SMX East 2013 – Topic Sneak Peek
Please note: The final SMX East 2013 agenda may vary from the sneak peek agenda. These descriptions are a sample of the topics we might cover, but there could be changes. To be notified with the official agenda launches, and other show updates, please fill out the form below!
SMX Boot Camp
SMX Boot Camp: Keyword Research Tools & Techniques
The first step to success of any marketing campaign is to know your message. With search marketing, that means knowing the search terms that are being used by your target audience. Understand what they’re searching for, and you can tune-in to their traffic via search engines. This session covers tools and techniques for performing keyword research.
SMX Boot Camp: Link Building Fundamentals
Ever since Google created PageRank more than a decade ago, every good search marketer’s motto has been “I link, therefore I am.” They’re important! Though linking seems easy, it’s a far more subtle art than most realize, and there are right and wrong ways to conduct your linking campaign. Not only that, since Google’s Panda updates and its introduction of Google Plus Your World, the type of links that are important have changed. In this session, we’ll look at how to reach out and get quality links, how to craft anchor text to build authority, and how to avoid commonplace mistakes that will hurt your web credibility (and search engine rankings).
SMX Boot Camp: Paid Search Fundamentals
Paid search allows you to generate traffic from search engines by purchasing ads, usually on a cost-per-click (CPC) / pay-per-click (PPC) basis. This session covers the basics of how to purchase placement from the major search engines, including best practices for success with your ads.
SMX Boot Camp: Search Engine Friendly Web Design
“I’m not designing my site for search engines,” is a common designer objection to SEO suggestions. But if search engines have problems “understanding” your site, either due to technical issues or because your content is presented in “confusing” ways, they will never be able to provide you with those precious top rankings. This presentation focuses on how to strike the perfect balance between appealing to your human readers and accommodating the technical needs of the search engines.
SEO Topics
What SEO Performance Metrics Are Truly Important?
Your boss or client may think top rankings are gold, but most knowledgeable SEOs will tell you those stats are so 20th-century that they’re virtually irrelevant. So how do you measure – and more importantly, prove – the value of your SEO activities, especially in the age of personalized, unique search results for everyone? Speakers in this session have promised to “open up their kimonos” and reveal the really useful, measurable techniques they use to demonstrate the value of their work.
What SEO Technical Metrics Are Truly Important?
Google is getting increasingly stringent on its rules about what constitutes “acceptable” SEO. The good news: they’re offering a lot of detail about what is and isn’t acceptable. The bad news? It’s not always clear how to determine when you’re playing nice or stepping over a line, and Google starts making life miserable for you and your site. This session examines the technical metrics that you should focus on to assure your SEO efforts are in compliance with Google’s increasingly strict guidelines.
Google Bought A Zoo: Surviving Penguins, Pandas & Other SEO Beasts
According to search honcho Amit Singhal, Google is making up to 600 changes to its algorithm per year. Some major, some minor, but all potentially having an impact on whether your site and content is found when people are searching. How do you track these changes? How should you respond? Attend this session to get answers, and learn the best strategies for getting back in Google’s good graces should you get negatively hit.
SEO Beware: Black Hat Tactics To Avoid & Be Wary Of
Like drugs, black hat tactics tempt those who want seemingly quick and easy paths to search marketing nirvana. But the highs they offer also never last, and can often lead to permanent disabilities. Nonetheless, all upstanding search marketers should understand that they’re facing competition from the “bad guys,” and this session explores the daring cunning of their tactics, how to respond, and most importantly provides solid reasons for never being tempted by the “dark side” that lures the black hat marketer.
Paid Search Topics
Pumping Up Your Flabby PPC Pecs
OK, so the campaigns you’ve been running have been successful. But take a look in the mirror – wouldn’t it be nice to whip them up into better shape? Take advantage of new ad formats and targeting options that make them more appealing and irresistibly clickable? Or enlarge that ROI a bit? This session explores how to take your existing campaigns to peak performance.
