It’s Gonna Be Good: August PRO Training Seminar Finalized

Today, instead of playing in the uber-rare Seattle sunshine, I spent the day polishing off the PRO Training seminar schedule and it looks amazing. I’m excited to see these sessions myself (and I rarely sit through presentations). Check it out for yourself below; if you’re inclined and available, we’d love to see you.

Oh, and don’t worry, I’m not cruelly sharing when we’ve already sold out. We still do have some seats left. Dates are Monday & Tuesday August 30th + 31st with the tools training half day Wednesday, September 1st. However, I would strongly urge you to register soon, as we’ve sold out by early August in each of the past 4 years.

Top 5 Ways Our PRO Seminar is Different

1. “Tips” Focused Content
   Many sessions that I attend have discussions and opinions as featured content. Although I think that can be great, our focus is 100% on providing value you can apply back to your sites + campaigns immediately. I’ve talked to every speaker and reviewed every outline – the sessions at our seminar are exclusively focused on making you smarter, faster and better at your job.
2. Single-Track, Deep Dives by Only the Best Speakers
   Rather than panels of 2, 3, 4 or more speakers on an hourlong session, we have only a few sessions each day, enabling us to pick only the most talented, compelling speakers for our event. You can’t pitch to speak at SEOmoz – it’s by invitation only and those invites come because we’ve seen you speak many times and been seriously impressed. There are only 14 speakers in total at the event and every one is an oustanding presenter – we know because we’ve watched them.
3. The Same Incentives for all Participants
   At many events, the real revenue comes from sales of booths, promotional materials or sponsored sessions. SEOmoz has none of these. Our primary goal with the PRO Training isn’t to make money (being fully TAGFEE; this year, we anticipate the seminar to generate less than 4% of our gross with relatively slim margins), but to spread knowledge of SEO in a deep, meaningful way and meet many of our community members in person. We also pay for our speakers’ transportation and hotels so they don’t have the burden of selling to recoup travel costs.
4. Less than 1/2 the Price of Other Events
   With a PRO membership, the event costs just $649. Add in a hotel for 2 nights and a flight from most US locations and it’s still less than a single ticket to many of the larger conferences (e.g. the on-site price for Web 2.0 NYC or SES SF is $1,995).
5. No Vendors, Pitches, Booths or Sales
   There’s no expo hall, no sponsors, no SWAG in a bag, no salespeople seeking to close a deal at lunch, nada. This event is about learning from experts, networking with peers and coming home with phenomenal, actionable information.

