wright

• There are a lot of bad players in the reputation management space. Some even create a "crisis" and solicit work
• There are no quick fixes to reputation management
• It's not on one platform
• The best way is to create a better reputation
• The first step is to monitor your online reputation
• The second step: tell your story ... NOW!
• Next, build relationships with influencers in your space
• Also build a social media policy for employees
• The new ORM
• Always tell your story and make sure it shows up
• Make your side of the story palatable to your target audience (if you don't know, you may not want to take a controversial stand)
• You're not going to replace all negative stuff in the SERPs - and you don't really need to replace it all
• Respond to minor issues in the forum on which the review or comment was left
• Respond to "crisis level" issues in an official forum, like a press release or on your website
• When you mess up - and you will mess up
• Don't believe your lawyer - lawsuits may be less costly than the monetary cost of your reputation issue
• Don't admit guilt until you know the whole story
• News cycles are quick, what happened may be forgotten very within a week or two
• Be transparent - but remember there are always 2 sides to the story
• Start impact analysis early
• How is this affecting your bottom line?
• Can the brand survive the crisis?
• Larger brands can weather crisis, smaller brands can be hurt and be killed
• B2B brands can be severely hurt
• Monitor, monitor, monitor
• Consult an attorney, but don't let the lawsuit alone dictate your plan
• Avoid making the crisis more visible