I have now been on the Euro 2012 State of Search Roadshow for 3 weeks and it has certainly flown by. I have been very lucky to meet up with 4 different SEOs in Berlin and Vienna to speak to them about what search is like in their country and if they are affected by many of the updates that the search engines in the UK and US have been.
My first meeting in Berlin was with Marcus Tober, the CTO and founder of Searchmetrics. The full interview with Marcus is on State of Search, but I wanted to briefly summarise my interview with him.
The beginning of Searchmetrics
Marcus set up Searchmetrics in 2005 and then in 2007 a venture capital company invested in the firm where they then rebranded the organisation as you see today. Marcus had been working as a PHP developer since 2001 and had also been optimising websites so he certainly has an indepth knowledge of the market. The company has a head office in Berlin with 100 staff, I met Marcus at the headoffice and had a tour.
Search market in Germany
Marcus and I went to a nearby Austrian restaurant where we sampled some German beer and I asked him a few more questions about the search market in Germany. He said it is very competitive and there are many German search events. Marcus goes to SMX Munich,there is SES Berlin and an SEO day in Cologne. Marcus also spoke at Webinale which took place on the 5th and 6th of June. One of the many interesting points Marcus made was that it is important to be present at all the search events worldwide not just the ones in Germany as they would just be focusing on the German market. The English speaking search market are bigger than the German (which covers Austria, Switzerland and Germany) and therefore to not attend these English speaking events would mean cutting off a potentially huge market share.
Google updates
Given the recent updates from Google such as Penguin which were a hot topic at SMX London, I wanted to find out if they had been affected. Marcus told me their clients had not been affected as many of their sites have a high number of branded anchor text and not many exact match and their brand is well recognised in the market.
Searchmetrics in a nutshell?
Searchmetrics have built the largest database in combined SEO and Social data. In SEO they have more than 100 million keywords which they update regularly to calculate rankings, trends as well as competitive data. This research capability is unique and they have two main products they offer for their clients. 1) The enterprise solution for larger clients where you can connect external data like web analytics (traffic, conversions) with your SEO data. 2) software (Searchmetrics Essentials) for a deep SEO and Social signals analysis. I have been using the Essentials suite and will be attending Searchmetrics event they are hosting on July 11th to see the latest features added.
The future of SEO in Germany
The Google updates have shown SEO is more important to organisations than ever which has resulted in more partners working with Searchmetrics. The future of SEO is that it will become more complex and therefore more organisations will want to understand it and either partner with us to do so or use our tools. Search engines will always want to deliver the best results to there fore there will be a development of a different type of SEO – once which is focused on the user or “user focused SEO”.
Today I am lucky enough to meet more SEOs in Florence, Italy, so watch this space, another post will be updated. I will be writing summaries of the my 2 other interviews in Berlin and my interview in Austria on SEO Jo Blogs.