Monday, August 30th

• 9:00am – 9:45am: It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad SERP
  • The expansion of new results types in the search result pages has SEOs asking if traditional rankings are dead. They’re not, but there are a whole lot more opportunities to get SEO traffic. In this session, Rand Fishkin explores the world of real-time, social, news, images, video & expanded listing results with specific recommendations for how to get included, stand out and win clicks.
• 9:45am – 10:30am: How to Win Rankings and Influence Competitive Local/Maps Results
  • As Google Maps and the 3/7/10-pack results have become more competitive, SEOs have been thinking less about the question “what are the local ranking factors?” and more about “how do I get maximum visibility in local results?” David Mihm explores the answers with specifics about how to draw eyeballs and clicks from the maps listings.
• 10:30am – 10:45am: Morning Break
• 10:45am – 11:45am: The Science of Twitter Success
  • What makes some Twitter updates spread across the web while other languish in obscurity? Hubspot’s Dan Zarrella examines the science of tweets, retweets and clicks and provides specific, actionable tactics for how to improve the results marketers derive from promotion of their content on Twitter.
• 11:45am – 12:30pm: Presentation Off: How to Pitch SEO
  • Distilled’s esteemed director, Will Critchlow, has never lost against Rand, but they’ve also never faced off in the US. Watch Rand and Will on SEOmoz’s home turf as they break down how to pitch SEO internally to your team/managers or externally, to a potential client. Specific strategies of how to win the battle for marketing dollars will rule the day. Voting to be determined by a show of hands immediately following the presentations.
• 12:30pm – 1:30pm: Lunch
• 1:30pm – 2:00pm: Earning Direct ROI on Social Media
  • Social media tends to send traffic that clicks once, visits fast and leaves without much engagement. Yet, we know that over time, these branding touchpoints and positive references can lead to awareness, influence and, ultimately, conversion. In this session, SEOmoz’s community manager, Jen Lopez, shows real life examples of how social media can lead directly to conversions. She’ll also cover how to track clicks to and conversations about your site/brand that happen across the web and map these to the metrics that predict web success.
• 2:00pm – 2:45pm: Site Architecture & Best Practices for Big Site SEO
  • Large sites frequently struggle against indexation, navigation and organization issues. In this session, Marshall Simmonds, chief search strategist for the NYTimes, About.com, and many other large content-based sites will present solutions for effectively analyzing the problems inherent with large sites, identifying solutions and implementation. Specific topics include controlling faceted navigation, creating index-worthy category and sub-category pages as well as XML sitemap & internal link optimization.
• 2:45pm – 3:00pm: Afternoon Break
• 3:00pm – 4:00pm: Uncovering a Hidden Technique for SEO
  • You’re familiar with optimizing for a keyword by placing it on a page and acquiring anchor-text targeted links, but this session goes in a completely different direction. We’ll be pulling back the curtain on a new way to rank higher, and a process to do it! Led by Ben Hendrickson, SEOmoz’s Senior Scientist, this session will go heads down in the math and science of how search engines crawl, index and rank web pages.
• 4:00pm – 4:30pm: Constructing Effective SEO Audits
  • As the director of consulting at SEOmoz, Lindsay built dozens of audits for clients like Microsoft, Etsy, SimplyHired and more. In this presentation, she’ll share her methodology for delivering a site audit that clients and managers will appreciate and actually use!
• 4:30pm – 5:30pm: Conversion Rate Optimization
  • One of the web’s foremost experts in conversion rate optimization, Tim Ash will be sharing case studies and specific tips for how to make more of the visitors who click into customers.

Tuesday, August 31st

• 9:00am – 9:45am: 10 Sites the Earned Amazing Links: How they Did It & What we Can Learn
  • Sometimes, the best way to learn is through direct observation. In this session, Rand will walk through 10 sites that achieved top rankings through remarkable link acquisition strategies. He’ll explore not just where they earned links, but why those links were created and what other SEOs can take away from the success stories.
• 9:45am – 10:30am: Reverse Engineering Your Competitors’ Rankings
  • Why does that page rank above yours? Until you know the answer, you’re optimizing in the dark and potentially wasting massive amounts of time, energy and resources on metrics that won’t move the needle. In this session, Wil Reynolds, head of digital agency Thinkseer, walks through their process for strategically de-constructing the search results, determining the keys to ranking and executing on those metrics.
• 10:30am – 10:45am: Morning Break
• 10:45am – 11:30am: Manual Link Building: That’s Right; It Still Works
  • Picking up links one-by-one may not be highly scalable nor incredibly fun work, but it does work. In this session, Distilled Consulting head of US operations, Rob Ousbey, walks through the power and process of manual link building. If you’re ready to put your shoulder to the grindstone, you can have a serious impact on your business with these tactics.
• 11:30am – 11:50am: Top 10 Tips for Community Building
  • The power of user-generated-content and user engagement to build up a site’s reach, branding and SEO is phenomenal. SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin walks through his top tactics for attracting an engaged audience.
• 11:50am – 12:10pm: Top 10 Tips for Blogging
  • Blogs are still one of the most powerful ways to build content, draw in links, grow your branding & attract new customers. Ian Lurie, founder of Portent Interactive and Conversation Marketing has a list of unbeatable tips to maximize the value you get from blogging.
• 12:10pm – 12:30pm:Top 10 Tips for Paid Search Optimization
  • Paid search will draw in $25 billion dollars in the US alone this year – a lot of that won’t make much of an ROI. Joanna Lord wants to make sure that doesn’t happen to you. Join her as she walks through 10 amazing tips to get high value out of paid search without spending a fortune.
• 12:30pm – 1:15pm: Lunch
• 1:15pm – 2:00pm: Designing Your SEO Strategy
  • Formerly the head of technical marketing at Yahoo!, Laura Lippay’s responsibility included managing SEO across dozens of the web’s most visited sites. In this session, she shares her process from years of experience and her popular blog series on SEOmoz covering the design and execution of an SEO strategy.
• 2:00pm – 2:45pm: Advanced Keyword Selection + Targeting
  • The basics of keyword research are well known, but discovering terms and phrases that are on the verge of becoming popular, in the middle or tail of the demand curve or have cyclical demand can be a huge advantage for your website. Tom Critchlow, Head of Search for Distilled, presents killer tips on how to select the right keywords and use them in the right ways to maximize your search traffic potential.
• 2:45pm – 3:30pm: The End of Analysis Paralysis: Tracking What Matters & Ignoring the Rest
  • Too often, the overwhelming quantity of data we get from tools like Google Analytics, Omniture, Conversion Rate Tracking + Testing Software can overwhelm us. SEOmoz’s Joanna Lord is here to put an end to the overload and give striking examples of how to build an analytics dashboard that records what matters and ignores what doesn’t so you can make the right decisions about what to invest in.
• 3:30pm – 3:45pm: Ice Cream Break
• 3:45pm – 4:30pm: How to Make SEO Data Reporting Sexy
  • Ready to take your data visualization skills to the next level? Join Distilled’s Will Critchlow as he remakes the tedious process of SEO reporting on keywords, links, traffic and SERPs into something not only beautiful, but useful and ready to apply to the real world. Your clients & managers will be head over heels when they see the amazing, actionable data visualizations you present.
• 4:30pm – 5:30pm: No More Secrets: SEO Veterans Spill the Goods on Tactics that Work
  • 6 Expert Practitioners of SEO will share their most powerful & actionable tips for all things web marketing. If you’re seeking an unfair advantage over the competition, listen closely – it doesn’t come any better than this. Join Ian Lurie, Will & Tom Critchlow, Laura Lippay, Wil Reynolds & Todd Friesen for a remarkable session.
• 7:00pm – 12:00am: SEOmoz Annual Garage Party!
  • Bowling, billiards, beer and more! Don’t miss our favorite party of the year, replete with free drinks, food and entertainment.

