International Search Summit (ISS) Interview with Andy Atkins-Krüger

Following on the theme of conference interviews with Danny Sullivan from SMX London and Kelvin Newman for BrightonSEO, todays interview is with Andy Atkins-Krüger ahead of the International Search Summit (ISS) in London on 14th May 2012.

The International Search Summit is obviously coming up soon in London – can you just give us a bit of background about the event for those who haven’t attended before? The first public International Search Summit was organised in London in May 2008 – originally it was created because the major search conferences didn’t have enough space on the agenda to accommodate a deep content on international search subjects. Personally, they were mostly kind enough to invite me along and I’d have 10 minutes to cover what is a huge subject. Compare that with the typical presentation which today, I open the ISS with which runs to some 30 minutes followed by speakers throughout the rest of the day. Since then we have been running the ISS twice a year in London, with a selection of other cities which, for one reason or another, have invited us. The last year we teamed up with the great team at SMX to run the event alongside SMX in most locations globally.What are the main sessions you’re looking forward to seeing yourself and the key takeaways attendees should be looking to learn? Difficult to choose – we have some great speakers this year including Pierre Far from Google, Bas van den Beld from State of Search, Nick Garner from Unibet and Lisa Myers from Verve search. However, I’m particularly interested in learning more from Lee Macini of Sekari who will be talking about the Arabic web. I believe the Arabic speaking world is still wide open for search marketers and whilst we’ve been working in that region for some years, I think we all have a lot to learn. However, I have to add that the most valuable things I’ve learned from ISS in the past were things I hadn’t even thought about. ISS is very good at opening your eyes to new opportunities.The last 12-months have been crazy in terms of the number of changes we’ve seen in search. How has this impacted global SEO strategies? Over the last 12 months the impact of search engine changes on global SEO strategies has been huge. Currently, the most hotly contested issue is the use of canonicals combined with Hreflang tags which is pretty recent by anyone’s measure. Pierre Far will be the third speaker this year addressing this issue and we’re certainly aiming to try and clear some of the fog surrounding it. Mind you the Hreflang tag, in my opinion, is a response by Google to try and help global search marketers to cope with the vast waves of movement we have seen on global websites in the last twelve months. Panda, in particular, was targeted at improving the quality of content and removing abusers – but it has had a very negative impact on big global websites too, especially those using machine translation. It seems that Panda thinks a website automatically translated into multiple languages by machine falls into the same category as content spinners! Trouble is, to fix the problem in 40 languages and 160 countries costs huge sums of money that no one can really justify. And this only scratches the surface. As more and more companies try to gain a foothold internationally, the competition is growing and the need to market effectively has put huge pressure on the SEO teams. Whilst some of the technical aspects are the same, the impacts and the means of addressing them are not!In terms of SEO strategies – how different do you see tactics being across different countries? For example, have the rollouts of Google panda, Google Venice, Google+/personalisation etc affected the global search market in the same way as the US and UK? Or do some of the old tactics still work in certain countries better than you’d expect? SEO strategies do need to vary by market because the markets are different – even though Google’s overriding algorithm works principally in the same way. The biggest issue is dealing with language, relevant local keywords and understanding really what the customers want to know and how it’s different. About Us pages, for instance, are really important for some countries, less so for others. Of course, we also have to keep an eye on Yandex, Baidu, Seznam and Naver which are all very different to Google. They’re also now spreading into other international markets than their home bases – such as Turkey or Egypt – so delegates to ISS are often interested to learn more of these search engines as they can be somewhat obscure. And as we cover social media and its connections with search, Google+ is a BIG topic for international folks right now. The agenda looks great – obviously it’s very internationally focussed with a nice mix of speakers from different regions.Is the ISS audience aimed at global marketers look to take SEO to the next level internationally? And how do you see this fitting in alongside SMX London this year? ISS delegates include agencies who are looking after clients with international needs as well as clients with years of global search marketing experience and “newcomers” to the field – noting that these “newcomers” are often highly experienced SEOs or search marketers who’ve acquired new responsibilities. We also have teams from organisations which have just decided they should “go global” and now they need to figure out how. The discussions to locate ISS alongside SMX in London happened because for a couple of years ISS took place the week before SMX and we were getting delegates flying in from all over the world to attend ISS, stay the weekend and then go to SMX. So it made sense to bring the events much closer together. But it also meant that SMX didn’t have to worry so much about spending more of its valuable agenda grid time on international content even in a global city like London. So the combination worked really well and has continued to develop. I first met Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman in 2004 and it is a privilege to work with them – as the ISS team we do feel a great sense of responsibility to deliver top notch content on international topics to complement the great work they’re doing!

