Verndale will be tweeting and blogging live from Search Engine Strategies (SES NYC) this week.
Updates from the conference will be posted on this page and also on our Twitter page. For a list of panelists and conference sessions, click here.
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3/23/2010 - 2:00pm
Big turnout at SES NY!
This morning's session, “Search: Where to Next?” discussed where search was going and what marketers should be focused on moving forward.
Heavy emphasis on personalized search and live search.
I believe it was Brett Tabke, CEO, WebmasterWorld.com who said research has shown that 95% retweets have URLs in them. He said this should be a “signal” for search engines, as they can place priority on links that are tweeted most often. Interesting concept, I thought.
Google, for example is already taking into account how many followers a Twitter user has when choosing which tweets to display in its live search feed.
The “Successful Information Architecture” seemed to be the most packed session of the day. Shari Thurow, Founder & SEO Director, Omni Marketing Interactive gave an awesome presentation on how to marry SEO and information architecture. The key takeway from her speech was to NEVER build an IA without consulting web analytics.
More to come...
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3/23/2010 - 3pm
Keynote Pannel, “Analyze This”. Discussion was mainly around mobile and how it is Apple vs. Google for years and how Android will dominate.” Google already has 1 billion android devices out there and is growing rapidly”.
BAn audience member asked the panel why companies are turning toward social media when they are not maximizing their search potential (specifically paid search), which means money is left on the table. Interesting question.
The panel answered by saying social media sites have people talking about you and it is there that you have to manage your reputation. Managing your reputation in search engines is almost impossible, so you need to go to where your audience is talking about you.
I can add to that and say that while Google is the #1 (Facebook is #2) most visited site in the world, users go there to conduct a search and leave within seconds. Time is spent on social media sites much more than it is on search engines, which is why marketers need to engage in social media efforts.
Erika Brown also said “Google is an advertising platform, not a search engine”. I could not disagree more, and judging by other responses heard in the room, I was not alone. Google is a search engine first, an advertiser second. Users go to Google for the answers, not the ads.
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3/23/2010 - 5pm
During Google’s Sponsored Session, “Getting the Most Out of AdWords Features & Tools”, we learned before any announcement to the public, a major AdWords update that will now support search funnels. The update will begin to roll out today and all advertisers should see functionality within a week.
Previously, AdWords associated the “last click” with the recorded conversion. In simplified language, if a user searches “hawaii hotels”, clicks on a Hilton PPC ad without booking the hotel, but then searches “hilton” the next day, clicks on the ad and books; AdWords will associate “hilton” with the conversion. For a while, advertisers have been asking Google for keywords that have “assisted” in the conversion process, so this is a big step.
For more info, the AdWords team released this post here: http://conversionroom.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-adwords-reports-adwords-search.html
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3/24/2010 9am
Avinash Kaushik, Author, Blogger, and Analytics Evangelist at Google. Author of “Web Analytics 2.0”
Preaching “Smarter Search and Analytics”.
Look beyond the top 10 keywords
How do you understand 20,000+ keywords when you can only visualize 10-20? You group only keywords that perform well for you (i.e., conversion rate, % of new visits, time on site, etc.).
Juice Analytics – data visualization though what they call “keyword trees”. Analyzes query data and displays the group of keywords color coded and sized based on the traffic and relationships they share with each other.
Outcomes, baby!
Talk to people in language and numbers that are meaningful to them. Tie dollars to the analytics data. You will never achieve success by looking at the macro number of conversion, you have to (first define) and look at the micro number of conversions.
He also preached the Search Based Keyword Tool, which I believe is a underutilized tool
He ended his speech talking about a buzz word topic here at SES, “Attribution”. Attribution modeling helps marketers understand which channels are influencing each other aims to identify the true ROI for all of your integrated marketing efforts. Since there are so many different channels users are accessing your content today, it’s difficult to craft an attribution model that melds all of this cross-channel data. It centers around the question: “What happened before the click and/or before the conversion?”.
His look at the near future:
- Media mix modeling – Run experiments for all of your different channels to justify what’s working
- Marginal attribution modeling – If the first if too difficult, Identifies incremental conversions
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3/24/10 - 1:30pm
The keynote panel this afternoon is “Video: The Next Digital Marketing Frontier”
Terrence Kelleman, President/Designer of Dynomighty Design is talking about how he used YouTube for direct marketing and branding. In December 2006, his company became famous on YouTube after the Original Magnetic Plaything, the Bandoleer Bracelet, was featured for 10 days on their main page. Today, the video has over 2,600,000 views and has changed the future of Dynomighty.
Baljeet Singh, Senior Product Manager, YouTube & Google Content Network says CPCs for YouTube video ads are around 10 to 15 cents and there are millions of clicks every week. He cites a big correlation between paid views and organic views – how paid influences organic.
He mentioned there are two types of marketing initiatives for YouTube currently:
- Video promotion – promoted videos, sponsored results
- Video sponsorship – ads in, around videos
Neither of these initiatives are limited to either small or large business – it’s a mix of both.
Rachel Scotto, Metrics Strategy Consultant, Sony Pictures & Ann Taylor says to move beyond metric of video stream (video start). Move to a more engagement-type metric. Set milestones (i.e., video completion). Advanced video behavior is part of the engagement effort (fast forward, pause, rewind, etc.). She noted it can be taxing on server calls.
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3/24/2010 2:52pm
Eli Goodman, Search Evangelist, from comScore, Inc. gave a bunch of stats on search and social. Search is still the largest and fastest growing online vehicle. Search is not just limited to the engines, it now includes searches on social media sites, YouTube, Facebook, etc.
“heavy searchers” (340 searches per month) who account for 20% of the population account for 60% of all searches.
Influenced paid + social has a major effect on stronger organic clicks
Cool Content analysis tool: seoworkers.com/tools/report.html
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3/24/2010 - 6pm
Jim Boykin, CEO and Link Building Ninja of We Build Pages Internet Marketing Services gave a nice session on link building tactics. He started out with how the practice of buying links was ubiquitous in link building up until mid-2008. Now, buying paid links puts you at risk of omission from the major search engines’ indexes as they have developed automated tools and have dedicated spam teams to detect paid links.
He now builds content and links for clients organically. He introduced two types of link building, Link Bait and Trust Bait. Trust Bait is king.
Link Bait for links (tend to be flashy)
- Content built for bloggers and social audience
- Almost all links form blogs
- Link value often fades with old news
Trust Bait (resourceful) – think NASA, universities, top researchers…
- Content built for educators and research audience
- Links from non-blogs
- Link value constant and permanent
Take audit of search results on a key term, looks for # of backlinks of top ranking sites, then assess the quality of those sites, .govs, .edus. Once you’ve targeted the sites that present an opportunity to obtain a link from, reach out to the webmaster and request a link by praising her content and how a link to your page can benefit users
To me, and I am sure many experienced SEOs, this exercise is nothing new – this is link building 101. Where experts have an edge in this game is the internal tools they use to assess which sites to go after for links. I use a tool that automates this process. You feed the tool 10-20 of your priority keywords and it gathers all of the top ranking sites and then assesses all of the banklinks to those sites. You would end up with a weighted list of sites based off of PageRank, .edus vs. .govs vs. .coms, Alexa rank, etc.
While these tools can help speed up the process, it’s totally feasible to do this data gathering and analysis manually – and sometimes better for qualitative purposes.
Internal linking helpful tools mentioned by Jim Boykin:
Spyfu.com
Keywordspy.com