The Optimal Conversion Recipe: Search, Display & Retargeting
Many search marketers have to manage both text and display ads, and how to do this best is an important concern. An key success factor with this juggling act is retargeting: understanding user intent via search, and then subsequently advertising to each individual with a combination of search, display or other online ads beyond search. This session looks at how the pros are making the most effective use of a rich combination of all types of marketing assets to extend their reach and boost conversions.
PPC Analytics: Crunching Your Own Data
In this session, we will explore new ways to analyze data from all available sources to improve your PPC campaign performance. We’ll tackle the challenges of both large and small data sets, managing through the fog of long-tail data, and making decisions from seemingly inconclusive data. Plus we’ll provide you with new types of KPIs, PPC analytics, attribution models, and trend line analyses that will help you identify new opportunities for optimization.
PPC Analytics: Competitor Analysis
It’s not enough to be brilliant with your own paid search efforts. You also need to have an intimate understanding of your competitors – their keywords, landing page and quality score strategies, campaign management efforts – everything that they’re doing to enhance their visibility and jostle you out of your hard-won positions. It’s relatively easy to apply the time-tested techniques of competitive intelligence to give yourself an edge, and this session shows you how.
Social Media Topics
Getting Ahead With Google+
Google+ is a social aspect to Google, allowing people to share photos, places they’ve been, videos, links and status updates. Google CEO Larry Page has publicly stated that Google+ is the “new DNA” for all aspects of Google, so as a marketer, you ignore it at your peril. This session examines the core mechanics of Google+ and how marketers should best interact with all of its moving parts.
Tuning Up Your Twitter Tactics
Twitter is a proven source of traffic, but it’s no longer just about simply pushing out a quick 140-character update to your followers. Other important considerations now include time of day, frequency of tweets and retweets, the authority of those who retweet you, Twitter’s expanding promoted tweet program and many other increasingly complex factors. Attend this session and get the insight you need to drive more traffic – and potential customers – from Twitter.
Getting Liked & Shared On Facebook
With nearly one billion users, the Timeline feature and integration of everything people do from link sharing to exercising, Facebook offers a huge opportunity for marketers. This session looks at how to drive traffic and conversions through fan pages, viral campaigns and more.
Facebook’s Graph Search & Its Marketing Implications
Facebook’s Graph Search isn’t a direct threat to Google, it’s very good at people search, local & vertical search and entertainment search. Come hear our panel discuss how graph search is unique, how it will change SEO, and the opportunities and challenges it’s likely to present for advertisers and marketers.
Local & Mobile Search Topics
Meet Siri: Apple’s Google Killer?
“Siri? Can I trust you more than Google?” Despite voice search being available on Google for a long time, Apple’s Siri introduced the masses to the concept of voice search, and it’s becoming clear Apple intends to become a major player in search, despite the challenges of going up against Google and Microsoft. In this session, we’ll explore how to optimize for Siri, as well as if/when you should commit significant resources to the effort.
Looking Ahead: Local Search In 2013
The local search opportunity continues to expand, with the evolution of Google Places into Google + Local, Apple’s new maps feature, Bing’s continuing investment into local – not to mention the local verticals such as Yelp, TripAdvisor and the location-specific apps proliferating on mobile devices. This session explores where we’re going, how we’ll get there and where to find the opportunities in local search.
Being Found Through Mobile Apps
Most marketers recognize the increasing significance of mobile apps, but don’t understand how they work or how to optimize to be found on them. And that’s a lost opportunity, because mobile searchers are increasingly forgoing browser-based search for specialized apps. This session looks at some of the most popular search-oriented apps and provides solid advice for creating “appilicious” content that’s more likely to be found by those not using traditional desktop search.
How To Play In The Exploding Mobile Ads Universe
eMarketer predicts that mobile ad spend will surpass $17 billion in 2012. Haven’t done mobile search ads yet? Stop missing out! This session looks at mobile paid search options and how you can make the most of this tsunami of opportunity.
