Sesmag sf13

SES San Francisco

September 11–13, 2013

SESConference.com

September 2013

Keys to Mobilizing Your Website and Apps for Search Bring Your Site into Compliance with Google’s Mobile Requirements page 1

Use Landing Pages Effectively 10 Become an Elite B2B Social Brand 11 Put the “Public” Back into PR 13

staff

about SES

Mike Grehan Group Publishing Director Sharon Morabito Head of Events, Americas Program Development Head of Events Content Conference Producer

Laura Roth Anna Lee

Operations Senior Event Manager Event Manager Customer Service Manager Customer Service EXECUTIVE

Kim Kiedaisch Jackie Ortez Charisse Rosales Amanda Targowski

ClickZ & Search Engine Watch special projects editor Copy Editor Asia Desk Editor

Melanie White Caitlin Rossman Adaline Lau

Sales & Marketing Sales Directors

Director, Client Services Marketing Manager Marketing Associate Web Designer Online Operations associate

Andrew Katz Elaine Mershon Elaine Romeo Peter Westerholm JoAnn Simonelli Amy Xu Ploy Tangtrakul Rebecca Holz Aleksey Gershin

Magazine Editor Contributors

Dawn Cavalieri Mel Carson Chris Goward Brian Klais John Lee

Welcome to the San Francisco issue of SES Magazine. SES San Francisco will consist of three days of unparalleled education in online marketing, including the latest techniques and trends in search, social media, mobile, and email. Best-selling author Jeffrey W. Hayzlett will deliver the keynote address, explaining how you can develop the vision and courage you need to make smart, strategic, and lasting changes in your business.

This issue features a roster of eminent practitioners who will be speaking at the conference. Mel Carson of Majestic SEO will show you how to develop a digital PR strategy. John Lee of Webtrends will be among the panelists in the session on “Building a B2B Social Media Cohesive Strategy.” Brian Klais of Pure Oxygen Labs, along with Michael J. Becker of the Mobile Marketing Association, will teach you how to optimize for the Mobile Google Display Network.

See page 14 for sample sessions.

To make the most of your time in San Francisco, be sure to download the SES San Francisco app. The most up-to-date agenda can also be found on the conference website, SES SanFrancisco.com.

And don’t forget these upcoming events: •• SES Hong Kong, September 16–18, The Mira Hong Kong (SESHongKong.com) •• SES Berlin, October 9–10, The Kosmos Berlin (SESBerlin.com) •• SES Chicago, November 4–7, Chicago Marriott Downtown Magnificent Mile (SES Chicago.com) In addition to the three-day learning environment, there will be many opportunities for informal networking throughout the conference. See you there!

Best regards, Mike Grehan, Chair SES Advisory Board Chair Group Publishing Director, Incisive Media

Corporate Chief Executive

Tim Weller

SES Advisory Board

Comprised of both industry thought leaders and real-world practitioners, the SES advisory board brings together top players in the field of interactive media and search. The team works to deliver continually cutting-edge search techniques, more integrated and relevant content, and professional development resources to SES attendees.

SES: Volume 7, Issue 4 | September 2013 © 2013 Incisive Media plc To subscribe, contribute, or view past issues, visit www.sesconference.com/ses-magazine

Mike Grehan, Chair PUBLISHER SES/Search Engine Watch/ ClickZ

Bryan Eisenberg Bestselling Author bryaneisenberg.com

Jon Myers VP, Commercial Director EMEA Marin Software

To advertise, contact sales at sales@sesconference.com or +1 (212) 457-4993.

Matthew Bailey President Site Logic Marketing

Andrew Goodman President Page Zero Media

Lee Odden CEO TopRank Online Marketing

Chris Boggs CMO Internet Marketing Ninjas

Bill Hunt President Back Azimuth Consulting

Giovanni Rodriguez CoFounder and CEO SocialxDesign

Mikel Chertudi Sr. Director, Online & Demand Marketing Adobe

Anne F. Kennedy International Search Strategist Beyond Ink USA

Laura Roth Senior Conference ManageR SES Conference & Expo

Eddie Choi Managing Director Frontiers Digital

Anna Lee Conference Producer SES Conference & Expo

Crispin Sheridan Sr. Director of Search Marketing Strategy SAP

Comments? Want to unsubscribe? E-mail us at magazine@sesconference.com Incisive Media, U.S. 55 Broad Street, 22nd fl.

New York, NY 10004-2501 tel +1 (646) 736-1888 fax +1 (646) 390-6612

Incisive Media, head office 28-29 Haymarket House London SW1Y 4RX, UK tel +44 (0)20 7316 9609 fax +44 (0)20 7930 2238

contents

Follow SES at twitter.com/SESConf

cover Story

1

Keys to Mobilizing Your Website and Apps for Search Bring Your Site into Compliance with Google’s Mobile Requirements and Engage with Mobile Audiences Conference Information

2 14

Sponsors & Exhibitors

Columns

10

Use Landing Pages to Find the Perfect Value Proposition The “POPs, PODs, and POIs” Framework Will Help You Develop Positioning Opportunities

11

Become an Elite B2B Social Brand Separate Your Brand from the Pack by Adopting Four OftenOverlooked Practices

13

Putting the “Public” Back into PR through Social Media An Effective PR Strategy Includes Much More Than Press

SAMPLE SESSIONS at SES SAN FRANCISCO

September 2013

Cover art via Shutterstock

Keys to Mobilizing Your Website and Apps for Search Bring Your Site into Compliance with Google’s Mobile Requirements and Engage with Mobile Audiences

by Brian Klais

W

e live in a world progressively driven by mobile technology, and that includes mobile search.

Google estimates that three out of four mobile searches trigger follow-up actions such as store visits, phone calls, purchases, and word-of-mouth sharing—with over half of these occurring within one hour.

If 60% of mobile searchers only look at the first page of results, companies should be applying the same rigor to mobile search that they apply to desktop SEO.

The Impact of Algorithm Changes in a Google-Dominated Mobile World Fueling the urgency around mobile optimization, Google recently announced changes in the way it will handle smartphone search results.

While the search giant has made countless alterations to its algorithm to improve search quality and relevance, this is the first time that it has made an algorithm change so significant that it punishes companies for failing to optimize for mobile searchers. With 96% of the mobile search market dominated by Google, any change to

Google’s algorithm is a warning for companies to revisit their mobile optimization strategy. Yet, few are doing so.

Recent research by Pure Oxygen Labs revealed that one-third of Fortune 100 companies serve mobile content, but only 6% comply with Google’s new requirements. Further, two-thirds risk downgrades for not serving mobile versions of indexed pages. Despite the fact that over half of these companies have mobile sites or incorporate responsive design techniques, most of these sites are not configured to comply with Google’s mobile requirements, especially when it comes to their deeper pages.

The timing and downgrade severity of Google’s mobile-driven algorithm change is not yet known. However, it is well documented that a drop in search rankings— mobile or otherwise—can have a significant impact on revenue for many businesses.

Forging a Path through the Technical Maze of Mobile Re-evaluating your site every time Google makes a significant algorithm update is a daunting task. Even though the majority

Don’t miss this session at SES San Francisco:

From Mobile PPC to Mobile SEO: Unlocking the Value of Mobile Marketing See page 15. of leading brands currently fall short of Google’s best mobile practices, bringing a site into compliance for mobile searchers can begin with a few simple steps.

The following technical tips, coupled with the use of free mobile diagnostic tools, can serve as a helpful road map for improving mobile search visibility and engaging with mobile audiences.

