SearchFest 2015 Agenda

Registration & Breakfast

Marketing Automation: The 40 Hour Asset

Step by step preparation for getting successful content out the door quickly. Want to help your in-house teams and clients understand how inbound marketing pros leverage marketing automation to impact all points of the sales funnel? This session includes pro tips, resources, process, case studies and measurement to illustrate the value of marketing automation for nurturing prospects from SEO discovery to brand loyalty.
Speaker:
John-Henry Scherck – WP Engine

Moderator:
Lisa Williams – Sustainable Digital Marketing

Crafting and Executing a Local Content Strategy

Mike Ramsey and Dana DiTomaso share their favorite examples of content to grow a local audience. Mike starts with the good, the bad, and the ugly from right here in Rose City and Dana takes you start-to-finish through her agency’s process, from brainstorming to organization to execution.
Speakers:
Dana DiTomaso – Kick Point
Mike Ramsey – Nifty Marketing

Moderator:
David Mihm – Moz

Social Content & Community

Want your social strategy & content to work together to be hugely successful? This session will cover key components of crafting your social content strategy including the why and how of creating marketing tributaries that naturally feed well-targeted streams of content for the right social audiences as well as how to leverage social content to build a great community.
Speakers:
Mark Traphagen – Stone Temple Consulting
Joanna Lord – Porch

Moderator:
Kevin Getch – Webfor

Performing a Highly Technical SEO Audit

Have you ever performed a technical SEO audit of your website? Do you know what data to pull, what to look for, and how to analyze that data? In this deep dive technical SEO session, we’ll start with several crawlers to grab the data we need, and then start analyzing those results and make recommendations for changes. We’ll cover everything from the tools needed to crawl and analyze site, and other tools and services, such as Google Webmaster Tools, that you can use to help gather the data.

Once the proper data is gathered, we’ll dive right into it and start analyzing. Pulling the data can be a daunting task, but analyzing the data, knowing what to look for, and making sense of it is what we’ll focus on in this session.

For those of you who provide SEO Audits to clients, we’ll also discuss proper formats for sending audit results to clients, and explaining the results.

Key Takeaways:
• Know which tools to use during an SEO audit and why
• Know and understand what to look for and what issues to point out.
• Understand why SEO audits are necessary, and how to present an SEO audit to a client.
Speaker:
Bill Hartzer – Globe Runner SEO

Moderator:
Michael Cottam – Visual Itineraries

Penalties & Ranking Drops

Google penalties and ranking shifts are a part of the game, manual, algorithmic, or a combination or the two. This session covers what you need to know about getting, getting out of them, and how to identify problems.

Speakers:
Greg Boser – Foundation Digital
Ian Lurie – Portent, Inc.

Moderator:
Scott Hendison – Search Commander Inc.

Semantic Juggernaut

What do instant answers, the Knowledge Graph, Google Now, schema.org and Hummingbird have in common? They’re all products of semantic technology that have disrupted “traditional” SEO. Grab a life preserver and hang on tight as our speakers help you navigate the perilous waters of semantic search and succeed at semantic SEO.
Speakers:
Aaron Bradley – Electronic Arts (EA)
Mike Arnesen – SwellPath

Moderator:
Mike Rosenberg – Veracity

Transform Your Content: Create, Measure, Succeed!

This session will explore the different types of content that is shared on Social networks like Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook and Google+, as well as how to measure it with a deep dive into tools. You will learn how to grow your brand through creating sharable content that will win links, social media shares and sales.
Speakers:
Kristy Bolsinger – PwC
Mat Siltala – Avalaunch Media

Moderator:
Todd Mintz – 3Q Digital

Office Hours with “Professor Maps”

Join “Professor Maps” Mike Blumenthal for this interactive Q&A session and get his perspective on your most burning Local questions–from how Google works, earning customer reviews at scale, and all the latest changes and trends across the local ecosystem.
Speaker:
Mike Blumental – GetFiveStars.com

