Call To Action Conference 2016: Rand Fishkin

DISCLAIMER: This post is written as a live blog from the Call To Action Conference 2016. There may be typos and grammar to make my high school English teachers weep. Please excuse those … it’s a fast=paced conference with back-to-back sessions and no time for proofing or even proper writing.

Kicking off day two is Moz's Rand Fishkin. He begins with a story about his back issues.  He talks about pain and how having a fitbit and knowing what his weaknesses were helped him see what he needed to do to improve. Knowing what works and what doesn't for you can guide you but it focuses on the outcome not what created the specific success metrics.  We often don't ask "What if I'm wrong?" unless there's a major issue. A major challenge our industry faces is generating targets.  This is because it requires uncovering what specifically works which can be extremely hard.  He mentions the process of experimentation which companies don't like to budget time and money into generally as we assume we know what works. Instead we measure our tasks (small sample sets, personal bias, etc.) and hope we get some type of reasonable data. According to Rand this is the greatest challenge of our industry today. Next he's talking about a Greek Island (Ikaria) where people forget to die (hey live 20 years longer than the rest of the developed world.  This is due to diet, sleep, rich social lives and walking.  So Fitbit began measuring areas where there's a correlation to health.  It shows what you've done and gauges them to 7 Areas With Sure Improvement:

1. Internal Links - internal links with keyword use in the anchors mattes
2. Create Content Targeting Keywords - research low competition keywords and generate content for it.
3. Convert Mentions To Links - Find people who mention your company or content but don't to you.
4. Test New Titles & Descriptions - Small changes deployed widely can have a huge impact.
5. Vary Social Sharing Automation & Scheduling - Tools like Buffer help with this.  Automating ^ scheduling a few more social updates that you currently do targeting your most successful content can have significant results.  Find the best stuff to share and push them up over various networks over the next few days, weeks and/or months.
6. Add Related Topics To Your Keyword-Targeted Pages - putting related keywords on a page tells Google your page is relevant to a subject.  For example, ranking for New York will need Brooklyn, Queens, etc. to lock down relevancy.
7. Contact Non-Converting Folks in Your Audience & Use Their Feedback to Improve - Rank designed a very poor landing page with a 0.11% conversion rate.  He asked people why they didn't convert and they all said the same thing - no free trial.  Thy added one and bumped real paid conversions to almost 20% for the same page (a pricing page).Worth noting - the page was for Keyword Explorer and it's an awesome tool

Next Rand is chatting about a new way to look a analytics.  Me recommends changing an action for a few weeks and measure against your targets.  We also need to ask if we did enough and if we gave it enough time.  This will help us understand what works and focus on that.