inhousesem.com

After ringing in the New Year in Brazil I’ve been back and beavering away on all things search again. And what do I have to show for it? A new column on search engine land covering the strategic to do list for 2010 for search engine marketers. Also, a new SEMcast podcast is also posted, on the to do list and also how to use Google’s new sitelinks and product links that are increasingly popping up on the results pages.

Also I’ll be speaking at SMX West on Twitter Marketing Tactics, its nice to know the efforts we’ve been putting into Twitter at Viator are getting some attention.

Speaking Engagements, Tip of My Hat, Uncategorized google product links, google sitelinks, smx west

I was at SMX Advanced last week and spent some time reviewing my notes and take aways from the sessions in the hopes of formulating some sort of coherent to-do list for myself. I noticed a couple of things I learned, so I thought I would share:

1. Google’s search query report just got more useful. Many less “other unique queries” and more actual queries exposed. I checked this one out myself, and its true, so thanks Google for making that better!

2. Only 5% of internet users time is spent searching, the other 95% is spent doing other things on the web. Fascinating. See, I told you content targeting was a good idea.

3. No one seems excited about bid management tools. One session has presenters explicitly talked about ways to calculate for yourself what your ideal bid should be and most people I talked to either weren’t using a system or didn’t think it was worth the money. Also with quality score’s ability to enormously impact bids, most marketers thought that was more important to optimize quality score than finely monitoring the bid itself.

4. Quality score is super important. There was a whole session on quality score and how important it is at the account, ad, keyword and landing page levels. Also general advice was given that if you have keywords with a score below 5, you should consider removing them or at least moving them to alleviate possible tainting. I knew it was important, but this really made me think much more about it.

5. Mobile is still early days. The mobile session presenters were great, but my big takeaway was that unless you’ve got a super perfect for mobile product (like a ringtone, or iphone app), then its still really early days for you to gain mobile adopters. The volume isn’t there yet.

Thanks to everyone who gave their time and expertise to making the sessions and roundtable discussions so worthwhile! I had a great time speaking and meeting lots of other search engine marketers.

Industry, Speaking Engagements search engine marketing education, smx advanced

Just got the news I’ll be speaking at SMX Advanced for the Proving and Improving ROI in Paid Search session - Day 2 (June 3) at 3:00-4.15. Come say hi and hopefully learn something about improving your paid SEM ROI!

I’m very interested in checking out the mobile paid search session and amazing ppc tactics (go on, amaze me!). And I’ll probably attend some of the social media track as well.

I’ll likely do a rundown of interesting tidbits and insights on SEMcast, the in-house search engine marketing podcast I host on geekcast.fm, but I probably won’t live blog the sessions.

Hope to see you there!

Speaking Engagements, Tip of My Hat paid search roi, smx advanced

Sadly I won’t be attending or speaking at SMX West this year. 2009 marks my mother’s 60th birthday and she is an avid dog lover, so we’re off to the Westminster Kennel Club dog show in New York to celebrate. Unfortunately its the same time as SMX West so this year I miss out! If you want to read a blog post about the dog show, I’m sure I’ll be posting one on the Viator Travel Blog once I return. I hope everyone has a great time, learn something new and have a cocktail at a networking event for me!

Industry, Speaking Engagements smx west 2009

As you might have seen I crossed the pond to speak at SMX London earlier this month. From talking to several UK SEOs there seems to be an impression that SMX is for more advanced search marketers, which probably explains why the boot camp track was sort of empty and the more advanced sessions packed full. The Fundamentals of Search Advertising panel was truly international consisting of me (USA! USA!), Ophir Cohen (Israel), Alan K’necht (Canada) and Richard Gregory (UK). Everybody had something a little bit different to say, but I think all the thoughts were very complimentary and I hope the audience learned a lot.

Most of the sessions I attended were fairly worthwhile, though I think it is worth noting that if you are going to attend just one search marketing event, SMX West is really where its at. SMX West is much, much bigger and more well attended and a better opportunity for networking. Also I think SMX West topics are more advanced and cutting edge. That said, I did learn things from SMX London and meet some new folks, so it was certainly worth the time.

One trend I noticed in presentations (and maybe it was just the sessions I was in) is that there’s a tendency to talk a lot about bad marketing tactics, and to do so at such a length that less time is actually spent on good ones and best practices, which I find much more actionable and useful. Telling me what not to do doesn’t really help me do anything (just helps me not do things). I concede that knowing where to draw the line is good and learning from mistakes is important, but I’d prefer to see more than half the content be about success than failure. In particular I found the Integrating Search and Display session to mainly focus on bad examples and very few actual best practices.

Enough on my opinion, I filled out my feedback form! See you all at SMX West in a few months.

Industry, Speaking Engagements, Uncategorized search marketing expo london, smx london

Attending SMX London? I”ll be speaking at SMX London, here’s my session:

Fundamentals of Search Advertising
Day 1, Nov 4th 1-2.15 pm

I think that the other speakers will likely be covering how to get started creating a good campaign structure and other basic best practices.

I plan to complement the just getting started presentations with a presentation on how to do an initial account optimization. I”ll feature specific information about which reports to run, how to cut costs and identify where more investment will increase sales, as well as tools and features provided by the search engines to block sites, ips, etc.

So drop by and say hi, I would love to meet you!

Speaking Engagements smx london, smx london speakers