36 Coast-to-Coast Liveblog Posts Covering Pubcon Las Vegas & SMX East 2014

Bruce Clay, Inc. sent livebloggers Virginia Nussey and Kristi Kellogg to Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East 2014 and Pubcon Las Vegas to report live on 36 sessions on key digital marketing topics. Whether you’re interested in SEO, SMM, PPC, mobile optimization or content marketing, you’ll find coverage of the most important sessions coast to coast. Read on for an overview of each liveblog post and click through to read what piques your interest — or read them all!

Pubcon Las Vegas 2014

1. New Mobile Behavior and Click-to-Call Strategies

Learn how to enhance your PPC campaigns with click-to-call extensions — and why they matter so much — as Jason Spievak (CEO of Invoca) and Daryl Colwell (Senior Vice President, Matomy Media Group) take the Pubcon stage to talk mobile search advertising.

2. Chris Brogan on Mission-Driven Execution

In Wednesday morning’s opening keynote from Pubcon Las Vegas, Chris Brogan shares inspiring examples of brand and mission. Keep the mission alive with content and participation. Content is the drum that calls us together.

3. Search Algorithm Chaos & Keyword (Not Provided)

In this Pubcon Las Vegas session, Bruce Clay (president of Bruce Clay, Inc.), Prashant Puri (co-founder of AdLift) and Jake Bohall (vice president of marketing at Virante) are going to talk about an always-hot topic in SEO: Keyword data (Not Provided).

4. SEO Mosh Pit

It’s Pubcon’s 15th birthday (and the final panel), and you know it’s a party when there’s beer and cake and an SEO Mosh Pit, a Q&A session where conference attendees get to ask their questions of some of digital marketing’s best minds and leaders, including Bruce Clay, about the current SEO state of affairs.

5. The Importance of ‘Buyer Legends’ with Jeffrey Eisenberg

There’s so much that goes into online marketing, and marketing at largeBuyer legends” are what marketer and bestselling author Jeffrey Eisenberg calls the narratives that craft a customer journey – and it’s also the name the company that he runs with his brother. In this morning’s keynote, Eisenberg will dive into buyer legends, exploring why they matter and what goes into them.

6. SEO Copywriting Style Guide: Tools & Tricks for SEO Writers

The lessons shared by these panelists, including Bruce Clay, Inc.’s SEO Manager, Mindy Weinstein, help writers craft content for people that’s also rich for search engines. Whether you’re writing an article, a blog post, your home page — where do you start? You need to start with the human element.

7. Link Building Without a Penalty

Rhea Drysdale, Joe Youngblood and Russ Jones talk about link building. While this session was covered, Bruce Clay, Inc. does not endorse any of these tactics. Always proceed with caution when it comes to any link building effort.

8. Jay Baer, Author of Youtility – Help Not Hype

Marketing is more challenging than ever. Attention spans are shorter, consumers demand more knowledge, and what worked twenty years ago won’t work today. What does work for gaining mindshare? Being helpful.

9. Real-Time Content Marketing with Wearables & Google Glass

When it comes to wearables, devices and technology are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and Internet marketers are embarking on a new frontier: real-time marketing.

10. Link Building through Press Outreach

Rob Woods, SEO consultant, will share insights on press outreach that leads to strong links in this Pubcon Las Vegas 2014 session. Caveat: Going after press links are hard work, take time and money, and you are going to face rejection from reporters.

11. Jason Calacanis on Startups that Save the World

Angel investor Jason Calacanis’s keynote is unique – it’s not tactical or strategy-driven. It’s steeped in reality and meant to simply inspire and inform the audience of the amazing progress that startups and forward-thinking companies are bring to the world in the areas of six global problems. Startups, he asserts, will solve our world’s problems rather than governments. His keynote, that is meant to inspire us, will cover major advances by tech and startup companies.

12. Pinterest and Other Missed Social SEO Opportunities

Have an interest in Pinterest? You should – there are 70 million users are Pinterest, and their business is up for grabs. John Rampton, editor-at-large at Search Engine Journal, Stephan Spencer, vice president of SEO at Covario, and Cynthia Johnson, director of social media marketing at RankLab, share their insights on wielding Pinterest for to drive traffic, build community and boost sales.

13.Utilizing Personas in Social Media Contests

One of the most common reasons why business fail to gain ROI from their social media marketing efforts is their failure to fashion their content to target specific personas.

 

SMX East 2014

1. Google’s Gary Illyes Talks HTTPS & the Future of Secure Search; SEO VIPS Share Data/Experiences with HTTPS

Googler Gary Illyes, talks about the future of secure search, Google’s thoughts on secure search, and the possible return of keyword data (scroll to Q & A at end). Eric Enge says he’s seen “no material change” in moving to secure search, and Raza Zaidi weighs in on RSS and WordPress in relation to secure search.

2. BuzzFeed Founder Jonah Peretti Talks Going Viral, SEO, Social Media and More

Jonah Peretti, founder of BuzzFeed, has a history of Internet brilliance. Before founding BuzzFeed, he was a co-founder of the Huffington Post. For tonight’s grand finale, Search Engine Land Founding Editor Danny Sullivan picks Peretti’s brain on the early days of SEO at the Huffington Post, the nature of social sharing, the nuances of different social networks, the role (or lack thereof) of SEO at BuzzFeed, native advertising, and more.

3. 25 Smart Examples of Structured Data You Can Use Now

Have you reviewed your website inventory ad implemented structured data markup wherever applicable. Perhaps most important to your decision of whether or not you need to add markup now, speaker Mike Arnesen shares how to track the ROI of rich snippets.

