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07.07.2016

2 min read

Search Leeds: Stop best practicing, start doing by Stephen Kenwright

This article was updated on: 07.02.2022

Stephen Kenwright is Branded3’s director of search. His presentation touched upon the confusion associated with the term ‘best practice’.

He says people come into the workplace expecting a ‘bible’ full of ‘best practice’ methods, but he likened it to Wikipedia in the sense that ‘best practice’ is really something that’s being contributed to by everyone.

Stephen believes there are confusing messages where one article says one way to carry out ‘best practice’ , while another says something completely contradicting.

His message was that ‘best practice’ doesn’t work all of the time, sometimes what you should actually be doing is trying something for yourself. The reason ‘best practice’ isn’t always valid, he says, is because the web is always changing.

Best practice changes with the web.

“Google hasn’t always got it right,” he adds.

Here are some other key takeaways from Stephen’s talk: 

  • 50% of local searches end up in store within a day. Stephen said: “local search is nowhere near as big as it’s going to be…it’s going to be huge.”
  • Stephen recommended investing in a Local Management Platform (LMP) like Yext, a technology company that enables businesses to update location-related information on multiple websites from one place.
  • Find new ways to use old things. For example, using paid search to get links.
  • Key Best practice = why, not how
  • Thin content. Stephen gave an interesting example here based on a simple, but common search term: ‘When do the clocks go back?’  The Daily Mirror ranks fifth for this, with an article that followed what we’ve been told is ‘best practice’; it had video, subheadings, images, call to actions etc. The article on the Government’s website didn’t adhere to the ‘typical best practice’ rules – yet it ranks first.

 

Search Results

 

Taken from the Daily Mirror:

Daily Mirror

Taken from the Gov.UK:

'When do the clocks change?'

Definitely food for thought…