It feels great to be back at SES in San Jose. The usual suspects are here and the conversations are buzzing - one topic that keeps coming up over and over again is the question "Where is Search going?". That question is what ultimately led to me to jump on the Search & The Future track and attend this session.
The room was packed and the panelists were great.
Eli, Carla and Heather spoke a lot about Social Media and if "SEO is DOA". They all agree that SEO is still very much alive and still strongly believe that companies will need to continue to optimize, optimize, optimize their core search pages. While Chris was "loving him some SEO" and was pushing for more analytics to show the value of SEO with ROI metrics. Spencer sees the future of search headed to a language user interface. He mentions "Stop texting, it would be easier if you just had to say it." And our own Pavan Li spoke about the power of mobile specifically mobile search. Based on her research studies she reports that you can expand your reach by 13% by adding mobile to your marketing mix. She also reminded us that mobile is not yet a competitive space so for now it remains uncluttered.
Here is the complete list of the speakers in the panel:
-- Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts, LLC
-- Pavan Lee (Peiwen Li), Senior Research Manager, Microsoft
-- Heather Dougherty, Research Director, Hitwise
-- Chris Boggs, Director, SEO, Rosetta
-- Eli Goodman, Search Evangelist, comScore, Inc.
-- Carla Borsoi, VP, Research & Analytics, Ask.com
More to come! If you are attending SES San Jose, be sure to stop by the Bing booth 303 and say hi. It'd be great to see you there.