The latest edition of Search Engine Strategies took place in Berlin and Refined Labs was also there. Lots of interesting search topics that were discussed by experts. It was a great event. But what else would you expect with Refined Labs founder Thomas Bindl as chairman? Here’s a short excerpt of what has happened.
Day 1
Covered Topics were the allocation of revenue in regards to long tail usage. This can be perfectly accomplished with a Bid-management tool. A well-chosen and optimized long tail can bring high revenue compared to spend. Take a look at our long tail case study with Google if you want to know more about the long tail and how you can optimize it.
Blue Summit discussed the relevance of brand keywords and how they affect the performance of your search campaign as well as the importance of the content network. The key findings in regards to booking the brand were, that the brand brings quality and history into your account and you get the possibility of an outcome oriented controlling of the customer via sitelinks.
Another session covered the value of the customer. You need to understand customer acquisition and where your customers come from. In addition we got an insight into how the search process is refined by the searcher and that 2 to 3 word queries are getting the highest CTRs in the German market.
In a very interesting session about cross media influence as well as the search process we learned that in the beginning the searcher is an informational searcher who becomes a transactional searcher and finally turns into a navigational searcher. Therefore the separation of brand and non-brand keywords is very important. A detailed analysis of the long tail and hence the funnel is essential. By the way, Refined Ads is a great tool to get the most out of the funnel and to accomplish these goals.
The last session of the day was a very entertaining session on link building strategies. Key findings were that the mixture of links is essential. There should be no pattern within the links – “bad links” are as essential as “good links”. Also the topic plays a key role within the link building process.
Day 2
Bill Hunt kicked off the second day with his keynote about “Getting ready for search 3.0”. What will search marketing offer in the future? Users will get a highly customized experience. The results will be based on interest or intent and there will be an increased opportunity to dominate the results listings. Search is becoming integrated with blogs, videos, PR and much more. This requires different thinking and companies need to evolve. More and more, the customer will become the center of all efforts. To say it with Bill Hunts’ words: “Stop talking start listening”.
The next session addressed the management of campaigns in multiple countries. If you manage campaigns in multiple countries it is very important to consider other search engines besides Google. In addition it is crucial to have an integrated way of controlling the campaign. Centralized or decentralized campaign management has its disadvantages. If you implement an integrated management you can minimize the disadvantages and get the best out of both worlds.
In a later session we heard that image SEO and video SEO is becoming more important since the advent of Google’s universal search, Bing and other search engine developments. But not only image SEO is changing. There will be a major shift in how you approach SEO and SEM. Universal search will change the search patterns. If companies do not adapt to those new developments quickly to gather data and to learn how those features work, they will most likely have major disadvantages within the market.
The following session showed the significance of social media. 700 million people are participating in social media worldwide. 43 million people are participating in Germany. A key message was, that if you want to use social media, it is crucial to know what you are doing. You need the ability to handle this massive power. You have to live social media.
Last but not least there was a very interesting session about the SEM and SEO tools and how you can facilitate the different tools that are out there on the market to get the best out of your SEM and SEO activities. Especially in SEO it is important to have an integrated tool that covers all areas. Some very interesting conclusions were that the value of classical organic search rankings is decreasing, SEO is getting more complex and more important at the same time and universal search again will play a very important role in the future. All told SEO Tools can help you to master these challenges.
So altogether we learned a lot and enjoyed our stay at SES Berlin. If you want to get a closer look and the presentations check out www.searchenginestrategies.de
