After the roaring success of our SEO meetup in Ahmedabad, the Serpzilla bandwagon arrived in Bangalore the very next week for a meetup of the sharpest minds in SEO from all over the south of India. It was a long time coming, because there haven’t been any digital marketing or SEO conferences of note lately in this region.
While most of our community members who couldn’t attend were able to follow the live tweets and shares on our Twitter and LinkedIn profiles (hey, give us a follow if you haven’t done so yet) here is a complete recap from start to end of the event.
While the start time was 6 PM on a Friday evening, we allowed participants a little time to beat the notorious Bangalore traffic, while the rest of us enjoyed a nice pre-networking session. Our very own Yulia Aslamova was instrumental in introducing the Serpzilla brand to the pumped up crowd of 60-odd marketers and giving a great start to the proceedings.
Jaydip Parikh: How to Leverage Wikipedia for SEO
Jaydip himself went first. While he had spoken about the hot topic in SEO – AI – in Ahmedabad, he revisited one of the oldest but the most respected sites that we use for SEO: Wikipedia. And he showed how Wikipedia still has a lot to offer us.
The key points he made were:
- Wikipedia is not just a link building platform. It can help immensely in keyword research, especially in finding topically and semantically relevant terms.
- Of course, you can still build links from Wikipedia. Look for dead links in entries related to your business. Add geographically relevant information or some latest stuff in your niche.
- If you’ve built up a great and helpful profile (or engage someone who has), you can kill the competition by adding an entry for your brand.
Here’s Jaydip’s slide deck:
https://www.slideshare.net/Serpzilla/how-to-leverage-wikipedia-for-seo-jaydip-parikhpptx
You can find him on Twitter @jaydipparikh
Company website: Tej SolPro
Sanjay Shenoy: AREP Framework
Sanjay Shenoy is another of our good friends in Bangalore. He presented his home-grown creation – the AREP framework for SEO projects. AREP stands for Audit, Research, Execution, Projections.
The key points he made were:
- The goal of an SEO audit is to uncover any issues in crawling, indexing, rendering, site structure, canonicalization and duplication. You need to make intelligent use of tools here.
- The Research phase is where you undertake keyword research, assess the competitive landscape, and find opportunities all through the search intent funnel. Based on this, create an execution timeline for your tasks and deliverables.
- The Projections phase is where the magic happens. Here is where you define priorities, work out different scenarios, estimate the time taken to reach top position, and calculate CTR, sales and LTV.
Here’s Sanjay’s slide deck:
https://www.slideshare.net/Serpzilla/arep-framework-sanjay-shenoy
You can find him on Twitter @SanjayShenoy13
Company website: Boring Marketing
Vedanarayanan V: SEO & ASO – Startups Success Stories & Case Studies
Veda, as he is popularly known, has extensive experience in the startup scene – across industries such as travel, education, healthcare and fintech. He is adept at combining SEO with App Store Optimization (ASO) and he shared some great real-world examples of companies that did that successfully.
The key points he made were:
- Startups should start SEO by trying to rank for a core set of long-tail keywords (that reflect their expertise) rather than trying to outrank bigger competitors for head terms.
- ASO is SEO’s cousin in the app world. Most startups have an app, but don’t focus on optimizing it for greater visibility in the app stores.
- If you get SEO and ASO right, organic traffic and installs will eventually scale to a level where even a drop in paid marketing (read, VC funding) won’t affect revenue.
Here’s Veda’s slide deck:
https://www.slideshare.net/Serpzilla/seo-aso-startups-success-stories-case-studies-vedanarayanan-v
Veda works for Microsoft as a Marketing Leader. You can find him on LinkedIn
Sergey Pankov: Link Building 2.0
Our CEO Sergey is always in his element while presenting on his favorite topic – you guessed it: link building! Sergey outlined an in-depth and precise strategy for link building, including real-world case studies, practical templates and advanced tactics.
The key points he made were:
- Google’s search algorithm is built on the back of PageRank, which is a link scoring system. Therefore, links will always remain important for getting good rankings.
- The number and type of links you get should closely match those of your competition, so that you have what Google calls a “natural” backlink profile.
- Buying backlinks intelligently can give your site a visibility boost in as little as one-to-three months. The amount of traffic you get will be directly proportional to the number of keywords you rank well for.
Here’s Sergey’s slide deck:
https://www.slideshare.net/Serpzilla/linkbuilding-20-sergey-pankov-bangalore
You can find him on LinkedIn
And you are actually on his company website now 🙂
Keep in Touch!
As the photos convey, the audience was listening with rapt attention to the flurry of insights our speakers shared.
Needless to say, it was a great experience for everyone.
We keep creating opportunities for our community members to get together and discuss their favorite subject: SEO. Neeraj, Evgeny, Yulia and others are always available for a quick chat. Moreover, we continue to organize webinars with digital marketing experts every once in a while, so stay tuned!