SMX Advanced Topics
The Mad Scientists Of Paid Search
It’s alive! Mwah ha ha ha! Our mad scientists emerge from their PPC labs, where they’ve been assembling keywords, bidding strategies and other assorted parts into monster PPC campaigns. Attend this session to see how they’ve successfully enhanced paid search performance with rigorous testing and trial and error. Their creations are abnormally effective!
iConvert: Landing Pages & Conversion In A Smartphone & Tablet World
Well-designed mobile landing pages and sites can mean the difference between consumer engagement or abandonment, with corresponding consequences to your brand. But can mobile sites and landing pages actually drive conversions? Should marketers plan that mobile users will convert on their smartphones, or should they expect conversions to come from other channels, like landline phone, computer or even (gasp!) offline? And how can those smartphone-influenced sales or conversions be tracked? What about “T-commerce?” Should tablets be treated like PCs or smartphones or neither? Join us as we debate these burning questions and take away best practices you should be implementing.
Pagination & Canonicalization For The Pros
SEO geek alert: Google now recommends using the pagination tag with optional parameters, sort orders, and filters. For the rest of us, that raises questions like: are there still reasons to use robots.txt or noindex? Can a canonical tag really replace a 301? How do you keep your IIS=based site from infinite redirect loops when you canonicalize default page names? And what about rel=alternate href=lang? We’ll go through the issues step by step so you can clear up the clutter on your site, maximize crawling and indexing, and eliminate duplicate content risks.
Breaking The Speed Limit: Faster Sites Win!
Faster sites win in more ways than just rankings. Search engines can crawl (and index) more pages as server-side speed increases. And user engagement (including conversion!) increases as client-side speed (and perceived loading time) increases. Learn about hidden tricks you might be missing on how to speed things up.
Content Topics
Beyond The Google AdWords Tool: Advanced Keyword Research Tactics
Doing keyword research? Chances are, you went straight to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to find answers. It’s a wonderful tool, but there are a range of other options out there you can – and should – consider. This session looks at some and how to use them to perform better research.
The New “Killer” Content
Many people were surprised when Google’s Panda update “pandalized” their rankings. Google has made it clear that quality content is key – but what exactly does that mean? And how do you avoid producing content that Google’s new “zoo” animals hate? This session explores the various types of content sites you should be creating, including sales pages, blog posts and white papers, how to repurpose existing content and slice it up for social media, and many other techniques that will help your overall visibility, and keep your sites out of trouble.
Extreme SEO Makeover: The Final Results
Is it really possible to take a site from nowhere to top rankings in 3 months? That’s the challenge we issued to each intrepid speaker on this panel, who volunteered to work on a small business or charity website, each in a different niche, that was ranking on page 5 (or worse) on Google for the site’s main search term. Each speaker has worked with a website to improve SEO rankings, traffic and revenue. Our speakers will reveal what advice was offered, the changes made-and most importantly, the end results for each makeover.
Content Clinic
Is your content compelling enough to attract both search engines and people? Our experts in this session will take a deep look at your sites and give you solid and frank feedback on the strengths (and potential weaknesses) of your content, and will offer suggestions for making sure you can gain and keep the attention of both search engines and your ultimate prospects and customers.
Semantic SEO Topics
Schema 101: Why The New Meta Data Matters
Schema.org is a joint alliance between Google, Microsoft and others to provide a common foundation for microdata standards. In other words, provide trusted meta data that allow site owners to express important “facts” about their businesses that both inform searchers and build authority with search engines. This session looks at these microdata standards and how to use them to enhance the importance of your own online content.
Schema 201: Real World Markup For Success
You know semantic markup is important, but are you using it in the most effective way possible? This session features marketers that have explored and fine-tuned their approaches to microdata and other ways of expressing authority to search engines. Speakers will also offer case-study examples of how paying attention to detail has had a significantly positive impact on online visibility.
From Authorship To Authority: Why Claiming Your Identity Matters
With all of the recent focus on “content is king,” many marketers overlook that there’s a much broader process involved in establishing and maintaining the all-important factor of “authority.” This comprehensive session considers the entire process of “claiming your identity,” starting with brainstorming sessions with SEO, social and content development teams, to content promotion tactics for gaining authority links. Both enterprise SEO teams as well as outside consultants will benefit from this session.
Direct Answers & The Knowledge Graph: Friend Or Foe?