4 . How SEO & SEM Can Help Each Other

SEO and PPC VIPs Lisa Williams, Aaron Levy and Brett Snyder break down the relationship between SEO and SEM from an operational and tactical level during the first session of Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East 2014’s Tactics Track.

5. All Search is Now Social

Think of an apple and a bag of marbles. Both simple images, and when you compare the two you’ll get an idea of the shift that social media has caused brands to make to stay relevant today. An apple is the old way of thinking of your brand, unified and on-message. The bag of marbles is a little more assorted, a collection, not a unified message but it has 300% more surface area. You’re able to increase the surface area of your brand by releasing individual advocates.

6. SEO Is Never Dead — Marshall Simmonds

In this opening summit session at SMX East, the SEO thought-leading veteran Marshall Simmonds puts to rest the popular critique of search engine optimization, “SEO is dead.” He explains: “If Google is constantly changing, we [search marketers] have to be constantly moving to meet those changes.

7. Branding Your Data Visualizations with Annie Cushing

Annie Cushing makes data pretty and meaningful for her clients with Excel dashboards customized in their colors and fonts and will be imparting her guidelines for making your data visualizations fit your brand, making it a brand identity tool online.

8. The 4th Wave of Content Marketing

We’re at the forefront of a movement to make technologists and marketers talk to each other. This session is called “The 4th Wave of Content Marketing: From Passive to Interactive” and it’s about the next thing in content. Don’t just publish more, make it interactive with marketing apps.

9. Twitter Cards & Facebook’s Open Graph

Take your social game to the next level by implementing Twitter Cards and Open Graph Tags. The speakers in this panel assert that social strategy means thinking about social posts as if they are ads (and therefore crafting them with the same amount of care and creativity).

10. Automation Does Not Equal Strategy

SMX speaker Kevin Ryan posits that “a Tool Box Does Not a Cabinet Make” as referenced in the alternate title of this session on marketing automation. Ryan is going to speak on a bad habit: focusing on the new, shiny new technology and neglecting the strategy.

11. The Future of a Brand

What is a brand and how are marketers in control of a brand? These are the questions she’s been tackling this decade because things have changed, and branding is now a business driver. As such, a brand should have it’s own budget, it’s own team and it’s own conversation with the executives. Joanna Lord explains the best practices of what some better brands are doing.

12. SMX East Evening Forum with Danny Sullivan

Search Engine Land Editor in Chief Danny Sullivan fields questions from the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East 2014 audience. Find out what he had to say about Authorship, markup, local SEO, how to teach SEO in college and much more.

13. Tough Love: What I Wish CMOs Knew About Search Marketing

Internet marketers know the importance of SEO, SEM and content marketing … but that’s not always the case with the C-Suite. Hillary Glaser stresses the importance of maintaining SEO. If your CEO/CMO is unconvinced of the power of ongoing Internet marketing, Glaser’s insights are definitely must-shares. Erin Everhart shares the seven things she wishes execs understood. Tom Alison rounds out the session by sharing compelling statistics on the future of Internet marketing, and why PPC is necessary for branded terms.

14. Creating, Testing & Optimizing Paid Search Ads

PPC pros share their top tips on testing ads, including tips that account for the shift of mobile users. From “always be testing” guidelines to creating ad testing framewor, discover what matters most when it comes to creating, testing and measuring ads.

15. Learn With Google — Attribution Strategies

In the Learn with Google classroom, the topic of the morning is: Attribution Strategies to Inform Your Search and Digital Investments. Because understanding the interplay of channels leads to smarter marketing investments.

16. What SEOs Should Be Doing with Mobile

When it comes to mobile, Google prefers responsive design. But there is no ranking boost or penalty for using this method when designing your mobile site. Cindy Krum, Michael Martin, Jim Yu and Gary Illyes talk about what happens when sites use dynamic serving, separate sites and responsive design — or some combination of all three.

17. The Importance of Imagery

In a stream of consciousness presentation of images, SMX speaker Rhonda Hanson, Sr. Director of Digital Marketing, Global Marketing, formerly of Concur, thinks about using images to your advantage and points out a few dos, don’ts and trends.

18. Making Moments Matter

The sales funnel has exploded. However, the pieces of the funnel are still highly relevant. You need to be there in the consideration phase. You need to streamline the purchase process so it’s frictionless. You need to work to maintain retention and get fanatical loyalty.

19. Keyword Research for Better Content & Audience Engagement

SEO masterminds Michael King, Jason White and Joe Pawlikowski share their top insights on keyword research. Discover their favorite tools, tried-and-true tactics, thoughts on persona research, (Not Provided) and much more.

20. Deconstructing Pigeon, Google’s New Local Search Algorithm

In July, the quality of Google local search results took a turn for the worse, experts say. The cause? A pesky little creature called the Pigeon Update crawled into the maps, local packs and authoritative one boxes. Learn what changed for searches with generic terms, geolocally modified terms, and see some of the wacky-broken results that have cropped up since Pigeon landed.

21. Conversion Rate Rock Stars

Luke Summerfield shares brilliant insights on designing your site and content to appeal to people’s unconscious brains (i.e., where emotions live). Then Paras Chopra and Khalid Saleh talk technical CRO matters.

22. Search & Find: Marketing in the Age of the Internet of Things

In this session at SMX East, speaker Erynn Petersen takes a high-level view of a future where we don’t go to a phone or computer to get online, but rather all the devices and appliances around us are online.

23. Competitive Research for SEO

This session dives into competitive research that will help you identify your true competition (it isn’t always who you think it is) and then assess why and how they are outranking you. Armed with this information, you can fight back and rise to the top of the SERP.