Online Marketing Blog

Today’s Orion panel at SES NY really took a different spin on the topic of universal search. I went in expecting to hear the same info  about what it is, how info is gathered and how to optimize for universal search. Which, if you are interested, can be read about in a previous SES Chicago post regarding universal search.

This session was moderated by Kevin Ryan and Mike Grehan. The session was lively and engaging. Panelists included:
John Battelle from Federated Media, James Lamberti from comScore, Lyndsay Menzies from Big Mouth Media and Jack Menzel from Google.

James led the group by presenting not-seen-before data about universal search from a study comScore recently conducted.

Of the 1.2 billion queries studied, 220 million contained a universal result, categorized as news, video, images etc.

Yesterday proved to be an interesting kickoff to this year’s Search Engine Strategies conference here in New York. The Organic Listings panel was entertaining and informative as always and the Build Investment Interest in your SEO/SEM firm was an early indulgence for myself that offered great tips for those looking at the future liquidity and monetization for their agency.

Jolina weighed in with her posts on excellent sessions, Four Ways to Redfine the Customer and Three Tips for Successful Analytics. There was also a spontaneous goofball interview with Mike McDonald of WebProNews offering a few insights about the future of SES/SMX.

With the changes last year in the search marketing conference industry there has been disappointing side-taking and rumor mongering but also a healthy dose of optimism about what more competition will do for attendees. I would think the sustainability and success of any conference is in large part dependent upon attendees needs being met. Whether your primary business is interactive marketing, public relations, advertising or SEM, online marketing and PR oriented conferences offer a variety of benefits.

Because of Online Marketing Blog readers’ varied marketing and PR related interests, this week’s Poll aims to identify the top motivations for readers to attend marketing industry conferences:

Here’s a roundup of photos from day two of Search Engine Strategies London 2008:

Anne Kennedy and Bryan Eisenberg

Jim Sterne and Andy Beal

Audience

Massimo does his magic as Amanda looks on

Competitive Intelligence panel

Blog SEO session

Lisa Ditlefsen and Rob Kerry

Chris Leggett and Jon Meyers

Post conference activities

Here’s a day SES London day one wrap up video from Incisive:

And here’s a wrap up of day two SES London blog coverage, images and video on Search Engine Watch

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Spotlight on Search Interview with Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land

Photo Credit Liana Evans

Online Marketing Blog is very fortunate this week to have a special interview with Chris Sherman, Executive Editor at Search Engine Land and long time observer/analyst/practitioner/advocate in the search engine marketing industry. Chris has been a instrumental influence in the growth of the search marketing industry with his 10+ year old search consulting practice, past involvement with Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Strategies as well as his new role as Executive Editor at Search Engine Land, running the Search Marketing Now webcasts and helping to program SMX conferences.

A lot has changed in the search marketing conference industry in the past year. The biggest news being the addition of Kevin Ryan to oversee Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Strategies along with the departure of Danny Sullivan from SES to start his own venture, Third Door Media and the Search Marketing Expo or SMX series of conferences.

Additional news includes the success of new conferences like MediaPost’s Search Insider Summit, programmed by David Berkowitz as well as the reduction in conference dates for Brett Tabke’s WebmasterWorld’s Pubcon down to one (albeit, temporarily) in Las Vegas. With the number of new and niche conferences popping up it begs the question as to whether the market demand can support so many events?

Day three of Search Engine Strategies San Jose started off with Danny Sullivans’ last keynote presentation where he talked to Marissa Mayer of Google, who was giving her first keynote. Overall they talked about universal search, touch on video, personalized search, iGoogle and the iPhone.

Marissa sated that they felt users were happy with the new universal search. A lot of work had to go into chainging the algorithm to incorporate the additional sources but they were happy. She did say that they had a long way to go yet and other sources, such as scholar, may be added in the future. Google’s goal with universal search is to be more like an encyclopedia with as much relevant information right at your finger tips.

Analytics is a big part of a website’s success, However, even though analytics software is getting better and cheaper, website owners still don’t really know what to do with it.

Matt Bailey with Site Logic is an excellent speaker on this topic. He talks about how analytics is more than just hits, it’s about segmenting and tracking and learning how your visitors are using the site. Tracking things like page views, top 10 entry pages, keywords and hits are just scraping the surface. There is so much more that should be happening. What are the KPIs? Analytics numbers are just numbers with no action and figuring out what they mean is the key to success.

The core message of the Searcher Behavior Research Update at this year’s SES was that there are missed search marketing opportunities as traditional marketers fail to take into account the exponential growth of online marketing.

Each study presented valuable data and insight into how search engines can help reach your targeted audience.

For example, Pavan Lee of Microsoft described how marketers of the “soccer mom” segment may miss considerable opportunities by utilizing only traditional marketing. Lee presented a study indicating, that of their sample of “soccer moms”:

• 90% Use search engines at least 2 times a day
• 60% Possess an education past high school
• One -third make a total house hold income of $100,000 or more
• 57% Use search engines to make a purchase offline

While moving some of the material from my home office to our Lake Minnetonka office, I recently came across the SES San Jose 2004 Conference Handbook (dust and all) which was the first SES conference I ever attended. Paging through my notes was a trip down memory lane (in internet time). People talk about how things change so quickly with search marketing, but looking at the content from this event 3 years ago was tangible evidence.

For example, the session on “Web Feeds, Blogs and Search” with Danny moderating and speakers: Scott Rafer of Feedster (Now with MyBlogLog/Yahoo), Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit, Jeremy Zawodney of Yahoo, Chris Tolles from Topix and Mark Fletcher from Bloglines (Now an Ask.com property). In my notes it mentions that there were 4.1 million blogs and that the number would hit 10 million by the end of 2004. Now in 2007 Technorati reports over 92.4 million blogs. Who knew then blogs would take off? Amanda did.

Have you noticed the number of regionalized or small scale search marketing conferences that are popping up?Jill Whalen has been running her High Rankings Search Engine Marketing seminar for a few years now (disclosure: I am a speaker for the Mpls event and my PR agency works with Jill) that is very hands on focused. The speakers all share a very similar philosophy about search marketing so there are not the mixed messages you get at larger events.

Danny Sullivan has started his SMX event (is that name a subliminal play on Search Marketing Sex?) starting in Seattle this summer as well.

There’s also Elite Retreat with a $5,000 price tag that includes: Guy Kawasaki, Aaron Wall, Lee Dodd, Darren Rowse, Jeremy Shoemaker, Kris Jones and Neil Patel. The marketing is getting slick on this one along with the all-star speaker lineup.

Last week’s Search Engine Strategies conference was jam packed with information, networking, some fun and a little business too. What I like about conferences in Chicago is that it’s only an hour flight from Minneapolis, so I can leave on the last day of the conference and get home at a decent time. These days with a growing family and the biz, I need all the productive time I can get.

For anyone that reads this blog, you know we try to do our part and walk the talk on the social media front by offering photos on Flickr, videos, tags and bookmarks - and the SES Chicago conference was no different. We blogged 14 sessions, did 7 video interviews and posted 61 photos (so far). Our SEO Designer and go-to guy for anything related to blogs, Thomas McMahon joined me on this trip and earned his keep by doing a great job blogging most of the sessions covered here.