This event is running alongside SMX London this year – so maybe sign up for both with our 15% off discount code (SEOPTIMISE012) and see you there!

Kevin Gibbons is Founder/Director of Strategy at SEOptimise. Kevin is well known within the search industry as a blogger for sites such as Search Engine Land, Econsultancy and Search Engine Watch. Kevin is also a frequent SEO speaker at a number of conferences including Search Marketing Expo (SMX), Search Engine Strategies (SES), a4uexpo, SAScon and BrightonSEO.

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BlueGlass LA Interview with Chris Winfield

In the last in our series of conference interviews (for now at least), I’m talking to Chris Winfield ahead of the BlueGlass LA conference later this month. Personally I find it incredibly useful attending US conferences in order to keep up with how the industry is developing in the States – this has included SMX Advanced in Seattle and Pubcon Las Vegas in the past – and this year I’m heading over to the BlueGlass LA event.

Image credit: Dana Lookadoo

Thanks to Chris for taking the time to answer these questions – here goes:

1) I haven’t attended a BlueGlass event before, but I have heard great things about them (which is why I’m attending this year) – can you give us a bit of background about the event and let us know why first-time attendees should sign up? 

Over the years, several of us at the company have attended and spoken at just about every Internet marketing conference. I did make great connections going to shows, but it was because I was going to 10+ conferences a year with a lot of the same people. We wanted to find a way to whittle this type of networking down into just one conference where you’d also learn from the best minds in the industry without sacrificing an entire week of your time.

We set out to create an experience where attendees can see real benefits in their business because of what they’ve learned and who they’ve connected with. Because we cap our conference size and everyone attends the same sessions (one track), there’s ample opportunity to form relationships with the other participants AND speakers. The speakers don’t just show up for their panels: they attend the sessions and hang out with everyone. It’s nearly impossible to get that kind of access at a big conference.

What a lot of people don’t realize is we’re not in the conference business. We don’t profit off of our conferences (we’d be happy to just break-even on one of these). That in itself differentiates us from other conferences since we don’t have to be focused on the bottom line.

2) BlueGlass has made a fantastic name for itself in a very short space of time – obviously you must be delighted with the growth experienced, but with that do you think there comes an expectation with this to take things further? The BlueGlass events seem to be very highly thought of because of the high-quality of sessions, hand-selected speakers and the limited number of attendees which creates a more intimate community feel. Do you think you can keep that balance if Blueglass was to grow into a larger scale event?

Honestly, it’s hard to believe this is only our fourth conference. We’ve learned so much about how to put on a show in just under two years. I can only imagine what our conferences will look like in another two years.

I’m really proud of the niche we’ve carved out for ourselves, and I don’t see a reason to veer much from this formula in the future. Instead, we’ll continue coming up with ways to get a great mix of speakers, include even more in the cost of a ticket, and facilitate networking among participants.

I don’t think taking things further necessarily means growing our attendance roster. We’ve managed to improve on each conference without compromising the intimate feel we set out to achieve with our very first conference.

3) As I mentioned I’ve heard lots of great things about BlueGlass (both as a company and the events), the team is full of world-class speakers/bloggers, you all actively use Twitter etc. I’m a big fan of the inbound marketing approach and I’m sure BlueGlass is an excellent example of this paying off very effectively, but I just wondered how you value putting the effort in to building a strong brand and reputation. I remember seeing an interesting case study on how Pubcon saved $xxx,000 on advertising by replacing this with Twitter and word-of-mouth promotion – do you measure and compare this activity against alternative advertising methods/costs in a similar way?