Moderator:
David Mihm – Moz

Competitive Intel

Two of the best minds in search talk through their latest strategies for competitive intelligence and audience development. Rae and Rand have seen the industry go through a myriad of changes. Find out what they have on their radar for 2015.
Speakers:
Rae Hoffman – Sugarrae & PushFire
Rand Fishkin – Moz

Moderator:
Matthew Brown – Moz

Mobile Strategy: Execution to Analysis

Mobile search is overtaking desktop search, but ROI for mobile is far from easy to achieve. Mobile may be your biggest challenge AND your biggest opportunity in 2015. Mobile friendliness, technical expertise and strategy are all essential to making mobile a great user experience and revenue driver. Learn how to make your mobile strategy sing from execution to analysis.
Speakers:
David Roth – Emergent Digital
Marcus Tober – Searchmetrics

Moderator:
Lisa Williams – Sustainable Digital Marketing

PPC: Top Hacks and Keywordless Targeting

Learn how to increase your returns while decreasing your average cost per conversion by exploiting the various idiosyncrasies and system loopholes within the different PPC platforms to generate massive profits.
Speakers:
David Rodnitzky – 3Q Digital
Larry Kim – Wordstream

Moderator:
Kevin Getch – Webfor

Big Data and SEO

Learn the biggest trends driving the search industry and how data – Big Data – can affect your brand, your rankings and your search strategy for 2015.
Speakers:
Marshall Simmonds – Define Media Group

Moderator:
Ian Lurie – Portent, Inc.

Dashboards for Marketers

Learn how to create sexy dashboards from your data that are actually meaningful to your business AND sexy! Our two analytics experts will deliver the goods from dashboarding basics and resources to actionable tips and real-world examples.
Speakers:
Annie Cushing – YourTango & Annielytics
Rachael Gerson – Google

Moderator:
Ben Lloyd – Add3

Global Search Strategies

Seasoned international search marketers Michael Bonfils from SEM International, and Zeph Snapp from Altura Interactive will tell you how to expand your reach beyond the United States. Michael will discuss “How to Launch Your Site in 50 Countries” with the strategies you need to engage for success. Zeph will drill deep with “Getting Tactical With LATAM” sharing specific tactics that have been successful marketing to Spanish speakers all over the world, especially Latin America.
Speakers:
Zeph Snapp – Altura Interactive
Michael Bonfils – SEM International

Moderator:
Anne Kennedy – Outlines Venture Group

How To Make (Piles Of) Money With Social Media In 8 (Absolutely) Attainable Steps

Sure, every business marketer recognizes that (somehow) social media is an essential sales tool. Still, realizing tangible return on investment from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and other social communities can be daunting for many.

Join perennial Inc. 5000 agency owner-.entrepreneurs Marty Weintraub and Will Scott for a no-holds-barred shredding session to demystify crucial strategic and tactical social media marketing selling conundrums. Attend this session and you’ll learn to:
– Separate commercial social media reality from myth.
– Use new (and intensely focused) social psychographic targeting to flesh out customers, hungry to buy and drive them to your website on a budget
– Use social pay per click today to make sales now
– Dramatically amplify content marketing programs for influencer distribution, PR, SEO and attributable sales
– Filter social retargeting as a “Second targeting hop,” to qualify traffic even further.
– Leverage blurred lines between organic (free) and paid social media distribution for cost effective lead generation and sales
– Merge search and social media marketing to build a truly integrated marketing program
– Deploy social media marketing for B2B & B2C (if b2b and b2c is not in the title)
Speakers:
Marty Weintraub – aimClear
Will Scott – Search Influence

Moderator:
Kent Lewis – Anvil Media

In-depth Mobile, with Tactical Best Practices

Bing Ads isn’t just a search marketing platform – it’s a massive data-mining machine. This is why we can share meaningful insights culled from our own internal research on a topic as critical as mobile. We’re tracking, measuring and sharing the mobile madness that passes through our search engine every day. Learn why mobile matters more for Mother’s Day, get some answers on the brand-term bidding debate and come with us into optimization and conversion land, backed by science.
Speakers: 
Anna Hughes – Microsoft
Frances Donegan-Ryan – Microsoft
Moderator:
Nathan Issacs – Seven G Media