On March 14th and 15th, 2016 Pi Datametrics sponsored, talked and exhibited at the 20:20 Digital Marketing Summit, hosted in the grand London Marriott Hotel, Grosvenor Square. The event was attended by major brands and agencies, and was a coming together of the finest minds in Digital Marketing.

Jon Earnshaw's talk: Conflicting Content

Pi Datametrics CTO Jon Earnshaw (@jonearnshaw) gave his popular talk on Cannibalisation / Conflicting Content (your biggest nightmare), at Midday on Tuesday 15th, and got the room excited about the pivotal role of SEO in the creation and curation of content.

Jon showed how some major online players such as RyanAir, Santander and Curry's had suffered a loss of SERP visibility, due to suffering from one or in some case more of the four types of SEO cannibalisation:

• Internal SEO Cannibalisation
• Subdomain SEO Conflict
• International Conflict
• Semantic Flux

Cannibalisation, as Jon explains, is all to do with conflicting content. In this new age of semantic search, content is once again rightly king but with over 40% of online marketing budgets being spent on this content we need to start taking better care of it. Essentially we need to become better curators of our online assets and the doorways into our online world.

One of the reasons for this is that Google is becoming increasingly sensitive to content of a similar nature and if we haven't made it completely clear exactly which page(s) that we want to return, and which ones we have chosen to be complementary, the result will inevitably be cannibalisation, leading to loss of visibility, traffic and revenue.

The only winners in this are your competitors. The good news is that there are ways to prevent this and if you are suffering from (an you almost certainly are) there is a cure!

View Conflicting Content (your biggest nightmare) slides here:

http://www.slideshare.net/pidatametrics/conflicting-content-your-biggest-nightmare-59720965

Re-watch Jon's talk here (Live from Periscope):

View Jon's content flowchart here:

Providing that you're not suffering from too much cannibalisation already, if you follow the simple steps outlined in this flowchart you should be able to avoid the most common form of cannibalisation - internal conflict!

Essentially, this involves beginning inside the mind of the customer to determine the search criteria they are most likely to use. Armed with this, the next thing you need to do is take stock of your existing content and determine whether any of it is either a) complementary or b) potentially conflicting. Use the Google site: operator. Title tags should be your guide.

For complementary content - use this to promote the authority of your new content through relevant and appropriate intra-site links. This will benefit Google and searchers alike.

With potentially conflicting content, a decision needs to be made. Which page do you want your searchers to find? Make this the relevant doorway into your world. Theme this page appropriately and down weight the theming of the competing pages to make them become complementary.

Watch Jon's previous talk on Cannibalisation, from BrightonSEO, here:

Twitter's response to Jon Earnshaw's talk

Jon tends to cause quite a stir on Twitter after his talks, and the 20:20 Digital Marketing Summit was no different:

At #2020Digi conf. @jonearnshaw gave energetic SEO talk that underlined why SEO is a core activity - brands still make basic onsite mistakes

— Duncan Parry (@duncanparry) March 15, 2016

"Help Google understand your site. Make sure your content is connected" @jonearnshaw#2020digi#conflictingcontent#SEO#marketing

— Neil Hart (@blinkertoon) March 15, 2016

Love it! "No magic button for #SEO" @jonearnshaw#2020digi#conflictingcontent

— Neil Hart (@blinkertoon) March 15, 2016

@jonearnshaw great and insightful talk on SEO, be great to get a copy of your deck and the flowchart you mentioned?

— Martin Jaskolowski (@jurgen52) March 15, 2016

@jonearnshaw Great talk on content. Thanks. My key take away is to dig deeper into the data, would be keen to see your flowchart #2020digi

— Chris Newnham (@chrisnewnham) March 15, 2016

Panel Discussion: Content marketing: The next digital frontier

Jon Earnshaw then featured in the Panel Discussion, and spoke on the topics of user-generated content, viral content and semantic search.

"Make sure that user-generated content doesn't usurp your own. Ensure it links back, to give your content authority" @jonearnshaw#2020digi

— Pi Datametrics (@PiDatametrics) March 15, 2016