As the UK search marketing industry awaits the sound of the Search Engine Strategies 2010 conference wagon wheels rolling into town in February, we took a look at the event’s schedule, to see what some of the key themes and topics will be this year.
Many will be excited to hear the keynote speeches from Avinash Kaushik, Google’s leading Analytics guru and Author, and from Jim Sterne, Author and Chairman of the Web Analytics Association. And indeed the theme of analytics and conversion modeling, conversion attribution and optimisation features frequently throughout the three-day event schedule. Clearly search marketers are no strangers to accountability, but being able to lift search out of its silo and beyond the last click, and to model its success in line with the performance of a brand’s website and of its entire cross-media activity is front of mind for the industry in 2010.
There are the usual suspects for those new to search marketing such as Introductions to Paid Search and SEO and link building strategies. And it is important that such industry events accommodate the needs of new market entrants as well as stalwarts.
Another theme which has more prominence on the SES conference schedule this year than it has in previous years is the importance of ensuring that search informs and shapes content strategy. On Wednesday 17th February (Day 2) there is a panel called “Developing Great Content” which will explore a range of web content development strategies that are born of the search marketing set (as opposed to the more ‘traditional set’ of journalists, copy writers and designers).
Reform’s Amanda Davie will be speaking in this session, and will be joined by search content and publishing specialists from Site Logic Marketing, SearchEngineWatch, SuccessWorks and SEO-PR.