We planned to start seriously start promoting BlueGlass LA in April, but we’ve already sold out! We’ve been fortunate enough that we’ve never spent money advertising our conferences. It’s been done using word-of-mouth and our own resources: social media, our site and newsletters.

We’ve actually watched conversations on Twitter where someone is talking about our conference, and next thing we know we have a ticket purchased from one of their followers. That’s pretty damn cool.

4) What are the main sessions you’re looking forward to seeing yourself at Blueglass LA?

As you mentioned before, we hand-picked all of the speakers. In other words, this is the BlueGlass team’s dream speaker list. We also come up with most of the session topics, so it’s also what we want to hear our dream team speak about! This is by far our best lineup yet, so it’s not easy to pick just one or two sessions. But if I have to…

Having Chris Brogan and Brian Clark speak together will be off the charts. Plus, I get to moderate their panel, called Cultivating Visibility: How to Amplify the Human Digital Channel. 

I’m also really excited for the PR panel, called Why Trusted Recommendation is the New Public Relations. There are few people I want to hear talk about the shifting PR landscape more than Peter Shankman, Sonia Simone and Adam Singer. 

5) 2011 and early 2012 seem to have been crazier than ever in the world of search. What do you think have been the biggest game changers in search during the last 6 months and should be the key takeaways from the event?

We made sure our sessions touch on most, if not all, of the recent game changers.

Greg Boser has a killer presentation planned for his first session where he’ll walk through what he considers the most pivotal algorithm tweaks Google’s made since November. We have an entire panel focusing on alternative data-collection methods in wake of Google’s “not provided” keywords. If Panda taught us anything, it’s that everything needs to be built around quality content. As such, our agenda for this conferences focuses on a lot of content marketing.

Honestly, I haven’t thought of anything as being a game changer in a really long time. And that’s not because there haven’t been huge, momentous events or actual changes but rather because the only constant in this game is change.

6) The agenda looks amazing, packed full of great speakers and very interesting/topical sessions – what type of audience is this aimed towards and as our readers are largely from the UK, do you think this has an international appeal?

This is a more advanced conference, so many of those attending have at least several years experience in the industry. Our audience includes business owners, SEOs and marketing teams representing companies ranging from small to global, in a wide range of verticals. We also have a lot of return attendees. Some people have been to all 4 of our conferences (and no, they don’t work for us!).

Most online marketing principles are universal, so the overall agenda will appeal to just about anyone in the industry. We don’t have any sessions specifically focused on international topics, but we do have quite a few Europeans speaking (Joost de Valk, Marcus Tandler and Dennis Goedeubuure – even though Dennis is now a California resident :) so I expect their presentations to be infused with what they’ve learned in international markets. And I should mention our Chairman of the Board Richard Zwicky is Canadian and moderating one of the SEO panels (yes, Canadian counts as international!).

We have quite a few attendees traveling from all over the world (yourself included), so we expect this to be quite an international crowd.

If you want to signup for BlueGlass LA unfortunately you’re now too late! The event fully sold out (always a good sign though!), but of course there will be further events announced later in the year. And if you’ve missed our previous interviews – we’ve also spoken about SAScon, SMX London, BrightonSEO, ionSearch (I’m also speaking at all four) and International Search Summit.

Kevin Gibbons is Founder/Director of Strategy at SEOptimise. Kevin is well known within the search industry as a blogger for sites such as Search Engine Land, Econsultancy and Search Engine Watch. Kevin is also a frequent SEO speaker at a number of conferences including Search Marketing Expo (SMX), Search Engine Strategies (SES), a4uexpo, SAScon and BrightonSEO.

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BrightonSEO 2012 Interview with Kelvin Newman

Following on from my interview with Danny Sullivan last week – I decided to give our readers some insight into some of the other up-and-coming events, so that they can get an idea about what each has to offer and why they are different etc. We’ll be running a series of similar interviews during the next week, starting today with the host of BrightonSEO Kelvin Newman.