•• Relevance matters. To boost your mobile rankings, make sure that any server redirects route mobile searchers to deep, relevant mobile pages rather than the mobile site homepage. There’s a complex web of mobile “air-traffic-control signals” operating behind the scenes continues on page 9

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sponsors & exhibitors SES San Francisco | September 10–13, 2013 PLATINUM SPONSORS Google Track Sponsor www.google.com Google’s innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google’s targeted advertising program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users.

Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia. For more information, visit www. google.com.

Marin Software Booth 102 & Track Sponsor www.marinsoftware.com Marin Software provides the world’s leading online advertising management platform for advertisers and agencies to manage their paid search, social media, display advertising, and mobile campaigns. Marin Software’s platform is designed to meet the workflow, reporting, and optimization needs of advertisers and agencies, helping them to save time and improve financial performance.

Free Download for ClickZ’s Facebook Casebook. Sponsored by Marin Software.

Gold Sponsor Bing Booth 500 www.advertise.bingads.microsoft.com Search advertising with Bing helps you efficiently reach your next best customer—within your budget and with the support you need to get started, optimized, and measure your results.

Silver Sponsors BlueHornet Booth 600 www.bluehornet.com BlueHornet: Email Done Differently BlueHornet is an enterprise email service provider that the world’s most talked-about brands partner with to do email differently. They rely on our powerful, easy-to-use technology, Support2 service model, and proactive deliverability to rise above the noise and put their brand everywhere their customers are. The results?

See them at www.bluehornet.com/casestudies and visit Booth 707.

Or give us a call now at 866-586-3755.

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Webtrends Digital Sponsor Silver & Tweet Wall Sponsor www.webtrends.com Webtrends powers digital marketing success. Webtrends is at the forefront of real-time digital marketing relevance and customer experience management through unified customer intelligence. Our industry-leading analytics across mobile, social, and web enables marketers to optimize campaigns, maximize customer lifetime value, and deliver highly relevant digital brand experiences in real-time.

Webtrends dramatically improve digital marketing results for more than 3,500 global brands including, in EMEA and internationally, Lloyds Banking Group, Barclays, HSBC, ASOS, Orange, T-Mobile, Microsoft, BMW, Toyota, Play.com, AllSaints, and The Telegraph.

Sponsors & Exhibitors AdRoll Booth 709 www.adroll.com AdRoll is the largest retargeting platform with over 8000+ active advertisers in the US and around the world. With 97% customer retention rate, our mission is to make powerful performance advertising techniques simple for businesses of all sizes.

AdRoll’s SaaS platform provides unmatched transparency, crossplatform reach across the largest display inventory sources, and innovative tools that personalize ad campaigns based on a visitor’s shopping behavior. AdRoll’s innovative and easy-to-use platform enables brands to collect, analyze, and act on valuable site data, ensuring maximum return on their online advertising investment.

AdRoll is backed by leading investors such as Foundation Capital, Accel Partners, Merus Capital, and Peter Thiel. For more information, please visit www.adroll.com.

aimClear Casino Night Sponsor aimClear® is a culturally driven and rapidly growing online marketing agency, widely respected for leading clients to integrated strategies and data driven tactics. Client credits range from iconic multinational brands to seriously motivated startups. Über focused demographic targeting, bleeding-edge creative, and aggressive conversion techniques are hallmarks of aimClear’s holistic integration of social, PR, search, and display advertising channels. aimClear’s personaDriver™ process, mapping “whole user” demographics, has proven groundbreaking. Proprietary predictive modeling software makes goals scientific, in unpredictable multichannel environments. True multinational, multilingual Conversation Alerts™ keep community managers informed, to quickly leverage opportunities, defend attacks, and advise marketers.

product & service guide

Booth #s on right.

Advertising Networks Alpha Brand Media, SEJ....................................... 403 Bing..........................................500 7Search.com......................... 601

Content Management Brafton....................................604 Edgenet, Inc..........................505 LinkVehicle............................ 700 Yext...........................................400

Link Building MajesticSEO.........................405 Page One Power.................605 Link Building................ Sponsor SubmitEdge.......................... 404

Advertising, Blog Alpha Brand Media, SEJ....................................... 403 Kvchosting.com.......... Sponsor LinkVehicle............................ 700

Domain Registrars & Marketplace Kvchosting.com.......... Sponsor

Local Search Marketing Services & Directories Covario.......................... Sponsor Placeable...............................603 Yext...........................................400

Advertising, Display AdRoll...................................... 709 ClickZ....................................... 100 Page Zero Media....... Sponsor RKG................................. Sponsor 7Search.com......................... 601 Webmarketing123..............602 Advertising, Mobile, & Rich Media AdRoll...................................... 709 Content & News Feed Providers Alpha Brand Media, SEJ....................................... 403 Brafton....................................604 Submit Press Release 123........................... 5 UserTesting.com................. 704

Email Marketing Solutions BlueHornet............................600 Interactive Marketing Agencies BlueHornet............................600 Elite SEM............................... 703 Fruition.net............................ 402 Internet Marketing Ninjas..................................401 Stone Temple Consulting................ Sponsor Interactive Marketing Associations & Publications SEW.......................................... 100 Lead Generation ClickZ....................................... 100 Submit Press Release 123........................... 5 VisiStat Inc............................ 305

Marketing Optimization Solutions BlueHornet............................600 BoostCTR............................... 702 BrightEdge............................ 501 ClickZ....................................... 100 Gigya....................................... 303 gShift Labs SEO Software for Agencies...... 4 Internet Marketing Ninjas..................................401 Marin Software................... 102 Market Motive......................701 Optimizely.................................. 3 Page One Power.................605 SEW.......................................... 100 StratApps.................................... 2 Topsy.............................................6 UserTesting.com................. 704 Webtrends.................... Sponsor

Online Authentication Gigya....................................... 303

Private Label Solutions VisiStat Inc............................ 305

Organic Search Marketing BrightEdge............................ 501 Covario.......................... Sponsor Elite SEM............................... 703 Fruition.net............................ 402 gShift Labs SEO Software for Agencies...... 4 Info Cubic Japan..................504 Internet Marketing Ninjas..................................401 LinkVehicle............................ 700 Page One Power.................605 Page Zero Media....... Sponsor RKG................................. Sponsor The Search Agency..................1 Stone Temple Consulting................ Sponsor Submit Press Release 123........................... 5 Webmarketing123..............602

Search Engines, General Bing..........................................500 Google............................ Sponsor Kvchosting.com.......... Sponsor

Pay-Per-Click Networks & Management Services Bing..........................................500 BoostCTR............................... 702 Info Cubic Japan..................504 The Search Agency..................1 7Search.com......................... 601

Search Engines, Specialized Edgenet, Inc..........................505 MajesticSEO.........................405 Search Marketing Agencies Covario.......................... Sponsor Elite SEM............................... 703 Info Cubic Japan..................504 Page Zero Media....... Sponsor Placeable...............................603 RKG................................. Sponsor The Search Agency..................1 SubmitEdge.......................... 404 Webmarketing123..............602 Search Marketing Software BoostCTR............................... 702 BrightEdge............................ 501 gShift Labs SEO Software for Agencies...... 4 Marin Software................... 102 Placeable...............................603

Social Media Monitoring Gigya....................................... 303 StratApps.................................... 2 Topsy.............................................6 Training Courses & Certification in Search Marketing Market Motive......................701 Video SEO & Video Content Brafton....................................604 SubmitEdge.......................... 404 Web Analytics Moz................................. Sponsor StratApps.................................... 2 Topsy.............................................6 UserTesting.com................. 704 VisiStat Inc............................ 305 Webtrends.................... Sponsor Website Search & Technologies Edgenet, Inc..........................505 Fruition.net............................ 402 MajesticSEO.........................405 Market Motive......................701 SEW.......................................... 100

Alpha Brand Media

BrightEdge

Booth 403 alphabrandmedia.com Alpha Brand Media, the parent company of SEJ, SoJones, and EveryGuyed, is a digital media publishing company that leverages its expertise in social media, SEO, and content marketing to promote its network of blogs and websites, reaching millions of visitors every month.

