The percentages and trends are in from SMX London, so lets take a look at the focus of one of this year’s biggest conferences:
According to Econsultancy/Guava’s UK Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report, 69% of agencies expect an increase in social media marketing this year. 58% are convinced that SEO is the single most cost-effective form of marketing, particularly during a recession. However, search marketing only has a 1.5% mindshare of the average Fortune 500 CMO.
The top social media sites used for marketing in 2009 stacked out as follows: Facebook 65%, Twitter 49% (up from 3% in 2008!), YouTube 39%, LinkedIn 38%, Delcious 31%, Digg 31% and Wikipedia 24%.
Google is still King of the World… apparently there are 400 million internet users in Europe. Of those users, 93.89% prefer Google, 2.14% use Yahoo.
Startling news concerning YouTube; only one of the top eighteen videos on YouTube is actually user generated content, according to Ciaran Norris.
Don’t add the Tweet button to all of your stuff – link bait is about links, not Tweets. Twitter does have a rapidly increasing value, however, and should be exploited as much as possible!
Overall, the SMX London was packed with excellent tips, tools and tweaks designed to help SEO and SEM experts everywhere improve their clients’ chances at rankings. SEO is obviously not dead yet; pay per click is alive and kicking, and linking and keyword research remain the top tools for website optimization. Social engines such as Twitter, Facebook, etc are still gaining ground, and the visual engines now in place are designed to encourage users to search in new ways.
Keep up with all the latest techniques by following the methods detailed here at SubmitEdge!
Tags: search, SEM, SEO, SMX London