The Future of SEO/SEM - SXSWi Panel Notes

Posted March 13th, 2008 at 2:59pm

These are notes that I took during a panel at SXSWi 2008 presented by William Leake of Apogee Search. I have seen William speak a few times now, have talked with him at a few local AustinIMA meetings, and Apogee tends to exhibit at most relevant conferences that I attend. He’s a very nice guy who is clearly passionate about what he does. He loves his ‘product’ and has an easy way about him in his ever-present jeans and cowboy boots.

Please note: Some of this is from the presentation and some are my thoughts on the issues on which he presented.

SEO 3.0: Optimizing Search & Social for 2008 and Beyond

Local is hotness.

Right now local SEO is easy peasy. (well, comparatively) So where are the companies/people specializing in local search placement? Is this a matter local businesses not understanding the power/value of being found? A quick search on Austin’s craigslist shows there are some offerings, but are they speaking the language that these local businesses are using? Some examples:

• Social Marketing, Search Engine Ranking Placement, and web development
• Free Search Engine Optimization Proposal, SEO Consulting Services
• #1 Google Ranking Wanted ? SEO Consultant Available | Top 10 Ranking

Okay, so call me crazy, but if I own the little flower shop on Main Street, what are the odds that I am going to know what any of those words mean?! “Ranking Placement?” “SEO?” Is using the word “consultant(ing) supposed to make you sound professional? Or scary to the mom and pop shops all over town. Seriously, people. There are literally thousands of businesses in Austin that would benefit from just a few hours of work yet these ads are sure to scare most of them away. I imagine most small businesses take the position, “I know I want more people on my website, but I have no idea how to get that done.” Am I wrong? They don’t care what you can do. They care what you can do for THEM. Why not try something like these:

• “Get found online by Austin customers. I can make sure your website is where they are looking!”
• “Want more Austinites to find your website but you aren’t sure how? I can do that for a one-time fee.”

William suggested a one-time fee of $500 to get a local company ranked where necessary. Spend $100 on labor and the rest is profit. There are lots of places to do this from the most obvious - like Google local - to paid services - like an upgraded placement on CitySearch.com. So many opportunities. So few people doing it right.

IMO, the local SEO space is very, very cool. In the past the web has been all about how big the world is and how we can find something across the globe with just a few clicks. While that’s great, I think the local space has tremendous value that isn’t being tapped fully yet. (I will write more about this later.)

(Note: being that this is local, this topic varies widely. Understand *your*market - they are all different!)

Google results are getting more blended.

Have you noticed lately how much the goog is integrating other types of results within the standard web page returns? I am sure you *have* noticed this, but have you been using it to get better rankings? For whatever you want to rank for, you need to *at least* be producing video content and properly tagging it across all the video sites that you use regularly. This certainly has benefits of its own, but wouldn’t you like an extra opportunity to snag another top spot with a different kind of media?

William’s example was ‘I have a dream‘. If you click on that you see standard natural results, a paid ad, plus a google books result, plus You Tube videos (with thumbnails). Add to that possible news results and images and you have the full spectrum. If you want to be found you need to be everywhere that you can. This has never been more important than now.

Hype for 08.

• Virtual worlds
• Pay per call (search engines didn’t jump on board with this for lots of reasons)
• Mobile (he doesn’t believe this is the year for mobile to go mainstream)

Hot in 08.

• More and more video media
• Social media optimization (this is really just word of mouth marketing, but there are always new was to facilitate it)
• More convergence and cross-channel marketing (ie. a video campaign plays into a tv commercial campaign)

Ad agency frustration.

William expressed clear and palpable frustration with traditional ad agencies and their (and he was generalizing here) inability to adapt to new ways of working their craft. His example was taking two approaches to running a large print campaign in CFO Magazine. The traditional media approach would be to create ads, do ‘focus groups’, and determine which ad should get the huge ad spend.

OR, his approach. Have the ad agency do what they do best and create a bunch of different ads. Then take all those beautiful creatives and run them at CFO.com to test their effectiveness. The best man wins, and the winner will become obvious with the proper metrics. Boom, you have your ad and you know it worked.

I have to agree - this should be standard thinking, but I also admit that I have limited experience with ad agencies. My limited experience tells me that the ones that I have dealt with for NBF can be clueless about how to *actually* reach their consumers. It baffles me.

Video Optimization.

An audience members asked about proper video optimization. William said that the best that we can do now is produce good, linkable video content and properly tag it. Don’t stuff keywords. I would add to that also that there are a TON of video sites out there. Make sure you aren’t missing a niche video site for whatever you are promoting.

I think it will be very cool when search engines can actually read the internal content of the videos. I know there are a bunch of companies scrambling to perfect this, and when they do it’ll be hot.

Natural SEO.

I think this came out of an audience question. William suggested something that I think should be standard practice. If you are setting out to optimize a site, start with a 1 month PPC campaign with a ton of words in it. As many as you can possibly reach for in your niche. Run it and carefully track what words are converting. At the end of the month, analyze your list and you have your terms for SEO. Don’t waste time on words you think you can get rank for if they won’t convert (and you would likely rank for them anyway if they are easy). Likewise, put some effort into words that are a reach because of the competition, but they convert like crazy. It’s amazing how many companies have no clue what their best converting phrases are. Scary, actually.

I think that’s most of it. He said more things, but they were more common sense SEO than anything, so I didn’t jot them down. I know this isn’t rocket science, but I think he really added value - and the audience seemed to concur. I think that even today there is just a ton of mystery around this stuff. It’s fascinating because it feels like, after all this time, that it’s been around forever.

Nice job, William! See you at the next AustinIMA event.

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