Booth 501 & Casino Night Sponsor www.brightedge.com BrightEdge is the global leader in enterprise SEO, helping more than 4,500 of the world’s largest brands stay ahead in the rapidly evolving Internet landscape. BrightEdge S3 harnesses the power of analytics on big-data to drive revenue from web sites, search engines, and social networks across the globe in a measurable, predictable way.

BrightEdge is based in San Mateo, CA, with offices in New York City and London.

BoostCTR Booth 702 www.boostctr.com BoostCTR is an on-demand, crowdsourced network of expert PPC copywriters supported by an automated testing platform. The BoostCTR platform makes ad text optimization more effective and efficient.

Brafton, Inc. Booth 604 www.brafton.com Brafton is a news and content marketing agency. Full-time, in-house content writers and graphic designers create exclusive content targeting clients’ unique audiences, keywords, and business goals.

Account managers provide consultancy on SEO-friendly content marketing strategies to engage social audiences, drive relevant website traffic, and optimize for conversions. Custom analytics reporting ensures the most effective strategies for maximum results. Brafton serves clients throughout North America from offices in Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco.

Bruce Clay Inc. Casino Night Sponsor www.bruceclay.com Bruce Clay, Inc., circles the globe educating and servicing companies in Internet marketing’s best practices. The company provides search engine optimization (SEO) services, PPC advertising management, SEO training courses, and the full-featured SEOToolSet® suite of tools. Founder and president Bruce Clay has led the industry by authoring the SEO Code of Ethics, now translated into 18 languages, as well as Wiley Publications’ SEO All-In-One for Dummies, a comprehensive guide to the technical and marketing requirements of SEO. Based in the Los Angeles area, Bruce Clay, Inc., also has international offices in Switzerland, Brazil, India and Japan. For details, visit http:// www.bruceclay.com/.

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sponsors & exhibitors SES San Francisco | September 10–13, 2013 ClickZ

Edgenet

Booth 100 www.clickz.com ClickZ is the largest resource of interactive marketing news, information, commentary, advice, opinion, research, and reference in the world, online or off-. From search to social, technology to trends, our coverage is expert, exclusive, and in-depth.

Our mission: to help interactive marketers do their jobs better.

The seasoned ClickZ News team serves up smart, original reporting and analysis on the interactive marketing industry and the companies that make it tick. Experts from the trenches provide commentary, opinion, advice, and thought leadership from the leading practitioners in interactive marketing. The ClickZ Stats section is an award-winning source for interactive and Internet research. Facts, figures, research, and data on every facet of the online industry, domestic and worldwide.

ClickZ also offers: •• ClickZ Job Board: ClickZ Jobs helps connect job seekers with new employment opportunities and provide employers access to our large audience of interactive marketing professionals.

•• ClickZ Academy: ClickZ Academy has been created to help online marketers develop their skills. From e-learning and webinars, to onsite or in-house training, we offer a format to suit your preferred learning style.

Booth 505 www.edgenet.com Edgenet creates technologies harnessed to its unparalleled expertise in managing, structuring, and optimizing product data and product data feeds.

Founded in 1991, Edgenet is a privately held company with offices in Atlanta, Nashville, and Milwaukee, where they have assembled a team of experts who boast years of experience in taxonomy and some of the brightest minds in the world.

Edgenet’s team designs successful solutions for everything from guided and visual selling to collecting and optimizing manufacturer data to product search’s most pressing demand—merchant feeds and product listing ads (PLAs).

Today’s customers demand rich, structured data for their comparison and research needs. Edgenet’s technologies enable merchants (both in store and online), search engines and suppliers to accurately and completely represent their brand and products online.

Covario Keynote Sponsor www.covario.com Covario is the world’s leading independent search marketing agency.

Covario was selected by OMMA as both the 2012 and 2011 Search Agency of the Year. The firm is also the parent company of Rio SEO, the leading software provider of SEO, social media, and content marketing automation tools. Headquartered in San Diego, Covario has about 250 team members worldwide who are also concentrated in Beijing, Chicago, London, New York, Phoenix, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Seattle, Singapore, Tokyo, and Toronto. The agency’s growing customer base includes world leaders in technology, consumer electronics, retail, ecommerce, financial services, media, entertainment, publishing, and consumer packaged goods. More information is available at www.covario.com.

DoubleClick by Google Booth 800 www.doubleclick.com/search DoubleClick Search is a search management platform that helps agencies and marketers efficiently manage some of the largest search marketing campaigns in the world, across multiple engines and media channels. Streamlined workflow, powerful reporting, and its very familiar AdWords interface enable buyers to efficiently run campaigns, while strategic bid optimization improves campaign performance. Last but not least, native integration with the DoubleClick platform, as well as other big data capabilities, allows users to create campaigns that can standout from the competition.

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Elite SEM Booth 703 www.elitesem.com Elite SEM was founded in 2004 as a performance-based search marketing agency specializing in paid and organic search. From small beginnings, Elite SEM is now the agency of record for several Fortune 500 and Internet Retailer Top 500 companies, including Ideeli, Hugo Boss, Pandora, Tommy Bahama, Clarks, Havaianas, Solstice, Coffeeforless.com, and Rockport. Elite SEM specializes in helping our customers navigate the ever-changing landscape of marketing on the web. All account managers at Elite SEM are Google Adwords and Microsoft AdExcellence certified and experts in planning and executing display, remarketing, and social media advertising campaigns. Our years of experience and extensive knowledge of the online marketing industry have cemented our position as one of the fastest-growing and best search engine marketing agencies in the country.

Fruition—Internet Marketing Expertise Booth 402 fruition.net Fruition® is a Denver based SEO, social media, website design, and development company. Fruition’s mission is to help companies get online, stay online, and use the Internet as a competitive advantage.

Since 2003, our team of experts has offered data driven strategies and enterprise level services at mid-market levels of engagement.

Gigya Booth 303 www.gigya.com Gigya’s Connected Consumer Management Suite enables the world’s largest brands, including Pepsi, Verizon, and ABC, to understand and connect more closely with today’s mobile and socially

sponsors & Download the app or visit SESSanFrancisco.com. exhibitors connected consumers. Our technology helps businesses access, consolidate, and manage permission-based identity and behavior data, while providing deep customer insights that turn data into action.

Through products like Social Login, Registration-as-a-Service, Social Plugins and Gamification, Gigya provides clients with the rich data, intelligence, and tools needed to reach consumers with the right messages, on the right platforms, and at the right time.

Gigya drives user acquisition and engagement for 700 enterprises and reaches 1.5 billion unique users per month, ensuring that today’s businesses stay relevant in the age of the connected consumer.

GroupM ClickZ Awards Reception Sponsor www.groupm.com GroupM is the leading global media investment management operation. It serves as the parent company to WPP media agencies including Maxus, MEC, MediaCom, and Mindshare. Our primary purpose is to maximize the performance of WPP’s media communications agencies on behalf of our clients, our stakeholders, and our people by operating as a parent and collaborator in performanceenhancing activities such as trading, content creation, sports, digital, finance, proprietary tool development, and other business-critical capabilities. The agencies that comprise GroupM are all global operations in their own right with leading market positions. The focus of GroupM is the intelligent application of physical and intellectual scale to benefit trading, innovation, and new communication services, to bring competitive advantage to our clients and our companies.

gShift Labs SEO Software Booth 4 www.gshiftlabs.com gShift Labs’ industry leading SEO software system, Web Presence Optimizer™ (WPO), helps marketers and agencies more efficiently and effectively monitor and report on SEO campaigns. gShift’s patent-pending WPO software provides insight into an entire web presence—website, blogs, press releases, social media, and analytics—by reporting organic rank data, backlinks, social signals, and competitive intelligence, all of which contribute to the goal of ranking higher organically in the search engines.

