Search Marketing: Highlights from SMX East

The Search Marketing Expo (SMX) is the best national digital marketing conference, and I attended SMX East in New York earlier this month.

I spent most of my time in advanced search marketing sessions, plumbing the depths of topics such as quality scores, conversion optimization, remarketing, and bid testing.

But there were some bigger-picture takeaways that can benefit anyone interested in pumping up their sales and site traffic with digital marketing.

• Search is still growing rapidly, and is more heavily used than ever. Average searches per day on Google – which has 67% of the search market – are at 4.7 billion per day, up from 3.6 billion per day (a 31% increase) from last year.
• In this difficult economy, marketers are watching their spending more carefully than ever. They are cutting back on some types of promotions, but overall spending for search marketing will grow by a whopping 27% this year, compared to last.
• Marketers are increasingly using “remarketing,” which is the ability to show text or display ads on other sites to users who have visited your site. It provides a way to keep your message in front of prospects, and to reach customers across the entire buying cycle. Remarketing improves sales and/or lead generation response rates, and Altitude offers remarketing in all of its search campaign setups.
• The increasing use of mobile devices, such as smartphones and iPads, to access the internet leaves marketers with choices: should you build a mobile app, mobile landing pages, or “responsive design” landing pages? At Altitude, we can help you decide.
• The search engines are effectively killing manipulative, spammy organic search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. If you don’t have a strong content and PR strategy, you won’t contend for page 1.