Image credit: Flickr

 The growth of BrightonSEO has been phenomenal over the last couple of years and April’s event promises to the biggest yet. So is it going to be the best? :) It’s been crazy the growth, the first event we had thirty forty people along and now we’ve got a thousand, which I hope is a testament to the quality of the content at the event. Will the next one be the best? I certainly hope so, though as the event gets bigger it does become harder to please everyone but I think more than any other event in the industry it brings the biggest and best selection of SEOs in one room at one time. Being free means more people from smaller agencies or in-house teams can make it along than other more expensive events. The speakers we’ve got this time are simply outstanding and in most cases are delivring the type of session I can’t imagine being scheduled at any other events. We’re avoiding covering the conference cliches like ‘content is king’ and really delving deep into to what I think are the most interesting areas of search.What are the main sessions you’re looking forward to? The Q&A session with Pierre Farr from Google and Dave Coplin from Bing has huge potential, I know there’s loads of probing questions and unusual anomalies people want to ask them about, I’ve got high hopes for that session. I’m also looking forward to hearing from Glenn Jones and Phillip Sheldrake who aren’t part of the SEO world but are experts in areas which have the potential to make a huge difference to the SEO game, the internet of things and semantic mark-up.BrightonSEO has always been a great event for encouraging new speakers in the UK – how do you find the balance between giving opportunities to first-time speakers and growing the event in size? It’s great to have developed a reputation for finding new speakers and introducing them to the circuit, I take huge pride in seeing people who did their first major speaking gig at BrightonSEO now delivering talks all over the country and world. The reason I invite new speakers is twofold, everyone needs a first opportunity to speak at an event, so I think any conference organiser has an obligation to try and find new talent, but the real reason is too many conference organisers are scared to take risks so rely on the ‘old guard’ of speakers who they’ve worked with in the past. That’s not a bad thing, especially as I’m probably part of that old guard. But I want BrightonSEO to have the most interesting talks of any marketing event and to do that I need to find people who have new perspectives or won’t just roll out their ‘greatest hits’ set. As the audience becomes larger it does become tricky. Other than maybe the keynote slots at the big conferences, the audience at BrightonSEO is probably the biggest of any event now. that’s daunting for a first time speaker; but what I’m interested in is do they have something new and compelling to say. If they do – they’ve got nothing to worry about.What do you think have been the biggest game changers in search during the last 6 months and should be the key takeaways from the event? It certainly feels a bit more dramatic than usual, but I don’t think many of the changes are things most of us couldn’t have anticipated. But I think the changes rewarded people taking action; for example we all knew it made sense for Google to better personalise results pages based on the recommendations of someone’s friends. So rather than just anticipating that but doing nothing the early winners in Search Plus Your World will be those who were taking action! I hope what the next event will do is give people a few more things to add to their to do list, the challenge is executing on those items.Can you tell us more about what else you’re doing around the conference this year? One of the downsides to squeezing lots of talks into the conference is you can’t always go into quite as much details as you’d like, so this time we’ve added three workshops the day before covering Advanced Analytics, What SEO can learn from PR and Building your own SEO tools and we’ve also got a bowling competition the day after as well, which I imagine will be closely fought!

The event is on 13th April and already sold out – but if you’re heading down, we’re bringing the team and myself and Chelsea Blacker from SEOptimise are both speaking – so make sure you say hi!

Kevin Gibbons is Founder/Director of Strategy at SEOptimise. Kevin is well known within the search industry as a blogger for sites such as Search Engine Land, Econsultancy and Search Engine Watch. Kevin is also a frequent SEO speaker at a number of conferences including Search Marketing Expo (SMX), Search Engine Strategies (SES), a4uexpo, SAScon and BrightonSEO.

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SAScon 2012 Interview with Pete Young

Last week we ran a series of blog interviews for the up-and-coming search conferences and events, including SMX London, International Search Summit, BrightonSEO and ionSearch – today we look at SAScon, with answers from co-organiser Pete Young.

