New Year, New Look For Search Engine Land’s SMX Search Marketing Conference

The New Year has brought a fresh look for our Search Marketing Expo conference: a new logo, web site and tagline: “Obsessed With SEO & SEM.” Here’s a guide to all the changes that we’re excited about.

Obsessed With SEO & SEM

Search Marketing Expo — SMX — is the search marketing conference that Search Engine Land has produced since 2007. SMX is unique because it’s the only major conference series that’s entirely focused on search.

We love the breadth of digital marketing. That’s why we operate our Marketing Land web site and produce our SocialPro and MarTech conferences. But when search makes up half of online ad spend, we feel those who specialize in it deserve a place where search is always center stage, not lost among other types of digital marketing activities.

Enter our new tagline: “Obsessed With SEO & SEM.”

As part of developing our new look and site, we spent plenty of time pondering how to summarize the uniqueness of SMX for those involved with search marketing.

What our attendees tell us they want most — and love that we deliver — is actionable tactics. They also want good networking and a great conference experience.

We pondered ways to put these in a tagline along with some of our other benefits. However, in the end, we wanted a tagline that captured the heart and soul of SMX: that we love search. We love developing content to help search marketers get more out of their efforts. We love hosting a place where search marketers can be loud and proud about being search marketers. We love seeing the search industry advance and grow.

We’re obsessed with search. Our attendees are, too. That’s why they love our SMX events. Our new tagline speaks to that and to the two branches of the search marketing space: SEO and SEM.

Our New Logo & Look

Beyond our tagline, we wanted a fresh logo and look for SMX. We spent time working with our great design team from Column Five going through various ideas that would somehow capture the spirit that we’re all about search:

That’s right. The trusty magnifying glass won out. It’s funny that a device dating back over 1,000 years still works to symbolize the amazing 21st century search engines that we use today to locate information. Yet, it does, more than anything else. Just consider these two search boxes from some familiar players that make use of magnifying glasses:

Beyond the magnifying glass, we have a refined palette of colors and fonts that will be used in association with the show, including on our new web site.

The New SMX Web Site

I’m not going to do a detailed explanation of all that’s new on the SMX site. A lot of it will be self-evident. Instead, I’m going to focus on things that I think are particularly new or important, using examples from our SMX West event that’s happening this March.

On the home page, you’ll discover what we call our “benefit boxes,” a fast review of some of the most important things that SMX offers our attendees:

Actionable tactics. Great programming from the team behind Search Engine Land, an independent and trusted resource. Advanced content for the pros; boot camp for those new to search marketing. Plentiful networking opportunities and a place that SEOs and SEMs can call home. Those are just some of the benefits, and if you hover over any of the boxes on the site, you’ll learn more.

SMX West offers over 50 different sessions during three days it will run from March 1 through March 3 this year in San Jose. Trying to figure out what to attend? Our new agenda page should make this much easier.

You can now scroll down one single page and see all the sessions at once, with the ability to use the “Learn More” option to get more details about who is speaking and a session description:

Want to easily narrow the agenda to sessions just about SEO or SEM? You can do that with the new filter option at the top of the page, along with some other filtering choices:

Want to save various sessions for future reference? Just click on the “Add To My Agenda” option listed above each session to craft your own agenda. You can review in the “My Agenda” section at the bottom of the page and email your choices to yourself:

You’ll find the new branding, look and functions where relevant for all our SMX shows within the United States. Outside the US, our London and Israel shows have changed while our events in Germany and France will retain the old branding in the short term.

And the usual pardon our dust caveat applies. It’s a huge effort changing over a brand across your web, social, email and other properties. If you see an old look showing up somewhere, rest assured we’ll be updating it soon.

Thanks!

Getting the new look and site going has been a year-long effort of hard work, and some special thanks are due to:

• Elisabeth Osmeloski, our vice president of audience development, who led the project
• Everyone on our events marketing communication team for feedback and suggestions
• Our aforementioned design team at Column Five
• Our vice president of technology Michelle Robbins and her tech team of John Blanchard and David Chordigian for bringing the vision into a working site

Enjoy our new SMX look and web site, and we hope to see many of our readers at one of our upcoming events!

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