Top ten SEO insights from Search Engine Strategies 2009 in London
10. Pirates push the boundaries and without them, the music and film industries would not be meeting customer needs. They wouldn’t have moved on. A later question: are black-hat SEO marketers the equivalent? Pushing their industry forward?
9. Blended search changes the rules. If you aren’t optimising for video, image, news and local results, then you are missing an SEO trick. Or are you? For longtail results, does this matter – yet?
8. Un-sourced but thought-provoking claim: once upon a time, 70% of all clicks were taken by top 5 results. Now, one video appearing in a first set of results can take 10-30 per cent of clicks. So maybe blended results do matter now?
7. Ranking results are dead. Long live ranking results. But what are the new standardised metrics for SEO reporting? There aren’t any. Despite SEO being an enormous and growing industry no one quite knows how to measure it.
6. Most businesses are spending approximately 95% of their search budgets on PPC and the rest on SEO. But conversely, SEO pulls in over 90% of their clicks – and conversions. This aint right.
5. Most companies still don’t coordinate their search activity with the rest of their marketing. Despite most initial engagement with brands still happening offine.
4. There are two types of podcast listeners: those that subscribe through i-Tunes and listen regularly; and those that come across your podcast through web searching and listen to it straight away. How do each of these groups find you?
3. From a social media point of view, this year it’s Twitter which is going to save the world. No one mentions Facebook applications anymore.
2. BlendTec is still the poster-child for the User Generated Content cause. It is a great case study in UGC, particularly video and YouTube marketing but it’s not even that new. Where are the other examples?
1. Good content still rules. You can optimise for GoogleBot all you like but lasting engagement and customer conversion isn’t going to happen purely through SEO.
Ten not enough? Here’s 77 more tips from SEO London.
Lego Pirates from Joz on flickr
Tags: conferences, content, lists, piracy, search, SEO, UGC, video
By Dom Waghorn, Head of User Engagement at 
