Digitalzone’20 Online: Presentation Summaries and Key Points

At Digitalzone’20, we once again welcomed internationally recognized professionals to the largest digital marketing conference in Eastern Europe and MENA, which we have organized every year since 2013.

Because of the pandemic, this was the first time we held the event online and offered it free of charge. Although we could not meet in person, the format allowed us to connect with many more people around the world.

Here are the key points from our speakers' presentations on SEO, PPC, and Content Marketing.

1. Judith Lewis - Top 12 Tips for a Better SEO Life

Judith Lewis, whom we last hosted on the Digitalzone stage in 2017, opened this year's Digitalzone Online. She has worked in digital marketing since 1996 and provides SEO, PPC, Social Media, and Integrated Marketing Communication services through Decabbit Consultancy, the company she founded. Judith also serves as a judge for several Search Awards around the world.

Joining us from London at 7:30 a.m. local time, Judith brought plenty of energy to her presentation, "Top 12 Tips for a Better SEO Life." Drawing on her own experience, she shared 12 optimization and analysis methods that can easily be overlooked in SEO campaigns. Here are the key points:

●  A clear user journey map belongs in the early stages of suitable projects and can guide the work that follows. Teams often begin by classifying users according to search intent. Judith opened by explaining how this work informs content strategy and content mapping.

●  During content mapping, it is essential to consider the points users find problematic and the questions they might ask.

●  Content should be produced in parallel with users' purchasing steps.

●  Content should be shareable for users while also being enriched with keywords.

●  You can test your title and meta description tags on Google Ads first, then use the highest performers on the organic side. Not every setup that works on PPC will work on SEO, but these tests will give you a good sense of what to do.

●  SEO tools such as SEMRush can help you detect content that already brings competitors traffic where you are not yet listed, revealing new content topics.

●  Most SEO tools now provide keywords related to a searched topic as a separate group. These words are valuable for identifying new content topics.

●  Internal links from the homepage to subpages can signal their importance within the site hierarchy to Googlebot. Links placed in the most visible part of the homepage, known as above the fold, are also more likely to receive clicks and may help those pages rank better.

●  Including the main keyword in the title tag remains one of the most important SEO optimizations even today. Important keywords should appear in the first part of the title tag, and title tags should still stay within 60-70 characters.

●  If your brand is well recognized, you can place the brand name at the start of the title tag. Otherwise, keep it at the end.

●  Good content depends on solid target audience analysis, consistently data-driven work, and measurement.

●  Focusing on content that stays useful over time, often called evergreen content, can bring more organic traffic in the long term.

●  Simple, clear content is more likely to be read, and it should also be shared on social media.

●  Pages created for special days or events that brought good traffic should be reused for similar work rather than deleted. Updating old blog content, or moving content that no longer fits its page to other subpages and linking back to it when needed, has a positive effect on organic traffic.

●  When measuring KPIs, consider the value a better ranking for a term will add to your site, not just a specific position, and account for the seasonality of those terms.

●  Judith summarized the main areas that need to be improved first while performing technical analysis for the sites as follows:

         -Identifying duplicate content

         -Controlling the title and meta description tags of important pages

         -Identifying the 404 pages linked in the site

         -Removing the redirect chains

         -Checking the response time of the server

●  Click-through rate (CTR) for keywords is a more useful measurement metric than position alone. Google Analytics and Search Console provide all the data you need for measurement.

2. Yiğit Konur - How to Manage Large Amount of SEO Data by Using CLI/Terminal

Yiğit, one of Zeo's founding partners, has spoken at conferences including Digitalzone, CMMasters, SEMdays, WMF, Orbit, and BrightonSEO, Europe's largest SEO conference. He is currently developing the SEO.do project in the product department in Ankara.

Yiğit's interactive presentation took a more technical direction than many recent discussions in SEO. He showed how SEO specialists can bring Terminal, a powerful but often overlooked tool, into their daily work. Because much of the presentation took place directly in Terminal, we also recommend watching the video.

Key points included:

●  You don't need to know how to code to simplify SEO work with bash scripts in Terminal. Terminal works like its own kind of programming language, so once you've memorized the commands, you just type them directly.

●  You can handle many daily tasks in Terminal, such as opening, saving, viewing, filtering, and examining a Word file.

●  Terminal can process large volumes of data very quickly, which is why data scientists as well as developers rely on it often.

●  Every SEO specialist is, in effect, a mini product manager and project coordinator, so strong technical capabilities matter.

●  Learning Python has recently become popular among SEO specialists, and plenty of resources now exist to support it. Still, not everyone has the time or opportunity to learn Python, and some concepts can be hard to grasp without programming experience.

