SMX East Preview: What’s New & Why You Should Attend

Our annual Search Marketing Expo – SMX East is less than two months away, and it’s shaping up to be an exceptional show. We’ve developed a ton of new content for the conference to keep you current with the latest tactics, tools and techniques.

What’s New In SEO

A better question is “what isn’t new?” Google and Bing continue to roll out significant algorithm changes. Google made more than 600 changes to its core algorithm last year – that’s almost two changes per day!

SMX East panels will explore all the new SEO developments, with speakers who have dug deep and understand not only what the changes are, but how to adapt optimization techniques to the new realities. Some of the key trends you’ll hear about include:

How Google’s Hummingbird Algorithm Has Changed SEO: Both Google and Bing have become much better at going beyond keywords and understanding actual things – entities – and how they are interrelated. This has led to much richer search experiences for users, and presents opportunities for marketers fluent in new SEO tactics.

How Publishers Can Use Structured Data To Influence Search Results: Gone are the days when meta tags were one of the few ways you could define your content. Now there are numerous markup languages that let you influence how search engines see your site. Structured data also lets you take control of things like sitelinks, offering an easy way to gain more real estate in search results.

How To Deal With Increasingly Complex Technical Challenges: Doing effective SEO at scale requires detailed technical knowledge and the ability to execute flawless processes. Whether you’re dealing with canonicals, crawl priority, AJAX, HTML5, rel next and prev tags, to dynamic URL management and pagination topics, SMX East sessions will offer best practices and real-world examples of how to deal with real-world complexity.

How Google’s Pigeon Will Impact Your Local Search Results: Google’s Pigeon update is a newly released algorithm to provide more useful, relevant and accurate local search results that are tied more closely to traditional web search ranking signals. The core changes are behind the scenes, but do impact local search results rankings. Our expert local search panel will share tactics for coping with changes in web site referrals, leads and business from the new algorithm.

The Evolving Paid Search Landscape

Paid search advertisers have plenty to keep up with too – new ad formats, extensions, more sophisticated options for remarketing and retargeting, enhanced automation tools… to name just a few.

SMX East paid search sessions cover the fundamentals like creating, testing and optimizing paid search ads, and dive deep into advanced topics like bidding strategies and bid modifiers.
We’ll also tackle some thorny SEM issues including:

• protecting your brand from fraud, hijacking and infringement;
• time saving automation and scripting;
• and tactics you can use to keep your paid search campaigns fresh and delivering ROI.

SoLoMo? Conversions? E-commerce? You Bet!

The internet marketing landscape includes much more than SEO and SEM. Marketers increasingly integrate search with social, local and mobile campaigns. We’ll explore the intersections, and provide insights into maximizing the impact of your efforts, often in creative and fresh ways not considered by your competitors.

And that’s not all: You’ll also have the opportunity to attend sessions exploring topics such as analytics, conversion, video marketing, merchandising for ecommerce, attribution and other important areas of concern – and opportunity – for marketers.

You’ll also want to check out our newly created Ad Agency & CMO track, where we will delve into issues unique to agencies and the CMOs that hire them.

Finally, get personal, one-on-one advice from experts in SEM, SEO and social media marketing at our Clinic track.

A Stellar Lineup Of Speakers

In creating SMX shows, we begin by asking for input from the community. We distill the best concepts and combine them with our own ideas about the hot topics to create an agenda. Then we ask people to tell us why they should speak.

Selecting speakers this year was both gratifying and agonizing. We received an unprecedented number of exceptional submissions and turned away many more speakers than we accepted. It’s no exaggeration that every single session will showcase the knowledge and insights of subject matter experts who have pushed the envelope with new approaches (and learned valuable lessons) they’ll share from their own successful search marketing campaigns.

You’ll hear in-depth, TED-style solo sessions at the Summit track from hand-selected thought leaders in online marketing. You’ll get perspective on big picture issues to complement the tactics you use daily.

Register Today!

Don’t miss SMX East! Three day All Access passes are just $1695. Register before August 29th save $200!

Sending your team? You can save up to 35% when registering three or more people. To book your group, complete the team registration form and e-mail [email protected]. Or you call us at (877) 242-5242 (Monday to Friday, 9am-5pm ET).

Helpful SMX East links:

• Check out the agenda at a glance
• First time? Here’s what to expect
• See what past attendees have said
• Need approval? Get your Boss Onboard
• Hotel & travel information
• Have more questions? Check out our FAQ