The fundamentals of SEO still matter; however, SEO in 2013 is about social signals (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest) and fresh content (blogs and press releases).

Track, manage, measure and report web presence analytics data all in one place using gShift’s SEO monitoring and reporting software. Organizations of all sizes benefit by reducing the time and resources required to analyze and improve organic search optimization. gShift Labs can be contacted at 1-866-743-5960 or sales@ gShiftLabs.com or by visiting www.gshiftlabs.com.

Info Cubic Japan Booth 504 www.infocubic.co.jp/en/ Info Cubic Japan is a search engine marketing firm serving more than 500 businesses in the Far East. Established in 2002, we have optimized more than 5,000 keyword searches designed to drive traffic to our clients’ web pages. Info Cubic Japan, however, doesn’t stop at search engine optimization; we also provide individualized cutting-edge global marketing strategies, advanced pay-per-click analyses, and website localization for the Asian market. In addition, our extensive experience with Internet marketing in Asia enables us to help our overseas customers effectively market their goods and services throughout the region.

Internet Marketing Ninjas Booth 401, Sponsored Session, & Badge Booklet Sponsor www.internetmarketingninjas.com Internet Marketing Ninjas, formerly We Build Pages, is a fullservice Internet marketing company established in 1999. Though the agency is most well known for their expertise in link building, the rebranding has introduced a broad range of additional SEO services including social media marketing, SEO reporting, content development, conversion analysis, and their currently featured Panda Recovery Reports. The company’s CEO and founder, Jim Boykin, is a frequent conference speaker and a pioneer in the SEO industry. Jim’s blog, a renowned link building resource, was named BestLink Building Blog in 2006 and 2007 by Search Engine Journal. Now the blog hosts even more voices including frequent contributor Ann Smarty and staff writers Bonnie Stefanick and Jennifer VanIderstyne.

Recently, Internet Marketing Ninjas released a number of free public tools including an on-page optimizer and a comprehensive site crawler. Currently the in-house staff consists of nearly 100 Ninjas, expertly trained in various aspects of SEO.

KVCHOSTING Sponsor www.kvchost.com KVCHosting.com is a web hosting company that endeavors to make first class technology available by providing cheap and affordable quality web hosting packages. KVC Hosting specializes in web hosting services of various categories. Since the start in 2008, with over 500.000 domains hosted with us, KVCHosting has been named as one of the fastest-growing web hosting companies for qualitydriven, technology-enriched, and affordable web hosting developers.

LinkVehicle Booth 700 www.linkvehicle.com Connect to the web’s most influential voices with the content search engines love to rank. LinkVehicle has partnered up with 40,000+ bloggers. LinkVehicle provides blog marketing, content and infographics, link building, social marketing, reputation management,

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sponsors & exhibitors SES San Francisco | September 10–13, 2013 and display advertising services. To learn more, please go to www. linkvehicle.com.

Majestic SEO Booth 405 www.majesticseo.com Majestic SEO provides competitor backlinks intelligence to SEO specialists. Majestic SEO is the planet’s most comprehensive backlinks information provider and offers a number of tools to access to this valuable resource. Most recently, Majestic launched Site Explorer—offering more data than anyone else by a considerable margin.

Majestic enables registered users to test its services free of charge by generating reports for site users’ control. Registration is free, and highly competitive subscription plans start at low prices, with a one-month minimum commitment. Subscribers have a range of tools to enable link analysis of competing domains to be performed. For Enterprise users, Majestic offers an API service for internal use that enables developers to integrate the data into new or existing suites of reports and applications.

Link data includes 3 trillion links on the web by: •• Anchor text •• Link strength •• Crawl date •• Country source •• IP number •• Follow/frame/redirect and other flags Stop by their stand to request a demo and trial.

Market Motive Training Institute Booth 701 www.marketmotive.com What does it take to be certified in search marketing? Visit Market Motive to find out. We’ll show you our online video training library; you’ll meet our top-rated faculty and get a glimpse into the testing and endorsement system that is world-recognized and endorsed by the biggest names in search.

Market Motive provides online certification courses in SEO, web analytics, PPC, social media, conversion optimization, online PR, email marketing, and more. All courses are online and all students have weekly phone conferences with the faculty. And the faculty is the best part—it’s a “Who’s Who of the Internet marketing world” according to Website Magazine and “the best in the business” according to Internet Marketing Pilgrim. To learn more, see us at the conference or visit www.marketmotive.com.

Moz Lanyard Sponsor moz.com Moz provides analytics software to track all of a website’s inbound marketing efforts on one platform—with beautiful data visualizations, insights into competitors’ data, and actionable recommendations to improve each effort’s performance. Dedicated to helping

6 SES • September 2013 {San Francisco}

people do better marketing, Moz creates easy-to-use tools, tutorials, and educational resources for learning inbound marketing—and fosters the web’s most vibrant online marketing community. With offices in Seattle, WA, and Portland, OR, Moz supports over 20,000 customers and 300,000 community members worldwide.

Optimizely Booth 3 www.optimizely.com Optimizely is a world-class website optimization platform, providing A/B and multivariate testing that is incredibly powerful and easy-to-use. Since its founding in 2010 by two former Google product managers, Dan Siroker and Pete Koomen, Optimizely has seen strong and growing demand.

Optimizely enables users with and without technical expertise to make dynamic changes to their websites, test the variations to live traffic, gather immediate results, and start achieving goals. Over 3,500 enterprises have adopted Optimizely and a staggering 223,600+ experiments have been run on the Optimizely platform. The number of experiments is growing rapidly as more individuals and businesses alike realize the power of data-driven decision-making.

Page One Power Booth 605 & Sponsored Session www.pageonepower.com Page One Power is a Boise SEO firm headed by two brothers, Jon and Zach Ball. Page One Power focuses on customized, white-hat link building strategies. We work with a limited number of highly motivated clients who are focused on getting top search engine rankings.

P1P specializes in custom link building. We create a unique strategy for each of our clients, because every website is different.

We analyze a niche, your leading competitors, and industry experts to formulate a customized solution for your particular link building needs. We value communication, transparency, and results.

Our professional writers and researchers are creative, highlymotivated individuals who take pride in their work and care deeply about your brand. They spend all day creating high-quality, sustainable links.

We’re the link builders you’ve been looking for.

“We’re a small firm. We don’t have departments and account managers so our clients work directly with the leadership of the company. Because of this our clients love working with us. Of course we get results too.”—Jon Ball, Page One Power Free Webinar: Jonathan Ball from Page One Power presents “Link Building 101.” View on demand.

Page Zero Media Track Sponsor & Room Key Sponsor www.pagezero.com Page Zero Media is a full-service digital marketing agency focusing especially on paid search (SEM), display advertising, and other forms

sponsors & Download the app or visit SESSanFrancisco.com. exhibitors of effective audience targeting. Led by founder and president Andrew Goodman, the company is headquartered in Toronto, Canada. Clients include Postmedia Digital, Canon, Direct Energy, Wave Accounting, and Nuts.com. Page Zero is a Google AdWords Certified Agency.

Perfect Audience Booth 0 perfectaudience.com Fast and easy retargeting on Facebook Exchange and across the web.

