Reseo at SMX Sydney

Earlier this month the team here at Reseo headed up to Sydney to attend Australasia’s largest annual search marketing expo, SMX Sydney, held in amongst carousals and dodgem cars at iconic Luna Park.

During the two day conference we were inundated with insightful presentations ranging from twitter tips to blended search tactics to bot herding and more. International speakers such as Bruce Clay and Rand Fishkin imparted valuable information on developments, techniques and trends in the SEO industry, while Chris gave his first ever SMX presentation, on the topic of ‘Copywriting for Search’, which received a lot of positive feedback. Nice work Chris!

Here are a few tidbits from the presentations I personally enjoyed the most (apart from Chris’s of course!):

Twitter Tips & Etiquette - Darren Rowse (ProBlogger)

Darren Rowse knows a thing or two about Twitter and uses it to its full potential. He frequently shares this wisdom on his popular Twitter site TwiTip. Along with discussing Twitter benefits and tips for business, Darren provided us with some interesting stats:

• Twitter is now the fastest growing ‘member’ or ‘community’ site on the web.
  
• There are approximately 6 million tweets sent every day!
  
• Twitter has had 1,382% growth in the past 12 months (Feb 08 -Feb 09).
  
• The largest user group is 35-49 year olds.
  
• Twitter is currently the 49th most popular site in Australia, and rising. (It has since risen to 17th).

Handy Twitter Tools recommended by Darren are:

• TweetDeck
  
• CoTweet
  
• Monitter
  
• Twends
  
• Twitter Hawk

What made this presentation even more entertaining were the overwhelming number of people twittering non-stop, about a presentation on Twitter. Twitter overload!

What’s New in Mobile Search – Cindy Krum (Rank-Mobile)

Cindy Krum gave a fascinating presentation on the rise of mobile search. She emphasised its increasing importance due to the mass convergence between users and phones such as the iPhone with 3G and open Wifi access, faster download speeds and cheaper pricing plans. She also highlighted the important differences between traditional SEO and Mobile SEO:

• Different search behaviour (more specific and the desire for immediate intent/action).
  
• Different crawlers.
  
• Different algorithms.
  
• Different search results pages.

Cindy also stressed that mobile search is still in its infancy and provides huge opportunities for those who take advantage of it early.

Conversion Rate Optimisation – Stephen Pavlovich (Conversion Rate Experts)

This was a great presentation and probably the one we got the most out of. Stephen covered some very useful content including the nine stages of conversion rate optimisation. He discussed (among other things) how to best understand your visitors (particularly the non-converting ones), improving web site usability, using advanced market intelligence and carrying out experiments on your website. He also covered off a number of methods for handling conversion objections.

Stephen provided us with a number of useful tools to help in receiving feedback from online visitors. Some of these are:

• Crazy Egg
  
• SurveyMonkey
  
• 4Q.iperceptions.com
  
• Kampyle
  
• Google Website Optimizer

Some other interesting insights gleaned at SMX were the current and emerging trends in the SEO industry. In particular:

• There has been an increase in interest in search marketing since the global financial crash.
  
• A lot more awareness in SEO has lead to increased competition levels.
  
• Search engines are cracking down on spam, with more immediate action.
  
• Search engines now have a lot more data sources to use when ranking a site, not just content and links.
  
• More options have been and will continue to be added to search results pages.
  
• Social Media is merging with SEO.

Overall the conference was a great success and a fantastic opportunity to meet some respected names in the industry. We left with a wealth of new information, tactics, tools and ideas which we’ve already started to explore and integrate in to our current SEO projects.

Annemarie Hunter - Search Marketing Specialist