SMX is the worlds leading search marketing expo, drawing digital marketing experts from across the globe. Held in a number of locations all over the world, the SMX provides a forum for digital enthusiasts and experts to share ‘trade secrets’ and the latest industry news.
Edmund who attended the Sydney conference from 14 to 17 April, said the expo was great.
“It really reinforced the importance of continuous learning,” Edmund said.
“Our philosophy at Traffika is to always be the student, keeping ourselves open to new ideas, people and techniques,” Edmund said.
The highlight of Edmunds trip was the ‘SMX Elite Day’, a day for advanced ‘techies’ and some of the world’s leading SEO experts to gather and share knowledge about the latest key word research, advanced techniques and enterprise level SEO. Among those who attended include Danny Sullivan, Editor of Search Engine Land, the head of SEO for EBay and the Google web spam team.
“One of the hot topics during the Expo was the fear that Google, as a business, is starting to stretch beyond their core business of search,” Edmund said.
“Google is starting to monopolise other non-traditional areas including travel, real estate and shopping, giving them too much ‘market power’,” Edmund said.
According to Edmund, if your business receives a large portion of its online traffic from Google, it would be wise to diversify traffic sources and start investing in other search engines. Here are a few of Edmunds tips:
- Learn how to use Search Marketing to generate traffic and leads.
- Try using ‘Bing’, owned by Microsoft, another powerful search engine that occupies 30% of the market.
- Research and use offline channels to supplement your online marketing.
“Another prominent topic was the growth in social media activity and more specifically, the importance of ‘social signals’,” Edmund said.
‘Social signals’ is content that has been ‘re-tweeted’ on Twitter or ‘shared’ on Facebook and is now one of many key factors that determine how your webpage ranks in search engine results. For example, social media content that has been ‘shared’ or ‘re-tweeted’ will rank higher than content that has not.
“Search engines are incorporating ‘social signals’ to help them rank content in their search results,” Edmund said.
“Fortunately, it is easy to increase your ranking using ‘social signals’. Simply, be active in social media and create ‘cool’ content that people will want to share such as industry info-graphics,” Edmund said.
