This year’s Search Engine Strategies New York was here and is gone again. This year’s was held – as in previous years – at the Hilton Towers Hotel on 53rd and 6th (Avenue of the Americas) in the heart of the city. This year’s event ran from Tues the 24th through Thurs 26th with an additional, optional day of sessions on Monday the 23rd.
I had blogged about 2009 SEO events on another of my sites, CaseDetails.com and listed SES as the first major show of the year. It featured industry leaders commenting on topics along the lines of SEO 101, small business, metrics/analytics and commerce within the “fear economy”. The analytics & vertical track sessions were the ones I found to be most informative with, specifically, the comments by Scott Brinker of ion interactive & Ian Harris, CEO, Search Laboratory Ltd during the Advanced B2B session to be particularly interesting. Their focus was on maximizing PPC traffic through customer segmentation – using A/B landing page testing to find ways to help customers easily identify that you have a product… a message just for them. The discussion went deeper into use of multi-page landing pages and how they, contrary to perception, may end up increasing your conversions 3×4 times over baseline.
The expo had lots of good vendors, weighted heavily toward PPC software providers (”SEM solutions”) but I actually spent some time talking to the teams from Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery, SiteCore and Blogsvertise.com. Of course, industry gorillas Google, Yahoo!, MSN and even Facebook were there, but oddly sequestered to the 2nd floor expo hall – oddly detached. Hearing rumors of the decline of Idearc, I interested to see their booth open and bustling with optimistic staffers.
I didn’t get to attend any of Thursday’s sessions, but my overall experience was just a hare better than so-so for Tues and Wed. The vendors were sharp and the sessions had bright spots, but much of it seemed to be the same old story. Market research & website positioning is important, conversions are king and, as the search landscape matures, proof of value ultimately relies on providing return on investment in a measurable way.