……………………………..and Other Stories

A grand event title and a grand setting greeted me as I arrived at The Law Society on Chancery Lane to speak at Latitude’s Client Summit yesterday.

I’d been kindly invited by Dylan Thwaites & Richard Gregory to represent Microsoft and speak on a panel with Google and Yahoo!

These events a generally very good. They’re a way for agencies to gather their clients in one place once a year to update them on the latest news, views and hullabaloo’s going on in the digital space. But they’re also a constructive way for suppliers like the Google’s, Yahoo!’s and Microsoft’s of this world to meet advertisers, gather feedback and get their points across in a stimulating environment.

The search engine session was moderated by Davina Lines from Netimperative who coordinated a flood questions on privacy, the role of social media in search, personalised search and relevancy.

Boringly, Mark Howe from Google (very jolly chap!), Richard Firminger from Yahoo!(who I’ve sat on many a panel with) and myself do tend to agree on an awful lot.

People often ask what it’s like being up there “with the enemy” but it’s not like that at all! We all have a very deep respect for each other’s businesses and, to be honest, are more interested in evangelising and helping advertisers understand search and get better ROI than engaging in handbags at dawn sessions.

The key take away from the session for me, was Mark Howe talking about businesses needing to build better websites.

It’s something I always bring up when I’m out and about, and having spent a lot of time recently with world class SEO & usability practitioners, I’m seeing it as being more and more crucial.

It doesn’t matter how sophisticated a PPC engine is, it doesn’t matter how intelligent an indexing spider is, if your website is inaccessible, badly constructed, and has usability issues, you will not get the best ROI that you could be getting.

G, Y! and M are gagging to give you free traffic, YES FREE TRAFFIC, if you’ll only let us make sense of your site.

Talking about this afterwards with Mark and Will Cooper from NMA, we discussed two HUGE online retailers in the UK, one that Mark simply gave up on trying to buy a trampoline for his kids because the navigation was so bad. The other was a site I pitched SEM to a few years ago who said they couldn’t put a tracking tag on their thank you page for another 9 months because their dev guys only updated the back end once a year!

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