Placeable Booth 603 & Conference Bag Sponsor placeable.com Be Placeable. Formerly known as LocationInsight, Placeable aims to help large advertisers improve results and the local consumer experience by enhancing the optimization of directories, local pages, search engine maps, locators, social networks, and search engines listings. By combining the industry’s most advanced location platform with unique data management and content syndication solutions, Placeable location marketing technology powers millions of locations worldwide for brands like Bank of America, Western Union, American Express, and Nationwide Insurance. Placeable is based in Denver, CO. For more information, please visit www.placeable.com.

RKG Sponsor www.rimmkaufman.com RKG is a data-driven online marketing firm specializing in paid search marketing, SEO, comparison shopping engine management, social media marketing, blueprint search analytics, multichannel attribution management, and display advertising. Long recognized as the thought leader in paid search marketing, RKG drives results for over 170 retail, travel, finance, and B2B clients. RKG strives to become an integrated member of each client’s marketing team. Our expert analysts leverage proprietary, constantly evolving technology to develop scalable strategies that meet or exceed each client’s unique marketing goals. A privately held company, RKG is headquartered in Charlottesville, VA, with offices in Seattle, WA; San Francisco, CA; Bend, OR; and Boston, MA.

The Search Agency Booth 1 www.thesearchagency.com The Search Agency is a global online marketing firm that combines high-tech and high-touch strategies to help marketers engage their customers online and measure ROI beyond a reasonable doubt.

Services include paid search, SEO, landing page optimization, display media, social media, and comparison shopping management, which are strategically leveraged to maximize the efficacy of clients’ integrated marketing campaigns. Founded in 2002, The Search Agency is headquartered in Los Angeles, CA, with 180 employees in 8 offices worldwide.

Search Engine Watch Booth 100 searchenginewatch.com Search Engine Watch provides tips and information about searching the web, analysis of the search engine industry, and help to site owners trying to improve their ability to be found in search engines.

7Search.com Booth 601 www.7search.com 7Search has been a premiere pay-per-click search network for over a decade, distinguishing itself for driving quality traffic, affordably. It is known for excellent customer service—advertisers can call, email, or instant message an actual person who is an expert in training and assisting advertisers to optimize their campaigns. This team is dedicated to ensuring that each and every advertiser achieves the best return on investment they possibly can. Take advantage of 7Search’s network to drive traffic your way.

Stone Temple Consulting Sponsored Session & Reception Sponsor www.stonetemple.com Stone Temple Consulting provides holistic Internet marketing optimization services. This includes SEO, social media, and PPC services, all designed to grow your business steadily over time. Link building services focus on strategies that combine brand building with the creation of all natural high quality authoritative links.

Key STC facts include: •• More than 10 years experience in the industry.

•• 25+ experience online marketing practitioners.

•• Clients ranging from Fortune 100 companies to startups.

STC CEO Eric Enge is the lead co-author for The Art of SEO, a frequent industry speaker, and a regular columnist for Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land.

StratApps Booth 2 www.stratapps.com StratApps, Inc., is a leading provider of analytics services for big data–driven sales and marketing. Contact Persona from StratApps is a revolutionary new persona-based offering that provides enhanced social intelligence across your contacts. Contact Persona aggregates, quantifies, and predicts contact behavior, including competitive affinity, relevant to your products and services. With Contact Persona you achieve net lift from better response rate, reduction in prospect to revenue cycle, and discovery of new contacts all done specific to your business needs. Visit us at www.stratapps.com to learn more.

sesconference.com • SES 7

sponsors & exhibitors SES San Francisco | September 10–13, 2013 SubmitEdge

UserTesting.com

Booth 404 www.submitedge.com SubmitEdge specializes in fulfilling all your Internet marketing needs. We believe in continuous improvement in all our operations, and focus on building and maintaining sound relations with each of our customers. Over 30,000 customers worldwide have benefited from our services since 2006. From social media and search engine optimization to video creation, all our services are available in competitive packages to meet the diverse needs of our customers.

Booth 704 www.usertesting.com UserTesting.com lets UX professionals and designers observe people while they use your website, prototype, or mobile app—without the time, expense, and hassle of lab observation. In about one hour, you will unearth critical usability issues, revealing where your visitors get stuck and WHY they leave your site.

Submit Press Release 123 Booth 5 online.submitpressrelease123.com Submit Press Release 123 delivers your news to the right media outlets at the right time. Our customer-focused online press release distribution service provides access to over 5000 sites, and includes social media, Google News, and PR Newswire distribution.

Tealium Casino Night Sponsor www.tealium.com Tealium is the leader in enterprise tag management, helping marketers solve their big data challenge at its source. Tealium’s web-based service makes it easy for digital marketers to deploy and manage their third-party vendor tags, and then correlate the data those tags generate into an actionable source. Using Tealium, organizations can streamline their digital marketing operations, increase the effectiveness of customer acquisition campaigns, and power their big data initiatives. The company differentiates itself through ease of use, scale and performance, and fanatical customer support. Select clients include Petco, Lenovo, A+E Networks, Fox Networks Group, Urban Outfitters, Nokia, NHL, and Sony Online Entertainment.

Topsy Booth 6 topsy.com Topsy is the premier social analytics platform for real-time marketing and discovery. By giving customers the power to explore any question or topic using the world’s largest index of real-time public social data, Topsy helps to uncover unexpected insights and answer critical questions.

8 SES • September 2013 {San Francisco}

VisiStat Booth 305 www.visistat.com VisiStat is a web analytics / customer intelligence platform that captures complex analytical data in real-time, and simplifies it specifically for SMB / SME, enabling well-informed business decisions that increase sales opportunities and maximize online marketing effectiveness. The VisiStat solution is an integrated, single-source ecosystem providing comprehensive web analytics and campaign tracking to optimize website performance and online marketing ROI, plus an anonymous visitor identification solution that generates new sales leads directly from your website. The result is greater visibility as to how customers and prospects are engaging your business, and clear, specific steps to improve your online presence.

Webmarketing123 Casino Night Sponsor www.webmarketing123.com Founded in 2004, Webmarketing123 is an Inc. 500 digital marketing agency providing SEO, SEM, display advertising, and social media marketing to help clients generate and fast-track online revenue. Our unique approach pairs metrics-rich methodology with an understanding of our clients’ business goals and challenges. We combine a deep expertise across industry verticals, smart use of automation, and efficient use of analytics to inform data-driven decision-making.

Yext Booth 400 www.yext.com Yext is the location information software company that allows businesses to own and instantly update their content on 45+ different local directories, search engines, and mapping apps including Yahoo, YP.com, Citysearch, and Foursquare. Yext works with the largest brands including seven Fortune 100 companies.

As an industry leader, Yext has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Business Insider. Yext is based in New York City, and was named to the Inc. 500 fastest growing private companies (top 10 in NYC) in 2011.

COVER STORy / SEO

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Keys to Mobilizing Your Website and Apps for Search from page 1 of your site. In the land of mobile, the device, the site, the design, and even the link you click can influence the content that is served, including error messages.

Sites that eliminate barriers to mobile content earn higher positions in mobile search results.

•• Follow Google’s advice regarding canonical link markup. If you have an “m.” mobile site, each desktop page should contain a “rel=alternate” link meta tag that points to the mobile URL, and each mobile page should contain a “rel=canonical” meta tag that points to the desktop URL. Properly implementing canonical markup is essential for making mobile content visible to bots and searchers, particularly for mobile sites that rely on Javascript or “uncrawlable” redirects to route mobile users to mobile URLs. •• Clarify whether content varies by device type. When the server redirects or modifies content for mobile customers and mobile bots, the Vary response header must contain “user agent.” Google recommends that all sites that customize their mobile experience based on user-agent settings make it clear to bots that the content varies by user agent. These mobile routing instructions are critical to avoid being wrongly penalized for cloaking or bait-and-switch redirects.