Wednesday, September 1st (Tools Training)

• 9:30am – 10:30am: A Deep Dive Into Link Research w/ Linkscape, Open Site Explorer & Keyword Difficulty
  • These three tools comprise the most powerful resources available for advanced link exploration, algorithm reversing and competitive analysis. In this hour, Rand Fishkin shows how to apply the full spectrum of data to strategize, measure and acquire links.
• 10:30am – 10:45am: Morning Coffee Break
• 10:45am – 11:45pm: Getting the Most from the New (REDACTED UNTIL LAUNCH)
  • Obviously, I can’t provide a description without giving too much away. Needless to say, though, it will be big 🙂
• 11:45pm – 12:15pm: Adding Value to Your SEO w/ Q+A, the mozBar + SEOmoz Labs
  • Rand walks through the best practices and some hidden ways to employ PRO membership utilities from Labs, Q+A and the mozBar. There’s a lot of information and functionality to be found here and with Ran’d guidance, you’ll be able to get maximum value from these products.
• 12:15pm – 1:00pm: A Sneak Peek Into SEOmoz’s Product Roadmap & Call for Suggestions
  • Join Adam Feldstein, head of Product at SEOmoz and Rand Fishkin, CEO, for a look at the product roadmap for SEOmoz over the next 6 months. We’ll be soliciting your feedback, too, so please come ready with your ideas!

Bonus: Oilman is Our MC!

We’ve employed copious quantities of beer, cookies and B-rated action movies on DVD to compel Todd Friesen, aka Oilman, to MC the event for us. We’re honored to have Todd run the show, make sure our panelists stick to their time slots and badger anyone who tries to hold back critical information. In exchange, he’s promised to wear his pearliest white hat and make sure every attendee has a phenomenal experience.

That smile means he’s up to something… (via jenn.matthews)

Thanks Todd! We’re showing our appreciation by bolstering your follower count on Twitter.

Looking forward to seeing many of you at the PRO Seminar and showing off our big August launch too!