I’ve just been speaking at the Search Engine Room conference in Sydney. This is the first search marketing even I’ve been to in Australia. It was interesting to compare the Australian attitudes and knowledge to those I see in the US. There were a handful of familiar faces from SES and similar shows: Stephan Spencer from Net Concepts, David Warmuz from Trellian, and Lee Odden from TopRank.
The Aussie search marketers appear to be as well informed as their US counterparts – they read all the same blogs and forums. They’re talking about the same issues. Their biggest challenge is educating the market about the benefits of search marketing. Michael Edwards gave a presentation about the mission he had selling the benefits of SEO and what needed to be done, to all the internal stakeholders at travel.com.au. And he’s their marketing manager. US search marketers have the same issues but because more of them have been doing it for longer there is more awareness in the US.
I came away encouraged by what I saw and excited by the opportunities in the Australian market.
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I had a great time at the Search Engine Room Conference. Not that much meat, but a great opportunity to network. It was surely interesting talking to SEO Consultants and finding that many had problems getting businesses to implement their recommendations. I wrote a short case study on the travel.com.au website on my SearchMasters site – “travel.com.au. An example of Bad SEO”. Didn’t manage to get to that seminar presentation but interesting hearing your comments about how the Marketing Manager had issues in selling the benefits of SEO. Sounds like the travel.com.au site is not so much an example of bad SEO as much as an example of SEO not implemented.
I am looking into SEO for the site http://www.eflight.com.au. I am interested in learning if there are any SEO consultants that specialise in travel related sites or is a non issue?