SES Recap and Takeaways

Search marketing is growing up. This year’s Search Engine Strategies San Jose presenters as well as attendees are acquiring a sense of ownership and integration with the rest of the business development team.

Defining the Value of Search

Today’s successful search marketers don’t just go away and provide magical results. They participate in planning of success for the company they serve. They create integrated marketing plans and they work with other marketing professionals to present a clearer picture of what the touch points are for their customers on and offline.

The Search & Measurement Track was chock full of theory as well as application. The “Meaningful SEO Metrics: Going Beyond the Numbers” panel shared that search has had a bit of mystery around it and those who understand and successfully execute no longer feel the need to own their clicks from PPC and natural search, they’ve established their place as a contender for the marketing dollar and this maturity allows them to take a larger role at the planning table and nurture an environment that understands the customer attribution model.

One of the most difficult and most powerful things we created for ourselves as search marketers is our reliance on analytics, said one of the panelists. Search marketing is held to a level of accountability that doesn’t exist for our radio, TV and print counterparts. Attribution of the click, with exceptional implementation of analytics tools is the cornerstone of search and will ultimately be why more and more of the marketing budget will go towards online efforts.

There have never been more tools, more knowledge or more need for defining the value of search with the execution of exceptional analysis, nor has it ever been more complex. As the value of search continues to evolve, analytics will add at least as much value of other search strategies.

Today’s top-tier search marketers have not only answered all the questions from the business community about how they add value, today’s search marketers are standing in front of the business community and have asserted a leadership position in impacting the bottom line through search marketing and all that entails.

Defining the Future of Search

SES Advisory Board Member Anne Kennedy said a great deal of time and energy went into “The Future of Search” Track. Predictive modeling and semantic technology will change SEO. Industry heavy hitters predictions were supported by a good amount of data as well as past experience. Semantic and predictive modeling will challenge the search marketing industry to define value and ranking as a business metric will fade as personalized results become more and more prevalent.

Defining the Customers Role in Branding

Social Media, though still in it’s infancy, is also growing up. Companies like Dell, Comcast and WalMart are leveraging the power of the consumer conversation to drive branding.

Charlene Li, co-author of Groundswell, executed a highly informative and actionable keynote. Its’ relevancy and clarity were of the highest caliber and search marketer and business community alike gleaned understanding from the presentation.

Defining the Players

Google is now seen as a bit of a 600-pound gorilla and Microsoft is shifting its’ role from behemoth to the scrappy company learning to listen to its’ customers needs rather than drive their own agenda, which some considered to be the reason for their lack of market share. The launch of Bing in June and their recent collaboration with Yahoo is helping them take a bigger piece of search (though still a small part of the search picture).

Defining Success for the Industry

One thing hasn’t changed, that’s the excitement and intensity of search marketing practitioners. Even if you’ve no interest in search marketing, you’d be hard pressed not to be swept up in the speed of change and the conviction of ideas and philosophies of today’s search marketers.

Defining Success for Businesses

Site reviews have always been a mainstay of the search marketing conference, it’s a great way to take search theories and put them into practice. Bryan Eisenberg and Ethan Giffin paneled a live clinic. Outdoorplay.com, a Hood River-founded company, received focus research through UserTesting.com to better understand how and why to implement the recommended expert recommendations. The user testing made the session that much more relevant since the panelists weren’t just espousing their views (which are well-founded) but showing that users back up their suppositions about the sites strengths and deficiencies.

Success is different for every business, but the commonality is entrenched in business process; create objectives, strategies and tactics and analyze and improve. The biggest challenge for businesses large and small is finding the right search partner and maintaining a commitment to search.

Defining Search Marketing Role

The reality is that natural search continues to be the lifetime value marketing proposition that does an exceptional job of providing short term and long term business goals. The onus is no longer just on the search professionals. Companies who are investing in search are reaping the benefits, but the cost is integration into their team, understanding the goals of the CMO, commitment to the search process and most importantly, commitment to analysis of the metrics.

At my first SES San Jose show in 2001 it was our effort to try to fit into the marketing mix and find our place, we were learning how to have impact by understanding the algorithm, now we’re adding impact by understanding the business and the customer.

At the end of the day, the biggest changes were that early adopters of search have the lead and displacing them is nearly impossible. The divide between search strategies for small and big business are enormous, yet the ability to impact your business and brand online has never been better. The quality of technical-centric strategies and consumer-centric strategies will be the driver to the next level of search. What this means for the business community is that search is becoming less of a mystery or dark art and more of a necessary, quantifiable strategy to business goals.

Favorite SES Show Stats

80% of Fortune 500 plans on marketing spend for PPC

55% of Fortune 500 plans on marketing spend for natural search

75% Americans are participating in social media

A relatively small number of business are creating actionable analysis from their analytics data

Successful websites get about as much traffic, leads and sales from social media as they do from search engines

Favorite SES Case Study

One of the best implementations of on and offline integration was from WalMart, in real-time they’re posting their customers product review at the product level in the store. That’s real power for the consumer. At one of the social media tracks a presenter said he had a conversation with a Fortune 500 CEO that said, we’re just not ready to have our customers talking about us yet. They are talking about you, your choice isn’t if you’re ready as a business community, the question is are you going to participate in that conversation?

Thanks again to Marty Weintraub of AimClear for the opportunity to write for the show, it was a great experience, thanks as well to my Derek Edmond and Merry Morud, fellow live bloggers. (check out our coverage at AimClearblog)

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