Wanted: Session ideas for SMX West

We want your input to help us plan our upcoming SMX West conference, which will be taking place on February 19 – 21, 2019 in San Jose. Specifically, we’d love to hear from you if you have an great idea for a session that you think should be on the agenda. And if you’re interested in speaking at the show, the absolute best way to improve your chances of being chosen is to get involved at this point, by suggesting an awesome idea that really catches our attention.

This year, we’re adding both breadth and depth to the agenda. We’ll have more tracks, and are looking for speakers who can dig deeper into topics, speaking for 20-40 minutes or more. This means we’ll also be adding topics that we haven’t been able to cover in the past, enriching the overall content experience for our attendees. What are we looking for, specifically?

We’re still planning to focus on SMX’s core areas, SEO and SEM. But we’re looking for presentations that go beyond the basics, or even intermediate or advanced best practices that most search marketers are familiar with. We’re acknowledging that search marketers are increasingly responsible for more and more diverse types of work, and are no longer siloed into traditional SEO or SEM roles.

We’re looking for novel approaches that have been proven to save time or money. Or unique or unusual ways to use existing tools to gain a competitive edge. And we’ll also be asking speakers to provide three tangible objectives that will result in attendees taking away new knowledge or skills that they can put to use right away in their own jobs.

We’re also planning to devote a significant amount of programming to ecommerce. What sorts of tactics should online retailers be focusing on to attract customers? How can advertisers take their shopping campaigns to the next level? When does it make sense to take a multi-faceted approach using integrated campaigns across search, advertising and social channels? We welcome your proposals covering these areas and any others that would be useful for online merchants wanting to increase profits and ROI.

We’re also looking for sessions that go beyond core SEO and SEM activities but are still essential parts of a comprehensive search marketing effort or campaign. Topics like:

• Analytics
• Data visualizations
• Key reports and dashboards and how to use them
• Creative approaches to keyword research
• Conversion Rate Optimization
• Landing page optimization
• User experience
• Content marketing and copywriting
• Creative use of images, infographics and other visuals
• Integrating search marketing with other types of digital marketing or offline campaigns
• Video marketing, both paid and organic
• Favorite tools, both paid and free
• Remarketing and retargeting in all of its forms
• Technical SEO topics (be specific: e.g. JavaScript, crawling issues, pagination, redirects, hreflang, etc)
• Emerging channels, such as podcasting and voice search
• How to build and deploy skills for personal assistants
• Understanding and leveraging the role of AI in online marketing
• Management, leadership, and career development of marketing teams

We’re looking for the best of the best: seasoned professionals, acknowledged thought leaders, inspiring communicators. People who will wow attendees with their knowledge and motivate them to chart new territory in their own online marketing campaigns.

We are also looking for exclusivity. We want content that’s unique from speakers who don’t recycle the content they share at other conferences or events. If you want to speak at SMX, we want you to share something here people won’t get anywhere else, and we will be asking you to agree to that exclusivity. In return, we’ll provide you with our trademarked world-class conference production services and venues, and motivated attendees who are hungry to learn from you.

Key Milestones For SMX West — Mark Your Calendar!

• Session Ideas Accepted: Through Friday, Sept. 27
• Agenda Posted: Week of Oct. 21
• Speaking Pitches Accepted After Agenda Posting: Through November

If you would like to share your experience and insight with the community around a search marketing challenge you’ve faced and the way you addressed it — and we hope you are — we’d love for you to send in a proposal to speak at SMX West. Please read our guidelines for speaking at SMX conferences, use the session idea suggestion form to describe your idea.

Don’t delay! The session idea suggestion form closes Friday, September 27.