●  Terminal tasks are generally much easier than programming, since bash scripts read close to plain language. It is also faster than tools such as Excel, and a large Stack Overflow community supports people working this way.

●  Using Terminal can be genuinely fun. It can make you feel like a true hacker, and it impresses non-technical colleagues too.

●  Once you start using Terminal, you will reach the point where you think, "I can actually do everything with bash."

●  Yiğit then summarized installation tools for Windows and macOS, noting that a package manager is essential for Terminal. He recommended homebrew for macOS.

●  Continuing interactively, Yiğit covered basic Terminal commands such as cd desktop, pwd, and ls, and showed simple tasks such as creating a new file with nano and editing it.

●  Managing data well matters most in large agencies and website projects. Anyone who has worked with a large number of .csv files in Ahrefs knows the pain of opening them one by one to combine them. The cat command in Terminal can do this very quickly.

●  Other frequent daily tasks include searching and manipulating data, finding a single column in a file, and selecting certain words, along with analyzing data volume and sharing specific files with others via links.

●  Another important command, grep, works in zip files too. It is especially useful for identifying 404s in log analyses, which are typically provided as gzip files.

●  In the last part of the presentation, Yiğit ran through all the commands he had discussed using Zeo's own sitemap.

●  At the end of the presentation, Yiğit shared news of our second product, seoman, following the soft beta launch of SEO.do. With homebrew installed, you can get the open-source extension using the "pip3 install seoman" command. The tool provides your daily rankings and keyword details for the last two weeks without any developer support.

3. Hannah Smith - Still No Eye Deer

Hannah Smith has worked in online marketing since 2007. After a short stint in PPC and Technical SEO, she moved into creative content and went on to manage PR and content teams at agencies such as Distilled and Verve Search. She has also spoken at many SEO conferences, including BrightonSEO, Mozcon, and Search Love. She has since left agency life behind and now runs content consultancy services through her own company, Wonderist.

Hannah's presentation addressed creativity, inspiration, and the fear of running out of ideas, the recurring nightmare of content writers. Few speakers address these struggles this candidly, and being honest about a difficult stretch is never easy. Anyone who has ever worked in content production would recognize themselves in this talk.

The key points of the presentation are as follows:

●  Content writers can suddenly feel that they have run out of creativity, unsure what to do next even though ideas used to come easily and the work was going well.

●  Various underlying reasons can cause a loss of creativity, but despair tends to dominate regardless of the cause. Identifying those underlying reasons is the way to move past it.

●  Common underlying reasons include not knowing what to do or how to do it, feeling that you are bad at the job, feeling frequently interrupted, or simply not enjoying the work.

●  Starting a task is hard without a clear goal. In the creative process, too much freedom or too many constraints can both work against you, so balancing the two matters. A customer brief that is too restrictive or too open-ended can cause the same kind of creativity block and make it hard to begin.

●  For PR content especially, aim to get at least a list of 5-10 websites the customer definitely wants the content posted on, or topics that must not be included. Ideally, you should also know which topics the customer wants mentioned, the audience the content should target, and other similar details.

●  A brief such as "we need creative ideas for our contact lens company" can be easy to misread too narrowly, limiting content to contact lenses alone. In fact, any content related to vision and optics fits. The point is to focus on how users use the product or service, not just the product or service itself, and widen the perspective from there.

●  In sectors such as travel, where content could cover history, culture, languages, sport, food and drink, movies, and books, having too many possibilities can hurt concentration. When a customer's brief is not clear, it helps to set your own limits.

●  People tend to assume ideas arrive instantly and miraculously. In practice, creativity comes from finding and refining your own process through repetition, and everyone has to find that process for themselves.

●  Hannah usually starts by reviewing successful content already shared in the sector for inspiration. She then checks whether she can quickly reach the specific topics she wants to include, and finally considers whether the resulting work truly fits the customer's goals and is feasible.

●  It's easy to compare yourself with other content producers and conclude that you're not good at the job, mostly because only the best work is ever visible. No one talks about the discarded ideas or the difficulties behind them, so comparing your whole creative process against someone else's best work is not a fair comparison.

●  When you doubt your own work, revisit past successes or try a small creativity exercise.

●  If concentration is a problem or others keep interrupting you, address it before it becomes routine. An interruption takes roughly 23 minutes to recover from, so close your mailbox, sign out of social media, stay off Slack, and put your phone on airplane mode when needed. If interruptions are constant in your workplace, work somewhere else instead, such as a café, a library, or home, wherever you can focus more comfortably.

