Search Engine Strategies London 2009 – Day One
Posted by David Wilding on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 in Conferences, Search Engine Strategies
Well the first day of Search Engine Strategies 2009 London is over, and so far its been quite the Search Marketing Mecca it proclaims to be. From Digital Asset Optimisation through to pirate radio the day has certainly kept me both entertained and informed. If you’ve ever wondered what its like to attend any of these conferences, and if its worth the money, then this is the blog post for you. Follow me through my day as I point out the key points from each talk I’ve attended.
The Pirates Dilemma
Perhaps the best presented and most entertaining talk of the day, SES London kicked off with a talk on ‘how youth culture reinvented capitalism’ in the guise of The Pirate Dilemma, hosted by Matt Mason. I won’t dwell on this one to long as it has little relevance for most people involved in a day to day search marketing campaign, but it was certainly an insightful lecture. In essence the talk outlined how privacy has influenced & changed business models & practices, and how to best deal with privacy (to your advantage) if you should ever become a victim of it. You can download the book for free from Matt’s website – http://thepiratesdilemma.com/download-the-book.
Universal & Blended Search
Over the past two years Google has significantly changed how it displays search results with the introduction of Universal and Blended search. For those not familiar with these terms I’m referring to the image, video, news & local results Google inserts into the natural listings, as well as the targeted search tabs that run along the top of Google.
As search marketers were all familiar with the CTR stats of the top 5 results in Google gleamed from the leaked AOL data a few years ago. What may shock may people to learn is that when a video is present within the natural listings this ’steals’ away 30% of ALL the traffic the top five sites normally receive. Its this kind of insight and statistical data which makes me really warm to SES, you just can’t seem to find trustable data and statistics on things like this very easily, if at all, anywhere else. There was a lot more to this presentation which I hope to share with you all in the coming days, but simply if you want to dominate the SERPs that you need to understand Universal Search and “Digital Asset Optimisation”.
IAB: Search Marketing Best Practice
This would have been a great presentation for marketing managers looking to hire an search marketing agency, concluding with a fantastic checklist of what to look for and ask when hiring. After asking these questions about Epiphany Solutions I’m happy to say we I think we would fair very well against these ’standardised’ benchmarks of quality.
Orion Panel: Measuring Success in a 2.0 World
One point that may surprise many that don’t work day to day in the world of SEO is the view of Google Analytics that came across in this question and answer session.
“Jack of all trades”
“One size fits all solution”
“If you only have a hammer then all you see is nails”
Were just a few of the clichés used to describe Google Analytics by the panel, and I think they have a point. If you have a specific KPI for your business than you should chose the metrics package that will best report on that KPI for you, and not just blindly adhere to the Google mantra. I think this is an important point and for me, the same is also true of Google Website Optimizer. It’s a great product, and its free, but don’t just assume that it’s made by Google that it’s the right solution for you and your particular business objective.
Analytics: Data into Action
Heavily relying on a Star Trek (The Original Series) analogy throughout, this presentation was insightful, to the point and packed full of useful information, as well as entertaining. The message to this talk though was fairly simple; don’t get locked into just producing reports with meaningless numbers. If you are to provide useful advice to your clients then you need to give insight, you need to look at the experience a website visitors receives, you need to segment your data and not just aggregate it all in together to gain a true understanding of what your visitors are really doing, and whos really converting. Otherwise your reports are just meaningless lumps of numbers and data.
Come back tomorrow to read my review of the second day of events at SES London 2009.
February 22nd, 2009 at 6:08 am
[...] David Wilding of the Epiphany Search Marketing Blog captured the news in his roundup of “Search Engine Strategies London 2009 – Day One.” He observed, “One point that may surprise many that don’t work day to day in [...]