Leeds Digital Festival is back! Which marked the return of Leeds Loves Search a half-day mini SEO conference, that brings together leading agencies in Leeds for an afternoon of insight into technical SEO, link building, voice search and more. Thank you to everyone who came and made it such a success this year. For those who couldn’t make it here is a recap of what we covered:
How to get a 100% Lighthouse score. Polly Pospelova, Delete
Polly started us off with a bang, with one of the most accessible and engaging talks about Lighthouse I have been to. Lighthouse is an ever-changing beast, and still quite new for a lot of people both in and out of the industry, so Polly ran through her advice on how to achieve that perfect score we all want. Working with her in-house dev team, she came up with some key aspects which are often missed that help improve scores:
- HTTP/2
- Image quality (WebP and others)
- Modern JS and rejection of heavy libraries
- Auto-critical
- Small chunks “load-only-what-you-need”
- Semi-automatic chunk loader
- Modern JS and rejection of heavy libraries
To view them in more detail, head over to her recap here.
How do people actually use Voice Search? Neill Horie, Home Agency
Digital assistants are in more homes than ever before – with 1 in 10 Brits now own one. Neill got to the bottom get to the bottom of how people are using Voice Search and digital assistants, as well as what they’re using them for and which devices they use. One key takeaway is that due to Amazon’s dominance in the market and the use of Siri, Google’s stake in the market isn’t as high when it comes to voice search alone. Consider the situations when people use voice, keep your content short and task-based as this will be what the audience is wanting. But most importantly, don’t forget about Bing. View the slides here
How to not f-ck up a migration. Jack Nottidge, Stickyeyes
Site migrations don’t always go to plan. Whether you’re migrating to HTTPS, domain or to a whole new website platform, there are crucial elements that you need to be considering to avoid substantial loss of organic traffic. Jack shared some of his real-life examples as well as common pitfalls and tools to ensure a smooth transition and a very happy client! One main one – don’t do it on a Friday. View the slides here
Landing links on top tier press – Carrie Rose, Edit
Digital PR is competitive and it’s only getting harder to achieve the links you not only want, but what your clients are expecting. There isn’t a magic bullet to instantly getting in major press, but as Carrie pointed out – you need to start with a story. The format of that story should always come second. If you are wanting publications to give you links as well as covering the story you need to give them something that they have to link to – on-site content that adds value is engaging and can be used as a resource. If they can cover the story without linking then start again. Do your research before you start and before you fall in love with your own idea do the mum test – she’ll tell you if its interesting or not. View the slides here
