Back in September I attended SMX East 2014 in New York City for the first time and although I’ve been to other SEO conferences, they were never in “The Big Apple”, so expectations were high. Here’s my post recapping the event and venue, please share in the comments any of your takeaways if you attended as well.

The venue?
Weeks before the conference started, if SMX came up with friends or colleagues I kept having the same strange conversation again and again…

So by the time Day 1 of the conference arrived, I had mixed feelings (to say the least) and as we got to the end of 17th and were waiting at the crosswalk, the much ballihooed Javits Center was all you could see across the street. A bleak mountain of glass and steel that could probably double as Superman’s Fortress of Solitude should he ever get tired of going to the north pole. But it is a conference center after all, so how much architectural fanfare should be expected?

Once inside we went through the check in process, got our badges and were then pointed to a swag table where we received a black cross-body backpack full of vendor sales material. The backpack was cool and the spam inside was to be expected, but the problem was that now we’re here for the whole day with yet another thing to carry around. I myself already had a laptop bag and a purse… and now backpack makes 3. Awesome. There were also no lockers or coat check areas around so we were stuck with quite a bit of “luggage” for the duration.

But I digress and will just say it would have been great if they’d handed out the swag at the END of Day 1 instead of the beginning. Rant over. ☺

Hope you weren’t expecting a lot of personal space
Just to quickly touch on the meeting rooms for the panel discussions, all I say is that if you’re familiar with the ever narrowing personal space available on a flight in coach then you would have been right at home here.

It was unbelievably compacted in all of rooms and especially for the really popular sessions, we were like refugees packed into a grass hut. If you didn’t get there early, folks were grabbing spots on the floor, in the back (i.e. standing room only) or wherever they could find room to squeeze in. And not that anyone asked for my opinion, but if there was a way to RSVP for sessions in advance, that would helped manage the size of the crowd or move the really popular sessions to larger rooms. Just a thought.

Beware the badge police
The last slightly ranty thing I’d like to mention was the overzealous badge monitoring done by the event staff. I can’t say whether they work for SMX or Javits (and who knows maybe they were trained to be militant?) but they were everywhere and absolutely let you know where you stood in the pecking order of access.

My first encounter was after my colleague and I had gotten past the check in area and were down in the hall being used for SMX. We saw a handful of round tables just off the main walkway and headed over to stop for a minute and get organized, but no sooner had we walked up to a table but an attendant rushed over, demanded to see our badges, and immediately told us we had to leave that area. They said it was VIP only and that we could go to the open area at the end of the hall. Okay, that’s fine, but it wasn’t like we were trying to sneak into The Oscars. There was no signage stating it was a special area, none of the tables were full and we weren’t planning to camp out there as the first session was about to begin on 5-10 mins. So we left and went to the other area (where we were badge checked again before entering!) and all in all it really wasn’t the best “welcome” to kick off Day 1.

Now for the main event
It was a jam-packed three days at SMX East 2014 and each day had four distinct sessions (2 morning, 2 afternoon) with 3-5 panels to choose from. So it wasn’t a question of finding a session you liked, it was about making hard choices on which one to attend! I stayed more on in the SEO fundamentals, PCC, mobile and content tracks – but there were plenty others focused on SEM, social, link building and more.

Mobile Recap
There was a good focus on intent for search as it relates to mobile and how ranking on mobile & desktop are different because of this. Which is of course true as the ‘need state’ of the user is inferred to be different (and rightly so) as a mobile searcher needs something right now, versus desktop searcher is possibly planning to do something later.

Example: searching for “bank” on desktop vs. mobile

On desktop, I might be looking for investment advice, 401k information, loans, savings accounts – you name it. However on mobile, most likely I need some cash and just want the closest ATM. Therefore the search results delivered to me so me take that into account and serve up what is most likely my ‘need state’ based on device type.

It seems like Google is continuing to reward sites designed with this ‘need state’ in mind and as of Nov 18th Search Engine Land announced an experiment giving Google designated mobile friendly sites a better ranking in mobile SERP.

Here are few other fun-facts about mobile from the session that day:

Mobile is outpacing desktop x10
• 23% of organic search are from smartphones
• 62% of keywords have different ranks

Mobile keyword intent from data
• stock of product available nearby
• top X products/services
• reviews (especially locally/socially)
• video and interactions w/products
• click to call and locations nearby

Deconstructing Pigeon (no, it’s not a French haute cuisine dish)
On Day 2, I attended a great session that demystified some of what had gone down with the latest Pigeon update and here are a couple highlights from my notes:

• Google is recognizing generic searches (boats for sale) as branded searches
• Google is using keywords in reviews (yours and competitors) to generate search results
• Google also narrowed the search radius in suburban areas (meaning business owners with locations in small towns were hit hardest)

And while there were definitely some negative effects from the Pigeon update, here’s what you need to know to make sure you stay on the dean’s list.

Also the good folks over at Moz had some sage advice to share and provided a handy checklist I think everyone should take a look at and will find value from.

However as we all know, it’s been bird battle cage match over the last couple of months with updates, roll back and changes are happening faster than you can say “happy feet” so who really knows how this is going to net out? For the latest Penguin update (as of 12/5/14), it’s summed up nicely here from our friends at SEO Round Table.