Search Engine Land Summit: Different Leaders, One Perspective

So, I finally made it to Seattle! Seattle’s weather was at its best and the sea smelt great. The number of participants was mind boggling.

The first speaker at SEL Summit was Duane Forrester from Microsoft. He spoke of how local search is changing, and how to change the way to market. Apps rule the roost and examples stating the same were of Tesla Cars, Smart Refrigerators and Navigation System Advertising. The local search behavior is changing. Mobiles, Tablets, Phablets and Wearables are making this change. Search behavior data is being gathered from these points and you can target people at this point. Self driving cars by Google have been approved for use in California and some other states. The future trend of local search is predictive behavior. We need to adapt this to stay in business.

In an information packed session, Rebecca Lieb from Altimeter spoke on Native Advertising Landscape and how it should be incorporated within our strategy. Native advertising is also a trend that should be incorporated into any content strategy and both social and content teams along with sales team should be educated about it.

However, Matt Cutts has gone on record saying that 'Google does not approve of native advertising'. But there is very little that Google can do if native advertising content goes viral. So it’s worth the effort.

Kevin Ryan CEO of Motivity Marketing got the most laughs as he talked about 'Taking Back Strategy' into the marketing. Automated marketing works well only when you think of the automation as tools and build it around people.

Cindy Krum CEO Mobile Moxie reiterated the need to leverage constant stream of data from all devices and making business sense out of it by giving it a monetizing value.

Rhonda Hanson had some powerful images in her presentation and should how companies can goof up imagery.

Lunch as usual was excellent.