Recap of SEO-Campixx 2019

From March 21 to March 22, I got to attend the SEO-Campixx for the first time, and in this recap I'd like to share my experiences with you.
Was the conference all about the topic of SEO / search engine optimization worth it?
Which insights were exciting, and what was the supporting program like?

One thing first: unfortunately I wasn't able to attend a single talk on the second Campixx day, but more on that later.

Talk Martin Mißfeldt (Image SEO and Core Update)

The first talk I attended was by Martin Mißfeldt. Since the room was already completely full half an hour beforehand, Martin decided to do ten minutes of image SEO and then give his talk on the Core Update:

• Talk No. 1 Martin Mißfeldt: Image SEO

Many images are copied and published on various sites. An image, e.g. from Shutterstock, is bought by niche-site operators and then uploaded to various sites -> How does Google decide which page/URL with the image will appear in image search? To explain this, he first lays out the important ranking factors.

• ALT tag of an image
• Image caption
• Surrounding text of the image
• (File name of the image?)
• Why are these factors so important? Google still can't recognize the content in images, even if this could soon be different by means of machine learning, and that's why texts are so important for Google in order to classify an image correctly.
• Duplicate Content is therefore important with images: if an image appears multiple times on various sites and the texts send the same signals about what the image is, Google also knows for sure what the image is and lets it rank accordingly.
• If an image is found often on the web and is similar in various sizes as well as in the aforementioned text signals, the chances of getting good rankings are especially high.
• That's why it's so important that many sites use the image, BUT there should be no contradictory signals (different texts) to be found
• The answer to the question of which URL Google takes when an image is found on various URLs: the page with the best organic ranking also gets the best spot in image search!

Another good tip for taking over existing rankings of images in Google Search:

Example with Shutterstock: if your site ranks organically better than Shutterstock for a certain search term, but Shutterstock ranks well with an image for this search term, then you can buy the stock photo and host it yourself. With that, you should then also take over the ranking in image search.

• Talk No. 2 Martin Mißfeldt: Causes of the Core 3 Update

“DC is no longer a positive ranking factor.”

That's the headline of his talk. Briefly for everyone who didn't catch it: Martin is an artist and builds veritable content giants of websites. In the past these ranked very well, but they were hit hard by the latest Google update. Visibility and traffic have noticeably declined.

A few statements up front:

• Most of his sites moved up nicely thanks to the last Medic Update (August 2018).
• If a URL has good rankings, then you'd better leave that page alone.
• What does Google advise webmasters who “lost” due to the latest update: “As a webmaster, you didn't do anything wrong.” – rather weak comfort…
• No “brand” correlations with the current update: among both the winners and losers there are big brands to be found.

Martin then laid out various theses that he came up with himself or that were passed on to him by others.

Thesis 1: Expert status not present or lost

Thesis 2: User intention not met

Thesis 3: User signals too poor

Thesis 4: Weaknesses in link building (his sites linked too strongly with each other?)

Thesis 5: Too much thin and duplicate content?

What does his data say?

• CTR became significantly worse
• Almost all top rankings dropped to pos. 5–9 -> therefore significantly fewer clicks
• Ranking losses affected almost only keywords with very high search volume and in the short-tail range
• Traffic really significantly lower, because most people just click only on position 1
• Position 1 for long-tail keywords retained

His conclusion:

Martin doesn't think that he was penalized.

His brand/expert status wasn't revoked. After all, he still has very many top keywords in the long-tail range

• He sees a connection between the Phantom and Medic updates.
• Latest Core Update: this isn't about individual pages, but about the search results as user experiences.
• Phantom Update: user intent -> pure information pages vs. transactional pages
• With the Phantom Update, shops and similar transactional pages were upgraded over information pages. That way, an eyewear website of his was overtaken again in the SERPs for some keywords by eyewear shops like Fielmann and so on.
• Medic Update: trust! With the update, the attempt was made to enable Google to identify trustworthy pages even better.

His thesis: Medic and Phantom Update combined = in case of doubt, transactional pages are preferred over guides. In addition, trustworthiness is reassessed

To further substantiate the thesis, Martin briefly showed what his previous “recipes for success” in SEO looked like:

• Always content-based (don't forget images ?)
• Keyword clustering! (keyword research don't forget)
• Answer topics as “holistically” as possible on one URL

Why the new update hit him:

• The main pages have no added value, because …
• On the homepage he has only duplicate content. He copies the introductions from his guide articles and puts them as an intro on his homepage and then links to the article as further information.
• The introductions, however, don't contain the answers, but only that the reader should click on the link to get the full article and thus the answer.
• Google penalized him for content-weak, copied text blocks on the homepage
• Google itself has filed patents in which they stated that they are able to evaluate even individual text blocks.

