A Bunch of Search Marketing Tips from the Experts

We went to the Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago this week and brought back a lot of good advice for businesses. You can see more coverage at WebProNews, but we thought we’d take the time to share a few highlights with SmallBusinessNewz readers. 

Here are a few tips from Google’s Analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik’s keynote:

1. Embrace analytics and try to get great at keyword discovery via competitive intelligence (for example, looking at audits and who’s bid on what historically). 

2. Experiment with behavioral targeting and don’t obsess about tools. Just try to understand the landscape, identity gaps, and opportunities – then execute. 

3. When it comes to the tail of search, focus and sort through the data, using logical filters, and keep an eye on visits, new visits, and bounce rates.

4. Utilize tag clouds, keyword trees, and look beyond the top ten rows of datasets.

Here are some takeaways from the Future of Search session:

1. Keyword research may be narrowed down by all three search engines.  

2. Autocomplete needs to branch out.  

3. There will be deeper analytics.  

4. Building content will continue to be very important 

5. There will be increased filtering of search results by users.  

6. SEO is going the way of a targeted market.  

7. Complexity of keywords is changing because of the algorithms

8. SEO is going to be "a piece of optimization pie." 

9. There will be increased focus on local.  

10. Even as mobile continues to grow, there will always be search. 

11. Social will continue to play an important role. Likes will become as important as links. 

Here are some tips from the session called "Update on Real Time Search: I Want it Now!": 

1. Real-time is more than Twitter.  Forum posts, blog posts, and comments can factor in, as "recency" replaces "relevance" to become the new "R" word, according to iCrossing Senior Strategy director Rob Garner. 

2. Use Google Trends as a way of tracking what’s popular in real time, bud don’t track every term. Annie Stickney, General Manager of Online Marketing and Development at Minyanville Media says to remember your business objectives and go after trends that are "on fire" or "volcanic" according to Google. 

Here are some tips from the "Brand, Trademark & Reputation Management" session:

1. Be proactive, rather than reactive, when it comes to brand reputation. That is the advice of Fionn Downhill, CEO of reputation management firm Elixer Interactive. 

2. Downhill suggests never engaging brand attackers at all. If they’re attacking you on blogs, forums, and social media, you might be better off simply addressing such complaints on your own blog and defending yourself from there, than using SEO to work on the visibility of your side of the story. 

3. She also suggests buying up defamatory versions of your domain, so other’s can’t get them and use them against you – things like yourbrandsucks.com. 

According to former Kodak CMO Jeffrey Hayzlett, who gave another keynote speech, you should remember the "four E’s": Engage, excite, educate, and evangelize. 

Here are some tips from the "Search, PR, and the Social Butterfly" session:

1. If  you want to promote your product, brand or business you need to branch out from just using traditional public relations tools such as press releases.

2. Optimize press releases, blogs, videos, images, posts, and tweets. 

3. "Facebook is becoming a search engine," says Lisa Buyer, President & CEO of The Buyer Group. 

4. Use keywords in your tweet and titles.

5. Publicize via distribution and social media

According to Jonathan Allen, Director of SearchEngineWatch, embeds drive the most traffic for video, and discovery is the main traffic driver on YouTube.