•• Check thoroughly for errors. Confirm that none of your desktop pages lead mobile users to a 404 error page. It’s not yet clear when Google’s new mobile SERP algorithm will roll out, but your site could be put in the penalty box if you’re serving error pages to your mobile customers. Beyond finding yourself in mobile search oblivion, few mobile searchers will return to your mobile site once they encounter an error.

•• Make your iOS app more visible.

Use Apple’s Smart Banner meta tag to make it easier for iOS users to download your iOS app. With the release of iOS 6, Apple introduced the Smart Banner meta tag to promote iOS apps and deliver an improved mobile experience.

Consider making customized smart banners that work for Android and are Googlebot friendly as well. Be sure to avoid interstitial app ads—users find them annoying, as do bots since they often inadvertently block crawler access to mobile content.

•• Be responsible with responsive design weight so that pages load quickly.

The total time to download a mobile page should be less than one second. Page weight matters, especially for sites that

employ responsive design techniques, the emerging trend recommended by Google. Overuse or incorrect use could cause your search rankings and customer experience to suffer.

Conclusion Search algorithms and mobile optimization techniques change often. It’s more important than ever to keep up with emerging trends in search and continually seek out tools and experts to help diagnose problems early.

Brian Klais is founder and CEO of Pure Oxygen Labs, a mobile consulting and technology company.

sesconference.com • SES 9

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CONVERSION & ROI

Use Landing Pages to Find the Perfect Value Proposition The “POPs, PODs, and POIs” Framework Will Help You Identify New Positioning Opportunities

by Chris Goward

S

earch marketers already know that they need to be testing their landing pages. That’s a given principle for success. But are you limiting the potential of your testing program? If you’re still only testing button color, form fields, or the latest tips and tricks, you’re missing out!

Your landing pages are often just one stop in a long journey for your customers. When you consider all the touchpoints your visitor must hit to become a customer, you develop a broader view. Hopefully you’re not just optimizing landing pages, but also testing your category pages, product detail pages, segmentation pages, search results pages, homepage, site-wide elements, registration forms, checkout, etc.

However, your landing pages play a unique role. Here’s a little-known fact: your landing pages are the best place to discover your most powerful value-proposition points. A lot of search marketers don’t have the structured process they need to leverage huge marketing insights.

What Do I Mean by Value Proposition?

I think of value proposition as the outcome of the cost-versus-benefit equation that gives your prospects motivation.

If your perceived benefits outweigh the perceived costs, your prospects will be motivated to act.

For some of our clients, we know that it’s important that we offer full-service design and technical implementation for the tests we plan. For others, those with lots of production resources, the strategy and test plans are our most important offering. But what if the majority of our prospects think that our friendly team members are really our most important feature? That would be good to know, right? We should test that!

You need to discover your best value proposition in order to have the best chance of closing the most sales. Emphasizing the

10 SES • September 2013 {San Francisco}

most important parts of your value proposition will maximize your conversion rate.

How Do You Find Your Best Value Proposition?

Simplistically, you could think about the WIIFM (what’s in it for me?).

Every marketer understands the WIIFM concept. You already know how to speak to your customers in their language and understand their needs. That’s the entry price to understanding marketing.

The WIIFM are all the features and benefits your prospects could get from your products and services. But you can’t communicate them all at once. If you try to emphasize everything, your prospect will absorb nothing.

How do you know which features are most important to your customers?

You Should Test That!

Traditionally, marketers have relied on their own intuition to come up with the right features to create and emphasize. Sure, they may have gotten input from small groups of customers via surveys and focus groups, but there are many reasons those focus groups aren’t as great as they seem.

How do you decide what could be valuable to test for your customers?

Your combination of prospects, products, and competitive environments is unique. To find out what works best, you need to create great value-proposition hypotheses.

You Need Value-Proposition Optimization I recently published the “POPs, PODs, and POIs” framework for identifying new positioning ideas to test based on Kevin Keller’s concept of points of parity versus points of difference. Kevin used this concept with respect to brand positioning, product development, and brand extensions; I believe it’s also a useful tool for thinking about the features to emphasize for existing products and brands: •• Points of parity (POPs). These are the features you offer that are important to your prospects and that you share with your competitors. Think of them as the basic entry requirements to the game.

Your prospects need to know that you offer the POPs, but emphasizing them won’t impress anyone.

•• Points of irrelevance (POIs). All the other features that you offer, but that aren’t interesting to your prospects, are points of irrelevance (POIs). These are continues on page 12

SOCIAL MEDIA

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Become an Elite B2B Social Brand Separate Your Brand from the Pack by Adopting Four Often-Overlooked Practices

by John Lee

W

hen it comes to social media marketing, there’s an unshakable sense that we’re not quite there yet—that nagging feeling, from the CMO down, that we could, and should, be doing better, especially in B2B. This is because many brands have not reached the level of maturity that social itself has reached. The social channels are well established and their value well known.

The gap between good social brands and great ones is massive and growing.

The good news, though, is that greatness in B2B is readily attainable, because great social isn’t an accident; it’s the result of an intentional, strategic framework that’s both scalable and accountable.

Good Brands Make Social a Key Part of the Marketing Mix; Great Brands Use Measurement to Drive Integration Lack of measurement is the number one reason that social fails. Nearly 90% of brands measure volume and initial engagement (likes, followers, etc.), but only 31% ever measure it against revenue (Ragan/NASDAQ).

Similarly, 95% of brands think that their marketing innovations—including those rooted in social—work, but only 27% actually review them (Forrester Research).

As a result, we often don’t know what social is contributing to revenue generated, the heart of any B2B company. Instead, we trumpet our ability to churn out social-friendly content and attention-grabbing campaigns. But social busyness isn’t an indicator of success.

What really matters is the ability to articulate social’s contribution to the sales pipeline.

So don’t get lazy. Start by putting the right analytics infrastructure in place. This entails conversion tracking throughout your site and proper campaign IDs broken down by channel, initiative, and time frame. It also requires crystal-clear communication to all team members—your analytics, web, and content people—about where the conversion points are on each page and how they’re being measured.

Move past exposure and influence and look at engagement (clicks, retweets, and shares). Focus your attention on conversion points and eventual ROI, not impressions and reach. Your sales cycle might be months long, but the payoff will come when a deal closes down the line and you can track that first touch, or multiple touches, back to social.

more complicated than that. Disparate parts of personalities come together to affect decision making, preferences, and actions, and it’s crucial that we embrace this fundamental nature of user behavior.

In other words, people act, engage, and respond not solely as professionals, but also as nuanced human beings. Therefore, users are not simply—and absolutely cannot be

Good Brands Make Their Content Socially Accessible; Great Brands Create Experiences That Appeal to Their Audience’s Non-B2B Side

treated solely as—potential sales.

A phenomenon in linguistics known as “codeswitching” refers to instances when a person alternates between multiple languages and personas in a single conversation. Nowhere is this phenomenon more prevalent in the digital world than in social.

People act, engage, and respond not solely as professionals, but also as nuanced human beings.

Therefore, users are not simply—and absolutely cannot be treated solely as—potential sales.

When a user comes across your Twitter handle or Facebook feed, she doesn’t suddenly transform into professional-only mode that consumes, filters, and reacts to content based totally on her company and career. Her professional persona may take center stage, but her entire thought process is influenced by the less apparent parts of her personality: the fact that she’s a parent, for example, or that she enjoys rock climbing, is coming off a rough week, or lives in a city.

The problem is that most B2B firms target only the corporate part of their customers’ personas, and spend the majority of their time making sure that content is available and shareable across platforms.