●  Almost everyone facing a creative block asks the same question: "Do I not enjoy doing this job?" To answer it clearly, track how long it takes you to come up with a creative idea and identify your most creative hours, using a time-tracking tool such as Toggl.

●  Creative ideas often surface while cooking or showering, simply because those moments give the mind some space. Building in time to rest while working through an idea matters just as much.

●  One of the biggest challenges with creativity is that some people work well in teams while others do better alone. Deadline pressure can weigh heavily on content writers at a corporate job, and missing a deadline often triggers worst-case-scenario thinking and panic, even though this sector rarely deals in life-or-death stakes.

●  Making room for creativity outside your job can also make the job itself more enjoyable.

●  Even with a reliable process for finding ideas, expect some bad days. Better ones will follow.

4. Jamie Alberico - Rendering: Or why your perfectly optimized content doesn't rank

Jamie is known for making even the most technical topics clear and engaging at conferences such as BrightonSEO. She works as a Technical SEO consultant focused on how search engines scan, process, and index the web, and her past presentations show a particular interest in JavaScript frameworks such as Angular and React. The Zeo team saw her speak at BrightonSEO 2019, and we were glad to bring her to our own stage this year.

Jamie's presentation was accessible even to those with no background in Technical SEO. A skilled speaker, she explained how even the best content can be wasted by Technical SEO problems, and how to fix them. Here are the key points:

●  Every website runs on underlying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. HTML carries the fundamental content, CSS handles layout and design, and JavaScript makes the front end look good. The numbers involved might look small, but there is far more optimization happening here than is easy to notice.

●  A large number of sites now run on JavaScript. It is a powerful, effective language that can turn just a few arrays of code into an entire site.

●  On large websites especially, you can often see a huge gap between the number of pages on the site and the number actually indexed. These rendering problems are commonly believed to affect only sites that use JavaScript.

●  75% of product pages on e-commerce sites go unindexed because of flawed optimization, which raises the question of why so much optimization effort goes to waste. When Google scans a page, it first pulls the content and passes it to Chrome. Chrome then runs the scripts on the page and loads any additional content. Once everything has loaded, Googlebot renders a snapshot of the page, and that snapshot is what actually gets indexed.

●  Googlebot effectively acts as a user client here, but it is only one of the microservices Google uses for search. Google runs many tools, and most of them serve both organic and paid search.

●  Google uses Chromium as its web render service. Chromium works as a headless browser with no involvement in page design. It loads pages, retrieves metadata, reads the DOM, performs the painting, and handles tasks such as rendering snapshots and analyzing scripts.

●  Blink and V8 are two of Chromium's critical, open-source components.

●  Jamie visualized the rendering process and explained it through real-life comparisons.

5. Jim Banks - Navigate The Opportunities And Threats As A Programmatic Media Buyer In 2020 And Beyond

Jim Banks is a PPC specialist and international speaker who has been a regular presence at sector events worldwide through 2020. He is currently CEO of Spades Media, a growth agency, and founder of Elite Media Buyers, an online community.

Here are the key points from his presentation:

●  Jim has worked in the programmatic world since 2009 and is a strong advocate of performance marketing. He opened by describing how the programmatic ecosystem has changed over time.

●  Programmatic advertising is the process of buying and selling ads in real time through an automated tendering system.

●  Any media purchase made in the digital environment is, in effect, a programmatic media purchase.

●  Digital advertising generally covers local ads and social ads such as Facebook and Twitter's, but not Google search ads. Facebook and Google still dominate the market, though Amazon has become increasingly involved in programmatic media.

●  An estimated 78% of online shopping across most sectors happens on mobile devices, a trend closely tied to the rise of programmatic advertising.

●  Spending on programmatic is predicted to reach $95 billion within the next three years. The pandemic has radically changed buying behavior, and advertisers hope some of that shift will continue afterward.

●  Many businesses now recognize the value of moving a large share of their physical activity online, which itself is a golden opportunity for advertisers.

●  People involved in media purchasing tend to like control, which is part of why it took time to trust the machine learning, algorithms, and artificial intelligence that media purchasing companies have built.

●  But there's no way around it. Between Google ad networks, YouTube, re-marketing, Facebook and Instagram auctions, and frequency-based ad models, plus the choice between a daily or total budget and highly dynamic creative formats, doing this manually across such an ecosystem simply isn't possible.

●  Facebook ads have a reputation for being difficult and dependent on too many variables. In practice, though, Facebook automatically allocates your budget toward the campaigns performing best for you, and it also handles automatic placements.

