| Online Marketing Summit Debrief Posted: 16 Feb 2011 01:39 PM PST Last week I had a great opportunity to attend the Online Marketing Summit in San Diego. It’s a conference that attracted more than 1,000 professionals from across the country and globe who were eager to learn more about online marketing and SEO from expert speakers. I decided to take and share my notes on Twitter so that I wouldn’t run the risk of not being able to read my handwriting later, or losing my notepad. And I’m glad I did — I connected with several great people who noticed my tweets and then recognized me in a session. (Side note: This is the big benefit of using your real name as your Twitter handle and having an avatar that looks like you.) You can see my tweet notes from OMS here (look for the #OMS11 hashtag from February 8-10) for bite-sized nuggets of insights as I heard them. In this blog post I have digested the key things I learned or had re-affirmed at the Online Marketing Summit for easier and more thorough consumption:
- Local and mobile are the big trends to prepare for. One speaker said a trend to watch out for is sites being pushed down in search results by local results. To compete in the local space, the first thing you will want to do is claim your Google Places and other listings. People are checking email more and more from their mobile phone, so keep your marketing emails and newsletters short. Use fewer images and a compelling subject line.
- Reviews are very important.
- More and better reviews of your company (on Google, CitySearch, etc.) can help you rank better for local SEO.
- Visible reviews for products on e-commerce sites can help build trust and make your visitors more likely to convert or purchase.
- Site speed is more important for SEO than we thought. Two speakers stressed the importance of site speed for SEO and rankings, including empirical tests by Covario. This makes our article about simple ways to make your website load faster even more relevant, so I loved hearing it.
- Content is key. Creating more content on your site provides more opportunities to get linked to, and fresh content can help keep search engines coming back to your site. The more content the better, but don’t sacrifice quality: You can do all the online marketing in the world, but it won’t help much if your content isn’t good. If you don’t have the time or resources to devote to building content, look for opportunities to:
- Take offline content and put it on your site
- Re-purpose content you already have
- Add basic content to pages that don’t have any, like product category pages on an e-commerce site
- Don’t forget about people once they’re on your site. It can be easy to focus entirely on getting more people to your website, but don’t forget about what really matters: visitors converting into customers. Several OMS sessions focused on testing, conversion, and usability, all with the goal of making the most out of your visitors. One simple but often overlooked change that can improve your conversion rate is making your call to action (like the “add to cart” or “sign up” button) more obvious. Tim Ash suggested making sure your mother-in-law could figure out and do what your site wants her to do.
- Social is even more important now that it’s a ranking factor. The Online Marketing Summit was abuzz with talk of social media. It’s important as a stand-alone marketing tool, plus now it can influence your site’s SEO. Rand Fishkin shared how SEOmoz shot to Page One of results for a particular search after a tweet linking to his site was retweeted about 100 times.
- Links are still very important for SEO. Several speakers said that about 75 to 80 percent of ranking is tied to the backlinks to your site.
I look forward to attending SearchFest and other online marketing events so I can share the latest and greatest insights about online marketing with you.  |
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