This is a worthy effort, but real people are

Good Brands Publish Across All Social Platforms; Great Brands Develop Individual Strategies for Each Platform Don’t confuse social activity for social achievement. Maintaining a robust presence across a myriad of social channels is no small feat, but being great means diving deeper into the nuances of each one. Social platforms are not created equally, serve very different purposes, and have different audiences. And they deliver value to brands in very different ways.

Elite social brands account for these variances and build comprehensive strategies unique to each channel. The kicker is that these individual plans also roll up into one cohesive social media plan, ensuring consistency and alignment.

Good Brands Articulate When, Where, and How Often to Post; Great Brands Articulate When, Where, and How Often to Be Silent Talk to a social media manager, one in charge of actually creating and sharing content, and you’ll realize that the sheer pace and size of the social sphere make it incredibly conducive to overactivity and a general sense that you need to be “doing something.”

But being great in social doesn’t mean talking a lot; it means talking at the right time. The best brands understand this and embrace the concept of social silence. It’s an intentional strategy that identifies when a brand might overpost—for example, talking continues on page 12

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CONVERSION & ROI / Social MEDIA

Use Landing Pages to Find the Perfect Value Proposition from page 10 particularly appealing to engineers who have spent many hours building features that, unfortunately, no one cares about.

•• Points of difference (PODs). Here’s where you can win the game. Points of difference are the features that are important to your prospects and not available from your competitors.

You’ll want to focus on the PODs. These are the features you can emphasize that will move your prospects to action; they’re your differentiators. But all PODs aren’t created equal. Some will be more important than others, and some will only be important to certain customer segments.

No matter how much effort and research you’ve put into your value-proposition points, you should test that!

When combined with data from surveys of customer and market perceptions, these

tests add quantitative validity to the qualitative insights. The learning from these valueproposition tests generates powerful marketing insights that affect the overall marketing strategy.

Don’t miss this session at SES San Francisco:

Landing Page Optimization: Test, Analyze, Execute See page 15.

Landing Pages Are Your Best ValueProposition Test Opportunities Your best opportunities for testing your value proposition are with first-impression visitors. These are usually new visitors to your high-traffic landing pages or home page.

By testing on new visitors, you’ll reduce your exposure to existing customers or prospects who are already in the consideration phase. New prospects offer a clear canvas on which you can present your message and see what sticks.

Then, from the learning gained on landing pages, you can validate insights with other target audience groups and with your customers to leverage the learning across the company.

Landing page testing can do more than just improve conversion rates on landing pages. When done strategically, it can deliver powerful, high-leverage marketing insights.

For more about how to build a winning conversion optimization system, download the free whitepaper Five Steps to Developing a Successful and Scalable Conversion Optimization Strategy.

Chris Goward is the founder of WiderFunnel—the marketing optimization agency that pioneered conversion rate optimization methods—and the author of You Should Test That!

Become an Elite B2B Social Brand from page 11 excessively about themselves or posting purely out of habit—and establishes a framework and purpose for staying quiet.

Most importantly, social silence is based in a fundamental truth: no brand, no matter how awesome, is that interesting all the time.

Social silence asserts that a brand’s cadence and content are most effective when driven by genuine authenticity and insights, not mandates or routines.

The Takeaway Today, only 5% of brands say that they’re highly satisfied with their social media campaigns (Ragan/NASDAQ). 5%. That’s it.

It’s a jarring stat for sure, but it also reflects an amazing opportunity. It means that while

12 SES • September 2013 {San Francisco}

other brands are scrambling to be just good enough, a window exists for us to become great.

The best part is that the roadmap for improvement—understanding the intricacies of user behavior, accounting for the nuances of each channel, knowing when to stay silent, and investing more in measurement—is actually well defined. It can be a difficult journey, but the end result—being a socially fluent marketer in a competitive landscape that doesn’t quite get it yet—is a bankable advantage more than worth the investment.

John Lee is manager of brand and social marketing at Web­ trends. In 2012, he was recognized by PR Daily for creating the “Best Branding Campaign” and “Event of the Year.”

Don’t miss this session at SES San Francisco:

Building a B2B Social Media Cohesive Strategy Wednesday, September 11, 3:50–4:50pm Speakers: John Lee, Manager, Brand & Social Marketing, Webtrends Rebecca Tann, Vice President of Marketing, Regus

Social MEDIA

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Putting the “Public” Back into PR through Social Media An Effective PR Strategy Includes Much More Than Press

by Mel Carson

M

y foray into social media came about completely by accident.

Back in 2005, I joined Microsoft in the UK to help launch adCenter (now Bing Ads), and it was very much a startup environment. My official role was to be a specialist account manager running search campaigns across the UK and France, plus whatever market came next.

But as anyone who’s worked on a massive new digital project knows, there are always other jobs that need doing, so I became an evangelist-about-town in London. As the launch approached, I was talking to almost every agency in the city about what advertisers could expect from the platform and Microsoft.

Blogging As we crept into 2006, the pilot was going well. The date of the full launch was settled, and some senior Microsoft people came over from Seattle to see how it was all going. One of them mentioned, as part of their thinking on how to market adCenter, that they were setting up a “community team,” and asked if I would be interested in joining it as their coworker in Europe.

Delving deeper into what a community team would entail, I discovered that it meant writing for a blog and spending time on forums answering advertisers’ questions about how to get the best for their marketing dollar.

Frankly, I couldn’t believe my luck. Microsoft was going to invest in me and a couple of others and let us be a front-and-center piece of their communication machine. I would be doing things I love to do: writing and talking.

Of course I said yes, and thus I began my career in pushing the boundaries of digital conversations and connections.

It wasn’t until we’d established a healthy presence on Twitter and Facebook that I realized that our work with the adCenter Blog and forums had actually been part of the early stages of what we now know as social media. The association of social with these

platforms is fair enough given their ubiquity today, but if you read some early books on the subject of blogging, such as Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, you’ll see that brands were listening to customers and creating discoverable and sharable content years before Facebook and Twitter first pushed their code live.

Don’t miss this session at SES San Francisco:

The Marriage of Social & PR: Making It Work for Your Brand Wednesday, September 11, 2:50-3:20pm Speaker: Mel Carson, Brand Ambassador, Majestic SEO

Content Marketing This year’s buzz phrase in the online marketing industry is “content marketing,” but many of us have been doing exactly this for years. I remember an exercise we did in 2007: we worked out the top ten problems our advertisers had with adCenter by scouring the forums and canvassing our customerservice teams. We then wrote a series of blog posts addressing all of these problems and offering answers and workarounds, while making sure that the product teams were aware of these so that they could stack rank new features and fixes according to what the community actually wanted.

PR is no longer just about pitching a hyperboleriddled press release to anyone who can read. PR professionals are beginning to understand the benefits of an inbound strategy for their messages through SEO, social media, and other vehicles like video and infographics.

Was this so radical? Well, it would seem so, if the majority of companies are only just waking up to this way of customer communication and product marketing, six years later!

Digital PR

across the social sphere via channels such as Twitter and Facebook, where engagement and sentiment can be easily measured, and news outlets are opening their editorial to comment and scrutiny. Therefore, PR is no longer just about pitching a hyperbole-riddled press release to anyone who can read.

PR professionals are beginning to understand the benefits of an inbound strategy for their messages through SEO, social media, and other vehicles like video and infographics. It’s not that they want to bypass press— far from it. Rather, early adopters recognize the opportunity to have a direct relationship with consumers who are savvy enough to form their own opinions on the brand, as well as the opportunity to use digital to help journalists create engaging stories that are more discoverable, shareable, and long-lived.

Conclusion The lines between marketing and PR teams are blurring as never before. The brands who can capitalize on solid digital strategies, and bring these groups together at the start of a new campaign or messaging initiative, will see far more return on their investment through an integrated strategy.