●  Certain programmatic areas stand out as particularly powerful for 2020 and beyond. Jim shared his experience across four of them in detail.

●  The first is local ads, and the second is re-marketing. A less obvious one is first-party data: as browsers are expected to phase out cookies, third-party data will stop being available, which is why your target audience should be built on first-party data instead. The fourth is video ads, where opinions differ on the right moment to deliver your message to users, especially within the YouTube ecosystem.

●  Podcasts are another notable trend today, with substantial advertising opportunities on platforms such as Spotify and Soundcloud. Affordable voice-over services are available on platforms such as Fiverr. Banner ads don't appear to be going away either. Tools such as Bannersnack and Adacado can generate banner ads for dynamic products in seconds, and Adbeat is a useful way to view competitors' ads.

6. Irina Nica - How to Boost Your Search Visibility with a Surround Sound Strategy

Irina Nica is a digital marketer and international speaker with more than ten years of experience in content marketing and SEO. She is a member of the User Acquisition team at HubSpot, where she works on the Surround Sound program to raise awareness of the company's freemium products.

Here are the key points from her presentation:

●  People's online buying behavior has changed completely, and so has the journey behind it. The customer journey is far less predictable than before, largely because we are flooded with options and opportunities every day.

●  Google has studied this new customer journey closely, especially a decision-making stage it calls the Messy Middle. Rather than weighing options and moving in a straight line, people take indirect paths. They get stuck between alternatives, ask peers for information, and check recommendations from those they see as opinion leaders. Comments from strangers matter to them too.

●  HubSpot is a CRM company, but it also offers services in many other areas, including a marketing automation tool. So whenever Irina thinks about the customer journey, she pictures someone searching for a CRM for their small or medium-sized business. That person might start by asking peers in their profession which CRM they use, then run searches on search engines, and then visit the sites of CRMs they're considering to see what other users say. The search and evaluation continues until they reach a final decision.

●  Surround Sound is a set of strategies and tactics designed to make HubSpot's products visible whenever a customer shops for something similar. Irina walked through the process she followed to build it.

●  The first step is to explore new keywords users would use to find products and services like yours, with or without a brand name. Next, look for opportunities to make the company and product more visible for those keywords. If you're just starting out, reviewing only the first 10 or 20 Google results is enough.

●  From there, pick out the relevant articles and lists and build an outreach list, then reach out to those people to discuss the best ways to work together.

●  Finally, make sure you measure every result. Irina recommends a tool called SERP Tracker for this.

●  Tools such as Ahrefs or SEOmonitor can help you find more keywords related to your product, service, or sector. Classify those keywords by user intent as well. An audience that already uses a CRM but wants to switch, for example, is an ideal target for HubSpot.

●  Each month, Irina tracks roughly 500-600 keywords at HubSpot related to its products.

●  When you track how often your brand name appears in the first 20 Google results and can show the results of your improvements, it becomes easier to bring more stakeholders into the project and see your work recognized.

7. Isaac Rudansky - Workshop on Conversion Rate Optimization

Isaac Rudansky founded AdVenture Media Group, a New York-based digital advertising agency that works with B2B and B2C clients across many sectors, from brands and retailers such as American Eagle to small family businesses. His company approaches media purchasing through psychological principles and data-driven methods.

Here are the key points from his presentation:

●  Isaac's interactive presentation focused on practical strategies for running conversion rate tests and conversion rate optimization analyses.

●  Digital marketers don't usually prioritize conversion rate optimization on websites or landing pages.

●  No matter how well you understand a media purchasing platform or Google/Facebook ads, plenty will still be unknown when you run a digital campaign, which is why experimenting and testing new ideas matters so much.

●  Marketers tend to focus heavily on click rate and conversion rate, working to improve quality score or find better keywords, while most customers and advertisers spend too little time directly optimizing landing pages.

●  Raising the percentage of users who convert, rather than simply raising the budget, increases the total sales, income, or profit a campaign generates.

●  The point of improving your design is simple: make the website more enjoyable and easier for users. A better design directly improves conversion rate, which in effect lets you measure your design's quality. Traffic quality still depends on other factors as well.

●  A frustrating experience on your website directly reduces the likelihood that users will come back. Even when people enjoy their visit overall, they tend to remember the negative moments most.

●  The first step of conversion optimization is transparency and clarity: being upfront with users about what you do and what you offer. You have roughly 5-10 seconds to get that message across.

●  Most websites fall short. They fail to answer visitors' questions, don't provide the information they're looking for, and load slowly. Delivering your message quickly, by contrast, reliably increases both time spent on the site and conversion rate.

