Our team at Weidert Group had the pleasure of spending Monday's lunch hour listening to a webinar with Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz, and Dharmesh Shah, CTO and co-founder of HubSpot. That webinar being The State of SEO & Internet Marketing in 2012.
We've been studying and covering a lot of the changes taking place in the SEO world in the last couple of months, which are mainly tied to Google's public algorithm changes, and we didn't want to miss this highly anticipated webinar with two leading figures in the SEO industry. In case you missed it, we have you covered!
Here's some of the more notable highlights we took away from the webinar that we wanted to share with our readers.
- As of August 2012, there's 3 billion searches conducted online each day
- 75% of all clicks are on organic search results, versus paid links
- Per point #2, more than 50% of search queries have no paid ads at all - meaning without appearing in the organic results you won't be found!
- With paid search ads, such as Google AdWords, you are simply renting attention. Similar to when you're done renting an apartment, you have nothing to show for once you're done paying
- Based on SEOmoz survey of 4,431 respondents that have job responsibilities in SEO:
- Content creation is the predominant SEO and social media tactic being embraced because it works!
- Social/Community Management saw huge growth in the last year, as well as Local SEO and Content Creation
- The most popular forms of marketing content are blog posts, social media, article & guides, and press releases
- Marketers can't continue to overlook mobile, even for nichce B2B businesses. Mobile search and browsing has become a way of life and will only continue to grow
- If you don't have plans to implement a mobile website at least make a responsive design website that adjusts for mobile devices
- It's estimated that Google's algorithm changes 500-600 times per year. We typically only hear about a handful of these updates
- Marketers need to come to the realization that an end has come for "craphat link building". The best links are ones that are earned through the creation of awesome content. For those who ignore this, be prepared for the next Penguin update from Google which will attack aggressive link builders
- Brand social media signals for SEO are becoming essential: the correlation between social shares and inbound links is proof of this
- To some marketers, Google+ may seem like a waste of time but the social media network's impact in Google search results and rankings have become very prominent
Summary:
You can dig into the webinar slides for yourself since these are only the highlights, but the underlying theme in what was covered is the fact the Inbound Marketing principles such as content creation and social media activity are driving modern-day SEO.
A point that Dharmesh made that isn't outlined above is to always challenge yourself on why you deserve to rank ahead of everyone else (for a particular keyword or phrase). Remember to solve for the humans not the search bots! Google and other search engines have one goal: to offer the best user experience possible for those looking to answer a question or solve a problem through search. If you set out to create the best user experience through awesome content presented in a fun and creative way, you're bound to win.
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