What has to be done now:

• The user doesn't want text blocks that have no added value and where they're only led to a link.
• They want to see the answer immediately (user intent!)
• Check all of his pages for whether, besides the homepages, further “weak” pages with text blocks without added value exist.
• Apply guide pages to transactional pages! That doesn't mean having a shop, but can also mean offering an e-book, videos, or MP3 as a download.
• Upgrade the content more strongly, not just through images, but also through PDFs, and so on.

Content Refinement: What to Do When Your Content Is Already Supposedly Perfect?

Nils Römeling is surely known to one or another SEO through his numerous affiliate projects such as deutschlandtrikot.de. His talk was about the topic of how he puts, proverbially, a crown on his content.

First fun fact from his presentation: voice search has existed since 2009 – only now, 10 years later, is everyone talking about it…

At the beginning, he mainly went into the changes at Google. Numerous new “features” of Google took away his traffic for some search terms. For the keyword “World Cup / Euro schedule,” for example, he was in position 1 for a very long time. However, for some time now Google itself has been showing an “answer box” with the complete schedules within the search query. As a result, hardly any traffic comes to his website for this term anymore.

Note: as soon as Google itself provides an answer, you no longer need to optimize for the keyword at all.

What does content refinement actually mean?

Improve existing content – e.g. the current national team. Here he has to update his articles quite quickly as soon as old players leave the national team and new players join.

What is good content?

• Uniqueness
• Error-free
• Added value (e.g. having a “calculator” on a comparison page)
• Timeliness
• Holistic (comprehensive)

The prerequisites for good rankings are right:

• Clean technology, everything clean! (crawlability and indexing)
• Keyword monitoring, in order to measure results and be able to continue acting.
• Disclaimer: IT TAKES TIME!!!

Featured snippets: definitely try to get in here. Every second person mostly clicks on this.

His approach here is that the answer must be 54–58 words long, the question must be posed in an H2, and the answer must be found below it. You do have to be in the TOP 5 for it, however, and, as so often in SEO ? have a bit of luck.

For featured snippets that list bullet points as an answer, the individual bullet points must be in H2 or H3 headings.

His workflow here is that he regularly looks at which URL is newly in the TOP 5 (e.g. with Sistrix) in order to then optimize it for the featured snippets.

Snippet optimization:

• The title is still super important!
• Look at what the SEA ads for the keywords look like and how. You can learn quite a bit here!
• Build in special characters.
• Arouse curiosity (click me, it could be worth it).
• Start an exciting sentence in the description but don't finish it, so that visitors click on it (arouse even more curiosity).

How long does an article have to be?

• It depends :-S
• Look at what the search intent is
• Always keyword clustering!
• FAQ pages don't rank well for him.
• Use the add-on “Lighthouse” from Google for optimization.

Content reduction:

• Nobody needs SEO texts anymore.
• Texts that are too long without added value won't achieve anything.
• Previously hundreds of individual texts for hundreds of keywords = today it's possible to cover hundreds of keywords with a single text (keyword clustering)

Content design:

• The text has to look great at first glance
• This is what awesome content design looks like: Urlaubguru.de taken as an example – like https://www.urlaubsguru.de/reisekalender/beste-reisezeit-japan/.
• Quick and easy: with WordPress, using Shortcode Ultimate you can build many small visual elements (boxes, checklists, and so on) into your text. By the way, you can find more on this here: WordPress SEO Tutorial
• As an example, he also mentioned his site https://www.botschaft-myanmar.de/.
• On one of his travel sites, topic Taj Mahal (I unfortunately couldn't find the website just now), he looked for someone from the region on Fiverr.com to advertise his website and capture this on camera. Would work very well.

Observe competitors:

• Very important – what are the others doing!
• He recommends various SEO tools for working, like https://monitoor.com/willkommen for monitoring competitors

SEO Expert Panel

The SEO Expert Panel was an interesting group moderated by Florian Stelzner. Present in this session were, among others, Anke Probst, Martin Mißfeldt, Carsten Hinrichs, Florian Elbers, Tobias Schwarz, and Katrin Diener.

The main topic was the current Core Update and its consequences, especially for Martin's websites. But Xing, too, lost quite a bit of visibility. According to Anke Probst, the loss was especially with navigational keywords such as “Siemens.” The loss is therefore bearable, since for such queries the searcher wants to head to the respective company website and doesn't want to land on Xing.

For Martin, as already written, visibility collapsed. He introduces himself to the audience with: “I used to be an artist, now I'm an SEO.” :D In the group it was therefore discussed how he could get his websites back to the front. Especially the technical errors should be fixed, even if good ranking results were possible so far despite these errors: the competition doesn't sleep, and Google may have downgraded his websites because they simply had too many errors and the competition is technically cleaner…

Anke confirmed above all how important it is to meet the search intent. But it's not always so easy to determine it exactly. What information exactly do people want when they search for a person, for example? It's supposedly immensely important to constantly look at the competition and monitor them, which is why Xing developed its own tool for the internal process.

The question came up in the group of how things continue once all the analysis tools no longer show any errors. -> You're never finished with SEO. Monitoring your own website and that of the competition are, for example, a permanent topic.

