Last week SEO Specialist, Emily Van, and I had the opportunity to attend the Search Engine Journal Summit in Chicago. This conference, which was held at Navy Pier, featured some of the top SEO’s in the digital marketing industry. It was a day packed with eight 20 min presentations from some of the top SEO’s that discussed Google AMP, Technical SEO, Reddit, SEO Content, and how to appeal to your consumers through SEO. I’m going to share the top three things I learned at the SEJ Summit and what we plan to continue to focus on for our clients moving forward.

• Continue to Focus on Reddit

Brent Csutoras, Founder & CEO of Pixel Road Design discussed why businesses should continue to focus on Reddit due to its growing number of users each year. Reddit reached 231 million unique visitors this year and it’s continuing to grow.  He also said that people think that their consumers aren’t on Reddit, but based on the stats he shared that way of thinking is wrong. 53% of Reddit users are male and 47% female. 63% of Reddit users are under 25 and 87% under 35. This is the perfect target audience for our car dealership clients; that’s why I strongly agreed with Brent’s presentation and we’re going to continue to focus on this platform here at L2TMedia.

Brent Csutoras, Founder & CEO of Pixel Road Design

• Why Having a Positive Website Experience Continues to Be a Top Priority for Both Desktop & Mobile

There were a few presentations that discussed the importance of having a positive user experience for both your desktop and mobile sites. Carolyn Shelby, Director, SEO at Tronc, Inc. shared that a 1-second delay in page load time yields, 11% fewer page views, 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and 7% loss in conversions. Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, said that 40% of people will abandon a mobile site if it takes more than three seconds to load.  These stats show why it’s so important to be paying attention to the factors that could be slowing down your sites, like too many plugins, too many http redirects, not optimizing your image file sizes, etc. There are great stats to further show our clients the importance of paying attention to the technical SEO elements.

Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google

• Continue to Think about Your Audience When Producing Website or Blog Content

Even though it’s well known that the days of writing content just for the search engines is long gone, it was great to hear the presenters continue to focus on the importance of writing content that’s specific for your audience. Ryan Jones, Manager SEO & Analytics at SapientNitro said when coming up with content for your audience, you want to give them a solution or help them accomplish something. You want to start asking yourself, “What would someone searching for a specific keyword find useful or what are they trying to find when searching for that keyword?” You then want to come up with content that helps answer those questions. I definitely agree that this is a way to come up with great content to get people to your website or blog and will be something we continue to do here at L2TMedia.

Ryan Jones, Manager SEO & Analytics at SapientNitro

These were just a few of the main points that I learned at the Summit, but there was plenty of knowledge that I took from the day that I will definitely be sharing with my SEO Team and implementing for our current SEO clients. I enjoyed my experience at the SEJ Summit: 2016 and would recommend it to all SEO’s in the digital marketing field.