Mel Carson is US brand ambassador at Majestic SEO and founder of Seattle-based Delightful Communications, a social media, digital PR, and personal branding consultancy.

Businesses are also embracing the notion of digital PR. Consumer opinion is proliferating

sesconference.com • SES 13

sessions SES San Francisco | September 11–13, 2013 | hosted by Sample Sessions

Download the app or visit www.SESSanFrancisco.com for complete agenda and session descriptions.

Day 1—Wednesday, September 11 10:30–11:30am

INTEGRATED Effectively Combining Paid, Owned and Earned Media In this session, you will: •• Learn how to analyze PPC keywords and adjust for SEO linking.

•• Discover how to increase organic keyword saturation using PPC data.

•• Learn to maintain lasting SEO ranking and increase PPC effectiveness.

•• Learn how content and social media drive SEO rank.

Speaker: •• Andrew Beckman, CEO, Location3 Media

2:50–3:20pm

OWNED Track There’s an App for That: How to Make Your Mobile App Discoverable Join this session and explore the world of new requirements for keeping your brand in the hands of your constantly connected mobile customers and building stronger relationships today. Learn how to acquire mobile app users by using traditional SEO techniques, track the performance of your mobile marketing, and boost performance with mobile advertising.

Moderator: •• Gregg Stewart, President, North America, Geary LSF Speaker: •• Jennifer Wong, Marketing Manager, HasOffers

Day 2—Thursday, September 12

11:45–12:45pm

10:15–11:15am

OWNED TRACK Secrets of Mobile Video: YouTube and Instagram and Vine, Oh My!

EARNED TRACK Driving Value from Earned Media through Quality Content

Attend this session to get the answers to these and other questions: •• Who are the people most likely to discover, watch, and share your mobile videos?

•• What steps should you take to create a mobile video for YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook?

•• When should you start building a cohesive mobile video strategy and viewing experience?

•• Where should you optimize your mobile videos to reach the widest possible audience?

Moderator: •• Melanie White, Special Projects Editor, ClickZ Speakers: •• Tony Gemma, Director of Sales Strategy, Millenial Media •• Greg Jarboe, President & Co-founder, SEO-PR

Learn best practices in creating quality content: •• How to create a cohesive brand story across thousands of posts, photos, videos, articles, and more.

•• How to use big data analytics to measure the real impact of social content on site and campaign traffic, conversion, brand reach, and ROI. •• Hear a case study on how Whole Foods manages content creation for 350 branded Facebook pages.

Moderator: •• Laura Roth, Head of Content, Interactive Marketing Division, Incisive Media Speakers: •• Jim Rudden, CMO, Spredfast •• Jennifer Slegg, CEO, JenSense

2:15-2:45pm

11:30–12:30pm

INTEGRATED Track Next Generation Mobile Engagement: Building Brand Love on Smaller Screens

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE TRACK Mad Men of Search: How They Leverage Data to Rock the Customer Experience

Brand engagement on mobile cannot be a rehash of the old model; it must be re-designed and re-imagined. Brands can no longer be interrupters; they need to be reciprocators, natively threaded into these moments to deliver unexpected value for consumers. In this session, Brian Wong will lead a discussion around next generation advertising on the smartphone channel, identifying how marketers can at last capitalize on and reward everyday activities.

Moderator: •• Adaline Lau, Editor, ClickZ Asia Speaker: •• Brian Wong, CEO & Co-Founder, Kiip.me

Big data has the potential to impact every aspect of your business.

This session will explore: •• How search algorithms have evolved over time.

•• How you can leverage big data.

•• What tools are available.

•• How to act on big data insights in real time.

It will cover everything search marketers need to know about big data for marketing and sales but might have been afraid to ask.

Speaker: •• Bryan Eisenberg, SES Advisory Board; NYTimes Bestselling Author, bryaneisenberg.com

14 SES • September 2013 {San Francisco}

Download the app or visit SESSanFrancisco.com.

sessions

2:30–3:30pm

12:00–1:00pm

INTEGRATED TRACK From Mobile PPC to Mobile SEO: Unlocking the Value of Mobile Marketing

PAID TRACK The RTB Opportunity for Online Marketers: Truths & Myths for Performance Targeting

In this session, you will learn: •• What is the Mobile Google Display Network and how it works.

•• How to pave wormholes so mobile users don’t get stranded.

•• How to identify key mobile signals that Google uses to rank your site.

•• How to understand how redirects are used and can be configured to properly route mobile users and bots to the relevant mobile page.

•• Tips for driving higher app rankings, free downloads, and usage.

Moderator: •• Greg Jarboe, President & Co-founder, SEO-PR Speakers: •• Michael J. Becker, Managing Director, North America, Mobile Marketing Association •• Brian Klais, Founder & CEO, Pure Oxygen Labs

Learn what retargeting really is and why most ad impressions are wasted spend. Overcome common challenges faced by the search marketer, such as view-through measurement and display creative.

Find out what RTB, DMPs, DSPs, and FBX could do for you, and leave with practical ideas about how to get started, how to execute, and how to measure your display in tandem with search.

Moderator: •• Erick Mott, Director, Social Business, Oracle Eloqua Speakers: •• Eran Metzer, Senior Director, Global Ad Marketplace, Yahoo!

•• David Scacco, Sr. Director, Agency & Marketer Development, Quantcast

2:30–3:30pm

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE TRACK Landing Page Optimization: Test, Analyze, Execute Find out what to test, how to analyze your landing pages and how to get significant revenue lift quickly. This session includes real case studies from leading companies like SAP, eBay, Iron Mountain, and Electronic Arts.

Moderator: •• Jamie Smith, Founder, Engine Ready Speakers: •• Noran El-Shinnawy, Director of Marketing, Onestop •• Chris Goward, Co-founder and CEO, WiderFunnel Marketing Optimization

Day 3—Friday, September 13

12:00–1:00pm

OWNED TRACK SCHEMA: The Silver Bullet Structured data, microdata, rich snippets—they are more important than ever, especially for local businesses. But how do you decode which schemas are most important for you, and where do you start in optimizing? This panel will discuss: •• How to structure and fill your meta data repository.

•• The mechanics of several rich snippet success stories.

•• The under-the-radar meta data that could make a huge difference for your business.

Moderator: •• Anne F. Kennedy, SES Advisory Board; International Search Strategist, Author, Beyond Ink USA Speakers: •• Daniel Schulman, Director of Search Marketing, Donordigital •• Kent Yunk, VP of SEO, PPC Associates 12:00–1:00pm

10:45–1:45am

EARNED TRACK Innovative Branded Content Campaigns to Drive Engagement Attend this session to learn: •• Examples of the most—and least—effective engagement practices of popular campaigns.

•• What consumption, connection and creation look like in practice, and which is best for your brand.

•• What will the future of integrated marketing look like?

Moderator: •• Simon Heseltine, Director of Audience Development, AOL Inc. Speakers: •• Ranvir Gujral, Co-Founder, Chute •• Dave McMullen, Partner/Strategic Planning, redpepper

EMAIL Track The Convergence of Email, Social, and Mobile Marketing Social media and mobile are prompting email marketers to reexamine the effectiveness of their current programs. With new social networks, mobile devices, and mobile apps constantly entering the digital arena, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. This session will provide an opportunity to pause, think, and take action on the intersection of email, social, and mobile.

Moderator: •• Sundeep Kapur, Digital Evangelist, NCR Corp.

Speakers: •• Jeremy Fong, Senior Marketing Specialist, San Francisco Federal Credit Union •• Eyal Mintz, CEO, Fan Interactive Marketing

sesconference.com • SES 15

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