Insights into the latest Search Marketing trends and feeling the vibe at SMX East 2019 in New York
Multiplier Digital Managing Director, Alischa Wunsch and Digital & Marketing Consultant, Rowena Purdy travelled to New York last month to attend the SMX East conference. Wunsch reports for Campaign Brief.
SMX East 2019 in New York was the second Search Marketing Expo that I’ve attended and it was a slightly smaller event compared to the annual West Coast Silicon Valley conference, but no less rewarding with over 100 sessions on the latest developments in SEO, digital advertising and data and analytics on offer. The challenge with any conference is that there are always multiple sessions happening at the same time that you want to be at, but at least this time having two of the Multiplier Digital team there meant that we could cover off twice as much of the content.
The quality of the presenters at the SMX conferences is always guaranteed as it is curated by the search industry’s leading source of news and analysis, Search Engine Land. This year SMX East attracted over 1350 attendees from specialist digital marketing agencies from across the globe plus marketing teams from the major US brands and major sponsorship from Google, Microsoft Advertising and Longtail UX, a software start-up from Australia.
The keynote drawcard was Rand Fishkin (pictured below left with Purdy and Wunsch), a well-known SEO expert in the industry who originally founded the leading SEO software tool, Moz and is now CEO and co-founder of SparkToro, another new software start-up. Rand kicked off the conference by presenting some ground-breaking research on the impact of zero-click search results on brands organic search performance and what this could mean for the future of organic search traffic and search strategy.
Zero-click searches are when a user does a Google search but instead of clicking on any of the sites on the results page, they use the information already presented by Google as a featured snippet as a means of answering their query. Whilst the industry has been focused on optimising web pages to take advantage of these zero position search results which offer great visibility, a downside has emerged in the US market, where the zero position search results for many topics no longer feature a clickable URL to take the user to the website where the information has been pulled from.
“Google’s relationship with brands has shifted from referrer to competitor,” Rand Fishkin said during his keynote at SMX East about how the search engine’s business model has been evolving. More than half (56.1%) of Google searches conducted from a mobile browser and 34.9% of Google desktop searches ended without a click to other content, according to the Jumpshot data.
“The trend is the same: organic, going down; while paid and zero-click searches are on the rise. Now that the majority of Google searches are no-click, companies will have to find on-SERP opportunities to reach their audiences and strengthen their branding so that users will actively seek them out”, said Fishkin.
“The trend is the same: organic, going down; while paid and zero-click searches are on the rise. Now that the majority of Google searches are no-click, companies will have to find on-SERP opportunities to reach their audiences and strengthen their branding so that users will actively seek them out”, said Fishkin.
At present the key sectors that are being impacted by this are weather, flights, hotels, jobs and college rankings but it’s also starting to impact popular culture and media.
“We are talking about results that are taking business away from Skyscanner and Kayak in travel, and Eater and Yelp in local results” said Fishkin.
Whilst we aren’t quite seeing the same level of zero click searches in the Australian market just yet, it is likely that we will see this issue emerge more strongly over the next two years if Google continues to roll out the same approach to displaying zero position search results without displaying the website URL as part of the search result. This coupled with a growth in the use of voice search, will reshape the volume of website traffic that organisations may see in the future.
Across the two-day conference, tracks were focused on SEO, SEM, data and analytics and software solutions and for the first time this year a new agency track was added, which gave digital marketing agencies the opportunity to share their experience in dedicated sessions. When you are working deeply in search marketing on a daily basis there are very few other people that will understand the highs, lows and often frustrations of working in a rapidly changing landscape – so the opportunity to share insights with fellow practitioners from all around the world is a unique opportunity. For me, there were plenty of highlights from the conference agenda including sessions on java-script, automation, conversion rate optimisation and voice search and assistants. Search Engine Land also launched their new Periodic Table for PPC following on from their well-established SEO Periodic Table.
The trade hall exhibition at the conference is always a useful opportunity to check out the leading SEO and SEM software vendors in the industry all under one roof and also pick up a bit of merchandise or swag as the Americans call it. It was great to connect with the Longtail UX team from Sydney who were launching their Australian developed SEO software into the US market at SMX East as a major sponsor.
Longtail UX’s co-founder and CEO Andres Dzumla demonstrated the AI-powered platform at SMX East and its ability to roll out Google-friendly landing pages at scale, eliminate the drudgery of keyword research and give organisations better transparency on the return they are getting on their online marketing. The search engine optimisation start-up is backed by Seek boss, Andrew Bassat and Longtail UX is already working with major brands in Australia like Woolworths, Kogan and AdoreBeauty.
Attending a conference in New York is, of course, as much about getting a feel for the current vibe on the streets and checking out the latest trends, as the takeaways from the conference. We Work co-working offices were frequently visible no matter which part of Manhattan you were passing through, along with cycling and spin studios and poke bowl or taco quick food outlets offering plenty of vegan options.
Despite recurring news of retail’s demise, the New York retail scene looked pretty vibrant with Nordstrom opening a women’s store in New York for the first time in late October and doing $6 million in it’s first day of trade. From trainer re-sellers pimping out rare editions of Jordan trainers with $500 to $1000 price tags, sample sales with cues out the front and a massive Gucci store in SOHO doing brisk trade on anything that could be worn or displayed on your body or in your home, the city that never sleeps was doing just that whilst walking past homeless on the streets and subways.
Up town, President Trump was bunkered in the Trump Tower for a weekend visit, where both sides of the street were lined with buses and dump trucks filled with sand to stop bombs and police and secret service agents had cordoned off every corner.
One thing I’m always blown away by is the outdoor media opportunities in New York – Times Square being an obvious one – but there was an amazing 50 metre video wall installation in the new World One Square Westfield Centre that was impressive and probably eye watering in terms of the cost of the media placement.
Newly launched streaming tv services Apple+ and Disney+ were battling it out for eyeballs on every corner promoting their launch and tv series at every opportunity. And as we departed, the continuing dominance of the Influencer was evident with multiple super-sized poster displays promoting an Influencer management platform as you cleared customs and headed to the gate.
For Rowena and myself, the SMX East conference trip was an investment in benchmarking our search marketing skills against the best in the business and bringing back the latest SEO and SEM techniques to the WA market. A 24-hour flight each way is a necessary evil that pays off ten fold with the stimulation and professional development that you get from the investment.
