From powerfully passionate speakers like Mig Reyes to highly seasoned experts like Alan Bleiweiss with 22 years in SEO, the 2015 State of Search conference came and went last month in our very own Downtown Dallas.

Breaking things and burning business cards were just a few of the advised actions from Rand Fishkin and Mig Reyes.

With so many prolific speakers, not learning something wasn’t an option.

To segment the topics here are the top takeaways from the content and SEO portions of the event.

Content creation Highlights of the State of Search Conference

1. Outreaching to connections before rolling out content is vital (PR media connections, other bloggers, blog platform owner notifications, influencers, etc.). Outreach works best for big content, but blogs naturally get shared more often.

• John Doherty’s slides on this here.

2. There are many things the most viral content pieces have in common; here they are segmented into slides

• Ross Hudgens’ slides on this here.

3. Data driven content is the best-performing kind of content (also interesting local content based on data like “Top earning ____ in Dallas”).

• Find this on the second half of John Doherty’s slides here.

4. “Hub and spoke” type of on-site content setup with smaller pieces pointing back to a large guide is highly effective, especially for SEO.

• Ruth Burr Reedy’s slides on this here.

5. Marketing teams from digital marketing agencies can talk all day about doing something but execution is critical to success.

SEO Highlights of the State of Search Conference

1. SEO is a highly scientific process involving multiple algorithms and many, many ugly websites. Sending the proper signals to Google isn’t rocket science, its SEO.

• Alan Bleiweiss’ slides on this here.

2. Try to get indexed in a “featured snippet” within Google by creating articles with numbered lists and answer direct questions within the article for Google to pick up on.

• Eric Enge’s explanation of how to do this here.

3. Check and make sure you never use public domain data as Google indexes this and give you no credit or link backs.

• Eric Enge’s slides 27 and 28 here.

4. Cleaning up and doing high-value local SEO for multi-location businesses can be complicated but is very possible.

• Dan Liebson’s approach on how best to do this here.

5. With 91.6 million smart watches sold by 2018, wearables aren’t exactly a futuristic technology anymore. Internal SEO’s and those from digital marketing agencies need to realize this and progress as soon as possible.

• Here’s how.

The digital landscape in 2015 is vastly different from what we saw only a year ago, and this conference gave us the opportunity to pool collective knowledge gained from other prolific digital marketers.

Find out more about how we uphold our name on our about page here.