●  One of the easiest tests to run is the five-second availability test: show study participants an image of one of your pages and ask what the company does, what value it might offer customers, or who its target market is. Isaac ran a similar test live during his presentation.

●  If you sell a product, even a simple group meeting with the sales team can sharpen your understanding of users. A sales representative can sometimes know the company and product better than the CEO does.

8. Clément Hochedez - Pulling core web vitals into a technical SEO audit and measuring their impacts on rankings and traffic

Clément Hochedez started his career at a startup in Paris, where he specialized in SEO. Before joining OnCrawl as a Technical SEO Leader, he worked at Adviso and served as a senior counselor on the National Bank of Canada project.

Here are the key points from his presentation:

●  When Google announced that Web Vitals would become a ranking factor, Clément's customers had plenty of questions. With so many tools available for measuring page speed, choosing which method to focus on can be difficult, and measuring speed across a site with millions of URLs is especially hard.

●  Google's research found that 55% of mobile visitors leave a site immediately if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. The first 5 seconds of load time have a considerable effect on conversion rates, which then drop by 4.42% for every additional second.

●  Because site speed matters so much for user experience, Google announced Core Web Vitals as an official ranking factor in May.

●  Google added 3 new metrics to its site speed tooling to measure page experience: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). These were expected to become permanent ranking factors in 2021, giving site owners roughly 6 months to improve their websites.

●  Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures how fast the page's visible content loads.

●  Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures how quickly the page becomes functional. If a button a user tries to interact with isn't active yet because the page hasn't finished loading, that's a serious problem.

●  First Input Delay (FID) measures the browser's response time to user interaction, usually affected by JavaScript or third-party code.

●  Until this year, two separate Google teams were responsible for PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse. Recently, the two have been integrated.

●  You can use Python commands against the API to measure CLS, FID, and LCP values in bulk across pages, then segment and analyze the resulting data. With millions of URLs, though, retrieving the data can take a long time, since the API itself runs somewhat slowly.

●  Clément then showed how to pull speed data directly from OnCrawl using an API key and analyze it.

●  Website visuals and video content should be optimized to improve Core Web Vitals, and LCP in particular, the same way you would optimize for site speed.

●  The most important content on a page belongs above the fold, in the upper part of the site.

●  Non-critical JS resources should also be loaded with a delay.

●  Take the necessary steps to offer a much better mobile experience, in line with Google's Mobile-First Index preference.

9. Frederick Vallaeys - Unlevel the PPC Playing Field

Frederick Vallaeys is a leading figure in PPC search engine marketing, as well as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and writer. As one of Google's first 500 employees and its first AdWords delegate, he played an important role in developing the company's PPC marketing system.

With everyone relying on the same automation, Frederick's presentation answered the "how digital marketers beat competitors" question. Here are the key points:

●  One of the biggest truths in digital marketing is that advertising platforms will keep automating. Ad automation is growing fast, and there's no stopping it.

●  The automation industry keeps growing because Google and other search engines are heavily focused on it, though automation itself has been part of our lives since the 1950s.

●  Today's machines and computers are now fast enough to do a good job with artificial intelligence and machine learning. Moore's law holds that processing power doubles roughly every 18 months, and after 50-60 years of that trend, machines can now do remarkable things.

●  Google introduced quality score because it needed a way to predict which ads would get clicked more. Google is, after all, a cost-per-click advertising system, and it only makes money when the ads it shows are good enough for people to click. Quality score, a machine learning system, solves much of that problem through automation.

●  Advertisers also tend to be bad at the underlying math, which is another reason data control has slipped away. Calculating conversion rates well is genuinely hard, and Google isn't trying to overwhelm advertisers with detail. Otherwise, many more advertisers would call Google's support team over false assumptions, asking why a smart proposal isn't working. Numbers are simply misleading by nature.

●  Google's product manager advises advertisers who push back against automation to focus on conversion rate optimization or a more holistic view of the campaign, rather than chasing down the reason for a two-dollar waste.

●  When it comes to Cost Per Click, relying solely on machine learning proposals can backfire badly. Warnings from the system are worth heeding, but decisions such as lowering a bid still need careful judgment.

●  The net result is more automation but less data and less control. Google frames this as good for everyone, but for CPC and digital marketing experts, it means more competition and a higher cost per click.

●  Bringing a human element into the mix, rather than leaving everything to automation, can still produce great results. If your competitors rely solely on Google's supercomputer, a few tools such as Excel or Optmyzr can help you do noticeably better.

●  Frederick closed by walking through several examples of how to do a whole lot better.