By Nick Nelson

When MnSearch, Minnesota’s premier collection of search marketing luminaries, held its latest big annual summit in St. Paul, we knew TopRank Marketing had to be in the house. I attended Friday’s festivities at the RiverCentre along with our search marketing manager Ryan Leighty.

It was my first time attending a marketing conference in almost three years — and also my first time meeting my awesome coworker Ryan in person — which created plenty of good vibes in itself. But there was also a lot of really great content from very bright folks, making this event all the more enriching.

Ryan and I divided and conquered the day’s sessions. Naturally, he dove into the more technical search topics — you’ll be shocked to hear Google Analytics 4 (GA4) was a recurring focus! — while I gravitated more toward the content-centric themes.

Here I’ll share some of the most notable insights and learnings I took away from the sessions I attended at the MnSearch Summit 2022.

Jenny Halasz on Ecommerce Pitfalls & Solutions

The morning started with an opening keynote from Jenny Halasz, SEO manager at LL Flooring (formerly Lumber Liquidators). She spoke about five key search-related challenges in today’s eCommerce space and how to overcome them.

1 — Site migrations: They never go smoothly and there are a tremendous number of technical variables for which to account.

What to do: Hire a seasoned SEO consultant or agency (hey, she said it, not me!) to help you navigate the complexities. And also: never do a migration during a busy season for the business.

2 — Seasonality: It’s not as simple or straightforward as some make it out to be. Some months have different numbers of days, some have holidays, and so on, making apples-to-apples comparisons misleading.

What to do: Don’t always take data at face value. Analyze search trends and seek out deeper context.

3 — Speed matters: Page load speed is a key factor in driving traffic and conversions, and it’s especially critical with the continuing growth of mobile commerce. Mobile spending is expected to be three times higher in 2025 than it was in 2019, according to Halasz.

What to do: Use tools that can persistently track page load speed and track them vigilantly – and “never turn your back.” Be careful of common slowdown culprits, like background images or JavaScript and cascading style sheets (CSS) loading on every page.

4 — Duplication: It’s not always just straight-up duplicated content. Halasz spoke about “duplication of purpose” affecting one area of the LL Flooring website, where the content on two vinyl flooring pages was different but addressed the same thing so users found it redundant.

What to do: Test relentlessly to seek out duplicative instances in your user experience. Halasz mentioned that when her team combined the two pages mentioned above into one, overall performance improved substantially.

5 — Trusting tools: There are plenty of great SEO tools …read more

Source:: Top Rank Blog