SAScon has quickly grown into a key UK industry event – when starting out did you ever see this as the plan? And are there any further plans to expand this moving forward? The original concept round Sascon was to deliver a complete search engine marketing and social marketing conference which could compete against established conferences such as Search Engine Strategies and SMX – but do this in the regions rather than in London which is where a number of the more established conferences tend to be. At the end of the day there are some fantastic search and social marketeers in the regions and some great work being done here, and thus it seemed a shame not to take advantage of it. Moving forward there are plans to take Sascon to a far wider audience, outside of just the UK. At the end of the day, search and social marketing are still growing perhaps even faster outside of the UK and it would be great to take the Sascon brand to more people. Further to that being involved in the Search Awards (of which there are the European Search Awards in Amsterdam on the 5th July – http://www.europeansearchawards.com) is allowing us to show case much of the good work many search businesses are doing and taking both the awards and the Sascon brands to a far bigger audience.What are the main sessions you’re looking forward to seeing yourself? Given that I helped put alot of the panels together thats a difficult one to answer as I think all of them have their own strengths but on a personal note I always enjoy watching Martin McDonald speaking and his panel with Jon Quinton should be particularly interesting – not to mention I am moderting :). Also looking forward to seeing how some of the new panel frameworks come together as we have tweaked some of the panels a bit to encourage more debate not just from the panelists themselves but from the wider audience as well.With SAScon standing for “Search, Analytics and Social Media conference” how do you think the integration between these disciplines has changed during the last 6-12 months? I think one only has to look at the Google search results to see just how much the landscape has changed recently. Search and social are now so integrated as Google looks to evolve beyond a pure search player. This in itself is bringing its own challenges. Changes to the way they parse data for example has implications not just for SEO’s but for paid search marketeers as well – and the integrated picture becomes a far more complicated beast than it was 12 months ago. That is something I am looking forward to seeing come out of Sascon – how people are embracing these challenges and making them work in this new environment.What do you think have been the biggest game changers in search during the last 6 months and should be the key takeaways from the event? Personally, I would have to say the integration of social and the personalisation aspects this has allowed Google in particular to integrate into our results have been a particular challenge. The one size fits all approach is no longer applicable and we are now having to think multi channel , multi touch points to ensure we make our sites and content as visible as possible. Further to that the complexities caused by the data or lack of it that Google allow us is another issue that has caused a number of late nights as we look to highlight to advertisers the impact and effect of our work on what we know is a viable marketing channel.And lastly, why should people attend the event? I noticed a mix of sessions which focus on in-house strategies, plus verticals such as retail and gaming – what type of audience do you expect to be attending? We are trying to create an event that caters for all. The modern day search conference landscape is increasingly competitive with some great conferences such as Think Visibility already well established over in Leeds. For that reason we have to cater for a slightly different audience, and in particular we have looked to engage with client side marketeers – who sometimes I think dont get the value out of due to the high agency side involvement in many events. Further to this, we want to create a legacy. Sascon is a not for profit event. When myself, Nicky Wake (from Dont Panic), Richard Gregory (from Latitude), Simon Wharton (from Pushon), Peter Cobley (Home James), Richard Hudson (Vanilla Storm)  and Ben McKay started on this road we did it because we wanted to give something back to the community and create something that really did provide value to the industry. None of that has changed…..

If you haven’t signed up yet, you really should – SAScon is a great event packed full of great sessions/presentations for a mix of skills and I’m excited to be speaking there again this year – see the full agenda here.

Kevin Gibbons is Founder/Director of Strategy at SEOptimise. Kevin is well known within the search industry as a blogger for sites such as Search Engine Land, Econsultancy and Search Engine Watch. Kevin is also a frequent SEO speaker at a number of conferences including Search Marketing Expo (SMX), Search Engine Strategies (SES), a4uexpo, SAScon and BrightonSEO.

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SMX London 2012 Interview with Danny Sullivan

With SMX London coming up in May, we were lucky enough to get a chance to ask Danny Sullivan some questions ahead of the conference.

