Yesterday, some of the Serps team were lucky enough to attend the annual Ecommerce Scotland event at the Glasgow Science Centre. Not only was it a great chance to hear from and connect with some of the biggest ecommerce brands and industry experts in Scotland (and beyond), but we also got the chance to see Feli, our CEO and Founder, speak at the ‘Busting Ecommerce SEO Myths’ panel.
Let’s recap some of our favourite talks and panels of the day.
Influencer Content that Converts
The first session of the day kicked off with a talk from Lara Mowforth, the commercial and strategy director at Hoozu, one of Australia’s leading influencer marketing agencies. Lara’s main aim of the session was to debunk the myth that influencers don’t drive revenue, with real life examples of how her agency has helped deliver results to brands across the globe.
Whilst influencer marketing isn’t a service that we offer at Serps, one of the main overlaps we found was the importance of recognising cultural differences when planning your international strategy. Depending on your target markets, the kind of influencers you engage with and the type of campaigns you run should vary. For example, in Asia or the US, your campaigns might be more sales driven. Compared to the UK or Australia where users typically respond better to campaigns that are more community driven, so you might have more of an emphasis on micro influencers and user generated content for example.
Regardless of your approach, the most important way to maximise your return on investment is to utilise your content across other channels. Working with your other teams, departments and agencies to integrate your influencer marketing across email, paid social, your website and blog to create a halo effect.
Driving Growth with Videos and Podcasts
The morning sessions also included a panel chaired by Dr. John McSloy (CTO at INDEZ), with panellists Mark Hunter (Co-Found of Podcast Studio Glasgow) and Ben Heath (Founder and CEO of Heath Media). The session focused on how brands can leverage YouTube and podcasts to build awareness, establish thought leadership and drive engagement.
Both panellists gave best practice advice for those in the audience looking to get started, as well as real life examples of how Scottish brands like Guitar Guitar and Ooni have integrated the mediums into their strategy.
One of the main topics of interest that was tackled, was the question on if video has killed the need for a blog. Despite recent hype around this question, we found ourselves agreeing with Mark Hunter, whose final answer was no!
Rather than choosing one or the other, we would always say think about what type of content will best answer the user’s question. If you want to target a user in the early stages of the buyer’s journey, maybe some engaging video content that quickly captures their attention might be best served. However, if the user is closer to the decision-making stage of their journey, they might appreciate a more in-depth blog article – particularly if they will be making a higher cost purchase. The best way to tell for sure is to analyse the SERPs and see what type of content Google is ranking, then you can decide what type of content you need to create.
Plus, don’t forget that video and podcast content can (and should) be used on your website as well!
GenAI – an Overhyped Hallucination?
The late morning sessions kicked off with Dr. John McSloy again, this time with a talk on ‘GenAI’ – friend or foe?
The talk started off with some bad examples of GenAI, demonstrating why no one should be trusting it for medical advice any time soon! Whilst funny at points, it did become alarming when we learned that 57% of web content that exists in search indexes currently has been generated by AI, and that number is growing daily.
Of course, AI can be useful and allow brands to increase their team or agency’s productivity by producing more content. However, we need to be mindful of the quality of that content. Particularly as AI continues to learn from said content, eventually it will have learned from a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy… you see where this is going.
The conclusion we think is that yes while scaling your content strategy and output is important, particularly if you want to continue to compete, it’s integral to ensure that the quality of your content isn’t sacrificed. Bake in human edits, brand personalisation, sense checks and localisations into your workflow, to ensure that your results last long-term.
Busting Ecommerce SEO Myths
Next up was the highlight of the day (and we’re in no way biased), the SEO panel. Feli was joined by fellow panellists Geoff Kennedy (SEO & Digital Marketing Consultant, Freelance), Daniela Young (Digital Marketing Manager, ThePaintShed) and chair John McSloy.
This was an interactive panel where the audience could also vote yay or nay to popular SEO myths including ‘ecommerce SEO is dead’, ‘ChatGPT can be used to translate and localise my website’ and ‘you only need hreflang tags to geo-target content’. Spoiler alert, the collective consensus to all of these myths was no!
Sure, we can all agree that the way we optimise for search engines is changing but the need for ecommerce brands to perform on Google (and other search engines) isn’t going anywhere.
For ecommerce brands, organic should be driving 40 – 50% of all website traffic, conversions and revenue (sometimes upwards of this when a competitive strategy is implemented) – anyone to argue that this isn’t a huge driver of performance and growth is crazy. And with algorithms changing faster than ever, the need to have an experienced and proactive SEO team on your side has never been more important.
Other talks and panels
There were so many other great talks and panels throughout the day, including ‘Content Creators: Your Brand’s Best Friends’, ‘AI Powered Customer Experiences and Personalisation’, ‘Future Proofing Your Ecommerce Strategy for 2025’ and much more. It was great not only to pick up some tips from industry experts but also to get some insight into the challenges many of our clients are facing, so that we’re better equipped to help them.
If you attended the conference or are an ecommerce brand looking for a digital marketing partner that will help you scale your results, get in touch with us today.