We all want the best “results” from search engines, and increasingly we’re seeing “direct answers” based on “facts” search engines discover rather than the traditional ten blue links of results. For some, this is a boon, eliminating competition. For others, it’s a nightmare, sharply increasing SEO competition, often in unexpected (and to some, “unfair”) ways. How should marketers deal with the so called “knowledge graph” and the unprecedented changes it’s creating? Come to this session to hear some great forward-looking insights.
Enterprise & In-house Topics
Maximizing Enterprise SEO
Large organizations face unique challenges when it comes to SEO. Multiple websites, perhaps running on multiple content management systems, in different countries and languages… the list goes on. And with increasingly strict content guidelines, it’s crucial for organizations to coordinate and integrate their SEO efforts across the enterprise. In this session, speakers who have had hands-on experience managing large-scale SEO efforts share best practices and offer practical advice for maximizing site visibility – and avoiding disasters.
Maximizing Enterprise SEM
Paid search offers many benefits for large organizations: increased sales, enhanced brand awareness – even channels to counter competitors. But managing enterprise paid search campaigns can be a nightmare, especially when different departments think they should “own” the process. This session explores the challenges of running an enterprise-level paid search campaign, and how to get all stakeholders in alignment to assure the maximum return possible.
In-House PPC: Organizational PPC Challenges & Solutions
In this session you’ll hear from enterprise-level PPC in-housers who will talk about the nuances of managing paid search campaigns on a massive scale. Speakers will cover items such as coping with differences in global vs. local priorities, managing multiple business units, what to do if campaigns compete against each other for the same keywords and how to effectively compare programs and report progress to the execs.
In-House SEO: Organizational SEO Challenges & Solutions
In this session we’ll talk about SEO operations (the systems, templates, worfklows, etc.) when doing SEO in-house, regardless of whether you’re a Global 100 company or a mom and pop shop. This session will be less about SEO tactics and tools, and more about the integral workings of in-house SEO from idea to launch, and how to make sure the nitty-gritty details don’t get lost along the way.
Vertical Topics
Going Viral On YouTube
We all know that going viral on YouTube can generate thousands of views. We also know that you may not want to promote your business via a cute kitty video or as a conversation with your 12 year-old CEO. So what’s the best approach to going viral with online video? Panelists in this session share best practices for socially promoting your videos while assuring you also maintain the integrity of your brand.
YouTube Words: Tying Your PPC Campaigns To YouTube
Google literally owns YouTube (incidentally, by some measures the second largest search engine after Google), but for years the two companies and their advertising options have been run separately. That’s changed – it’s now possible to tightly integrate your YouTube and paid search campaigns and get the analytics feedback you need to see how effectively your paid search efforts are converting. Attend this session and come “watch” how.
Google Shopping Goes Pay-For-Play: Lessons & Learning So Far
Google is slowly unveiling what it has in store for users with its new paid version of Google Shopping, formerly known as Google Product Search. The implications for both shoppers and retailers are huge as we start to see more of the new Google Shopping listings incorporated into regular search results. Google is also experimenting with new ad formats, including the new “buying guide”. Be among the leading edge advertisers who understand what’s happening and can maximize on these unprecedented opportunities ahead of your competition.
SMX Summit
Conversation: Is There Really “Advanced” Link Building?
Despite all the recent changes in search engine algorithms, garnering great links remains one of the single most important components of an effective search marketing campaign. But how can you gain an edge? Are the tools available to analyze competitor links effective? Do non-traditional channels, such as .edu links and retweets work? Join us for a no-nonsense non-PowerPoint discussion of this vital activity.
Conversation: Where’s SEO Going in 2013?
Constant algorithm updates. “Negative” SEO penalties. Social, mobile and other alternative channels for SEO activities. What’s really important for SEOs to focus on going forward? Join us for this non-PowerPoint discussion to help create your game plan for 2013.
Conversation: Where’s Paid Search Going in 2013?
Paid search marketers have a lot of new things to consider: increased competition and costs, changes in result page layout (hey – where did the ads go for that page that’s now displaying “knowledge graph” results?), new ad formats and retargeting options. Join us for this non-PowerPoint discussion of the pervasive changes marketers face in the coming months.