aimClear Search Marketing Blog

This is part 2 in a series detailing the wonderful and overly full seminar, Converting Visitors to Buyers at Search Engine Strategies New York. (Read part One).

The third speaker was Michael Sack, Director, SEM technology & Development, Idearc Media Corp. I feel personally involved with this presentation because I “fixed” it for him on my computer when he brought his thumb drive to me in desperation.

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Whoosh! The Converting Visitors Into Buyers seminar at Search Engine Strategies New York felt like a whole day chock full of my daily dose of conversions!

This seminar was moderated by Aaron Shear, Search Engine Watch Expert and Partner, Boost Search Marketing.

The speakers were:

• Mike Moran, Distinguished Engineer, IBM ,Nigel Ravenhill, Program Manager, McAfee, (and author of the new book, Do It Wrong Quickly)
• Michael Sack, Director, SEM technology & Development, Idearc Media Corp.
• Howard Kaplan, COO, Future Now Inc.

WRITER’S NOTE: This seminar was so full of excellent and actionable information that it won’t all fit in one post! This is part one… Read the rest of this entry »

Google Website Optimizer just celebrated its 1st birthday this week. Tom Leung, Business Product Manager for GWS presented What’s New With Google Website Optimizer today at Search Engine Strategies New York.

This amazing FREE service lets users test different versions of their site and plays nicely with Google Analytics (also FREE) to tell them how it tests compared to the original. This makes it incredibly easy for website owners to improve the customer site experience.

Google Website Optimizer is focused on post-click optimization- what happens after the user has clicked the ad creative. It lets you dabble in “content experimentation” and see how it will affect your conversion goals. Read the rest of this entry »

Greetings from Search Engine Strategies! This post is part of aimClear’s continued live blogging coverage of SES NY 2008.

Local search has finally come into itself. There are roughly 20 million small and medium sized businesses in the U.S., and fewer than 25% have a website. Most of these companies obviously have a limited presence in a small geographically defined region. Search engines have made some major inroads in giving many of these SMEs a presence online, but there is still much room for improvement.

Not only will search provide an opportunity to all those local businesses, but so too will those with the foresight and capability to help expose those business to the internet and search. What a behemoth opportunity! Read the rest of this entry »

Day 1 of Search Engine Strategies New York certainly lived up to expectations. The sessions were excellent, the city is spectacular, and I was fortunate enough to meet up with a large number of new and old friends. The day ended for most with a St. Paddy’s day pub crawl, primarily through Irish bars :). Read the rest of this entry »

It’s Monday March 17, (I forgot to wear green!) and I’m excited to be covering the first seminar of the day at Search Engine Strategies New York, Redefining The Customer, presented by Jeffrey Eisenberg (subbing for brother Bryan who is here but down with “the crud.”)

Bryan and Jeffrey are co-authors of Waiting For Your Cat To Bark?: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing. This content and more can be found on their excellent blog, (and podcast!) GrokDotCom.

There’s a Marketing (r)evolution underway. Old marketing used Pavlovian methods. Passive consumers, like dogs, would salivate and buy when marketers pushed their ads. But today’s consumers are cats, not dogs - and we all know cats don’t come when called, they take a message and get back to you.

But marketers are no longer in control of the bell. Read the rest of this entry »

Mobile applications and local searches continue to penetrate deeper into the mobile user experience, and exciting developments are on the horizon.

Mobile and Local Search: Finding the Way was moderated by Michael Boland, Senior Analyst, The Kelsey Group. Speakers at this Search Engine Strategies seminar all brought knowledge from different corners of the mobile and local fields.

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As mentioned in part 1 of the “Search Around the World” Series, what do you do when your primary markets are hyper competitive, and increasing sales or marketshare is extremely difficult or expensive? Answer … expand to secure a presence in different countries.

In many cases, the economic and business climates of Europe and the UK will be closest to our own here in North America, and therefore make the most logical first step to expanding abroad.

If this is something you’re considering as a firm, or might consider, then understanding more about the intricacies of those regions is crucial. Here are some opinions from experts currently operating in those regions. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the second post in continued coverage of SES New York, and the series on Search in Asia, Asia Pacific and Latin America.

The last post looked at China and Japan. This post will look at the other 3 countries discussed in the session, namely Australia, Singapore, and Latin America Read the rest of this entry »

How best to grow your firm when your primary markets are hyper competitive? This is a question many many companies ask themselves routinely.Begs the question; why not look to additional markets? There is absolutely no better place or opportunity for growth than in Asia, Asia Pacific, and Latin America. Not only do many of these countries support tremendous populations, but their economic systems are getting much stronger.

That said, today there a 5 speakers discussing how to gain a better presence in Asia, the Asian Pacific, and Latin America. Read the rest of this entry »