Last week in the beautiful city of Santa Monica, CircleClick CEO Anne A. Ward was a keynote speaker at the prestigious Search Engine Journal Summit. Additional keynotes included Maile Ohye and John Brown of Google, Jeff Preston of Disney, and Larry Kim, founder of Wordstream.

The SEJ Summit is a unique conference experience tailored for search marketers, and the event features a single track of vetted, keynote-style presentations given by industry experts and over three hours of high-quality networking opportunities. Topics included SEO, paid search, social media, content marketing, CRO, UX, Google happenings, actionable tips on linking, and how to make things happen in house. Anne was also a speaker at SEJ Summit in 2014. During her keynote, Anne discussed optimizing for mobile and also discussed virtual reality, AMP, and HTTPS. Here 3 key takeaways for the audience were:

• Speed is king.
• Don’t build an app for the sake of it.
• There is no dominant platform, consider all possibilities.

Facebook Instant Articles are going to be a game changer on mobile, says @annebot #SEJSummit #WorkItOut pic.twitter.com/Ygo7S63wro

— Circle Click (@circleclick) April 13, 2016

There’s now 100 billion monthly searches that occur on mobile devices. – @annebot #SEJSummit

— SearchEngineJournal® (@sejournal) April 13, 2016

I SEO like a girl… Which means intelligently and with heart, GUSTO! #SEJSummit

— annebot (@annebot) April 13, 2016

Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead at Google, also discussed AMP and the importance of preparing for it.

“Get AMP and Structured Data ready” – At @Google, “there’s a lot of manpower behind AMP…” @maileohye #SEJSummit

— Tim Lavelle (@tlavelle) April 13, 2016

Another highlight of the day was a keynote by Melissa Palazzo, president at Ant Farm. She talked about the power of compelling video when the user can identify with it. She showed three powerful advertisements that nearly brought the audience to tears each time. One of the ads she showed was from Ariel laundry detergent, an ad Sheryl Sandberg called “one of the most powerful videos I have ever seen.”

Humanize your brand by tapping into the passions, emotions of your target audience #SEJSummit @melissapalazzoh pic.twitter.com/4ttTqvqHSJ

— Jenise Henrikson (@ItsDUHnise) April 13, 2016

Larry Kim, founder of Wordstream, focused his keynote on paid social media marketing. Larry compared social media gems that get lots of attention and engagement as “unicorns” and recommended taking advantage of those quickly by strategically marketing them to the right audience.

John Brown, Head of Publisher Policy Communications at Google, gave a keynote called “Know Your Ads, Users, and Inventory.” John explained the importance of user experience (UX), and that the rise in ad blockers is a direct result of poor UX. John compared this poor UX to being in Time Square, where ads are prominent. Because of this, as blocking has increased over 200% since 2013. According to Brown, “The currency that we use [as marketers, digitally] is trust. Hold each other to really high standards.”

“Blocking ads increased more than 200% since 2013. 55% of ad agencies consider ad blocking a major concern.” – @AdManJayBee #SEJSummit #SEO

— Bruce Clay, Inc. (@BruceClayInc) April 13, 2016

The Search Engine Journal Summit was full of valuable content and industry leaders. The CircleClick team was happy to attend and it was excellent to see our CEO share her wisdom with such an engaged audience.