Search Engine Marketing Conference: SMX Advanced Seattle

August 2008

Some would ask why are you English guys travelling all the way to Seattle, Washington, for a two-day Search Engine Marketing Conference? I must admit I was wondering the very same thing when we booked it as they do offer several conferences in London. However our reasoning was justified. SMX Advanced Seattle is just that… Advanced.

We were delighted that nothing in the debate was beyond our collective knowledge. I have to admit however deferring to my colleague James a few times when matters got a bit nerdy during the developer sessions. Luckily in the Search Engine Optimisation sessions I was in a comfort zone and soaked it all up.

We did learn some key lessons and got tips on many issues from pricing models to specific link building techniques so James and I split our time between the development, SEO and search industry related sessions. This gave some great insights as to the maturity of the US market for search. For example SEO companies were being valued at 4.3 x revenue according to Bruce Clay of US firm Bruce Clay inc.

But that said many suggested that whilst huge, the SEM market had much further to go and more budgets to pull from other marketing spend. What was clear was that the UK really has long way to go for everyday businesses to realise the true benefits available through Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

Paid search is very popular in the US but still underutilised over here. There were some great sessions and we learnt directly from Google, Yahoo and MSN about some of the key features of their online advertising. James and I brought home some key lessons around paid search that has helped us improve our own services.

At the end of the second day there is a round up called the ‘give it up’ session. This is where the key gurus on the US circuit give out their SEO secrets or better described as experiences they have observed of things that help or hinder them in their striving for that top slot. We all make an honourable pledge not to release any of this for 30 days. A funny one was the idea of moving in on an old hotmail address from an old blog no longer used, resetting the password and taking over the blog. Why – well getting inbound links from Blogs is great SEO fodder – some will go to extraordinary lengths!

Another is that with Google Paid search you pay for position but your position is not directly down to how much you pay but balanced with a ‘quality score’. Well Michael Gray suggested that the Google quality score was nothing to do with the quality of the landing pages or relevance but down to your natural listings capability! Interesting.

Social networking was naturally a key subject. Some benefit here with Google juice flowing if you have personal profiles out there linking back. I have already noticed this with some LinkedIn profiles.

I will finish off with a nerdy one: custom 404 pages: When pages go out of date or product pages are no longer required don’t get rid of the benefit that resided with that page – we would do a 301 redirect to the category page. If you use a custom 404 the page will disappear.

As you can guess we came back laden with ideas and a deeper knowledge. My advice to UK companies however is not to get hung up on techniques. It’s all about competition. My analogy is that if a team wants to win at football in the premier league they don’t have to be great at football – just be better than everybody else. So if your competition is Google No1 lets look at their structure, let’s look at their links, let’s analyse their tactics, its all there for us to see. We just have to go out and beat them! Competition in the UK for specific products and services is not very high so with the right basic structure of a site and some ongoing SEO activity you can make a massive difference to any marketing campaign.

Credit to the team of SMX Advanced Seattle for a great conference and indeed thank you to the great people we met; attendees, as well as companies like Microsoft and Yahoo who’s cocktail parties I will remember for a while yet. Seattle, well a great place but with a population predictably addicted to coffee!

Richard Watts - August 2008

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