SEO and Machine Learning

Gregor Meier gave a very entertaining talk on the topic of machine learning and SEO. In doing so, he once again showed the difference from a classic program. Put simply, here you give the program certain information and the program applies it steadily. With machine learning, the program is likewise given information, but the program learns from it and tries to steadily recognize new connections. Here a great deal of computing power is usually needed. As an example, he mentioned DeepL. Thanks to machine learning, one of the best translation programs was created here over the last few years. Even Google Translate can call it a day here.

He then shows three examples of which tasks machine learning can take on.

• Generating:
  – Creation of any kind of texts and images. Example: creation of Meta Title / Title Tag and Description
• Classifying:
  – The program learns to distinguish content from one another and can thus filter out SPAM or also distinguish first names from last names
• Will copywriters become unemployed? No, machine learning is not (nearly) perfect yet.

Roughly speaking, Google could tell its algorithms: “These are the characteristics of a good website, and these are signs of a bad website. Please now sort the search results accordingly.”

Site Clinic with Ryte

Since the machine learning slot was over earlier than planned, I was able to experience the last few minutes of the site clinic by Ryte with Alexander Breitenbach and Marcus Tandler live. The website “APO-ROT.de” was taken apart here using the Ryte tool. The pharmacy website lost quite a bit of visibility (probably due to the latest Core Update).

The guys from Ryte took the site apart quite thoroughly, as far as I could judge in the last ten minutes. The following errors were found, among others: too many titles built into the source code, very many H1s, URLs with session IDs, and much more.

Effective B2B / B2C SEO Funnels

In his presentation, Nedim Sabic explained how to build an effective SEO funnel.

What is an effective funnel?

• Must be cheap
• Fast/short paths (touchpoints up to the lead)
• Scalable
• Sustainable

Sales via SEO are higher than with SEA: people trust the organic search results more than the results in SEA.

The more help is offered on a page, the better the sales.

Important: track the path (touchpoints) of the customer journey via Google Analytics (GA -> Conversions -> TAG Conversion)

If the conversion funnel is too long (has too many touchpoints), then there's no trust. Example: his hosting company had on average 32 touchpoints up to the conversion. So the customer had 32 points of contact with the hosting website before deciding to book.

Psychology:

What's going on in people's heads? What do they actually want with a search query? Here Nedim gave a very, very funny example: let's assume the searcher is male and has a rash on his best piece (yes, he really gave this example, people laughed endlessly).

The search process in this example could go as follows:

1. The searcher enters into Google: “rash on the p….s.”
2. The searcher learns that he has an allergy.
3. He searches for “latex-free condoms.”
4. He searches for the right size.

If, as an entrepreneur, you want to achieve the best/highest conversions via SEO here, you MUST be found well for the keyword “rash on the p…s.” The searcher should get all the information here and be shown where you can buy what. With that, you spare the searcher another search and thus make them happy ?

• You should rank well for information keywords in order to then move the customer to a purchase.
• The customer is at the very beginning of the customer journey, but often buys from the provider from whom they also got the information.
• Wikis are especially good for ranking for as many information keywords as possible (e.g. Ryte, Indux.de)

Another important tip from him: double the preparation time cuts the implementation time in half!

After the funnel is before the funnel:

• Retargeting ads
• Upsell newsletter
• Emails are very important
• Push notifications (tool: One Signal)

You need backlinks?

• Submit a press release to a proper press distribution service (the good press services also cost a fair bit; never take the free ones).
• Normally that already generates attention, and you get backlinks from 3–4 major newspapers -> That's it!
• If this strategy doesn't work, your product is too boring, and you should switch companies quickly :D

My Talk: SEO for Bloggers and Smaller Websites

I recorded my talk as a YouTube video, and it therefore doesn't need much explanation. The talk was about how, first alone and later with our team, out of the blog Farbentour an SEO and link-building agency was built. I was probably a bit too excited and therefore spoke a bit too fast. May it be forgiven…and now have fun with it:

And the rest of the talks?

(The reason why I could only write half a recap)

Um….well, those were all the talks I saw. I completely messed up the second day. First overslept, then the last finishing touches on my own presentation! I therefore couldn't catch a single talk on the second day. Luckily, the dear colleagues have, here, in their recaps put together quite a bit:

• https://seo.de/10742/seo-campixx-2019-tag-1-recap/
• https://www.nils2.de/seo-campixx-2019-mein-recap-und-vortrag-content-veredelung/

My Opinion on the Campixx

A lot of light and (luckily) only very little shadow. The conference won me over, and I'll come back next year. There were so many people, interesting conversations, there was a lot of laughter: this community is really super! At the talks, too, everyone could take away something.

What I liked less, however, was the hotel. There was no free Wi-Fi, the rooms were already pretty worn out, and the beds mega hard, and much more …

… and yet the SEO Campixx 2019 was great!

Until next time!