Search London, also known as SearchLDN was officially set up in October 2010 when I took over the meetup group from my former colleague. There were 200 members and just 2 meetups. It was rebranded to Search London and there are now more than 2200 members and there have been over 50 meetups
To celebrate turning 8 years old, SearchLDN had their party at Bounce, in Central London François Goube, founder of OnCrawl spoke about “How to Make Better SEO Decisions” and Lukasz Zelezny presented “SEO Tactics To Implement Tonight”. Yard, a technical agency with offices in Cardiff and Edinburgh sponsored the cakes, what is a birthday party without the cake?
How to Make Better SEO Decisions
The headline Sponsor of the night was OnCrawl and the CEO and founder, François shared a user case about how to use data to build a better SEO roadmap. He loves to run test with data,which is why he built Oncrawl. In his presentation, Francois wanted to help us (those in SEO) be the super hero. He shared 5 tips on how to make better SEO decisions.
1) Log file analysis
Log file analysis is important, because SEOs can see in real time what Google is doing. Those in online marketing can see how often Google is coming to a website, the new pages that are crawled every day.
Showing examples in the presentation (which you can see in the video below), Francois showed how Google bots behave when they are rendering javascript. When users review your log files, it helps you to see how Google is rendering your resources.
SEOs can also understand when Google is switching you to the mobile index.
As soon as you are mapping your website, it is easy to see the log file analysis and see that Google may not be looking at all of a website.
2) Combing log files with crawls
When combining crawl and log data, users are crunching both data sets which allows SEOs to see what franking factor influences ranking factor.
François then shared an example from his case stud there a page has 800 words, Google crawled 8 out of 10 of the pages. A page with less than 500 words, Google crawled 1 out of 2 of your pages.
“It is not about adding content and unique content, the real question is how many pages do I need for each page to get them crawled.”
3) Loading time
Google does not behave the same for all websites.
For classified sites, the volume of content is not important. Google knows it is hard to build unique content for these types of site, therefore it does not penalize these sites if they do not have lots of unique content.
4) Links
How many links should you build to add to pages to get them crawled? Francois said analyzing logs and crawl can help SEOs.
5) H1
Is it important to have a unique H1. According to Francois’ data, the sites had had unique H1s, Google crawled 70% of the site. When there is no unique H1, Google crawled 30% of the site.
Understand the behavior of your users, combine your crawl data with log file analysis. With OnCrawl you can also add your Google Search Console Data and you can therefore analyse the data after.
The full video can be found on YouTube
SEO Tactics to Implement Tonight
Lukasz Zelezny is a regular at Search London and now as a freelance consultant, this was the first time for him to sponsor the SearchLDN event. Lukasz was the gold sponsor on the night and he shared some great SEO tactics to implement that night.
1) Tactic – finding low hanging fruits with Search Console
Google Search Console is a very powerful tool, but there are some limitations. For example, there is a limit on the number of rows to export (999 keywords). Plug Search Console into Google Data Studio allowing you to give a broader view of the data including more keywords. You can export this and start optimizing for existing keywords. You can also see where a site is ranking and how to rank it higher.
2) On Page Optimisation:
Lukasz is an avid user of SEMrush. He likes to work with them because it provides many different pieces of information about your website. SEMrush is also easy to present data, you can show your client what work you are carrying out.
3) Merge subdomains into Subfolders
Lukasz talked about a client that wanted to move his blog from the subdomain into a subfolder. For example, moving blog.domain.com to domain.com/blog. This had a positive impact on the client’s site. This is because Lukasz was merging two domains into one and as a result they say the traffic and visibility increase.
4) Link building with Brand
Use a social monitoring tool to track your brand. Lukasz recommended Brand24. You can then see where the mentions are and if there is any misspellings or old data, you can ask them to correct them and link to your site.
5) Cloud
Lukasz recommended using siteground and WPEngine. The basic package for Siteground was 9 GBP.
Lukasz’s presentation was also recorded and can be found here:
After the presentations, there were two cakes to cut, with the cake sponsor Yard helping blow out the candles. The agency sponsored two cakes for the event, a delicious chocolate one and a cookies and cream cake for Search LDN.
The rest of the evening was taken up by ping pong games. There were two “games gurus” who organized the rest of the attendees into ping pong competitions.
There was also food and drinks at the event. With 85 people attending on a Monday, it was a busy night. This meetup group has grown over the past 8 years because of great speakers and of the people that attend. Anyone can start a meetup group but consistency, patience with relevant topics and good speakers allows the meetup to grow and become a community.
I would like to say a big thank you to everyone who has been part of SearchLDN for the past 8 years. Last year after we turned 7, I asked Ayruz to build our site, they were professional and helped a lot after the site had been built. Thank you also to the photographer Mariusz (from http://Grafimar.co.uk) who Lukasz invited to capture the evening.
See more images
Jo Juliana Turnbull is a skilled professional in SEO and online marketing with over 10 years of experience in digital (both client and agency side). She set up her website SEO Jo Blogs in 2009 after she started a career in SEO. She is also a travel blogger and shares her budget travel tips on Being30.com. SEO Jo is the organizer of a networking group called Search London for online professionals in SEO, PPC and Social Media. She has been running the event for over 8 years where it has grown to over 2200 members.
Jo Juliana Turnbull is a skilled professional in SEO and online marketing with over 10 years of experience in digital (both client and agency side). She set up her website SEO Jo Blogs in 2009 after she started a career in SEO. She is also a travel blogger and shares her budget travel tips on Being30.com. SEO Jo is the organizer of a networking group called Search London for online professionals in SEO, PPC and Social Media. She has been running the event for over 8 years where it has grown to over 2200 members.