SMX East: Local, Content & SEO Diversity Sessions (What I’m Looking For)

SMX East is coming up in a couple months (October 1-3 in NYC), but we’re already well underway with the planning.

I’ll be moderating three sessions this time around, and since we’re accepting speaking pitches right now (submit yours here), I wanted to share some thoughts on what I’m looking for and what I want each session to accomplish.

Remember, if you’re pitching a session (mine or not), check out my unofficial SMX speaking pitch tips.

Here are my three sessions and a few thoughts on each for those planning to pitch.

Life Beyond Google: Diversifying Your SEO Efforts

You can click the link to read the session description. What I’m looking for here, if I were to describe it one sentence, is how do you Google-proof your business? What can a business owner/webmaster/marketer/SEO do to decrease reliance on natural traffic from Google?

I’d also love a case study showing specific tactics that worked to lessen Google traffic and increase traffic from other sources.

What I’m not looking for: anything related to tactics or strategies that improve Google traffic. 🙂

Must Have Local Search Tactics

Local search is in a constant state of change, isn’t it? We’re starting to settle in a bit with Google’s move from “Places for Business” to “Google+ Local.” That’s a potential topic for someone’s presentation. There’s also the insane local carousel that Google is now showing more frequently. That’s another good topic. And there are obviously plenty of other things going on — local landing pages, multi-location best practices, etc.

The one thing I’m not looking for here is mobile SEO, because there’s a separate session just for that.

Conversation: Content: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

This is one of the “conversation”-style sessions we’ve been doing over the last year or so. No powerpoints. No presentations. Just some really smart people sitting together and answering questions for 75 minutes. In this session, I’m sure we’ll talk about generating content ideas, blogging, infographics, figuring out where and how to promote your content, and so much more.

If you’re accepted for this session, you’ll have some homework: I’ll need you to submit to me, in advance, a list of 5-10 questions/topics that you think we should discuss during the conversation. I’ll take those and combine them with my own topic/question ideas, and we’ll also (obviously) take questions from the audience during the session.

Final Note

As I said, the pitch form is open now. It might remain open as late as July 22nd. BUT … and this is important … if I get the right pitches before then, I’ll close the session earlier than that date so we can start putting the session together with the selected speakers.

In other words, don’t wait until the last minute to submit your pitch.