Image credit: Flickr

Firstly, great news that you’re coming over to SMX London in May. I noticed that SMX London has dropped the Advanced tag this year, how do you see the event changing from previous years in terms of content and audience? We haven’t dropped SMX Advanced but rather incorporated it into the broader show of SMX London. SMX Advanced runs in one track each day, while the other track will cover aspects of search marketing accessible to people of all skill levels. So all the great advanced content is still there. But we know there’s a broader base out there that’s been wanting to come to our London show, and so the expansion helps serve them, too. We also added a new SMX Boot Camp as one of the pre-conference workshops to help those new to search marketing get a start.There’s been a huge amount of changes in the world of search during the last 12-months, what do you consider to have had the biggest impact so far and is likely to be the key talking points at SMX London 2012? Mobile and social are both key developments. We’re searching all the time now, away from our desktops, on our phones and tablets. It’s crucial that marketers understand that conversions and radically drop when people encounter a mobile-unfriendly site. Our Mobile Trends session will be looking at this. As for social, Google have moved its ads further down the page to make room for the Google+ “People and Pages” box. That should tell search marketers all they need to know about how serious Google is about making Google+ be a success. It’s factored into the new Search Plus Your World ranking, so it’s a major new signal that marketers need to consider. Meanwhile, Bing taps into Facebook and Twitter. The world of social meets search keeps getting reshaped literally each month, but the main point is clear: if you want to succeed in search, you need to be considering social. We’ll have plenty of sessions about this.Looking ahead – do you think Google+ is likely to be the biggest game-changer in search this year? And what do you think should be the key takeaways attendees should look to learn about this? I think Google+ already is one of the biggest game changers. The takeaway is that you should be doing it. But the conference takeaways will be specific tips on how to best build your followers and tap into Google+ enhancements for your listings.With Google’s updates and rollouts of Google+/authorship/personalisation/Google Venice/local etc – do you think this is their reaction to the social media threat of personal recommendations? For example, a query for “can you recommend a good yoga class in London for under £20?” is likely to get a better (or at least more personal) response on Twitter than a Google query could provide. Or, as many believe, do they just want your data?! There are a combination of things. People do “search” by asking their friends questions through social networks. Google needs to find a way to integrate that type of activity. Google+ is one way of doing this, such as through the “Need some input from friends? Ask on Google+” links that appear on Google.com now. It would be better if Google could also help us sort through our Facebook and Twitter data, but until there’s some détente on deals, that’s in the distance. Of course, Google does also want more data about us, both because it allows them to create better products for us and also to target us better with ads. But Google+ is about far more than that.I’ve also noticed you’ve been writing about Google’s anti-competitive behaviour recently (e.g. “Google plus your world” favouring Google’s own social network over others and their hypocrisy over “privacy” issues) – do you think Google are potentially running the risk of becoming too monopolistic? I think Google’s given more solid ammunition than ever before to those who make an anti-trust argument. However, that ammunition doesn’t help those who’ve been leading this fight directly, the vertical search engines that claim they’re hard-done-by. It’s difficult to argue that you’re being harmed by Google when at the same time, you argue that 75% of your traffic comes from Google, as some do. The bottom line is that the vast majority of web sites continue to get huge amounts of traffic for free from Google.And finally, you lived in England for several years so I wondered how you find the UK industry and development of search strategies when compared with the US and other key international territories? The UK has always been fairly advanced in search marketing, even compared to the US. In some cases, it can even be ahead. The main challenge is that the UK is in an interesting middle ground of often having products and sites aimed toward the UK, Europe and the US. That means grappling with two different English languages (UK English vs US English), as well as the multitude of European languages, along with issues of running country-specific sites in the mix. That’s one reason why it’s great to have the International Search Summit running as one of the pre-conference events.

If you haven’t signed up for the event yet, make sure you use the SMX London discount code: SEOPTIMISE012 for 15% off the ticket price – see you there!

Kevin Gibbons is Founder/Director of Strategy at SEOptimise. Kevin is well known within the search industry as a blogger for sites such as Search Engine Land, Econsultancy and Search Engine Watch. Kevin is also a frequent SEO speaker at a number of conferences including Search Marketing Expo (SMX), Search Engine Strategies (SES), a4uexpo, SAScon and BrightonSEO.

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